THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT and Other Essays / 3 < BY JOHN ERSKINE, Ph.D. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK DUFFIELD AND COMPANY MGMXV Copyright, 1915, by DUFFIELD AND COMPANY NOV -6 1915 ^aA416259 CONTENTS PAGE The Moral Obligation To Be Intelli- gent 3 The Call to Service 35 The Mind of Shakspere ...... 73 Magic and Wonder in Literature . . 119 NOTE The title essay, originally read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Amherst College, is reprinted with the editor's courteous permission from the Hibbert Journal. The last essay also was read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Amherst College, and before the Phi Beta Kappa Alumni of New York City. In different ways the four essays set forth one theme — the moral use to which intelligence might be put, in rendering our admirations and our loyalties at once more sensible and more noble. THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT IF a wise man should ask. What are the modern virtues? and should an- swer his own question by a summary of the things we admire; if he should discard as irrelevant the ideals which by tradi- tion we profess, but which are not found outside of the tradition or the profession — ideals like meekness, humility, the re- nunciation of this world; if he should include only those excellences to which our hearts are daily given, and by which our conduct is motived, — ^in such an in- ventory what virtues would he name? [3] THE MORAL OBLIGATION This question is neither original nor i very new. Our times await the reckon- 1 ing up of our spiritual goods which is here suggested. We have at least this wisdom, that many of us are curious to know just what our virtues are. I wish I could oflFer myself as the wise man who brings the answer. But I raise this question merely to ask another — When the wise man brings his list of our genuine admirations, will intelligence be one of them.^^ We might seem to be well within the old ideal of modesty if we claimed the virtue of intelligence. But before we claim the virtue, are we convinced that it is a vir- tue, not a peril .f^ II The disposition to consider intelli- gence a peril is an old Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Our ancestors have cele- [4] TO BE INTELLIGENT brated this disposition in verse and prose. Splendid as our literature is, it has not voiced all the aspirations of hu- manity, nor could it be expected to voice an aspiration that has not character- istically belonged to the English race; the praise of intelligence is not one of its characteristic glories. "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever." Here is the startling alternative which to the English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced — full [5] t THE MORAL OBLIGATION mind, starved heart — stout heart, weak head. Kingsley's Hne is a convenient text, j but to establish the point that EngHsh Hterature voices a traditional distrust of the mind we must go to the masters. In Shakspere's plays there are some highly intelligent men, but they are either villains or tragic victims. To be as intelligent as Richard or lago or Edmund seems to involve some break with goodness; to be as wise as Prospero seems to imply some Faust-like traffic with the forbidden world; to be as thoughtful as Hamlet seems to be too thoughtful to live. In Shakspere the prizes of life go to such men as Bassanio, or Duke Orsino, or Florizel — men of good conduct and sound character, but of no particular intelligence. There might, in- deed, appear to be one general exception to this sweeping statement: Shakspere [6] TO BE INTELLIGENT does concede intelligence as a fortunate possession to some of his heroines. But upon even a slight examination those ladies, like Portia, turn out to have been among Shakspere's Italian importations —their wit was part and parcel of the story he borrowed; or, like Viola, they are English types of humility, patience, and loyalty, such as we find in the old ballads, with a bit of Euphuism added, a foreign cleverness of speech. After all, these are only a few of Shakspere's heroines; over against them are Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, Hero, Cordelia, Mi- randa, Perdita — ^lovable for other qual- ities than intellect, — and in a sinister group, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Gone- ril, intelligent and wicked. In Paradise Lost Milton attributes intelligence of the highest order to the devil. That this is an Anglo-Saxon read- ing of the infernal character may be [7] THE MORAL OBLIGATION shown by a reference to the book of Job, where Satan is simply a troublesome body, and the great wisdom of the story is from the voice of God in the whirlwind. But Milton makes his Satan so thought- ful, so persistent and liberty-loving, so magnanimous, and God so illogical, so heartless and repressive, that many per- fectly moral readers fear lest Milton, like the modern novelists, may have known good and evil, but could not tell them apart. It is disconcerting to in- telligence that it should be God's angel who cautions Adam not to wander in the earth, nor inquire concerning heaven's causes and ends, and that it should be Satan meanwhile who questions and ex- plores. By Milton's reckoning of in- telligence the theologian and the scien- tist to-day alike take after Satan. If there were time, we might trace this valuation of intelligence through the [8] TO BE INTELLIGENT English noveL We should see how often the writers have distinguished between intelligence and goodness, and have en- listed our affections for a kind of inexpert virtue. In Fielding or Scott, Thackeray or Dickens, the hero of the English novel is a well-meaning blunderer who in the last chapter is temporarily rescued by the grace of God from the mess he has made of his life. Unless he also dies in the last chapter, he will probably need rescue again. The dear woman whom the hero marries is, with a few notable exceptions, rather less intelligent than himself. When David Copperfield marries Agnes, his prospects of happiness, to the eyes of intelligence, look not very exhilarating. Agnes has more sense than Dora, but it is not even for that slight distinction that we must admire her; her great qualities are of the heart — ^patience, hu- mility, faithfulness. These are the qual- [9] THE MORAL OBLIGATION ities also of Thackeray's good heroines, like Laura or Lady Castlewood. Beatrice Esmond and Becky Sharp, both highly intelligent, are of course a bad lot. No less significant is the kind of emo- tion the English novelist invites towards his secondary or lower-class heroes — tow- ard Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, for example, or Harry Foker in Pendennis. These characters amuse us, and we feelj pleasantly superior to them, but we agree with the novelist that they are wholly ad- mirable in their station. Yet if a French- man — ^let us say Balzac — were presenting such types, he would make us feel, as in Fere Goriot or Eugenie Grandet, not only admiration for the stable, loyal nature, but also deep pity that such goodness should be so tragically bound in unintelligence or vulgarity. This comparison of racial temperaments helps us to understand ourselves. We may continue the method [10] I TO BE INTELLIGENT at our leisure. What would Socrates have thought of Mr. Pickwick, or the Vicar of Wakefield, or David Copper- field, or Arthur Pendennis? For that matter, would he have felt admiration or pity for Colonel Newcome.^ Ill I hardly need confess that this is not an adequate account of English litera- ture. Let me hasten to say that I know the reader is resenting this somewhat cavalier handling of the noble writers he loves. He probably is wondering how I can expect to increase his love of literature by such unsympathetic re- marks. But just now I am not con- cerned about our love of literature; I take it for granted, and use it as an in- strument to prod us with. If we love Shakspere and Milton and Scott and 111] THE MORAL OBLIGATION Dickens and Thackeray, and yet do not know what quaHties their books hold out for our admiration, then — let me say it as delicately as possible — our admiration is not discriminating; and if we neither have discrimination nor are disturbed by our lack of it, then perhaps that wise man could not list intelligence among our virtues. Certainly it would be but a silly account of English litera- ture to say only that it set little store by f the things of the mind. I am aware that for the sake of my argument I have ex- . aggerated, by insisting upon only one ' aspect of English literature. But our history betrays a peculiar warfare be- | tween character and intellect, such as to the Greek, for example, would have been incomprehensible. The great English- | man, like the most famous Greeks, had intelligence as well as character, and was at ease with them both. But whereas [12] TO BE INTELLIGENT the notable Greek seems typical of his race, the notable Englishman usually seems an exception to his own people, and is often best appreciated in other lands. What is more singular — in spite of the happy combination in himself of char- acter and intelligence, he often fails to recognize the value of that combination in his neighbors. When Shakspere por- trayed such amateurish statesmen as the Duke in Measure for Measure^ Burleigh was guiding Elizabeth's empire, and Fran- cis Bacon was soon to be King James's counsellor. It was the young Milton who pictured the life of reason in V Allegro and // Penseroso, the most spiritual fruit of philosophy in Comus; and when he wrote his epic he was probably England's most notable example of that intellectual inquiry and independence which in his great poem he discouraged. There re- main several well-known figures in our [13] THE MORAL OBLIGATION literary history who have both pos- sessed and beHeved in inteUigence — Byron and Shelley in what seems our own day, Edmund Spenser before Shakspere's time. England has more or less neglected all three, but they must in fairness be counted to her credit. Some excuse might be offered for the neglect of Byron and Shelley by a nation that likes the proprieties; but the gentle Spenser, the noblest philosopher and most chivalrous gentleman in our literature, seems to be unread only because he demands a mind as well as a heart used to high things. This will be sufficient qualification of any disparagement of English literature; no people and no literature can be great that are not intelligent, and England has produced not only statesmen and scientists of the first order, but also poets in whom the soul was fitly mated with a lofty intellect. But I am asking you to 114] TO BE INTELLIGENT reconsider your reading in history and fiction, to reflect whether our race has usually thought highly of the intelligence by which it has been great; I suggest these non-intellectual aspects of our lit- erature as commentary upon my ques- tion — and all this with the hope of press- ing upon you the question as to what you think of intelligence. Those of us who frankly prefer char- acter to intelligence are therefore not without precedent. If we look beneath the history of the English people, be- neath the ideas expressed in our litera- ture, we find in the temper of our remot- est ancestors a certain bias which still prescribes our ethics and still prejudices us against the mind. The beginnings of our conscience can be geographically located. It began in the German for- ests, and it gave its allegiance not to the intellect but to the will. Whether or 115] THE MORAL OBLIGATION not the severity of life in a hard dimate raised the value of that persistence by which alone life could be preserved, the Germans as Tacitus knew them, and the Saxons as they landed in England, held as their chief virtue that will-power which makes character. For craft or strategy they had no use; they were already a bulldog race; they liked fight- ing, and they liked best to settle the matter hand to hand. The admiration for brute force which naturally accom- panied this ideal of self-reliance, drew with it as naturally a certain moral sanc- tion. A man was as good as his word, and he was ready to back up his word with a blow. No German, Tacitus says, would enter into a treaty of public or private business without his sword in his hand. When this emphasis upon the will became a social emphasis, it gave the direction to ethical feeling. Honor lay [16] TO BE INTELLIGENT in a man's integrity, in his willingness and ability to keep his word; therefore the man became more important than his word or deed. Words and deeds were then easily interpreted, not in terms of absolute good and evil, but in terms of the man behind them. The deeds of a bad man were bad; the deeds of a good man were good. Fielding wrote Tom Jones to show that a good man some- times does a bad action, consciously or unconsciously, and a bad man some- times does good, intentionally or unin- tentionally. From the fact that Tom Jones is still popularly supposed to be as wicked as it is coarse, we may judge that Fielding did not convert all his readers. Some progress certainly has been made; we do not insist that the more saintly of two surgeons shall operate on us for ap- pendicitis. But as a race we seem as far as possible from realising that an [17] THE MORAL OBLIGATION action can intelligently be called good only if it contributes to a good end; that it is the moral obligation of an in- telligent creature to find out as far as possible whether a given action leads to a good or a bad end; and that any sys- tem of ethics that excuses him from that obligation is vicious. If I give you poison, meaning to give you wholesome food, I have — to say the least — not done a good act; and unless I intend to throw overboard all pretence to intelligence, I must feel some responsibility for that trifling neglect to find out whether what I gave you was food or poison. Obvious as the matter is in this academic illustration, it ought to have been still more obvious in Matthew Arnold's famous plea for culture. The purpose of culture, he said, is ''to make reason and the will of God prevail." This formula he quoted from an English- [18] TO BE INTELLIGENT man. Differently stated, the purpose of culture, he said, is "to make an intelli- gent being yet more intelligent." This formula he borrowed from a Frenchman. The basis culture must have in character, the English resolution to make reason and the will of God prevail, Arnold took for granted; no man ever set a higher price on character — so far as character by itself will go. But he spent his life trying to sow a little suspicion that before we can make the will of God prevail we must find out what is the will of God. I doubt if Arnold taught us much. He merely embarrassed us temporarily. Our race has often been so embarrassed when it has turned a sudden corner and come upon intelligence. Charles Kings- ley himself, who would rather be good than clever, — and had his wish, — was temporarily embarrassed when in the consciousness of his own upright char- [19] THE MORAL OBLIGATION acter he publicly called Newman a liar. Newman happened to be intelligent as well as good, and Kingsley's discomfiture is well known. But we discovered long ago how to evade the sudden embarrass- ments of intelligence. "Toll for the brave/' sings the poet for those who went down in the Royal George. They were brave. But he might have sung, *'Toll for the stupid." In order to clean the hull, brave Kempenfelt and his eight hundred heroes took the serious risk of laying the vessel well over on its side? while most of the crew were below. Having made the error, they all died bravely; and our memory passes easily over the lack of a virtue we never did think much of, and dwells on the English virtues of courage and discipline. So we forget the shocking blunder of the charge of the Light Brigade, and proudly sing the heroism of the victims. Lest [201 TO BE INTELLIGENT we flatter ourselves that this trick of defence has departed with our fathers — this reading of stupidity in terms of the tragic courage that endures its results — let us reflect that recently, after full warning, we drove a ship at top speed through a field of icebergs. When we were thrilled to read how superbly those hundreds died, in the great English way, a man pointed out that they did indeed die in the English way, and that our pride was therefore ill-timed; that all that bravery was wasted; that the tragedy was in the shipwreck of intel^ ligence. That discouraging person was an Irishman. IV I have spoken of our social inheritance as though it were entirely English. Once more let me qualify my terms. Even [21] THE MORAL OBLIGATION those ancestors of ours who never left Great Britain were heirs of many civiHza- tions — Roman, French, Itahan, Greek. With each world-tide some love of pure intelligence was washed up on English shores, and enriched the soil, and here and there the old stock marvelled at its own progeny. But to America, much as we may sentimentally deplore it, England seems destined to be less and less the source of culture, of religion and learning. Our land assimilates all races; with every ship in the harbor our old English ways of thought must crowd a little closer to make room for a new tradi- tion. If some of us do not greatly err, these newcomers are chiefly driving to the wall our inherited criticism of the in- tellect. As surely as the severe northern climate taught our forefathers the value of the will, the social conditions from which these new citizens have escaped [22] TO BE INTELLIGENT have taught them the power of the mind. They differ from each other, but against the Anglo-Saxon they are confederated in a Greek love of knowledge, in a Greek assurance that sin and misery are the fruit of ignorance, and that to know is to achieve virtue. They join forces at once with that earlier arrival from Greece, the scientific spirit, which like all the immigrants has done our hard work and put up with our contempt. Between this rising host that follow intelligence, and the old camp that put their trust in a stout heart, a firm will, and a strong hand, the fight is on. Our college men will be in the thick of it. If they do not take sides, they will at least be battered in the scuffle. At this moment they are readily divided into those who wish to be men — whatever that means — and those who wish to be intelligent men, and those who, unconscious of blasphemy or hu- [23] THE MORAL OBLIGATION mor, prefer not to be intelligent, but to do the will of God. When we consider the nature of the problems to be solved in our day, it seems — to many of us, at least — that these un-English arrivals are correct, that intelligence is the virtue we par- ticularly need. Courage and steadfast- ness we cannot do without, so long as two men dwell on the earth; but it is time to discriminate in our praise of these vir- tues. If you want to get out of prison, what you need is the key to the lock. If you cannot get that, have courage and steadfastness. Perhaps the modern world has got into a kind of prison, and what is needed is the key to the lock. If none of the old virtues exactly fits, why should it seem ignoble to admit it.^^ England for centuries has got on better by sheer character than some other nations by sheer intelligence, but there is after all a [24] TO BE INTELLIGENT relation between the kind of problem and the means we should select to solve it. Not all problems are solved by will- power. When England overthrew Bona- parte, it was not his intelligence she overthrew; the contest involved other things besides intelligence, and she wore him out in the matter of physical endur- ance. The enemy that comes to her as a visible host or armada she can still close with and throttle; but when the foe arrives as an arrow that flieth by night, what avail the old sinews, the old stout- ness of heart! We Americans face the same problems, and are too much in- clined to oppose to them similar obsolete armor. We make a moral issue of an economic or social question, because it seems ignoble to admit it is simply a question for intelligence. Like the medi- cine-man, we use oratory and invoke our hereditary divinities, when the patient [25] THE MORAL OBLIGATION needs only a little quiet, or permission to get out of bed. We applaud those leaders who warm to their work — who, when they cannot open a door, threaten to kick it in. In the philosopher's words, we curse the obstacles of life as though they were devils. But they are not devils. They are obstacles. j V Perhaps my question as to what you think of intelligence has been pushed far enough. But I cannot leave the subject without a confession of faith. None of the reasons here suggested will quite explain the true worship of intelli- gence, whether we worship it as the scientific spirit, or as scholarship, or as any other reliance upon the mind. We really seek intelligence not for the an- swers it may suggest to the problems of [26] TO BE INTELLIGENT life, but because we believe it is life, — not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love vir- tue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue's other and more precise name. We believe that the virtues wait upon intelligence — literally wait, in the history of the race. Whatever is ele- mental in man — love, hunger, fear — ^has obeyed from the beginning the discipline of intelligence. We are told that to kill one's aging parents was once a demonstra- tion of solicitude; about the same time, men hungered for raw meat and feared the sun's eclipse. Filial love, hunger, and fear are still motives to conduct, but intelligence has directed them to other ends. If we no longer hang the thief or flog the school-boy, it is not that we think less harshly of theft or laziness, but that intelligence has found [27] THE MORAL OBLIGATION a better persuasion to honesty and en- terprise. We believe that even in rehgion, in the most intimate room of the spirit, intel- Hgenee long ago proved itself the master- virtue. Its inward oflBce from the be- ginning was to decrease fear and increase opportunity; its outward eflfect was to rob the altar of its sacrifice and the priest of his mysteries. Little wonder that from the beginning the disinterestedness of the accredited custodians of all temples has been tested by the kind of welcome they gave to intelligence. How many hecatombs were offered on more shores than that of Aulis, by seamen waiting for a favorable wind, before intelligence found out a boat that could tack! The altar was deserted, the religion revised — fear of the uncontrollable changing into delight in the knowledge that is power. We contemplate with satisfaction the law y [28] TO BE INTELLIGENT by which in our long history one re- hgion has driven out another, as one hypothesis supplants another in astron- omy or mathematics. The faith that needs the fewest altars, the hypothesis that leaves least unexplained, survives; and the intelligence that changes most fears into opportunity is most divine. We believe this beneficent operation of intelligence was swerving not one degree from its ancient course when un- der the name of the scientific spirit it once more laid its influence upon re- ligion. If the shock here seemed too violent, if the purpose of intelligence here seemed to be not revision but contradic- tion, it was only because religion was invited to digest an unusually large amount of intelligence all at once. More- over, it is not certain that devout peo- ple were more shocked by Darwinism than the pious mariners were by the [29] THE MORAL OBLIGATION first boat that could tack. Perhaps the sacrifices were not abandoned all at once. But the lover of intelligence must be patient with those who cannot readily share his passion. Some pangs the mind will inflict upon the heart. It is a mis- take to think that men are united by elemental affections. Our affections di- vide us. We strike roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our locality, the customs and the language in which we were brought up. Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced roots of affection must be pulled up. These are the old pangs of intelligence, which still comes to set a man at vari- ance against his father, saying, "He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me." [30] TO BE INTELLIGENT Yet, if intelligence begins in a pang, it proceeds to a vision. Through measure- less time its office has been to make of life an opportunity, to make goodness ar- ticulate, to make virtue a fact. In his- tory at least, if not yet in the individual, Plato's faith has come true, that sin is but ignorance, and knowledge and virtue are one. But all that intelligence has ac- complished dwindles in comparison with the vision it suggests and warrants. Beholding this long liberation of the human spirit, we foresee, in every new light of the mind, one unifying mind, wherein the human race shall know its destiny and proceed to it with satisfac- tion, as an idea moves to its proper conclusion; we conceive of intelligence at last as the infinite order, wherein man, when he enters it, shall find him- self. Meanwhile he continues to find his [31] THE MORAL OBLIGATION virtues by successive insights into his needs. Let us cultivate insight. "O Wisdom of the Most High, That reachest from the beginning to the end, And dost order all things in strength and grace. Teach us now the way of understanding." [32 J THE CALL TO SERVICE THE CALL TO SERVICE A COMMENCIJMENT ADDRESS AS I feel for a moment the wholesome jf"^ dizziness that is the penalty of mounting a platform above one's fel- lows, and as I look down at the young faces courteously lifted for my first words, I am aware of — what shall I call it?— of an enforced collaboration; suddenly I have a vision of other rooms filled with other young men, who wait, as you do, for the first words of the commencement speaker, and at once I feel a sudden sympathy with those other speakers, who desire, as I do, to translate the occasion [35] THE CALL TO SERVICE into wise and appropriate words. I see our various schools and colleges keeping their commencements with a single mind — the audiences all expecting the same address, and the speakers, however orig- inal, all delivering it. You expect, every graduating class expects, to be told what to do with education, now you have it; your school or college owes it to itself, you think, to confess in public the pur- pose for which it has trained you. I can almost hear the speakers, from ocean to ocean, responding in unison to this expectation in the graduates they face; the simultaneous eloquence is so in- evitable that I can follow it almost word for word; in fact, I almost join in. The speech they are delivering is known as the Call to Service. The substance of it is that educated men should be unselfish; that learning is a vain and dangerous luxury if it is only for ourselves; that the [36] THE CALL TO SERVICE following of truth, the reverent touching of the hem of her garment, is not, as we may have thought, a privilege, nor is even the love of truth a virtue, until it is con- verted into a responsibility toward others. Few of us care to challenge this teaching. We share in the will to serve, not merely as an annual attitude, but as a year-long passion, until it becomes our one au- thentic motive to good living — or, if we disobey it, a witness against us, incessant and uncomfortable. No wonder that at commencement time particularly, at a moment of success and hope, the instinct of the young graduate is to hear the call to service, and the instinct of the speaker is to sound it. Yet some of us hesitate. So long as the mind is enclosed within the happy com- mencement scene, the circle of well- intending graduates, affectionate parents, and earnest teachers, it is easy to say [37] THE CALL TO SERVICE "Come into the world now, young man, and begin your life-long service; your good fortune, your privileges, have set you apart, but other men, alas, are also set apart by the very lack of what you have enjoyed; now bring your plenty to their want." If our thought is centered, I repeat, on those whom we call into the world, this speech comes easy, but it sticks in our throat if we begin to think of those who, we say, are in need of service. Immediately a second and pro- founder vision rises before us — no cheerful reaction of commencement audience and commencement speakers, but a violent opposition between the fortunate who are preparing aid and the more numerous unlucky who presumably are preparing to accept it. What confounds us is the plain fact that only those who hope to render the service have the slightest en- thusiasm for it. We might well expect [38] THE CALL TO SERVICE also some due and ardent recognition, some rising to the moment, from those about to be served. Their need, to be sure, has no such focus, no such rally- ing-point, as the impulse to their rescue; no commencement address puts them in mind to receive, as you graduates are stimulated to give. But their need it- self, we might think, should at first pre- pare in them, and experience year by year confirm, a receptive and a thankful heart. Yet those about to be served are silent. If there are distinctions in si- lence, theirs leans less toward humility than toward defence. Those who have already been served and who now hear again the summons to their benefit, break silence by gradations of reproach. They deprecate the ministrations of the edu- cated. They invite the physician to heal himself. They intimate hypocrisy in their would-be rescuers, who, they say, [391 THE CALL TO SERVICE instead of equalizing men's misfortunes once for all, so that no further rescue might be needed, actually prefer to patch up life's injustices from year to year, finding a moral satisfaction in being charitable, and craving, therefore, a sup- ply of the unfortunate to exercise that virtue on. These criticisms, it seems to me, have too much truth in them. They throw us back upon our conscience, and force us to examine the motives with which we call others to service or answer the call ourselves. Is service truly a rescue or a profession? Do we hope to cure our neighbor's misfortune or to live by it.f^ Nothing could be more reasonable than that service should be judged by its value to the served, yet too often we practise this unselfishness as it were for our own good; we obey the call to service as an invitation to a salutary exercise of the [40] THE CALL TO SERVICE souL When the disturbing vision rises before us of half the race in need, and of the other half eager to help, we must withhold approval till we ask the eager helpers, "Do you look on the unfortunate as on your brothers, in temporary dis- tress, or do you see in them objects of charity? Do you think your function is to serve, and their function is to be served? If by a miracle they should get on their feet, would you have lost your career?" II If these questions seem rhetorical and strained, let me put them in other terms to several of you who presumably desire to be in the truest sense serviceable. My object, frankly, is to show that the life of service is often exploited in such a way as to come fairly within the range [41] THE CALL TO SERVICE of criticism, and that the men who sound the call to service nowadays and those who respond to it have often no right conception of what is serviceable. I should like to indicate what are the signs of true service and what are the signs of something else that masquerades in its name. I Some of you, doubtless, have decided to enter the Church. There was a time when the call to service was identical with a call to enter the religious life. Religion, the oldest, was once the broad- est avenue to good works, so broad that for centuries it included those two other main paths, now become quite secular — science and education; and with science and education it still provides the main opportunities for ministering to the soul, the body, and the mind of our fellows. Those of you, then, who contemplate the religious life, ought to be furnished out [42] THE CALL TO SERVICE of antiquity with a definition of the service you would render; you ought to know the nature of the benefit the lay- man comes to religion for, and how to assist him to that benefit. Perhaps you do not agree with me that you ought to know all this; per- haps, having felt a call to the ministry, you think the call justifies itself. As I speak, I see once more that ominous gulf between the server and the served. On one side I see you priests-to-be, loving your historical church, or your theology, or your revealed truth — loving, that is, certain gifts of God which you think you can prepare for by study, and receive by heavenly grace, and by your faithfulness transmit unimpaired to others after you; and your loyalty to theology or church or revelation you conceive to be service. On the other side of the gulf I see men waiting for real service at the hands of [43] THE CALL TO SERVICE the Church, and not getting it. If there is hostihty in the world to religion per se, at least that is not what I am talking about; I speak solely of those optimistic veterans in the pews who still expect the service of religion from the new arrival just out of the divinity school. They have a pretty clear notion as to what religion promises, and they grow impatient for the promise to be kept. Religion promises, in the old words, a more abundant life, an immediate as well as a distant benefit, an enjoyment to be entered upon in this present world. It would provide at once an exercise to develop the spiritual faculties we now have into powers we but faintly imagine. "More abundant life," to the religious- minded, is the phrasing of an old battle- hope, a more than ancient faith in his own sufiiciency to approach God, which individual man, in this sense forever [44] THE CALL TO SERVICE Puritan, has never entirely let go. Even when the priest in his primitive func- tion stood between the people and their deity, mediating by virtue of his superior gifts and training, the savage in his fear still had glimpses of a time when each heart should perform to God its vows and sacrifices, consecrated by the mere sharing in human life. "I will make him a nation of priests," promised Jehovah to Israel. The pro- gram of religion, therefore, is not to do away with the priest, but to bestow the priestly character more abundantly upon all men. Must I qualify my words, and say that this is only the layman's program of re- ligion? It seems to be different from the program of the loyal priest. He hopes to perpetuate his office for the good of more and more laymen; the layman hopes that the distinction between priest [45] THE CALL TO SERVICE and layman will disappear. The priest looks upon his office as destined to serve perpetually, and upon the layman, there- fore, as destined to be perpetually an object of service; but the layman hopes to need service less and less. How very disconcerting it would be for the Church, as it is at present organized, if all the laymen should become, in the truest sense, priests. Even if we grant that the organization conforms at present to a situation, yet we detect no wish on its part that the situation should be changed. In every denomination there seems to be a tendency to widen the gulf between priest and layman, honoring the first without ennobling the second. The very devotion which is the warrant of true religion, bids the layman look up, as to a higher order of being, to the holder of the priestly office. But when a man begins ' as it were to cherish holiness in another's [46] THE CALL TO SERVICE life rather than in his own, the mischief is done; religion then robs him of the very thing it promises to give. If we cannot find the illustrations close at hand, the book of history opens at the very places. Whenever the priesthood has been exalted as a separate ideal of good- ness or of wisdom, some integrity, some consecration, has been taken away from common men. In so-called Puritan mo- ments, when the priesthood has been least remote, the conduct of the average man has been most nobly severe; but where the distinctive holiness of the priest has been most devotedly cherished, the average man has needed a system of pardons and indulgences. No doubt the priests were holy, and were eager to serve mankind, but was it service that they actually conferred.^ It appears that no man can be holy for his neighbors; or if he persuades them to submit to the [47] THE CALL TO SERVICE experiment, the little holiness they have is taken away. Perhaps you have not thought of the religious life as involving these problems. "Going into the ministry" has perhaps meant to you simply a process by which you dreamt of getting a parish to work in and people to serve. Yet even in the smallest parish the division I speak of, the opposition between priest and lay- man, between the serving and the served, will be awaiting you. Do you dream of a congregation to help? Your congre- * gation dream of rising beyond need of help. Do you expect to be consecrated above the layman.^ The layman, who nowadays has a dialectic of his own, will ask how your consecration manifests it- self. If you explain that your superiority is not in you but in your office, he will press you to explain why the office, even if sacred, is necessary; he will ask [48] THE CALL TO SERVICE whether a system of superiorities and in- feriorities is vital to the religious life and whether, if all men were equally sanctified, the religious life would cease. You understand that this is but a figure of speech. The layman will not argue with you in this fashion; he will stay away from your church on Sunday and avoid your society during the week. If empty pews mean anything, he is resolved to escape your benefits, but for old time's sake he prefers not to quarrel with the minister. With religion he still has no quarrel, but the Church seems to him actually irreligious — well-organized, yes, well-meaning and well-behaved, even indefatigable in distributing warm clothes and wholesome food to the needy, yet also in spite of her gifts increasingly re- mote, strangely indisposed or incom- petent to share or impart the religious spirit. No wonder that, since it is [49] THE CALL TO SERVICE spiritual development he craves, he will give his allegiance to other organiza- tions than the Church. He sees that to join a parish for love of God comes to practically the same thing as join- ing it for love of the priest, to whose credit in a worldly sense an increase in the congregation is reckoned; he sees that against any criticism from the con- gregation the priest can and often does assert the authority of his office; he sees that though attendance at church will be counted as approval of the particular minister in charge, absence from church will be diagnosed as hostility to religion; and rather than accept the service of re- ligion on terms so compromising to his self-respect, he retires from the field and cultivates indifference. From this mood he is roused only when a loud call to his rescue excites his wrath. The reform, he thinks, should begin elsewhere. [50] THE CALL TO SERVICE III I have been speaking to those of you who, in love of service, may think of entering the ministry, and my purpose has been to describe that gulf be- tween your good intentions and the real needs of those whom you may have thought of as destined to be served. Yet others of you, I am aware, may not be stirred to repentance by the picture I have drawn; you may indeed be far from displeased by it. Perhaps you have left religion behind you, as an old-fash- ioned preoccupation of your grandmoth- ers, and whatever seems to be a criticism of it will confirm your complacency at having left it behind. You also are in love with service, but it is the call of science that you hear — real service, as you would say, without superstition or humbug. [51] THE CALL TO SERVICE Science does call you to a service of her own, but her program is perhaps less original than you think. Like religion, she would teach you an attitude of mind, an intimate approach to the universe. Like religion, science also urges you to good works; but whereas the rewards of religion are often indirect or deferred, science can appeal to your selfishness by showing an immediate as well as a re- mote profit. In this smaller, practical oflSce science might be expected even to surpass the service of religion, telling you how to make yourselves immune to disease, how to regulate your diet, how to choose your dress, how to keep the streets clean, how to secure sanitation. Science has far larger and more diflScult things to teach, principles and prospects of which these matters are the merest incidents; but out of her exuberant joy of service she freely bestows these [52] THE CALL TO SERVICE simple aids toward a more abundant life. Yet you can no more be scientific for your neighbors than you can be holy for them. If you persuade them to submit to the experiment, they will lose what little intelligence they had. Do we not see that the average man is more and more disposed to honor a few scientists, superstitiously exalting their skill into a kind of magic, and relying less and less upon himself .f^ For every service science has rendered, some common intelligence has been taken away. She gave us the barometer, and we ceased to be weather- wise; the almanac, and we forgot the stars. If this service from without left us free to apply our knowledge in other fields, there might be a compensation for the intelligence that has been taken away. But with intelligence departs the willing- ness even to be intelligently served, and [53] THE CALL TO SERVICE just as religion falls back upon threats of hell, so at last science calls in the police. If my house is ventilated and sanitary, it is not because science has made me intelligent, but because the expert to whom I have delegated my intelligence is now applying it on my behalf, with or without my consent. When my fire- escape was cast in the foundry, perhaps for the rescue of my life some day, they fixed in the mold a threat to fine me ten dollars, if ever I should block it up. However we may condemn the result, the intention to serve us is unmistakable. But science is strangely inconsistent. Having assumed the place of our intelli- gence, she develops what seems to be a startling indifference to our welfare. At times she surpasses the worst that has been charged against religion in the dis- position to fall in love with her own image. Since the middle of the nine- [54] THE CALL TO SERVICE teenth century, men at her invitation have contemplated their unsavory be- ginning and the myriad processes by which they are supposed to have escaped from it. They have not been greatly edified; kinship with the monkey, if true, is uninspiring. Into what nobler relations are we to enter .^ Science does not reply. The excuse is that science is collecting facts, or perfecting methods, or at best is occupied in remedial work, in solving problems of disease and in re- ducing the discomforts of life. Service so vast and so humane cannot be over- valued. Yet even in the region of this service, is not science frittering itself away upon methods, instead of setting before us the end.^^ And is it possible to estimate the value of the method, until we know the end? One scientist tells us, as a matter of fact, that our best days are over at forty. Much of the informa- [55] THE CALL TO SERVICE tion which science imparts is as cheerful as that. Another tells us how to prolong life, by drinking sour milk. But if the first doctor is right and our heyday is over at forty, why should we wish to grow old.f^ Our true benefactor would tell us how long we ought to wish to live. Or even when science is not so blind, it often sins by applying itself to an end it knows to be wrong. It invents vehicles of con- stantly greater speed, though it assures us that such acceleration is the ruin of our nerves. It invents methods of kill- ing people, and means of protecting them, though it persuades us at the same time — as if we needed persuasion! — that war is an awkward way of serving mankind. Those of you who heard with com- placence my criticism of religion ought not to protest if I bring the same judg- ment to bear on science. Indeed there is a fine irony in substituting the service of 156] THE CALL TO SERVICE science for the service of religion as a tar- get for the fault-finder; for science, which began by pointing out the insufficiencies of religion, and gradually usurped relig- ion's place in this matter of serving man- kind, has also, it may be, taken to herself some of the frailties she once condemned. Between you and those whom you would serve through science the same gulf lies as between the priests and those they would benefit. The protest against sci- ence is not yet so loud, I grant you, as that against religion, but it is the same in kind, and it is growing. Scientists are as eager to do our thinking for us as ever the Church has been, they are just as ready to use force to make effective the truth as they see it, and they keep their scientific spirit to themselves as effectively as the priests keep their priesthood. They look upon themselves as a caste, and in the name of science 157 ] THE CALL TO SERVICE they presume to dogmatise outside of their field, exactly as the priests once did. We, meanwhile, as profoundly de- sirous of magic as primitive man ever was, wait with awe upon the word of these latest magicians, or begin to grum- ble because they do not let us into the secret. We grow rich, it appears, in the results of science, but poor in its spirit. If the symptoms of this un- healthy condition were found only in the man in the street, there would be less need to worry, for that mythical person is by definition the first to get hold of applied results and the last to be in- terested in principles. But the criticism is justified in the places where science is avowedly engaged in handing on her torch — in your college, for example, where almost all of you studied the sciences and almost none of you was suspected by anybody of being scientific. The technic [58] THE CALL TO SERVICE of the laboratory instruments appealed to you exactly as does the management of a motor-car or the handling of a shot- gun; most young men like to use a machine and to get mechanical results. But as to learning the insatiable love of truth, the precise observation and the inexorable deduction which are essential in the scientist, you probably have not even made a beginning. IV I can imagine that some of you will be as little troubled by the insufficiency of science as by the shortcomings of re- ligion; you have heard the call to service, but you understand it as a call to teach. Observing that I am by profession a teacher, you probably think that I have saved up education for the end of my discourse as a happy contrast to those [59] THE CALL TO SERVICE ^ other ways of serving. The call to service does indeed seem to be a sum- mons to inquiry, whether of religion or science or any other region of faith or experience, and the life of inquiry might seem to be the life of a college professor. The college is supposed to be a place of precious leisure, in which truth may be sought without distraction. It is not directly practical nor serviceable; it is the gymnasium rather than the arena of the spirit. As its name implies, it is a collection of diverse minds and natures, strengthening their noblest impulses and their finest knowledge by a communal sharing. Into this charged atmosphere of the spirit a student enters, to learn his capacities and to develop them, as his teachers develop theirs, by this high trafiic of soul and soul. The service which the college can render is to keep the atmosphere properly charged — to see that [60] I THE CALL TO SERVICE there are enough teachers and enough students, so that this interchange of character may be complete. The ideal is a byword — "Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a boy on the other." The log, of course, is not necessary. It is only a convenience. But unfor- tunately the college is seized with that spirit of service which looks for quick results. Neither Mark Hopkins nor the boy can be organized and administered to serve any very immediate popular de- mand; it is the log, therefore, that the colleges have organized and elaborated. With the sincerest desire to be of service to the greatest number — if possible, to all who present themselves — they have ex- tended the log till some of the boys are almost out of earshot of Mark Hopkins, and for weak backs they have inserted a few bolsters. How narrow and unsym- pathetic sounds an extract from the re- [61] THE CALL TO SERVICE port to the trustees of Columbia College in 1810 on the state of instruction in that institution — "Your committee cannot for a moment suppose that it is the intention of the Board to try that most fruitless and mischievous experiment — the experi- ment of educating either the naturally stupid or the incurably idle." In justice to the modern educator who does not admit the existence of any such class as the naturally stupid or the in- curably idle, be it said that he lives up to his ideal of service, even to the for- feiture of that leisurely investigation and contemplation of truth which is the prime delight of the scholar. The log has not been easy to organize. The college pro- fessor has had to manipulate embarrass- ing entrance requirements, and make the curriculum pliable, and serve as preceptor to the near-idle and as adviser to the near-stupid; nay, having evolved this [62] THE CALL TO SERVICE system of dependence in intellectual things, he has carried it, in the spirit of service, into the amusements of the students, until he acts as director of their sports and treasurer of their gate receipts and sponsor of their business contracts. All this takes time. In more leisurely days the scholar would come from his meditations upon great truths like the prophet from Sinai, with the skin of his face shining. Now from a conference with student managers or from investigating the eligibility of the football captain he returns with that nervous step, that fretful eye, that palpable collapse of spirit, which an- nounce to his sympathetic colleagues, "I have served." Yet he would still have his reward, did his labors ennoble the served, or con- fer upon them a more abundant life. That the effect is otherwise might be [63] THE CALL TO SERVICE prophesied from a certain complacency in his sacrifice. If he looks down to those | he serves, if the angle of his condescen- sion is to himself the warrant of his well- doing, if football or the college dramatics be not really his career, but only an excuse for demonstrating to the young-^ sters that he can still revisit their point of view — then he has robbed them of what it is his profession to give; robbed them not simply in their greater de- pendence, in their lessening enthusiasm and ability to conduct their own af- fairs, but far more tragically in the de- feat of their right to live in the presence, and profit by the inspiration, of a scholar who follows with his whole heart the great quest of truth. Whether or not it is the students' duty to study, it is their right to behold the scholar at his work, and to imitate him; for it is by comradeship and imitation that they [64] THE CALL TO SERVICE share the teacher's life. But if the teacher keeps his scholarship out of the comradeship and the life which they share; if he manages his days as though scholarship were a solace of the leisure to be earned by service, or a hoarded treasure not to be rashly displayed — ^he will no more make others scholarly than a priest who conceals his holiness will make others holy, or a scientist who does not live his science will make others scientific. V It would be wrong to let you think that by entering any great profession? even my own, you will automatically enter the life of genuine service. With teaching, with science, with religion, I have no quarrel; I long ago gave my allegiance to all three, and it is from L65] THE CALL TO SERVICE noble priests and scholars and teachers that I have drawn the ideals here set forth. But while human nature remains what it is, there is a great temptation to mistake immediate results for the true ends, to impart the by-products rather than the vital principle, to think of our- selves as conserving the torch, instead of handing it on. The mass of man- kind are good-natured enough to let us treat them for a certain length of time as objects of charity, as destined to be served, but there is an end to their good nature. In religion this conclusion has already shown itself; in science and in I education the writing is on the wall. For that reason I hesitated to call you to service, lest you should understand the summons only in the familiar way, and by your enthusiasm should make the gulf wider between your ideals and your fellow-men. But to be truly [66] I ^ THE CALL TO SERVICE serviceable is our loftiest ambition. The service we dream of is such education, such religion, such science, as will increase in all men the abundance of life. The method we dream of is such an illustration of religion or science or scholarship in our own lives as will increase in others a hunger for the same spiritual sustenance. To make this illustration, we must first cultivate religion or science or scholar- ship in ourselves. This is the statement of the call to service which I have been approaching slowly and with care, for to the generous- hearted it is on first acquaintance a hard saying. Seek truth or seek goodness for yourselves, if you wish others to have it. If you rise to your own stature, you will thereby perform all the service you could desire — ^you will help others to rise. Doubtless some of your neighbors will think you selfish. Doubtless the man [67] THE CALL TO SERVICE who buried his talent in a napkin was answering the call to service elsewhere. The sacrifice was his own concern, but the service so rendered must have been for the served also a lessening of spiritual wealth. True service lessens nothing. Not that the teacher should waste him- self in the enterprises of boyhood, but that even boys should fall in love with the enterprise of truth; not that the scientist should become a commodity- monger, but that all men should enjoy the high commodity of the scientific spirit; not that the priest should be secularized, but that by a race-wide con- secration man should become a nation of priests — this is the end of true service. For this we must be patient and with becoming care make ourselves ready; it is required of us only that we be produc- tive of good at last. For a thousand years of inspiration to unnumbered men, [68] THE CALL TO SERVICE how brief an investment are the forty years, or fifty, of the scholar's seclusion, the saint's discipline! Meanwhile the humble apprentice, so he be faithful, is even at the moment serviceable; for none of us can withdraw himself so far, but he will be still a ganglion of inspira- tion for all whose fate, by accident or kin- ship, is bound with his. We cannot too greatly desire to bring our fellows to the truth, but we may underestimate their own desire for it. When we ourselves seek it, every man who feels our contact will go with us. This is the true call to service — not, "The world is waiting for you — come and help it"; but, ''Are you fit to serve .^^ Do you know how to live your own lite? Either religion or science may be for you the City of God. If the ram- parts need rebuilding, take counsel of those ancient men who after long cap- Leo] THE CALL TO SERVICE tivity raised again the walls of Jerusa- lem. Every man built in front of his own house." THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE IN a recent guide-book to Shakspere occur certain questions intended to promote critical faculty in the student. "What amount of time," asks the writer, examining A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, "is covered by the entire action, accord- ing to the direction given at the beginning of the play? Show by references the time-scheme which seems to you to be actually followed." The student is here expected to perceive a discrepancy. Then, continues the questioner, "Why did Shakspere allow this discrepancy to re- main in the play.f^" Again, "Note cases of stichomythia, or dialogue in which each [73] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE speech consists of a single line. Is it effective in each case, or does it seem artificial?" And finally, "For what dif- ferent purposes, in this play, does Shak- spere seem to use blank verse, five-accent rimed lines, four-accent rime, and prose?" As we read these questions and others like them, beyond a doubt helpful toward a serious weighing of Shakspere's genius, they suggest perhaps a larger question which from time to time has troubled us all, and for which some of us have not heard the sufficient answer. They sug- gest the question of Shakspere's mind. They bid us ask once more, is his art the result of intention, or is there another explanation of it; and if there is another explanation, does this sort of catechism make allowance for it? In these familiar phases, — "why did Shakspere allow," "for what purpose does Shakspere seem to use," — ^in this echo of the formulas [74] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE most teachers unconsciously lean to, there is an implication which not a few lovers of poetry may care to challenge. Admit- ting that all the manifestations of genius are proper subjects for minute study, we may yet be fearful of the missteps of scholarship in the uncertain field of art; we may doubt whether any phrase which even slightly emphasizes the design and intention of the great poet's craft, does not follow as an unrecorded premise the critic's knowledge of his own rather than of Shakspere's mind. For we cannot too often recall that this man's fame, moving up through heavens of misty or pedantic adoration, has obligingly modified itself to the scope of the beholding eye. Whatever rest his curse procured for his bones, we have made chameleon work of his reputation. We have thought of him with Ben Jonson as an improviser, or with Milton as [75] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE fancy's child, or with Arnold as a solitary peak, lifting above us inscrutable, un- scanned. Nothing in this tradition would prohibit one more guess at Shakspere's mind. Yet in the newest explanation there will be a few things in common with those that went before. From the beginning the world has felt the natural- ness of this well-poised genuis; he never dwelt apart, starlike. No explanation will satisfy us which does not make Shakspere's mind a thing of nature — even a normal thing, in kind if not in degree. From the beginning the world has ac- knowledged the comprehensiveness of his imagination; at times so slight a barrier of visible art divides the life he saw from his representation of it, that life itself appears the medium of his thought. No explanation of his mind will satisfy us which does not make reasonable this godlike grasp upon experience. From [76] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE the beginning also there has been an adverse opinion of Shakspere's craft; if we are to beheve the extreme criticism of him, he never revised his work, he was sometimes careless of his grammar, he was sometimes all but indifferent to dramatic structure. Though the volume of his fame has more or less overwhelmed all fault-finding, no sincere attempt to explain his mind will neglect to bring even the rumor of his defects to a final account. The desirable explanation, therefore, will answer the question of his natural- ness, the question of his comprehensive- ness, the question of his imperfections. The well-known attempts to understand this elusive intellect have, however, usu- ally busied themselves with only one or two of these aspects. Such a partial solu- tion is in Hartley Coleridge's beautiful sonnet: [77] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE "Like that Ark, Which in its sacred hold upUfted high, O'er the drowned hills, the human family. And stock reserved of every living kind, So in the compass of the single mind The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie That make all worlds. Great Poet, 'twas thy art To know thyself, and in thyseK to be Whatever love, hate, ambition, destiny. Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart Can make of man." Helpful as the simile is, it illuminates only the comprehensiveness of Shak- spere's mind; it ignores the shortcomings of his workmanship and the limitations of his thought; it is inconsistent with perhaps any theory of his apparently natural inspiration. True, all men ob- serve, not the world outside, but them- selves — since what they see is at best only their conception of what they see; with this interpretation Shakspere's art may be said to consist solely in his ob- servation of himself. Yet this would be [78] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE to spin too fine Coleridge's already subtle thought. His meaning is clear enough; he would stress Shakspere's independence of knowledge gained by experience; this most precious intellect was freighted once for all with the infinite fortunes and as- pirations of the race, and — to exaggerate slightly — neither study nor thought nor travel nor age could add one little weight of knowledge. A mind so described is not the normal mind, as we know it, and in the description is no place for that fiavor of contact, that smack of im- mediate experience, which is the first mark of Shaksperian thought. Most of the criticism of our century, even of our own day, would explain Shakspere's comprehensiveness at the cost of his naturalness. German philos- ophy in the early years and German scholarship later have tried to establish a sort of standard of omniscience, against [79] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE which the poet's faults if perceived at all are measured as lapses from his true self. From Germany, though he denied it, the elder Coleridge learned to deal with Shakspere as with a god, whose mind was of a higher order than ours, yet might with labor be dimly learned; whose clearest utterance hinted at divine plans not in our fate to conceive, but only to admire; whose occasional vacu- ities meant no more than that the god perchance was sleeping or on a journey. "A nature humanized," Coleridge pic- tures Shakspere, "a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness." Again, echoing the theme of his son's verses, he gives us this con- ception of a meditating, Coleridgean Shakspere — "The body and substance of his works came out of the depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation L80] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE and reading, which was considerable, sup- plied him with the draperies of his fig- ures." And again, ''He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher." No more significant but probably bet- ter known is that passage in which Hazlitt subtilizes about the mind of Shakspere, saying nothing new, perhaps^ but setting an example in his phrase for the manner of question we noticed in the student's guide-book. "The striking pe- culiarity of Shakspere's mind," he says, "was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds, so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, in- [81] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE tuitively, into all their conceivable rami- fications, through every change of for- tune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. . . . He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different con- cerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues^ actions, and motives — as well those that they knew, as those that they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves." Through this rhapsody how shall we approach the man Shakspere with human faults of speech and conduct; or how shall we see the roots of his genius in any faculty that is ours.f* This school of criticism might be called the philosophical adoration of Shakspere. In the soberer end of the nineteenth cen- tury we have had the scholarly adoration, a milder but no less devoted flame, as befits much telling of syllables and [82] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE matching of texts. To make the account somewhat brief — those who have studied the matter know that the chief furnish- ings of Shakspere's lodgings and of his theatres must have been the shelves crowded with his sources. Where an earlier version is not forthcoming, as in Love's Labor's Lost, we yet live in hope; if it be not found, at least some thesis will prove that it has been mislaid. We are supposed to know also that Shakspere was a lawyer, a doctor, an experimental psychologist, a sociologist, an aristocrat, a democrat, a moralist, a cryptic preacher of esoteric religion. To be specific, we observe, for example, that in modern society rich and idle families when they degenerate have a trick of announcing their end in one of two ways; the latest descendant sometimes reverts to the original vulgarity and common sense of the peasant who founded the line and [83] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE by dint of practice and the family for- tune becomes an almost eflScient, if un- economic, hunter or sailor or farmer; or the latest descendant inherits grace of manner, the cumulative breeding of gen- erations, but the exhausted stock be- queathes him nothing more, and he is at best a gentlemanly fool. This two- fold degeneracy the student of society teaches us to observe, — and lo ! Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. Or, to illustrate again, the old French poets had a definite type of lyric called the chanson d'auhade, or dawn song — the complement of the serenade, or evening song. A famous example of this type, the French scholar tells the French stu- dent, is "Hark! Hark! the lark," from Cymbeline, One other type of dawn song, the chanson d'aube, expressed the sorrow of two lovers who must leave each other's arms at daybreak. Among the marks of [84] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE this type are the man's anxiety not to be found by his enemies, and the woman's reckless desire to detain him if only for a moment. He tells her that already the birds of dawn are singing; she answers that he hears the birds of a darkening twilight. And of this type of French lyric there is one perfect illustration, Juliet's cry to Romeo, "Will you begone? It is not yet near day! It was the nightingale and not the lark.'* So Shakspere is become a research schol- ar, poor man! Or dare we dissent from all that this sort of criticism implies? Only two things ac- tually known of Shakspere bear on this problem; for other aids to the under- standing of his mind we should look not in books, but in life. We know that he was a man of action, a man infinitely busy with practical affairs, a man who pro- [85] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE duced several plays a year, and who could have no leisure. We know also that from the first he had a fluent gift of speech; he could say what he would, with the least possible impediment of language. But for the radical secret of his mind perhaps we should look in our own experience, if we would justify the hope that he was such a man as we are. II What, for instance, is the effect of his plays on us.f^ For one thing, we under- stand them, as we could hardly do if they were the work of superhuman intelli- gence. What audience was ever puzzled by a Shakspere play.f^ It is only the theories of his critics that perplex. Fur- ther, the plays seem to the audience to be miracles not of intellect but of obser- vation. No doubt the poet was thought- [86] - THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE ful; no doubt his mind brooded on life; but in his plays he gives the results of clear vision, not the results of clear thinking. Might we not find a clue to the secret in the behavior and expression of children before they are instructed as to what they ought to think and say? Who of us cannot recall at least one of their dis- concertingly apposite remarks f Their naive pronouncements share with great poetry the double effect of echo and sur- prise; we who hear have felt our way towards some such idea, yet when it con- fronts us we are startled. For highly conventionalized people, like Tennyson's spinster, children in their talkative moods are almost demoniacal, "a-haxin ma hawkward questions, an saayin on- decent things." But their youthful penetration is not solely a cause of embarrassment. Some- [87] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE times it shocks us to repentance for the unnatural state of mind into which we have grown. When Mr. Brocklehurst asked Httle Jane Eyre what she must do in order to avoid hell fire after death, she replied, "I must keep in good health, and not die." Why not, after all.f* We have been educated to a less natural answer. Sometimes this penetration is the very gift of prophecy. When young William Blake was to be apprenticed to a certain painter, the boy objected, saying that the man looked as if he were to be hanged. And the man later did come to be hanged. This faculty in childhood, which we can all illustrate for ourselves, appears to be nothing more than accurate, natural observation — an almost animal power of sight such as a fine dog or horse would have — and spontaneous, unretarded ex- pression. As we grow older, learning to [88] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE consider our thoughts we become con- ventional — that is, we train ourselves to see only what we expect to see. And learning to consider our speech, we limit our vocabulary; for the effect of taking thought is to curtail, not extend, our sup- ply of words. Because we are unsure of many a fine word, or because we are unsteady in its pronunciation, we or- dinary grown folk will not use it; and we hesitate to write it, forsooth, because of the spelling. Yet what energetic child, before he has been to school, ever stops for a word.^ Will he not make one up as he needs it, and pronounce it as he can, and by the same guidance spell it — very much in the way of that reckless word-user, William Shakspere? As to that unspoiled power to see true, some vestiges of it we grown folk perceive when upon meeting a stranger or seeing a landscape we feel an instant reaction, [89] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE an impulsive judgment which craves ex- pression, but which we stifle because we did not expect it. And a few seconds later perhaps some unconsidering person says the very thing, and wins a prompt acclaim. Is there not a hint of Shakspere in this.f^ To be sure, he was no child, but a mature man, educated to some extent in the knowledge of his time, if not in the profundities of modern scholarship. His associates were probably better educated than he, and his daily conference with them must have subjected his thought to a thousand influences of wisdom which we shall never be able to trace specifically among his "sources." Yet with all this maturity, can we not imagine a grown person with whom for the most part ex- pression has remained an instantaneous reflex of experience, who sees true habit- ually, as we less child-like folk do occa- [90] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE sionally, and who speaks so spontaneously that he takes no account of his utter- ance? He never blotted a Hne, if we be- lieve Ben Jonson; and even if we do not believe him, it is harder to prove that Shakspere's second thought is in any of the texts, than it is to conceive of his mind at its best as unspoiled by in- tention or reconsideration, like the mind of a child whose penetrating, unconscious criticism of life has not yet been ruined by blame or praise. With such a con- ception, the known facts of Shakspere's life cease to be puzzling. Hawthorne wondered that poetic genius could grow up in the small Stratford house, where there was no privacy. Probably Haw- thorne's meditative genius could not have grown up there, but for Shakspere's mind there could be no happier school. At all times and places his mental process was normal; he needed no privacy for [911 THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE penurious inspiration, but in the very heart of noisy, roistering Southwark could reflect the life that crowded in upon him; and doubtless the lack of seclusion in his father's house fostered the gift. Indeed, privacy and leisure would prob- ably have meant starvation for his art. The fortunate conditions for the develop- ment of his energy and his naturalness, were a crowded and stirring environment and the necessity of ceaseless labor. It is no miracle that in a few years filled with distractions he produced in such rapid succession so many plays; had he enjoyed an unstimulating quiet, perhaps only by a miracle would he have pro- duced any plays at all. Shakspere's energy, which we assume as the prime fact in his character, is too generally conceded to call for proof. In the details of his career from the im- prudent marriage and the deer-stealing [92] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE to the purchase of New Place and the return to Stratford, he was a man of action fully occupied with affairs. Pro- fessor Wallace's recent contributions to our knowledge of his life in London, set him still more clearly in this light. But his writing might teach us as much with- out the help of the biographers. Great energy, strong interest, whether a man be very happy or very angry, results in vividness of imagination and felicity of speech. Shakspere's writing further re- minds us that it is too much to expect even him to live invariably in a tense, reacting frame of mind, wherein life is observed and created with infallible en- ergy. Many a dull and self-conscious passage — ^if we may be forgiven for ob- serving them! — is witness to his relaxed moments. Yet it would not be difficult to argue that his best work was done in his busiest years. That he mingled with [93] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE other men in a companionable way, with- f out much hint that he or they thought him more than a genial, frank comrade, is no paradox, but the inevitable conse- quence of his interest in life and his en- ergy ; nor should we wonder that his fam- ily remembered him in the death record as a gentleman, not as the world's greatest poet. His business was to live, not to write. That we have his plays now, means only that poetry is the most en- during reaction to life. He illustrates the usually forgotten truth that the greatest poets, normal and not too con- scious of themselves, are men of action. Like Dante or Milton or Scott, he responded to life in other ways than through poetry — only he set so great value on the other ways and so little on the poetry that we are forced to think him the least conscious and most naive of artists. [94] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE If his unconscious energy illuminates his vast accomplishment, it throws light as well upon his narrowest limitation. Since his genius at its typical moments reflected life in spontaneous, uncalculat- ing speech, no wonder that his horizon was narrowly bounded by human birth and death. His thought attempted no other world, no other life, than this. His mind could not react happily on what could not be physically seen. Dante's imaginings or Milton's were therefore impossible to his temperament; indeed, the casual questions of any serious-minded contemporary of his as to a future existence were to him it seems strange and forbidding. In Ham- let and Measure for Measure, those dark adventures in the borderland of death, the practical wisdom of life is profound, but the brooding upon the hereafter is child-like, with a child's respect for angels [95] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE and devils, and a more certain dread of ghosts and of being alone in the dark. The other fact of Shakspere's equip- ment which needs no proof is his gift of language. Distinction must be made of course between his natural endowment and the felicitous word-play which he shared with his contemporaries. It was a languaged age. What Shakspere owed to Euphuism is known to all students of his style. The fashion of fine cadences helped him to many a much-commen- taried line, sounding and shallow, like "And peace proclaims olives of endless age," or taught him such a flawless stretch of song as satisfies us though we forget the allusion — "And the imperial votaress passed on In maiden meditation fancy-free," or shorter phrases, now proverbial, like [96] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE "Sweets to the Sweet," "More sinned against than sinning." In these felicities, however, Shakspere surpassed but httle the other poets of his time, who improved their vocabu- lary and style, as we nowadays would do, by taking thought. Any one with an ordinary ear for word-music could effect some such happy combinations of sound. If he should occasionally miss the mark, so also did Shakspere; im- mediately before and after these quoted lines occur others far less happy. That he excelled at all in the practice of Euphuism, that he had a higher average of happy lines to his credit than others in that fashion, is proof only of his delight in language for its own sake — a delight that is common in some degree to all poets. Even in the highly Euphuistic pas- [97] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE sages, however, with aUiteration and balance and the other artifices of style, some magic word often lives with the Shaksperian vitality. Among the "w's" and the "I's" and the "k" sounds of the following most familiar lines, the verb which gives the picture has an eerie detonation, a charm that it never wore in any other employment — "On such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea bank, and waft her love To come again to Carthage." The distinction of Shakspere's lan- guage at its best is its extraordinary vitality. Words to most men are list- less things, to be combined into station- ary forms of thought or color. But in the Shaksperian word there is always a certain astonishment, a new approach, whether or not the word has been familiar before — [98] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE "In the dead vast and middle of the night." "Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change.'^ "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety." Does not the secret of this imaginative speech he in the poet's clearness of vision and in his immediateness and ac- curacy of expression? Such words can- not be found by careful search in one's vocabulary; they are found, if at all, in the thing contemplated, when the energy of the poet's nature provides — to take a liberty with his own phrase — that the firstlings of his sight shall be the firstlings of his speech. To a degree children have this spontaneous felicity, at least as long as they keep a naive approach to language. Until they are spoiled by self-consciousness they do not think the words — they see them, as [99] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE something new and wonderful. Certain child-like ages, notably the Elizabethan, have rediscovered language, have toyed with it and manipulated it, — even dis- torted it; and Shakspere, the supreme child of a child-like age, when his in- terest was diverted from word-play to the spectacle of life, energized that life with unreflecting abandon into language curiously haphazard and uneven, but at its best a matchless symbol or in- carnation of life itself. Ill The theory of Shakspere's mind which is here put forth seems to find two ob- jections. The sonnets, which follow a contemporary fashion in a set literary form, can hardly be accounted for as the unconscious product of the naive con- templation of life. And in the plays [100] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE there seems to be constant though un- even evidence of design, and in the later plays especially the poet seems to speak as a philosopher, passing conscious ver- dicts upon life. It was this philosophical matter that led Coleridge and his school to see in Shakspere a profound nature. This paper does not intend, of course, to announce the great dramatist as a sort of automaton, who had no sense of the quality or purport of his work. In the sonnets and the early plays Shakspere is artificially self-conscious. But he is the most uneven of great writers; even in his artificial moments he is capable of naive utterance, of that penetrating truth which is his characteristic; on the other hand, in his noblest passages of this sort he sometimes indulges in palpable tricks of style or artifice of idea. Without raising the mooted questions of the son- nets, we can agree with those many [101] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE critics who have found in them some of Shakspere's happiest phrases; whatever else they are, they are born of a nature in love with fine speech. If we study the style of the sonnets at all, however, f it is only fair to reckon with the style of all of them — not simply to dwell upon the most felicitous, in the habit of the Shaksperian fanatics. At least, it is only fair to reckon with them all if we are to use them as indications of the poet's mind. The series has had its fame from a bare dozen of really splendid sonnets, much helped by the dramatic story which seems to be their back- ground, and which may or may not be autobiography. It is hard not to think that the noblest of these poems are direct reflections of life; yet it does not follow that the whole story is. On the con- trary, there are rather more sonnets of an artificiality so great as to raise the [102] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE doubt whether the poet knew anything of love at aU. Did the imagination that fashioned the Dark Lady, or uttered the terrible curse of lust, or the superb praise of friendship and of the "marriage of true minds," equally indulge in chop- logic? The examples are familiar. To choose one — "If I love thee, my loss is my love's gain, And losing her, my friend hath found that loss; Both find each other, and I lose both twain, And both for my sake lay on me this cross. But here's the joy; my friend and I are one; Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone." Or the whole of the following sonnet, with its amazing artifice — "When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, For all the day they view things unrespected; But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee. And darkly bright are bright in dark directed. Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright. How would thy shadow's form form happy show [103] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE To the clear day with thy much clearer light. When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so! How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made By looking on thee in the living day, When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay! All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me." If this sort of writing indicates anything of the writer's mind, it tells us that he was practising the devices of style with great ingenuity. The human experience contained in the poem, however, is hardly what his admirers would like to call Shaksperian. Nor does it aid them greatly to say that here Shakspere was learning his craft. What craft .^ The use of language .f^ Perhaps, — though he used language less and less often in this fashion. But how is this sort of hair- splitting a training for his knowledge of life.f^ What is the connection between [104 ] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE these lines and Hamlet's words with Horatio — "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making? "Horatio. Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness. "Hamlet. 'Tis e'en so: the hand of Httle employment hath the daintier sense." Or if the sonnets and early plays of Shakspere were a training for his art, how comes it that even in the mature plays he slips into unfinished and un- distinguished passages? It is usual to say that in the later work his thought overbalanced his speech, at times to the confusion of both; but it would be easier to suppose that throughout his life his moments of energetic vision alternated with very ordinary states of conscious- ness, and that he had little sense of the value of one condition over the other. The sonnets clearly echo older plots and [105] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE older sonnet series. It is impossible to prove them autobiographical as a whole. Yet it is just as difficult to deny the similitude of personal experience in the great sonnets. Shakspere followed the sonnet fashion, as he followed other fashions, doing only what others had done, but doing it better, with more energy; and in the process he lights up unexpected and amazing areas of truth. To say that in his later plays the thought overbalances the language, is to raise the main question as to whether Shakspere was a thinker at all. Accord- ing to the theory of his mind here ad- vanced, he was not. Except for his characteristic moments in which he flashes life into words, he is curiously conventional and timid. Though he fol- lowed the daring Marlowe and was the contemporary of Bacon, he never ven- tured out of the most conservative, even [106] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE non-committal, attitudes toward religion and learning and the established profes- sions. The endings of many of his plays and the initial circumstances of others, completely ignore the logic of the plot and of the characters; he is content that the scene should open and close upon artificial situations, but while the story is in motion he vitalizes it with his naive energy. If he is the greatest of world-dramatists, is he not also the play- wright who has taught least to posterity .^^ He did with supreme excellence what had been done before him, but added practically nothing to the craft of the theatre; the modern dramatist goes to other men for technical instruction. If Shakspere was a thinker, he must have accepted the conclusions of his own wisdom; if he did not know when he uttered wisdom, he was hardly a thinker. It is easier to take the latter conclusion, [107] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE though the admiring school have implied that Shakspere knew his own profundity, but carried the secret to his grave. The difficulty with that explanation is that it makes Shakspere practically omnis- cient. The Baconian heresy and other attempts to explain him, have been attempts to explain the author that Coleridge and the Germans found in the plays. Foolish as is the doctrine that Bacon could write and produce these dramas and have the secret kept for two centuries, it is really wiser than the belief that Shakspere could have been consciously omniscient, and yet keep the secret to himself — ^nay, even write a great many shallow things to hide the fact. To be sure, almost every phase of earthly life is glanced at in the plays. Yet this does not prove that Shakspere thought about any of them; he merely observed them. For example, the fa- [108] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE vorite memory of our first acquaintance with political economy is that question about what sort of society we would establish if cast upon a desert island. In The Tempest, when the King of Naples and his courtiers find themselves on what they think is a deserted island, they argue this very question. Says Gonzalo, "Had I plantation of this very isle, my lord — I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty. And use of service, none; contract, succession. Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor; treason, felony. Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine. Would I not have; but nature should bring forth. Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance. To feed my innocent people." [109] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE Now are we to believe that Shakspere here anticipates and pokes fun at the specula- tions of political economy, or that having this group of men upon a desert island he perceives the possibilities of the spec- ulation, and puts into Gonzalo's mouth a translation of words used with another reference by Montaigne? So with those curious coincidences which are strewn through the dramas. The poet has a trick — say some critics — of putting into the first words of the leading persons a clue to their characters. When Romeo says, "Is the day then so young," we are to see in him the embodi- ment of youth. It is easy enough to find marvels of this sort in Shakspere — perhaps in every poet. The themes of this same play of Romeo and Juliet may be said to be the conflict of Youth with Age — Age having forgotten what young love is like; and also the conflict of [110] THE MIND OF SHAKSPEEE Love with Hate — Hate being expressed in the feud, which in turn is incarnate in Tybalt. It is easy enough for us to think of the story in these terms, but did Shakspere so think of it while writing it? and did he summarize the themes intentionally in a passage at the end of Act I? Capulet speaks first, doubtless representing Age — "Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet, For you and I are past our dancing days: How long is't now since last yourself and I Were in a mask? Second Capulet. By'r lady, thirty years. Cap. What, man! 'tis not so much, 'tis not so much: 'Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio, Come pentecost as quickly as it will. Some five and twenty years : and then we masked. Sec. Cap. 'Tis more, 'tis more: his son is elder, sir; His son is thirty. Cap. Will you tell me that.? His son was but a ward two years ago." (Ill] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE Immediately Romeo speaks, representing Youth and Love — "What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand Of yonder knight? Serving-man. I kaow not, sir. Rom. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear; Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows. As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand. And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. Did my heart love till now.^* forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night." Now enters Tybalt, who personifies the last theme, Hate — "This, by his voice, should be a Montague. Fetch me my rapier, boy." It makes all the difference whether we believe that Shakspere consciously in- serted these designs or patterns in his work, or that they are there because they [1121 THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE are in life, and the poet, reflecting life, mirrored more than he knew. The chan- son d'aube and the aubade are in old French literature, but Shakspere never found them there; he found them, where the old French poets found them, in a dramatic situation of real life. Hamlet was the victim of heredity; the conflict of the vacillating mother and of the downright father was in him; yet Shak- spere only perceived in life what we have perceived there also and have learned to call heredity. When Macbeth says that he has murdered sleep, and we trace through the play the remorseful sleeplessness which finally drives Lady Macbeth to suicide, we may call Shak- spere a criminal psychologist if we choose, but he only observed what we have classified. He saw that we are such stuff as dreams are made of, but he probably would not have agreed with [113] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE Bishop Berkeley. These designs in Shak- spere are true and recognizable, but they are coincidences, like the Dipper in the heavens ; we cannot think that a supreme intelligence marshalled planets and stars to illustrate a kitchen utensil. IV This view of Shakspere may seem to belittle him, as reducing his work to the improvisations of a child. The kingdom of heaven was once thought to be for aristocracy of intellect, and some of us think as much of the kingdom of poetry; but there is good authority for believing that they are both open to the imagina- tive, to those who can be unconscious of self as little children. Great intellect alone cannot force its way in, and it is the part of intelligence to recognize that fact. There is, of course, no reason [114] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE why great intellect and great poetic faculty — the ability to reason and the ability to see and feel and speak — should not meet in the same person. They did so meet in Sophocles and in Euripides. But it seems that they did not so meet in Shakspere, and perhaps it is only a wilful praise of the poet of our own tongue that would call him, on the whole, the equal of the Greek dramatists. If we make an intelligent distinction, however, between logical or analytical power and the poetic gift, then this theory of Shakspere's naive mind is not without hope for a richer conception of the nature of poetry. Shakspere's crit- ics have measured themselves in their measure of him. Milton, who prayed that his own lips might be touched with fire from off the sacred altar, beheld in the dramatist a secular, somewhat sec- ondary, prophet of the same ineffable [115] THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE inspiration. Coleridge, philosopher and dreamer, never a man of action, saw in Shakspere a Prospero, a magician, con- trolling the ends of life by study and fore- thought. Arnold, the self-reliant, some- what estranged servant of culture, ex- pecting or desiring from men neither comprehension nor contact, imaged the poet in the unattainable, unguessed-at height. And if with another attitude we perceive in the mind of Shakspere only the most fortunate occurrence of quali- ties common to all men — only the eye to see, the heart to feel, the tongue to speak, and the absence of that over- caution which ceases to live when it stops to think — may it not be that our age, with all its sophistication, conscious- ly aspires to the immediateness and the simplicity of life, and to that poetry which is not the accomplishment but the essence of life.^^ [116] MAGIC AND WONDER IN LITERATURE MAGIC AND WONDER IN LITERATURE WIDELY as we all differ in know- ledge and in opinions, one general account of life we are supposed as edu- cated men to accept. We are supposed to agree that we live in a universe of order; that every effect, though to us un- explained, has proceeded from a cause, and that the same causes operate faith- fully at all times. If it is the out- ward world that engages us, we are sup- posed to perceive that the stars which seem to wander, nevertheless are true to their courses; that no wind bloweth where it listeth, for we do know whence [119] MAGIC AND WONDER it comes and whither it goes; that the flood and the earthquake, once monsters of caprice, are now phenomena of obedi- ence; that even chance has its law. If we look inward upon our reason, our emo- tions, our instincts, we are supposed to see that the mind, like other instruments, can be controlled, and that its relation to the outer world is so much the same in all men that we can speak of colors or of sounds, can frame a syllogism, express a desire, distinguish between the abstract and the concrete, and be understood. Finally, if our concern is with morals, we are supposed to conclude that since ideas and emotions are an established cur- rency among men, personality must be something constant and reliable. Know- ing a man's mind and his character, we can predict that in a given situa- tion he will think thus and behave so and so ; and conversely, from the opinions [120] IN LITERATURE uttered or the conduct adopted in a given situation, we can infer the character of a stranger. It seems that law of one kind or another is the condition on which we live, and that we illustrate as superb a logic as do the planets above us. Whether or not there are dissenters from this account of the universe, at least we may fairly say that this account is the basis of most thinking to-day. It is accepted, of course, with humility. Even within the limits of our powers, we have as yet gained far less con- trol of experience than our intellectual self-respect demands. We still blunder through life as though we did not know that the great game must be played ac- cording to the rules. But at least we admit that there are rules, and that when man has learned them, he will find the game much easier and happier to play. Having made this admission, how- [121] MAGIC AND WONDER ever, it is to be feared that we forget our humility and become self-satisfied. This orderly definition of the universe, we reflect, is something of an achievement, and we assume that it is peculiarly our own. The Greeks, to be sure, and a few others, seem to have had the idea, but this only shows, as we say, how modern the Greeks were. Primitive man in general, we are quite certain, preferred mystery to order, refused to recognize the most obvious causes, and rarely did a thing directly if by indirection he could get it done more awkwardly. Here again we are somewhat checked when the archaeologist comes upon some primitive implement strangely effective — that is, strangely like our imple- ments, — or discovers on forgotten cave- walls drawings which indicate a remark- able eye for things as they still are. Yet the mass impression remains, that [ 122 ] IN LITERATURE this life was once a matter of chance or luck, and experience was unforeseeable; that the race-mind cleared very slowly; and that we are the first to imagine a universe of complete and unalterable law. Our complacent attitude toward prim- itive man has of late been fostered by certain gifted classical scholars, chief among them Professor Gilbert Murray and Miss Jane Harrison, who with the help of anthropology have recreated that dim world which lay behind Greek letters. The beautiful logic by which these scholars reach their results in- creases our conceit that reason is a modern instrument, while the world they picture, a hopeless tangle of religion and superstition, of necromancy and the arts, reassures us as to what we have risen from. Against that sombre background Homer, once thought primitive, seems [1^3] MAGIC AND WONDER recent and enlightened. Professor J. A. K. Thompson, in his Studies in the Odys- sey, pubHshed in 1914, provides us with numerous examples. The Homeric epics are full of what are called "expurgations" of earlier legend. Those stories of bodily transformation which Ovid gathered up as fairy tales in his Metamorphoses, the primitive Greek took quite literally; but since the Homeric way of seeing life would not countenance this make-be- lieve, the transformations were "ex- purgated" by being turned into similes. When we read in the Odyssey, "So spake she and departed, the grey-eyed Athena and like an eagle of the sea she flew away," we surmise that in an older story the goddess turned herself into the sea- eagle. The Homeric conscience is re- luctant to transmit this account of the outer world; the most that can be con- ceded is a resemblance between Athena [ 124 ] IN LITERATURE and the sea-eagle. Sometimes, it must be confessed, the concession is more starthng than the original transforma- tion. When Hera and Athena came to the plains of Troy to aid the Greeks, we are told that "the goddesses went their way" into battle ''with step like unto turtle-doves." The explanation is that as attendants on Zeus, the goddesses had originally been imagined in the form of his sacred doves. The most helpful example, however, of the Homeric ex- purgation is the story of Dolon, in the tenth book of the Iliad, When Dolon set out to spy on the Greeks, he "cast on his shoulders his crooked bow, and put on thereover the skin of a grey wolf, and on his head a helm of ferret-skin, and took a sharp javelin, and went on his way to the ships." In the Iliad that grey wolf-skin is only a garment. But in the Rhesus of Euripides, which appears [125] MAGIC AND WONDER to follow the earlier legends, Dolon ex- plains his device to the chorus: "Over my back a wolf -skin will I draw, And the brute's gaping jaws shall frame my head: Its forefeet will I fasten to my hands, Its legs to mine; the wolf's four-footed gait I'll mimic, baffling so our enemies, While near the trench and pale of ships I am; But whenso to a lone spot come my feet, Two-footed will I walk." Here the wolf-skin is a disguise, which, though not in itself magical, carries us nearer to that primitive age when stealthy men, for their own purposes, changed into were- wolves, and when every wild beast, therefore, implied a fearful pos- sibility that it was a man transformed. From such illuminating glimpses into the early world we make the con- clusion that primitive man dwelt in mystery, that he was fond of make- believe, that he had a highly developed [126] IN LITERATURE sense of magic — in other words, that he looked for dehghtful shortcuts and es- capes from the facts of Hfe, whereas we look for the law which explains and con- trols the facts. But the truth probably is that primitive man had no sense of magic whatever; when he busied himself with his incantations and his hocus-pocus, he probably had a quite modern sense of cause and effect. To us he seems a magician, because his method of getting at the cause or at the effect was not ours ; but he had no measure by which to judge himself. He consulted the medi- cine-man as we consult the doctor, and his faith was no more shaken than ours is by a failure to cure. It is the con- ception of magic, not the conception of cause and effect, which has grown with time and enlightenment. Now, and only now, can we realize how much of prim- itive science was really magic; but in the [127] MAGIC AND WONDER essential desire to have a science — that is, to control and ameliorate our destiny by calculated means, it is not clear that we differ from our ultimate ancestors. In one respect, however, we ought to differ from them. If time has provided us with a criticism of magic, of illegitimate and ineffective attempts at power, it should have taught us also to admire what is lawful, effective, and true. If primitive literature, recording an in- comprehensible world, yearned after mag- ic, our records, of a world understood, should be full of wonder — that is, full of idealizing joy in the truth and in the beauty before our eyes. Time should have distinguished us so from earlier man, because the ability to wonder comes late. To be sure, the Rousseau senti- mentalists imagined the savage as con- templating the heavens and the earth beneath with astonishment and awe, and [128] IN LITERATURE they drew substance for their fancy from the supposed exaltation of spirit with which young children make their ac- quaintance with this planet. But noth- ing in our observation of children or in the anthropologist's observation of prim- itive men, would allow much truth in this old doctrine; the very contrary seems to be the fact — that only the sophisticated can appreciate the miracles that are actually before our eyes. Chil- dren take their world for granted; when we disclose some amazement at life, some awe of facts, it is a sign that we are no longer children. Moreover, we wonder only at what lies on the border of our experience; what is totally beyond us we still take for granted. The unclothed savage of Borneo is brought to the settle- ments and treated to a ride in a motor- car. Knowing nothing of such things, he is neither surprised nor interested, [ 129 ] MAGIC AND WONDER but lets the car, like gravitation, do its work. But he gapes for hours at a steel hammer or a serviceable saw. Our pity, then, for primitive man's de- fective science, hardly covers the situa- tion. Surely we can forgive the first comers for taking hold by the wrong handles; we still revise our methods- But what if we, who think of the universe as a realm of law, feel toward it no great wonder, not even a hearty approval, but still yearn after a magic, after an escape of some kind from the inexorable logic of life; what if we, who know the ma- jestic fidelity wherewith nature keeps her elements true to themselves, still desire, in the most spiritual things, an outworn alchemy! I wish to raise the question whether the literature even of modern times, far from expressing won- der, does not express a certain unwilling- ness to face the world we know; whether [.130 ] IN LITERATURE it does not display a tendency to make use — a more subtle use — of those prim- itive transformations which Homer re- jected; whether it does not show a per- verse delight in substituting the miracu- lous for the normal — preferring, that is, to give such an account of the outer and inner world as we know to be false, in- stead of the account which we know to be true. I ask your attention, then, to the in- consistency between our faith that the universe is orderly and wonderful, and our pleasure in that literature which represents life as miraculous and magical —between, that is, our conviction that miracles are the measure of wonder, and our disposition to treat them as the products of magic. The difference is great. If we love the poetry of life, there is a sense in which we cannot get along without miracles; without them as [131] MAGIC AND WONDER a language to talk with, we cannot ex- press that profound wonder at common facts which is the sign of enlightened manhood. For this reason we are un- willing to give up fairy stories or the legend of Santa Claus, until some other language is provided for dreams and as- pirations. We boldly make use of mir- acles to express or interpret life. But to account for life by miracles is stupid and unnecessary. Plutarch says that on the farm of Pericles a ram was found having a single horn. Lampon the soothsayer declared that Pericles, by this omen, would become sole ruler in Athens. But an annoying person named Anaxa- goras split the ram's skull in two, and showed that by a peculiar formation the horn had to grow single. So Anaxagoras confuted the soothsayer. But later Peri- cles did become ruler, and the sooth- sayer recovered his authority. Plutarch's [132] IN LITERATURE comment is that they were both right, for one explained how the horn grew, and the other explained what it meant — just as, when the dinner-bell rings, we know how the sound is produced, and we know what it means. It would be stupid, however — though I believe some philosophers have been guilty — ^to con- fuse the interpretation with the cause, to say it is the significance of the dinner- bell that is ringing it. The quarrel with the miraculous in literature, therefore, is only with the miraculous when used as magic — as a wilful substitute for that continuity of cause and effect which out- side of literature we believe in. II Of this kind of magic it is easy to find illustrations in medieval literature. Cer- tain well-known French lays of the [133] MAGIC AND WONDER twelfth or thirteenth century picture just such an irresponsible, accidental world as we usually ascribe to primitive man. In one story a fair lady is shut up in a tower, that she may not see her lover. As she is bemoaning her fate, a mag- nificent eagle flies through the narrow window, and lighting on the chamber floor, turns into a handsome young man, her persevering suitor. In another story a fair lady is imprisoned, and her true knight, instead of coming himself in a magic disguise, sends to her a wonderful swan, which flies back and forth between the two, carrying always a letter beneath his plumage. In another story a man confides to his wife that during his fre- quent absences from home he turns him- self into a were-wolf, and she straight- way contrives that the next time he shall not resume his human form. Here are such transformations as we glanced at in [134] IN LITERATURE pre-Homeric legend, but no attempt at the Homeric expurgation is here, unless the swan in the second story be such. Far from desiring any expurgation, the medieval audience may have been glad enough that literature should not give an accurate account of their life. They may have liked mystery for its own sake, as there is little reason to think primitive man ever did. Their faculty of wonder, we know, they exercised in contemplating the world to come; if, as we suspect, they rejoiced in this present life also with an almost renais- sance paganism, at least they rejoiced surreptitiously. It is incredible that they did not recognize as magic such episodes as we have just summarized; and if this material was as frankly magical to them as it now seems to us, it is a fact of some importance that the middle ages left us few pictures of the world as it was [135] MAGIC AND WONDER actually seen. We are sometimes told that in those unlucky centuries the Church imposed miracles and legends on secular ignorance. Whether or not those centuries were unlucky, a reading of these secular stories suggests wonder that more miracles and legends were not imposed on the Church. But however the twelfth century may have understood its literature, there is little doubt that the fourteenth century liked a certain class of stories which must have been recognized as false to experience. I refer to those tales of reckless or scandalous love — merry tales, as the Elizabethan translators would call them — such as Boccaccio included in a part of his famous collection. Their real immorality is not often observed, nor is it obvious in any single story; but when one reflects on all such stories as a class, whether in the Decameron or in other [136] IN LITERATURE collections, the amazing thing is that though they picture villainy, cruelty, and treachery, they picture no effects of vil- lainy, cruelty, or treachery; their es- capades continue to be merry; there is no hint of possible tragedy for man nor of pity for woman. To be sure, the medieval story-teller does chronicle sor- row, and he does treat womanhood sym- pathetically, but never when dealing with such themes as we are thinking of. Pa- tient Griselda is a medieval heroine; Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not. The middle ages, moreover, defined tragedy as a fall from good fortune to bad, and comedy as a rise from bad fortune to good; doubtless God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous, but in His own miraculous way, not in the inherent consequences of a moral choice. It is only by the caprice of her husband that Griselda is rewarded; to a dramatic I . [137] MAGIC AND WONDER imagination she seems not so much re- warded as tortured. In the Renaissance there was a con- ception of virtue which carried with it a behef, if not in a miraculous world in general, at least in a special magic or talisman for the individual. To the Greek mind a virtue was a state, a con- dition between two extremes, and Re- naissance philosophers, piously accepting Aristotle's terms, continued to speak of virtue as a mean. But the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, in which we get the less academic account of life, has a tendency to speak of virtue, not as a quality or condition, but as a thing, to be acquired and possessed. The Renais- sance man is not courageous — ^he has courage; the Renaissance woman is not beautiful — she has beauty. Whether this idea of virtue brought about the belief in a magic or talisman, or whether the [138] IN LITERATURE belief in a magic, helped by Platonic ideas, brought about this conception of virtue, it is at least clear that beauty, courage, friendship, or any other virtue, is often treated in Renaissance literature as a magical instrument, like the en- chanted spears and shields of medieval romance. In the Provencal tradition beauty was such a magic. The story of Aucassin and Nicolete, which though medieval in date is renaissance in spirit, tells how Nicolete passed by the door where a pilgrim lay sick, and the sight of her made him a well man. In the Faerie Queene, when Artegal is jousting with Britomart, he happens to strike off the front of her helmet. Her divine beauty causes his sword to fall powerless, and he is taken captive. In Paradise Lost, when the serpent approaches to tempt Eve, her loveliness renders the devil, for one moment, stupidly good. [139] MAGIC AND WONDER Nicolete and Britomart had a per- manent magic; Eve's beauty was effec- tive only for a moment. Milton was skeptical of magic, not only because he came late in the Renaissance, but be- cause he had an unusual intellect, and a mathematician's sense for order. In him the tradition of virtue as a talisman or miraculous instrument temporarily died out. For example, chivalry had fostered a belief in the magic of being right, the magic on which the institution of judicial combat was founded. He who had the right in any encounter must of necessity prevail. This institution was accepted throughout Spenser's Faerie Queene; un- less they had first committed a sin or fallen into an error, the good champions could not be overcome by the powers of evil. We remember, in passing, how Scott accommodated this large faith to modern skepticism, killing off the Tem- [140] IN LITERATURE plar by a stroke of apoplexy just in time to save Ivanhoe. It might have been thought that Shakspere, who was closer than most men to the realities of experi- ence, would have taken the edge off the miracle, as Scott did; but in As You Like It Orlando, having a just cause, is able to throw the professional wrestler. It remained for Milton to reject magic. To see how far he advanced beyond Spenser, for example, we have but to imagine how Spenser would have written Comus. The heroine of the poem, an- other Britomart, possessing the heaven- ly virtue of chastity, would have been armed against the spells of the sorcerer. All that Milton claims in the end, though he starts out bravely, is that the lady's soul was unharmed, though Comus did enchant her body. This concession is larger than at first might appear, for it contradicts the fine boast of the elder [141] MAGIC AND WONDER brother, who in the poem speaks for Milton— "Against the threats Of malice or of sorcery, or that power Which erruig men call chance, this I hold firm: Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt. Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled. Yet virtue is enthralled, and it is the grace of heaven, not the lady's innocence, that releases her. In Paradise Lost Mil- ton still clings, poet-like, to the magic of beauty, but the magic of being right he gives over, preferring to read man's fortunes dramatically, as the inevitable result of his choice among fixed laws. He holds to the dramatic attitude in Sampson Agonistes, although he does rep- resent the giant's strength as still resid- ing in his hair. This survival of primi- tive magic, however, is only figurative, a symbol of moral power lost and regained. Having given his allegiance to what he [1421 IN LITERATURE believed was a righteous cause, and hav- ing seen that cause collapse, Milton could but agree with Sir Thomas Browne, that a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender. Ill But the career of magic was not over. Milton rejected it, as Homer had done, as Scott did later, and many another in- dividual here and there; but it is not for their rejection of magic that Homer or Milton or Scott has been widely praised. We have advanced far enough to ask that our talismans be of a less obvious kind than satisfied men a thou- sand years ago, but a talisman of some kind we still delight in. Witness three novelists, undeniably great, who are sup- posed to account for life genuinely and [143] MAGIC AND WONDER honestly, yet who show a certain reluc- tance to accept the universe of order, and hark back rather to the old magical transformation. One of these novelists is Fielding. Criticism has stressed his manliness, his insistence on frankness, his ability to deal with a fact. Yet in none of his stories, except Jonathan Wild, does he treat his heroes as though character were really conditioned by causes and consequences. We watch the good and the bad traits in Tom Jones, for the first twenty-five years of his life, and then we are asked to believe that, once hap- pily married, he reformed, and his faults not only disappeared, but obligingly left no traces. In Amelia we must believe the same miracle of Booth, with the added difficulty that he is older when he reforms. In the minor details of both stories, as also in Joseph Andrews^ there [144] IN LITERATURE is a lucky juxtaposition of events to help out the character, which suggests the fairy godmother rather than the observer of this world. No ill effects result from bad choices, and good fortune is not the result of wisdom in the characters, but of benevolence in the author. Fielding has had his reputation from his hearty interest in life and his advance in verisi- militude over his predecessors. Looking back now, however, we see that his interest in life was neither wide nor deep, and that he had no use for the conception of the world as a sequence of inexorable justice; he preferred to think of it as a career where manliness was a suflSicient talisman^ — where the effects of conduct suspended themselves for a possibly err- ing heart, so long as it was stout. To make a similar criticism of Dickens requires some resolution, for he enlists our loyalty as Fielding never does. [ 145] MAGIC AND WONDER Our affection convinces us rightly that whatever the Hterary critic may pro- nounce upon David Copperfield or Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend, the emotions which those books stirred in us were noble. The fact is that Dickens uses the miraculous in both ways at once, as an interpretation and as an account of life. With him the same incident serves to state an ideal and to chronicle a fact. If only his facts had been cor- rect, he would have illustrated the per- fect formula of art. As it is, we fall in love with his ideals; and we learn better than to believe his picture of life. He accounted for experience, and explained it, by the simple magic of goodness. Before a good man, the problems of this world melt away. There is a wide dif- ference between this goodness and the old chivalric magic of being right. If one is right, at least one is in unconscious [146] IN LITERATURE accord with the facts and the laws of the universe. In Dickens the admirable characters are often mistaken, even hor- ribly in the wrong, but they are good, and so long as they remain good they excite admiration and surmount diffi- culties. The illustrations of this magic occur in the most characteristic parts of Dickens' work — in the Christmas Carol, for example. To read this story for its emotions is to learn generosity and brotherly love; but how disconcerting to learn our virtues from a false picture of life! Do misers like Scrooge repent? Can anyone turn over a new leaf and undo all his past? And does such good- ness as Tiny Tim's or Bob Cratchit's really solve the difficulties of their situa- tion as completely as Dickens represents? The pity that we feel for Tiny Tim is a tribute to what is true in the story; the comfortable optimism with which [147] MAGIC AND WONDER we put down the book, is evidence of some trick of magic, some eluding of truth — for looking at men and women around us, we are convinced that such satisfaction is not reached that way. Besides, we have learned to think that people in poverty or misery are still in trouble even though they are brave about it; if we could agree that goodness is a talisman, we might as well give up all social work, on the ground that the worthy poor are as happy as possible, and the unhappy poor must be unworthy. What Dickens has done, then, is to state his ideals in terms of what pretends to be real experience. Our admiration cannot be withheld from the ideals, nor can our intelligence endorse the account of life. If it is a fairy story that we are reading, we ought not to be deceived into mistaking it for history. There is reason to think, however, that Dickens [148] IN LITERATURE did not consider it a disadvantage to be the victim of illusion. At least he portrayed many "illusionists," as a Ger- man scholar called them, who tabulated and classified them all. Mr. Pickwick, Mrs. Nickleby, Swiveller, Tom Pinch, David Copperfield, and of course Mr. Micawber, are among the illusionists. The French critic Taine made the same point by saying that many characters in Dickens have a touch of insanity. In the world as Dickens represents it, these illusioned characters get on very well, but in the real world they come to grief. Of such disillusion Thackeray is the kindliest example. At least he repre- sents a partial reaction from the magic of goodness; he can no longer believe in it, but he wishes with all his heart he could. What really happens to absolute good- ness in this world is portrayed, not in Bob Cratchit, nor in David Copperfield, [149] MAGIC AND WONDER but in Colonel Newcome. With magic Thackeray is convinced, we might say, that the novel should have nothing to do, yet he devotes his art to no religion of wonder. Because he has so gently and persuasively corrected Dickens' picture of life, at the same time endorsing, as it were, his ideals, Thackeray has had much reputation for wisdom and modern- ness. Yet in the cardinal emotions of wonder and delight he is not modern at all; the logic of character, the unalter- able order, whereby Colonel Newcome suffered for his mistakes, however excel- lent his motives — this saddens Thack- eray, even though he is in honor bound to present it. For an ordered universe he has no love, nor any passion for the career of the mind. Perhaps it is only his sentimentality that hides from us the materialism in his picture of life — the implication that the good are victims of [150] IN LITERATURE inevitable laws; whereas they are really victims of their own ignorance. The laws of human nature, if Colonel New- come were only wise enough to make them the instruments of happiness, would seem reliable, to wonder at, rather than inexorable, to fear. Of stories and plays written in our own time it is enough to say that few of them show any persuasion that there is consequence in the world. If you open any of the numerous manuals which tell you how to write fiction, you may read that actions should be mo- tivated, that there should be reasons why things happen — as though cause and effect were subdivisions of the literary art. Few of our contemporary writers seem to practise this instruction, and still fewer of their readers know whether they practise it or not. We have with us still, of course, special schools of [151] MAGIC AND WONDER fiction, which insist on a precise or a continuous or an unselected rendering of experience — reaHstic and naturahstic schools; and individual masters of real- ism or naturalism from time to time captivate many readers. But even these individual successes, added together, seem to make no total impression on the read- ing world. In contemporary fiction char- acters slough off the past, serpent-like, and emerge brighter than ever; or they change their nature in a twinkling; and it seems that few readers seriously pro- test against the miracle. Our supposed faith in the logic of personality, our faith that a given character will act in a certain way, our faith especially that a | man's conduct or occupation influences his character, that he is marked by what he does — all this we seem to have sur- rendered, substituting in its place a ^j misty benevolence, a magic of the Dick- [ 152 ] i IN LITERATURE ens type, a persuasion that any char- acter, viewed sympathetically, will seem, or will actually become, as admirable as any other character. One illustration may be found in the stories of the underworld, where the professional criminal or wrongdoer is shown in the final paradox to be essen- tially righteous and permanently re- formed. We are convinced, of course, that to be a professional crook will in the end lead to some moral deterioration. We read with pleasure, however, these fables which keep the soul of the crook unspotted from his own conduct. Our pleasure is based on a fine humaneness, on the undoubted fact that criminals are largely manufactured or at least en- couraged by circumstances, and that few of them were originally bad at heart. But this doctrine, excellent as a vantage- point from which to enter upon social [153] MAGIC AND WONDER responsibility and rescue, has been stretched in our fiction until it misrepre- sents the consequences of wrongdoing, and even diminishes, strangely enough, that sense of social responsibility from which it sprang. We felt to blame for letting our fellow-man become a crimi- nal, but after the story or the play has demonstrated how excellent morally the criminal is, we feel less guilty. In such tales, however, there is always an in- consistency; the hero is singled out for admiration, but his comrades in guilt are saved by no miracle — so much is conceded to our general knowledge of J the facts. I Another illustration may be drawn from a very different region of interest, from those stories or plays, like The Passing of the Third Floor Back, or The Servant in the House, which show the miraculous influence of a perfect char- [154] IN LITERATURE acter. In such fiction a stranger is represented as entering a community, a group of people formed and settled, and by the magic of his presence transmuting them into quite different persons. This kind of story must express some precious ideal, or it would not be so tenderly popular; but as a picture of life it is both incorrect and immoral, for it both contradicts our experience and relieves us — ^provided we can entertain the stran- ger — of responsibility for our conduct. To be sure, the public thinks this type of story far from immoral — ^rather a religious parable, for does not the author suggest that the stranger is Christ .^^ And does not that suggestion explain the miracles.^ But here we see how an inclination to magic befuddles our ordi- nary intelligence. Because the stranger converts everybody he meets, we think he is Christ-like, forgetting that the [155] MAGIC AND WONDER New Testament gives no such account of Christ. IV Perhaps the contrast has been in- dicated sufficiently between the universe of law which we are supposed to believe in, and the world of magic which we like to read about. What does this in- consistency mean? Perhaps it is rash to venture on so large a question in so short a space, but in this balancing of magic against wonder a conviction steals on one that the love of magic, though it may be stupid, indicates something far higher than stupidity. The connota- tions of the words themselves convince us. Magic suggests power, however ob- tained, whereas wonder suggests no pow- er at all. Is there such merit in en- lightenment if one is to be, after all, [156] IN LITERATURE only an enlightened bystander? The magician at least wanted control of experience — and so do we ! Magic sought to engage the help of alien forces, foreign gods, in the problems of this world; we, believing that no gods are alien to our universe, ought logically to make the remotest force effective in our daily aspirations; we cannot stop with a passive wonder. Or if we do, our sym- pathies, and the sympathy of our fel- lows, will return to magic, which with all its defects dreamt of power. When we consider how many noble intellects have tried in vain to take from the race its love of magic, and to teach it instead the habit of wonder, the long failure can be explained, I think, by the fact that the ideal of wonder has rarely included the ideal of control, without which we refuse to be fascinated. This is true of the philosophers, who though MAGIC AND WONDER they have sought to correct all hap- hazard and irresponsible impressions of the universe, yet have so far failed, in that they have not greatly disturbed man's love of magical stories. Some of them, Francis Bacon, for example, have opened up visions of scientific control more magical than magic itself; we shall owe it to them eventually that our magic and our wonder have become identical. But most philosophers have been content to attack the ignorance of magic without satisfying its aspiration; and the wonder which they would substitute, though nobly imaginative, has stopped short of that power men yearn for. Lucretius serves for example, whose poem on the Nature of Things sought to take away our fear of death by removing our faith in immortality — or, as he would say, our superstition. This intended service has not roused the gratitude of mankind. [158] IN LITERATURE What stirs us in the poem is the vision of an ordered world, and an impassioned rebuke that the vision has not stirred us before. To feed our sense of wonder we have had recourse to fairy tales; but, says the poet, *'Look up at the bright and unsullied hue of heaven, and the stars which it holds within it, wan- dering about, and the moon and the sun's light of dazzling brilliancy; if all these things were now for the first time suddenly presented to mortals, what could have been named that would be more marvelous?" Here is an escape from ignorance, if you please, a sense of wonder in the presence of the actual universe; but when we have felt this wonder, what next? Having got rid of our superstitions, shall we then be ready to die? The same criticism can be made of \ Milton, the one English poet comparable [159] MAGIC AND WONDER with Lucretius in loftiness and fervor. His sense of reality, as we saw, kept him from believing in magic; his special gift, it seems, was for wonder on an infinite scale. But he stops with wonder; he would not have mankind seek knowledge for the magic purpose of control. When Adam voices his suspicion that the sun, the moon, and the stars, are not circling the earth, as they appear to be doing, for the sole uneconomic purpose of fur- nishing light for one man and his wife, Raphael replies with a superb summary of both the Ptolemaic and the Coper- nican theories, but he advises Adam not to bother his head with either hypothesis, nor to prosecute any scientific inquiry. The great Architect, he says, "Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge His secrets to be scann'd by them who ought Rather admire. . . . Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, Leave them to God above, Him serve and fear." [160] IN LITERATURE That Milton, himself pre-eminently a thinker and a student, should have repre- sented the powers of good as opposed to enquiry, has greatly puzzled his ad- mirers. We should like to find an argu- ment on the other side in Adam's reply to the angel, "To know That which before us lies in daily life Is the prime wisdom." We should like to translate this speech into a praise of practical science, of enquiry which has for object the control of one's destiny. But there is nothing in the context to aid this interpretation. If the philosophers have not lured us to a reasonable view of life, the satirists have not driven us to it. Wherever satire has dealt with man's ignorance, it has attacked magic in some form. Even magic-lovers themselves, as to some ex- [161] MAGIC AND WONDER tent Fielding and Thackeray were, have appealed to the inexorable order when they wrote satirically, as in Jonathan Wild and Barry Lyndon, The stock in trade of George Bernard Shaw today is our persisting trust in magic formulas. The substance of his art is but to prick that bubble. In Androcles and the Lion, for example, he gives a reading of Chris- tian martyrdom in what professes to be the unchanging law of character; his audience wonder why he should have\ demonstrated the obvious, and they re- mark as they go home that he is losing his old sparkle. But they have applauded with spontaneous and unembarrassed delight that moment in the play where the lion refuses to eat Androcles — which proves, I suppose, that they have fallen into Shaw's trap. Yet with all this clever exposing of our inconsistencies, the satirist gives us no vision of what [162] IN LITERATURE life would be like, were we to make in- telligent use of the laws we profess to believe in. Here and there, however, poets have given us glimpses of the vision. Such a poet is Shelley. We do not usually praise him for a sense of fact. Yet few men have tried so honestly to give their enthusiasms to the proper objects, or have contemplated with such genuine rapture the control over experience which a knowledge of nature's order should give. His education in science was am- ateurish and fragmentary, but no special- ist conceives more clearly or more rap- turously the magic possibilities of exact knowledge. For Shelley, science was to be the key to nature's secrets, and those secrets, once known, were to subject nature to man. The fullest expression of this faith is in Prometheus Unbound, the last act of which, in praise of what [163] MAGIC AND WONDER may be called scientific living, might be read as a commentary on The Newcomes, "Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, Whose nature is its own divine control. Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea; Familiar acts are beautiful through love; Labor, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove Sport hke tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be! AU things confess man's strength — ^Through the cold mass Of marble and of color his dreams pass; Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their children wear; Language is a perpetual Orphic song. Which rules with Dsedal harmony a throng Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were. The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep Gives up her stars, and Uke a flock of sheep They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roU on! The tempest is his steed, he strides the air; And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare. Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none. [164] IN LITERATURE Such a poet, to name a second, is Emerson. He, also, is not famous for any grasp on reality. His fame, however, does him injustice. He was indeed a mystic, and much of his teaching seems to belittle the facts of life, the terms on which we move in this present world. But he did not belittle facts, nor under- value whatever is actual. There is no real power, he taught, which is not based on nature, and the beginning of power is the belief that things go not by luck, but by law. Even when the mystic in him was uppermost, he often meant in a nobly practical way what we have taken as an extravagance of idealism. "Hitch your wagon to a star." We translate "aim high" — ^but that was not his meaning. He meant that we should be scientific, if you choose — ^that having learned to wonder at the laws and forces of the universe, we should [165] MAGIC AND WONDER m then turn the laws to our advantage and should ourselves control the forces. These are his words: "I admire the skill which, on the seashore, makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages the assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron. Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star." Here is an invitation to a greater power than magic, and here, I think, is a fore- taste of what poetry may be. Lucretius stood in awe before the universe, but he stood aloof; Shelley and Emerson, mod- ern of the moderns, beheld man entering into control of a vaster universe than the Roman poet merely contemplated. When literature expresses the miracle of that control, our common life will be [1661 IN LITERATURE transfigured in wonder, our dreams will lie, not in the impossible, but in the path of our happy destiny, and the gods will walk with us. THE END 311-77-9 CONGRESS