THEODORE ROOSEVELT
HISTORY
AS LITERATURE
1913
Collection
of
addresses and essays.
Source: Archive.org
I
HISTORY
AS LITERATURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
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HISTORY
AS LITERATURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1913
IV
Copyright,
1913, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
—————
Published September,
1913
V
PREFACE
IN this volume I have gathered certain addresses
I made before the American Historical Association, the University of
Oxford, the University of Berlin, and the Sorbonne at Paris, together
with six essays I wrote for The
Outlook, and one that I wrote
for The
Century.
In these addresses and essays I have discussed not
merely literary but also historical and scientific subjects, for my
thesis is that the domain of literature must be ever more widely
extended over the domains of history and science. There is nothing
which in this preface I can say to elaborate or emphasize what I have
said on this subject in the essays themselves.
THEODORE
ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL,
July 4, 1913.
VI
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VII
CONTENTS
*** Three chapters, “Biological
Analogies in History,” “The World Movement,” and “Citizenship in a
Republic,” were included in the volume
entitled “African and European Addresses.”
VIII
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1
HISTORY AS LITERATURE
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3
HISTORY AS
LITERATURE ¹
THERE has been much discussion as to whether
history should not henceforth be treated as a branch of science rather
than of literature. As with most such discussions, much of the matter
in dispute has referred merely to terminology. Moreover, as regards
part of the discussion, the minds of the contestants have not met, the
propositions advanced by the two sides being neither mutually
incompatible nor mutually relevant. There is, however, a real basis for
conflict in so far as science claims exclusive possession of the field.
There was a time — we see it in the marvellous dawn
of Hellenic life — when history was distinguished neither from poetry,
from mythology, nor from the first dim beginnings of science. There was
a more recent time, at the opening of Rome's brief period of literary
splendor, when poetry was accepted by a great scientific philosopher as
the appropriate vehicle for teaching the lessons of science and
philosophy. There was a more recent
¹ Annual address of the president of the
American Historical Association delivered at Boston, December 27, 1912.
4 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
time still —
the time of Holland's leadership in arms and arts when one of the two
or three greatest world painters put his genius at the service of
anatomists.
In each case the steady growth of specialization has
rendered such combination now impossible. Virgil left history to Livy;
and when Tacitus had become possible Lucan was a rather absurd
anachronism. The elder Darwin, when he endeavored to combine the
functions of scientist and poet, may have thought of Lucretius as a
model; but the great Darwin was incapable of such a mistake. The
surgeons of to-day would prefer the services of a good photographer to
those of Rembrandt even were those of Rembrandt available. No one would
now dream of combining the history of the Trojan War with a poem on the
wrath of Achilles. Beowulf's feats against the witch who dwelt under
the water would not now be mentioned in the same matter-of-fact way
that a Frisian or Frankish raid is mentioned. We are long past the
stage when we would accept as parts of the same epic Siegfried's
triumphs over dwarf and dragon, and even a distorted memory of the
historic Hunnish king in whose feast-hall the Burgundian heroes held
their last revel and made their death fight. We read of the loves of
the Hound of Muirthemne and Emer the Fair without attributing to the
chariot-riding heroes who
5 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
“fought over
the ears of their horses” and to their fierce lady-loves more than a
symbolic reality. The Roland of the Norman trouvères, the Roland
who blew the ivory horn at Roncesvalles, is to our minds wholly
distinct from the actual Warden of the Marches who fell in a rear-guard
skirmish with the Pyrenean Basques.
As regards philosophy, as distinguished from
material science and from history, the specialization has been
incomplete. Poetry is still used as a vehicle for the teaching of
philosophy. Goethe was as profound a thinker as Kant. He has influenced
the thought of mankind far more deeply than Kant because he was also a
great poet. Robert
Browning was a real philosopher, and his writings have had a
hundredfold the circulation and the effect of those of any similar
philosopher who wrote in prose, just because, and only because, what he
wrote was not merely philosophy but literature. The form in which he
wrote challenged attention and provoked admiration. That part of his
work which some of us — which I myself, for instance — most care for is
merely poetry. But in that part of his work which has exercised most
attraction and has given him the widest reputation, the poetry, the
form of expression, bears to the thought expressed much the same
relation that the expression of Lucretius bears to the thought of
Lucretius. As regards this, the
6 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
great mass of
his product, he is primarily a philosopher, whose writings surpass in
value those of other similar philosophers precisely because they are
not only philosophy but literature. In other words, Browning the
philosopher is read by countless thousands to whom otherwise philosophy
would be a sealed book, for exactly the same reason that Macaulay
the historian is read by countless thousands to whom otherwise history
would be a sealed book; because both Browning's works and Macaulay's
works are material additions to the great sum of English literature.
Philosophy is a science just as history is a science. There is need in
one case as in the other for vivid and powerful presentation of
scientific matter in literary form.
This does not mean that there is the like need in
the two cases. History can never be truthfully presented if the
presentation is purely emotional. It can never be truthfully or
usefully presented unless profound research, patient, laborious,
painstaking, has preceded the presentation. No amount of self-communion
and of pondering on the soul of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary
imagery, can take the place of cool, serious, widely extended study.
The vision of the great historian must be both wide and lofty. But it
must be sane, clear, and based on full knowledge of the facts and of
their interrelations. Otherwise we
7 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
get merely a
splendid bit of serious romance-writing, like Carlyle's
“French Revolution.” Many hard-working students, alive to the
deficiencies of this kind of romance-writing, have grown to distrust
not only all historical writing that is romantic, but all historical
writing that is vivid. They feel that complete truthfulness must never
be sacrificed to color. In this they are right. They also feel that
complete truthfulness is incompatible with color. In this they are
wrong. The immense importance of full knowledge of a mass of dry facts
and gray details has so impressed them as to make them feel that the
dryness and the grayness are in themselves meritorious.
These students have rendered invaluable service to
history. They are right in many of their contentions. They see how
literature and science have specialized. They realize that scientific
methods are as necessary to the proper study of history as to the
proper study of astronomy or zoology. They know that in many, perhaps
in most, of its forms, literary ability is divorced from the restrained
devotion to the actual fact which is as essential to the historian as
to the scientist. They know that nowadays science ostentatiously
disclaims any connection with literature. They feel that if this is
essential for science, it is no less essential for history.
8 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
There is much truth in all these contentions. Nevertheless, taking them
all together, they do not indicate what these hard-working students
believed that they indicate. Because history, science, and literature
have all become specialized, the theory now is that science is
definitely severed from literature and that history must follow suit.
Not only do I refuse to accept this as true for history, but I do not
even accept it as true for science.
Literature may be defined as that which has
permanent interest because both of its substance and its form, aside
from the mere technical value that inheres in a special treatise for
specialists. For a great work of literature there is the same demand
now that there always has been; and in any great work of literature the
first element is great imaginative power. The imaginative power
demanded for a great historian is different from that demanded for a
great poet; but it is no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no
sense incompatible with minute accuracy. On the contrary, very
accurate, very real and vivid, presentation of the past can come only
from one in whom the imaginative gift is strong. The industrious
collector of dead facts bears to such a man precisely the relation that
a photographer bears to Rembrandt. There are innumerable books, that
is, innumerable volumes of printed
9 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
matter between
covers, which are excellent for their own purposes, but in which
imagination would be as wholly out of place as in the blue prints of a
sewer system or in the photographs taken to illustrate a work on
comparative osteology. But the vitally necessary sewer system does not
take the place of the cathedral of Rheims
or of the Parthenon;
no quantity of photographs will ever be equivalent to one Rembrandt;
and the greatest mass of data, although indispensable to the work of a
great historian, is in no shape or way a substitute for that work.
History, taught for a directly and immediately
useful purpose to pupils and the teachers of pupils, is one of the
necessary features of a sound education in democratic citizenship. A
book containing such sound teaching, even if without any literary
quality, may be as useful to the student and as creditable to the
writer as a similar book on medicine. I am not slighting such a book
when I say that, once it has achieved its worthy purpose, it can be
permitted to lapse from human memory as a good book on medicine, which
has outlived its usefulness, lapses from memory. But the historical
work which does possess literary quality may be a permanent
contribution to the sum of man's wisdom, enjoyment, and inspiration.
The writer of such a book must add wisdom to knowledge, and the gift of
expression to the gift of imagination.
10 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
It is a shallow criticism to assert that imagination tends to
inaccuracy. Only a distorted imagination tends to inaccuracy. Vast and
fundamental truths can be discerned and interpreted only by one whose
imagination is as lofty as the soul of a Hebrew prophet. When we say
that the great historian must be a man of imagination, we use the word
as we use it when we say that the great statesman must be a man of
imagination. Moreover, together with imagination must go the power of
expression. The great speeches of statesmen and the great writings of
historians can live only if they possess the deathless quality that
inheres in all great literature. The greatest literary historian must
of necessity be a master of the science of history, a man who has at
his finger-tips all the accumulated facts from the treasure-houses of
the dead past. But he must also possess the power to marshal what is
dead so that before our eyes it lives again.
Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of
readableness in a book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a
few learned people seem to feel that the fact that a book is
interesting is proof that it is shallow. This is particularly apt to be
the attitude of scientific men. Very few great scientists have written
interestingly, and these few have usually felt apologetic about it. Yet
sooner or later the time will come when the mighty sweep of modern
11 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
scientific
discovery will be placed, by scientific men with the gift of
expression, at the service of intelligent and cultivated laymen. Such
service will be inestimable. Another writer of “Canterbury Tales,”
another singer of “Paradise Lost,” could not add more to the sum of
literary achievement than the man who may picture to us the phases of
the age-long history of life on this globe, or make vivid before our
eyes the tremendous march of the worlds through space.
Indeed, I believe that already science has owed more
than it suspects to the unconscious literary power of some of its
representatives. Scientific writers of note had grasped the fact of
evolution long before Darwin and Huxley; and the theories advanced by
these men to explain evolution were not much more unsatisfactory, as
full explanations, than the theory of natural selection itself. Yet,
where their predecessors had created hardly a ripple, Darwin and Huxley
succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the thought of the age,
a revolution as great as that caused by the discovery of the truth
about the solar system. I believe that the chief explanation of the
difference was the very simple one that what Darwin and Huxley wrote
was interesting to read. Every cultivated man soon had their volumes in
his library, and they still keep their places on our bookshelves. But Lamarck
and Cope
are only to be
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found in the
libraries of a few special students. If they had possessed a gift of
expression akin to Darwin's, the doctrine of evolution would not in the
popular mind have been confounded with the doctrine of natural
selection and a juster estimate than at present would obtain as to the
relative merits of the explanations of evolution championed by the
different scientific schools.
Do not misunderstand me. In the field of historical
research an immense amount can be done by men who have no literary
power whatever. Moreover, the most painstaking and laborious research,
covering long periods of years, is necessary in order to accumulate the
material for any history worth writing at all. There are important
by-paths of history, moreover, which hardly admit of treatment that
would make them of interest to any but specialists. All this I fully
admit. In particular I pay high honor to the patient and truthful
investigator. He does an indispensable work. My claim is merely that
such work should not exclude the work of the great master who can use
the materials gathered, who has the gift of vision, the quality of the
seer, the power himself to see what has happened and to make what he
has seen clear to the vision of others. My only protest is against
those who believe that the extension of the activities of the most
competent mason and most energetic con-
13 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
tractor will
supply the lack of great architects. If, as in the Middle Ages, the
journeymen builders are themselves artists, why this is the best
possible solution of the problem. But if they are not artists, then
their work, however much it represents of praiseworthy industry, and of
positive usefulness, does not take the place of the work of a great
artist.
Take a concrete example. It is only of recent years
that the importance of inscriptions has been realized. To the
present-day scholar they are invaluable. Even to the layman, some of
them turn the past into the present with startling clearness. The least
imaginative is moved by the simple inscription on the Etruscan
sarcophagus: “I, the great lady”; a lady so haughty that no other human
being was allowed to rest near her; and yet now nothing remains but
this proof of the pride of the nameless one. Or the inscription in
which Queen Hatshepsu
recounts her feats and her magnificence, and ends by adjuring the
onlooker, when overcome by the recital, not to say “how wonderful” but
“how like her!” could any picture of a living queen be more intimately
vivid? With such inscriptions before us the wonder is that it took us
so long to realize their worth. Not unnaturally this realization, when
it did come, was followed by the belief that inscriptions would enable
us to dispense with the great historians of
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antiquity.
This error is worse than the former. Where the inscriptions give us
light on what would otherwise be darkness, we must be profoundly
grateful; but we must not confound the lesser light with the greater.
We could better afford to lose every Greek inscription that has ever
been found than the chapter in which Thucydides tells of
the Athenian failure before Syracuse. Indeed, few inscriptions teach us
as much history as certain forms of literature that do not consciously
aim at teaching history at all. The inscriptions of Hellenistic Greece
in the third century before our era do not, all told, give us so
lifelike a view of the ordinary life of the ordinary men and women who
dwelt in the great Hellenistic cities of the time, as does the
fifteenth idyl of Theocritus.
This does not mean that good history can be
unscientific. So far from ignoring science, the great historian of the
future can do nothing unless he is steeped in science. He can never
equal what has been done by the great historians of the past unless he
writes not merely with full knowledge, but with an intensely vivid
consciousness, of all that of which they were necessarily ignorant. He
must accept what we now know to be man's place in nature. He must
realize that man has been on this earth for a period of such
incalculable length that, from the standpoint of the student
15 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
of his
development through time, what our ancestors used to call “antiquity”
is almost indistinguishable from the present day. If our conception of
history takes in the beast-like man whose sole tool and weapon was the
stone fist-hatchet, and his advanced successors, the man who etched on
bone pictures of the mammoth, the reindeer, and the wild horse, in what
is now France, and the man who painted pictures of bison in the burial
caves of what is now Spain; if we also conceive in their true position
our “contemporaneous ancestors,” the savages who are now no more
advanced than the cave-dwellers of a hundred thousand or two hundred
thousand years back, then we shall accept Thothmes and Cæsar,
Alfred and Washington, Timoleon and Lincoln, Homer and Shakespeare,
Pythagoras and Emerson, as all nearly contemporaneous in time and in
culture.
The great historian of the future will have easy
access to innumerable facts patiently gathered by tens of thousands of
investigators, whereas the great historian of the past had very few
facts, and often had to gather most of these himself. The great
historian of the future can not be excused if he fails to draw on the
vast storehouses of knowledge that have been accumulated, if he fails
to profit by the wisdom and work of other men, which are now the common
property of all intelligent men. He must use the instruments which
16 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
the historians
of the past did not have ready to hand. Yet even with these instruments
he can not do as good work as the best of the elder historians unless
he has vision and imagination, the power to grasp what is essential and
to reject the infinitely more numerous non-essentials, the power to
embody ghosts, to put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men
living before our eyes. In short, he must have the power to take the
science of history and turn it into literature.
Those who wish history to be treated as a purely
utilitarian science often decry the recital of the mighty deeds of the
past, the deeds which always have aroused, and for a long period to
come are likely to arouse, most interest. These men say that we should
study not the unusual but the usual. They say that we profit most by
laborious research into the drab monotony of the ordinary, rather than
by fixing our eyes on the purple patches that break it. Beyond all
question the great historian of the future must keep ever in mind the
relative importance of the usual and the unusual. If he is a really
great historian, if he possesses the highest imaginative and literary
quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of the
general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting peaks.
It is even more essential to have such quality in writing of the
commonplace than in writing of the exceptional.
17 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
Otherwise no
profit will come from study of the ordinary; for writings are useless
unless they are read, and they can not be read unless they are
readable. Furthermore, while doing full justice to the importance of
the usual, of the commonplace, the great historian will not lose sight
of the importance of the heroic.
It is hard to tell just what it is that is most
important to know. The wisdom of one generation may seem the folly of
the next. This is just as true of the wisdom of the dry-as-dusts as of
the wisdom of those who write interestingly. Moreover, while the value
of the by-products of knowledge does not readily yield itself to
quantitative expression, it is none the less real. A utilitarian
education should undoubtedly be the foundation of all education. But it
is far from advisable, it is far from wise, to have it the end of all
education. Technical training will more and more be accepted as the
prime factor in our educational system, a factor as essential for the
farmer, the blacksmith, the seamstress, and the cook, as for the
lawyer, the doctor, the engineer, and the stenographer. For similar
reasons the purely practical and technical lessons of history, the
lessons that help us to grapple with our immediate social and
industrial problems, will also receive greater emphasis than ever
before. But if we are wise we will no more permit this practical
training to
18 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
exclude
knowledge of that part of literature which is history than of that part
of literature which is poetry. Side by side with the need for the
perfection of the individual in the technic of his special calling goes
the need of broad human sympathy, and the need of lofty and generous
emotion in that individual. Only thus can the citizenship of the modern
state rise level to the complex modern social needs.
No technical training, no narrowly utilitarian study
of any kind will meet this second class of needs. In part they can best
be met by a training that will fit men and women to appreciate, and
therefore to profit by, great poetry and those great expressions of the
historian and the statesman which rivet our interest and stir our
souls. Great thoughts match and inspire heroic deeds. The same reasons
that make the Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural impress
themselves on men's minds far more deeply than technical treatises on
the constitutional justification of slavery or of secession, apply to
fitting descriptions of the great battle and the great contest which
occasioned the two speeches. The tense epic of the Gettysburg fight,
the larger epic of the whole Civil War, when truthfully and vividly
portrayed, will always have, and ought always to have, an attraction,
an interest, that can not be roused by the description of the same
number of
19 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
hours or years
of ordinary existence. There are supreme moments in which intensity and
not duration is the all-important element. History which is not
professedly utilitarian, history which is didactic only as great poetry
is unconsciously didactic, may yet possess that highest form of
usefulness, the power to thrill the souls of men with stories of
strength and craft and daring, and to lift them out of their common
selves to the heights of high endeavor.
The greatest historian should also be a great
moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and
goodness as on the same level. But of course the obsession of
purposeful moral teaching may utterly defeat its own aim. Moreover,
unfortunately, the avowed teacher of morality, when he writes history,
sometimes goes very far wrong indeed. It often happens that the man who
can be of real help in inspiring others by his utterances on abstract
principles is wholly unable to apply his own principles to concrete
cases. Carlyle offers an instance in point. Very few men have ever been
a greater source of inspiration to other ardent souls than was Carlyle
when he confined himself to preaching morality in the abstract.
Moreover, his theory bade him treat history as offering material to
support that theory. But not only was he utterly unable to distinguish
either great virtues or great vices when he looked
20 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
abroad on
contemporary life — as witness his attitude toward our own Civil War —
but he was utterly unable to apply his own principles concretely in
history. His “Frederick the Great” is literature of a high order. It
may, with reservations, even be accepted as history. But the “morality”
therein
jubilantly upheld is shocking to any man who takes seriously Carlyle's
other writings in which he lays down principles of conduct. In his
“Frederick the Great” he was not content to tell the facts. He was not
content to announce his admiration. He wished to square himself with
his theories, and to reconcile what he admired, both with the actual
fact and with his previously expressed convictions on morality. He
could only do so by refusing to face the facts and by using words with
meanings that shifted to meet his own mental emergencies. He pretended
to discern morality where no vestige of it existed. He tortured the
facts to support his views. The “morality” he praised
had no connection with morality as understood in the New Testament. It
was the kind of archaic morality observed by the Danites in their
dealings with the people of Laish. The sermon of the Mormon bishop in
Owen Wister's “Pilgrim on the Gila” sets forth the only moral lessons
which it was possible for Carlyle truthfully to draw from the successes
he described.
21 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
History must not be treated as something set off by itself. It should
not be treated as a branch of learning bound to the past by the
shackles of an iron conservatism. It is neither necessary rigidly to
mark the limits of the province of history, nor to treat of all that is
within that province, nor to exclude any subject within that province
from treatment, nor yet to treat different methods of dealing with the
same subject as mutually exclusive. Every writer and every reader has
his own needs, to meet himself or to be met by others. Among a great
multitude of thoughtful people there is room for the widest possible
variety of appeals. Let each man fearlessly choose what is of real
importance and interest to him personally, reverencing authority, but
not in a superstitious spirit, because he must needs reverence liberty
even more.
There is an infinite variety of subjects to treat,
and no need to estimate their relative importance. Because one man is
interested in the history of finance, it does not mean that another is
wrong in being interested in the history of war. One man's need is met
by exhaustive tables of statistics; another's by the study of the
influence exerted on national life by the great orators, the Websters
and Burkes, or by the poets, the Tyrtæuses and Körners, who
in crises utter what is in the nation's heart. There is need of the
study of the historical workings of representative gov-
22 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
ernment. There
is no less need of the study of the economic changes produced by the
factory system. Because we study with profit what Thorold Rogers wrote
of prices we are not debarred from also profiting by Mahan's studies of
naval strategy. One man finds what is of most importance to his own
mind and heart in tracing the effect upon humanity of the spread of
malaria along the shores of the Ægean; or the effect of the Black
Death on the labor-market of mediæval Europe; or the profound
influence upon the development of the African continent of the fatal
diseases borne by the bites of insects, which close some districts to
human life and others to the beasts without which humanity rests at the
lowest stage of savagery. One man sees the events from one view-point,
one from another. Yet another can combine both. We can be stirred by
Thayer's study of Cavour without abating our pleasure in the younger
Trevelyan's volumes on Garibaldi. Because we revel in Froissart, or
Joinville, or Villehardouin, there is no need that we should lack
interest in the books that attempt the more difficult task of tracing
the economic changes in the status of peasant, mechanic, and burgher
during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
History must welcome the entrance upon its domain of
every science. As James Harvey Robinson in his “New History” has said:
“The bounds of all departments of
human re-
23 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
search and
speculation are inherently provisional, indefinite, and fluctuating;
moreover, the lines of demarcation are hopelessly interlaced, for real
men and the real universe in which they live are so intricate as to
defy all attempts even of the most patient and subtle German to
establish satisfactorily and permanently the Begriff und Wesen
of any artificially delimited set of natural phenomena, whether words,
thoughts, deeds, forces, animals, plants, or stars. Each so-called
science or discipline is ever and always dependent on other sciences
and disciplines. It draws its life from them, and to them it owes,
consciously or unconsciously, a great part of its chances of progress.”
Elsewhere this writer dwells on the need of
understanding the genetic side of history, if we are to grasp the real
meaning of, and grapple most effectively with, the phenomena of our
present-day lives; for that which is can be dealt with best if we
realize at least in part from what a tangled web of causation it has
sprung.
The work of the archæologist, the work of the
anthropologist, the work of the palæo-ethnologist — out of all
these a great literary historian may gather material indispensable for
his use. He, and we, ought fully to acknowledge our debt to the
collectors of these indispensable facts. The investigator in any line
may do work which puts us
24 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
all under
lasting obligations to him, even though he be totally deficient in the
art of literary expression, that is, totally deficient in the ability
to convey vivid and lifelike pictures to others of the past whose
secrets he has laid bare. I would give no scanty or grudging
acknowledgment to the deeds of such a man. He does a lasting service;
whereas the man who tries to make literary expression cover his
ignorance or misreading of facts renders less than no service. But the
service done is immeasurably increased in value when the man arises who
from his study of a myriad dead fragments is able to paint some living
picture of the past.
This is why the record as great writers preserve it
has a value immeasurably beyond what is merely lifeless. Such a record
pulses with immortal life. It may recount the deed or the thought of a
hero at some supreme moment. It may be merely the portrayal of homely
every-day life. This matters not, so long as in either event the genius
of the historian enables him to paint in colors that do not fade. The
cry of the Ten Thousand when they first saw the sea still stirs the
hearts of men. The ruthless death scene between Jehu and Jezebel;
wicked Ahab, smitten by the chance arrow, and propped in his chariot
until he died at sundown; Josiah, losing his life because he would not
heed the Pharaoh's solemn warning,
25 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
and mourned by
all the singing men and all the singing women — the fates of these
kings and of this king's daughter, are part of the common stock of
knowledge of mankind. They were petty rulers of petty principalities;
yet, compared with them, mighty conquerors, who added empire to empire,
Shalmaneser and Sargon, Amenhotep and Rameses, are but shadows; for the
deeds and the deaths of the kings of Judah and Israel are written in
words that, once read, can not be forgotten. The Peloponnesian War
bulks of unreal size to-day because it once seemed thus to bulk to a
master mind. Only a great historian can fittingly deal with a very
great subject; yet because the qualities of chief interest in human
history can be shown on a small field no less than on a large one, some
of the greatest historians have treated subjects that only their own
genius rendered great.
So true is this that if great events lack a great
historian, and a great poet writes about them, it is the poet who fixes
them in the mind of mankind, so that in after-time importance the real
has become the shadow and the shadow the reality. Shakespeare has
definitely fixed the character of the Richard III of whom ordinary men
think and speak. Keats forgot even the right name of the man who first
saw the Pacific Ocean; yet it is his lines which leap to our minds when
we think of the “wild surmise” felt by the indomitable
26 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
explorer-conqueror
from Spain when the vast new sea burst on his vision.
When, however, the great historian has spoken, his
work will never be undone. No poet can ever supersede what Napier wrote
of the storming of Badajoz, of the British infantry at Albuera, and of
the light artillery at Fuentes d'Oñoro. After Parkman had
written of Montcalm and Wolfe there was left for other writers only
what Fitzgerald left for other translators of Omar Khayyam. Much new
light has been thrown on the history of the Byzantine Empire by the
many men who have studied it of recent years; we read each new writer
with pleasure and profit; and after reading each we take down a volume
of Gibbon, with renewed thankfulness that a great writer was moved to
do a great task.
The greatest of future archæologists will be
the great historian who instead of being a mere antiquarian delver in
dust-heaps has the genius to reconstruct for us the immense panorama of
the past. He must possess knowledge. He must possess that without which
knowledge is of so little use, wisdom. What he brings from the
charnel-house he must use with such potent wizardry that we shall see
the life that was and not the death that is. For remember that the past
was life just as much as the present is life. Whether it be Egypt, or
Mesopotamia, or Scandinavia with
27 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
which he
deals, the great historian, if the facts permit him, will put before us
the men and women as they actually lived so that we shall recognize
them for what they were, living beings. Men like Maspero, Breasted, and
Weigall have already begun this work for the countries of the Nile and
the Euphrates. For Scandinavia the groundwork was laid long ago in the
“Heimskringla” and in such sagas as those of Burnt Njal and Gisli
Soursop. Minute descriptions of mummies and of the furniture of tombs
help us as little to understand the Egypt of the mighty days, as to sit
inside the tomb of Mount Vernon would help us to see Washington the
soldier leading to battle his scarred and tattered veterans, or
Washington the statesman, by his serene strength of character,
rendering it possible for his countrymen to establish themselves as one
great nation.
The great historian must be able to paint for us the
life of the plain people, the ordinary men and women, of the time of
which he writes. He can do this only if he possesses the highest kind
of imagination. Collections of figures no more give us a picture of the
past than the reading of a tariff report on hides or woollens gives us
an idea of the actual lives of the men and women who live on ranches or
work in factories. The great historian will in as full measure as
possible present to us the every- day life of the men and women of
28 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
the age which
he describes. Nothing that tells of this life will come amiss to him.
The instruments of their labor and the weapons of their warfare, the
wills that they wrote, the bargains that they made, and the songs that
they sang when they feasted and made love: he must use them all. He
must tell us of the toil of the ordinary man in ordinary times, and of
the play by which that ordinary toil was broken. He must never forget
that no event stands out entirely isolated. He must trace from its
obscure and humble beginnings each of the movements that in its hour of
triumph has shaken the world.
Yet he must not forget that the times that are
extraordinary need especial portrayal. In the revolt against the old
tendency of historians to deal exclusively with the spectacular and the
exceptional, to treat only of war and oratory and government, many
modern writers have gone to the opposite extreme. They fail to realize
that in the lives of nations as in the lives of men there are hours so
fraught with weighty achievement, with triumph or defeat, with joy or
sorrow, that each such hour may determine all the years that are to
come thereafter, or may outweigh all the years that have gone before.
In the writings of our historians, as in the lives of our ordinary
citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it is the ordinary
every-day life which counts most;
29 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
nor yet that
seasons come when ordinary qualities count for but little in the face
of great contending forces of good and of evil, the outcome of whose
strife determines whether the nation shall walk in the glory of the
morning or in the gloom of spiritual death.
The historian must deal with the days of common
things, and deal with them so that they shall interest us in reading of
them as our own common things interest us as we live among them. He
must trace the changes that come almost unseen, the slow and gradual
growth that transforms for good or for evil the children and
grandchildren so that they stand high above or far below the level on
which their forefathers stood. He must also trace the great cataclysms
that interrupt and divert this gradual development. He can no more
afford to be blind to one class of phenomena than to the other. He must
ever remember that while the worst offence of which he can be guilty is
to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he
can not write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail
will sum up as the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the
truth.
There can be no better illustration of what I mean
than is afforded by the history of Russia during the last thousand
years. The historian must trace the growth of the earliest Slav com-
30 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
munities of
the forest and the steppe, the infiltration of Scandinavian invaders
who gave them their first power of mass action, and the slow, chaotic
development of the little communes into barbarous cities and savage
princedoms. In later Russian history he must show us priest and noble,
merchant and serf, changing slowly from the days when Ivan the Terrible
warred against Bátory, the Magyar king of Poland, until the
present moment, when with half-suspicious eyes the people of the Czar
watch their remote Bulgarian kinsmen standing before the last European
stronghold of the Turk. During all these centuries there were
multitudes of wars, foreign and domestic, any or all of which were of
little moment compared to the slow working of the various forces that
wrought in the times of peace. But there was one period of storm and
overthrow so terrible that it affected profoundly for all time the
whole growth of the Russian people, in inmost character no less than in
external dominion. Early in the thirteenth century the genius of
Jenghiz Khan stirred the Mongol horsemen of the mid-Asian pastures to a
movement as terrible to civilization as the lava flow of a volcano to
the lands around the volcano's foot. When that century opened, the
Mongols were of no more weight in the world than the Touaregs of the
Sahara are to-day. Long before the century had closed they
31 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
had ridden
from the Yellow Sea to the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf. They had
crushed Christian and Moslem and Buddhist alike beneath the iron
cruelty of their sway. They had conquered China as their successors
conquered India. They sacked Baghdad, the seat of the Caliph. In
mid-Europe their presence for a moment caused the same horror to fall
on the warring adherents of the Pope and the Kaiser. To Europe they
were a scourge so frightful, so irresistible, that the people cowered
before them as if they had been demons. No European army of that day,
of any nation, was able to look them in the face on a stricken field.
Bestial in their lives, irresistible in battle, merciless in victory,
they trampled the lands over which they rode into bloody mire beneath
the hoofs of their horses. The squat, slit-eyed, brawny horse-bowmen
drew a red furrow across Hungary, devastated Poland, and in Silesia
overthrew the banded chivalry of Germany. But it was in Russia that
they did their worst. They not merely conquered Russia, but held the
Russians as cowering and abject serfs for two centuries. Every feeble
effort at resistance was visited with such bloodthirsty vengeance that
finally no Russian ventured ever to oppose them at all. But the princes
of the cities soon found that the beast-like fury of the conquerors
when their own desires were thwarted, was only equalled by their
32 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
beast-like
indifference to all that was done among the conquered people
themselves, and that they were ever ready to hire themselves out to aid
each Russian against his brother. Under this regime the Russian who
rose was the Russian who with cringing servility to his Tartar
overlords combined ferocious and conscienceless greed in the treatment
of his fellow Russians. Moscow came to the front by using the Tartar to
help conquer the other Russian cities, paying as a price abject
obedience to all Tartar demands. In the long run the fierce and pliant
cunning of the conquered people proved too much for the short-sighted
and arrogant brutality of the conquerors. The Tartar power, the
Mongolian power, waned. Russia became united, threw off the yoke, and
herself began a career of aggression at the expense of her former
conquerors. But the reconquest of racial independence, vitally
necessary though it was to Russia, had been paid for by the
establishment of a despotism Asiatic rather than European in its spirit
and working.
The true historian will bring the past before our
eyes as if it were the present. He will make us see as living men the
hard-faced archers of Agincourt, and the war-worn spearmen who followed
Alexander down beyond the rim of the known world. We shall hear grate
on the coast of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves
33 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
whose
children's children were to inherit unknown continents. We shall thrill
to the triumphs of Hannibal. Gorgeous in our sight will rise the
splendor of dead cities, and the might of the elder empires of which
the very ruins crumbled to dust ages ago. Along ancient trade-routes,
across the world's waste spaces, the caravans shall move; and the
admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the oceans with their lonely
prows. Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above
armed hosts. We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that
have changed the course of time. We shall listen to the prophecies of
forgotten seers. Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed
greatly, who saw in their vision peaks so lofty that never yet have
they been reached by the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall
sing to us the deeds of men of might and the love and the beauty of
women. We shall see the dancing girls of Memphis. The scent of the
flowers in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon will be heavy to our senses.
We shall sit at feast with the kings of Nineveh when they drink from
ivory and gold. With Queen Maeve
in her sun-parlor we shall watch the nearing chariots of the champions.
For us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the flood, and the
harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls. The frowning
strongholds of the barons of old shall rise before us, and
34 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
the white
palace-castles from whose windows Syrian princes once looked across the
blue Ægean. We shall know the valor of the two-sworded Samurai.
Ours shall be the hoary wisdom and the strange, crooked folly of the
immemorial civilizations which tottered to a living death in India and
in China. We shall see the terrible horsemen of Timur the Lame ride
over the roof of the world; we shall hear the drums beat as the armies
of Gustavus and Frederick and Napoleon drive forward to victory. Ours
shall be the woe of burgher and peasant, and ours the stern joy when
freemen triumph and justice comes to her own. The agony of the
galley-slaves shall be ours, and the rejoicing when the wicked are
brought low and the men of evil days have their reward. We shall see
the glory of triumphant violence, and the revel of those who do wrong
in high places; and the broken-hearted despair that lies beneath the
glory and the revel. We shall also see the supreme righteousness of the
wars for freedom and justice, and know that the men who fell in these
wars made all mankind their debtors.
Some day the historians will tell us of these
things. Some day, too, they will tell our children of the age and the
land in which we now live. They will portray the conquest of the
continent. They will show the slow beginnings of settlement,
35 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
the growth of
the fishing and trading towns on the seacoast, the hesitating early
ventures into the Indian-haunted forest. Then they will show the
backwoodsmen, with their long rifles and their light axes, making their
way with labor and peril through the wooded wilderness to the
Mississippi; and then the endless march of the white-topped
wagon-trains across plain and mountain to the coast of the greatest of
the five great oceans. They will show how the land which the pioneers
won slowly and with incredible hardship was filled in two generations
by the overflow from the countries of western and central Europe. The
portentous growth of the cities will be shown, and the change from a
nation of farmers to a nation of business men and artisans, and all the
far-reaching consequences of the rise of the new industrialism. The
formation of a new ethnic type in this melting-pot of the nations will
be told. The hard materialism of our age will appear, and also the
strange capacity for lofty idealism which must be reckoned with by all
who would understand the American character. A people whose heroes are
Washington and Lincoln, a peaceful people who fought to a finish one of
the bloodiest of wars, waged solely for the sake of a great principle
and a noble idea, surely possess an emergency-standard far above mere
money-getting.
Those who tell the Americans of the future
36 HISTORY AS LITERATURE
what the
Americans of to-day and of yesterday have done, will perforce tell much
that is unpleasant. This is but saying that they will describe the
arch-typical civilization of this age. Nevertheless, when the tale is
finally told, I believe that it will show that the forces working for
good in our national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and
that, with many blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and
turning aside from the path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith by
our works, and show in our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth
a nation.
37
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
IN HISTORY
38
Blank
page
39
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
IN HISTORY ¹
AN American who, in response to such an
invitation as I have received, speaks in this university of ancient
renown, can not but feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm
of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations.
Your great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are
living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of men who have
never seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover,
these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than in
those who are not. My people have been for eight generations in
America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather
than like many of the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the
blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnic
make-up of our people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race
tends to become more and more akin to that of those Americans
¹ Delivered at Oxford, June 7,
1910. This was the Romanes Lecture for 1910.
40 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
who like
myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I
think that, as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and
sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less.
Any of my ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who
had come to Oxford in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth,” would
have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common
heirship in the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common
heirship in the things of the body.
More than ever before in the world's history we of
to-day seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not
only mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search,
we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear
vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous procession
of the ages, from the immemorial past when in “cramp elf and saurian
forms” the creative forces “swathed their too-much power,” down to the
yesterday, a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of
man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet;
and studying we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and
death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of
animal life which we designate as
41 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
species,
forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise
before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.
It is this study which has given science its
present-day prominence. In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most
marked features in the history of the past century have been the
extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and investigation, and
in the position held by the men of science with reference to those
engaged in other pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied science; of
the science, for instance, which, having revolutionized transportation
on the earth and the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the
air; of the science that finds its expression in such extraordinary
achievements as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which
have so accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial
conditions for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary
life during the last three generations have been greater than in all
the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science
which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our every-day life
than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A
hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know something
of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather against his
hav-
42 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
ing any but
the most superficial scientific knowledge. At present all this has
changed, thanks to the interest taken in scientific discoveries, the
large circulation of scientific books, and the rapidity with which
ideas originating among students of the most advanced and abstruse
sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the
position of science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly
increased respect naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been
a certain tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields.
This is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only
have scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the
history of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what
biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has
arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both
positions are in their essence right; but as regards each position, the
more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge take an
attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter
of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth merely
as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree
that accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative
worth
43 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
and
interrelationship are just as necessary in historical study as in any
other kind of study. The fact that a book, though interesting, is
untrue, of course removes it at once from the category of history,
however much it may still deserve to retain a place in the always
desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction. But
the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to
insist upon what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which
is written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth
seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific
historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a historical book is
directly in proportion to the impossibility of reading it, save as a
painful duty. Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a
branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch
of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science
encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding
encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the
great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is
broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of
books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which
shall be readable. So far from doing away with the school of great
historians, the
44 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
school of
Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need merely that the
future writers of history, without losing the qualities which have made
these men great, shall also utilize the new facts and new methods which
science has put at their disposal. Dryness is not in itself a measure
of value. No “scientific” treatise about St. Louis will displace
Joinville, for the very reason that Joinville's place is in both
history and literature; no minute study of the Napoleonic wars will
teach us more than Marbot and Marbot is as interesting as Walter Scott.
Moreover, certain at least of the branches of science should likewise
be treated by masters in the art of presentment, so that the layman
interested in science, no less than the layman interested in history,
shall have on his shelves classics which can be read. Whether this wish
be or be not capable of realization, it assuredly remains true that the
great historian of the future must essentially represent the ideal
striven after by the great historians of the past. The industrious
collector of facts occupies an honorable, but not an exalted, position,
and the scientific historian who produces books which are not
literature must rest content with the honor, substantial, but not of
the highest type, that belongs to him who gathers material which some
time some great master shall arise to use.
Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said
45 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
of the masters
of literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in
the scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He who
would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology, of
the science that treats of living, breathing things; and especially of
that science of evolution which is inseparably connected with the great
name of Darwin. Of course, there is no exact parallelism between the
birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world, and the birth,
growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet there is a
certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there
are homologies.
How far the resemblances between the two sets of
phenomena are more than accidental, how far biology can be used as an
aid in the interpretation of human history, we can not at present say.
The historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific
man is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit
ignorance is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge.
Wisdom is advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge;
and, moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record
facts of vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full
significance, are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The
research which enables us to add to the sum of
46 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
complete
knowledge stands first; but second only stands the research which,
while enabling us clearly to pose the problem, also requires us to say
that with our present knowledge we can offer no complete solution.
Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two
taken from one of the most fascinating branches of world-history, the
history of the higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.
Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the
length of time necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any
rate, many hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have
passed by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period,
we find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed
mammalian life on the land masses out of which have grown the
continents as we see them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the
advent of man substantially in the physical shape in which we now know
him, we also find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind,
though widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day.
Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type,
in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of
development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most
imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often
47 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
turned into
foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed
clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these
lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The
scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of the
relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by mutation,
by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study their
writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which
our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case
the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such
partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying that we
have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the development
of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals, there are some
facts which are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes
for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. There are other facts
as to which we grope in the dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes,
of which we can give no adequate explanation.
Before illustrating these types, let us settle one
or two matters of terminology. In the changes, the development and
extinction, of species we must remember that such expressions as “a new
species,” or as “a species becoming extinct,” are each commonly and
indiscrimi-
48 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
nately used to
express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course the “new”
species is not new in the sense that its ancestors appeared later on
the globe's surface than those of any old species tottering to
extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal now living must necessarily
trace its ancestral descent back through countless generations, through
eons of time, to the early stages of the appearance of life on the
globe. All that we mean by a “new” species is that from some cause, or
set of causes, one of these ancestral stems slowly or suddenly develops
into a form unlike any that has preceded it; so that, while in one form
of life the ancestral type is continuously repeated and the old species
continues to exist, in another form of life there is a deviation from
the ancestral type and a new species appears.
Similarly, “extinction of species” is a term which
has two entirely different meanings. The type may become extinct by
dying out and leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because as the
generations go by there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is
produced. Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In the
other case it changes into something different. The huge titanothere,
and the small three-toed
horse, both existed at what may roughly be called the same period
of the world's history, back in the middle of the mammalian age. Both
are
49 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
extinct in the
sense that each has completely disappeared and that nothing like either
is to be found in the world to-day. But whereas all the individual
titanotheres finally died out, leaving no descendants, a number of the
three-toed horses did leave descendants, and these descendants,
constantly changing as the ages went by, finally developed into the
highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and zebras of to-day.
The analogy between the facts thus indicated and
certain facts in the development of human societies is striking. A
further analogy is supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in
cases of intense and extreme specialization. When an animal form
becomes highly specialized, the type at first, because of its
specialization, triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and
attains a great development; until in many cases the specialization
becomes so extreme that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we
merely guess, it disappears. The new species which mark a new era
commonly come from the less specialized types, the less distinctive,
dominant, and striking types, of the preceding era.
When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or
gradual, which divide one period of paleontological history from
another, we can sometimes assign causes, and again we can not even
guess at them. In the case of single species, or of faunas
50 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
of very
restricted localities, the explanation is often self-evident. A
comparatively slight change in the amount of moisture in the climate,
with the attendant change in vegetation, might readily mean the
destruction of a group of huge herbivores with a bodily size such that
they needed a vast quantity of food, and with teeth so weak or so
peculiar that but one or two kinds of plants could furnish this food.
Again, we now know that the most deadly foes of the higher forms of
life are various lower forms of life, such as insects, or microscopic
creatures conveyed into the blood by insects. There are districts in
South America where many large animals, wild and domestic, can not live
because of the presence either of certain ticks or of certain baleful
flies. In Africa there is a terrible genus of poison fly, each species
acting as the host of microscopic creatures which are deadly to certain
of the higher vertebrates. One of these species, though harmless to
man, is fatal to all domestic animals, and this although harmless to
the closely related wild kinsfolk of these animals. Another is fatal to
man himself, being the cause of the “sleeping-sickness” which in many
large districts has killed out the entire population. Of course the
development or the extension of the range of any such insects, and any
one of many other causes which we see actually at work around us, would
readily
51 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
account for
the destruction of some given species or even for the destruction of
several species in a limited area of country.
When whole faunal groups die out over large areas,
the question is different, and may or may not be susceptible of
explanation with the knowledge we actually possess. In the old
arctogæal continent, for instance, in what is now Europe, Asia,
and North America, the glacial period made a complete, but of course
explicable, change in the faunal life of the region. At one time the
continent held a rich and varied fauna. Then a period of great cold
supervened, and a different fauna succeeded the first. The explanation
of the change is obvious.
But in many other cases we can not so much as hazard
a guess at why a given change occurred. One of the most striking
instances of these inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history
of South America toward the close of the tertiary period. For ages
South America had been an island by itself, cut off from North America
at the very time that the latter was at least occasionally in land
communication with Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up
in South America, some of the types resembling nothing now existing,
while others are recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters,
sloths, and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified
52 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
mammalian
fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any
representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar
during his career on this earth.
Toward the end of the tertiary period there was an
upheaval of land between this old South American island and North
America, near what is now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a
bridge across which the teeming animal life of the northern continent
had access to this queer southern continent. There followed an inrush
of huge, or swift, or formidable creatures which had attained their
development in the fierce competition of the arctogæal realm.
Elephants, camels, horses, tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big
cats, wolves, bears, deer, crowded into South America, warring each
against the other incomers and against the old long-existing forms. A
riot of life followed. Not only was the character of the South American
fauna totally changed by the invasion of these creatures from the
north, which soon swarmed over the continent, but it was also changed
through the development wrought in the old inhabitants by the severe
competition to which they were exposed. Many of the smaller or less
capable types died out. Others developed enormous bulk or complete
armor protection, and thereby saved themselves from the new beasts. In
consequence, South America soon became popu-
53 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
lated with
various new species of mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses,
deer, cats, wolves, hooved creatures of strange shapes, and some of
them of giant size, all of these being descended from the immigrant
types; and side by side with them there grew up large autochthonus
ungulates, giant ground-sloths well-nigh as large as elephants, and
armored creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally of the armadillo
or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only held their own,
but actually in their turn wandered north over the isthmus and invaded
North America. A fauna as varied as that of Africa to-day, as abundant
in species and individuals, even more noteworthy, because of its huge
size or odd type, and because of the terrific prowess of the more
formidable flesh-eaters, was thus developed in South America, and
flourished for a period which human history would call very long
indeed, but which geologically was short.
Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction
fell on this fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the
same fate befalling the changed representatives of the old
autochthonous fauna and the descendants of the migrants that had come
down from the north. Ground-sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and
mastodon, and all the associated animals of large size vanished, and
South America, though still retaining
54 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
its connection
with North America, once again became a land with a mammalian life
small and weak compared to that of North America and the Old World. Its
fauna is now marked, for instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer
and cats, fox-like wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as
by the presence of small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other
words, it includes diminutive representatives of the giants of the
preceding era, both of the giants among the older forms of mammalia,
and of the giants among the new and intrusive kinds. The change was
wide-spread and extraordinary, and with our present means of
information it is wholly inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is
hard to imagine any cause which would account for the extinction of so
many species of huge or moderate size, while smaller representatives,
and here and there medium-sized representatives, of many of them were
left.
Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of
species, there are, if not homologies, at least certain analogies, in
the history of human societies, in the history of the rise to
prominence, of the development and change, of the temporary dominance,
and death or transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form
races or nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in mind
that we use each of the words “birth” and
55 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
“death,”
“youth” and “age,” often very loosely,
and sometimes as denoting either one of two totally different
conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing as an “old”
or a “young” nation, any
more than there is an “old” or “young” family. Phylogenetically, the
line of ancestral descent must be of exactly the same length for every
existing individual, and for every group of individuals, whether
forming a family or a nation. All that can properly be meant by the
terms “new” and “young” is that in a given line of descent there has
suddenly come a period of rapid change. This change may arise either
from a new development or transformation of the old elements, or else
from a new grouping of these elements with other and varied elements;
so that the words “new” nation or “young” nation may have a real
difference of significance in one case from what they have in another.
As in biology, so in human history, a new form may
result from the specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very
slowly changing, generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance,
occurs when a barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops
a more complex cultivation and civilization. This is what occurred, for
instance, in western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and,
later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the modern
coun-
56 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
tries of
western Europe are descended from the states created by these northern
invaders. When first created they would be called “new” or “young”
states in the sense that part or all of the people composing them were
descended from races that hitherto had not been civilized, and that
therefore, for the first time, entered on the career of civilized
communities. In the southern part of western Europe the new states thus
formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants already in the land under
the Roman Empire; and it was here that the new kingdoms first took
shape. Through a reflex action their influence then extended back into
the cold forests from which the invaders had come, and Germany and
Scandinavia witnessed the rise of communities with essentially the same
civilization as their southern neighbors; though in those communities,
unlike the southern communities, there was no infusion of new blood, so
that the new civilized nations which gradually developed were composed
entirely of members of the same races which in the same regions had for
ages lived the life of a slowly changing barbarism. The same was true
of the Slavs and the Slavonized Finns of eastern Europe, when an
infiltration of Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an
infiltration of Byzantine culture from the south, joined to produce the
changes which have gradually, out of the little Slav com-
57 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
munities of
the forest and the steppe, formed the mighty Russian Empire of to-day.
Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting
off from a long-established, highly developed, and specialized nation.
In this case the nation is usually spoken of as a “young,” and is
correctly spoken of as a “new,” nation; but the term should always be
used with a clear sense of the difference between what is described in
such case, and what is described by the same term in speaking of a
civilized nation just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse
were new cities compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or
Phoenician race was in every sense of the word as old in the new city
as in the old city. So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new
community compared with England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of
civilization and culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of
course do not mean for a moment that great changes are not produced by
the mere fact that the old civilized race is suddenly placed in
surroundings where it has again to go through the work of taming the
wilderness, a work finished many centuries before in the original home
of the race; I merely mean that the ancestral history is the same in
each case. We can rightly use the phrase “a new people,” in speaking of
Canadians or Australians, Americans or Africanders. But we use it in an
entirely dif-
58 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
ferent sense
from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as those
founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of
astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves
conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use
it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when
speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod,
and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the marshy forests
struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to become builders of cities
and to form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred
were “new,” compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also in
every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing in
common with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the
Cæsars of Byzantium; their social problems and after-time history
were totally different. This is not true of those “new” nations which
spring direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United
States, are all “new” nations, compared with the nations of Europe;
but, with whatever changes in detail, their civilization is
nevertheless of the general European type, as shown in Portugal, Spain,
and England. The differences between these “new” American and these
“old” European nations are not as great as those which
59 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
separate the
“new” nations one from another, and the “old” nations one from
another. There are in each case very real differences between the new
and the old nation; differences both for good and for evil; but in each
case there is the same ancestral history to reckon with, the same type
of civilization, with its attendant benefits and shortcomings; and,
after the pioneer stages are passed, the problems to be solved, in
spite of superficial differences, are in their essence the same; they
are those that confront all civilized peoples, not those that confront
only peoples struggling from barbarism into civilization.
So, when we speak of the “death” of a tribe, a
nation, or a civilization, the term may be used for either one of two
totally different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological
history being complete. Certain tribes of savages — the Tasmanians, for
instance, and various little clans of American Indians — have within
the last century or two completely died out; all of the individuals
have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood has disappeared.
Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are now
disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the veins of
the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those white
intruders; so that in reality they are merely being transformed into
something absolutely different
60 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
from what they
were. In the United States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks,
Cherokees, Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes are in process of
absorption into the mass of the white population; when the State was
admitted a couple of years ago, one of the two senators, and three of
the five representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In
but a few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely
as those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by
absorption and transformation into the mass of the American population.
A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the
statement that a civilization has “died out.” The nationality and
culture of the wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain
have completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences
dating therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and hidden
form as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the Roman Empire
was of no such character. There was complete change, far-reaching
transformation, and at one period a violent dislocation; but it would
not be correct to speak either of the blood or the culture of Old Rome
as extinct. We are not yet in a position to dogmatize as to the
permanence or evanescence of the various strains of blood that go to
make up every civilized na-
61 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
tionality; but
it is reasonably certain that the blood of the old Roman still flows
through the veins of the modern Italian; and though there has been much
intermixture, from many different foreign sources — from foreign
conquerors and from foreign slaves — yet it is probable that the
Italian type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type in the ancient
Latin. As for the culture, the civilization of Rome, this is even more
true. It has suffered a complete transformation, partly by natural
growth, partly by absorption of totally alien elements, such as a
Semitic religion, and certain Teutonic governmental and social customs;
but the process was not one of extinction, but one of growth and
transformation, both from within and by the accretion of outside
elements. In France and Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small;
but the Roman culture which was forced on those countries has been
tenaciously retained by them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical
and political changes, as the basis on which their civilizations have
been built. Moreover, the permanent spreading of Roman influence was
not limited to Europe. It has extended to and over half of that New
World which was not even dreamed of during the thousand years of
brilliant life between the birth and the death of pagan Rome. This New
World was discovered by one Italian, and its mainland first reached and
named
62 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
by another;
and in it, over a territory many times the size of Trajan's empire, the
Spanish, French, and Portuguese adventurers founded, beside the Saint
Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks of the Andes, and in the
shadow of the snow-capped volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande to
the Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourishing and growing
apace, which in speech and culture, and even as regards one strain in
their blood, are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization.
When we speak of the disappearance, the passing away, of ancient
Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same terms to
describe totally different phenomena.
The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize
much more clearly than their predecessors of a couple of generations
back, how artifical most great nationalities are, and how loose is the
terminology usually employed to describe them. There is an element of
unconscious and rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a
century ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential
admiration, as if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but
something ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride
and faith in their own and their fellow countrymen's purity of descent
from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a few
generations earlier by the various
63 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
noble families
who traced their lineage direct to Odin, Æneas, or Noah.
Nowadays, of course, all students recognize that there may not be, and
often is not, the slightest connection between kinship in blood and
kinship in tongue. In America we find three races, white, red, and
black, and three tongues, English, French, and Spanish, mingled in such
a way that the lines of cleavage of race continually run at right
angles to the lines of cleavage of speech; there being communities
practically of pure blood of each race found speaking each language.
Aryan and Teutonic are terms having very distinct linguistic meanings;
but whether they have any such ethnical meanings as were formerly
attributed to them is so doubtful, that we can not even be sure whether
the ancestors of most of those we call Teutons originally spoke an
Aryan tongue at all. The term Celtic, again, is perfectly clear when
used linguistically; but when used to describe a race it means almost
nothing until we find out which one of several totally different
terminologies the writer or speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the
term is used to designate the short-headed, medium-sized type common
throughout middle Europe, from east to west, it denotes something
entirely different from what is meant when the name is applied to the
tall, yellow-haired opponents of the Romans and the later Greeks;
while, if used to des-
64 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
ignate any
modern nationality, it becomes about as loose and meaningless as the
term Anglo-Saxon itself.
Most of the great societies which have developed a
high civilization and have played a dominant part in the world have
been — and are — artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the
sense of including totally different race types. A great nation rarely
belongs to any one race, though its citizens generally have one
essentially national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these
great artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the
parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward or
go back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very
powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses. National unity is
far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon with; until indeed
we come to race differences as fundamental as those which divide from
one another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when they
become so important that differences of nationality, speech, and creed
sink into littleness.
An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples
were divided according to their physical and racial characteristics,
such as stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no
resemblance whatever to a map giving the political di-
65 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
visions, the
nationalities, of Europe; while, on the contrary, a linguistic map
would show a general correspondence between speech and nationality. The
northern Frenchman is in blood and physical type more nearly allied to
his German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediterranean
seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than to
the man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tributaries of the
Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the qualities that tell in
the make-up of a nationality, all these kinds of Frenchmen feel keenly
that they are one, and are different from all outsiders, their
differences dwindling into insignificance compared with the
extraordinary, artificially produced resemblances which bring them
together and wall them off from the outside world. The same is true
when we compare the German who dwells where the Alpine springs of the
Danube and the Rhine interlace, with the physically different German of
the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and
Yorkshireman in England.
In dealing, not with groups of human beings in
simple and primitive relations, but with highly complex, highly
specialized, civilized, or semi-civilized societies, there is need of
great caution in drawing analogies with what has occurred in the
development of the animal world. Yet even
66 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
in these cases
it is curious to see how some of the phenomena in the growth and
disappearance of these complex, artificial groups of human beings
resemble what has happened in myriads of instances in the history of
life on this planet.
Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are
knit by a bond of speech and culture much more than by a bond of blood,
show periods of extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or lingering
decay? In some cases we can answer readily enough; in other cases we
can not as yet even guess what the proper answer should be. If in any
such case the centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal, the nation
will of course fly to pieces, and the reason for its failure to become
a dominant force is patent to every one. The minute that the spirit
which finds its healthy development in local self-government, and is
the antidote to the dangers of an extreme centralization, develops into
mere particularism, into inability to combine effectively for
achievement of a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great
results. Poland and certain republics of the Western Hemisphere are the
standard examples of failure of this kind; and the United States would
have ranked with them, and her name would have become a byword of
derision, if the forces of union had not triumphed in the Civil War.
So, the growth of soft luxury after it has reached a certain
67 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
point becomes
a national danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the
vision of a seer to foretell what must happen in any community if the
average woman ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy
children, if the average man loses the will and the power to work up to
old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely
commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in
graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the
nation has lost what no material prosperity can offset.
But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or
partially inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward
when great slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a
country-side of peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and
sensuality ate like acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while
the mass of the citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions,
but upon the state, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. But
this does not explain why the forward movement stopped at different
times, so far as different matters were concerned; at one time as
regards literature, at another time as regards architecture, at another
time as regards city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome's
dissolution at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart from the
impoverishment and depopulation of the empire, its fall would be
68 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
quite
sufficiently explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had
lost the fighting edge — an essential even under a despotism, and
therefore far more essential in free, self-governing communities, such
as those of the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is
rather that out of the chaos and corruption of Roman society during the
last days of the oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an
empire able to hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or four
centuries. But why, for instance, should the higher kinds of literary
productiveness have ceased about the beginning of the second century,
whereas the following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of energy in
the shape of city-building in the provinces, not only in western
Europe, but in Africa ? We can not even guess why the springs of one
kind of energy dried up, while there was yet no cessation of another
kind.
Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland.
For a period covering a little more than the seventeenth century,
Holland, like some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period,
stood on the dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly
her superior in territory and population as to make it inevitable that
sooner or later she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence
to which she had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall
came; it could not
69 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
have been
indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker than it needed to come,
because of shortcomings on her part to which both Great Britain and the
United States would be wise to pay heed. Her government was singularly
ineffective, the decentralization being such as often to permit the
separatist, the particularist, spirit of the provinces to rob the
central authority of all efficiency. This was bad enough. But the fatal
weakness was that so common in rich, peace-loving societies, where men
hate to think of war as possible, and try to justify their own
reluctance to face it either by high-sounding moral platitudes, or else
by a philosophy of short-sighted materialism. The Dutch were very
wealthy. They grew to believe that they could hire others to do their
fighting for them on land; and on sea, where they did their own
fighting, and fought very well, they refused in time of peace to make
ready fleets so efficient as either to insure them against the peace
being broken or else to give them the victory when war came. To be
opulent and unarmed is to secure ease in the present at the almost
certain cost of disaster in the future.
It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when
she did her position among the powers; but it is far more difficult to
explain why at the same time there should have come at least a partial
loss of position in the world of art and letters. Some
70 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
spark of
divine fire burnt itself out in the national soul. As the line of great
statesmen, of great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the
line of the great Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the
schools followed the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council
chamber.
In the little republic of Holland, as in the great
empire of Rome, it was not death which came, but transformation. Both
Holland and Italy teach us that races that fall may rise again. In
Holland, as in the Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there
was in a sense no decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what
has befallen so many countries: no lowering of the general standard of
well-being, no general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened
was, first a flowering time, in which the country's men of action and
men of thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the
day; then this period of command passed, and the state revolved in an
eddy, aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet
the people themselves in their internal relations remained
substantially unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now
recovered themselves and play again a leading part.
In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer
time, the course of affairs was different.
71 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
When the Roman
Empire that was really Roman went down in ruin, there followed an
interval of centuries when the gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form
of luxury and frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work,
of enervating self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we
regard as most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work
throughout Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism.
It had ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring
forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people
cowered in helpless misery among the horse-hoofs of the barbarians, as
the wild northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the
cities for a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but
in the end it was seen that what came had been in part change and
growth. It was not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a vast
heritage of language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but
the people of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain in their
veins. In a few centuries came a wonderful new birth for Italy. Then
for four or five hundred years there was a growth of many little
city-states which, in their energy both in peace and war, in their
fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts and
letters, and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve
order among them-
72 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
selves or to
repel outside invasion, can not unfairly be compared with classic
Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or
Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the nineteenth century, there came
for the third time a wonderful new birth.
Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old
home, and in certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter
disappearance in certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where
it at one time seemed as firmly established as in Italy — certainly as
in Spain or Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and
disappearance of a national type can be found than in the case of the
Græco-Roman dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told
it extended over nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander
till after the time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet
remain the ruins of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted
that dominion must once have been. The overshadowing and far-reaching
importance of what occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact
that the New Testament was written in Greek; while to the early
Christians, North Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the
valley of the Po. The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in
the lands for a period twice as long as that which has elapsed since,
with the voyage of
73 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
Columbus,
modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then they withered
like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion, and their place
knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they vanished; and the
old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside them a new type,
the Arab.
Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure
of the main facts. We know that the Hollander remains in Holland,
though the greatness of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin
blood remains in Italy, whether to a greater or less extent; and that
the Latin culture has died out in the African realm it once won, while
it has lasted in Spain and France, and thence has extended itself to
continents beyond the ocean. We may not know the causes of the facts,
save partially; but the facts themselves we do know. But there are
other cases in which we are at present ignorant even of the facts; we
do not know what the changes really were, still less the hidden causes
and meaning of these changes. Much remains to be found out before we
can speak with any certainty as to whether some changes mean the actual
dying out or the mere transformation of types. It is, for instance,
astonishing how little permanent change in the physical make-up of the
people seems to have been worked in Europe by the migrations of the
races in historic
74 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
times. A tall,
fair-haired, long-skulled race penetrates to some southern country and
establishes a commonwealth. The generations pass. There is no violent
revolution, no break in continuity of history, nothing in the written
records to indicate an epoch-making change at any given moment; and yet
after a time we find that the old type has reappeared and that the
people of the locality do not substantially differ in physical form
from the people of other localities that did not suffer such an
invasion. Does this mean that gradually the children of the invaders
have dwindled and died out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancient
blood, has there been a change, part reversion and part assimilation,
to the ancient type in its old surroundings? Do tint of skin, eyes and
hair, shape of skull, and stature change in the new environment, so as
to be like those of the older people who dwelt in this environment? Do
the intrusive races, without change of blood, tend under the pressure
of their new surroundings to change in type so as to resemble the
ancient peoples of the land? Or, as the strains mingled, has the new
strain dwindled and vanished, from causes as yet obscure? Has the blood
of the Lombard practically disappeared from Italy, and of the Visigoth
from Spain, or does it still flow in large populations where the old
physical type has once more become dominant? Here in Eng-
75 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
land, the
long-skulled men of the long barrows, the short-skulled men of the
round barrows have they blended, or has one or the other type actually
died out; or are they merged in some older race which they seemingly
supplanted, or have they adopted the tongue and civilization of some
later race which seemingly destroyed them? We can not say. We do not
know which of the widely different stocks now speaking Aryan tongues
represents in physical characteristics the ancient Aryan type, nor
where the type originated, nor how or why it imposed its language on
other types, nor how much or how little mixture of blood accompanied
the change of tongue.
The phenomena of national growth and decay, both of
those which can and those which can not be explained, have been
peculiarly in evidence during the four centuries that have gone by
since the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good
Hope. These have been the four centuries of by far the most intense and
constantly accelerating rapidity of movement and development that the
world has yet seen. The movement has covered all the fields of human
activity. It has witnessed an altogether unexampled spread of civilized
mankind over the world, as well as an altogether unexampled advance in
man's dominion over nature; and this together with a literary and
artistic activity to be matched in
76 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
but one
previous epoch. This period of extension and development has been that
of one race, the so-called white race, or, to speak more accurately,
the group of peoples living in Europe, who undoubtedly have a certain
kinship of blood, who profess the Christian religion, and trace back
their culture to Greece and Rome.
The memories of men are short, and it is easy to
forget how brief is this period of unquestioned supremacy of the
so-called white race. It is but a thing of yesterday. During the
thousand years which went before the opening of this era of European
supremacy, the attitude of Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and
Tartar, Arab and Moor, had on the whole been that of successful
aggression against Europe. More than a century went by after the
voyages of Columbus before the mastery in war began to pass from the
Asiatic to the European. During that time Europe produced no generals
or conquerors able to stand comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber
and Akbar. Then the European advance gathered momentum; until at the
present time peoples of European blood hold dominion over all America
and Australia and the islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the
major half of Asia. Much of this world conquest is merely political,
and such a conquest is always likely in the long run to vanish. But
very much of it represents not a
77 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
merely
political, but an ethnic conquest; the intrusive people having either
exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples, or else having
imposed upon them its tongue, law, culture, and religion, together with
a strain of its blood. During this period substantially all of the
world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the people
of European descent. The first exception of any consequence is the
wonderful rise of Japan within the last generation — a phenomenon
unexampled in history; for both in blood and in culture the Japanese
line of ancestral descent is as remote as possible from ours; and yet
Japan, while hitherto keeping most of what was strongest in her ancient
character and traditions, has assimilated with curious completeness
most of the characteristics that have given power and leadership to the
West.
During this period of intense and feverish activity
among the peoples of European stock, first one and then another has
taken the lead. The movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their
flowering-time was as brief as it was wonderful. The gorgeous pages of
their annals are illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers,
statesmen, poets, and painters. Then their days of greatness ceased.
Many partial explanations can be given, but something remains behind,
some hidden force for evil, some hidden source of weakness
78 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
upon which we
can not lay our hands. Yet there are many signs that in the New World,
after centuries of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and
Portuguese stock are entering upon another era of development, and
there are other signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula
itself.
About the time that the first brilliant period of
the leadership of the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the
other end of Europe, in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy
forest, the Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his
hand to grasp leadership and dominion. Since then almost every nation
of Europe has at one time or another sought a place in the movement of
expansion; but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon of
mankind has been the growth of the English-speaking peoples and their
spread over the world's waste spaces.
Comparison is often made between the empire of
Britain and the empire of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on
all modern civilization, the empire of Rome is of course the more
important, simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots
in other continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome
by the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The empire of Rome is
the most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time can be
compared with it. But this is merely another
79 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
way of saying
that the nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection of
the stream's current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires one with
the other in point of actual achievement, and disregarding the
immensely increased effect on other civilizations which inhered in the
older empire because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand
years, there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and
abounding interest and importance of their careers.
In the world of antiquity each great empire rose
when its predecessor had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed
large over the horizon of history, there were left for her to contend
with only decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she conquered
Pyrrhus, she strove against the strength of but one of the many
fragments into which Alexander's kingdom had fallen. When she conquered
Carthage, she overthrew a foe against whom for two centuries the single
Greek city of Syracuse had contended on equal terms; it was not the
Sepoy armies of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius of
the House of Barca, which rendered the struggle forever memorable. It
was the distance and the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen,
that set bounds to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was
curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the
80 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
tall
barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her
greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the
Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German threatened
her but to die.
On the contrary, the great expansion of England has
occurred, the great empire of Britain has been achieved, during the
centuries that have also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish
on the continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and
keeping the empire she won between the days of Scipio and the days of
Trajan, had at the same time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon
and Tiglath, the Egypt of Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of
Persia and Macedon in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. The empire
of Britain is vaster in space, in population, in wealth, in wide
variety of possession, in a history of multiplied and manifold
achievement of every kind, than even the glorious empire of Rome. Yet,
unlike Rome, Britain has won dominion in every clime, has carried her
flag by conquest and settlement to the uttermost ends of the earth, at
the very time that haughty and powerful rivals, in their abounding
youth or strong maturity, were eager to set bounds to her greatness,
and to tear from her what she had won afar. England has peopled
continents with her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming
81 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
myriads of
alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested from all comers
the right to the world's waste spaces, while at home she has held her
own before nations, each of military power comparable to Rome's at her
zenith.
Rome fell by attack from without only because the
ills within her own borders had grown incurable. What is true of your
country, my hearers, is true of my own; while we should be vigilant
against foes from without, yet we need never really fear them so long
as we safeguard ourselves against the enemies within our own
households; and these enemies are our own passions and follies. Free
peoples can escape being mastered by others only by being able to
master themselves. We Americans and you people of the British Isles
alike need ever to keep in mind that, among the many qualities
indispensable to the success of a great democracy, and second only to a
high and stern sense of duty, of moral obligation, are self-knowledge
and self-mastery. You, my hosts, and I may not agree in all our views;
some of you would think me a very radical democrat — as, for the matter
of that, I am — and my theory of imperialism would probably suit the
anti-imperialists as little as it would suit a certain type of
forcible-feeble imperialist. But there are some points on which we must
all agree if we think soundly. The precise form of
82 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
government,
democratic or otherwise, is the instrument, the tool, with which we
work. It is important to have a good tool. But, even if it is the best
possible, it is only a tool. No implement can ever take the place of
the guiding intelligence that wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the
work of the best craftsman; but a good tool in bad hands is no better.
In the last analysis the all-important factor in national greatness is
national character.
There are questions which we of the great civilized
nations are ever tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth
drawing to an end? Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of
that great law of death which is itself but part of the great law of
life? None can tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are
hidden or that can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us,
both for good and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in
taste for vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and
unhealthy. The most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate,
in the rate of natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree
shared by most of the civilized nations of central and western Europe,
of America and Australia — a diminution so great that, if it continues
for the next century at the rate which has obtained for the last
twenty-five years, all the more highly
83 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
civilized
peoples will be stationary or else have begun to go backward in
population, while many of them will have already gone very far backward.
There is much that should give us concern for the
future. But there is much also which should give us hope. No man is
more apt to be mistaken than the prophet of evil. After the French
Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr
hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go down with a
crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third- and
fourth-century Rome a respectable, but painfully overworked,
comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus
as to the future of the world have proved groundless as regards the
civilized portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look back at Carlyle's
prophecies of some seventy years ago, and then think of the teeming
life of achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and of noble
effort crowned by success, which has been ours for the two generations
since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had been told and
all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth doing had been
done. I believe with all my heart that a great future remains for us;
but whether it does or does not, our duty is not altered. However the
battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with utmost vigor do
his allotted task, and bear himself as valiantly in defeat as in
victory. Come
84 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
what will, we
belong to peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being
great. In the ages that have gone by, the great nations, the nations
that have expanded and that have played a mighty part in the world,
have in the end grown old and weakened and vanished; but so have the
nations whose only thought was to avoid all danger, all effort, who
would risk nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. In the end, the
same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one type
perishes with it, while the other leaves its mark deep on the history
of all the future of mankind.
A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and
even though in the physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down
a history of heroic achievement, and for all time to come may
profoundly influence the nations that arise in its place by the impress
of what it has done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the
same time to see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to
take up the task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the
earth. But if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is
ours to remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our
fathers were before us. The torch has been handed on from nation to
nation, from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded
time, from the dim years before
85 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
history dawned
down to the blazing splendor of this teeming century of ours. It
dropped from the hands of the coward and the sluggard, of the man
wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man whose soul was eaten away by
self-indulgence; it has been kept alight only by those who were mighty
of heart and cunning of hand. What they worked at, provided it was
worth doing at all, was of less matter than how they worked, whether in
the realm of the mind or the realm of the body. If their work was good,
if what they achieved was of substance, then high success was really
theirs.
In the first part of this lecture I drew certain
analogies between what has occurred to forms of animal life through the
procession of the ages on this planet, and what has occurred and is
occurring to the great artificial civilizations which have gradually
spread over the world's surface during the thousands of years that have
elapsed since cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile
and the Euphrates, and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled with the
masts of the Ægean craft. But of course the parallel is true only
in the roughest and most general way. Moreover, even between the
civilizations of to-day and the civilizations of ancient times there
are differences so profound that we must be cautious in drawing any
conclusions for the present based on
86 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
what has
happened in the past. While freely admitting all of our follies and
weaknesses of today, it is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize the
incredible advance that has been made in ethical standards. I do not
believe that there is the slightest necessary connection between any
weakening of virile force and this advance in the moral standard, this
growth of the sense of obligation to one's neighbor and of reluctance
to do that neighbor wrong. We need have scant patience with that silly
cynicism which insists that kindliness of character only accompanies
weakness of character. On the contrary, just as in private life many of
the men of strongest character are the very men of loftiest and most
exalted morality, so I believe that in national life, as the ages go
by, we shall find that the permanent national types will more and more
tend to become those in which, though intellect stands high, character
stands higher; in which rugged strength and courage, rugged capacity to
resist wrongful aggression by others, will go hand in hand with a lofty
scorn of doing wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of
Hampden, of Washington, and Lincoln. These were as good men, as
disinterested and unselfish men, as ever served a state; and they were
also as strong men as ever founded or saved a state. Surely such
examples prove that there is nothing Utopian in our effort
87 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
to combine
justice and strength in the same nation. The really high civilizations
must themselves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence and love of
ease which they tend to produce.
Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible
problems to solve within its own borders, problems that arise not
merely from juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from
the self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must
deal with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which
the problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must
be a spirit of broad humanity, of brotherly kindness, of acceptance of
responsibility, one for each and each for all, and at the same time a
spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and
sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong to
the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil affairs
it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the lazy, the
vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted a reward which is really the
robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned. The only
effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself; and the
worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently helped at the
expense of some one else. True liberty shows itself to best advantage
in protecting the rights of
88 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
others, and
especially of minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it
is to the advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the
advantage of a majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or
freedom of contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from
the body politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the
doctrinaires of an impossible and incidentally of a highly undesirable
social revolution which, in destroying individual rights including
property rights and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in
the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the
advance or the preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil
and a dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to
our duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social
conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this
betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social
conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with
the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and
business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to
remember that, though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no
greater an evil than softness of head.
But in addition to these problems, the most intimate
and important of all, and which to a
89 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
larger or less
degree affect all the modern nations somewhat alike, we of the great
nations that have expanded, that are now in complicated relations with
one another and with alien races, have special problems and special
duties of our own. You belong to a nation which possesses the greatest
empire upon which the sun has ever shone. I belong to a nation which is
trying, on a scale hitherto unexampled, to work out the problems of
government for, of, and by the people, while at the same time doing the
international duty of a great Power. But there are certain problems
which both of us have to solve, and as to which our standards should be
the same. The Englishman, the man of the British Isles, in his various
homes across the seas, and the American, both at home and abroad, are
brought into contact with utterly alien peoples, some with a
civilization more ancient than our own, others still in, or having but
recently arisen from, the barbarism which our people left behind ages
ago. The problems that arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty.
They can not be solved by the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home
people, with little patent recipes and those cut-and-dried theories of
the political nursery which have such limited applicability amid the
crash of elemental forces. Neither can they be solved by the raw
brutality of the men who, whether at home or on the rough
90 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
frontier of
civilization, adopt might as the only standard of right in dealing with
other men, and treat alien races only as subjects for exploitation. No
hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races, because
they differ from one another far more widely than some of them differ
from us. But there are one or two rules which must not be forgotten. In
the long run there can be no justification for one race managing or
controlling another unless the management and control are exercised in
the interest and for the benefit of that other race. This is what our
peoples have in the main done, and must continue in the future in even
greater degree to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines alike. In
the next place, as regards every race, everywhere, at home or abroad,
we can not afford to deviate from the great rule of righteousness which
bids us treat each man on his worth as a man. He must not be
sentimentally favored because he belongs to a given race; he must not
be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted to cumber the ground, or
given other privileges which would be denied to the vicious and unfit
among ourselves. On the other hand, where he acts in a way which would
entitle him to respect and reward if he was one of our own stock, he is
just as entitled to that respect and reward if he comes of another
stock, even though that other stock produces a much
91 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
smaller
proportion of men of his type than does our own. This has nothing to do
with social intermingling, with what is called social equality. It has
to do merely with the question of doing to each man and each woman that
elementary justice which will permit him or her to gain from life the
reward which should always accompany thrift, sobriety, self-control,
respect for the rights of others, and hard and intelligent work to a
given end. To more than such just treatment no man is entitled, and
less than such just treatment no man should receive.
The other type of duty is the international duty,
the duty owed by one nation to another. I hold that the laws of
morality which should govern individuals in their dealings one with the
other, are just as binding concerning nations in their dealings one
with the other. The application of the moral law must be different in
the two cases, because in one case it has, and in the other it has not,
the sanction of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can
depend for his rights upon the courts, which themselves derive their
force from the police power of the state. The nation can depend upon
nothing of the kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the
highest duty of the most advanced and freest peoples to keep themselves
in such a state of readiness as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism
the
92 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
hope of
arresting the progress of the world by striking down the nations that
lead in that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the
unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples
who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible
foe. But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and the
peoples who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and iniquity
by the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate
lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong; and
both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous
fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country
should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for insistence
upon one's own rights and of respect for the rights of others, that
marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when dealing with his
fellows. Permit me to support this statement out of my own experience.
For nearly eight years I was the head of a great nation, and charged
especially with the conduct of its foreign policy; and during those
years I took no action with reference to any other people on the face
of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking as an
individual in dealing with other individuals.
I believe that we of the great civilized nations of
to-day have a right to feel that long careers of
93 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
achievement
lie before our several countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the
honorable privilege of doing his part, however small, in that work. Let
us strive hardily for success, even if by so doing we risk failure,
spurning the poorer souls of small endeavor, who know neither failure
nor success. Let us hope that our own blood shall continue in the land,
that our children and children's children to endless generations shall
arise to take our places and play a mighty and dominant part in the
world. But whether this be denied or granted by the years we shall not
see, let at least the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward
the lighted torch in our own day and generation. If we do this, then,
as our eyes close, and we go out into the darkness, and others' hands
grasp the torch, at least we can say that our part has been borne well
and valiantly.
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THE WORLD MOVEMENT
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97
THE WORLD MOVEMENT
¹
I VERY highly appreciate the chance to address
the University of Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of
existence. It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate
the feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a
country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the
case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with
proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the
abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany. More
than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the West
became in fact a German empire. Throughout mediæval times the
Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history of
the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that
Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately
the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep
it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders,
road-
¹ Delivered at the University
of Berlin, May 12, 1910.
98 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
makers; they
battled to bring order out of the seething turbulence around them; and
at the same time they first beat back heathendom and then slowly
wrested from it its possessions.
After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in
sunder of the Roman Empire, the first real crystallization of the
forces that were working for a new uplift of civilization in western
Europe was round the Karling house, and, above all, round the great
Emperor, Karl the Great, the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under
the Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the
Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into
Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who
had long held tented dominion in middle Europe, were utterly destroyed.
With the break-up of the Karling empire came chaos once more, and a
fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the frozen north, and new hordes
of outlandish riders from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany
proper who quelled these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman
and Magyar became Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so
that Europe began to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day.
Since then the centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of
fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement
in arms and in gov-
99 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
ernment, in
science and the arts. The centre of power shifted hither and thither
within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house
which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the
very forefront among the nations of mankind.
To this ancient land, with its glorious past and
splendid present, to this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I
come from a young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different
from, each of the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has
inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing
every inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The
German strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning
there has been a large German element among the successive waves of
newcomers whose children's children have been and are being fused into
the American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the
Low Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we
have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our
veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations
American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to the
wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the
intimate and friendly connection between the two
100 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
countries is
now in every way closer than it has ever been before.
Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the
world movement of to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly
visible. The life of this university covers the period during which
that movement has spread until it is felt throughout every continent,
while its velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face
of the world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is
therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.
When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was
developed on this planet, the change worked by his appearance was at
first slight. Further ages passed while he groped and struggled by
infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for
the general law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever
its nature, changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms.
The life of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and
groups of savages influence one another but little. The first
rudimentary beginnings of that complex life of communities which we
call civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far
the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living
world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something
101 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
totally
different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been before.
There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the
development of life generally and what has gone on in the development
of human society. [These I have discussed in the preceding chapter.]
But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.
Throughout their early stages the movements of
civilization — for, properly speaking, there was no one movement — were
very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each
developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered
these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such
extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and
the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these
inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes,
still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who
know none of them except fire — and the discovery and use of fire may
have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of
the savagery which separated man from brute.
Even after civilization and culture had achieved a
relatively high position, they were still purely local, and from this
fact subject to violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence
in prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many
102 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
peoples who,
in given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture
that was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say
what, if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we
have developed our own, while it is also difficult to say exactly how
much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many cases, as
where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic
peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower
civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other
cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the
beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the
neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain
softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the
mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls
cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that had
been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of
barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak
definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years
that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in
prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as
to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to the
history and fate of the build-
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ers of those
strange ruins of which Stonehenge is the type.
The first civilizations which left behind them clear
records rose in that hoary historic past which geologically is part of
the immediate present and — which is but a span's length from the
present, even when compared only with the length of time that man has
lived on this planet. These first civilizations were those which rose
in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years
ago. As far as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of
cultural development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to
enable us to connect either with the early cultural movements, in
southwestern Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with
that Chinese civilization which has been so profoundly affected by
Indian influences.
Compared with the civilizations with which we are
best acquainted, the striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic
civilizations were the length of time they endured and their
comparative changelessness. The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt
by the Nile or Euphrates are found thinking much the same thoughts,
doing much the same deeds, leaving at least very similar records, while
time passes in tens of centuries. Of course there was change; of course
there were action and reaction in influence between them
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and their
neighbors; and the movement of change, of development, material,
mental, spiritual, was much faster than anything that had occurred
during the eons of mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern
times the movement was very slow indeed; and, moreover, in each case it
was strongly localized, while the field of endeavor was narrow. There
were certain conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests
in the domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which
spread the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of
it as a “world movement” at all, for by far the greater part of the
habitable globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at,
so far as peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned. With
the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into
prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be said
to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can
consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to
be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man,
when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically
these three peoples — although, judged even by the history of which we
have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.
The case of the Jew was quite exceptional.
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His was a
small nation, of little more consequence than the sister nations of
Moab and Damascus, until all three, and the other petty states of the
country, fell under the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all
his fellows died. In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion
which has been the most potent of all factors in its effect on the
subsequent history of mankind; but none of his other contributions
compare with the legacies left us by the Greek and the Roman.
The Greco-Roman world saw a civilization far more
brilliant, far more varied and intense, than any that had gone before
it, and one that affected a far larger share of the world's surface.
For the first time there began to be something which at least
foreshadowed a “world movement” in the sense that it affected a
considerable portion of the world's surface and that it represented
what was incomparably the most important of all that was happening in
world history at the time. In breadth and depth the field of
intellectual interest had greatly broadened at the same time that the
physical area affected by the civilization had similarly extended.
Instead of a civilization affecting only one river valley or one nook
of the Mediterranean, there was a civilization which directly or
indirectly influenced mankind from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic,
from the Atlantic Ocean to the westernmost mountain chains that
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spring from
the Himalayas. Throughout most of this region there began to work
certain influences which, though with widely varying intensity, did
nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the
forms of science, in almost all the forms of art, there was great
activity. In addition to great soldiers there were great administrators
and statesmen whose concern was with the fundamental questions of
social and civil life. Nothing like the width and variety of
intellectual achievement and understanding had ever before been known;
and for the first time we come across great intellectual leaders, great
philosophers and writers, whose works are a part of all that is highest
in modern thought, whose writings are as alive to-day as when they were
first issued; and there were others of even more daring and original
temper, a philosopher like Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose
minds leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what none of their
contemporaries saw, but who were so hampered by their surroundings that
it was physically impossible for them to leave to the later world much
concrete addition to knowledge. The civilization was one of
comparatively rapid change, viewed by the standard of Babylon and
Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, moreover, the whole system
went down with a crash to seeming destruction after a period short
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compared with
that covered by the reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with
the time that elapsed between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war
sixteen centuries later which fully avenged it.
This civilization flourished with brilliant
splendor. Then it fell. In its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a
wave of barbarism from among those half-savage peoples from whom you
and I, my hearers, trace our descent. In the south and east it was
destroyed later, but far more thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly
different type. Both conquests were of great importance; but it was the
northern conquest which in its ultimate effects was of by far the
greatest importance.
With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of
course ceased, and it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a
thousand years passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as
European civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is
concerned. During all those centuries the civilized world, in our
acceptation of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly
climbing back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of
the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted
with qualifications. There is no hard-and-fast line between one age or
period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression
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universal in
all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of
the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan
civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the
civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of the ages
which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry, of architecture —
especially cathedral architecture — and of serene spiritual and
forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of violence, rapine,
and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded that the noble and
daring spirits who sought it, especially in its scientific form, did so
in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.
During this period there were several very important
extra-European movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe.
Islam arose, and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally
different races into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has
never been able to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly
influencing European culture. It produced a civilization of its own,
brilliant and here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when
compared with the civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The
great cultured peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their
checkered development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of,
any European influence.
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Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the
unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and
terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction — Hun and
Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes of
warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and
destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in
no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.
At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the
movement toward a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The
beginning of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing
with the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea
ventures which culminated in the discovery of America; and, after these
two epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material
and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should
thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that had
gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da
Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of
intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names of
Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man was
breaking the fetters that
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had cramped
it; and for the first time experimentation was used as a check upon
observation and theorization. Since then, century by century, the
changes have increased in rapidity and complexity, and have attained
their maximum in both respects during the century just past. Instead of
being directed by one or two dominant peoples, as was the case with all
similar movements of the past, the new movement was shared by many
different nations. From every standpoint it has been of infinitely
greater moment than anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many
different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in
population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical
activity and natural resources. All of this has been accompanied and
signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative.
The result is as varied as it is striking.
In the first place, representatives of this
civilization, by their conquest of space, were enabled to spread into
all the practically vacant continents, while at the same time, by their
triumphs in organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an
unheard-of military superiority as compared with their former rivals.
To these two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first
time there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a
world movement. The
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spread of the
European peoples since the days of Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the
Terrible has been across every sea and over every continent. In places
the conquests have been ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering
of the peoples, and new commonwealths have sprung up in which the
people are entirely or mainly of European blood. This is what happened
in the temperate and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in
Australia, in portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other
places the conquest has been purely political, the Europeans
representing for the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and
administrators, as in most of tropical Asia and Africa, and in much of
tropical America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there
has been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly
and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The
most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan's
growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways
the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her
past history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she
has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering
ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading
civilized nations of mankind.
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There are, of course, many grades between these different types of
influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last
four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises
a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There
are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is
at present no large space of territory in which the general movement of
civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This
represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been
seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was
felt over only a relatively small portion of the world's surface. Over
much the larger part of the world the process of change and development
was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman
Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in
action and reaction, and in interaction, among themselves, were grouped
immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is
bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred
rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.
Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any
line of thought or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own
country. The student of sociology may live in Berlin or Saint Peters-
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burg, Rome or
London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Ayres;
but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men
who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor
problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life-insurance for
wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and we also
turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is doing. When
a great German scientist is warring against the most dreaded enemies of
mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which the microscope reveals
in his blood, he may spend his holidays of study in central Africa or
in eastern Asia; and he must know what is accomplished in the
laboratories of Tokio, just as he must know the details of that
practical application of science which has changed the Isthmus of
Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health resort. Every
progressive in China is striving to introduce Western methods of
education and administration, and hundreds of European and American
books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of European
governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact that
admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem
conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question
in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European
or
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American
control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the form of
demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to what it is
in England or the United States. The deeds and works of any great
statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or political
teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every continent.
From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating or
applying socialism, there is no movement of note which can take place
in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of people
in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal or for
woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever
before.
So much for the geographical side of the expansion
of modern civilization. But only a few of the many and intense
activities of modern civilization have found their expression on this
side. The movement has been just as striking in its conquest over
natural forces, in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of
things.
The conquest over Nature has included an
extraordinary increase in every form of knowledge of the world we live
in, and also an extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the
forces of Nature. In both directions the advance has been very great
during the past four or five centuries, and in both directions it has
gone on with ever-
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increasing
rapidity during the last century. After the great age of Rome had
passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in many cases it was
not until well-nigh our own times that her domain was once again pushed
beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year 150 A. D., Ptolemy, the
geographer, published his map of central Africa and the sources of the
Nile, and this map was more accurate than any which we had as late as
1850 A. D. More was known of physical science, and more of the truth
about the physical world was guessed at, in the days of Pliny, than was
known or guessed until the modern movement began. The case was the same
as regards military science. At the close of the Middle Ages the
weapons were what they had always been — sword, shield, bow, spear; and
any improvement in them was more than offset by the loss in knowledge
of military organization, in the science of war, and in military
leadership since the days of Hannibal and Cæsar. A hundred years
ago, when this university was founded, the methods of transportation
did not differ in the essentials from what they had been among the
highly civilized nations of antiquity. Travellers and merchandise went
by land in wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden, and by sea in boats
propelled by sails or by oars; and news was conveyed as it always had
been conveyed. What improvements there had been had
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been in degree
only and not in kind; and in some respects there had been retrogression
rather than advance. There were many parts of Europe where the roads
were certainly worse than the old Roman post-roads; and the
Mediterranean Sea, for instance, was by no means as well policed as in
the days of Trajan. Now steam and electricity have worked a complete
revolution; and the resulting immensely increased ease of communication
has in its turn completely changed all the physical questions of human
life. A voyage from Egypt to England was nearly as serious an affair in
the eighteenth century as in the second; and the news communications
between the two lands were not materially improved. A graduate of your
university to-day can go to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less
consciousness of performing a feat of note than would have been the
case a hundred years ago with a student who visited Sicily and
Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and use of machinery run by steam or
electricity have worked a revolution in industry as great as the
revolution in transportation; so that here again the difference between
ancient and modern civilization is one not merely of degree but of
kind. In many vital respects the huge modern city differs more from all
preceding cities than any of these differed one from the other; and the
giant factory town is of and by
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itself one of
the most formidable problems of modern life.
Steam and electricity have given the race dominion
over land and water such as it never had before; and now the conquest
of the air is directly impending. As books preserve thought through
time, so the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space
they annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without
regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each
community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the
body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the farm
enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained
intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the
effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific
development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind
that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation on
a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at the
cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing
output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when
our children's children, or their children's children, shall dwell in
an ironless age — and, later on, in an age without coal — and will have
to try to invent or develop new sources for
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the production
of heat and use of energy. But as regards many another natural
resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to preserve it through
use. The best use of field and forest will leave them decade by decade,
century by century, more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the
indestructible power that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of
surgery, of medicine, the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and
sanitation, have been literally marvellous; the advances in the past
century or two have been over more ground than was covered during the
entire previous history of the human race.
The advances in the realm of pure intellect have
been of equal note, and they have been both intensive and extensive.
Great virgin fields of learning and wisdom have been discovered by the
few, and at the same time knowledge has spread among the many to a
degree never dreamed of before. Old men among us have seen in their own
generation the rise of the first rational science of the evolution of
life. The astronomer and the chemist, the psychologist and the
historian, and all their brethren in many different fields of wide
endeavor, work with a training and knowledge and method which are in
effect instruments of precision, differentiating their labors from the
labors of their predecessors as the rifle is differentiated from the
bow.
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The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world
as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces
for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a
thousandfold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the
whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the
mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole
world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.
In this movement there are signs of much that bodes
ill. The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so
great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is
cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from
any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing
out of the machine itself. The only previous civilization with which
our modern civilization can be in any way compared is that period of
Greco-Roman civilization extending, say, from the Athens of
Themistocles to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and
tendencies which were then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury,
and refinement, wide material conquests, territorial administration on
a vast scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and
in applied science — all these mark our civilization as they marked the
wonderful civilization
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that
flourished in the Mediterranean lands twenty centuries ago; and they
preceded the downfall of the older civilization. Yet the differences
are many, and some of them are quite as striking as the similarities.
The single fact that the old civilization was based upon slavery shows
the chasm that separates the two. Let me point out one further and very
significant difference in the development of the two civilizations, a
difference so obvious that it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt
upon by men of letters.
One of the prime dangers of civilization has always
been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the
fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious
lives, there is always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into
their manliness of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions
of his life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities
which the man of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk,
factory hand, merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now, I will
not assert that in modern civilized society these tendencies have been
wholly overcome; but there has been a much more successful effort to
overcome them than was the case in the early civilizations. This is
curiously shown by the military history of the Greco-Roman period as
compared with the history of the last four or five
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centuries here
in Europe and among nations of European descent. In the Grecian and
Roman military history the change was steadily from a citizen army to
an army of mercenaries. In the days of the early greatness of Athens,
Thebes, and Sparta, in the days when the Roman republic conquered what
world it knew, the armies were filled with citizen soldiers. But
gradually the citizens refused to serve in the armies, or became unable
to render good service. The Greek states described by Polybius, with
but few exceptions, hired others to do their fighting for them. The
Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly ceased to furnish any
cavalry, and were rapidly ceasing to furnish any infantry, to the
legions and cohorts. When the civilization came to an end, there were
no longer citizens in the ranks of the soldiers. The change from the
citizen army to the army of mercenaries had been completed.
Now the exact reverse has been the case with us in
modern times. A few centuries ago the mercenary soldier was the
principal figure in most armies, and in great numbers of cases the
mercenary soldier was an alien. In the wars of religion in France, in
the Thirty Years' War in Germany, in the wars that immediately
thereafter marked the beginning of the break-up of the great Polish
kingdom, the regiments and brigades of foreign soldiers formed a
striking and
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leading
feature in every army. Too often the men of the country in which the
fighting took place played merely the ignoble part of victims, the
burghers and peasants appearing in but limited numbers in the mercenary
armies by which they were plundered. Gradually this has all changed,
until now practically every army is a citizen army, and the mercenary
has almost disappeared, while the army exists on a vaster scale than
ever before in history. This is so among the military monarchies of
Europe. In our own Civil War of the United States the same thing
occurred, peaceful people as we are. At that time more than two
generations had passed since the war of independence. During the whole
of that period the people had been engaged in no life-and-death
struggle; and yet, when the Civil War broke out, and after some costly
and bitter lessons at the beginning, the fighting spirit of the people
was shown to better advantage than ever before. The war was peculiarly
a war for a principle, a war waged by each side for an ideal, and while
faults and shortcomings were plentiful among the combatants, there was
comparatively little sordidness of motive or conduct. In such a giant
struggle, where across the warp of so many interests is shot the woof
of so many purposes, dark strands and bright, strands sombre and
brilliant, are always intertwined; inevitably there
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was corruption
here and there in the Civil War; but all the leaders on both sides and
the great majority of the enormous masses of fighting men wholly
disregarded, and were wholly uninfluenced by, pecuniary considerations.
There were, of course, foreigners who came over to serve as soldiers of
fortune for money or for love of adventure; but the foreign-born
citizens served in much the same proportion, and from the same motives,
as the native-born. Taken as a whole, it was, even more than the
Revolutionary War, a true citizens' fight, and the armies of Grant and
Lee were as emphatically citizen armies as the Athenian, Theban, or
Spartan armies in the great age of Greece, or as a Roman army in the
days of the republic.
Another striking contrast in the course of modern
civilization as compared with the later stages of the Greco-Roman or
classic civilization is to be found in the relations of wealth and
politics. In classic times, as the civilization advanced toward its
zenith, politics became a recognized means of accumulating great
wealth. Cæsar was again and again on the verge of bankruptcy; he
spent an enormous fortune; and he recouped himself by the money which
he made out of his political-military career. Augustus established
imperial Rome on firm foundations by the use he made of the huge
fortune he had ac-
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quired by
plunder. What a contrast is offered by the careers of Washington and
Lincoln! There were a few exceptions in ancient days; but the immense
majority of the Greeks and the Romans, as their civilizations
culminated, accepted money-making on a large scale as one of the
incidents of a successful public career. Now all of this is in sharp
contrast to what has happened within the last two or three centuries.
During this time there has been a steady growth away from the theory
that money-making is permissible in an honorable public career. In this
respect the standard has been constantly elevated, and things which
statesmen had no hesitation in doing three centuries or two centuries
ago, and which did not seriously hurt a public career even a century
ago, are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still exercise a large,
and sometimes an improper, influence in politics, but it is apt to be
an indirect influence; and in the advanced states the mere suspicion
that the wealth of public men is obtained or added to as an incident of
their public careers will bar them from public life. Speaking
generally, wealth may very greatly influence modern political life, but
it is not acquired in political life. The colonial administrators,
German or American, French or English, of this generation lead careers
which, as compared with the careers of other men of like ability, show
too little rather
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than too much
regard for money-making; and literally a world scandal would be caused
by conduct which a Roman proconsul would have regarded as moderate, and
which would not have been especially uncommon even in the
administration of England a century and a half ago. On the whole, the
great statesmen of the last few generations have been either men of
moderate means or, if men of wealth, men whose wealth was diminished
rather than increased by their public services.
I have dwelt on these points merely because it is
well to emphasize in the most emphatic fashion the fact that in many
respects there is a complete lack of analogy between the civilization
of to-day and the only other civilization in any way comparable to it,
that of the ancient Greco-Roman lands. There are, of course, many
points in which the analogy is close, and in some of these points the
resemblances are as ominous as they are striking. But most striking of
all is the fact that in point of physical extent, of wide diversity of
interest, and of extreme velocity of movement, the present civilization
can be compared to nothing that has ever gone before. It is now
literally a world movement, and the movement is growing ever more rapid
and is ever reaching into new fields. Any considerable influence
exerted at one point is certain to be felt with greater or less
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effect at
almost every other point. Every path of activity open to the human
intellect is followed with an eagerness and success never hitherto
dreamed of. We have established complete liberty of conscience, and, in
consequence, a complete liberty for mental activity. All free and
daring souls have before them a well-nigh limitless opening for
endeavor of any kind.
Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has been
able to develop only a comparatively few activities; that is, its field
of endeavor has been limited in kind as well as in locality. There
have, of course, been great movements, but they were of practically
only one form of activity; and, although usually this set in motion
other kinds of activities, such was not always the case. The great
religious movements have been the pre-eminent examples of this type.
But they are not the only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the
Phœnicians, at almost opposite poles of cultivation, have represented
movements in which one element, military or commercial, so overshadowed
all other elements that the movement died out chiefly because it was
one-sided. The extraordinary outburst of activity among the Mongols of
the thirteenth century was almost purely a military movement, without
even any great administrative side; and it was therefore well-nigh
purely a movement of destruction.
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The individual
prowess and hardihood of the Mongols, and the perfection of their
military organization rendered their armies incomparably superior to
those of any European, or any other Asiatic, power of that day. They
conquered from the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Adriatic;
they seized the imperial throne of China; they slew the Caliph in
Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India. The fanaticism of Christianity
and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless against them.
The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was impotent to check
them. They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their
horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across Poland and Hungary;
they overthrew with ease any force from western Europe that dared
encounter them. Yet they had no root of permanence; their work was mere
evil while it lasted, and it did not last long; and when they vanished
they left hardly a trace behind them. So the extraordinary Phœnician
civilization was almost purely a mercantile, a business civilization,
and though it left an impress on the life that came after, this impress
was faint indeed compared to that left, for instance, by the Greeks
with their many-sided development. Yet the Greek civilization itself
fell because this many-sided development became too exclusively one of
intellect, at the ex-
128 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
pense of
character, at the expense of the fundamental qualities which fit men to
govern both themselves and others. When the Greek lost the sterner
virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen
grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and
pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not
all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic
development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the
Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.
What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the
way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of
civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the
world's surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of
its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world
movement — are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the
more complete and terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that
the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that
we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There
is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for
ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty.
Personally, I do not believe that our civiliza-
129 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
tion will
fall. I think that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I
think that on the whole the future holds more for us than even the
great past has held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the
future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by
our own mighty deeds we make them come true. We can not afford to
develop any one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the
cost of seeing others, equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the
military efficiency of the Mongol, the extraordinary business ability
of the Phœnician, nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek
availed to avert destruction.
We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many
qualities if we are to do our work well. We need, first of all and most
important of all, the qualities which stand at the base of individual,
of family life, the fundamental and essential qualities — the homely,
every-day, all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if
he has not in him the will and the power to be a good husband and
father; if the average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of
many healthy children, then the state will topple, will go down, no
matter what may be its brilliance of artistic development or material
achievement. But these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in
addition, be that power of organization, that
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power of
working in common for a common end, which the German people have shown
in such signal fashion during the last half-century. Moreover, the
things of the spirit are even more important than the things of the
body. We can well do without the hard intolerance and arid intellectual
barrenness of what was worst in the theological systems of the past,
but there has never been greater need of a high and fine religious
spirit than at the present time. So, while we can laugh good-humoredly
at some of the pretensions of modern philosophy in its various
branches, it would be worse than folly on our part to ignore our need
of intellectual leadership. Your own great Frederick once said that if
he wished to punish a province he would leave it to be governed by
philosophers; the sneer had in it an element of justice; and yet no one
better than the great Frederick knew the value of philosophers, the
value of men of science, men of letters, men of art. It would be a bad
thing indeed to accept Tolstoi as a guide in social and moral matters;
but it would also be a bad thing not to have Tolstoi, not to profit by
the lofty side of his teachings. There are plenty of scientific men
whose hard arrogance, whose cynical materialism, whose dogmatic
intolerance, put them on a level with the bigoted mediæval
ecclesiasticism which they denounce. Yet our debt to scientific men is
incal-
131 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
culable, and
our civilization of to-day would have reft from it all that which most
highly distinguishes it if the work of the great masters of science
during the past four centuries were now undone or forgotten. Never has
philanthropy, humanitarianism, seen such development as now; and though
we must all beware of the folly, and the viciousness no worse than
folly, which marks the believer in the perfectibility of man when his
heart runs away with his head, or when vanity usurps the place of
conscience, yet we must remember also that it is only by working along
the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind,
that we can be sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more
permanent plane of well-being than was ever attained by any preceding
civilization. Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that
does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who
would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average
man loses the righting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if
the day of need should arise!
It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization
in which morality, ethical development, and a true feeling of
brotherhood shall all alike be divorced from false sentimentality, and
from the rancorous and evil passions which, curiously enough, so often
accompany professions of senti-
132 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
mental
attachment to the rights of man; in which a high material development
in the things of the body shall be achieved without subordination of
the things of the soul; in which there shall be a genuine desire for
peace and justice without loss of those virile qualities without which
no love of peace or justice shall avail any race; in which the fullest
development of scientific research, the great distinguishing feature of
our present civilization, shall yet not imply a belief that intellect
can ever take the place of character — for, from the standpoint of the
nation as of the individual, it is character that is the one vital
possession.
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this
movement which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe,
should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving
unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the
present stage of the world's progress is essential to the world's
well-being. You, my hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to
different nations. Under modern conditions the books we read, the news
sent by telegraph to our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the
things we hear and do each day, all tend to bring us into touch with
other peoples. Each people can do justice to itself only if it does
justice to others; but each people can do its part in the world
movement for all only if it first does
133 THE WORLD MOVEMENT
its duty
within its own household. The good citizen must be a good citizen of
his own country first before he can with advantage be a citizen of the
world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you and your future. I
admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness and variety of your
achievements in so many and such widely different fields; and my
admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the less, because I
am so profound a believer in the institutions and the people of my own
land.
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STRANGE and impressive associations rise in the
mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in
this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows
of mighty kings and warlike nobles, of great masters of law and
theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees
crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of
times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students
to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only
outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
This was the most famous university of
mediæval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a
New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge
already stretched far back into the remote past at the time when my
forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of
traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle
with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were
¹ Delivered at the Sorbonne,
Paris, April 23, 1910.
138 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
laying the
foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To
conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means
grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it can not keep, still
less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and
which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old
land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same
hostile forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy
of our race. The primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities
which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been
painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven
upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but
a primitive culture. At first only the rudest schools can be
established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven,
sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage man
and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools
can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings
expand into vast stretches of fertile farmland; the stockaded clusters
of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of
trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the
139 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
soil, the men
who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds
and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before
the civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children of
their successors and supplanters, and then their children and
children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity.
The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness,
all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism,
self-reliant, self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of
its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism
of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism
even more intense and absorbing than that of the older nations;
although these themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a
complex and predominantly industrial civilization.
As the country grows, its people, who have won
success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions
of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in
order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their
children inherit. The leaders of thought and of action grope their way
forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes
clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation
or an individual, is of value
140 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
only as a
foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from
devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be
developed afresh from what is round about in the New World; but it can
be developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of
the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of
wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak to-day. It is a mistake
for any nation merely to copy another; but it is an even greater
mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to
learn from another, and willing and able to adapt that learning to the
new national conditions and make it fruitful and productive therein. It
is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of the Gamaliel of the Old;
then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can show that Paul in his
turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.
To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of
individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my
hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we are citizens
of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as each of
ours — an effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and
for the people — represents the most gigantic of all possible social
experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good
and for evil.
141 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
The success of
republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the
despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality
of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government,
under the rule of one man or of a very few men, the quality of the
rulers is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the
rulers is high enough, then the nation may for generations lead a
brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world
achievement, no matter how low the quality of the average citizen;
because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working
out the final results of that type of national greatness.
But with you and with us the case is different. With
you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or
failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the
average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day
affairs of life, and next in those great occasional crises which call
for the heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if
our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise
higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and
national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.
Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the
average citizen is kept high; and the aver-
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age can not be
kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in
any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from
the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that
those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of
devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special
advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental
training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance
for the enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of
your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you
much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which
it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated
intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position, should especially
guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable;
and if yielded to, their — your — chances of useful service are at an
end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered
leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself
and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and
beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to
face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a
kind of
143 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
twisted pride
in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the
way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no
more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either
really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief
toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that
noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A
cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work
which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual
aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities — all
these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of
superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their
part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the
affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from
others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there
is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both
criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who
points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds
could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and
blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and
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again, because
there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually
strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great
devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows
in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he
fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall
never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor
defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to
develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work
of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there
is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life
who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there
for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear
the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that
they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not
what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid
figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or
voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows
nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern
belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride
the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed;
145 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
well also,
though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly
ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is
war-worn Hotspur,
spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end,
over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young
lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a soldier.”
France has taught many lessons to other nations:
surely one of the most important is the lesson her whole history
teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is compatible
with notable leadership in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry
of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and
during these same centuries at every court in Europe the “freemasons of
fashion” have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while
every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to
appreciate that marvellous instrument of precision, French prose, has
turned toward France for aid and inspiration. How long the leadership
in arms and letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact
that the earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid French
epic which tells of Roland's doom and the vengeance of Charlemagne when
the lords of the Frankish host were stricken at Roncesvalles.
Let those who have, keep, let those who have
146 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
not, strive to
attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us
remember that these stand second to certain other things. There is need
of a sound body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and
above body stands character — the sum of those qualities which we mean
when we speak of a man's force and courage, of his good faith and sense
of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we
keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I
believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But
the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be
really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of
intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of
the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense,
the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in
conjunction with others, courage and resolution — these are the
qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can
control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside.
I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which
represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay
all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training of
the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the
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assent of all
of you present when I add that more important still are the
commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will
and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy
children. The need that the average man shall work is so obvious as
hardly to warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country
so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful
function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness;
for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is
essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people
who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom
remuneration is an object of indifference. But the average man must
earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should
be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does
not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever
end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object
of derision.
In the next place, the good man should be both a
strong and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should
be able to serve his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There
are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness
of war. They are right only if
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they lay all
their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and
unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because
it is unjust, not because it is war. The choice must ever be in favor
of righteousness, and this whether the alternative be peace or whether
the alternative be war. The question must not be merely, Is there to be
peace or war? The question must be, Is the right to prevail? Are the
great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer
from a strong and virile people must be, “Yes,” whatever the cost.
Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just as
every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in
private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no
self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to
submit to wrong.
Finally, even more important than ability to work,
even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember
that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its
seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical
times; and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses
is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should
be that visited upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any
civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of
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healthy
children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is
not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to
increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate
and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of
those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and
effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily
than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people
who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and
error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully
barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our
achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life,
no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of
riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way
compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these
great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race's power to
perpetuate the race.
Character must show itself in the man's performance
both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The
man's foremost duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do
this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to
material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can
hope
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to build a
higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only
after this has been done that he can help in movements for the general
well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can
his surplus strength be of use to the general public. It is not good to
excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is
what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such
that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things
for humanity in the abstract, but who can not keep his wife in comfort
or educate his children.
Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point,
while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there
must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the
nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being
represents nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though
indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure
of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere
multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any
country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has
earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him of real benefit, of
real use — and such is often the case — why, then he does become an
asset of worth. But it is the
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way in which
it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that
entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other
forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their
places can not be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is
a good thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But
we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the
deed rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists without the
service having been rendered, then admiration will come only from those
who are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure of
tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of
increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to other
things that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to
raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no
falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being
in and for itself. The man who, for any cause for which he is himself
accountable, has failed to support himself and those for whom he is
responsible, ought to feel that he has fallen lamentably short in his
prime duty. But the man who, having far surpassed the limit of
providing for the wants, both of body and mind, of himself and of those
depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition
or
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retention of
which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole,
should himself be made to feel that, so far from being a desirable, he
is an unworthy, citizen of the community; that he is to be neither
admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him
low in the scale of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the
admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be
put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be
carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases,
human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run
identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict
between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property
belongs to man and not man to property.
In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly
to understand that there are certain qualities which we in a democracy
are prone to admire in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be
judged admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use
made of them. Foremost among these I should include two very distinct
gifts — the gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making,
the money touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in
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a moderate
degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great
degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and
without such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the
least attractive types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it
is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in
a democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly.
But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is to enable
the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to persuade
his hearers to put false values on things, it merely makes him a power
for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not the gift at all,
and must rely upon their deeds to speak for them; and unless the
oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common sense
and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the better
the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives. Indeed,
it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the
people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value
words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they
are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready
talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for
courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious ele-
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ment in the
body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over
them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality
behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with
even greater force to the orator's latter-day and more influential
brother, the journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he
is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of that power
unless it is used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He
can do, and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all
writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast
possibilities of their profession, should bear testimony against those
who deeply discredit it. Offences against taste and morals, which are
bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into
instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper.
Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are
potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience.
The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and
that the demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it
were advanced by the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.
In short, the good citizen in a republic must
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realize that
he ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails
without the other. He must have those qualities which make for
efficiency; and he must also have those qualities which direct the
efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if he is
inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of
whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is
dependent upon a sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is
little place in active life for the timid good man. The man who is
saved by weakness from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune
from the robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of
all be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the
ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make him
fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an
efficient citizen.
But if a man's efficiency is not guided and
regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he
is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the
masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are used
merely for that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the
rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community
worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes
regardless of whether
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the qualities
are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to the precise
way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference
whether such a man's force and ability betray themselves in the career
of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular
leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the
more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing
men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the
people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone
wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability
to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the
character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they
prove themselves unfit for liberty.
The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary
workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and housemother,
which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good
soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course many
others must be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but
great. Good citizenship is not good citizenship if exhibited only in
the home. There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the
state, and these duties are none too easy under
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the conditions
which exist where the effort is made to carry on free government in a
complex, industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the
ordinary citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has
to remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer
doctrinaire. The closet philosopher, the refined and cultured
individual who from his library tells how men ought to be governed
under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; and
the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob-leader, and the insincere
man who to achieve power promises what by no possibility can be
performed, are not merely useless but noxious.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must
be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes
from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have
become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impracticable
visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the
imbittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings
and shortcomings, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give
effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things.
Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of
making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when
he appears and hampers him as he does the
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work!
Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and
contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that
he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably
to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him remember
also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the
success with which it can in practice be realized. We should abhor the
so-called “practical” men whose practicality assumes the shape of that
peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality
and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such
a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic. But only less
desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the man
of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy
of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the
doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an
extreme socialism. Individual initiative, so far from being
discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we should remember that, as
society develops and grows more complex, we continually find that
things which once it was desirable to leave to individual initiative
can, under the changed conditions, be performed with better results by
common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw
in
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theory a
hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases.
This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closet
philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about
some of our commonest phenomena. For instance, when people live on
isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left to attend
to its own drainage and water supply; but the mere multiplication of
families in a given area produces new problems which, because they
differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree but in kind from
the old; and the questions of drainage and water supply have to be
considered from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract
dogmatizing to decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be
tested by practical experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism
and individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on
terminology. It is not good to be the slave of names. I am a strong
individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is
a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the state, the
community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things
better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism
which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked
very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in
our turn strive to shackle or
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destroy that
individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the
weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with
any man in the effort to bring about justice and the equality of
opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and more into the tool-owner,
to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably borne. The
deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme
socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer
destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler
immorality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we
may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed
by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to
be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more
than in telling a lie. We should not say that men are equal where they
are not equal, nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an
equality where it does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a
measurable equality, at least to the extent of preventing the
inequality which is due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of
the plain people, blood of their blood and bone of their bone, who all
his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, and at
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the end died
for them, who always strove to represent them, who would never tell an
untruth to or for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his
usual mixture of idealism and sound common sense. He said (I omit what
was of merely local significance):
“I think the authors of the Declaration of
Independence intended to include all men, but that they did not mean to
declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men
were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social
capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did
consider all men created equal — equal in certain inalienable rights,
among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they
said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious
untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that
they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set
up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all —
constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never
perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly
spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and
value of life to all people, everywhere.”
We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those
men who would make us desist from the
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effort to do
away with the inequality which means injustice; the inequality of
right, of opportunity, of privilege. We are bound in honor to strive to
bring ever nearer the day when, as far as is humanly possible, we shall
be able to realize the ideal that each man shall have an equal
opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by the way in which he
renders service. There should, so far as possible, be equality of
opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality
of service there should and must be inequality of reward. We may be
sorry for the general, the painter, the artist, the worker in any
profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it
is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who
does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of
privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege
is injustice, whatever form it takes.
To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious,
the incapable, ought to have the reward given to those who are
far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and can
not be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of
levelling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to
his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a
man lies down, it is a waste of time to
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try to carry
him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that
the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and to those
who do it.
Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of
life, and not be misled into following any proposal for achieving the
millennium, for re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it
to hardheaded examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a
proposal merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given
scheme is proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it,
disregard formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or
why. If it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise
reject it. There are plenty of men calling themselves Socialists with
whom, up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next
step is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it,
without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may
differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it
has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least mean
that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is just
as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire at
some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these
absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the
extremists were wise.
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The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of
pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus
claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in
any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country.
Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and
opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he
desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor.
Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to
which side happens at the moment to be the persecutor and which the
persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without any
regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a
class for loyalty to the nation, or substitutes hatred of men because
they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded
them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure
of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look
down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to the envy and
hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The
over-bearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious
and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root
merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely the two
sides of the same shield. The
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man who, if
born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate
brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who
excites those who have not property to plunder those who have. The
gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his
station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily on the line
that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of
more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the
only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man,
whether he be rich or poor, without regard to his profession or to his
station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test
that can with propriety be applied in a republic. There have been many
republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we
call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was
the fact that the parties tended to divide along the line that
separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was
successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the
rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once
loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic,
the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day
than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage be-
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tween right
and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right
angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class
and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face
if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct
in that position.
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to
combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of
conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious,
political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect
alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.
Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not
of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether
religious or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself
but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief
factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.
Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the
citizens of a republic should beware, arid that is of the man who
appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to
other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect
him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens
of the republic. It makes no difference whether he ap-
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peals to class
hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The
man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for
the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing that an
intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should
do is to reward any public man because that public man says he will get
the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not
entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private
citizen ought not to possess. Let me illustrate this by one anecdote
from my own experience. A number of years ago I was engaged in
cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western United States. There
were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each being
determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the
cows they followed. If on the round-up an animal was passed by, the
following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was then
called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks were
branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found. One
day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came upon
a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a little fire, took
out a cinch-ring, heated it at the fire; and the cowboy started to put
on the brand. I said to him,
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“It is
So-and-so's brand,” naming the
man on whose range we happened to be. He answered: “That's all right,
boss; I
know my business.” In another moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are
putting on my brand!” To which he answered: “That's all right; I always
put on the boss's brand.” I answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go
straight back to the ranch and get what is owing to you; I don't need
you any
longer.” He jumped up and said: “Why, what's the matter? I was putting
on your brand.” And I answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for
me you will steal from me.”
Now, the same principle which applies in private
life applies also in public life. If a public man tries to get your
vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you
can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he
will do something wrong against your interest.
So much for the citizenship of the individual in his
relations to his family, to his neighbor, to the state. There remain
duties of citizenship which the state, the aggregation of all the
individuals, owes in connection with other states, with other nations.
Let me say at once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism.
I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as
the only possible way of being, a
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good citizen
of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests
that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he
does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in
actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who
says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because
he is a citizen of the world, is in very fact usually an exceedingly
undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the
moment to be in. In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards
may change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all
other countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise
to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take
the same dispassionate view of his wife and his mother. However broad
and deep a man's sympathies, however intense his activities, he need
have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man
should not wish to do good outside of his native land. On the contrary,
just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a
good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most
useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic
nation. So far from patriotism being incon-
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sistent with a
proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true
patriot, who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman is of
his own honor, will be careful to see that the nation neither inflicts
nor suffers wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others
or to suffer others to wrong him. I do not for one moment admit that
political morality is different from private morality, that a promise
made on the stump differs from a promise made in private life. I do not
for one moment admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public
servant in his dealings with other nations, any more than that he
should act deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other
private citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should
treat other nations in a different spirit from that in which an
honorable man would treat other men.
In practically applying this principle to the two
sets of cases there is, of course, a great practical difference to be
taken into account. We speak of international law; but international
law is something wholly different from private or municipal law, and
the capital difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no
sanction for the other; that there is an outside force which compels
individuals to obey the one, while there is no such outside force to
compel obedience as re-
171 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
gards the
other. International law will, I believe, as the generations pass, grow
stronger and stronger until in some way or other there develops the
power to make it respected. But as yet it is only in the first
formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is of necessity
obliged to judge for itself in matters of vital importance between it
and its neighbors, and actions must of necessity, where this is the
case, be different from what they are where, as among private citizens,
there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and must be
invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise statesmen,
gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and build
up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute some
other agency for force in the settlement of international disputes. It
is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the nation so
that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the great
civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to the
cause of humanity and civilization, must keep ever in mind that in the
last resort they must possess both the will and the power to resent
wrong-doing from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality
preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether among
private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals should be
high, but not so high as
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to make it
impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely and earnestly
believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man
who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms
against him.
And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I
belong to the only two republics among the great powers of the world.
The ancient friendship between France and the United States has been,
on the whole, a sincere and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you
would be a sorrow to us. But it would be more than that. In the
seething turmoil of the history of humanity certain nations stand out
as possessing a peculiar power or charm, some special gift of beauty or
wisdom or strength, which puts them among the immortals, which makes
them rank forever with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these
nations. For her to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are
certain lessons of brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can
teach better than any of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang
of Malbrook, it was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took
flight upward through the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries
ago, Froissart,
writing of a time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was
never so stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly
fight for it. You have had a
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great past. I
believe that you will have a great future. Long may you carry
yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation which bears a leading part
in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.
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THE THRALDOM OF
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THE THRALDOM OF
NAMES
IT behooves our people never to fall under the
thraldom of names, and least of all to be misled by designing people
who appeal to the reverence for, or antipathy toward, a given name in
order to achieve some alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is
as old as the history of what we understand when we speak of civilized
mankind. The rule of a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and
oppressive as the rule of a single individual, whether or not called a
dictator; and the rule of an oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a
plutocracy or a bureaucracy, or any other small set of powerful men,
may in its turn be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty as that of a
mob. But the apologists for the mob or oligarchy or dictator, in
justifying the tyranny, use different words. The mob leaders usually
state that all that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the
cause of “liberty,” while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually
defended upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely
necessary so as to secure “order.”
178 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
Many excellent
people are taken in by the use of the word “liberty” at the one time,
and the use of the word “order” at the other, and ignore the simple
fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression
oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many individuals,
by a state or by a private corporation.
Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of
people is very apt in the long run to damage especially the
representatives of that very class by the violence of the reaction
which it invites. The course of the second republic in France was such,
with its mobs, its bloody civil tumults, its national workshops, its
bitter factional divisions, as to invite and indeed insure its
overthrow and the establishment of a dictatorship; while it is needless
to mention the innumerable instances in which the name of order has
been invoked to sanction tyranny, until there has finally come a
reaction so violent that both the tyranny and all public order have
disappeared together. The second empire in France led straight up to
the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows how far the French people
had advanced in fitness for self-government as the fact that the
hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered it imperative that it
should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did not produce another
violent reaction, but left the French republic standing,
179 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
and the French
people as resolute in their refusal to be ruled by a king as by a mob.
Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no
matter how much people may have been misled by names, they promptly
awaken to their unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the
guillotine at Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the
individual who a century before was expelled from his beloved country,
or tortured, or sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever
that one set of acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and
Marat in the name of liberty and reason and the rights of the people,
or that the other was performed in the name of order and authority and
religion by the direction of the great monarch. Tyranny and cruelty
were tyranny and cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and
just as much when those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they
used another. All forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned
by honest men.
We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks
to the teaching and the practice of the men whom we most revere as
leaders, of the men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto
escaped the twin gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never
been in any danger from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we
should therefore be all the more careful, as we deal with
180 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
our industrial
and social problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which
have brought lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We
have achieved democracy in politics just because we have been able to
steer a middle course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the
dictator. We shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer
a similar middle course between the extreme individualist and the
Socialist, between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see
no wrong done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and
the apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a
restatement of the eighth commandment upon the ground that it will
“hurt business.”
First and foremost, we must stand firmly on a basis
of good sound ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and
sufficient reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stern
exposure of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked
man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved in
the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to
prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into a
terror-struck defence of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon
those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above
all things, of being mis-
181 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
led by wicked
or foolish men who would condone homicide and violence, and apologize
for the dynamiter and the assassin because, forsooth, they choose to
take the ground that crime is no crime if the wicked man happens also
to have been a shiftless and unthrifty or lazy man who has never
amassed property. It is essential that we should wrest the control of
the government out of the hands of rich men who use it for unhealthy
purposes, and should keep it out of their hands; and to this end the
first requisite is to provide means adequately to deal with
corporations, which are essential to modern business, but which, under
the decisions of the courts, and because of the short-sightedness of
the public, have become the chief factors in political and business
debasement. But it would be just as bad to put the control of the
government into the hands of demagogues and visionaries who seek to
pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing thrift and business
enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with, as an attendant result,
the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny of politicians with a
bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant people supporting them
would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of big corporations. The
tyranny would be the same in each case, and it would make no more
difference that one was called individualism and the other collectivism
than it made in
182 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
French history
whether tyranny was exercised in the name of the Commune or of the
Emperor, of a committee of national safety, or of a king.
The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister
and violent radical, are alike in this, that each works in the end for
the destruction of the cause that he professedly champions. If the one
is left to his own devices he will make such an exhibition of brutal
and selfish greed as to utterly discredit the entire system of
government by individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to
work his will he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and
control by the state that any abuses connected with the untrammelled
control of all business by private individuals will seem small by
comparison. We can not afford to be empirical. We must judge each case
on its merits. It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of
individual initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does
not mean that we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the
growth of our complex civilization necessitates an increase in the
exercise of the functions of the state. It has been shown beyond power
of refutation that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the
destruction of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of
“individualism” can not be permitted to interfere with the duty of a
great city to see that householders, small as well
183 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
as big, live
in decent and healthy buildings, drink good water, and have the streets
adequately lighted and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of
individualism, may be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked
growth of private monopoly, if the state does not interfere at all, as
it would be crushed out under communism, or as it would disappear,
together with everything else that makes life worth living, if we
adopted the tenets of the extreme Socialists.
In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing
defeat for the very reason that, together with legitimate attacks on
real abuses, they combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the
methods of dealing with these real abuses, and in addition stood for
abuses of their own which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast
quite into the shade the effects of the abuses against which they
warred. It was essential both to the material and moral progress of the
country that these forces should be beaten; and beaten they were,
overwhelmingly. But the genuine ethical revolt against these forces was
aided by a very ugly materialism, and this materialism at one time
claimed the victory as exclusively its own, and advanced it as a
warrant and license for the refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on
the part of men of wealth. What such an attitude meant was set forth as
early as 1896 by an English
184 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
visitor, the
journalist Steevens,
a man of marked insight. Mr. Steevens did not see with entire clearness
of vision into the complex American character; it would have been
marvellous if a stranger of his slight experience here could so have
seen; but it would be difficult to put certain important facts more
clearly than he put them. Immediately after the election he wrote as
follows (I condense slightly):
“In the United States legal organization of industry
has been left wholly wanting. Little is done by the state. All is left
to the initiative of
the individual. The apparent negligence is explained partly by the
American horror of retarding mechanical progress, and partly by their
reliance on competition. They have cast overboard the law as the
safeguard of individual rights, and have put themselves under the
protection of competition, and of it alone. Now a trust in its exacter
acceptation is the flat negation of competition. It is certain that
commercial concerns make frequent, powerful, and successful
combinations to override the public interest. All such corporations are
left unfettered in a way that to an Englishman appears almost a return
to savagery. The defencelessness of individual liberty against the
encroachment of the railway companies, tramway companies,
nuisance-committing manure companies, and the like, is little less than
horrible.
185 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
Where
regulating acts are proposed, the companies unite to oppose them; where
such acts exist, they bribe corrupt officials to ignore them. When they
want any act for themselves, it can always be bought for cash. [This is
of course a gross exaggeration; and allusion should have been made to
the violent and demagogic attacks upon corporations, which are even
more common than and are quite as noxious as acts of oppression by
corporations.] They maintain their own members in the legislative
bodies — pocket assemblymen, pocket representatives, pocket senators.
In the name of individual freedom and industrial progress they have
become the tyrants of the whole community. Lawless greed on one side
and lawless brutality on the other — the outlook frowns. On the wisdom
of the rulers of the country in salving or imbittering these
antagonisms — still more, on the fortune of the people in either
modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get dollars is
the one end of life — it depends whether the future of the United
States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster. It may
stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may become the
devil's drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will furnish
themselves against the social Armageddon.”
Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one
ought to recognize, that if individual-
186 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
ism is left
absolutely uncontrolled as a modern business condition the curious
result will follow that all power of individual achievement and
individual effort in the average man will be crushed out just as
effectively as if the state took absolute control of everything. It
would be easy to name several big corporations each one of which has
within its sphere crushed out all competition so as to make, not only
its rivals, but its customers as dependent upon it as if the government
had assumed complete charge of the product. It would, in my judgment,
be a very unhealthy thing for the government thus to assume complete
charge; but it is even more unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus
to assume it. The simple truth is that the defenders of the theory of
unregulated lawlessness in the business world are either insincere or
blind to the facts when they speak of their system as permitting a
healthy individualism and individual initiative. On the contrary, it
crushes out individualism, save in a very few able and powerful men who
tend to become dictators in the business world precisely as in the old
days a Spanish-American president tended to become a dictator in the
political world.
Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness,
absolute failure by the state to control or supervise these great
corporations, the inevitable result is to favor, among these very able
men of
187 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
business, the
man who is unscrupulous and cunning. The unscrupulous big man who gets
complete control of a given forest tract, or of a network of railways
which alone give access to a certain region, or who, in combination
with his fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may crush out
in the great mass of citizens affected all individual initiative quite
as much as it would be crushed out by state control. The very reason
why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual
initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility,
is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic
control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation
as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate
total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the
business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe
would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.
There must be law to control the big men, and
therefore especially the big corporations, in the industrial world in
the interest of our industrial democracy of to-day. This law must be
efficient, and therefore it must be administered by executive officers
and not by lawsuits in the courts. If this is not done the agitation to
increase out of all measure the share of the government in
188 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
this work will
receive an enormous impetus. The movement for government control of the
great business corporations is no more a movement against liberty than
a movement to put a stop to violence is a movement against liberty. On
the contrary, in each case alike it is a movement for liberty; in the
one case a movement on behalf of the hard-working man of small means,
just as in the other case it is a movement on behalf of the peaceable
citizen who does not wish a “liberty” which puts him at the mercy of
any rowdy who is stronger than he is. The huge, irresponsible
corporation which demands liberty from the supervision of government
agents stands on the same ground as the less dangerous criminal of the
streets who wishes liberty from police interference. But there is an
even more important lesson for us Americans to learn, and this also is
touched upon in what I have quoted above. It is not true, as Mr.
Steevens says, that Americans feel that the one end of life is to get
dollars; but the statement contains a very unpleasant element of truth.
The hard materialism of greed is just as objectionable as the hard
materialism of brutality, and the greed of the “haves” is just as
objectionable as the greed of the “have-nots,” and no more so. The
envious and sinister creature who declaims against a great corporation
because he really desires himself to enjoy what in hard,
189 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
selfish,
brutal fashion the head of that great corporation enjoys, offers a
spectacle which is both sad and repellent. The brutal arrogance and
grasping greed of the one man are in reality the same thing as the
bitter envy and hatred and grasping greed of the other. That kind of
“have” and that kind of “have-not” stand on the same eminence of
infamy. It is as important for the one as for the other to learn the
lesson of the true relations of life. Of course, the first duty of any
man is to pay his own way, to be able to earn his own livelihood, to
support himself and his wife and his children and those dependent upon
him. He must be able to give those for whom it is his duty to care food
and clothing, shelter, medicine, an education, a legitimate chance for
reasonable and healthy amusements, and the opportunity to acquire the
knowledge and power which will fit them in their turn to do good work
in the world. When once a man has reached this point, which, of course,
will vary greatly under different conditions, then he has reached the
point where other things become immensely more important than adding to
his wealth. It is emphatically right, indeed, I am tempted to say, it
is emphatically the first duty of each American, “to get dollars,” as
Mr. Steevens contemptuously phrased it; for this is only another way of
saying that it is his first duty to earn his own living. But it
190 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
is not his
only duty, by a great deal; and after the living has been earned
getting dollars should come far behind many other duties.
Yet another thing. No movement ever has done or ever
will do good in this country, where assault is made, not upon evil
wherever found, but simply upon evil as it happens to be found in a
particular class. The big newspaper, owned or controlled in Wall
Street, which is everlastingly preaching about the iniquity of laboring
men, which is quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds,
but which with raving fury defends all the malefactors of great wealth,
stands on an exact level with, and neither above nor below, that other
newspaper whose whole attack is upon men of wealth, which declines to
condemn, or else condemns in apologetic, perfunctory, and wholly
inefficient manner, outrages committed by labor. This is the kind of
paper which by torrents of foul abuse seeks to stir up a bitter class
hatred against every man of means simply because he is a man of means,
against every man of wealth, whether he is an honest man who by
industry and ability has honorably won his wealth, and who honorably
spends it, or a man whose wealth represents robbery and whose life
represents either profligacy or at best an inane, useless, and
tasteless extravagance. This country can not afford to let its
conscience grow warped and
191 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
twisted, as it
must grow if it takes either one of these two positions. We must draw
the line, not on wealth nor on poverty, but on conduct. We must stand
for the good citizen because he is a good citizen, whether he be rich
or whether he be poor, and we must mercilessly attack the man who does
evil, wholly without regard to whether the evil is done in high or low
places, whether it takes the form of homicidal violence among members
of a federation of miners, or of unscrupulous craft and greed in the
head of some great Wall Street corporation.
The best lesson that any people can learn is that
there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect,
and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how
to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish
visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire
socialism nor unrestricted individualism nor any other ism will bring
about the millennium. Collectivism and individualism must be used as
supplementary, not as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis
the welfare of a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy
development. A healthy social system must of necessity represent the
sum of very many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each
such force must depend in its
192 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
turn partly
upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to develop
a high grade of character in the individual men and women who make up
the nation. No individual man could be kept healthy by living in
accordance with a plan which took cognizance only of one set of muscles
or set of organs; his health must depend upon his general bodily vigor,
that is, upon the general care which affects hundreds of different
organs according to their hundreds of needs. Society is, of course,
infinitely more complex than the human body. The influences that tell
upon it are countless; they are closely interwoven, interdependent, and
each is acted upon by many others. It is pathetically absurd, when such
are the conditions, to believe that some one simple panacea for all
evils can be found. Slowly, with infinite difficulty, with bitter
disappointments, with stumblings and haltings, we are working our way
upward and onward. In this progress something can be done by
continually striving to improve the social system, now here, now there.
Something more can be done by the resolute effort for a many-sided
higher life. This life must largely come to each individual from
within, by his own effort, but toward the attainment of it each of us
can help many others. Such a life must represent the struggle for a
higher and broader humanity, to be shown not merely in the
193 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
dealings of
each of us within the realm of the state, but even more by the dealings
of each of us in the more intimate realm of the family; for the life of
the state rests and must ever rest upon the life of the family.
In one of Lowell's
biting satires he holds up to special scorn the smug, conscienceless
creature who refuses to consider the morality of any question of social
ethics by remarking that “they didn't know everything down in Judee.”
It is to be wished that some of those who preach and practise a gospel
of mere materialism and greed, and who speak as if the heaping up of
wealth by the community or by the individual were in itself the be-all
and end-all of life, would learn from the most widely read and oldest
of books that true wisdom which teaches that it is well to have neither
great poverty nor great riches. Worst of all is it to have great
poverty and great riches side by side in constant contrast.
Nevertheless, even this contrast can be accepted if men are convinced
that the riches are accumulated as the result of great service rendered
to the people as a whole, and if their use is regulated in the interest
of the whole community.
The movement for social and industrial reform has
for two of its prime objects the prevention of the accumulation of
wealth save by honest service to the country, and the supervision and
regu-
194 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
lation of its
business use, and the determination of how it shall be taxed, and on
what terms inherited, even when acquired and used honestly. This
movement is a healthy movement. It aims to replace sullen discontent,
restless pessimism, and evil preparation for revolution, by an
aggressive, healthy determination to get to the bottom of our troubles
and remedy them. To halt in the movement, as those blinded men wish who
care only for the immediate relief from all obstacles which would
thwart their getting what is not theirs, would work wide-reaching
damage. Such a halt would turn away the energies of the energetic and
forceful men who desire to reform matters from a legitimate object into
the channel of bitter and destructive agitation.
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PRODUCTIVE
SCHOLARSHIP
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197
PRODUCTIVE
SCHOLARSHIP ¹
WHAT counts in a man or in a nation is not what
the man or the nation can do, but what he or it actually does.
Scholarship that consists in mere learning, but finds no expression in
production, may be of interest and value to the individual, just as
ability to shoot well at clay pigeons may be of interest and value to
him, but it ranks no higher unless it finds expression in achievement.
From the standpoint of the nation, and from the broader standpoint of
mankind, scholarship is of worth chiefly when it is productive, when
the scholar not merely receives or acquires, but gives.
Of course there is much production by scholarly men
which is not, strictly speaking, scholarship; any more than the men
themselves, despite their scholarly tastes and attributes, would claim
to be scholars in the technical or purely erudite sense. The
exceedingly valuable and extensive work of Edward Cope
comes under the head of science, and represents original investigation
and original thought concerning what that investigation
¹ “The Mediæval Mind.” By Henry Osborn
Taylor.
“The Life and Times of
Cavour.” By William Roscoe Thayer.
198 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
showed; yet if
the word scholarship is used broadly, his work must certainly be called
productive scientific scholarship. General Alexander's
capital “Memoirs
of a Confederate” show that a man who is a first-class citizen as
well as a first-class fighting man may also combine the true scholar's
power of research and passion for truth with the ability to see clearly
and to state clearly what he has seen. Mr. Hannis Taylor's history of “The Origin
and Growth of the American Constitution” and General Francis V.
Greene's history of the American Revolution could have been written
only by scholars. Such altogether delightful volumes of essays as Mr. Crothers's
“Gentle Reader,” “Pardoner's Wallet,”
and “Among Friends” may not, in the strictest sense of the word,
represent scholarship any more than the “Essays of Elia” represent
scholarship; but they represent more than scholarship, and they could
have been written only by a man of scholarly attributes. The same thing
is true of Mr. Maurice Egan,
now our Minister to Denmark — who so well upholds the tradition which
has always identified American men of letters with American diplomacy —
in his essays in Comparative Literature, named, as I think not
altogether happily, from the first essay, “The Ghost
in
Hamlet”, Mr. Egan writes not merely with charm but as no one but a
man of scholarly attributes could write — and, by the way,
199 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
his dedication
to Archbishop John
Lancaster Spalding is a dedication to a man whose lofty spiritual
teachings have been expressed in singularly beautiful English. In its
most perfect expression scholarship must utter itself with literary
charm and distinction; although, I am sorry to say, the professional
scholars sometimes actually distrust scholarship which is able thus to
bring forth wisdom divorced from pedantry and dryness. As an example, Gilbert Murray's
“Rise of the Greek Epic” not only shows profound scholarship and the
profound scholarly instinct which can alone profit by the mere
erudition of scholarship, but is also so delightfully written as to be
as interesting as the most interesting novel; and, curiously enough,
this very fact, coupled with the fact that Mr. Murray's translations of
Euripides and Aristophanes are so attractive, has tended to excite
distrust of him in the minds of worthy scholars whose productions are
themselves free from all taint of interest, from all taint of literary
charm. Professor Lounsbury's
extraordinary scholarship has been fully appreciated only by the best
scholars; and this partly because of the very fact of his many-sided
development in the field of intellectual endeavor.
But I speak now of works of scholarship in the more
conventional sense, of works which show scholarship such as Lea showed
in his history of
200 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
the
Inquisition, such as Child
showed in his studies of English ballad poetry.
Mr. Taylor's
study of “The
Mediæval Mind” is a noteworthy contribution — I am tempted to
say the most noteworthy of recent contributions — to the best kind of
productive scholarship. His erudition is extraordinary in breadth and
depth, his grasp of the subject no less marked than his power of
conveying to others what he has thus grasped. He is not only faithful
to the truth in large things, he is accurate in small matters also; and
where he makes use of any statement he always shows that there is
justification for it; although, by the way, I can only guess at his
reason for calling Attila a “Turanian” — a word which carries a
pleasant flavor of pre-Victorian ethnology, and might just about as
appropriately be applied to Tecumseh. As he expressly states, Mr.
Taylor is not concerned with the brutalities of mediæval life,
nor with the lower grades of ignorance and superstition which abounded
in the Middle Ages, but with the more informed and constructive spirit
of the mediæval time. There is, of course, no hard and sharp line
to be drawn between mediæval time and, on the one hand, what is
“ancient” and, on the other hand, what is “modern”; but for his
purposes he treats the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as showing the
culmination of the mediæval spirit in its most
201 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
characteristic
form; although he also incidentally touches on things that occurred in
the fourteenth century, and of course covers the slow upward movement
through the Dark Ages (as to which he does rather less than justice to
the Carolingian revival of learning), when men were groping in the
black abyss into which civilization so rapidly slid after the close of
the second century. His mastery of the facts is well-nigh perfect, and
he handles them with singular sympathy. In such chapters as “The
Spotted Actuality” he makes it evident that he has constantly before
his own mind the whole picture. The ordinary reader, however, needs to
remember that it is no part of Mr. Taylor's purpose to present this
whole picture, but merely to make a study somewhat analogous to what a
study of the intellect of the nineteenth century would be if it dealt
exclusively with the thought of the various universities of Europe and
America and of circles like that of Emerson at Concord and Goethe at
Weimar. Indeed, this comparison is hardly accurate, for the
universities of the nineteenth century had a far closer connection with
the living thought of the day than was true of the universities of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The latter (like their feeble
survivals in the Spanish-speaking countries) much more closely
resembled the ordinary type of Mohammedan university of the pres-
202 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
ent day, such
a university as the big Mohammedan university at Cairo, than they
resembled any modern university worth calling such, or, indeed, any
ancient university of living and creative force. The schoolmen of the
Middle Ages and the universities in which they flourished are well
worth such study as that which Mr. Taylor gives them, if only because
they represented what regarded itself as the highest spiritual and
intellectual teaching of the time, and because they symbolized the
forces which manifested themselves with infinitely more permanent value
in that wonderful cathedral architecture which was one of the two
culminating architectural movements of all time — the other, of course,
being the classical Greek. But the greatest mediæval effect upon
the thought of after time was produced, not by the schoolmen, but by
works which they would hardly have treated as serious at all — by the
Roland Song, the “Nibelungenlied,” the Norse and Irish sagas, the
Arthurian Cycle, including “Parsifal”; and modern
literature, on its historical side, may be said to have begun with Villehardouin
and Joinville.
None of the leaders of the schools are to-day living forces in the
sense that is true of the nameless writers who built up the stories of
the immortal death fights in the Pyrenean pass and in the hall of
Etzel, or of the search for the Holy Grail. There are keen intel-
203 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
lects still
influenced by Thomas Aquinas; but all the writings of all the most
famous doctors of the schools taken together had no such influence on
the religious thought of mankind as two books produced long afterward,
with no conception of their far-reaching importance, by the obscure and
humble authors of the “Imitation of Christ” and the “Pilgrim's
Progress.” In the thirteenth century the spiritual life in action, as
apart from dogma, and as lived with the earnest desire to follow in the
footsteps of the Christ, reached, in the person of Saint Francis of
Assisi, as lofty a pinnacle of realized idealism as humanity has ever
attained. But among those who, instead of trying simply to live up to
their spiritual impulses, endeavored to deal authoritatively in the
schools with spiritual and intellectual interests, the complementary
tyranny and servility in all such spiritual and intellectual matters
were such as we can now hardly imagine to ourselves. The one really
great scientific investigator, Roger Bacon, who actually did put as an
ideal before himself the honest search for truth, was imprisoned for
years in consequence; and this in spite of the fact that his avowals of
abject submission to theological authority and unquestioning adherence
to dogma were such as we of to-day can with difficulty understand.
At first sight such an attitude in the intellectual
204 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
world seems
incompatible with the turbulent and lawless insistence on the right of
each individual to do whatever he saw fit in the political and social
world which characterized the seething life of the time. But, as Mr.
Taylor points out, the minute that a man in the Middle Ages began to be
free in any real sense he tended to become an outlaw; and, moreover,
the men who were most intolerant of restraint in matters physical and
material made no demands whatever for intellectual or spiritual
freedom. The ordinary knight or nobleman, the typical “man of action“
of the period, promptly resented any attempt to interfere with his
brutal passions or coarse appetites; but, as he had neither special
interest nor deep conviction in merely intellectual matters, he was
entirely willing to submit to guidance concerning them. The attitude of
the great baron of the highest class is amusingly shown by a
conversation that Joinville records as having occurred between himself
and King Louis the Saint. Among the questions which King Louis one day
propounded to Joinville, in the interests of the higher morality, was
whether Joinville would rather have leprosy or commit a mortal sin; to
which Joinville responded with cordial frankness that he would rather
commit thirty mortal sins than have leprosy. Now, in addition to being
a most delightful chronicler, Joinville was an exceptionally
205 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
well-behaved
and religious baron, standing far above the average, and he was very
careful to perform every obligation laid upon him by those whom he
regarded as his spiritual advisers. The fact simply was that he had no
idea of the need for spiritual or intellectual independence in the
sense that a modern man has need for such independence, because he took
only a superficial interest in anything concerned with intellectual
inquiry. To harry a heretic or a Jew was not only a duty but a
pleasure, and no effort whatever was needed to refrain from
intellectual inquiry which presented to him not the slightest
attraction; but leprosy was something tangible, something real, and the
instant that the real came into collision with even the most insistent
supposed spiritual obligation the rugged old baron went into immediate
revolt.
The whole way of looking at life was so different
from ours that only a thoroughly sympathetic and understanding writer
like Mr. Taylor can set it forth in a manner that shall be sympathetic
and yet not revolt us. One of his most delightful chapters is that on
“The Heart of Heloise.” The qualities that Heloise
displayed are those which eternally appeal to what is high and fine in
human life; as for her lover, Abelard, it is
possible to pardon the abject creature only by scornfully condemning
the age which imposed
206 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
upon him the
rules of conduct in accordance with which he lived.
Mr. Thayer's
“Life of Cavour” is another first-rate example of productive
scholarship. It is much more than a mere biography. The three greatest
and most influential statesmen, in purpose and achievement, since the
close of the Napoleonic epoch were Lincoln, Bismarck, and Cavour;
and any account of either of them must necessarily be an account of the
most vitally important things that happened to mankind during the
period when each was playing his greatest part. An adequate biography
of either must therefore be a permanent addition to history; such a
biography could be written only by a scholar and writer of altogether
exceptional attainments; and such a biography has been furnished by Mr.
Thayer. Mr. Thayer is already well known as the author of various
volumes dealing with Italy, all of them representing work worth doing,
and all of them leading up to and making ready the way for the really
notable history which he has now written. There are other books which
should be read in connection with it; the younger Trevelyan's
brilliant studies of Garibaldi and the Italian revolutionists of 1848
and the dozen years immediately succeeding, and De La Gorce's
profoundly interesting histories of the Second Empire and the Second
Republic in France, which con-
207 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
tain the most
powerful presentment of the period from the anti-revolutionary
standpoint. Cavour not only did more than any other one man for Italian
unity and independence, but he symbolized the movement as neither
Garibaldi the Paladin, nor Mazzini the Republican, nor even King Victor
Emmanuel symbolized it. As Mr. Thayer describes Cavour's career it is
not only of interest in itself, but it is of interest as showing that
vast and complex aggregate of contradictory forces through whose
warring chaos every great leader who fights for the well-being of
mankind must force his way to triumph. Cavour had to contend against
foes within just as much as against foes without. He had to hold the
balance between the unreasoning reactionary and the unreasoning
revolutionist, just exactly as on a larger or smaller scale all leaders
in the forward movement of mankind must ever do. Mr. Thayer has set
forth in masterly fashion the task to which the great statesman
addressed himself and the manner in which that task was performed; his
book is absorbingly interesting to the general reader, and should be of
profit not merely to the special student but to every active politician
who is in politics for any of the reasons which alone render it really
worth while to be a politician at all. Mr. Thayer is devoted to his
hero, as he ought to be; and he is a stanch partisan; but his obvious
208 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
purpose is to
be fair, and the principles of liberty to which he pins his faith are
those upon which American governmental policy must always rest —
although it is not necessary to follow him in all his views, as when he
suddenly treats free trade from the fetichistic standpoint instead of
as an economic expedient to be judged on its merits in any given case.
Every man interested not only in the realities but in the possibilities
of political advance should study this book; and, in addition to its
intrinsic worth and interest, it is an example of the kind of
productive scholarship which adds to the sum of American achievement.
Anything that Professor Lounsbury
writes is certain to be interesting. Any collection by him of the
writings of others is also certain to be interesting. Probably when Mr.
Lounsbury is doing what he himself is willing to accept as work, it is
both so profound and so erudite that we laymen can do little but admire
it from a distance. Fortunately, however, he is also willing to do what
he regards as play, such as a Life of Fenimore Cooper, or a study of
English adapted to the needs of those who are not scholars; and all of
his writing of this lighter kind adds markedly to the sum of enjoyment
of laymen who are fond of reading.
The two volumes before me illustrate the good
209 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
that can be
done by people of cultivation who at our different universities provide
the means needed to foster productive scholarship — for, unfortunately,
productive scholarship in this country is apt to be unremunerative. The
slender volume on the early literary career of Robert Browning
¹ is based on four lectures delivered at the University of
Virginia under the terms of the Barbour-Page Foundation, a foundation
due to the wisdom and generosity of Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page. The “Yale
Book of American Verse” ² is published by the Yale University
Press under the auspices of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, a
club founded by Mr. Alexander
Smith Cochran. It is the kind of club the possession of which every
real university in the country must envy Yale.
This study of Browning particularly appeals to any
man who, although devoted to Browning, yet does not care for the pieces
that some of the Browning clubs especially delight in. Browning's great
poems, those which will last as long as English literature lasts, are
given their full meed of praise by Professor Lounsbury. The other
poems, those which especially excite the interest of the average
Browning society, are treated very amu-
¹ “The Early Literary Career of
Robert Browning.” By Thomas R. Lounsbury.
² “Yale Book of American Verse.” Collected by
Thomas R. Lounsbury.
210 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
singly and on
the whole very justly. Professor Lounsbury insists that these “poems”
will not permanently last, because they are essentially formless, and
therefore not poetry at all, and indeed not literature. He holds that
the attraction such poems exercise on certain people is the attraction
of the unintelligible. Mr. Lounsbury's writings are always full of
delicious touches, and he is sometimes at his best in this little
volume, as, for instance, where he says: “In fact, commentaries on
Browning generally bear a close resemblance to fog-horns. They proclaim
the existence of fog, but they do not disperse it.” One of his main
contentions is that fundamentally the interest in those poems of
Browning which are both very long and very obscure does not differ in
kind from that displayed in guessing the answers to riddles or, to use
a more dignified comparison, from that employed in the solution of
difficult mathematical problems.
I think, however, that for the admiration of these
rather obscure philosophical poems of Browning there is a reason upon
which Mr. Lounsbury has not touched. He says truly that the men who
admire Browning are very apt to be men not especially drawn to writers
in whom lofty speculations have found their fitting counterpart in
clearness and beauty of expression; and he instances Wordsworth and
Tennyson as poets
211 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
to be enjoyed
only by men and women who have a certain degree of fondness for
literature as literature. Now, I think it is true of Browning (as it is
true of Walt Whitman) that many of the people who labor longest and
hardest to master his meaning are entirely mistaken in thinking that
they enjoy him as a poet. But I do not think that Mr. Lounsbury's
explanation that they prize him only as a puzzle fully accounts for the
enjoyment of many of these men or the profit they derive from their
study. The fact is that Browning does represent very deep thought, very
real philosophy — mixed, of course, with much thought that is not deep
at all but only obscure, and much would-be philosophy that has no
meaning whatsoever. In an instance that came to my own knowledge, a
class of college boys in a course of literature, after carefully
studying Browning for a couple of months, and after then taking up
Tennyson, unanimously abandoned Tennyson and insisted on returning to
the study of Browning. These hard-working, intelligent boys were not
all of them merely interested in puzzles. They were not all of them
blind to poetry as such. They did care to a certain extent for form,
but primarily they were interested in the great problems of life, they
were interested in great and noble thoughts. Doubtless many of them
rather enjoyed having to dig out the thought from involved language.
212 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
But probably a
greater number felt a larger enjoyment in finding lofty thought
expressed in language which was even more lofty than obscure.
It is true that as a poet Browning is formless. But
the poets who are great philosophers are few in number, and great
philosophers who have any gift of expression whatever or any sense of
form, or whose writings so much as approach the outer hem of
literature, are even fewer in number. Browning the philosopher is not
more deep than many other philosophers, and in form and expression he
is inferior to many poets. But he is a philosopher, and he has form and
expression. The philosophy he writes is literature, even though hardly
in the highest sense poetic literature. Therefore he appeals to men who
are primarily interested in his writings as philosophy, but who do
derive a certain pleasure from form or expression; who, without being
conscious of it, do like to have the writings they read resemble
literature. These men are given by Browning something that no other
poet and no other philosopher can give them; and I do not think that
these men receive full justice at Mr. Lounsbury's hands. Moreover, as
compared to Tennyson or Longfellow, or any other of the more
conventional poets — and I am extremely fond of these conventional
poets — there is far more in Browning, even in Browning's simpler and
more understandable and
213 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
formal poems,
that gives expression to certain deep and complex emotions. There are
many poets whom we habitually read far more often than Browning, and
who minister better to our more primitive needs and emotions. There are
very few whose lines come so naturally to us in certain great crises of
the soul which are also crises of the intellect.
“The Yale Book of American Verse” is an excellent
anthology, and the preface is one of the best things about it. In this
preface Mr. Lounsbury quite unconsciously shows why he appeals to so
many men to whom a college professor who is nothing more than a college
professor does not readily appeal. He mentions that on the march to
Gettysburg he picked up a torn piece of newspaper containing certain
verses which have always remained in his mind, and which he includes in
this collection of verse. This is the only hint in Professor
Lounsbury's writings that he fought in the Civil War. A professor of
English literature in a great university who in his youth fought at
Gettysburg must necessarily have something in him that speaks not only
to scholars but to men.
This anthology includes hymns as well as secular
poems. The collection is good in itself, as I have already said, and,
moreover, to all real lovers of anthologies it will also seem good
because each
214 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
of them will
take much satisfaction in wondering why certain of his or her favorite
poems have been left out and why certain other poems have been put in.
I suppose every man who cares for poetry at all at times wishes that he
could compile an anthology for his own purposes. I certainly so feel. I
would like to compile two anthologies, one of hymns and one of those
poems which our ancestors designated quite ruthlessly as “profane,” in
opposition to sacred. I should not expect any one else to read either
of my collections. I should not wish the edition to consist of more
than one copy. But I would like, purely for my own use, to own that
copy! In the anthology of hymns, for instance, besides all the great
hymns, from Bernard of Morlais to Cowper and Wesley and Bishop Heber, I
would like to put in some hymns as to which I know nothing except that
I like them. Every Christmas Eve in our own church at Oyster Bay, for
instance, the children sing a hymn beginning “It's Christmas Eve on the
River, it's Christmas Eve on the Bay.” Of course the hymn has come to
us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average
native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our own
soil which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the nearest
approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.
215 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
As for the
“profane” anthology, I think I should like to make one consisting of
several volumes. Even Mr. Lounsbury's volume of American verse, though
it contains some specimens of verse I would not have included, omits
others which I certainly should put in. And then, think of the many,
many volumes that would be needed to include the English poems, and the
French poems, and the German poems from the Bard of the Dimbovitza, and
all the other poems which no human being could make up his mind to see
any anthology leave out! I fear that a perfect anthology of the kind
that fills my dreams would be as large as the various rather dismal
series of volumes which contain, as we are told, “the world's best
literature” — and doubtless would be as unsatisfactory.
Meanwhile, as all this represents an unattainable
dream, we have reason to be glad that Mr. Lounsbury's particular
anthology has been published.
216
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217
DANTE AND THE BOWERY
218
Blank
page
219
DANTE AND THE BOWERY
IT is the conventional thing to praise Dante
because he of set purpose “used the language of the market-place,” so
as to be understanded of the common people; but we do not in practice
either admire or understand a man who writes in the language of our own
market-place. It must be the Florentine market-place of the thirteenth
century not — Fulton Market of to-day. What infinite use Dante would
have made of the Bowery!
Of course, he could have done it only because not merely he himself,
the great poet, but his audience also, would have accepted it as
natural. The nineteenth century was more apt than the thirteenth to
boast of itself as being the greatest of the centuries; but, save as
regards purely material objects, ranging from locomotives to bank
buildings, it did not wholly believe in its boasting. A
nineteenth-century poet, when trying to illustrate some point he was
making, obviously felt uncomfortable in mentioning nineteenth-century
heroes if he also referred to those of classic times, lest he should be
suspected of instituting comparisons between them. A thir-
220 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
teenth-century
poet was not in the least troubled by any such misgivings, and quite
simply illustrated his point by allusions to any character in history
or romance, ancient or contemporary, that happened to occur to him.
Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt
Whitman was the only one who dared use the Bowery — that is, use
anything that was striking and vividly typical of the humanity around
him — as Dante used the ordinary humanity of his day; and even Whitman
was not quite natural in doing so, for he always felt that he was
defying the conventions and prejudices of his neighbors, and his
self-consciousness made him a little defiant. Dante was not defiant of
conventions: the conventions of his day did not forbid him to use human
nature just as he saw it, no less than human nature as he read about
it. The Bowery is one of the great highways of humanity, a highway of
seething life, of varied interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and
terrible tragedy; and it is haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk
through the pages of the “Inferno.” But no man of Dante's art and with
Dante's soul would write of it nowadays; and he would hardly be
understood if he did. Whitman wrote of homely things and every-day men,
and of their greatness, but his art was not equal to his power and his
purpose; and, even as it was, he, the poet, by set intention,
221 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
of the
democracy, is not known to the people as widely as he should be known;
and it is only the few — the men like Edward FitzGerald, John
Burroughs, and W. E. Henley who prize him as he ought to be prized.
Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century,
cultivated people would ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental
truths, as Dante did six hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike
from human nature as he saw it around him and from human nature as he
read of it. I suppose that this must be partly because we are so
self-conscious as always to read a comparison into any illustration,
forgetting the fact that no comparison is implied between two men, in
the sense of estimating their relative greatness or importance, when
the career of each of them is chosen merely to illustrate some given
quality that both possess. It is also probably due to the fact that an
age in which the critical faculty is greatly developed often tends to
develop a certain querulous inability to understand the fundamental
truths which less critical ages accept as a matter of course. To such
critics it seems improper, and indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human
nature by examples chosen alike from the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle
Garden and the Piræus, alike from Tammany and from the Roman mob
organized by the foes or friends of Cæsar. To Dante such feeling
itself would have been inexplicable.
222 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
Dante dealt
with those tremendous qualities of the human soul which dwarf all
differences in outward and visible form and station, and therefore he
illustrated what he meant by any example that seemed to him apt. Only
the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and so, when he
spoke of pride or violence or flattery, and wished to illustrate his
thesis by an appeal to the past, he could speak only of great and
prominent characters; but in the present of his day most of the men he
knew, or knew of, were naturally people of no permanent importance —
just as is the case in the present of our own day. Yet the passions of
these men were the same as those of the heroes of old, godlike or
demoniac; and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries, or his
immediate predecessors, to illustrate his points, without regard to
their prominence or lack of prominence. He was not concerned with the
differences in their fortunes and careers, with their heroic
proportions or lack of such proportions; he was a mystic whose
imagination soared so high and whose thoughts plumbed so deeply the far
depths of our being that he was also quite simply a realist; for the
eternal mysteries were ever before his mind, and, compared to them, the
differences between the careers of the mighty masters of mankind and
the careers of even very humble people seemed trivial. If we translate
his comparisons into the terms of our day, we are apt to feel amused
over
223 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
this trait of
his, until we go a little deeper and understand that we are ourselves
to blame, because we have lost the faculty simply and naturally to
recognize that the essential traits of humanity are shown alike by big
men and by little men, in the lives that are now being lived and in
those that are long ended.
Probably no two characters in Dante impress the
ordinary reader more than Farinata
and Capaneus: the
man who raises himself waist-high from out his burning sepulchre,
unshaken by torment, and the man who, with scornful disdain, refuses to
brush from his body the falling flames; the great souls — magnanimous,
Dante calls them — whom no torture, no disaster, no failure of the most
absolute kind could force to yield or to bow before the dread powers
that had mastered them. Dante has created these men, has made them
permanent additions to the great figures of the world; they are
imaginary only in the sense that Achilles and Ulysses are imaginary —
that is, they are now as real as the figures of any men that ever
lived. One of them was a mythical hero in a mythical feat, the other a
second-rate faction leader in a faction-ridden Italian city of the
thirteenth century, whose deeds have not the slightest importance aside
from what Dante's mention gives. Yet the two men are mentioned as
naturally as Alexander and Cæsar are men-
224 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
tioned.
Evidently they are dwelt upon at length because Dante felt it his duty
to express a peculiar horror for that fierce pride which could defy its
overlord, while at the same time, and perhaps unwillingly, he could not
conceal a certain shuddering admiration for the lofty courage on which
this evil pride was based.
The point I wish to make is the simplicity with
which Dante illustrated one of the principles on which he lays most
stress, by the example of a man who was of consequence only in the
history of the parochial politics of Florence. Farinata will now live
forever as a symbol of the soul; yet as an historical figure he is
dwarfed beside any one of hundreds of the leaders in our own Revolution
and Civil War. Tom
Benton, of Missouri, and Jefferson Davis,
of Mississippi, were opposed to one another with a bitterness which
surpassed that which rived asunder Guelph from Ghibellin, or black
Guelph from white Guelph. They played mighty parts in a tragedy more
tremendous than any which any mediæval city ever witnessed or
could have witnessed. Each possessed an iron will and undaunted
courage, physical and moral; each led a life of varied interest and
danger, and exercised a power not possible in the career of the
Florentine. One, the champion of the Union, fought for his principles
as unyieldingly as the other fought for what he deemed right in trying
225 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
to break up
the Union. Each was a colossal figure. Each, when the forces against
which he fought overcame him — for in his latter years Benton saw the
cause of disunion triumph in Missouri, just as Jefferson Davis lived to
see the cause of union triumph in the Nation — fronted an adverse fate
with the frowning defiance, the high heart, and the stubborn will which
Dante has commemorated for all time in his hero who “held hell in great
scorn.” Yet a modern poet who endeavored to illustrate such a point by
reference to Benton and Davis would be uncomfortably conscious that his
audience would laugh at him. He would feel ill at ease, and therefore
would convey the impression of being ill at ease, exactly as he would
feel that he was posing, was forced and unnatural, if he referred to
the deeds of the evil heroes of the Paris Commune as he would without
hesitation refer to the many similar but smaller leaders of riots in
the Roman forum.
Dante speaks of a couple of French troubadours, or
of a local Sicilian poet, just as he speaks of Euripides; and quite
properly, for they illustrate as well what he has to teach; but we of
to-day could not possibly speak of a couple of recent French poets or
German novelists in the same connection without having an uncomfortable
feeling that we ought to defend ourselves from possible
misapprehension; and therefore we could not
226 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
speak of them
naturally. When Dante wishes to assail those guilty of crimes of
violence, he in one stanza speaks of the torments inflicted by divine
justice on Attila (coupling him with Pyrrhus and Sextus Pompey — a
sufficiently odd conjunction in itself, by the way), and in the next
stanza mentions the names of a couple of local highwaymen who had made
travel unsafe in particular neighborhoods. The two highwaymen in
question were by no means as important as Jesse James and Billy the
Kid; doubtless they were far less formidable fighting men, and their
adventures were less striking and varied. Yet think of the way we
should feel if a great poet should now arise who would incidentally
illustrate the ferocity of the human heart by allusions both to the
terrible Hunnish “scourge of God” and to the outlaws who in our own
times defied justice in Missouri and New Mexico!
When Dante wishes to illustrate the fierce passions
of the human heart, he may speak of Lycurgus, or of Saul; or he may
speak of two local contemporary captains, victor or vanquished in
obscure struggles between Guelph and Ghibellin; men like Jacopo del
Cassero or Buonconte, whom he mentions as naturally as he does Cyrus or
Rehoboam. He is entirely right! What one among our own writers,
however, would be able simply and naturally to mention Ulrich Dahlgren,
227 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
or Custer,
or Morgan,
or Raphael
Semmes, or Marion,
or Sumter,
as illustrating the qualities shown by Hannibal, or Rameses, or William
the Conqueror, or by Moses or Hercules? Yet the Guelph and Ghibellin
captains of whom Dante speaks were in no way as important as these
American soldiers of the second or third rank. Dante saw nothing
incongruous in treating at length of the qualities of all of them; he
was not thinking of comparing the genius of the unimportant local
leader with the genius of the great sovereign conquerors of the past —
he was thinking only of the qualities of courage and daring and of the
awful horror of death; and when we deal with what is elemental in the
human soul it matters but little whose soul we take. In the same way he
mentions a couple of spendthrifts of Padua and Siena, who come to
violent ends, just as in the preceding canto he had dwelt upon the
tortures undergone by Dionysius and Simon de Montfort, guarded by
Nessus and his fellow centaurs. For some reason he hated the
spendthrifts in question as the Whigs of Revolutionary South Carolina
and New York hated Tarleton, Kruger, Saint Leger, and De Lancey; and to
him there was nothing incongruous in drawing a lesson from one couple
of offenders more than from another. (It would, by the way, be outside
my present purpose to speak of the rather puzzling manner in which
228 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
Dante
confounds his own hatreds with those of heaven, and, for instance,
shows a vindictive enjoyment in putting his personal opponent Filippo Argenti
in hell, for no clearly adequate reason.)
When he turns from those whom he is glad to see in
hell toward those for whom he cares, he shows the same delightful power
of penetrating through the externals into the essentials. Cato and
Manfred illustrate his point no better than Belacqua, a contemporary
Florentine maker of citherns. Alas! what poet to-day would dare to
illustrate his argument by introducing Steinway in company with Cato
and Manfred! Yet again, when examples of love are needed, he draws them
from the wedding-feast at Cana, from the actions of Pylades and
Orestes, and from the life of a kindly, honest comb-dealer of Siena who
had just died. Could we now link together Peter Cooper and Pylades,
without feeling a sense of incongruity? He couples Priscian with a
politician of local note who had written an encyclopædia and a
lawyer of distinction who had lectured at Bologna and Oxford; we could
not now with such fine unconsciousness bring Evarts and
one of the compilers of the Encyclopædia Britannica into a like
comparison.
When Dante deals with the crimes which he most
abhorred, simony and barratry, he flails offenders of his age who were
of the same type as
228 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
those who in
our days flourish by political or commercial corruption; and he names
his offenders, both those just dead and those still living, and puts
them, popes and politicians alike, in hell. There have been trust
magnates and politicians and editors and magazine-writers in our own
country whose lives and deeds were no more edifying than those of the
men who lie in the third and the fifth chasm of the eighth circle of
the Inferno; yet for a poet to name those men would be condemned as an
instance of shocking taste.
One age expresses itself naturally in a form that
would be unnatural, and therefore undesirable, in another age. We do
not express ourselves nowadays in epics at all; and we keep the
emotions aroused in us by what is good or evil in the men of the
present in a totally different compartment from that which holds our
emotions concerning what was good or evil in the men of the past. An
imitation of the letter of the times past, when the spirit has wholly
altered, would be worse than useless; and the very qualities that help
to make Dante's poem immortal would, if copied nowadays, make the
copyist ridiculous. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing if we could,
in some measure, achieve the mighty Florentine's high simplicity of
soul, at least to the extent of recognizing in those around us the
eternal qual-
230 DANTE AND THE BOWERY
ities which we
admire or condemn in the men who wrought good or evil at any stage in
the world's previous history. Dante's masterpiece is one of the supreme
works of art that the ages have witnessed; but he would have been the
last to wish that it should be treated only as a work of art, or
worshipped only for art's sake, without reference to the dread lessons
it teaches mankind.
231
THE FOUNDATIONS OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
232
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page
233
THE FOUNDATIONS OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ¹
MR. H. S. CHAMBERLAIN'S work on “The Foundations
of the
Nineteenth Century” is a noteworthy book in more ways than one.
It
is written by an Englishman who has been educated on the Continent, and
has lived there until he is much more German than English. Previously
he had written a book in French, while this particular book was
written
in German, and has only recently been translated into English.
Adequately to review the book, or rather to write an adequate essay
suggested by it, would need the space that would have been taken by an
old-time Quarterly or Edinburgh Reviewer a century or fourscore years
ago. I have called the book “noteworthy,” and this it certainly is. It
ranks with Buckle's “History of Civilization,” and still more with
Gobineau's “Inégalité
des Races
Humaines,” for its brilliancy and suggestiveness and also for its
startling inaccuracies and lack of judgment. A witty Eng-
¹ “The Foundation's of the
Nineteenth Century.” By Houston Stewart Chamberlain. A translation from
the German, by John Lees. With an introduction by
Lord Redesdale. In
two volumes.
234 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
lish critic
once remarked of Mitford that he had all the qualifications of an
historian — violent partiality and extreme wrath. Mr. Chamberlain
certainly possesses these qualifications in excess, and, combined with
a queer vein of the erratic in his temperament, they almost completely
offset the value of his extraordinary erudition, extending into widely
varied fields, and of his occasionally really brilliant inspiration. He
is, however, always entertaining; which is of itself no mean merit, in
view of the fact that most serious writers seem unable to regard
themselves as serious unless they are also dull.
Mr. Chamberlain's thesis is that the nineteenth
century, and therefore the twentieth and all future centuries, depend
for everything in them worth mentioning and preserving upon the
Teutonic branch of the Aryan race. He holds that there is no such thing
as a general progress of mankind, that progress is only for those whom
he calls the Teutons, and that when they mix with or are intruded upon
by alien and, as he regards them, lower races, the result is fatal.
Much that he says regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about
the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races,
and the like, is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth
considering by a generation accustomed, as its forefathers for the
preceding generations were ac-
235 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
customed, to
accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious doctrines taught by
well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists; but Mr. Chamberlain
himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of those whom he
derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish hatred
is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines are based upon
foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain's hatreds cover a wide gamut. They
include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church, the people of
southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety of literary men
and historians. ¹ To this sufficiently incongruous collection of
antipathies he adds a much smaller selection of violent attachments,
ranging from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans to Immanuel Kant,
and Indian theology, metaphysics, and philosophy — he draws sharp
distinctions between all three, and I merely use them to indicate his
admiration for the Indian habit of thought, an admiration which goes
hand in hand with and accentuates his violent hatred for what most sane
people regard as the far nobler thought contained, for instance, in the
Old Testament. He continually contradicts himself, or at
¹ Some of his antipathies
appeal to the present writer; I much enjoy his irrelevant and hearty
denunciation of the folly of treating the comparatively trivial Latin
literature as of such peculiar importance as to entitle it to be
grouped in grotesque association with the magnificent Greek literature
under the unmeaning title of “classic.”
236 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
least uses
words in such diametrically opposite senses as to convey the effect of
contradiction; and so it would be possible to choose phrases of his
which contradict what is here said; but I think that I give a correct
impression of his teaching as a whole.
As he touches lightly on an infinitely varied range
of subjects, it would be possible to choose almost at random passages
to justify what is said above. Take, for instance, his dogmatic
assertions concerning faith and works. He frantically condemns the
doctrine of salvation by works and frantically exalts the doctrine of
salvation by faith. Much that he says about both doctrines must be
taken in so mystical and involved a sense that it contains little real
meaning to ordinary men. Yet he is also capable of expressing, on this
very subject, noble thought in a lofty manner. In one of his sudden
lapses into brilliant sanity he emphasizes the fact that Saint Francis
of Assisi was faith incorporate and yet the special apostle of good
works; and that Martin Luther, the advocate of redemption by faith,
consecrated his life and revealed to others the secret of good works —
“free works done only to please God, not for the sake of piety.”
Unfortunately, these brilliant lapses into sanity
are fixed in a matrix of fairly bedlamite passion and non-sanity. Mr.
Chamberlain jeers with rea-
237 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
son at the
Roman Curia because until 1822 it kept on the Index all books which
taught that the earth went round the sun; but really such action is not
much worse than that of a man professing to write a book like this at
the outset of the twentieth century who takes the attitude Mr.
Chamberlain does toward the teaching of Darwin. The acceptance of the
fundamental truths of evolution are quite as necessary to sound
scientific thought as the acceptance of the fundamental truths
concerning the solar system; and the attempt that Mr. Chamberlain in
one place makes to draw a distinction between them is fantastic. Again,
take what Mr. Chamberlain says of Aryans and Teutons. He bursts the
flood-gates of scorn when he deals with persons who idealize humanity,
or, as he styles it, “so-called humanity”; and he says: “For this
humanity
about which man has philosophized to such an extent suffers from the
serious defect that it does not exist at all. History reveals to us a
great number of various human beings, but no such thing as humanity”;
yet on this very page he attributes the history of the growth of our
civilization to its “Teutonic” character, and he uses the word “Teuton”
as well as the word “Aryan” with as utter a looseness and vagueness as
ever any philanthropist or revolutionist used the word “humanity.” All
that he says in derision of such a forced use of the
238 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
word
“humanity” could with a much greater percentage of truthfulness be said
as regards the words and ideas symbolized by Teutonism and Aryanism as
Mr. Chamberlain uses these terms. Indeed, as he uses them they amount
to little more than expressions of his personal likes and dislikes. His
statement of the raceless chaos into which the Roman Empire finally
lapsed is, on the whole, just, and, to use the words continually coming
to one's mind in dealing with him, both brilliant and suggestive. But
in his anxiety to claim everything good for Aryans and Teutons he
finally reduces himself to the position of insisting that wherever he
sees a man whom he admires he must postulate for him Aryan, and, better
still, Teutonic blood. He likes David, so he promptly makes him an
Aryan Amorite. He likes Michael Angelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da
Vinci, and he instantly says that they are Teutons; but he does not
like Napoleon, and so he says that Napoleon is a true representative of
the raceless chaos. The noted Italians in question, he states, were all
of German origin, descended from the Germans who had conquered Italy in
the sixth century. Now, of course, if Mr. Chamberlain is willing to be
serious with himself, he must know perfectly well that even by the time
of Dante seven or eight centuries had passed, and by the time of the
other great Italians he mentions eight or ten cen-
239 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
turies had
passed, since the Germanic invasion. In other words, these great
Italians were separated from the days of the Gothic and Lombard
invasions by the distance which separates modern England from the
Norman invasion; and his thesis has just about as much substance as
would be contained in the statement that Wellington, Nelson, Turner,
Wordsworth, and Tennyson excelled in their several spheres because they
were all pure-blood descendants of the motley crew that came in with
William the Conqueror. The different ethnic elements which entered into
the Italy of the seventh century were in complete solution by the
thirteenth, and it would have been quite as impossible to trace them to
their several original strains as nowadays to trace in the average
Englishman the various strains of blood from his Norman, Saxon, Celtic,
and Scandinavian ancestors. Nor does Mr. Chamberlain mind believing two
incompatible things in the quickest possible succession if they happen
to suit his philosophy of the moment. Generally, when he speaks of the
Teuton he thinks of the tall, long-headed man of the north; although,
because of some crank in his mind, he puts in the proviso that he may
have black as well as blond hair. The round-skulled man of middle
Europe he usually condemns; but if his mind happens to run with
approbation toward the Tyrolese, for
240 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
instance, he
at once forgets what ethnic division of Europeans it is to which they
belong, and accepts them as typical Teutons. He greatly admires the
teaching of the Apostle Paul, and so he endeavors to persuade himself
that the Apostle Paul was not really a Jew; but he does not like the
teachings of the Epistle of James on the subject of good works
(teachings for which I have a peculiar sympathy, by the way), and
accordingly he says that James was a pure Jew.
Fundamentally, very many of Mr. Chamberlain's ideas
are true and noble. I admire the morality with which he condemns the
intolerance of Calvin and Luther no less strongly than the intolerance
of their Roman opponents, and yet his acceptance of the fact that they
could not have done their great work if there had not been in their
characters an alloy which made it possible for actual humanity to
accept their teaching. But even his sense of morality is as curiously
capricious as that of Carlyle himself, and as little trustworthy. He
glories in the pointless and wanton barbarity of the destruction of
Carthage in the Third Punic War as saving Europe from the Afro-Asiatic
peril — pure nonsense, of course, for Carthage was then no more
dangerous to Rome than Corinth was, and the sacks of the two cities
stand on a par as regards any importance in their after effects.
Perhaps his attitude toward Byron
241 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
is more
practically mischievous, or at least shows a much less desirable trait
of character. He says that the personality of Byron “has something
repulsive in it for every thorough Teuton, because we nowhere encounter
in it the idea of duty,” which makes him “unsympathetic, un-Teutonic“;
but he adds that Teutons do not object in the least to his
licentiousness, and, on the contrary, see in it “a proof of genuine
race”! Really, this reconciliation of a high ideal of duty with gross
licentiousness would be infamous if it were not so unspeakably comic.
On the next page, by the way, Mr. Chamberlain
says that Louis XIV was anti-Teutonic in his persecution of the
Protestants, but a thorough Teuton when he defended the liberties of
the Gallican church against Rome! Now such intellectual antics as
these, and the haphazard use of any kind of a name (without the least
reference to its ordinary use, provided Mr. Chamberlain has taken a
fancy to it) to represent or symbolize any individual or attribute of
which he approves, makes it very difficult to accept the book as having
any serious merit whatever. Yet interspersed with innumerable pages
which at best are those of an able man whose mind is not quite sound,
and at worst lose their brilliancy without their irrationality, there
are many pages of deep thought and lofty morality based upon wide
learning and wide literary and
242 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
even
scientific knowledge. There could be no more unsafe book to follow
implicitly, and few books of such pretensions more ludicrously unsound;
and yet it is a book which students and scholars, and men who, though
neither students nor scholars, are yet deeply interested in life, must
have on their book-shelves. Much the same criticism should be passed
upon him that he himself passes upon John
Fiske, to whose great work, “The History of the
Discovery of America,” he gives deserved and unstinted praise, but
at whom he rails for solemnly, and, as Mr. Chamberlain says, with more
than Papal pretensions to infallibility, setting forth complete patent
solutions for all the problems connected not merely with the origin but
with the destiny of man. Mr. Chamberlain differentiates sharply between
the admirable work Fiske did in such a book as that treating of the
discovery of America and the work he did when he ventured to dogmatize
loosely, after the manner of Darwin's successors in the '70s and '80s,
upon a scanty collection of facts very imperfectly understood. But Mr.
Chamberlain himself would have done far better if in his book he had
copied the methods and modesty of Fiske at his best — the methods and
modesty of such books as Sutherland's “Origin and Growth of the Moral
Instinct” — and had refrained from taking an attitude of cock-sureness
concerning
243 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
problems which
at present no one can more than imperfectly understand. He is unwise to
follow Brougham's example and make omniscience his foible.
Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a
really beautiful and solemn appreciation of true Christianity, of true
acceptance of Christ's teachings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain
has done, a man who can sketch as vividly as he has sketched the
fundamental facts of the Roman empire in the first three centuries of
our era, a man who can warn us as clearly as he has warned about some
of the pressing dangers which threaten our social fabric because of
indulgence in a morbid and false sentimentality, a man, in short, who
has produced in this one book materials for half a dozen excellent
books on utterly diverse subjects, represents an influence to be
reckoned with and seriously to be taken into account.
244
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245
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
246
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247
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
THERE is superstition in science quite as much
as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous
because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are
freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of
mediæval superstition, even as it survived into
nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant,
much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual
sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic
materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific
but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these
pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a
matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect
the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private
and public conduct in the public mind.
This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere
more dangerous than among the nations in which the movement toward an
unshackled
248 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
materialism is
helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of political and
clerical absolutism. The first of the books mentioned below ¹ is
written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. Under the rather
fanciful title of “The Death of the Swan” it deals with the
shortcomings of Latin civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the
doctrines of pure materialism as a remedy for these shortcomings, and
draws lessons from the success of the Northern races, and especially of
our own country-
¹ “La Mort du Cygne.” By Carlos
Reyles. Translation from Spanish into French by Alfred de Bengoechea.
“Thoughts of a Catholic
Anatomist.” By Thomas Dwight, M.D.
“The Classical Heritage of the
Middle Ages.” By Henry Osborn Taylor.
“Some Neglected Factors in Evolution.” By Henry M.
Bernard.
“The World of Life.” By Alfred Russel Wallace.
“William James.” By Émile Boutroux.
“Science et Religion.” By Émile Boutroux.
“Science and
Religion.” By Émile Boutroux. Translation into English by
Jonathan Nield.
“Creative Evolution.” By Henri Bergson.
Authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell.
“The Varieties of Religious Experience.” By
William James.
“Time and Free Will.” By Henri Bergson. Translation
by
F. L. Pogson.
“From
Epicurus to Christ.” By William De Witt Hyde.
“The
Sixth Sense.” By Bishop Charles H. Brent.
I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review
these books in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use
them only to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the search for
truth;
as, for instance, the harm that comes from seeking to apply,
universally, truth as apprehended by the mere materialist, the futility
of trying to check this harm by invoking the spirit of reactionary
mediævalism, and the fundamental agreement reached by
truth-seekers of the highest type, both scientific and religious.
249 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
men, which I,
for one, am unwilling to have drawn. The author feels that the
civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is going down, and that it
owes its decadence to submission to an outworn governmental and
ecclesiastical tyranny, and especially to the futility of its ideals in
government, religion, and the whole art of living, a futility so
wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned aside the people from
all that makes for real efficiency and success. In his revolt against
sentimentality, mock humanitarianism, and hypocrisy the author
advocates frank egotism and brutality as rules of conduct for both
individuals and nations; and in his revolt against the theological
tyranny and superstition from which the Spanish peoples in the Old and
New Worlds have suffered so much in the past he advocates implicit
obedience to the revolting creed which would treat gold and force as
the true and only gods for human guidance; and this he does in the name
of science and enlightenment and of exact and correct thinking. He
speaks with admiration of certain American qualities, confounding in
curious fashion the use and abuse of great but dangerous traits. He
fails to see that the line of separation between the school of
Washington and of Lincoln and the school of the prophets of brutal
force, as expressed in the deification of either Mars or Mammon, is as
sharp as that which distinguishes
250 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
both of these
schools from the apostles of the silly sentimentalism which he justly
condemns. He sees that the really great Americans were thoroughly
practical men; but he is blind to the fact that they were also lofty
idealists. It was precisely because they were both idealists and
practical men that they made their mark deep in history. He sees that
they abhorred bigotry and superstition; he does not see that they were
sundered as far from the men who attack all religion and all order as
from the men who uphold either governmental or religious tyranny. It
was the fact that Washington and Lincoln refused to carry good policies
to bad extremes, and at the same time refused to be frightened out of
supporting good policies because they might lead to bad extremes, that
made them of such far-reaching usefulness.
Dr. Dwight's book is
very largely a protest against the materialistic philosophy which has
produced such conceptions of life, and against these conceptions of
life themselves. With this protest we must all heartily sympathize;
unfortunately, it is impossible to have such sympathy with the
reactionary spirit in which he makes his protest. There is much that is
true in the assault he makes; but in his zeal to show where the leaders
of the modern advance have been guilty of shortcomings he tends to
assume posi-
251 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
tions which
would put an instant stop to any honest effort to advance at all, and
would plunge us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark
Ages. Apparently the ideal after which Dr. Dwight strives is that
embodied in the man of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry Osborn
Taylor in one of his profound and able studies has said: “The
mediæval man was not spiritually self-reliant, his character was
not consciously wrought by its own strength of mind and purpose.
Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire
for liberty.”
Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous
parallelism between the lines of thought of the materialistic
scientists of to-day and those of the French Revolution. Strongly
though he disapproves of much of the thought of modern science, he
disapproves even more strongly of the Revolution. In speaking of the
similarities between them he says:
“Among the characters of the Revolution we meet all
kinds of company. There are the honest men anxious for reform, the
protesters against what they conceived to be religious oppression, the
dreamy idealists without definite plan, the ranting orators of the
'mountain,' fanatics and demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a
living from the more or less sincere promulgation of revolutionary
doctrines and who find
252 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
legalized
plunder very profitable, the army of those who for fear or for favor
prefer to be on the winning side and follow the fashionable doctrines
without an examination which most of them are incompetent to make, and
finally the mob of the sans-culottes
rejoicing in the overthrow of law, order, and decency.”
This is true, although it does not contain by any
means the whole truth; moreover, the parallelism with the scientific
movement of the present day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the saying
which Dr. Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer
applies to what he himself attempts; to destroy the case of one's
opponents and to justify one's own case are two very different things.
At present we are in greater danger of suffering in things spiritual
from a wrong-headed scientific materialism than from religious bigotry
and intolerance; just as at present we are threatened rather by what is
vicious among the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are
from what is vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely
because victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated
evil; and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our
protest against the evil of the present drive us into championship of
the evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not
only hideous in themselves, but were
253 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
fraught with a
menace to civilization which has lasted until our time and which has
found its most vicious expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its
would-be imitators here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was
hope for mankind in the French Revolution, and there was none in the
system against which it was a protest, a system which had reached its
highest development in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French
Revolution than the worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny —
physical, intellectual, spiritual — which brooded over the Spain of
that day. So it is with the modern scientific movement. There is very
much in it to regret; there is much that is misdirected and wrong; and
Dr. Dwight is quite right in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a
less extent against Weismann, and
against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism which the
scientists of their school display to as great an extent as ever did
any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in revolt. The
experience of our sister republic of France has shown us that not only
scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in their
liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of the most
extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and intolerance
are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when nominally
religious. But in his
254 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
entirely
proper protest against these men and their like Dr. Dwight is less than
just to Darwin and to many another seeker after truth, and he fails to
recognize the obligation under which he and those like him have been
put by the fearless pioneers of the new movement. The debt of mankind
to the modern scientific movement is incalculable; the evil that has
accompanied it has been real; but the good has much outweighed the
evil. It is only the triumph of the movement led by the men against
whom Dr. Dwight protests that has rendered it possible for books such
as Dr. Dwight's to be published with the approval — as in his case — of
the orthodox thought of the church to which the writer belongs.
The most significant feature of his book is the
advance it marks in the distance which orthodoxy has travelled. He
grudgingly admits the doctrine of evolution, although — quite rightly,
and in true scientific spirit, by the way — he insists most strongly
upon the fact that we are as yet groping in the dark as we essay to
explain its causes or show its significance; and he is again quite
right in holding up as an example to the dogmatists of modern science
what Roger Bacon said in the thirteenth century: “The first essential
for advancement in knowledge is for men to be willing to say, 'We do
not know.'” He, of course, treats of the solar system, the law of
gravitation, and
255 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
the like as
every other educated man now treats of them. Now, all of this
represents a great advance. A half-century ago no recognized
authorities of any church would have treated an evolutionist as an
orthodox man. A century ago Dr. Dwight would not have been permitted to
print his book as orthodox if it had even contained the statement that
the earth goes round the sun. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular
opinion sustained the church authorities in their refusal to allow that
extraordinary man to dissect dead bodies, and the use of antitoxin
would unquestionably have been considered a very dangerous heresy from
all standpoints. In their generations Copernicus and Galileo were held
to be dangerous opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held to be
when he brought out his “Origin of Species,” just as Mendel's work
would have been held if Darwin's far greater work had not distracted
attention from him. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was
at the time thought by many worthy people to be in contradiction of
what was taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt their way
toward the discovery of the law of gravitation made as many blunders
and opened themselves to assault on as many points as was the case with
those who first felt their way to the establishment of the doctrine of
evolution. The Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the free-
256 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
dom they do
only because of the triumph of the ideas of those scientific innovators
of the past whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically condemned.
But when Dr. Dwight attacks the loose
generalizations, absurd dogmatism, and ludicrous assumption of
omniscient wisdom of not a few of the so-called leaders of modern
science, he is not only right but renders a real service. The claims of
certain so-called scientific men as to “science overthrowing religion”
are as baseless as the fears of certain sincerely religious men on the
same subject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our
time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than
the discovery of the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries
ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the — surely very slight —
strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does move round the
sun need have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the
materialistic scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the
principle of evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with
just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of
gravitation. Science and religion, and the relations between them, are
affected by one only as they are affected by the other. Genuine harm
has been done by the crass materialism of men like Haeckel, a
materialism which, in
257 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
its
unscientific assumptions and in its utter insufficiency to explain all
the phenomena it professes to explain, has been exposed in masterly
fashion by such really great thinkers — such masters not only of
philosophy but of material science — as William James, Émile
Boutroux, and Henri
Bergson. It is worth while to quote the remarks of Alfred
Russel Wallace, the veteran evolutionist: “With Professor Haeckel's
dislike of the dogmas of theologians and their claims as to the
absolute knowledge of the nature and attributes of the inscrutable mind
that is the power within and behind and around nature many of us have
the greatest sympathy; but we have none with his unfounded dogmatism of
combined negation and omniscience, and more especially when this
assumption of superior knowledge seems to be put forward to conceal his
real ignorance of the nature of life itself.” Dr. Dwight is
emphatically right when he denies that science (using the word, as he
does, as meaning merely the science of material things) has taught “a
new and sufficient
gospel,” or that, to use his own words, there is any truth “in the
boast of infidel science that she and she alone has all that is worth
having.” He could go even further than he does in refuting the queer
optimism of those evolutionists who insist that evolution in the human
race necessarily means progress; for every true evolutionist must admit
the possibility of
258 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
retrogression
no less than of progress, and exactly as species of animals have sunk
after having risen, so in the history of mankind it has again and again
happened that races of men, and whole civilizations, have sunk after
having risen. In so far as Dr. Dwight's view of religion is that it is
the gospel of duty and of human service, his view is emphatically
right; and surely when the doctrine of the gospel of works is taken to
mean the gospel of service to mankind, and not merely the performance
of a barren ceremonial, it must command the respect, and I hope the
adherence, of all devout men of every creed, and even of those who
adhere to no creed of recognized orthodoxy.
In the same way I heartily sympathize with his
condemnation of the men who stridently proclaim that “science has
disposed of religion,” and with his condemnation of the scientific men
who would try to teach the community that there is no real meaning to
the words “right” and “wrong,” and who therefore deny free-will and
accountability. Even as sound a thinker as Mr. Bernard, whose book is
rightly, as he calls it, “an essay in constructive biology,” who in his
theory of group development has opened a new biological and even
sociological field of capital importance, who explicitly recognizes the
psychical accompaniment of physical force as something distinct from it,
259 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
and whose
final chapter on the integration of the human aggregate shows that he
has a far nobler view of life than any mere materialist can have, yet
falls into the great mistake of denying freedom of the will, merely
because he with his finite material intelligence can not understand it.
Dr. Dwight is right in his attitude toward the scientific men who thus
assume that there is no freedom of the will because on a material basis
it is not explicable. Whenever any so-called scientific men develop, as
an abstract proposition, a theory in accordance with which it would be
quite impossible to conduct the affairs of mankind for so much as
twenty-four hours, the wise attitude of really scientific men would be
to reject that theory, instead of following the example of the, I fear
not wholly imaginary, scientist who, when told that the facts did not
fit in with his theory, answered: “So much the worse
for the facts.” M. Bergson, in his “Creative Evolution,” has brought
out with convincing clearness the great truth that the human brain, so
able to deal with purely material things, and with sciences, such as
geometry, in which thought is concerned only with unorganized matter,
works under necessarily narrow limitations — limitations in reality
very, very narrow, and never to be made really broad by mere intellect
— when it comes to grasping any part of the great principle of life.
Reason can deal effect-
260 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
ively only
with certain categories. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to allow
reason to assume a sway outside of its limitations; and where
experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly, then
it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience, and bid
reason be humble just as under like conditions it would bid theology be
humble. A certain school of Greek philosophers was able to prove
logically that there was not, and could not be, any such thing as
motion, and that, even if there were, it was quite impossible logically
for a pursuing creature ever to overtake a fleeing creature which was
going at inferior speed; but all that was really accomplished by this
teaching was to prove the need of much greater intellectual humility on
the part of those who believed that they were capable of thinking out
an explanation for everything. Mr. Bernard ought not to have been
caught in such a dilemma, because of the very fact that he does not
cast in his lot with the crass materialists; for he admits that there
are many things we do not know, that there is much which our
intelligence — necessarily functioning in material fashion — can not
understand. It is just as idle for a man to try to explain everything
in the moral and spiritual world by that which he is able to apprehend
of the material world as it would be for a polyp to try to explain the
higher emo-
261 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
tions of
mankind in terms of polyp materialism. Not only would it be quite
impossible to conduct even the lowest form of civil society without
practical acknowledgment of free-will and accountability — an
acknowledgment always made in practice by every single individual of
those who deny it in theory — but even in their writings the very men
who deny free-will and accountability inevitably and continually use
language which has no meaning except on the supposition that both of
them exist. Mr. Bernard, for instance, on the same page on which he
denies freedom of the will, makes an impatient plea for just laws, and
explains that by “just laws” he means laws that are in accordance with
the highest conceptions of human relationships; he complains that the
legal idea of justice is invariably far behind that of our psychic
perceptions; and elsewhere, as on page 457, he speaks of the “duties”
of man and of his “moral perceptions,”
and on page 473 he asks for perfection of the community, so that
“social life worked out by the highest wisdom of mankind will at once
rise to a newer and higher physical and psychic level.” All of this is
meaningless if there are no such things as freedom of the will and
accountability; and its goes to show that even a profound and original
thinker, if he has dwelt too long in the realms where the pure
materialist is king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson's pregnant
262 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
saying that
“pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense, which is an
altogether different thing.” A part, and an essential part, of the same
truth is expressed by Mr. Taylor when he paraphrases Saint Augustine in
insisting that “the truths of love
are as valid as the truths of reason.”
Dr. Dwight and the many men whose habits of thought
are similar to his perform a real service when they keep people from
being led astray by the mischievous dogmas of those who would give to
each passing and evanescent phase of materialistic scientific thought a
dogmatic value; and our full acknowledgment of this service does not in
the least hinder us from also realizing and acknowledging that the
advance in scientific discovery, which has been and will be of such
priceless worth to mankind, can not be made by men of this type, but
only by the bolder, more self-reliant spirits, by men whose unfettered
freedom of soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great
cause of truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the
search to attain it. A brake is often a useful and sometimes an
indispensable piece of equipment of a wagon; but it is never as
important as the wheels. As the University of Wisconsin declared when
Dr. Richard T.
Ely was tried for economic heresy: “In all lines of investigation
the investigator must be
263 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
absolutely
free to follow the paths of truth wherever they may lead.”
It is always a difficult thing to state a position
which has two sides with such clearness as to bring it home to the
hearers. In the world of politics it is easy to appeal to the
unreasoning reactionary, and no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning
advocate of change, but difficult to get people to show for the cause
of sanity and progress combined the zeal so easily aroused against
sanity by one set of extremists and against progress by another set of
extremists. So in the world of the intellect it is easy to take the
position of the hard materialists who rail against religion, and easy
also to take the position of those whose zeal for orthodoxy makes them
distrust all action by men of independent mind in the search for
scientific truth; but it is not so easy to make it understood that we
both acknowledge our inestimable debt to the great masters of science,
and yet are keenly alive to their errors and decline to surrender our
judgment to theirs when they go wrong. It is imperative to realize how
very grave their errors are, and how foolish we should be to abandon
our adherence to the old ideals of duty toward God and man without
better security than the more radical among the new prophets can offer
us. The very blindest of those new scientific prophets are those whose
complacency is greatest
264 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
in their
belief that the material key is that which unlocks all the mysteries of
the universe, and that the finite mind of man can, not merely
understand, but pass supercilious judgment upon, these mysteries. Mr.
Wallace stands in honorable contrast to the men of this stamp. No one
has criticised with greater incisiveness what he properly calls “the
vague, incomprehensible, and offensive assertions of the biologists of
the school of Haeckel.” He shows his scientific superiority to these
men by his entire realization of the limitations of the human
intelligence, by his realization of the folly of thinking that we have
explained what we are simply unable to understand when we use such
terms as “infinity of time” and “infinity of space” to cover our
ignorance; and he stands not far away from the school of MM. Boutroux
and Bergson, and, old man though he is, comes near the attitude of the
more serious among the younger present-day scientific investigators —
of the stamp of Professor Osborn,
of the American Museum of Natural History — in his readiness to
acknowledge that the materialistic and mechanical explanations of the
causes of evolution have broken down, and that science itself furnishes
an overwhelming argument for “creative power, directive mind, and
ultimate purpose” in the process of evolution.
The law of evolution is as unconditionally ac-
265 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
cepted by
every serious man of science to-day as is the law of gravitation; and
it is no more and no less foolish to regard one than the other as
antagonistic to religion. To reject either on Biblical grounds stands
on a par with insisting, on the same grounds, that geological science
must reconcile itself — and astronomy as well — to a universe only six
thousand years old. The type of theologian who takes such a position
occupies much the same intellectual level with the strutting
materialists of the Haeckel type. To all men of this kind I most
cordially commend a capital book, “Evolution and Dogma,” by the Rev. J. A. Zahm,
one-time professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, in
Indiana.
The great distinguishing feature of the centuries
immediately past has been the extraordinary growth in man's knowledge
of, and power to understand and command, his own physical nature and
his physical surroundings in the universe. It is this growth which so
sharply distinguishes modern civilization, the civilization which we
may roughly date as beginning about the time of Columbus's voyage, from
all preceding civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably increased
man's power over nature, but, when rightly understood, has also
measurably added to his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and
command over things spiritual no less than ma-
266 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
terial. This
conquest could have been achieved only by men who dared to follow
wherever their longing for the truth led them, and who were masters of
their own consciences, and as little servile to the past as to the
present. But no such movement for the uplifting of mankind ever has
taken place, or ever will or can take place, without being fraught also
with great dangers to mankind. Our hope lies in progress, for if we try
to remain stationary we shall surely go backward; and yet as soon as we
leave the ground on which we stand in order to advance there is always
danger that we shall plunge into some abyss.
Naturally, the men who have taken the lead in these
extraordinary material discoveries have often tended to think that
there is nothing to discover or to believe in except what is material.
Much of the growth in our understanding of nature has been due to men
whose high abilities were nevertheless rigidly limited in certain
directions. Our knowledge of solar systems so inconceivably remote that
the remoteness is itself unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate
and inanimate forces working on a scale so infinitesimal and yet so
powerful as to be almost impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our
knowledge of the eons through which life has existed on this planet;
the extraordinary advances in knowledge denoted by the establishment of
267 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
such doctrines
as those of gravitation and of evolution; in short, the whole enormous
incredible advance in knowledge of the physical universe and of man's
physical place in that universe, has been due to the labor of students
whose special tastes and abilities lay in the direction of dealing with
what is purely material. Their astounding success, and the
far-reaching, indeed the stupendous, importance of their achievements,
have naturally tended to make those among them who possess genuine but
narrow ability, whose minds are keen but not broad, assume an attitude
of hard, arrogant, boastful, self-sufficient materialism: a mental
attitude which glorifies and exalts its own grievous shortcomings and
its inability to perceive anything outside the realm of the body. This
attitude is as profoundly repellent as that of the civil and
ecclesiastical reactionaries, the foes of all progress, against whom
these men profess to be in revolt; and, moreover, it is an attitude
which is itself as profoundly unscientific as any of the
anti-scientific attitudes which it condemns. The universal truth can
never be even imperfectly understood or apprehended unless we have the
widest possible knowledge of our physical surroundings, and unless we
fearlessly endeavor to find out just what the facts and the teachings
of these physical surroundings are; but neither will it ever be
understood if the physical
268 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
and material
explanations of life are accepted as all-sufficient. By none is this
more clearly recognized than by the most acute and far-sighted of the
investigators into physical conditions. Says Mr. Bernard: “There are
psychic elements wholly different in kind from the physical elements
... [they] constitute, in a way impossible to define, a new character,
quality, element — or shall we at once boldly borrow a term from
mathematics and call it a new 'dimension' of our environment, hitherto
three-dimensional? These various mental conditions lead us to believe
that at any moment, while being driven through this three-dimensional
environment, we may also be plunged into a psychic condition which
hangs like an atmosphere over our particular physical surroundings.”
Not only every truly religious, but every truly
scientific, man must turn with relief from the narrowness of a shut-in
materialism to the profound and lofty thought contained in the writings
of William James, of his biographer, M. Émile Boutroux, and of
another philosopher of the same school, M. Bergson. M. Boutroux's study
of William James gives in brief form — and with a charm of style and
expression possible only for those who work with that delicate
instrument of precision, French prose — the views which men of this
stamp hold; and be it remembered that, like James, they are thoroughly
scientific men, steeped
269 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
in the
teachings of material science, who acknowledge no outside limitation
upon them in their search for truth. They have a far keener
understanding of the world of matter than has been attained by the
purely materialistic scientists, just because, in addition, they also
understand that outside of the purely physical lies the psychic, and
that the realm of religion stands outside even of the purely psychic.
M. Boutroux's book on “Science and Religion” has been translated into
English — and we owe a real debt of gratitude to Messrs. Nield and
Mitchell for their excellent translations of MM. Boutroux and Bergson.
There is much talk of the conflict between science and religion. The
inherent absurdity of such talk has never been better expressed than by
M. Boutroux when he says that such opposition “is the result of our
defining both science and religion in an artificial manner by, on the
one hand, identifying science with physical science, and, on the other
hand, assuming that religion consists in the dogmas which merely
symbolize it.” M. Boutroux's book, like M. Bergson's “Creative
Evolution,” must be read in its entirety; mere extracts and
condensations can not show the profound philosophical acumen with which
these men go to the heart of things, and prove that science itself, if
correctly understood, renders absurd the harsh and futile dogmatism of
many of those
270 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
who pride
themselves upon being, above all things, scientific. For, as these
writers point out, the work of the scientist is conditioned upon the
existence of the free determination of a spirit which, dominating the
scientific spirit, believes also in an æsthetic and moral ideal.
They see the material, the physical body, in its relation to other
physical bodies; and back of and beyond the physical they see life
itself, consciousness, which is to be conceived of as something always
dynamic and never static, as a “stream of consciousness,” a “becoming.”
As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to the
individual his value and treats him as an end in himself, no less than
treating him from the standpoint of his duties to other individuals.
This philosophy is founded on a wide and sympathetic understanding of
the facts of the material world, a frank acceptance of evolution and of
all else that modern science has ever taught; and so those who profess
it are in a position of impregnable strength when they point out that
all this in no shape or way interferes with religion and with
Christianity, because, as they hold, evolution in religion has merely
tended to disengage it from its own gross and material wrapping, and to
leave unfettered the spirit which is its essence. To them Christianity,
the greatest of the religious creations which humanity has seen,
271 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
rests upon
what Christ himself teaches; for, as M. Boutroux phrases it, the
performance of duty is faith in action, faith in its highest
expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need give no other
reason, for its existence than “its own incorruptible
disinterestedness.” The idea thus expressed is at bottom based on the
same truth to which expression is given by Mr. Taylor when he says:
“The love of God means not despising but honoring self; and for
Christians on earth the true love of God must show itself in doing
earth's duties and living out earth's full life, and not in abandoning
all for dreams, though the dreams be of heaven.” To men such as William
James and these two French philosophers physical science, if properly
studied, shows conclusively its own limitations, shows conclusively
that beyond the material world lies a vast series of phenomena which
all material knowledge is powerless to explain, so that science itself
teaches that outside of materialism lie the forces of a wholly
different world, a world ordered by religion — religion which, says M.
Boutroux, must, if loyal to itself, work according to its own nature as
a spiritual activity, striving to transform men from within and not
from without, by persuasion, by example, by love, by prayer, by the
communion of souls, not by restraint or policy; and such a religion has
nothing to fear from the progress of science, for the spirit
272 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
to which it is
loyal is the faith in duty, the search for what is for the universal
good and for the universal love, the secret springs of all high and
beneficent activity.
It is striking to see how these two gifted
Frenchmen, by their own road, reach substantially the same conclusion
which, by a wholly different method, and indeed in treating religion
from a wholly different standpoint, is also reached by the president of
Bowdoin College. Mr. Hyde's
short volume combines in high degree a lofty nobility of ethical
concept with the most practical and straightforward common-sense
treatment of the ways in which this concept should be realized in
practice. Each of us must prescribe for himself in these matters, and
one man's need will not be wholly met by what does meet another's;
personally, this book of President Hyde's gives me something that no
other book does, and means to me very, very much.
We must all strive to keep as our most precious
heritage the liberty each to worship his God as to him seems best, and,
as part of this liberty, freely either to exercise it or to surrender
it, in a greater or less degree, each according to his own beliefs and
convictions, without infringing on the beliefs and convictions of
others. But the professors of the varying creeds, the men who rely upon
authority, and those who in different measures profess
273 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
the theory of
individual liberty, can and must work together, with mutual respect and
with self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep at the base of
every healthy social system. As Bishop Brent says: “The only setting
for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only
relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind.”
Abbot Charles, of Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the
case for friendly agreement among good men of varying views, when he
summed up a notably fine address in defence — as he truly says,
friendly defence — of his own church by enunciating the plea for “true
peace founded on justice,” worked out in accordance with what he
properly calls one of the “dearest blessings that heaven can give, the
spirit that springs from religious liberty.” However widely many
earnest and high-minded men of science and many earnest and high-minded
men of religious convictions may from one side or the other disagree
with the teachings of the earnest and high-minded students of
philosophy whom I have quoted, yet surely we can all be in agreement
with the fundamentals on which their philosophy is based. Surely we
must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we
ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should
be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with
humility
274 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
of spirit, and
with full recognition of our own limitations both of the mind and the
soul. We must stand equally against tyranny and against irreverence in
all things of the spirit, with the firm conviction that we can all work
together for a higher social and individual life if only, whatever form
of creed we profess, we make the doing of duty and the love of our
fellow men two of the prime articles in our universal faith. To those
who deny the ethical obligation implied in such a faith we who
acknowledge the obligation are aliens; and we are brothers to all those
who do acknowledge it, whatever their creed or system of philosophy.
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NEXT to developing original writers in its own
time, the most fortunate thing, from the literary standpoint, which can
befall any people is to have revealed to it some new treasure-house of
literature. This treasure-house may be stored with the writings of
another people in the present, or else with the writings of a buried
past. But a few generations ago, in that innocent age when Blackstone
could speak of the “Goths, Huns, Franks, and Vandals” — incongruous
gathering — as “Celtic” tribes, the long-vanished literatures of the
ancestors of the present European nations, the epics, the sagas, the
stories in verse or prose, were hardly known to, or regarded by, their
educated and cultivated descendants. Gradually, and chiefly in the
nineteenth century, these forgotten literatures, or fragments of them,
were one by one recovered. They are various in merit and interest, in
antiquity and extent — “Beowulf,” the Norse sagas, the “Kalevala,” the
“Nibelungenlied,” the “Song of Roland,” the Arthurian cycle of
romances. In some there is but one great poem; in some all the
278 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
poems or
stories are of one type; in others, as in the case of the Norse sagas,
a wide range of history, myth, and personal biography is covered. In
our own day there has at last come about a popular revival of interest
in the wealth of poems and tales to be found in the ancient Celtic, and
especially in the ancient Erse, manuscripts — the whole forming a body
of prose and poetry of great and well-nigh unique interest from every
standpoint, which in some respects can be matched only by the Norse
sagas, and which has some striking beauties the like of which are not
to be found even in these Norse sagas.
For many decades German, French, Irish, and English
students have worked over the ancient Celtic texts, and recently many
of the more striking and more beautiful stories have been reproduced or
paraphrased in popular form by writers like Lady Gregory
and Miss Hull,
Lady Gregory showing in her prose something of the charm which her
countrywoman Emily
Lawless shows in her poems “With the Wild Geese.” It is greatly to
be regretted that America should have done so little either in the way
of original study and research in connection with the early Celtic
literature, or in the way of popularizing and familiarizing that
literature, and it is much to be desired that, wherever possible,
chairs of Celtic should be established in our leading universities.
More-
279 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
over, in
addition to the scholar's work which is especially designed for
students, there must ultimately be done the additional work which puts
the results of the scholarship at the disposal of the average layman.
This has largely been done for the Norse sagas. William Morris
has translated the “Heimskringla” into language which, while not
exactly English, can nevertheless be understood without difficulty —
which is more than can be said for his translation of “Beowulf” — and
which has a real, though affectedly archaic, beauty. Dasent has
translated the “Younger Edda,” the “Njala Saga,” and the “Saga of Gisli
the Outlaw.” It is pleasant for Americans to feel that it was Longfellow
who, in his “Saga of
King Olaf,” rendered one of the most striking of the old Norse
tales into a great poem.
It is difficult to speak with anything like
exactness of the relative ages of these primitive literatures.
Doubtless in each case the earliest manuscripts that have come down to
us are themselves based upon far earlier ones which have been
destroyed, and doubtless, when they were first written down, the tales
had themselves been recited, and during the course of countless
recitations had been changed and added to and built upon, for a period
of centuries. Sometimes, as in the “Song of Roland,” we know at least
in bare outline the historical incident which for some reason impressed
280 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
the popular
imagination until around it there grew up a great epic, of which the
facts have been twisted completely out of shape. In other instances, as
in the “Nibelungenlied,” a tale, adaptable in its outlines to many
different peoples, was adapted to the geography of a particular people,
and to what that people at least thought was history; thus the Rhine
becomes the great river of the “Nibelungenlied,” and in the second part
of the epic the revenge of Krimhild becomes connected with dim memories
of Attila's vast and evanescent empire. The “Song of Roland” and the
“Nibelungenlied” were much later than the earliest English, Norse, and
Irish poems. Very roughly, it may perhaps be said that, in the earliest
forms at which we can guess, the Irish sagas were produced, or at least
were in healthy life, at about the time when “Beowulf” was a live saga,
and two or three centuries or thereabouts before the early Norse sagas
took a shape which we would recognize as virtually akin to that they
now have.
These Celtic sagas are conveniently, though somewhat
artificially, arranged in cycles. In some ways the most interesting of
these is the Cuchulain
cycle, although until very recently it was far
less known than the Ossianic cycle — the cycle which tells of the deeds
of Finn and the Fianna. The poems which tell of the mighty
281 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
feats of
Cuchulain, and of the heroes whose life-threads were interwoven with
his, date back to a purely pagan Ireland — an Ireland cut off from all
connection with the splendid and slowly dying civilization of Rome, an
Ireland in which still obtained ancient customs that had elsewhere
vanished even from the memory of man.
Thus the heroes of the Cuchulain sagas still fought
in chariots driven each by a charioteer who was also the stanch friend
and retainer of the hero. Now, at one time war chariots had held the
first place in the armies of all the powerful empires in the lands
adjoining the Mediterranean and stretching eastward beyond the Tigris.
Strange African tribes had used them north and south of the Atlas
Mountains. When the mighty, conquering kings of Egypt made their forays
into Syria, and there encountered the Hittite hosts, the decisive
feature in each battle was the shock between the hundreds of chariots
arrayed on each side. The tyranny of Sisera rested on his nine hundred
chariots of iron. The Homeric heroes were “tamers of horses,” which
were not ridden in battle, but driven in the war chariots. That
mysterious people, the Etruscans, of whose race and speech we know
nothing, originally fought in chariots. But in the period of Greek and
Roman splendor the war chariot had already passed away. It had
seemingly never been characteristic
282 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
of the wild
Teuton tribes; but among the western Celts it lingered long.
Cæsar encountered it among the hostile tribes when he made his
famous raid into Britain; and in Ireland it lasted later still.
The customs of the heroes and people of the Erin of
Cuchulain's time were as archaic as the chariots in which they rode to
battle. The sagas contain a wealth of material for the historian. They
show us a land where the men were herdsmen, tillers of the soil,
hunters, bards, seers, but, above all, warriors. Erin was a world to
herself. Her people at times encountered the peoples of Britain or of
Continental Europe, whether in trade or in piracy; but her chief
interest, her overwhelming interest, lay in what went on within her own
borders. There was a high king of shadowy power, whose sway was vaguely
recognized as extending over the island, but whose practical supremacy
was challenged on every hand by whatever king or under-king felt the
fierce whim seize him. There were chiefs and serfs; there were halls
and fortresses; there were huge herds of horses and cattle and sheep
and swine. The kings and queens, the great lords and their wives, the
chiefs and the famous fighting men, wore garments crimson and blue and
green and saffron, plain or checkered, and plaid and striped. They had
rings and clasps and torques of gold and
283 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
silver, urns
and mugs and troughs and vessels of iron and silver. They played chess
by the fires in their great halls, and they feasted and drank and
quarrelled within them, and the women had sun-parlors of their own.
Among the most striking of the tales are those of
the “Fate of the Sons of Usnach,” telling of Deirdrè's life and
love and her lamentation for her slain lover; of the “Wooing of Emer”
by Cuchulain; of the “Feast of Bricriu”; and of the famous Cattle-Spoil
of Cooley, the most famous romance of ancient Ireland, the story of the
great raid for the Dun Bull of Cooley. But there are many others of
almost equal interest; such as the story of MacDatho's pig, with its
Gargantuan carouse of the quarrelsome champions; and the tale of the
siege of Howth.
In these tales, which in so many points are
necessarily like the similar tales that have come down from the
immemorial past of the peoples of kindred race, there are also striking
peculiarities that hedge them apart. The tales are found in many
versions, which for the most part have been enlarged by pedantic
scribes of aftertime, who often made them prolix and tedious, and added
grotesque and fantastic exaggerations of their own to the barbaric
exaggerations already in them, doing much what Saxo Grammaticus
did for the Scandinavian tales. They might have been woven
284 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
into some
great epic, or at least have taken far more definite and connected
shape, if the history of Ireland had developed along lines similar to
those of the other nations of west Europe. But her history was broken
by terrible national tragedies and calamities. To the scourge of the
vikings succeeded the Anglo-Norman conquest, with all its ruinous
effects on the growth of the national life. The early poems of the Erse
bards could not develop as those other early lays developed which
afterward became the romances of Arthur and Roland and Siegfried. They
remain primitive, as “Beowulf“ is primitive, as, in less measure,
“Gisli the Outlaw” is
primitive.
The heroes are much like those of the early folk of
kindred stock everywhere. They are huge, splendid barbarians, sometimes
yellow-haired, sometimes black- or brown-haired, and their chief title
to glory is found in their feats of bodily prowess. Among the feats
often enumerated or referred to are the ability to leap like a salmon,
to run like a stag, to hurl great rocks incredible distances, to toss
the wheel, and, like the Norse berserkers, when possessed with the fury
of battle, to grow demoniac with fearsome rage. This last feat was
especially valued, and was recognized as the “heroes' fury.” As with
most primitive peoples, the power to shout loudly was much prized, and
had a distinct place of respect, under
285 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
the title of
“mad roar,” in any list of a given hero's exhibitions of strength or
agility; just as Stentor's
voice was regarded by his comrades as a valuable military asset. So,
when the slaughter begins in Etzel's hall, the writer of the Nibelung
lay dwells with admiration on the vast strength of Diederick, as shown
by the way in which his voice rang like a bison horn, resounding within
and without the walls. Many of the feats chronicled of the early Erse
heroes are now wholly unintelligible to us; we can not even be sure
what they were, still less why they should have been admired.
Among the heroes stood the men of wisdom, as wisdom
was in the early world, a vulpine wisdom of craft and cunning and
treachery and double-dealing. Druids, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians,
witches appear, now as friends, now as unfriends, of the men of might.
Fiercely the heroes fought and wide they wandered; yet their fights and
their wanderings were not very different from those that we read about
in many other primitive tales. There is the usual incredible variety of
incidents and character, and, together with the variety, an endless
repetition. But these Erse tales differ markedly from the early Norse
and Teutonic stories in more than one particular. A vein of the
supernatural and a vein of the romantic run through them and relieve
their grimness and harshness in a way very different from anything
286 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
to be found in
the Teutonic. Of course the supernatural element often takes as grim a
form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the Goddess with red
eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes from life did not
differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there were land and water
demons in Ireland as terrible as those against which Beowulf warred.
But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales an unearthliness free
from all that is monstrous and horrible; and their unearthly creatures
could become in aftertime the fairies of the moonlight and the
greenwood, so different from the trolls and gnomes and misshapen giants
bequeathed to later generations by the Norse mythology.
Still more striking is the difference between the
women in the Irish sagas and those, for instance, of the Norse sagas.
Their heirs of the spirit are the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines
of the romances of the Middle Ages. In the “Song of Roland” — rather
curiously, considering that it is the first great piece of French
literature — woman plays absolutely no part at all; there is not a
female figure which is more than a name, or which can be placed beside
Roland and Oliver, Archbishop Turpin and the traitor Ganelon, and
Charlemagne, the mighty emperor of the “barbe fleurie.” The heroines of
the early Norse and German stories are splendid and terrible, fit to
287 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
be the mothers
of a mighty race, as stern and relentless as their lovers and husbands.
But it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would
appeal to our modern ideas as does Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or
Dierdrè, the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and
Deirdrè have the charm, the power of inspiring and returning
romantic love, that belonged to the ladies whose lords were the knights
of the Round Table, though of course this does not mean that they
lacked some very archaic tastes and attributes.
Emer, the daughter of Forgall the Wily, who was
wooed by Cuchulain, had the “six gifts of a girl” — beauty, and a soft
voice, and sweet speech, and wisdom, and needlework, and chastity. In
their wooing the hero and heroine spoke to one another in riddles,
those delights of the childhood of peoples. She set him journeys to go
and feats to perform, which he did in the manner of later knight
errants. After long courting and many hardships, he took Emer to wife,
and she was true to him and loved him and gloried in him and watched
over him until the day he went out to meet his death. All this was in a
spirit which we would find natural in a heroine of modern or of
mediæval times — a spirit which it would be hard to match either
among the civilizations of antiquity, or in early barbarisms other than
the Erse.
288 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
So it was with Deirdrè, the beautiful girl who forsook her
betrothed, the Over-King of Ulster, for the love of Naisi, and fled
with him and his two brothers across the waters to Scotland. At last
they returned to Ireland, and there Deirdrè's lover and his two
brothers were slain by the treachery of the king whose guests they
were. Many versions of the Songs of Deirdrè have come down to
us, of her farewell to Alba and her lament over her slain lover; for
during centuries this tragedy of Deirdrè, together with the
tragical fate of the Children of Lir and the tragical fate of the
Children of Tuirenn, were known as the “Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin.”
None has better retained its vitality down to the present day. Even to
us, reading the songs in an alien age and tongue, they are very
beautiful. Deirdrè sings wistfully of her Scottish
abiding-place, with its pleasant, cuckoo-haunted groves, and its
cliffs, and the white sand on the beaches. She tells of her lover's
single infidelity, when he came enamoured of the daughter of a Scottish
lord, and Deirdrè, broken-hearted, put off to sea in a boat,
indifferent whether she should live or die; whereupon the two brothers
of her lover swam after her and brought her back, to find him very
repentant and swearing a threefold oath that never again would he prove
false to her until he should go to the hosts of the dead. She dwells
constantly on the unfailing tenderness
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of the three
heroes; for her lover's two brothers cared for her as he did:
“Much hardship would I take,
Along with the three heroes;
I would endure without house, without
fire,
It is not I that would be gloomy.
“Their three shields and their spears
Were often a bed for me.
Put their three hard swords
Over the grave, O young man!”
For the most part, in
her songs, Deirdrè dwells on the glories and beauties of the
three warriors, the three dragons, the three champions of the Red
Branch, the three that used to break every onrush, the three hawks, the
three darlings of the women of Erin, the three heroes who were not good
at homage. She sings of their splendor in the foray, of their nobleness
as they returned to their home, to bring fagots for the fire, to bear
in an ox or a boar for the table; sweet though the pipes and flutes and
horns were in the house of the king, sweeter yet was it to hearken to
the songs sung by the sons of Usnach, for “like the sound of the wave
was the voice of Naisi.”
There were other Irish heroines of a more common
barbarian type. Such was the famous warrior-queen, Meave, tall and
beautiful, with her
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SAGAS
white face and
yellow hair, terrible in her battle chariot when she drove at full
speed into the press of fighting men, and “fought over the ears of the
horses.” Her virtues were those of a warlike barbarian king, and she
claimed the like large liberty in morals. Her husband was Ailill, the
Connaught king, and, as Meave carefully explained to him in what the
old Erse bards called a “bolster conversation,” their marriage was
literally a partnership wherein she demanded from her husband an exact
equality of treatment according to her own views and on her own terms;
the three essential qualities upon which she insisted being that he
should be brave, generous, and completely devoid of jealousy!
Fair-haired Queen Meave was a myth, a goddess, and
her memory changed and dwindled until at last she reappeared as Queen
Mab of fairyland. But among the ancient Celts her likeness was the
likeness of many a historic warrior queen. The descriptions given of
her by the first writers or compilers of the famous romances of the
foray for the Dun Bull of Cooley almost exactly match the descriptions
given by the Latin historian of the British Queen Boadicea, tall and
terrible-faced, her long, yellow hair flowing to her hips, spear in
hand, golden collar on neck, her brightly colored mantle fastened
across her breast with a brooch.
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SAGAS
Not only were some of Meave's deeds of a rather startling kind, but
even Emer and Deirdrè at times showed traits that to a modern
reader may seem out of place, in view of what has been said of them
above. But we must remember the surroundings, and think of what even
the real women of history were, throughout European lands, until a far
later period. In the “Heimskringla” we read of Queen Sigrid, the wisest
of women, who grew tired of the small kings who came to ask her hand, a
request which she did not regard them as warranted to make either by
position or extent of dominion. So one day when two kings had thus come
to woo her, she lodged them in a separate wooden house, with all their
company, and feasted them until they were all very drunk, and fell
asleep; then in the middle of the night she had her men fall on them
with fire and sword, burn those who stayed within the hall and slay
those who broke out. The incident is mentioned in the saga without the
slightest condemnation; on the contrary, it evidently placed the queen
on a higher social level than before, for, in concluding the account,
the saga mentions that Sigrid said “that she would weary these small
kings of coming from other lands to woo her; so she was called Sigrid
Haughty thereafter.” Now, Sigrid was an historical character who lived
many hundred years after the time of Emer and Deirdrè
292 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
and Meave, and
the simplicity with which her deed was chronicled at the time, and
regarded afterward, should reconcile us to some of the feats recorded
of those shadowy Erse predecessors of hers, who were separated from her
by an interval of time as great as that which separates her from us.
The story of the “Feast of Bricriu of the Bitter
Tongue” is one of the most interesting of the tales of the Cuchulain
cycle. In all this cycle of tales, Bricriu appears as the cunning,
malevolent mischief-maker, dreaded for his biting satire and his power
of setting by the ears the boastful, truculent, reckless, and
marvellously short-tempered heroes among whom he lived. He has points
of resemblance to Thersites, to Sir Kay, of the Arthurian romances, and
to Conan, of the Ossianic cycle of Celtic sagas. This story is based
upon the custom of the “champion's portion,” which at a feast was
allotted to the bravest man. It was a custom which lasted far down into
historic times, and was recognized in the Brehon laws, where a heavy
fine was imposed upon any person who stole it from the one to whom it
belonged. The story in its present form, like all of these stories, is
doubtless somewhat changed from the story as it was originally recited
among the pre-Christian Celts of Ireland, but it still commemorates
customs of the most primitive kind,
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SAGAS
many of them
akin to those of all the races of Aryan tongue in their earlier days.
The queens cause their maids to heat water for the warriors' baths when
they return from war, and similarly made ready to greet their guests,
as did the Homeric heroines. The feasts were Homeric feasts. The heroes
boasted and sulked and fought as did the Greeks before Troy. At their
feasts, when the pork and beef, the wheaten cakes and honey, had been
eaten, and the beer, and sometimes the wine of Gaul, had been drunk in
huge quantities, the heroes, vainglorious and quarrelsome, were always
apt to fight. Thus in the three houses which together made up the
palace of the high king at Emain Macha, it was necessary that the arms
of the heroes should all be kept in one place, so that they could not
attack one another at the feasts. These three houses of the palace were
the Royal House, in which the high king himself had his bronzed and
jewelled room; the Speckled House, where the swords, the shields, and
the spears of the heroes were kept; and the House of the Red Branch,
where not only the weapons, but the heads of the beaten enemies were
stored; and it was in connection with this last grewsome house that the
heroes in the train of the High King Conchubar took their name of the
“Heroes of the Red Branch.”
When Bricriu gave his feast, he prepared for
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SAGAS
it by building
a spacious house even handsomer than the House of the Red Branch; and
it is described in great detail, as fashioned after “Tara's Mead Hall,”
and of great strength and magnificence; and it was stocked with quilts
and blankets and beds and pillows, as well as with abundance of meat
and drink. Then he invited the high king and all the nobles of Ulster
to come to the feast. An amusing touch in the saga is the frank
consternation of the heroes who were thus asked. They felt themselves
helpless before the wiles of Bricriu, and at first refused outright to
go, because they were sure that he would contrive to set them to
fighting with one another; and they went at all only after they had
taken hostages from Bricriu and had arranged that he should himself
leave the feast-hall as soon as the feast was spread. But their
precautions were in vain, and Bricriu had no trouble in bringing about
a furious dispute among the three leading chiefs, Loigaire the
Triumphant, Conall the Victorious, and Cuchulain. He promised to each
the champion's portion, on condition that each should claim it. Nor did
he rest here, but produced what the saga calls “the war of words of the
women of Ulster,” by persuading the three wives of the three heroes
that each should tread first into the banquet-hall. Each of the ladies,
in whose minds he thus raised visions of social precedence, had
295 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
walked away
from the palace with half a hundred women in her train, when they all
three met. The saga describes how they started to return to the hall
together, walking evenly, gracefully, and easily at first, and then
with quicker steps, until, when they got near the house, they raised
their robes “to the round of the leg” and ran at full speed. When they
got to the hall the doors were shut, and, as they stood outside, each
wife chanted her own perfections, but, above all, the valor and
ferocious prowess of her husband, scolding one another as did Brunhild
and Krimhild in the quarrel that led to Siegfried's death at the hands
of Hagen. Each husband, as in duty bound, helped his wife into the
hall, and the bickering which had already taken place about the
champion's portion was renewed. At last it was settled that the three
rivals should drive in their chariots to the home of Ailill and Meave,
who should adjudge between them; and the judgment given, after testing
their prowess in many ways, and especially in encounters with demons
and goblins, was finally in favor of Cuchulain.
One of the striking parts of the tale is that in
which the three champions, following one another, arrive at the palace
of Meave. The daughter of Meave goes to the sun-parlor over the high
porch of the hold, and from there she is told by the queen to describe
in turn each chariot and the
296 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
color of the
horses and how the hero looks and how the chariot courses. The girl
obeys, and describes in detail each chariot as it comes up, and the
queen in each case recognizes the champion from the description and
speaks words of savage praise of each in turn. Loigaire, a fair man,
driving two fiery dapple-grays, in a wickerwork chariot with
silver-mounted yoke, is chanted by the queen as:
“A fury of war, a fire of
judgment,
A flame of vengeance; in mien a hero,
In face a champion, in heart a dragon;
The long knife of proud victories
which will hew us to pieces,
The all-noble, red-handed Loigaire.”
Conall is described as driving a roan
and a bay, in a chariot with two bright wheels of bronze, he himself
fair, in face white and red, his mantle blue and crimson, and Meave
describes him as:
“A wolf among cattle; battle
on battle,
Exploit on exploit, head upon head he
heaps”;
and says that if he is excited to rage
he will cut up her people
“As a trout on red sandstone
is cut.”
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SAGAS
Then Cuchulain
is described, driving at a gallop a dapple-gray and a dark-gray, in a
chariot with iron wheels and a bright silver pole. The hero himself is
a dark, melancholy man, the comeliest of the men of Erin, in a crimson
tunic, with gold-hilted sword, a blood-red spear, and over his
shoulders a crimson shield rimmed with silver and gold. Meave, on
hearing the description, chants the hero as:
“An ocean in fury, a whale
that rageth, a fragment of flame and fire;
A bear majestic, a grandly moving
billow,
A beast in maddening ire:
In the crash of glorious battle
through the hostile foe he leaps,
His shout the fury of doom;
A terrible bear, he is death to the
herd of cattle,
Feat upon feat, head upon head he
heaps:
Laud ye the hearty one, he who is
victor fully.”
Bricriu lost his life
as a sequel of the great raid for the Dun Bull of Cooley. This was
undertaken by Queen Meave as the result of the “bolster conversation,”
the curtain quarrel, between her and Ailill as to which of the two,
husband or wife, had the more treasure. To settle the dispute, they
compared their respective treasures, beginning with their wooden and
iron vessels, going on with their rings and bracelets and
298 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
brooches and
fine clothes, and ending with their flocks of sheep, and herds of
swine, horses, and cattle. The tally was even for both sides until they
came to the cattle, when it appeared that Ailill had a huge,
white-horned bull with which there was nothing of Meave's to compare.
The chagrined queen learned from a herald that in Cooley there was a
dun or brown bull which, it was asserted, was even larger and more
formidable.
Meave announces that by fair means or foul the dun
bull shall be hers, and she raises her hosts. A great war ensues, in
which Cuchulain distinguishes himself above all others. All the heroes
gather to the fight, and a special canto is devoted to the fate of a
very old man, Iliach, a chief of Ulster, who resolves to attack the foe
and avenge Ulster's honor on them. “Whether, then, I fall or come out
of it, is all one,” he said. The saga tells how his withered and wasted
old horses, which fed on the shore by his little fort, were harnessed
to the ancient chariot, which had long lost its cushions. Into it he
got, mother-naked, with his sword and his pair of blunt, rusty spears,
and great throwing-stones heaped at his feet; and thus he attacked the
hosts of Meave and fought till his death. In the Cuchulain sagas the
heroes frequently fight with stones; and the practice obtained until
much later days, for in Olaf's
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SAGAS
death-battle
with the ships of Hakon his men were cleared from the decks of the Long
Serpent by dexterously hurled stones as well as by spears.
Partly by cunning, Meave gets the dun bull upon
which she had set her heart. Then comes in a thoroughly Erse touch. It
appears that the two bulls have lived many lives in different forms,
and always in hostility to each other, since the days when their souls
were the souls of two swineherds, who quarrelled and fought to the
death. Now the two great bulls renew their ancient fight. Bricriu is
forced out to witness it, and is trampled to death by the beasts. At
last the white-horned bull is slain, and the dun, raging and
destroying, goes back to his home, where he too dies. And this, says
the saga, in ending, is the tale of the Dun Bull of Cooley and the
Driving of the Cattle-Herd by Meave and Ailill, and their war with
Ulster.
The Erse tales have suffered from many causes. Taken
as a mass, they did not develop as the sagas and the epics of certain
other nations developed; but they possess extraordinary variety and
beauty, and in their mysticism, their devotion to and appreciation of
natural beauty, their exaltation of the glorious courage of men and of
the charm and devotion of women, in all the touches that tell of a
long-vanished life, they possess a curious attraction of their own.
They deserve the research
300 THE ANCIENT IRISH
SAGAS
which can be
given only by the lifelong effort of trained scholars; they should be
studied for their poetry, as countless scholars have studied those
early literatures; moreover, they should be studied as Victor
Bérard has studied the “Odyssey,” for reasons apart from
their poetical worth; and finally they deserve to be translated and
adapted so as to become a familiar household part of that literature
which all the English-speaking peoples possess in common.
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AN ART EXHIBITION
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AN ART EXHIBITION
THE recent “International
Exhibition of Modern
Art” in New York was really noteworthy. Messrs. Davies, Kuhn,
Gregg,
and their fellow members of the Association of American Painters and
Sculptors did a work of very real value in securing such an exhibition
of the works of both foreign and native painters and sculptors.
Primarily their purpose was to give the public a chance to see what has
recently been going on abroad. No similar collection of the works of
European “moderns” has ever been exhibited in this country. The
exhibitors were quite right as to the need of showing to our people in
this manner the art forces which of late have been at work in Europe,
forces which can not be ignored.
This does not mean that I in the least accept the
view that these men take of the European extremists whose pictures were
here exhibited. It is true, as the champions of these extremists say,
that there can be no life without change, no development without
change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to
be afraid
304 AN ART EXHIBITION
of life. It is
no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and
retrogression instead of development. Probably we err in treating most
of these pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent
in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly
lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum showed with his faked mermaid.
There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a
faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will
buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent
from every standpoint.
In some ways it is the work of the American painters
and sculptors which is of most interest in this collection, and a
glance at this work must convince any one of the real good that is
coming out of the new movements, fantastic though many of the
developments of these new movements are. There was one note entirely
absent from the exhibition, and that was the note of the commonplace.
There was not a touch of simpering, self-satisfied conventionality
anywhere in the exhibition. Any sculptor or painter who had in him
something to express and the power of expressing it found the field
open to him. He did not have to be afraid because his work was not
along ordinary lines. There was no stunting or dwarfing, no requirement
that a man whose gift lay in new
305 AN ART EXHIBITION
directions
should measure up or down to stereotyped and fossilized standards.
For all of this there can be only hearty praise. But
this does not in the least mean that the extremists whose paintings and
pictures were represented are entitled to any praise, save, perhaps,
that they have helped to break fetters. Probably in any reform
movement, any progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty
for avoiding the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is
vitally necessary to move forward and to shake off the dead hand, often
the fossilized dead hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face
the fact that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of
any forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe
was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists
and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists. I am not entirely certain
which of the two latter terms should be used in connection with some of
the various pictures and representations of plastic art — and, frankly,
it is not of the least consequence. The Cubists are entitled to the
serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored
puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason
for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less
fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most
formal
306 AN ART EXHIBITION
decorative
art. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists,
or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles
Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing
anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another. Take
the picture which for some reason is called “A
Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” There is in my bathroom a really good
Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is
a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some
inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of,
say, “A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder,” the name would fit the
facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the
“Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” From the standpoint of terminology each
name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining
after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of
sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of
the picture.
As for many of the human figures in the pictures of
the Futurists, they show that the school would be better entitled to
the name of the “Past-ists.” I was interested to find that a man of
scientific attainments who had likewise looked at the pictures had been
struck, as I was, by their resemblance to the later work of the
palæo-
307 AN ART EXHIBITION
lithic artists
of the French and Spanish caves. There are interesting samples of the
strivings for the representation of the human form among artists of
many different countries and times, all in the same stage of
palæolithic culture, to be found in a recent number of the
“Revue d'Ethnographie.” The palæolithic artist was able to
portray the bison, the mammoth, the reindeer, and the horse with spirit
and success, while he still stumbled painfully in the effort to portray
man. This stumbling effort in his case represented progress, and he was
entitled to great credit for it. Forty thousand years later, when
entered into artificially and deliberately, it represents only a
smirking pose of retrogression, and is not praiseworthy. So with much
of the sculpture. A family group of precisely the merit that inheres in
a structure made of the wooden blocks in a nursery is not entitled to
be reproduced in marble. Admirers speak of the kneeling female figure
by Lehmbruck
— I use “female” advisedly, for although obviously mammalian it is not
especially human — as “full of lyric grace,” as “tremendously sincere,”
and “of a jewel-like preciousness.” I am not competent to say whether
these words themselves represent sincerity or merely a conventional
jargon; it is just as easy to be conventional about the fantastic as
about the commonplace. In any event one might as well speak of
308 AN ART EXHIBITION
the “lyric
grace” of a praying mantis, which adopts much the same attitude; and
why a deformed pelvis should be called “sincere,” or a tibia of
giraffe-like length “precious,” seems to a reasonably sane view of the
pictures of Matisse
a question of pathological rather than artistic significance. This
figure and the absurd portrait head of some young lady have the merit
that inheres in extravagant caricature. It is a merit, but it is not a
high merit. It entitles these pieces to stand in sculpture where
nonsense rhymes stand in literature and the sketches of Aubrey Beardsley
in pictorial art. These modern sculptured caricatures in no way
approach the gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, probably because the
modern artists are too self-conscious and make themselves ridiculous by
pretentiousness. The makers of the gargoyles knew very well that the
gargoyles did not represent what was most important in the Gothic
cathedrals. They stood for just a little point of grotesque reaction
against, and relief from, the tremendous elemental vastness and
grandeur of the Houses of God. They were imps, sinister and comic, grim
and yet futile, and they fitted admirably into the framework of the
theology that found its expression in the towering and wonderful piles
which they ornamented.
Very little of the work of the extremists among the
European “moderns” seems to be good in
309 AN ART EXHIBITION
and for
itself; nevertheless it has certainly helped any number of American
artists to do work that is original and serious; and this not only in
painting but in sculpture. I wish the exhibition had contained some of
the work of the late Marcius Symonds; very few people knew or cared for
it while he lived; but not since Turner has there been another man on
whose canvas glowed so much of that unearthly “light that never was on
land or sea.” But the exhibition contained so much of extraordinary
merit that it is ungrateful even to mention an omission. To name the
pictures one would like to possess — and the bronzes and tanagras and
plasters — would mean to make a catalogue of indefinite length. One of
the most striking pictures was the “Terminal Yards”
— the seeing eye was there, and the cunning hand. I should like to
mention all the pictures of the president of the association, Arthur B.
Davies. As first-class decorative work of an entirely new type, the
very unexpected pictures of Sheriff Bob Chandler have a merit all their
own. The “Arizona Desert,” the “Canadian Night,” the group of girls on
the roof of a New York tenement-house, the studies in the Bronx Zoo,
the “Heracles,” the studies for the Utah monument, the little group
called “Gossip,” which has something of the quality of the
famous fifteenth idyl of Theocritus, the “Pelf,” with its grim
suggestiveness
310 AN ART EXHIBITION
— these and a
hundred others are worthy of study, each of them; I am
naming at random those which at the moment I happen to recall. I am not
speaking of the acknowledged masters, of Whistler,
Puvis
de Chavannes,
Monet; nor of John's children; nor of Cézanne's old
woman with a
rosary; nor of Redon's
marvellous color-pieces — a worthy critic should
speak of these. All I am trying to do is to point out why a layman is
grateful to those who arranged this exhibition.
Last update: February 22nd, 2017
