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A LOVER OF THE CIL\IR 
 
A LOVER OF THE CHAIR 
 
 BY 
 
 SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 MDCCCCXIX 
 

 COPYRIGHT' I 9 I 9 
 BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 THE'PLIMPTON'PBESS 
 NOEWOOD-MASS'U'S'A 
 
 ©CI.A559177 
 
 OEC 111919 
 
To 
 PROSSER HALL FRYE 
 
PREFACE 
 
 WHAT I have tried to treat with consistent 
 seriousness in these essays is the point of view 
 of the central figure, whose outlook was intended to 
 give to the series some measure of continuity and 
 singleness of purpose. A fling at the spirit of one's 
 age is not to be indulged in lightly, though it may, I 
 hope, be undertaken with good humor. That, at all 
 events, was the point of view of the Lover of the 
 
 Chair. 
 
 S. B. G. 
 
 June 2S, igig 
 
 vii 
 
CONTENTS 
 PART ONE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. A Lover of the Chair i 
 
 II. Chair and Saddle 28 
 
 III. A Liberal Experience 43 
 
 IV. A Modern Paradox 90 
 
 V. In Pursuit of the Arts 142 
 
 I. CUDGELS and COMMON SENSE . . 1 43 
 II. SENSE AND THE SOUL . . . .153 
 
 III. ART AND THE REASONERS . . . 1 67 
 
 IV. MADAME's TASTE 1 79 
 
 PART TWO 
 
 I. Poor Richard 209 
 
 II. The Awkward Age 232 
 
 III. PSEUDODOXIA EpIDEMICA 255 
 
 IV. In Quest of the Center 272 
 
 IX 
 
A LOVER OF THE CHAIR 
 
A Lover of the Chair 
 
 I 
 
 A LOVER OF THE CHAIR 
 
 ONCE over the border of a stormy youth — the 
 wrong border, alas, he was none the less in- 
 clined to say — he felt a curious serenity of spirit, 
 which gave him for a brief searching birthday a dis- 
 turbing qualm. It came over him suddenly that his 
 present restful content was the sign of approaching 
 age. He was concerned that he was not more con- 
 cerned about certain losses that those storms had 
 involved him in — certain shores that they had 
 beaten him back from. They had driven him far 
 enough about, sometimes into ports he had little 
 pride in remembering. But he was out of it now, 
 he told himself. His youth was over, he was as he 
 was, and there was nothing for it but to take him- 
 self so. He could settle back upon an ironic survey 
 of life and find a pleasant spice in his aloof con- 
 tentment. 
 
 Whatever the quality of his aloofness, his irony 
 was real enough to flash back upon himself; and 
 presently he found it smiling with the perception that 
 his losses were being accorded more than a scornful 
 hearing, and being dismissed with but a feminine no. 
 The occasional flashes of old moods that now after 
 a long period came back upon him were making him 
 
2 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 linger over the sense that there were starry parts of 
 the common life that had slipped by him and left 
 him untouched. He had the spirit, however, to 
 combat his regrets, and he settled back not uncom- 
 fortably upon the serenity of his new-found leisure. 
 
 He had the materials for contentment. There 
 were inbred habits of simplicity, and the thrill of 
 adventure in expenditure that are essential to wring- 
 ing luxury from any income, and can wring it from 
 any; and a taste that could find its pleasure in 
 lining his study with books and brooding among 
 them buried in one and at arm's length from the rest. 
 He had toned his library with the deep oranges and 
 browns that bound his present to certain serene 
 years of his childhood and overleaped the interval 
 of troubled youth. There was enough of an income 
 to give him travel when he cared for it. There was, 
 perhaps above all, the rich heritage of an improvi- 
 dent family — an unconcern for a possible rainy 
 day. Add to all this a habit of detachment that 
 left him free to meet the present humor for humor 
 and his equipment for content was reasonably com- 
 plete. 
 
 He had indeed some mental reservations as to 
 this humor of his. He knew that it had little out- 
 ward wit to match the subtlety of his inner percep- 
 tions of the foibles and inconsistencies of his own 
 and others' dancing to the spasmodic tune of life. 
 And he saw in this lack of explicit wit the explana- 
 tion of a characteristic of his — the fewness and in- 
 tensity of his friendships. For with perhaps less 
 than the normal ability to flash out the quality of 
 his perceptions, he could reveal himself only to the 
 
A Lover of the Chair 3 
 
 rare and old acquaintances whose outlook was 
 enough like his own to make a word or an allusion 
 carry the quality of his thought. With more ex- 
 pressiveness he could have won a more universal 
 response, and would have been no doubt content with 
 less delicately appreciative ears. As it was, he put 
 a value upon the friends he had that was the greater 
 for their necessarily deeper thrust. 
 
 It was the quality of his humor, however, that 
 it could be amused at his own foibles, and thus, as 
 he could smile to observe, it was rarely likely to be 
 graveled for matter. It served, at least, its inner 
 purpose with him in keeping his temper unsoured, 
 in relieving the somberness of reflection, and of 
 keeping him amused at the spectacle of a life that 
 seemed to him none too heartening in itself. 
 
 All in all he prized the fortune that had brought 
 him to his present station. It gave him a compe- 
 tence with leisure, work that he could look upon as 
 of decent importance, and an attitude to life that 
 commanded as well as permitted his indulgence in 
 the kind of exercise for which leisure is the con- 
 venient term. 
 
 He paid for this fortune, indeed, by a seclusion 
 that at moments, in late afternoons when the sun 
 fell warmly upon the deepening colors of his li- 
 brary, or in winter when the lights were lit before 
 the dinner hour called him away to bleak boarding 
 houses — a seclusion that at such moments mounted 
 to a poignant loneliness. Tactful suggestions had 
 come to him from time to time that there was a 
 common mode of relief from such a state. But he 
 had what comfort there was in the reflection that 
 
4 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 this normal escape from loneHness was prohibited 
 as much by the meagerness of his income as by its 
 incompatibility with the humorous detachment that 
 he so prized. The soldier, the priest, and the scholar 
 — he knew the ancient wisdom. 
 
 He had an amused outlook about him over the 
 devastations that this escape had entailed upon some 
 of his colleagues — the addition of domestic duties 
 that were sometimes more than Omphalean in their 
 indignity, the addition of domestic membership that 
 promised crying distractions for years to come, the 
 addition of expenses that superinduced pot-boiling 
 and politics — the entrance of the personal equation 
 destructive of scholarly calm and productive of the 
 multiplex irrelevant motives that made futile so 
 much of the life about him. 
 
 He knew, indeed, that he was open to the charge 
 of selfishness, and he squirmed at the accusation. 
 For he had the sentiment to be touched and won by 
 the spectacle that took place courageously, now 
 among his friends and now more remotely in some 
 romance that fell under his eye, of a brave launch- 
 ing out into the double struggle. But he knew that 
 the life that he proposed to himself was not to be 
 one of ease, and that however poor a performer he 
 was to be, it was, generically, to be performed the 
 better alone. 
 
 As for the lyric aspect of the matter he had his 
 reserves there too; and though he could smile at a 
 touch of pedantry in his necessarily aloof point of 
 view, he had the rational assurance of common 
 sense that the aloof point of view was probably the 
 saner — that the mad themselves were not the best 
 
A Lover of the Chair S 
 
 judges of madness. His own observations had made 
 him suspect a certain sentimental falseness in the 
 reputed attitude of all the world toward the concrete 
 instance of the malady — certainly of the masculine 
 part of it at all events. The instinct to hide the 
 emotion, increasingly strong the richer the nature, 
 rather suggested the older classic view of love as a 
 sickness to be suffered in patience, a walking fever 
 to be endured in as much silence as a resolute manli- 
 ness could command — not a thing to be courted 
 and fostered. And as he looked back upon a cen- 
 tury that in its literature and in its current interpre- 
 tation of life had lifted love to the highest place, he 
 was struck with the spectacle of an almost unprece- 
 dented bankruptcy. The age that had apotheosized 
 love was ending vulgarly as an age of divorce. 
 
 For all his smiles, and his perceptions, and his 
 rationalizations, however, the sense that his youth 
 had slipped by, often in futile experiences that he 
 might better have missed altogether, and that he 
 had missed this one experience, was a matter of 
 underlying regret. However much a malady it might 
 be, and however bitter its endurance, still it was too 
 universally human to let him be normal in so wholly 
 escaping it. His understanding of life was by so 
 much the less complete, for though he had felt the 
 vicarious passions of literature, he knew enough of 
 the comparative paleness of literature even at its 
 best to realize its insufficiency alone. And there 
 was too, in his exemption, the lurking suspicion of 
 something deficient in his own make-up, a suspicion 
 more disconcerting than the mere escape from the 
 external experience. 
 
6 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 It was therefore with a curiously complex con- 
 sciousness that he found himself, after a slow in- 
 duction, wholly enmeshed. He had at first a more 
 than ordinarily objective view of his own impulses, 
 and a perception that found some of its actual en- 
 joyment in the spectacle of his own foible. He had 
 a rational idea of the place of this passion in the 
 half-conflicting, half-cooperating schemes of nature 
 on the one hand and humanity on the other. But 
 presently this idea began to change its proportions. 
 His freedom began to seem less supremely desirable. 
 The malady began to seem an unwonted state of 
 health. He had once told himself that he had all the 
 wisdom about love except a knowledge of the thing 
 itself; and now he had a sudden sense of the vanity 
 of this wisdom. He caught his own downward drift, 
 and warned himself in amusement how desperately 
 he would have to cling to his pale wisdom to keep 
 him, in his inexperience, from a more than common 
 donning of the motley. 
 
 In the beginning, before he had ceased to spend 
 certain moments in his aloof conning tower, he was 
 whimsically dismayed at his plight, and at rebellious 
 rejoicings within him that the springs of his sensi- 
 bilities were not dried up. He had recently had an- 
 other experience that- had thrilled him with a paral- 
 lel though necessarily paler satisfaction — he had 
 been for the first time in Italy. He might have 
 learned from that that his sentiment was still quite 
 capable of tears. 
 
 He had gone reluctantly, and with misgivings, for 
 Italy had been the Arcadia of his dreams, and he 
 had known, in other spots less tenderly cherished 
 
A Lover of the Chair 7 
 
 but still looked forward to with hope, the chill of 
 disillusionment on the spots themselves. He had 
 paid before the penalty of too vivid a prefiguring and 
 too keen an anticipation. Even Paris, wrapped in 
 its magic past, and appealing, through a hundred 
 avenues of approach, to his idea, composite of scenes 
 and personages and dreams and hopes and accom- 
 plishments of the luminous moments of many cen- 
 turies — even Paris itself in the reality had stood 
 between him and his vision. He had indeed, in 
 repeated visits, learned to see, beneath the cloak of 
 its modern instantaneity, the Paris of his idea — 
 even to see in the cloak itself, with its stains and 
 its dinginess of daily wear, something of the eternal 
 vitality which scorned his too aesthetic demand that 
 it be laid away for him in lavender. None the less 
 he had had to let custom stale and obliterate much 
 of the ephemeral before the real Paris had emerged; 
 and by then the first thrill of perception had passed 
 — passed into something more substantial no doubt, 
 but too completely passed ever to command a per- 
 fect moment of rapture. 
 
 He had thrust off Italy, therefore, into the vague 
 future, hesitant to put it to the touch. It was for 
 him a state of mind peculiarly luminous, a clear and 
 simple vision to which he had clung with whimsical 
 hope, a bright limbo of soft skies, an aged earth still 
 fresh with verdure, hillsides terraced and vine-clad, 
 molded by ages of cultivation, ruins crumbling back 
 into the welcoming soil, old gardens with marble 
 balustrades and statues mellowing to their ancient 
 kinship with the earth, a people himiane of the 
 South, looking at him through eyes saddened with 
 
8 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the reminiscence of old centuries — a land where 
 human experience had risen to the highest and left 
 its mark deepcut but harmonious upon a still domi- 
 nant nature. And he had wanted to save this lu- 
 minous corner of his mind from the disappointing 
 touch of reality, fearful lest he, unlike those others 
 whose susceptibility still kept their spirits fresh, 
 should prove his lyric vein grown dry with the prose 
 of his reason. 
 
 When he did enter upon it, it was almost by acci- 
 dent. He had come afoot, with staff and pack and 
 a good companion, from the homely Tyrol, Teutonic 
 in its gross beverages, its broken-kneed crucifixes, 
 its flesh, its comfort, its frank coarseness. And he 
 found himself, after a loitering week, at the head of 
 the Engadin. Forgetting to be charmed he had been 
 charmed, in a lingering sunset after a day of storm, 
 by the beauty of the Silser See, cloud mass and 
 mountain mass in the sunset towering upward and 
 downward from its clear surface. The emotion of 
 the moment had broken the intransigence of his 
 resolve; and in the waywardness of his travel it was 
 an added adventure to decide in the whim of a mo- 
 ment's desire to turn toward Italy instead of back- 
 ward to the North. 
 
 The point of their decision, when they came to 
 the real moment of divergence, embodied itself pro- 
 phetically in the view that stretched behind and be- 
 fore them on the next morning from the top of the 
 pass. Behind, in the valley of the Inn, the lake, the 
 mountains, the whole region of their Teutonic pil- 
 grimage, and in their minds the whole past of their 
 Teutonic reminiscences, lay in heavy fog, obscure, 
 
A Lover of the Chair 9 
 
 forbidding, chilling. And before them, down the 
 long defile of the Val Bregaglia, the uplifting snowy 
 peaks, the green lower slopes, the winding thread of 
 the stream strung with gleaming villages, lay warm 
 in the sunshine beneath a clear, hopeful sky drifting 
 with headlong clouds. The spell fell upon them 
 there, and they knew it, and it still held them. 
 
 They had indeed but a touch of Italy, but they 
 had it on the intimate terms of the foot traveler. 
 Their knapsacks, that elsewhere had been the in- 
 signia of leisure, here seemed to put them in friendly 
 touch with the workaday life of the valley — with a 
 similarly harnessed population, men and women, 
 children of ten and age-bent elders, hewers of wood 
 and drawers of water, hay-harvesters and peddlers 
 — many a gay-tongued Autolycus, and one young 
 girl, wearied and resting by her pack, whose face 
 long afterwards haunted them with its sadness and 
 its beauty. It was indeed the inveterate world of 
 their old knowledge, a world of hard toil, of meager 
 rewards, of a life hard-wrung from a reluctant earth. 
 But it was a world transmuted. Its thousand times 
 repeated Buon giorno, Buona sera, from singing 
 children and from warped and wrinkled age, touched 
 their common humanity; and the earth itself, in- 
 stinct with the accumulated life of all their tradi- 
 tions and all their civilization, spoke to them on 
 every hand no less tenderly and no less humanly. 
 
 They knew afterwards how merely scenically they 
 had taken their first day as they plodded down the 
 long incline of the valley — the white villages 
 crowded upon the narrow cobbled street, the drowsy 
 tinkle of the scythe sharpeners seated by the open 
 
10 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 doors, the hamlets high up the mountainsides — 
 houses huddled like sheep around their shepherd 
 churches — other hamlets still higher up on slopes 
 that seemed inaccessible, and higher yet still other 
 hamlets to the very edge of the summer snows — 
 terraces of vines, terraces of short hay under the 
 low branches of chestnut groves — deep shady vistas 
 where the scythe and the bent mower forever reaped 
 the scant harvest — wayside shrines that harbored 
 here no broken-kneed Christs, but where the tender 
 Virgin won an unremitting homage of simple flowers 
 — stretches of old Roman roadway, and medieval 
 ruins, and the swarming albergo, there at once side 
 by side without clash, harmonious, in the presence 
 of a life so simple and so unaltering that Virgil and 
 St. Francis might have passed that way with them 
 unshocked by change. 
 
 They had taken it all with the objective, welcom- 
 ing eyes of travelers; but they had been moved, and 
 the spell of Italy, drawing from their sense of the 
 past and their vision of the present, had fallen upon 
 them and taken them captive. For one of these 
 travelers, at least, with his fears and his hopes, the 
 pilgrimage was doubly endeared. He was exultant 
 that the springs of his sensibilities were not wholly 
 dried up; and he found himself dangerously making 
 an attempt to adjust more leniently within him the 
 momentous proportions of his reason and his heart. 
 
 So that now, when he saw himself ensnared in a 
 new and deeper emotion, he was complexly but the 
 more guarded against its mastery as he found him- 
 self the more inclined to indulge and test the new 
 depths of his spontaneity. His conscious dualism 
 
A Lover of the Chair ii 
 
 never left him, however — never so wholly that he 
 could think of himself, after the manner of the 
 world's beloved, as foregoing principles, ambitions, 
 and native tastes as the price of attainment. And 
 he kept, even in the moments of stress, enough of his 
 objective humor to detect and smile back the un- 
 conscious egotisms of the lover in him. 
 
 He would have doubted, indeed, the probability of 
 his being really in love had there not come upon him 
 a vivid light that had never before illuminated his 
 perceptions even in imagination, even in moments 
 of transcendent emotion. Long ago he had had di- 
 verse experiences that had set him ruminating on his 
 attachment to life. He had come near enough to 
 death more than once in perils by sea and land to 
 know that his physical clinging to life was a dif- 
 ferent thing from his conscious sense of attachment 
 to it. As for his conscious attachment, his ultimate 
 findings came to him, as he might have anticipated, 
 not out of his reason but out of experience and an 
 intuition sensitive to the subtle imagery of emotion. 
 
 One of the friends who had given to his college 
 life the principal value that it had had for him, and 
 who had shared with him a year of prodigal wander- 
 ings, had afterwards gone away in search of health, 
 and then died. For five or six vital years they had 
 been together, conscious together of what had been 
 significant to each, filled with common tastes, often 
 differing in opinion, but with a common vocabulary 
 and a common understanding — phrases that meant 
 philosophies, gestures that meant attitudes to life, 
 smiles that summarized old experiences and old 
 readings, a rapport that included the whole of the 
 
12 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 structure that each in that period had built, in his 
 consciousness, of life as he knew it. 
 
 In the bleak period that had followed the first 
 departure, he had wandered through the empty 
 rooms of that house of friendship desolately enough, 
 yet forlornly comforted with the sense that still, 
 though from a distance and with only a word now 
 and then to break the loneliness, his habitation there 
 was still shared. Hope kept those rooms habitable 
 for lingering months. But when the end came, and 
 the first hot grief had burnt to ashes, he knew that 
 death had forever locked those doors. No one else 
 could enter there, and the part they had built to- 
 gether, detail by detail, he himself could never live 
 in again. New parts he could build, he knew, if he 
 should have the heart, but the years of his old build- 
 ing were gone, and the completed structure of his 
 life would forever be the less for the closing of those 
 silent chambers. 
 
 It was the way of life, he knew. And in the deso- 
 late reflections that followed he knew that the con- 
 scious attachment to life lay, negatively, in an 
 escape from an utter detachment, from isolation; 
 and positively, in a sense that the intangible struc- 
 ture of life as he grasped it was shared with someone 
 whose sympathy and understanding could confirm 
 it, and rescue it from the haunting suspicion of 
 nothingness. 
 
 He had secluded himself for a time, disheartened. 
 To begin anew, to build again, was more than he 
 could bring himself to at once. He had no wish for 
 other friends. He found indeed that it was not in 
 him to hunt them out, to choose and cultivate them. 
 
A Lover of the Chair 13 
 
 His turn of mind, the quality of his appreciations, 
 made a demand upon circumstances that if he have 
 friendship it must grow organically from the process 
 of life. Nothing else could produce what he under- 
 stood by that term. He had no care for casual ac- 
 quaintance. He had, however, the solace that comes 
 nearest to friendship — he had books; and with 
 them he spent his time for a year or two. And then 
 he found, growing out of the new life he had made 
 for himself, the beginning of new friendships. Liv- 
 ing again had zest for him. This led him into franker 
 and fuller associations, and these in turn to his curi- 
 ously eventless romance. 
 
 The girl who fanned the sudden flame in him was, 
 he knew at once, disconcertingly unlike the type of 
 women who in lonely moments had peopled his 
 fancy. They had been calm-mannered and friendly, 
 vital but contained. They had not been clever, per- 
 haps, but had grown up with ripe traditions into 
 whose ways they had richly fallen. In their pleasant 
 and wholesome benevolence they had been, above 
 all, restful and serene, with a frank and tender 
 humor, a refuge from life and from a troubled spirit. 
 
 The girl herself was wholly otherwise. He first 
 met her in the drawing room of acquaintances 
 whither he had gone to make a rare call. There was 
 a silence when he entered, not embarrassed but in- 
 tense, as though he had come upon a moment of 
 strong feeling in which, though he took no part, his 
 presence struck no discordant note. He was intro- 
 duced to her then, simply; and in the high tension 
 of her clear regard, in her elevation above the com- 
 monplace, he caught a wistful appeal in her inquir- 
 
14 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ing eyes. He did not know to what impassioned 
 question he was responding or to what doctrine he 
 was assenting. He only saw her there, very young 
 and very slender and very erect, her head quiveringly 
 high, her eyes burning with indignant wonder, her 
 color very pure and heightened with emotion, and 
 her thoughts lifted above the conventions of the 
 moment. His blood leapt, without asking leave and 
 without giving reasons. 
 
 He had no word with her then, except her look 
 of baffled inquiry too impersonal he thought to have 
 distinguished him; and yet in his unchallenged ad- 
 mission into the circle of her feelings he nourished 
 a hopeful interpretation against the waiting smile of 
 his later reflections. He put off impatiently the 
 mocking intrusion of those reflections, and listened, 
 when she had gone quietly and without apology from 
 the room, to the explanations of his friends. She 
 had been reading, they said with a lightness that 
 had no flippancy, some of those modern writers who 
 had discovered that life was hard, and harder for 
 some than for others. And she had gone out to see 
 for herself. What she had looked for had not been 
 hard to find, real and heart-rending. At the end 
 of her endurance she had come upon a pitiful case 
 of ejection, squalid household goods crying their 
 shame at the curbstone, a drunken father, a sad, 
 starved mother nursing a baby at her flat breast, and 
 half-clad, dirty children shivering about her. It was 
 a typical case, they said, as they sat in the comfort- 
 able drawing room before the blazing fire; and they 
 looked at each other wretchedly and in silence, 
 moved by the pure young sympathies of the girl, her 
 
A Lover of the Chair 15 
 
 generous indignation, the revival of old feelings and 
 old problems, and the reminder of old wounds that 
 had never healed. 
 
 He went away troubled, his quickened pulse at 
 the thought of the clear generous eyes of the girl 
 rebuked by the unselfish wistfulness of her emotion. 
 His mind moved along sudden unwonted paths. 
 Bright visions flashed out upon him. But he told 
 himself pityingly that he was too old. He had 
 struggled with the horror of that experience that 
 had now so suddenly blighted the joy of her normal 
 girlhood, and he had come out of the struggle, not 
 on the side of youth and hope and ardor and gen- 
 erosity, and of confidence that he could take the 
 world in his two eager hands and shape it anew in 
 some less hateful mold. He had come out, alas, on 
 the side of middle age, less hopeful, less eager, in 
 the measure of his despair; and now as he looked 
 back on the years since his Utopia had faded for 
 him, he knew that in the vision of ardent youth, with 
 the sight of the world's misery before its eyes, he 
 must be accounted by so much the less generous. 
 He was spending his years among books, in the 
 pleasant warmth of his study, shut off from the 
 sight of suffering in the elegant pursuit of learning, 
 or looking at it in strange foreign cities, in Italian 
 countrysides, in gaunt fishing villages on desolate 
 French coasts, with the curious, objective, aloof, 
 picture-hunting eyes of the traveler. With the 
 friends he had left but now he had talked of this 
 problem, trying against the incessant pressure of the 
 age to keep clear the point of view that he had 
 gained. He knew that whatever the evils of life, 
 
1 6 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 not sympathy alone could better them; that learn- 
 ing and thought must have their silent place in the 
 regenerative forces that should bring about a bet- 
 ter future. And he had committed himself to the 
 latter forces. 
 
 He went away from his friends glooming among 
 his own reflections. His humor deserted him. The 
 little personal charities that he had sneakingly 
 maintained against the wisdom of his organizing age 
 suddenly looked paltry and feeble in the face of 
 that sweeping grasp which the young hopes of the 
 new generation seemed to have attained. They 
 rose up and mocked him. And when at the door of 
 his own chambers he passed the humble figure of 
 an old pensioner of his, he strode in without a 
 smile of recognition and slammed the door. He was 
 down with the malady. 
 
 Seated by his window he looked afresh at the 
 problem from the point of view he had won in his 
 old wrestling with it. Surely for that less cruel 
 future toward which the present was aiming there 
 must be saved what good things had been accumu- 
 lated in the past; old traditions must go on, the love 
 of art, the love of books, the love of wisdom; the 
 human chain must remain unbroken; the torch must 
 be kept alight and handed on. 
 
 How trite it all sounded! To what feeble phrases, 
 now suddenly, he was reduced, as he came again to 
 view the problem from the ardent angle of youth and 
 generosity, and illusion, and hope! He saw it all 
 anew out of the dreaming eyes of girlhood — and it 
 struck him how drab and wintry were the colors of 
 his own vision. His own vision assumed all at once 
 
A Lover of the Chair 17 
 
 a dwindling remoteness. It lacked the warm, heart- 
 ening touch of immediacy, the quickening contact of 
 life. He seemed to be trying, from aloof, and with 
 averted eyes, to do what only a direct vision and 
 courageous bodily presence could hope to do. And 
 he saw embodied in this girl the spirit of a new age, 
 with eyes open, with quick sympathy, touching the 
 wound with its own hands, devoting itself to the heal- 
 ing service. Every instinct in him tugged at his 
 assent to this call of life. 
 
 He sat on in his window, ruminating in gloomy 
 rebellion. Why he should thus twist the fancies that 
 a fair face had set free in him into a grotesque pic- 
 ture of despair he had not, for the hour, the humor 
 even to question. It was indeed a rebellion against 
 growing up, a crying out against the years, an old 
 ember of his youth that had not gone out, glowing 
 through the ashes it had been buried among. But 
 he had lost his detachment, his perspective, his 
 humor; and the particular circumsta.nce of the mo- 
 ment absorbed and embodied the universal protest 
 — keen in him, for he loved the human aspects of 
 life — against the hardening changes of maturity. 
 
 He went on savagely reflecting. He knew the in- 
 transigence of youth, and the hardness of its gen- 
 erosity. And besides she was a woman. There 
 came into his mind a sally of an old humanist — La 
 Bruyere — which he knew to be true to his own 
 observation — that women cared nothing for the 
 past. They did care nothing for it — nothing for 
 the slow structure of accumulating wisdom built 
 upon the experience of peoples and ages that were 
 gone. There were almost no women historians, al- 
 
1 8 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 most no women philosophers, almost no women hu- 
 manists, though there were women poets and women 
 novelists in profusion, and a growing body of women 
 scientists, business women, and soon perhaps of 
 politicians. Their concern was with the present and 
 the immediate and the expedient. Their sensitive 
 sympathies, touched quickly with the present reality, 
 did much to mollify and humanize and warm a life 
 left cold by the remoter rational dreams of men. 
 
 He laughed aloud, mirthlessly, at the fine sweep 
 of his generalization. But it seemed to him true, 
 true in the large, though he saw in the situation 
 about him that many men were throwing over their 
 own for the feminine standard, were giving up their 
 concern for the large vision of the past, and were 
 substituting in human affairs the criterion of spon- 
 taneous sympathy, for that of a wisdom broadly 
 founded on the most significant of human experience. 
 
 He rose and strode across the room. With the 
 change of position there came into his mind the 
 picture of the old man who had been hanging about 
 the entry when he had come in. The pathos of 
 that patient figure, and the recollection that he had 
 passed him by without a word or a glance, smote 
 him and brought moisture to his eyes. A sudden 
 sympathy, such as he had never felt even when he 
 had been most kind, suffused him, and snatching his 
 hat and coat he went out to look for the old pen- 
 sioner. The empty passage filled him with remorse, 
 and sent him off to the poor rooms where the aged 
 man lived. Clearly he was down with the malady. 
 
 The relief of action gave a new turn to his inner 
 conflict. In the days that followed, a surging hope 
 
A Lover of the Chair 19 
 
 sang in his heart, and in leisure hours sent him wan- 
 dering away from the populous streets to the bare 
 wintry stretches of the park. Now for the first time 
 in years he felt the thrill of kinship with the natural 
 things that he had latterly shut himself away from. 
 His eyes found a sudden pleasure in the intricate 
 pattern of the twigs against the sky. The pale 
 purity of the blue background caught a response in 
 him that enriched the pleasure of his present per- 
 ceptions with a resurgence of his childhood's love 
 of color. He heard the thin minor pipe of a bird's 
 winter song high up among the branches. Without 
 his knowing why at first, nature was become thrill- 
 ingly vital. Then he knew with a kind of shame 
 that it was because of an absurd illusion. He seemed 
 to be sharing his perceptions — hearing through 
 other ears, seeing through other eyes, silently vol- 
 uble the while to an invisible companion at his side 
 in unutterable communion of the primal intuitions 
 that lay at the bottom of his consciousness — colors, 
 and sounds, and forms, and odors, the feel of the 
 breeze on his cheek, of vigor in his blood, of ardor in 
 his spirit, of beauty in external things, and of in- 
 expressible emotions. 
 
 It was the old and endeared story of his friend- 
 ship, but with this difference — that it was no shar- 
 ing of the conscious structure of the part of life 
 builded together and lived in common, but the sud- 
 den mystic hope, the semblance, the illusion, he 
 could not have said, of sharing in that region from 
 whose vague depths surged up the quickening in- 
 tuitions that are the essence of life itself. His ele- 
 mental perceptions brightened vividly, visibly, with 
 
20 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the sense of that response. He knew now in the 
 aloof and ironic half of his consciousness the mean- 
 ing of what the vulgar and the cultivated alike were 
 reduced to calling love at first sight. There were 
 moments when he felt ashamed, now that he was 
 face to face with that part of his common humanity 
 which he had so long suppressed. Yet there it was. 
 And if it had come to him suddenly, lovers obviously 
 needed no long experience in common; they had all 
 the mystery of life in common. They might indeed 
 add friendship when the fresh colors of the illusion 
 had dulled, but in itself love was other than friend- 
 ship. 
 
 He knew now the meaning of the pregnant silence 
 of lovers — the simple language of proximity — for 
 the substance of their communion was beyond the 
 reach of words. It was a commonplace to observe 
 that men did not fall in love with cleverness, with 
 virtue, with taste, with ability, with any of the cul- 
 tivated qualities, though these might indeed comfort 
 the conscience of the pure passion. It was the tem- 
 perament, the barbaric and unsubdued nature, flam- 
 ing beneath and through the character, that set the 
 heart astir with thrilling illusions. Cleopatra, not 
 Hypatia, had made the world's great love story. 
 
 As he saw her again and again he was charmed 
 with the accession of all the radiant, inexpressive 
 qualities that he had created for her in his hours of 
 dreaming. She was very young, scarcely twenty, 
 but in trying to place her by recollecting his own 
 state of mind at twenty he saw that he had no clue 
 to her. She was older than he had been, and though 
 she had less knowledge and less experience to build 
 
A Lover of the Chair 21 
 
 upon, her simpHcity was thus the less far-reaching. 
 It was piquant, and baffling, and competent. She 
 took his presence with frank kindliness, talked with 
 him without self-consciousness, and appealed from 
 her ignorance to his knowledge with an open sin- 
 cerity that smote him with the consciousness of his 
 age. None the less it was captivating, not to his 
 vanity, but to his love of the undisguised nature of 
 her. She had what was rare in his experience of 
 women — a way of saying yes and no firmly and 
 quickly, with her mind on the subject, as though 
 there were no impression to be made on the hearer, 
 no personal matter lurking in the rear in danger of 
 compromise. Her manner to him was open and 
 ardent with her own vitality, but without a touch of 
 the personal that he had come to think of as the dis- 
 tinguishing feminine trait. 
 
 She was, he came to believe, of the new order — 
 firm of tread, of strong supple hands, and with a 
 mind turned outward. She spoke recurrently, when 
 they met again and again, of the problem that her 
 awakening had put to her so poignantly. And in the 
 vivid strength of his sympathetic appreciation of 
 her, his heart failed him. He would have had her so 
 little otherwise. Her youth, her ardor, her hot in- 
 dignation, the generous reaction of her enlarging 
 spirit in its first hard contact with an inveterate 
 world, were too inherently right. Even from his own 
 older point of view the alternative, embodied in the 
 young women about them too absorbed in pleasure 
 to have felt the pathos of life outside themselves, 
 seemed to him shallow and ignoble. He had no wish 
 to dull the fine keenness of her Utopian dreams with 
 
22 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 his own sense of the hopelessness of her hope. If she 
 should come some day to an understanding of his 
 vision, it must be won by way of the path she had 
 already started out upon ; and knowing the sanctions 
 of the time, and remembering the slow struggle of 
 his own solution, and realizing that she was a woman, 
 he despaired again. His heart was still entangled 
 with his brain. 
 
 He spun for her, on the web of his imagination, 
 a state of mind serenely impersonal, objective, and 
 he dared not trespass upon it with his own more in- 
 timate dream. With a humor that did little to soften 
 the bitterness of his position he saw the touch of the 
 ridiculous in his reversal of traditional relations — 
 that it was he whose attitude was wholly personal 
 and she who was aloof among larger concerns. It 
 was no relief to realize that it was he who was ma- 
 ture and she a girl hardly on the threshold of woman- 
 hood. 
 
 He held his peace, therefore, and lent himself to 
 her service with an objective friendliness that he 
 despaired of altering. He saw himself with a sar- 
 donic smile, the aloof and ironic observer of men, 
 dangling forlornly and helplessly after a girl, no dif- 
 ferently from other poor mortals with no irony in 
 their souls, and no philosophy in their outlook upon 
 life. But the resolve to speak and put an end to 
 his distraction, formed away from his sight of her, 
 melted before the regard of her frank eyes when 
 they met again. She was too young, and too simple, 
 and too generous. He could not trouble with his 
 passion the serenity of her maidenly spirit. 
 
 With despairing clearness he saw that all the 
 
 I 
 
A Lover of the Chair 23 
 
 qualities on which he was wont to base his own self- 
 regard — good sense, insight, understanding — 
 added nothing to his intrinsic worthiness as a lover. 
 In a sudden accession of humility he felt a kind of 
 desecration in the thought that love should first 
 breathe upon her unconscious youth from his own 
 disillusioned lips. He could have chosen for her 
 some radiant youth whose lineaments, he realized 
 with a whimsical smile, were drawn from his own 
 picture of herself. 
 
 One day, when he found with forlorn amusement 
 how thick the sheaf of verses had grown in which he 
 had relieved the enforced silence of his feelings, he 
 admitted the lover in himself to be typical, undis- 
 guised, and to the top of the bent. But when he 
 looked forward he saw no turning in the long lane 
 ahead. He felt the bitter pain of his malady. In 
 time it grew intolerable, and at last drove him to 
 action. 
 
 He inscribed in the fly-leaf of a book he had prom- 
 ised her the fair copy of some verses he had writ- 
 ten. They pleaded his cause from that fantastic 
 elevation to which his over-sensitive interpretations 
 had lifted it; and if after all they were prose, they 
 had a touch of the dignity into which he had with- 
 drawn to meet the blow which he knew must follow. 
 
 Upon the top of this high wooded hill 
 The temple we have builded stands serene, 
 Stately and fair, with sunlit colonnades 
 That open out for us on all the world. 
 
 And you would linger, thus we differ so. 
 Though friends no less, within the colonnades. 
 
24 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 Where you and I, though we together walk 
 
 Hand fast in hand and murmuring each to each, 
 
 Must needs look outward; and the sunlit world, 
 
 Lying before us, many-colored, fair. 
 
 Or sometimes crying in its misery, 
 
 Is with us in this temple we have wrought. 
 
 Do you not see, dear, that we can not have 
 
 Our temple, though we builded it ourselves, 
 
 Without an inner portal which will lead — 
 
 Ah, can it be you fear? — through twilit aisles 
 
 To chapeled recesses, to mystic crypts, 
 
 Down undreamed passages to tapered shrines — 
 
 Perhaps with one shrine yet unguessed, whose god — 
 
 Would it be only Friendship? Ah, who knows? 
 
 He awaited with hot and cold blood the time 
 when he should see her again, anticipating in her 
 first glance the decision that he had precipitated. 
 He looked at himself with baffled scorn. He had 
 seen a good deal of the world, climbed its mountains, 
 braved its seas, endured good fortune and bad, and 
 had come back, to a life of seclusion indeed, but 
 with toughened fibers and a mind above the foibles 
 of ease-softened men, to sit aloof and understand 
 that life that had proved so empty. And here was 
 he, humbled to the common level, weaker than the 
 lover of the ball room, trembling lest he fail to win 
 a boon at the hands of a young girl, a personal boon 
 — he who had thought to live above the petty and 
 the personal — and a boon that would commit him 
 to the petty and the personal for all his time to 
 come. He scorned himself hotly — and he trembled 
 for his fate. 
 
A Lover of the Chair 25 
 
 When it came it came simply. Her steady eyes 
 met his, fearlessly, tenderly. Without the ability to 
 read there his sentence he saw swept away all the 
 tangled cobwebs of his fantastic weaving. He had 
 wrought masculinely, grotesquely; he had built in a 
 realm of unreality. And now at once as they faced 
 one another they were simply two — a man and a 
 woman. In that timeless moment his love grew 
 lucid and infinitely tender. He saw in her clear 
 and calm eyes the pure and natural reality of their 
 human relation, and her woman's competence to deal 
 with her woman's crisis. The moment was simpler 
 and more natural for her than for him. He felt 
 very young in the presence of her immemorial wo- 
 manhood. 
 
 Then in the tremulous tension of her mouth, in 
 her distressed brow, in the luminous promise of tears 
 in her eyes, he read the simple sincerity of her un- 
 derstanding and the pain of her denial. The bar- 
 riers of opinion that had troubled him, the attitude 
 to life, all the cultivated qualities of brain and 
 heart were not of the situation. These were mat- 
 ters of friendship, and she was still his friend. Her 
 denial came from deeper sources. 
 
 He had not known till then the intensity of his 
 longing. The days and weeks of hot grief that fol- 
 lowed were easier to bear than the later time of 
 grey and empty indifference when life had faded and 
 dulled, when he saw colors and lost their poignant 
 appeal, when he heard melodies and cared nothing 
 for their sweetness, and when old odors brought but 
 the sense of waste in the tender memories that they 
 
26 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 recalled. All the native intuitions and perceptions 
 had gathered themselves for a supreme moment, and 
 then, baffled and rejected, had sunk back withered 
 and inert. 
 
 When his interests began in time to revive he met 
 them shamefacedly and fought them back. He clung 
 desperately to his misery. Then one day he found 
 himself smiling down at himself from his aloof con- 
 ning tower. With that he knew that he was conva- 
 lescent, and hungry again for life. 
 
 He had no poignant regrets. Inevitably there 
 were moments of loneliness, when his memory con- 
 jured up old dreams. But he could smile at the 
 idyllic inconsistency even of these dreams, knowing 
 that only as dreams could they have left his life as 
 happy as it was. For his present life suited the tem- 
 per of his spirit. He rejoiced in its seclusion, in its 
 leisure, in the dignity of a position that gave him 
 entry to all sorts of men and excused him from the 
 need to go among them. Echoes of reproach, espe- 
 cially from feminine sources, that his way of life 
 was wholly selfish, reached him from time to time, 
 and amused him. At least he had done his best. The 
 memory of old fears lest he miss some part of the 
 typical life of men came back to him only to 
 strengthen his philosophic acceptance of his own 
 limitations. He saw these limitations now more 
 clearly, and took himself as he was. Besides, he had 
 had his romance. 
 
 Looking backwards he reasoned that he had over- 
 laid the spontaneous and natural elements of his 
 temperament too deeply to strike, in some one else, 
 
A Lover of the Chair 27 
 
 the answering spark of love. Love was a matter of 
 temperament, of native, not acquired qualities. 
 
 It was only later, when he fell again happily in 
 love, that he ceased to generalize about the vagaries 
 of this stirring and masterful passion. 
 
II 
 
 CHAIR AND SADDLE 
 
 IN the stretch that followed the rebellion of his 
 early thirties he developed into a kind of ma- 
 ture youthfulness that seemed, to his grim amuse- 
 ment, to dodge awkwardly between the privileges 
 of youth and the authority of age. His opinions 
 were no longer smiled at tolerantly as the promising 
 exuberance of young blood, nor listened to seriously 
 as the accumulation of experience. 
 
 Certain friends of his boyhood whom he saw now 
 and again seemed to have done better. They gave 
 him the impression of having definitely grown up. 
 They were irritating in the effect they produced of 
 terrible impressiveness, as though they had taken 
 better advantage of their time and got on to a defi- 
 nite maturity. They had set chins and firm mouths 
 of the slightly hard American kind; they spoke in- 
 cisively, without doubts and without shading; and 
 they were listened to. For the most part they were 
 in business, or in the professions that with us in 
 America are the adjuncts of business. But occasion- 
 ally some of them, or of their kind, had drifted into 
 the more disinterested walks, and proved there to 
 their own satisfaction and the general applause that 
 wherever the red-blooded man got into the saddle 
 the ambling nag underneath woke up and began a 
 smart canter. 
 
Chair and Saddle 29 
 
 He found his own nag, indeed, going at such a gait 
 under him that he began to doubt whether he could 
 keep his seat. And when he snatched fearful glances 
 about him for a reasonably safe place to alight, he 
 saw nothing but inhospitable doors closed to him. 
 He perceived promptly enough that the difficulty 
 lay in himself; his pace damned him. One door, 
 however, he did try, without discarding his mount. 
 It looked more inviting than any other he could see. 
 But after a good deal of knocking he met with cour- 
 teous refusals no less positive than those he had 
 foreseen elsewhere. It was the door of the pub- 
 lishers; he had begun to write. 
 
 The stuff he wrote bore plainly the stamp of fu- 
 tility; he dealt with what he was interested in and 
 treated it from his own point of view. His interest 
 was the eternal one, indeed, in human nature; but 
 his point of view was the obsolete one that the 
 French describe in the term moral — the disinter- 
 ested play of the discursive reason in the field of 
 life and letters. And he took it seriously. He had 
 humor, it is true, but even his humor he took a 
 little sadly, as befitted the human plight. It was 
 with a wry smile, therefore, that he saw his efforts 
 complained of as not sufficiently serious for publi- 
 cation. 
 
 His colleagues about him wrote and were pub- 
 lished, but they wrote in a more current vein, senti- 
 mentally, or scientifically, or in the interest of some 
 propaganda or current enthusiasm. He took his 
 grievance, however, without a sour face, and worked 
 on undiscouraged, putting the substance of his ideas 
 into brief essays condensed with the bitter pain of 
 
30 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 concentration. There were passages that he be- 
 lieved to have attained to some perfection of ex- 
 pression. He could smile, indeed, at his own vanity, 
 and not infrequently did, but it was disconcerting 
 to have his labors smiled at by others. One frank 
 editor spoke of them as the dilletante play of an 
 otiose fancy. He cherished this comment grimly. 
 It had been called forth by his animadversion that 
 the significance of history lay in its interpretation. 
 He collated this with the complaint of another edi- 
 tor that he had used the reason where the reason 
 had no place. His point on this occasion had been 
 that the significance of poetry lay in the moving ex- 
 pression of its idea. 
 
 There was private amusement to be had out of 
 all this, and in the serenity of his philosophic mo- 
 ments he had the humor to suck enjoyment from it. 
 But he was human enough in very virtue of the 
 humane quality of his interests to long, at other and 
 frequenter moments, for a little larger group to 
 share his appreciation with, and take a little of the 
 forlornness out of his fun. 
 
 This forlornness became particularly acute one 
 afternoon when he found himself forced to provide 
 himself with new storage room for an intolerable 
 heap of post-worn manuscripts that lay on his hands. 
 In a collective survey he amused himself with the 
 infinite variations of courtesy — ironic in the damn- 
 ing fact of print — that were possible to notices of 
 rejection. And on the heels of this, in a hurried 
 half -hour's conversation, he was plunged into an- 
 other variety of condemnation, and given to see with 
 fine explicitness the ultimate reason for his obscurity. 
 
Chair and Saddle 31 
 
 While he was dustily busy with this expanding 
 heap of manuscripts, he was caught by one of his 
 red-blooded colleagues, who had come in upon him 
 on half -official matters. His visitor was one who had 
 got on, one who sat the canter easily and touched 
 it up with spur and crop. He rode well and erect 
 and with a fine confidence; the glow of speed was in 
 his eye. Certainly he was a more pleasing spectacle 
 than the riders of the older school. 
 
 He was a modern anti-intellectualist in his avowed 
 philosophy and took his attitude quite seriously and 
 not a little dogmatically — a reasoner of the type 
 that so promptly accrued to M. Bergson's follow- 
 ing. His discipleship was superficial, perhaps, but 
 he had enough of that philosopher's convincing logic 
 to disconcert those of his antagonists who stuck to 
 a belief in the reason. 
 
 From the aloof quiet of his library, where our 
 friend spent enough of his days to keep his judg- 
 ments unroiled, this personage had seemed to him 
 eminently unimportant. But there was a sense con- 
 nected with some of his current reflections in which 
 unimportant was a very hard word to pronounce. 
 For the man was of the kind that inevitably won 
 suffrage and built upon suffrage. And his particu- 
 lar combination of politics and anti-intellectualism 
 was growing common and desperately effective. 
 
 These reflections were sufficiently irrelevant at the 
 moment, and only won pertinence by the accident of 
 a discussion that the two men, so polar in their 
 inner opposition, fell into on another topic. The 
 pile of rejected manuscripts was lying openly con- 
 fessional on the table before them, and shrank a bit, 
 
32 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 in the sensitive person of their author, before the 
 successful presence that now confronted it. For 
 this red-blooded modern was the author of three 
 widely read books, and had become what in the 
 current tongue is called an "authority" on social 
 questions. 
 
 Our friend himself was not unfound on that score, 
 and had indeed been reading the rejection of an 
 article mildly social when the other entered. It had 
 been so unusual in its terms, this rejection, and so 
 caustic in its revelation of the editor's bitter soul, 
 that he took now a kind of ironic joy in handing it 
 over to his visitor with a wave of his hand toward 
 the rejected remains on the table. 
 
 The moment he withdrew his fingers he repented. 
 For the other, though he had wit enough, had little 
 of that self-directed humor that is the mother of 
 urbanity among equals. His dogmatic and un- 
 doubting temper served him well among those who 
 discover seriousness only in solemnity — college 
 officials, the world of women's clubs, and the more 
 intelligent philistines — and it was among them that 
 he had won his place as a man of ideas. But for 
 friendly talk upon serious subjects he had none of 
 the penetrating frankness, the experimental courage, 
 the amused self-doubt, that make an adventure of 
 conversation. Our friend, therefore, watched the 
 perusal with a touch of compunction. He was un- 
 certain how it would be taken. 
 
 'We publish what will go," the editor had said, 
 "and your stuff won't go. It is detached, disinter- 
 ested. You lack what is known as 'life'. You don't 
 content yourself with the immediate play of appear- 
 
Chair and Saddle 33 
 
 ances — of things. Your ideas are general; they are 
 ideas; you say what is true of a number of cases 
 instead of what is true of a single case — of what is 
 unique. You lack edge. You ought to catch the 
 vivid drift of a lock of hair across a fair brow; and 
 what you do is to catch the invisible turn of mind 
 of a whole section of mankind. You try to write for 
 people who are educated, people who think alike 
 even when they disagree, who know an idea when 
 they see one, and aren't pared down to the senses 
 God gave them to go to the movies with. And such 
 people no longer exist. 
 
 "You see evils, and you blame the readers for 
 them; what we want is to blame someone else. You 
 have an idea that the people in their normal char- 
 acter — temper, intelligence, and morals — deter- 
 mine the quality of their own social conditions, and 
 that whatever revolution may come they drift back, 
 after it, to the old level, through the push of those 
 same normal forces. We want to spread the idea 
 that by a burst of energy a device can be got into 
 operation that will take the place of personal virtue 
 and intelligence. You want to make people mistrust 
 their normal selves; we want to make them trust 
 their normal selves. ..." 
 
 When his visitor looked up our friend was winc- 
 ing under the recollection of raw and flattering ex- 
 aggerations in certain phrases of the letter. He need 
 not. The face that looked at him was full of com- 
 placent sympathy. 
 
 "He is pretty hard on you." 
 "Bitterly," our friend returned. 
 "You are a conservative, I take it." 
 
34 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "No, a radical." 
 
 "But these things he says ..." 
 
 "My radicalism is what he objects to." 
 
 "I'm afraid I don't understand." There was a 
 touch of asperity in the voice now. 
 
 "You are right and I am wrong," his host re- 
 turned. "I was playing with the idea. My point was 
 simply that ideas lie at the root of all our voluntary 
 changes, and as I was in search of ideas I called 
 myself a radical — ideas, of course, in the sense of 
 those guiding principles and opinions that determine 
 actions." 
 
 His visitor pondered for a moment, the impa- 
 tience not quite gone from the finger tips that tapped 
 the arm of his chair. He was a Liberal of the cur- 
 rent school, and our friend found, in the none too 
 urbane discussion which followed, something of the 
 serious amusement with which he normally looked 
 upon certain of the Liberal paradoxes. 
 
 "Conservative, though, in the ordinary sense?" 
 his guest asked at last. 
 
 "I imagine; though sometimes when I look around 
 I wonder what I want to conserve." 
 
 "The authority of the few, I judge." 
 
 "If I could select my few," our friend smiled. 
 "But yes, that in principle. 
 
 "You hold against the majority opinion." 
 
 "As such, yes. The point is, of course, the very 
 old commonplace that the idea ought to be judged 
 on its own." 
 
 The subject was broached, and our friend drew 
 himself together in response to an indefinable loin- 
 girding on the part of his guest. 
 
Chair and Saddle 35 
 
 "Aren't you describing," the latter began — 
 "aren't you describing the conditions that made for 
 this?" And his hand rested on the pile of rejected 
 manuscripts. 
 
 "Ah, there they are," our friend smiled wryly. 
 
 "I don't so much mean," hastened his interlocu- 
 tor, "that you should write what the people want — 
 that you should be a trimmer'. What I mean is that 
 a philosopher of the few can expect to find his 
 readers limited." 
 
 "I wish I could make them more," his host re- 
 turned heartily. "You have managed it. I won't 
 ask for advice, for I suppose I am like others and 
 would go on in my old way in spite of it. But the 
 idea would be — ?" 
 
 "To have another philosophy." 
 
 "Of the many?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 The distinction between that and trimming was at 
 first obscure, and indeed it left the Liberal a little 
 uncomfortable. 
 
 "You must have the philosophy, of course," he 
 went on. "There is the difference. For my own 
 part I think that the time has past when the finest 
 minds aim at distinction. Rather they prize what 
 is common to all humanity, and prefer to merge 
 their own with the universal mind and will of the 
 race." 
 
 Our friend made no answer. His thoughts went 
 for a moment to the obscurity of those few at whom 
 the remark seemed to be aimed, and at the eminence 
 of those who caught the general ear. He wondered 
 whether, for these latter, independent thinking did 
 
36 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 appear to be only a bid for distinction — whether 
 perhaps, in the habit of building upon suffrage, they 
 had not lost the drive and compulsion of an indi- 
 vidual opinion. 
 
 "My trouble is,'' he resumed at last, "that I find 
 it hard to know what you mean. I don't know how 
 to think except with my own mind. And when I 
 find that differing from the popular one — why, I 
 side with myself. It's an old-fashioned egotism, 
 but I don't see how I can do anything else." 
 
 "You are an intellectual," the other returned, 
 " — you don't mind my saying it? — and I imagine 
 that the day of the intellectuals has passed. I find 
 myself a little abrupt, but we started by explaining 
 that heap of manuscripts. You say that they don't 
 go. And I should say that perhaps the reason is 
 that, so to speak, the bottom has fallen out of intel- 
 lectualism. You trust to your reason, you intellec- 
 tuals, and yet — Shall we go into this?" 
 
 j^By all means." 
 
 '"Well, then, at the bottom is the fact that the 
 reason has no solid criteria, nothing stable to build 
 upon, nothing indisputable except — I speak imper- 
 sonally — the self-complacency of an elect that 
 have been self -elected. And now that our modern 
 philosophy has shown how fluid and misty and wil- 
 ful the premises of your reason are, there is a kind 
 of sense abroad that the intellectuals have rather 
 imposed on humanity in the past. The movement 
 of Liberalism has been a steady revolt against self- 
 constituted authority — priest, autocrat, tyrant, and 
 now the intellectuals — arbiters of all kinds who set 
 themselves up as umpires of actions or ideas or 
 tastes.^' 
 
Chair and Saddle 37 
 
 An ironic retort clamored for release. Our friend 
 compromised. 
 
 ''My own difficulty," he said, ''when I get to that 
 stage of skepticism, is that there seems to be no 
 warrant for any ideas at all." 
 
 "That is it," the other assented. 
 
 "But you Liberals — just now you seem to be full 
 of ideas. You quite go in for regulation, restriction, 
 and the control of the individual." 
 
 "It is true, of course," the other returned, "but if 
 there is no warrant for ideas as such, it is our belief 
 that the ideas that go ought to be selected by those 
 who are going to be affected by them." 
 
 "Everyone for himself?" 
 
 "That would be anarchy. No — on the whole and 
 in the large." 
 
 "By majority vote, then." 
 
 "Yes. On the belief that the majority opinion 
 is the wisest and justest obtainable." 
 
 Our troubled friend pondered for a moment over 
 his guest's thus begging the question. To postulate 
 the majority opinion should have been the last word; 
 to bring in "justice" and "wisdom" was to bring in 
 ideas. But he gave over the point as too subtle for 
 their present driving manner. He went on to another 
 point that troubled him. 
 
 "Majority opinion — you use the phrase. But 
 for my own part, when I try to follow that concep- 
 tion down to the roots, and get rid, as you have done 
 just now, of all individual opinion and all new ideas 
 that crop up in individual minds, all that I find is 
 just what is — what is. What is, at any moment, 
 is the expression of the aggregate opinion, the bal- 
 
SS A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ance of all the extant motives. For anyone to try 
 to change the situation would be to try to inject an 
 idea into the balance — and that is against the 
 theory. The only thing to do would be to let things 
 drift." 
 
 '^Opinions, of course, have to begin somewhere," 
 the other answered. "The Liberal point is, nat- 
 urally, that they should be made over into majority 
 opinion by general explanation and persuasion. 
 Aren't you a little over-subtle?" 
 
 Our friend smiled. It was subtlety or nothing. 
 With a sigh he saw fate descending upon him. The 
 other, with his fine flow, and the touch of tolerance 
 which his red blood gave him the lordly right to, 
 would in a moment ride off in triumph. Nothing 
 could better the fine manner, but it refined even 
 upon itself with the open generosity with which it 
 smiled and mollified its rebuke. What wonder its 
 owner won suffrage! Our friend squirmed with the 
 sense of his own insignificance. 
 
 ''My point," he went on, none the less, with a 
 desperate pride, ''is that for the moment we are 
 both of us getting at the bottom, and the bottom is 
 always a little elusive. For my part I wanted to get 
 at two things. And now you must smile, or what I 
 say will be intolerable. These manuscripts of mine 
 — to tell the truth I should like to see my ideas 
 taken up and become majority opinion. I have my 
 vanity, you see. That puts them, philosophically, on 
 all fours with a Liberal opinion, doesn't it, before the 
 Liberal opinion gets majority support?" 
 
 The other waited with a kindly smile. 
 
 "We are all, I imagine," our friend went on, 
 
Chair and Saddle 39 
 
 "tarred with the same stick — tainted with intellec- 
 tualism. Even you use your reason to persuade us 
 that reason is fustian; and but a moment since you 
 spoke of making over individual opinion into ma- 
 jority opinion by general explanation and persua- 
 sion. And in your politics you propound theories of 
 wisdom and justice in majorities that seem to some 
 of us the most airy and brain-spun of pure ideas. 
 We are all of us condemned to intellectualism so 
 long as we talk, and plan, and keep a pride in our 
 human capacity to affect our own fate. And it is 
 you Liberals who have the greatest faith in that 
 capacity. 
 
 "Those are some of the reasons why some of us 
 hold back from what in many ways can't help having 
 a strong appeal to us. For my own part I like your 
 Liberal hopes even when I can't hope with you. But 
 your theories often, as in this case, go too much 
 against even your inner beliefs and outer practices to 
 win our sympathy. Like you we must go on saying 
 what we think. I am afraid that my heap of stuff 
 must go on piling up. And really what else is there 
 for it?" 
 
 The other sat for a moment, pondering the little 
 problem that so troubled his host. 
 
 "The trouble lies in your ideas," he said at last. 
 "As your harsh editor writes, they won't do. You 
 are conservative; and the day of conservatism is 
 past. As for us, we have faced about. We are look- 
 ing at the future. And then, too, it is your attitude. 
 Where you differ from the Liberals is in this — that 
 you care more for your ideas than you do for hu- 
 manity." 
 
40 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "And yet," our friend mused, '4t is you who wish 
 to change humanity according to your ideas, and we 
 who wish to preserve what humanity has estab- 
 lished." 
 
 They hung upon that for a moment. There was a 
 disconcerting point to it. 
 
 "It it a matter of sympathy — sympathy for 
 the human thing," his visitor concluded, ignoring 
 the pause. "The whole Liberal effort, often bungling 
 I dare say, is aimed at the opening up of more and 
 more of the vital sources of this humanity. Look at 
 it now, nine tenths of it suppressed, mute, going to 
 waste, humanly speaking, like immemorial ants. I 
 have turned over a stone on a lonely mountain peak 
 in the Rockies, and watched the endless conserva- 
 tism of a life there that has not changed from the 
 beginning, and will not change, slaves and rulers 
 alike, to a disheartening eternity. And when I have 
 looked back at humanity again, and seen so much of 
 the dull repetition of that endless spectacle under 
 the stone, I have seen too that the human thing is to 
 get away from that — to change, to progress, and 
 to give the least of them some share in the forces of 
 change. That is what I mean by democracy. If you 
 are not in sympathy with that movement — "he 
 smiled kindly and waved his hand toward the heap 
 on the table — "I'm afraid you will go on building 
 your sad monument here. For we are likely to be 
 permanent; in a democracy might and authority are 
 on the same side." 
 
 He left, and left our friend in the itching discom- 
 fort of unvented opinion. "To give to the least of 
 them some share in the forces of change!" Change 
 
Chair and Saddle 41 
 
 in what direction, and with what aim? And in that 
 question was involved the problem that this modern 
 was so scornful about through his philosophical vent. 
 Clearly the terrible thing about him and his Liberal 
 partisans was their extreme intellectualism through 
 their political vent. They would mold life over, at 
 once, and with a stroke of the pen. 
 
 Still he knew that there was a case for these men 
 of action — a case as good as his own. He had the 
 ambiguous blessing of imagination and could see 
 himself, in the interims of his militant moods, from 
 their point of view. They were the masters of the 
 world, and if they had the strut and swagger of con- 
 querors, who could blame them, or blame them the 
 touch of contempt, kindly or tolerant, but still con- 
 tempt, with which they must look down on the 
 aenemic scholar bending over his midnight treatise, 
 feet cold and head hot, wrestling with subtle brain- 
 spun distinctions twixt tweedledum and tweedledee 
 that the gross world could never see, or seeing could 
 never have the patience or the care to act upon? 
 
 He had no contempt of his own, however, for his 
 own kind. Rather he knew that each was necessary, 
 each complementing the other. It was a game, one 
 of the eternal conflicts, and he took it so, not flip- 
 pantly, but with the decent good humor that should 
 keep bitterness out of the calculation. He saw, too, 
 that if the men of action so often had the better of it 
 in the way of action, the others as often had the bet- 
 ter of it in the way of ideas; and having chosen his 
 side he could have nothing to complain of. He 
 played the game hard, therefore, no doubt often 
 puffing and blowing in the heat of hard-fought points, 
 
42 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 but willing in the end to acknowledge the fight worth 
 while and his opponent the thing that made it so. 
 
 He sat musing after his guest's departure, stirred 
 to his reflections by the sense that it was such irri- 
 tations as he had just been chafing under that roused 
 him to react. For he was tingling pleasantly with 
 the consciousness that there was still something 
 more to be said about ideas and Liberalism. 
 
 I 
 
Ill 
 
 A LIBERAL EXPERIENCE 
 
 THE point of this adventure was in the pecu- 
 liarly tentative turn of it. The adventurer 
 himself, in the midst of American life where so many 
 masculine things have gone overboard, had main- 
 tained toward practical affairs a very masculine habit 
 of disinterested observation and reflection. He 
 paid a high price for the indulgence. He forfeited 
 the approval of the feminine part of the local world 
 he lived in, and with us that comes to a very swinge- 
 ing majority. The older-fashioned among them felt 
 the ancient, subtle resentment at his aloofness, qua 
 aloofness, and the newer-fashioned resented his 
 thoughtfulness for not being immediate, and ardent, 
 and propagandist. 
 
 The end of it was that he came back after his 
 adventure to a very lively and very much heated 
 public opinion. The adventure itself was over and 
 done before the war began in 19 14, and the local 
 flare would probably have gone out as rapidly as 
 such flares do if the war itself had not intervened 
 to give a peculiar edge to his speculations. By a 
 slender tenure he held a post that was half public in 
 its nature, and this public exposure laid him open 
 to what followed. What did follow was a good deal 
 of newspaper publicity, and a delegation. 
 
44 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 He dealt with the delegation patiently, a little 
 amusedly. It was in the nature of his temper that 
 he could not answer questions in monosyllables, and 
 the delegation wanted monosyllabic answers. They 
 wanted to know specifically whether he believed in 
 democracy. His reply was not evasive, but it was 
 laborious and complex, and probably seemed eva- 
 sive to their impatience. 
 
 What he tried to make them see, and what seemed 
 so hard for them to see, was that since we were al- 
 ready a democracy the great thing was to maintain 
 a constant and goading criticism of it. To them 
 criticism meant simple hostility. They did not quite 
 grasp his interest in the idea, or fathom his sense 
 that to question the idea at every point was the only 
 mode of keeping it vital. His answer that it was 
 not the critical but the uncritical who were the 
 threat to democracy, left them a little hostile. In 
 the end their blunt question whether if he could he 
 would overthrow democracy tomorrow brought out 
 his surprised and evidently sincere, ^^No." They 
 left him then. They were puzzled, a little angry. 
 They seemed to have been robbed of the ground they 
 were standing on. 
 
 The adventure itself took place not in America at 
 all. A half-pay sabbatical had offered him a long- 
 hoped-for year of leisure, and he had elected to 
 spend it abroad. He wanted certain things that 
 he could get nowhere else — contact again with 
 old and vivid associations, and access to Paris, to 
 the Alps, and to Italy. Above all he wanted the 
 perspective of America that nothing but detachment 
 
A Liberal Experience 45 
 
 could give. Not inauspiciously he settled upon 
 London. 
 
 Before he had left a conscientious acquaintance 
 had intimated to him with tact that his going was a 
 piece of self-indulgence not so altruistic as the world 
 was latterly demanding of its best spirits — that the 
 old ideal of self-improvement was giving way before 
 the newer one of service. 
 
 The good will, the large, vague, myopic aspiration 
 that peered out of the earnest, solemn face before 
 him made it impossible to smile. Our friend kept 
 silence, waiting for other bolts from that quiver. 
 They came, one after another, with the persuasive 
 sincerity that made it hard to treat them humanly as 
 they deserved. If these men could only laugh ! But 
 they had no laughter in them. Clearly they had 
 taken too seriously the substitution of service for 
 self-improvement. 
 
 He knew that the best Liberals had no belief in 
 such clap-trap, however sincerely it came from the 
 mouths of the feeble; but he found himself in this 
 quandary as to Liberalism even at its best — that 
 whatever the beauty of Liberal ideals they were 
 calculated to put increasing power into the hands of 
 people like the little man before him, and of people 
 who found such logic plausible. 
 
 It was this latter perception, flashed on him on 
 the eve of his going away, that gave a bent to his 
 observations and reflections abroad — the percep- 
 tion that Liberalism had no adequate criticism in 
 America. There was plenty of opposition, it was 
 true, but he knew that for the most part it was 
 merely illiberal opposition — the opposition of the 
 
46 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 dog with a bone to the dog with none. That antago- 
 nism threw his sympathies so far to the side of 
 Mother Hubbard's poor beast, that if he could have 
 seen no third way out he would have gone over 
 heart and soul to the Liberals themselves. He 
 thought that he did see a third way out, however, 
 though to get to it now would be too blind a leap in 
 the dark. So he set himself, once off the ground of 
 his responsibilities, to groping toward it. 
 
 He settled in London in the pleasant way they 
 have there that goes by the name of ''lodgings." It 
 took, indeed, some courage for our friend to brave 
 it alone, for the peculiar delight of lodgings begins 
 when good comrades go it together, and increases 
 with the number of available acquaintances to be 
 invited in at will. But he began it, and for a time 
 the revival of old impressions kept him company 
 enough. 
 
 "London!" he wrote back at the end of his first week. 
 "The thing is that you feel at home here. You've been 
 taking it in from the time you first wept over Oliver 
 Twist and Little Nell. How universal and maudlin and 
 sincere those insincerities of Dickens were; they caught 
 us all where we lived. 
 
 "Nothing amazes you. That is the great impression 
 that London revisited makes. You expect everything, 
 and everything turns out as you expected — the soften- 
 ing grime of the London air, the lumbering busses, St. 
 Paul's and the river, the faces that Phiz stamped on 
 your brain years ago and you called impossible, shabby- 
 genteel ghosts out of Thackeray, intricate streets, and 
 names that are names of romance clinging here to dingy 
 reality. . . , " 
 
A Liberal Experience 47 
 
 After the pleasant restlessness of his first few 
 weeks had given way to an heroic treatment of in- 
 dulgence, and he had settled into a quieter content 
 with afternoon divings into the maelstrom, his re- 
 flections and his readings began to draw in upon the 
 special object he had set himself in pursuit of. There 
 were moments in these devious excursions into the 
 darker corners of the town when he was tempted in 
 rebellion to throw over the curious scrutiny of po- 
 litical ideas and to rest passionately on any party 
 that would undertake, with pity and courage, to 
 strike a blow for the relief of the misery of the poor. 
 So much was he touched by two or three instances 
 of degradation in poverty that came home to his 
 definite knowledge, and by at least one moving 
 case where a timely rescue had justified the hopes 
 that had prompted it, that he felt again the ardor 
 of his old-time dreams. He saw again from the 
 point of view of those who looked with intolerant 
 impatience upon those who sat aloof and spun 
 theories. His own years of secluded and snug re- 
 flection smote him. All this reversion was tentative, 
 appreciative, rather than active. He realized again 
 how men might abandon themselves to those fer- 
 vors, though he was, no doubt, far from such aban- 
 donment himself. 
 
 It was in a mood of this kind that he went one 
 day to hear a Liberal speaker who promised to deal 
 frankly with the problem. The plea was half given 
 over to touching pictures* of wretchedness. If the 
 speaker had stopped at that he would have done 
 well. The difficulty was that he could not stop at that. 
 To stop at that was to stop at the present, to rouse 
 
48 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the sympathies of the men and women in front of 
 him, and send them at most on separate errands of 
 kindness to the unfortunates whose sufferings they 
 could reach. But the speaker was not looking to 
 immediate acts of charity and kindness. He was 
 looking into the future. He was looking to such a 
 control of affairs as would prevent forever the con- 
 ditions he found so intolerable. He wanted those 
 men and women whose sympathies he had stirred to 
 co-operate with him in a scheme of control. It was 
 nobly and generously done. But it cured our friend 
 of his moment of weakness. It was patent at once 
 that the only grasp the speaker could have on 
 the future was the despised one of the aloof theorists 
 themselves. He had nothing to offer but an idea. 
 One of his auditors went away knowing, as he had 
 never quite ceased to know, that aside from the duty 
 of personal kindliness, the problem was to lay hands 
 on the right idea and make it prevail. 
 
 He saw, indeed, how it was possible to be too 
 aloof and to sit and spin ideas in cold words out of 
 a cold heart. But ideas quite clearly there must be. 
 And now, though he listened to one Liberal after 
 another, and found in them no suspicion of spinning 
 cold words out of a cold heart, there began to take 
 vague shape in his mind the audacious conception 
 that the trouble with Liberalism — whatever the vir- 
 tues of individual Liberals — was, surprisingly, just 
 that it had no idea. That the conception was quite 
 vague, quite shadowy, he saw with a smile at his 
 own expense. He was even a little shocked at it. 
 But it would not be dissipated by scrutiny. When 
 he found it thus standing its ground, refusing to 
 
A Liberal Experience 49 
 
 vanish at cock crow, he sat down to question it by 
 light of day. 
 
 It remained for the time, however, dim and un- 
 pleasantly ghostly. But it attained thus much of 
 definition as he examined it — that whatever the 
 idea that the Liberals should put up as the funda- 
 mental determinant of their political belief, that idea 
 might be overthrown by something still more funda- 
 mental in that belief — by the majority. 
 
 His own notion of a political principle or idea was 
 that it should itself be fundamental and constant — 
 as human affairs go — and should, so to speak, gov- 
 ern instead of being governed. The very point of 
 an idea was that it stood over against letting things 
 go as they would; and the final dependence upon 
 majority opinion seemed very much like letting 
 things go as they would. 
 
 He jotted these animadversions down in letters 
 home, and went on observing and reflecting. Later, 
 when he had got better settled, and the terrace 
 where he had his lodgings had begun to separate 
 itself into its particulars, acquaintance took up its 
 task of softening judgments with sympathies. His 
 perceptions began to have more color, and the re- 
 flections that had commenced misty took on faint 
 lines of definition. With the ounce of compunction 
 that was his usual tribute to the red face of the pil- 
 lar box after his fingers had released a letter, he 
 had already seen that in denying an idea to the Lib- 
 erals he had overlooked one possibility; — that the 
 belief in the majority might of itself be an idea of 
 the kind he was asking for, a steadying and guiding 
 principle. 
 
50 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 As a matter of bare logic he knew that there was 
 no necessary relationship between a majority and 
 either wisdom or justice. But he caught himself up 
 at that, remembering that bare logic was far from 
 being all that there was to be said about human 
 affairs. And now as he looked about at the men 
 and women around him, with the curious eyes of a 
 stranger to whom nothing is staled by custom and 
 nothing is taken for granted, and with the growing 
 sympathies of a more inclusive acquaintance than 
 he had ever formed before, he began to perceive 
 that the majority was not a mere mathematical 
 count, but rather was very human, made up of men 
 and women who, within the range of possibility, 
 might themselves be both wise and just. The ques- 
 tion after all and at bottom was a question of fact. 
 Establish the fact and the rest could be reasoned. 
 He began to look curiously into the fact. 
 
 He was in one of those streets off Bayswater Road 
 — stuccoed ghosts of Georgian fashion — that 
 gather an odd mixture of people but still maintain a 
 kind of identity of their own. It was not an identity 
 of wealth; it was distinctly lodgings. There were 
 rarely occasional villas inside their own grounds, and 
 some of the denizens were idlers; but the general 
 tone of the street was made by "activity" of some 
 kind, and had an intellectual flavor. The denizens 
 were neither economic sufferers nor economic op- 
 pressors, but belonged to the fluider parts of the 
 middling class, and were free enough both from 
 poverty and wealth to do with themselves after their 
 own human leanings. 
 
 As for our friend, his lingering glance and the 
 
A Liberal Experience 51 
 
 lucid humanity in it broke through the reserve of a 
 good many of his neighbors. Among themselves 
 there was little enough intercourse; the hard con- 
 sciousness of a settled society held them apart. But 
 the American was outside of it. He had nothing 
 about him but his common humanity; he had no 
 ramifications; he did not signify beyond the signifi- 
 cance of his presence. And because he was outside 
 of it he was, humanly speaking, let more into it than 
 they themselves. 
 
 The secret of his glance was, perhaps, that it re- 
 vealed interest without impertinence, and personal 
 distinction without the consciousness of class. It 
 dealt out none of the chagrins that make social com- 
 parisons so much harder to bear than personal. At 
 home the irony of his tongue had countered the 
 sympathy and simplicity of his eye, but at home, 
 for him too, the eternal responsibility for the quality 
 of life had edged and roughened many of his gentler 
 qualities. Here, however, he was detached, and 
 life was a spectacle, and he could fall into the very 
 simple bent of his very human nature. There was 
 a sense of relief in this irresponsibility — so pleasant 
 a relief that at times he plunged back into his old 
 militant scorns with a vigour that came from a 
 conscience alarmed at its own relaxation. 
 
 A sympathetic serenity, however, was his normal 
 mood; his mind was fallow. He read, sometimes in 
 his own room and sometimes under the dome of the 
 Museum, walked interminably in the streets, sat in 
 the crescent that stretched before the Terrace, and 
 passively cultivated the seeds of acquaintance that 
 blew into his garden. 
 
52 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 And slowly, as summer passed and autumn came 
 in, two impressions gathered weight and momentum 
 in his mind. Sometimes as he left the Museum at 
 the approach of dusk and turned eastward toward 
 the City he gave a loose to his legs, and with a mind 
 full of the echoes of ten centuries of life that had 
 resounded on that spot, let them thread the intricate 
 pattern, so planless and so human — street and lane, 
 flagged passage, hole in the wall — which men had 
 drawn there so impersonally under the drive of mo- 
 mentary needs that the triter phrase time seemed 
 to be truer than men to name the workman and point 
 the moral of the tale. 
 
 In a little passage off Cheapside there was a leg- 
 less beggar whom he found altogether loquacious and 
 delightful, and whom he came to like so well for the 
 shrewd humour with which he confronted good for- 
 tune and bad, that one day, in a mood that he after- 
 ward knew to be born of his own simplicity, he 
 gathered together an elaborate stock of the strings 
 and pencils that the cripple used, to keep himself 
 inside the law, and sent them secretly by messenger 
 to the accustomed corner. He never saw them 
 again. But when next he stood against the wall of 
 the passage watching the crowd and talking at odd 
 moments down into the cocked ears below him, he 
 heard in terms of gay and sophisticated irony the 
 tale of his own naivete. 
 
 "A good 'earted fool 'e was, sir, whoever 'e was, 
 but a fool just the same. 'Arf a day more and crool 
 ruin 'd a 'ad me. 'E don't know 'is economics, 'e 
 don't." 
 
 Bagdad or London, age of romance or dismal sci- 
 
A Liberal Experience 53 
 
 ence — what matter was it? Human nature re- 
 mained unchanged. 
 
 To stand there at that thronged corner of a bye 
 street, and to watch faces; to catch fragments of 
 talk, of despairs, of passions, of ribaldry and hope; 
 to see beneath the negligible cut of altered styles 
 the immemorial t3q3es — fishwife, porter, coster, pub- 
 lican, lean sharper of the law, saintly-eyed priests, 
 cripples from the wars, pale dapper clerks, robber 
 barons of the Castle or the Street, painted women; 
 or to sit in dingy taverns and hear the wranglings of 
 immemorial prejudice, obstinate and passionate over 
 immemorial beer ; or in urbaner ordinaries and catch 
 the ancient parochial platitudes of life and death, of 
 egotism, of caste, of the neglect of merit — to ob- 
 serve all this with sympathy and detachment was 
 to lose track of the century and feel the slow inertia 
 of the bulk of human life. 
 
 At such moments the recollection of his readings, 
 through years in his library at home, and more re- 
 cently under the dome of the Museum, took on a 
 peculiar light. It was a light that was starry in its 
 lucid and utter detachment. Plato, Jesus, Anto- 
 ninus, Dante, St. Francis, Pascal, Carlyle — the list 
 indeed was long, but they stood out sharply against 
 the great immensity of the night. In them, and in 
 the stream of their tradition, was matter to make 
 over a world that had been more rational and more 
 kind. What more, or better, was to be said to the 
 reasoning mind or the pitying heart? And how little 
 they had prevailed with the great turgid stream of 
 life! 
 
 In his earlier and lonelier days in London such 
 
54 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 visions were frequent enough to have become im- 
 pressive. He owned grudgingly their truth, and saw 
 in them the sad bidding to infinite and pitying pa- 
 tience. But though he longed to drag his Liberal 
 friends to that beggar's corner and bring home to 
 them the unchanging spectacle and humble their 
 confident eagerness, he caught also for his own 
 warning the odor of poppies that clung about such 
 broodings. 
 
 It was with some violence to his mood, therefore, 
 that he took himself humorously in hand. The sense 
 of the inveterate inertia of the mass of life still went 
 with him, ground note of a complex harmony; but 
 he turned himself back to his terrace with the recol- 
 lection of his own fugitive littleness, and reminders 
 that he was of his own time, and that the problem 
 of his own time was the fusing of those two streams, 
 dark and light. That, at least, was the proposal of 
 the Liberals ; and it was with them that he was just 
 now concerned. 
 
 He began now to see more sharply the terms of 
 his problem. If the Liberals held out hopes that in 
 the fusion it should be the light that had the better 
 of it and not the dark, he had, here on the Terrace, 
 something significant to watch — something of the 
 bare terms of the actual process. For in the course 
 of his first months there he had caught the quality 
 of his neighbourhood. It was intelligent; it was 
 Liberal, it was in an especial degree what the Lib- 
 erals wanted to make of the whole mass — it was 
 economically free. He had but a little while before 
 been inclined to complain that Liberalism had 
 nothing else at the bottom of its bag. But now he 
 
A Liberal Experience 55 
 
 was not so confident of his old assurances; at all 
 events he was more tolerant of the Liberal faith that 
 given economic freedom the rest would follow. And 
 so he set about to observe what, stripped of the 
 adventitious and the eccentric, typically did follow 
 with these men and women whom Liberalism had 
 finished with. He wanted, above everything, to be 
 actual. If the case of the majority was to be 
 grounded on the fact, the fact was the thing to be 
 looked at. And here was a significant sample of the 
 fact. 
 
 There was enough humour in him, of a self- 
 directed and ironic kind, to keep his thinking sane, 
 and the inevitable pride of perception never quite 
 deceived him into a belief that his score of motley 
 neighbours were an ultimate picture of the Liberal 
 accomplishment. But his humour could work both 
 ways, and if he demanded that the counters of his 
 own ideas should be fleshly and real, he demanded no 
 less of the Liberals themselves. And it seemed to 
 him, then and afterwards, that though the Liberals 
 showed a throbbing sense of reality in conceiving 
 their sympathies, and winning the sympathies of 
 others, there was something a little detached and 
 abstract about their thinking in the large. Some of 
 their phrases — the average, the will of the people, 
 majority opinion — seemed to him to have got their 
 warmth rather from the emotions that made the 
 Liberal motives than from a warm reality in the con- 
 ceptions themselves. Their moral substance dis- 
 solved under concrete inspection. Their cold statis- 
 tical values seemed far enough removed from the 
 personal immediacy of the very human problem that 
 politics at its best set out to solve. 
 
56 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 What he saw there on the Terrace was that he had, 
 if not an equivalence of the Liberal goal, at least a 
 spectacle that could keep warmth and reality in his 
 phrases. If they were, these neighbors of his, quite 
 startlingly individual, and concretely set up on their 
 own legs, and set going by their own spontaneities, 
 he detected the last touch of their very human 
 reality in their proneness to fall into human ten- 
 dencies. For one thing they were all Liberals. That 
 was, indeed, almost the only thing that they had in 
 common, but they did separately manage to fall into 
 many of the grooves and ruts of the time. If they 
 did not violate reality by being generic abstractions, 
 neither did they violate it by being unique. They 
 were knowably human, and quite humanly sociable, 
 and lonely, and anxious to accrue somewhere, to 
 belong to something bigger than themselves, to give 
 some significance to the grievous isolation of indi- 
 viduality. 
 
 How far they blew with the winds of opinion in 
 England he could hardly venture to say. Aristo- 
 cratic tradition there still had vitality. But he knew 
 his own country, and as he looked about him at that 
 London terrace, he seemed to see, beneath the sur- 
 face, something of the array of moral and intellectual 
 diversity that touched to the life his picture of Lib- 
 eral America. 
 
 A September fog — his first fog in London — was 
 enriched in its associations, if not made more en- 
 durable, by what at home would have been a painful 
 but unromantic twinge of rheumatism. Here, how- 
 ever, he felt entitled to the honors of gout, and bore 
 himself between twinges with a humorous sense of 
 
A Liberal Experience 57 
 
 this visitation as a thing of quite literary quality. 
 There was a more substantial reward in it, however, 
 in the fact that it brought the beginning of a new and 
 more intimate stage in his acquaintance with the 
 curious medley in the Terrace. The garrulous S3nii- 
 pathy of his landlady, no doubt, spread the rumor 
 that the poor American gentleman was laid by with 
 the more euphemistic malady. He became promptly 
 the object of much good feeling and not a few acts 
 of kindness. They came to him, these kindly neigh- 
 bors, with the warrant of previous conversations 
 in the lounge, and with the tradition of his Ameri- 
 canism to excuse their unreserve. They came singly, 
 for they held aloof from each other, and came again, 
 finding in him a disinterested attentiveness that was 
 soothing to their egotisms. They talked about 
 themselves, as interesting men do, and as uninterest- 
 ing men do, and they were often intimate in the im- 
 personal manner of people who are immersed in 
 special ways of judging the world. 
 
 In the semi-detachment that comes with chronic 
 and not too acute pain in a remote member, he 
 watched the little drama of conflicting ideas that 
 the house was staging around him, the rasping an- 
 tagonisms implied and expressed in their allusions to 
 each other, their mutual avoidances and constraints. 
 So that his days of confinement, when he came to 
 look back on them, took on the colors of quick and 
 significant action. His memory of it all was no 
 doubt highly selective, but the stuff that he found 
 in it was clearly enough present in the reality. 
 
 The first one to knock timidly at his door was a 
 woman. She lived in a little back room on his own 
 
58 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 floor, overlooking an area and a whitewashed wall. 
 Twenty years before, when she was twenty, she had 
 written a novel. Hearts Aflame; a copy of it lay 
 now, its lavender boards soiled and broken, on the 
 parlour table below. She had never got another 
 published. Soon the world had begun to frighten 
 her, and she had taken to ''metaphysics." Her face 
 was thin and the veins showed on the meager cheeks, 
 but there were delicate lips and dark eyes that still 
 showed the old dreams that once at least, and in the 
 cold world of print, had come true for her. Now 
 her eyes hovered and never came to rest. With a 
 rustle of black taffeta she fluttered in at the bidding 
 that answered her knock, unheedful, in the feverish 
 elevation of her mission, of the dressing gown and 
 the bandaged foot that for a brief moment embar- 
 rassed her host. 
 
 "Have you tried metaphysics?" she asked 
 abruptly, upright and tentative in the chair he 
 offered. 
 
 He answered no, hardly aware of her meaning, and 
 she hurried on. She was sure it was medicine that 
 kept him ill, for all sickness and all evil were only 
 illusions. She murmured on vaguely about the good- 
 ness of God, the control of matter by mind, and the 
 unreality of material things. And then she came 
 back to medicine, which somehow seemed the great- 
 est evil of all, and terribly real. 
 
 "You must ask me questions," she said. "It 
 isn't easy to grasp it all at once." 
 
 What could he ask? He inquired whether she 
 wore a cloak in winter, had a fire in her room, 
 whether she ate. And she answered very gently, 
 
A Liberal Experience 59 
 
 catching the drift, "We haven^t got so far as that, 
 yet." 
 
 After a while, when he was silent, she added, "It 
 is a religion; it is very sacred." And then more in- 
 tensely and a little bitterly, "I am reviled here. I 
 have spoken to them all, as I must, mustn't I, seeing 
 how they suffer from their lack of faith. But they 
 go on with their little human schemes to make a 
 bad world better, when all the time they keep it 
 evil by thinking it evil." 
 
 Someone knocked at the door, and the kitchen 
 slavey pushed into the room with a tray of tea 
 things. When the pale, slatternly little maid had 
 slid away to double her provision the two were 
 silent. Something in the pitiable hopelessness of 
 this apparition jarred on the visitor's last note and 
 made it hard to resume. Before the return of the 
 forlorn little wretch with fresh supplies, another 
 knock brought in other visitors. The fluttering 
 guest rose and said she must go, with a baffled ges- 
 ture that made her going almost a flight. 
 
 The new comers were a pair of biologists from 
 overhead, man and wife. They had stopped in, 
 they said, on their way home, the fog having put 
 an end to work. They had heard that he was laid 
 up. There was a hesitation in their manner that 
 the departed guest was clearly accountable for, and 
 a constraint set in that even tea with its ancient 
 sociability — it had been finally mustered for three 
 — did little to relieve. Only the clinking resur- 
 gence of the medicine bottle put them wholly at 
 their ease and gave them a point of contact. 
 
 The man was young, with uncouth, roomy clothes, 
 
6o A Lover of the Chair 
 
 a sprawling figure, and a droning voice. But he 
 had hands that were delicate, slender, and deft like 
 a woman's, and eyes that needed no supplement of 
 feature — wide apart, and keen or dreaming as the 
 talk shifted from fact to vision or vision to fact. His 
 wife was a girl in years, plain and calm and compe- 
 tent, speaking to the subject without the feminine 
 consciousness of the listener. They had met and 
 loved in a laboratory, and had gone out one afternoon 
 and been married by a magistrate. The quiet ro- 
 mance of their union still burned in their eyes and 
 told in their gestures, whether they talked, as they 
 did, of political hopes, or of the large dreams of 
 their science. 
 
 When medicine was disposed of and tobacco was 
 produced they settled themselves comfortably, di- 
 vining the welcome in reaction from their momen- 
 tary doubts. They both smoked, the man nervously, 
 and his wife with a sedative calm at once homelike 
 and revolutionary. 
 
 ^'We're a queer lot here," the biologist mused, and 
 his wife added, "I dare say you've had a taste of us." 
 
 "I shall hate it when I have to go," our friend re- 
 turned heartily. 
 
 "They're good-hearted enough," the scientist went 
 on. ''And if they'd stop there it would be a good 
 thing for England. Only they won't. They try to 
 think. Look at them. No, I'm not personal — it's 
 just because they take up these cults and get run 
 away with that it isn't like talking scandal to speak 
 of them. They move like puppets ; somehow they're 
 not their own men. And when you speak of them 
 you're speaking of something impersonal and 
 threatening — disintegrating." 
 
A Liberal Experience 6i 
 
 He omitted courteously the guest who had just 
 gone, but sketched out others in the house and set 
 them forth in clashing collocation — a Bergsonian 
 who was for reasoning away the reason, an aesthete 
 who was for sentimentalizing life, a pedagogue with a 
 modernistic cult of spontaneity, a socialist with a 
 dream of industrial bureaucracy, a social worker 
 drunk with a vision of syndicalist overthrow, and 
 worst of all the eternal gentleman with his static, 
 visionless immaculacy and his hopeless content with 
 polite manners, polite learning, polite charity, polite 
 inanity. There they were, threatening between them 
 to smash the only hope of unity that reason held out 
 for the future of poor England — and poor America, 
 for that matter. That only hope was science. Then 
 he sprawled at reflective length in his chair and 
 launched the great scientific dream, the praise of its 
 discipline, the vision of its gradual absorption of all 
 that was now going at loose ends under the care of 
 literature, and morals, and politics, and art. 
 
 They left at the appearance of the dinner tray, 
 and the doubts that were hovering in our friend's 
 mind as to the all-sufficiency of science to take care 
 of many of men's aspirations remained there undi- 
 vulged. He promised himself to review them over 
 his coffee and cigar, but his coffee and cigar were 
 shared by the anti-intellectualist and it was impos- 
 sible to share with this common enemy the ironies 
 that he had for science. For those ironies, after all, 
 were sympathetic and not fundamentally hostile. 
 
 The new visitor, with the prospect of two fair 
 hours before him, set out to shatter the reason with 
 irrefragible logic. The demonstration went forward 
 
62 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 apace, step by step, interrupted now and again by 
 inquiring visitors, who glanced at the guest and 
 would not stay, and ended with the reason quite in 
 the ruck and discard of the world's rushing progress 
 through time. 
 
 The loneliness of the second morning of confine- 
 ment was relieved by quite his most welcome visi- 
 tor. He was a young man of a reflective turn and 
 greying temples, who came toward noon with a mess 
 of sausages, and stayed to reveal a very endearing 
 nature. He was a writer on Liberal doctrines, and 
 eked out a living in several minor lectureships. Our 
 friend amused himself by picturing him as a modern 
 version of the old Whig pamphleteer. But the 
 type had changed, in externals at least. In place of 
 the old blind partisanship and the old emotional loy- 
 alty that went with the old ideas, there was the clear, 
 rational coolness that consorted with the term 
 science, which he used to designate his political the- 
 ories with. The change was consistent with the 
 change from the moral to the economic ends to which 
 Liberal theory had been so largely reduced. It was 
 beneath this exterior, however, that the old Whig 
 still smouldered — in a burning loyalty to the one 
 human idea that lay, by faith, in the Liberal prin- 
 ciple — the belief in the majority. He had a gen- 
 erous hatred of compulsion, a hatred that in someone 
 less ardent, a little more aloof, would have played 
 hob with his modern Liberal programme of sweeping 
 regulation and restriction. His ideas were tolerantly 
 put, but there was a brooding undertone running 
 through them, a kind of mute anger at the life at his 
 elbow, at the perverse spectacle of mad divergence 
 that kept men so unsympathetically apart. 
 
A Liberal Experience 63 
 
 "For all our interests, our best interests," he said, 
 "are one, you know, common, co-operative. And 
 yet, look at us here " 
 
 But when the pedagogue, with his theories of 
 spontaneity in education, came in, he himself was 
 fain to go. The spectacle of that demoralizer of 
 common foundations and common standards was 
 too much for his patience to bear. 
 
 Others dropped in on that day and the next in a 
 bright stream of clashing colours — the syndicalist 
 with his elan vital, the socialist with his rational, 
 hard, schematic, but beautiful Utopia, an Anglican 
 priest with brooding loyalty to a waning cause. 
 
 It was on the fourth day, when a warm sun and a 
 sudden relief from his malady took him out into 
 the crescent, that he met the aesthetic critic of whom 
 the scientist had spoken — a short stocky man 
 dressed always, morning and evening, in a jaunty 
 Norfolk jacket with a flare, a Windsor tie, and ex- 
 traordinarily stout boots. The morning invited talk, 
 and the sun, or a native bent, or both, charmed out 
 of the little man the eccentric tale of his own phil- 
 osophy. 
 
 He had got demd sick, he said, of propriety. He 
 had seen it until all the world had begun to look like 
 a box of puppets with strings pulled by a machine, 
 forever the same, without variation, without intelli- 
 gence, without imagination. He'd looked behind 
 for the operator. Dead! He'd looked for the in- 
 ventor. Dead, too! He'd then got out of the box 
 himself, and life was a jolly bit more like it outside. 
 Here he was, quite alive, and he knew it because 
 everything that came into his mind was something 
 
64 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 new. He had chucked the machine for good and 
 all. What he was looking for was life, and life was 
 spontaneous — not the same thing over and over. 
 As for laws, they were the joke of some devil who 
 wanted things to happen always the same way. 
 Artists were the people with life as he understood it. 
 They needed no laws; the instinct of beauty kept 
 them from anything nasty. And then he got on to 
 his scheme for social regeneration — a kind of Lib- 
 eral anarchy mitigated by aesthetics and propelled 
 by impulse. 
 
 It was a little inconsistent that, forgetting his 
 principles for the moment, he should respond to his 
 own clean impulses and damn the uglifying verses of 
 the poet who lived on the top floor of the Terrace, 
 and whom our friend had seen once or twice in the 
 passage. For himself, the critic did the arts for an 
 afternoon paper — and his thumb jerked toward the 
 villa that flanked the Terrace. He told then about 
 ^'Old Flash," his proprietor, owner of a half-penny 
 sheet in Fleet Street, that said wicked things about 
 the aristocracy at seductive length, and illustrated 
 with much bare flesh from the drawing-rooms and 
 the music halls. 
 
 He left our friend to musings about ^'Old Flash." 
 He remembered now to have seen that gentleman 
 from his own window that overlooked the garden 
 of the villa. The villa itself was a matter of flaming 
 riches and flaming taste, with footman and butler 
 and coachman in incredible livery. But the garden 
 belonged to another world, and answered to the care 
 of a spare and bandy Weshman in inalienable shirt- 
 sleeves and flat cap. It was there, in the summer, 
 
A Liberal Experience 65 
 
 that he had seen a boy of ten for the first time back 
 from school, thin and pale, and going about from 
 spot to spot watching the gardener with wistful eyes. 
 Later the family were on the wing for Brighton, and 
 the boy was in the garden going about saying good- 
 by to his pony and his rabbit and his dog. When 
 they found him he was standing before a prickly cac- 
 tus that he had brought from school in his pocket 
 and planted in a corner. There was language from 
 the pair in the French window, father and mother. 
 It came across the pleasant shrubbery harshly and 
 brutally, and our friend, from his own window, saw 
 the boy's shoulders shrink together as he turned and 
 went into the house. And now as he thought back 
 on this incident that had touched him so much then, 
 it became acutely significant. His habit, right or 
 wrong, was to generalize the color of life, to find in 
 the private springs of personal character the subtle 
 indications of the quality of large affairs. There 
 was something sinister, therefore, in this incident, as 
 he brooded upon it. His idea spread from the single 
 character whom he had seen in the French window, 
 out to the infinite repetitions of it in that half-penny 
 sheet dropping their indirect suggestions, and tread- 
 ing them down day after day into the minds, dull or 
 receptive, that made up majorities. 
 
 A kind of baffled, helpless impotence seized him 
 at the thought of the uncontrollable forces at work 
 against the efforts, generous but weak, of those who, 
 like his friend of the sausages, dreamed of a people 
 united in a single intelligent purpose and working 
 together to a single intelligent end. 
 
 He got up to walk off his restlessness. A distant 
 
66 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 church bell called back to him suddenly out of the 
 past an. older and larger and serener dream of an in- 
 fluence reaching out to all men, and working upon 
 them from within to bring them together with a 
 common and moving impulse. He had a fleeting 
 sense that only so, working through character to 
 outer expressions of it in social relations, could any 
 reform ever make over the life they were all trying 
 so desperately to make over. The turmoil of struggle 
 to mold it from without, to regulate the expressions 
 themselves, leaving the character untouched, or 
 touched only with the restive animosities of restraint, 
 struck him as tremendously, desperately futile. 
 
 It was perhaps this sense that led him, a few min- 
 utes later, to fall in step by genial invitation with 
 a minister who cogitated his sermons there, up and 
 down on the gravel. In a few more minutes he was 
 listening to the curious tale of that shift from Chris- 
 tianity to economics that was going on in the 
 churches — perhaps more in America than in Eng- 
 land — in the name of progress. 
 
 ^'Change and evolution are the law of life," he 
 heard the ministerial voice saying by his side, and it 
 came to him stridently across the quiet of his serener 
 vision of a moment before. "And if it is true that 
 Jesus did look upon possession as an evil and 
 poverty as a good, still we may hardly cling to ideas 
 that are outgrown. Christianity is not static; if 
 it is to live it must grow with the progress of ideas." 
 
 He was rational and hearty and disposed to talk. 
 Our friend put the point of his doubts to him. 
 
 ''It is still possible, though," he said, "to despise 
 riches and put one's heart on other things. Mightn't 
 that attitude still deserve to be called Christianity?" 
 
A Liberal Experience 67 
 
 ^'Historically, perhaps," the other returned. "But 
 that would be to stand still." 
 
 ''But why, then," our friend pursued, "keep to 
 the old term? There is a bit of stability in the name 
 that might be got rid of." 
 
 The answer was hard to put at once, delicately 
 and directly, but it came at last, out of many words, 
 that to give up the term Christianity would be to lose 
 much of the credit that the centuries had accumu- 
 lated about the sacred name. 
 
 Our friend crept back to his room and meditated. 
 
 "There they are," he mused, almost a year after- 
 wards, in a letter to the friend for whom he had 
 accumulated this gallery of portraits. "Do you 
 like them? For myself I find myself more tolerant 
 as I grow older, though I have a good deal of sym- 
 pathy for the bitterness of Burke in his old age. I 
 suppose it is easier for us, who hate the same things, 
 to take them more casually; we have grown up with 
 them. At all events, when I come to give up my 
 rooms — shut up my box of puppets, as the aesthete 
 would have it — I shall go away with a good deal of 
 the desolation that comes at parting. 
 
 "But I've watched the comedy almost out; theyVe 
 begun to reappear in the same parts, and repeat the 
 same speeches, with sincerity indeed — the sincerity 
 that makes them so likable — but each one with 
 the inner twist that sends him off on his own tangent 
 to add his own disorder to the great confusion. 
 If it were only a London terrace I could take them 
 aesthetically, as the Bergsonian is so fond of recom- 
 mending, and I could smile and call quits. But they 
 
68 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 are more than a London terrace. I have eaten their 
 chops and drunk their wine and their beer, and I 
 know how separately real they are. But they are 
 representative none the less. 
 
 ^'Have I played them a little false, to have watched 
 them, to let them talk, and thus to be writing to 
 you about them. I hope not. If I've looked on at 
 the play it has been with sympathy, and if I have 
 been amused, or found them wanting, it was no part 
 of mine to set up as their director. Even here I 
 have no wish to ridicule them. But I have wanted 
 answers to certain questions, and I've let them play 
 on and the answers have come out. I have seen 
 them here, irreconcilable, with nothing but their Lib- 
 eralism in common — and only that in common I 
 suspect because it has no ideas to disturb them — 
 without an education in common, without common 
 intellectual standards, without common ethical stan- 
 dards, inimical to each other. And I have asked 
 them, silently, what they themselves actually believe, 
 in the one thing that they can assert to be common 
 to their social philosophy — their belief in majority 
 opinion. 
 
 ^'Well, they don't believe in majority opinion. 
 
 " 'You are aware, sir,' the woman with the fright- 
 ened eyes said to me, one day as we sat alone in the 
 lounge, 'that we are few here. I understand that we 
 are many in your country. But here we are few, and 
 little understood. Only yesterday a meeting was 
 mobbed in Kent, and everywhere we are ridiculed. 
 But for us who know that God in His goodness could 
 create no evil, such things only strengthen us in 
 our faith.' 
 
A Liberal Experience 69 
 
 " 'God bless you sir,' the jaunty, good-souled 
 aesthete said on another occasion, 'they're a jolly 
 prim lot, I tell you. I can't help liking them, for 
 they're my own people, but they're as near mum- 
 mies as they can be in this climate. The human 
 atmosphere here is as dry as Egypt.' 
 
 ''I suggested the great English humourists. 
 
 " 'Ah,' he returned, 'the reason England's had so 
 many great humourists is because she's had so many 
 good subjects. We have some intelligent men, you 
 know, and they can't help seeing. But the run of 
 them — ah, we go to France for intelligence — or I 
 dare say America,' he added out of his goodness. 
 
 " 'Our trouble is,' the scientist explained, 'that 
 every upstart wants his son to be a gentleman, and 
 sends him off to a polite school where he is to get a 
 jumble of dead languages and dead knowledge. It 
 isn't only Oxford and Cambridge that are the curse 
 of English education, but every public school and all 
 the little private ones that ape them and pander to 
 the snobbish ambition of people on the make. A 
 few here and there break loose and find their way 
 into science. But it's a kind of accident with us. 
 Our education is rotten. The worst of it is that it's 
 the exact expression of our intelligence. By and 
 large, you know.' 
 
 "Shall I go on, or does it grow monotonous? 
 
 " 'There are so few,' the social worker complained 
 sadly, 'who really are interested. There's a great 
 deal of talk and a great deal of polite and fashion- 
 able slumming, but only a few people really care. 
 When you go down into the East End and see the 
 life of it and the mass of it, it is overwhelming — 
 
70 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the sense of all that is to be done, and the sense 
 that over there to the West and out through the 
 whole country those others are shutting themselves 
 off from a knowledge of conditions here, or if they 
 know are shutting their hearts against a care for 
 them. Here among ourselves sometimes we try to 
 believe that we have awakaned the world to the 
 crime of all this poverty and suffering. We read our 
 own papers and go to our own meetings, and fill up 
 our lives with it till we get to thinking that all the 
 world is as alive to it as we are. But we have only 
 to look off to the horizon to see that the world goes 
 on much as ever, indifferent, each man the center of 
 his own universe.' 
 
 " ^You mustn't listen to most talkers about social- 
 ism/ said the socialist. ^They give you a wrong 
 notion altogether. They don't go to the heart of it; 
 they want more than they've got, and socialism looks 
 like the best way to get it. The real thing is a phil- 
 osophy and a sympathy, not a grab.' 
 
 "A kind of helpless compunction seizes me when 
 I hear these unconscious answers coming out in un- 
 guarded moments. They are so human. They speak 
 from their hearts, then, and not by book. They are 
 thinking not by formula but of the majorities they 
 meet and jostle with, the men and women who make 
 up the actual world. In an abstract corner of their 
 minds they find the majority somehow good, but 
 where each one comes in conflict with reality his 
 loyalty goes with his idea. He and his forlorn hope 
 are right against the world. No majority could 
 make them think differently; their consciences would 
 rebel. How could the majority change the right- 
 
A Liberal Experience 71 
 
 ness of their ideas? Each one in the measure of his 
 sincerity would have contempt for the one who could 
 trim his ideas to suit the wind of popular opinion. 
 
 ^'For a time I thought that the Liberal writer was 
 an exception. His particular mission is just this 
 belief in majorities. But in a by-election in our 
 borough in March the majority went wrong. And 
 for a moment, as he came in, mud-spattered and 
 weary after the count, and flung himself down on 
 the couch, a touch of despair seized him. It was no 
 comfort to him for me to point out that however the 
 majority went the fundamental Liberal principle 
 triumphed because the majority had had its will. 
 
 ''He had done what Liberalism has not done — he 
 had put an idea at the bottom of his faith. He had 
 asked that the majority should be right. And the 
 majority had defected. They may have been right 
 and he wrong. I don't know. But in his honesty 
 he could not change his judgment to suit the vote. 
 And for the moment as he lay there — and I dare 
 say for the hundredth time — he saw as those others 
 had seen, each from his own real contact with the 
 world, that beneath the willful surface of his mind 
 he had no belief in majorities. He caught the dis- 
 junction between his fundamental principle and the 
 idea itself. 
 
 '' 'And yet,' he said, gathering courage from other 
 anchorages of his faith, 'right or wrong, still it is 
 best that they should have their own way. What- 
 ever they bring on themselves they bring on them- 
 selves. It is better than the injustice of compulsion 
 that would come from forcing them according to any 
 idea.' 
 
72 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ^'He was tired and discouraged. He got up and 
 went away, troubled, unhappy, struggHng with the 
 inner conflict, a cloud of bitterness darkening his 
 mood. 
 
 "The resumption of the point came later from an 
 unexpected quarter. I was visiting upstairs with 
 the uncouth scientist of the keen eyes and delicate 
 hands, and the smooth-browed, intelligent girl, his 
 wife. I had been listening to that vision of life and 
 society as an organism where neither crime, nor 
 beauty, nor happiness, nor will, nor anything hu- 
 man but would find its ultimate niche in the hier- 
 archy of some monstrous physics textbook. 
 
 "One doesn't expect too much consistency of men. 
 Life has a way of avenging .itself by striking a bal- 
 ance and maintaining its humour. One expects to 
 find an age of feminine suffragists blossoming out in 
 a feminine dress that exaggerates sexual differences. 
 He expects to find among physicists a belief in 
 ghosts; to find Dukes de Broglie of sublime morals 
 and abysmal morality, anti-intellectualists who deny 
 the reason and reason out the denial, feeble 
 Nietzsches proclaiming the doctrine of force, Rous- 
 seaus asserting the inherent goodness of men and 
 laying bare their own festering souls. But somehow 
 one is struck by the particular instances; and there 
 I sat amazed, listening to the virulent tirade of the 
 scientist who believed that all life and love and 
 beauty and spirit were but mechanical reactions — 
 his virulent tirade against the simple concept of sub- 
 ordination in social life. 
 
 "His science dissolved when it came home to his 
 own will. What he, who pictured all life but as a 
 
A Liberal Experience 73 
 
 vast mechanism, revolted against, was compulsion. 
 His point was the injustice of forcing human wills. 
 You know the curious simplicity of scientific minds 
 when they step over into the human field — a certain 
 credulity of assumption in them. Their charm is 
 that they reason frankly; they know how to differ 
 without invidious heat. And this evening, lured by 
 the argument and by the friendliness of the pair I 
 took up the cudgels. 
 
 "Put to it, they believed in government. Be- 
 lieving in government they believed in forcing some 
 wills. And at last they acknowledged a belief in the 
 stronger majorities forcing the wills of the weaker 
 minority. But for me as I listened, somehow the 
 idea of justice faded before that crude picture of 
 the rule of might. They themselves withdrew the 
 plea of justice. They dallied for a moment with 
 another possibility — that society was an organism 
 in which the individual was negligible, that majority 
 opinion represented the iinal opinion of the organism 
 to which all the members must conform. But in 
 that analogy the idea of justice was but dimly seen, 
 and the concepts of the organism and the negligible 
 individual were too Prussian, lent themselves too 
 well to the hierarchic scheme, to linger long in front 
 of us. We gave up the idea of justice. It was plain 
 that there was no more justice in forcing four men 
 against their wills than in forcing five. Justice be- 
 longed to the category of the idea and not to that of 
 the count. 
 
 "It was the girl, with her clear common sense and 
 her touch of feminine practicalness, who shifted the 
 majority rule to more stable grounds. 
 
74 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 " 'Whether or not it is just/ she said, 'depends 
 upon the rightness of the idea you enforce. But 
 majority rule, as such, is a matter of convenience, 
 isn't it? If we have government some wills must 
 have their way and others must submit. I should 
 say that it was done in the interest of order, simply.' 
 
 ''As I sat there under the spell of finality that 
 follows the simplifications of common sense, it 
 seemed as though the last word had been said. Ma- 
 jority rule was a device in the interest of order 
 simply. I thought back with humiliation on that 
 web of complexities that I had tangled myself in. 
 One clear shaft of simple intelligence had done away 
 with those probings after justice and wisdom. If 
 Liberals had really believed in the wisdom and jus- 
 tice of majorities they would have been passive under 
 the verdict of majorities. Once the majority had 
 decided, further agitation would have been imper- 
 tinence. Nothing would be consistent with a belief 
 in majority wisdom and justice but to cease trying 
 to influence it — to let life drift. No one did believe 
 in the essential wisdom and justice of majority 
 opinion. It was a device in the interest of order 
 simply. 
 
 "Then as we looked at the simplified picture, a 
 new perplexity got hold of us. What kind of order, 
 we asked. Any kind of submission made for order 
 of a sort. The question was, what was to be the 
 quality of that order. Was it to be mere mechanic, 
 unthinking submission to any haphazard succession 
 of ideas the majority chanced to hit upon? What 
 kinds of ideas were to be submitted to? And those 
 questions plunged us back into the night, for 
 
A Liberal Experience 75 
 
 Liberalism had no answer to them. It had no idea 
 of its own to offer, no principle to organize a con- 
 sistent order around. All it had to submit was the 
 will of the majority. 
 
 " ^It tries to relieve every one of economic slavery/ 
 the biologist said tentatively. 
 
 "But we soon saw that even the perfect accom- 
 plishment of that aim left them stranded short of 
 their beginning to have an idea. The Terrace in all 
 its motley rose up before us — more bitterly, in- 
 deed, for my hosts than for me, for against their own 
 ideas they felt the terrible menace of all those other 
 inimical ideas that the Terrace revealed. And what 
 order could come out of that chaos? It was just 
 there in that chaos that Liberalism abandoned them. 
 What we saw was that economic freedom was not 
 the essential element of order. The only order that 
 would be tolerable would be a moral order. And 
 Liberalism had nothing in its principles to center a 
 moral order around. 
 
 "Rather in its approval of anything that could get 
 a majority behind it, it seemed to echo the serious 
 banter of the jaunty aesthete. I met him in the park 
 one day soon after this conversation. 
 
 "'Not wisdom — well, rather not!' he laughed, 
 and paused, and I saw him there with his hands in 
 his pockets picturing the great British public in his 
 favorite vision. Taney, wisdom! And I dare say 
 it's no more just for a score of men to force a dozer 
 to put water in their beer than for a dozen to force 
 a score to put water in their beer. On the contrary, 
 I call it dem'd ungentlemanly, might is right, and 
 that sort of Prussian thing. But if we've got to 
 
76 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 have laws, and being poHtical animals I dare say we 
 shall go on having laws, the thing is still to have as 
 many on their own as possible, and that's the ma- 
 jority, and as few as possible knuckling under when 
 the strings are pulled, and that's the minority. It's 
 one of the beneficences of Providence, don't you see, 
 that there are fewer in the minority than in the 
 majority.' 
 
 ^'I wanted to ask why on their own, if their own 
 were so ludicrous as his favourite vision pictured 
 them, or they were so unwise as he imagined them. 
 But such a complaint would not have reached what 
 was the point with him. It was the flashing colors, 
 the variety, the quick changes of irregularity and 
 disorder that caught his eye and pleased his aesthetic 
 sensibilities. It struck me suddenly as significant 
 that of all the denizens of the Terrace he was the 
 only one untouched by discouragement — the only 
 one whom Liberalism seemed to satisfy in the reality. 
 
 "It was the Liberal writer who brought the point 
 back to the problem of order. I found him one 
 morning in the crescent with his notebook open on 
 his knee. He put it up when he saw me, and made 
 room on the iron bench beside him. It was August 
 bank holiday. There was a low white drift under 
 a blue sky, such as makes a pastoral of London, 
 sometimes, when there is a blow in the Channel. 
 
 '' 'I dare say we shall have it alone today,' he said, 
 and I knew that there was something behind the 
 tone of his voice. He was irritated. 'They'll be off 
 to the Heath to see the costers,' he went on with a 
 glance at the Terrace. And then, after a pause — 
 ^A curious lot! I'm afraid they'll have given you a 
 
A Liberal Experience 77 
 
 strange notion of us in England. They've mostly 
 gone daft. They are people of one idea — each one 
 with his own, you know — and you know how a 
 single idea plays hob with weak minds.' 
 
 "He went on about them at irritable length. 
 There was nothing petty in his grievance. He had 
 an unusual degree of sweet reasonableness in his 
 personal nature. But the concrete facts obtruded 
 harshly on his principles, and it was upon his prin- 
 ciples that his heart was set. 
 
 " What we aim at,' he said in his large way, ^is 
 the socialization of life. You have suggested that 
 we have no idea, but that is our idea — to quicken 
 the sense of social responsibility, to spread the 
 practice of social co-operation, to stimulate the con- 
 sciousness of the common good. The more wholly 
 the people take part in government the more they 
 must learn to work together. For order, real order, 
 and not a mere mechanic submission, can only come 
 from the presence of some consistent and con- 
 structive idea, a common standard of judgment, and 
 a common ethical criterion — a whole people work- 
 ing together. And these people — ' he looked up 
 sadly and there was no malice in his eyes — ^look 
 at them, each penned up in his little crib of an idea, 
 full of mutual suspicion — Old Flash and the priest, 
 mental healer and biologist and anti-intellectualist, 
 socialist, aesthete, rotten poet, social worker — each 
 one absorbed in his own two-penny theory, flying 
 off at a tangent, thinking of each other with con- 
 tempt, and thinking of the state only when they 
 spare a moment from their own interests, or when 
 they hope to serve themselves by drumming up a 
 
78 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 majority for their own ends. What have they in 
 common? What do they try to have in common. 
 They call themselves Liberals, but they get together 
 in nothing but their hatreds.' 
 
 "I quoted a passage from Burke's Reflections an- 
 ticipating a time when 'laws were to be supported 
 only by their own terrors and in the concern which 
 each individual may find in them from his own 
 private speculations, or can spare to them from his 
 own private interest.' He looked up suddenly, 
 startled by the similarity of these old words to his 
 own. Then with the distant gaze of his thoughtful 
 moments his unseeing eyes rested on a blue-coated 
 policeman plodding down the walk beyond the 
 palings. 
 
 '' 'The time has gone,' he mused, and I saw him 
 dropping back into the style of his lectures, 'when 
 we think of laws as resting their final sanction upon 
 force, or when we think of force as the outward ex- 
 pression of law. Rather we think of laws as the 
 outward expression of our governing ideas, the 
 codification of our social will and purpose, the overt 
 and explicit embodiment of our civilization, enacted 
 and published to form the center to which uncertain 
 wills and straying purposes may be attracted, and 
 about which maturing minds may be formed.' 
 
 "As I gazed after the distant policeman I knew 
 that my companion was dreaming his dream. He 
 had forgotten the Terrace — Old Flash pandering to 
 class envy and hatred, the mental healer closing her 
 eyes to evil, the syndicalist subverting order and 
 reason, the poet uglifying life, the aesthete under- 
 mining moral standards, and all those others riding 
 
A Liberal Experience 79 
 
 off on their intellectual hobbies farther and farther 
 from the centre and from each other, encouraged to 
 fly off by a fundamental and pervasive doctrine, that 
 social virtue lies not in the rightness of the idea, but 
 in whatever can muster numbers behind it. 
 
 '^ 'And meantime,' I asked, drawing him back to 
 the present 'to come at the dominance of that 
 moving, common idea?' 
 
 " 'Meantime,' he echoed, musing for a moment; 
 and then waking up to the curt style of his polemic 
 articles, 'meantime it is not a belief in their wisdom, 
 and it is not a belief in their justice. It is a loyalty 
 to the people in spite of their defects. For it is the 
 Liberal belief that men can be educated to common 
 standards, that they are persuadable to right think- 
 ing.' 
 
 "We were both silent. I thought of the peda- 
 gogue upstairs, and the whole movement in edu- 
 cation, and how now that majority opinion had laid 
 hands upon it education was promptly ceasing to 
 lay down common standards, but was diversifying 
 itself more and more, and earlier and earlier in the 
 child's life, and giving to the young as they matured 
 less and less of a common basis of thought and mu- 
 tual understanding. 
 
 "I thought again — and ever again — of the 
 medley there in the Terrace whose random diversity 
 and unbalanced extremity had so roiled the Liberal 
 theorist. The Liberal aim had been accomplished 
 in them; they were economically free; they were 
 persuadable; and they had been persuaded! 
 
 "I left him there, sad, and resolutely hopeful, his 
 notebook on his knee." 
 
8o A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ^Tor me the comedy was played out. Have I 
 been fantastic, or was the extravagance real? Have 
 I made too much of the bare contrast of reality 
 with the orderly theory? Merely to play up the 
 contrast is easy, and unjust. Livable houses, houses 
 with children, come short of the dream of the 
 motherly housewife. But the kindly guest makes 
 allowances; if he is human he likes the litter and 
 accumulation of the homely living-rooms better than 
 the flawless and inviolable parlors. But he likes, 
 I imagine, to feel the dream of order potent behind 
 and beneath the day's disorder — to know that it 
 is the day's disorder, and not the week's, or the 
 year's — incidental and not organic. 
 
 "Can this Liberal dreamer, with his noble pity for 
 suffering and for thwarted longings, and his vision 
 of a people unified through common standards and 
 common aims, hope to realize his dreams? Or is 
 there something incommensurable as between the 
 idea and the rule of the majority? The majority is 
 not inevitably wise and just, but neither is it in- 
 evitably unwise and unjust. At any one moment it 
 is a matter of fact. So I have tried to look at these 
 people here, so typical, it seems to me, of the great 
 restless democracies. I catch the mournful cadence 
 of my words, and you may smile; I do myself. But 
 I have looked further to generalize the view — to 
 see the kind of plays that they encourage in the 
 theaters, the kind of sermons they listen to in their 
 churches, the kind of books that sell best, because 
 they buy them, the kind of men they put into 
 office — and the spectacle is not heartening. 
 
 '1 can find no intelligent Liberal who bases his 
 
A Liberal Experience 8i 
 
 hopes on the present quality of the people. It is a 
 trust that they may be persuaded to better thinking 
 that feeds the Liberal faith. I have talked to Mr. 
 Wells, that arch-dreamer of a better day, and 
 beneath his simple kindly manner I have seen a sad 
 and sacred anger at the stupidity of human inertia. 
 I have seen in his brooding face a sense of impotence 
 to make men see the lucid ideas that seem so simple, 
 so obvious to him who has spent his years in thought. 
 But for the great masses — they are still to be won. 
 
 ''Can they be persuaded? More especially does 
 the Liberal doctrine tend to persuade them? Is 
 there anything inherent in the fundamental Liberal 
 principle of majority rule beyond the mechanical 
 order that comes from minority submission? This 
 is my problem. This is the heart of my quest. 
 
 "For my own part I can find nothing more. Wis- 
 dom and justice are not inherent in majority opinion; 
 no idea is inherent in it. No moral idea is more 
 sacred than the majority itself. Even its consti- 
 tutions are coming to be resented as too great checks 
 upon its vagaries. The men that make up majori- 
 ties, indeed, may be persuaded to moral ideas ; that, 
 let me repeat, is the great Liberal hope. But when 
 we come to ask what they are to be persuaded to 
 through Liberalism, we come to the great contra- 
 diction. Liberalism has no ideas so sacred as any 
 other ideas that the majority may enact. It has 
 no nucleus, no center about which to organize an 
 order. It has taken these errant, earnest men and 
 women of the Terrace to the end of its tether. And 
 there they are, as they are. It has nothing more to 
 say to them. Or if individual Liberals plead with 
 
82 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 them to bring the masses from poverty, even that 
 plea aims only to bring the masses into the condition 
 of the Terrace itself. It does nothing to bring 
 moral order into the intolerable confusion that the 
 Terrace itself presents. And so long as that con- 
 fusion endures, what real hope is there that even 
 that aim may be accomplished? 
 
 ^^ Modern Liberalism impresses me with its para- 
 doxes. Its avowed aim is to socialize life. But to 
 me it appears to work only in the other direction. 
 Its influence from the first has been to destroy the 
 unifying agencies. Personal loyalty has gone with 
 the passing of personal rule; a common ethical stan- 
 dard has gone with the decay of religion; a common 
 intellectual standard has gone with the democra- 
 tization of the schools. And it has put nothing in 
 their place. 
 
 "It is a curious thing to notice that the uniform 
 dissolution of each of these unities has been in the 
 non-moral direction of economics. Under the di- 
 rection of majorities politics has become a matter of 
 the regulation of business; the church tends to be- 
 come a propaganda for the amelioration of the poor, 
 and the schools a training for vocation. 
 
 "I know that there are those who can speak scorn- 
 fully of the people, and who will point out that in- 
 evitably the first consideration of the mass of men 
 will be for their bellies. But for my own part I 
 can't speak in such scornful terms. Seeing how 
 well even the best of men feed themselves if they 
 can, I can hardly scorn those who often go hungry 
 for wanting to do the same. It is not a case for 
 contempt; the economic need fastens on all of us. 
 
A Liberal Experience 83 
 
 But it is suggestive of the destitution of Liberal 
 ideas, to their want of moral principles — I mean of 
 course constructive principles looking toward a 
 moral order — that their politics, in the very 
 broadest sense of the term, should descend to the 
 irreducible minimum of economics — fall of its own 
 weight to the bottommost level where the bare me- 
 chanic necessities of life catch us all. What poverty 
 of spirit it reveals! How meagre the appeal to the 
 imagination, to the ardent loyalty of youth, to the 
 faith that we are something more than animals to 
 be fed and kept fat. Do they imagine that by 
 paring down our sense of humanity to the economic 
 limit we shall care enough about the whole affair to 
 be much concerned for the miserable stragglers? 
 Don't they see that it is just by centering our whole 
 attention upon the economic struggle that the 
 economic struggle grows most fierce? Can't they 
 see that the mitigation of economic evils comes, not 
 from economics itself, but from motives that can 
 find no place in their dreary statistics and dismal 
 textbooks — that it comes, when it does come, from 
 a large and generous sense of the dignity and des- 
 tiny of mankind? 
 
 ''They say that their aim is to socialize life, to 
 animate it with social sympathy, to make the laws 
 the nucleus about which maturing minds may centre 
 their conception of an eligible life, and to which 
 straying wills may conform. But what, in the fact, 
 do they offer, what dominant principle to bring the 
 many together under a common moral standard, to 
 give their lives a common motive and a common 
 purpose? No moral idea that the majority may not 
 
84 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 overthrow at will, nothing to unify that majority, 
 nothing to give it a single common aim and tend to 
 hold it in that direction. 
 
 ^'The people are not to blame. The moral idea 
 is personal, the expression of the humane element of 
 the spirit; but the majority is large, impersonal, 
 mechanical. The Liberals, with their faith in the 
 majority, call themselves progressive. Progressive! 
 Can there be anything so fixed, so unprogressive as 
 the great impersonal average that finds its ex- 
 pression in the majority — the elemental beneath 
 the roots of our developed differences? It fluctu- 
 ates, it sways back and forth within the narrow 
 limits, and gives to the myopic the illusion of change; 
 and to the myopic change is always progress. But 
 in the large it stays the same, and its politics sink 
 to the expression of that irreducible minimum of 
 wants and desires that affect us all, that mechanic 
 pressure of economic need. Is this but a pretty 
 theory? The politics of every Liberal nation has 
 reduced itself to this minimum. 
 
 ''Is there no way out, no movement forward, no 
 real progress, nothing but the swaying back and 
 forth in rebellion against this force that Liberalism 
 renders us into the power of? Liberalism itself rebels 
 now at this extreme and now at that; it began with 
 laissez-faire till laissez-faire grew intolerable, and 
 now it has turned about and is all for regulation and 
 restriction. But still we agitate ourselves in the 
 mechanic field of economics, and Liberalism offers 
 us nothing to lead us out. Nothing can lead us out 
 but the moral principle. 
 
 "And now, though you smile, I must offer you 
 
A Liberal Experience 85 
 
 another paradox. Sometimes I have a gleam of 
 penetration into the possibility that it is the fear of 
 having a moral principle that is at the center of 
 Liberal strength. For a people to have such an idea, 
 to govern themselves by it, as a man of character 
 governs himself by his principles, would perhaps 
 soon grow grievous to many, soon seem to subject 
 them to the will of those who still stood loyally to 
 it. And if they who still held to it were fewer than 
 the majority, the cry of compulsion, of tyranny, 
 would rise against them. Not that the majority 
 objects on principle to compulsion, or to the tyranny 
 of enforced ideas. There is the minority who must 
 submit. Moreover Liberalism has become the party 
 of the high hand; it has quite gone in for sweeping 
 control. One may sympathize with the feeling of 
 the majority — at least one may understand it — in 
 case it finds the principle maintained but by the 
 minority. Why should the few coerce the many? 
 Men want their own way, and so long as there is 
 recourse to the vote the many may have it, whatever 
 the wisdom and justice of the principle. Liberalism 
 offers them that — the power to have their own way; 
 that is its attraction; that is its strength. The 
 valu^ of a principle is its power to guide the will 
 when the will rebels, but Liberalism offers none to 
 guide the majority when their will rebels. They 
 have by Liberal theory — the only Liberal theory — 
 recourse to a Liberal principle more fundamental 
 than any rational or moral principle. 
 
 'Tor Liberalism is the government, par excellence^ 
 of the doctrine of might. Authority shifts with the 
 shift of power; it goes with numbers, and not with 
 
86 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the idea. Numbers add up into power and not into 
 wisdom and justice; and power belongs to the ir- 
 rational forces. That is the distinguishing quality 
 of Liberalism. And this submission to numbers has 
 the appeal of finality — the ultimate decision of 
 force. Those who object are eternally of the weaker 
 party. But it is the giving up of the human problem; 
 for the eternal human problem is the problem of the 
 idea. 
 
 " 'What ideas?' I hear you asking. But indeed 
 I have not been looking for specific ideas. I have 
 only been looking for conditions under which any 
 ideas have a chance to be established and main- 
 tained. It is not that individual Liberals themselves 
 have no ideas. I have read slowly through the po- 
 litical writing of the day. It is all avowedly Liberal. 
 The best of it is clear, rational, appealing, offering 
 pictures of social relations, that seem kindly and 
 wise. One may go far before he will find visions that 
 are more perfect. But they are not Liberalism. 
 
 'Tor alas — what chance have they of Liberal 
 realization? They are wrought out, each one, with 
 infinite labour and thought, unified, consistent, their 
 details tested by definite standards, brought into a 
 system from a stable point of view. Each writer 
 has subjected himself to a rigid discipline, holding 
 himself steadily to clear underlying principles, 
 judging this and that by firm criteria, rejecting here, 
 altering there. But dire as his labor is it is simple 
 compared with the task of putting it into currency. 
 And yet, though as a writer he has sweat blood to 
 build logically on the basis of the idea, he must hand 
 it over, as a Liberal, to a multitude from whom on 
 
A Liberal Experience 87 
 
 principle he demands no fundamental idea, no 
 common standard. He has built so well because he 
 has held himself with infinite pains to an underlying 
 moral conception. And they to whom civil life has 
 been entrusted have given up judging on the moral 
 basis; their criterion is the lot, the finality of ma- 
 jority power. 
 
 "In the year here on the Terrace I have come to 
 know the Liberal writer well — better than is com- 
 mon between men. He has something that catches 
 the affection — his human side is out, and it is a 
 very likable side. He is serious, but he has humor, 
 too. 'I dare say,' he smiled sadly one day, 'the 
 trouble with us Liberals is that we make Utopias, 
 and think we have been thinking.' We laughed, but 
 the quip was profound. 'And even those Utopias 
 are not alike,' he went on. 'Our visions themselves 
 clash. Until we who make them can agree upon one 
 Utopia among us, it is a brave thing to hope that we 
 can lead a whole people. Even if our Utopias agreed, 
 perhaps it would hardly be a Liberal habit of 
 thought to begin from the point of view of our per- 
 fect vision, and try to come by our ends through 
 regulation and restrictions downward. I'm afraid 
 we are still thinking like Caesar — are still autocrats 
 at heart. We are benevolent enough. And seeing 
 what we think would be good for our people we try 
 to foist it upon them whether they want it or not. 
 We do it, indeed, by majorities. But how are ma- 
 jorities mustered at the best? It isn't assent, but the 
 thought behind it that makes a vote liberal. If we 
 were Liberal ourselves, we who try to lead, we would 
 
88 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 want the people to have their own will. Only/ he 
 paused, smiling, 'we would want them to want Lib- 
 eral things. 
 
 " 'And here I am,' he continued after another mo- 
 ment. 'I've swung about through the full circle, and 
 I'm ready to begin again proclaiming my Utopia. 
 But sometimes here, as we have talked together, an- 
 other doubt has got hold of me. Suppose I could 
 have my dream, in all its outward perfection, would 
 I wish it upon the people as we know them? It has 
 been published. They have seen it. There is 
 nothing in it that could not be got, peaceably and by 
 law. But they haven't brought it about. They don't 
 want it. The art critic, your metaphysical friend, 
 the biologist, the pedagogue — they don't want it. 
 When I think of the multitude of madly divergent 
 men and women whom these people t5^ify, I'm not 
 sure that I should want it either. I doubt whether 
 it would seem Utopian to them. 
 
 " 'I think we have missed something from our Lib- 
 eral programme — something that should tend to 
 bring them together, not into agreement, perhaps, 
 but at least into a common understanding. For now 
 what is so egregious is that they don't think alike. 
 They have no common mental counters. The com- 
 pulsions that would have to be enforced, then as 
 now, would seem unjust to them, just as other peo- 
 ple's Utopias seem unjust to me, leaving out of ac- 
 count aspirations that seem to me very dear to hu- 
 man happiness. I'm afraid that we've begun at 
 the wrong end. If we are really Liberals and really 
 want that last and most precious freedom that we 
 prate of — the freedom and equality of the individ- 
 
A Liberal Experience 89 
 
 ual and the embodiment of his will in the laws that 
 govern him — and if we want that will to be Liberal 
 and just, we shall have to begin at the other end. 
 For after all's said, there can be only one Liberal 
 doctrine — such a common and universal education 
 as would tend to bring about common standards of 
 thought, mutual understanding, collective aspira- 
 tion, and a common sense of justice. When that 
 becomes our fundamental doctrine, then at last we 
 shall become Liberals. The rest would take care 
 of itself.' 
 
 "We smiled. Perhaps it was but a moment's re- 
 turn upon himself. But he came near in that mo- 
 ment, I fancy, to seeing the bottom of the well 
 where Liberal truth lies hid. And he put for me, 
 from his own point of view, the thought that had 
 been hovering vaguely over all my year's floundering 
 in the Terrace. As we both stood looking at that 
 smoke-softened fagade, I knew that he, as well as 
 I, was thinking of that motley array, and wonder- 
 ing whether a party, made up of them and their 
 like, would ever impose on itself the only doctrine 
 that at its heart can ever be called Liberal." 
 
IV 
 
 A MODERN PARADOX 
 
 IT was after his return from England that there 
 occurred in our friend's chambers an event of a 
 kind rare enough anywhere perhaps in our none too 
 serious, or all too serious century, and certainly 
 rare enough in the way it occurred there. In record- 
 ing it — after the manner of Thucydides no doubt, 
 for there was no reporter present — he followed the 
 necessary, courtesy of silence imposed by the times 
 concerning a circumstance without which it could 
 hardly have occurred. He could hardly record that 
 in the generous heat of wine his guests grew elo- 
 quent and made extraordinarily long speeches, for 
 all that the fine coherence of their ideas and the 
 lively interest they all maintained to the end pro- 
 claimed a moderation that was exemplary. That 
 too, malice might have said, was Thucydidean. 
 
 The four of them who were there, however, dis- 
 tributed their seriousness and their levity after their 
 own fashion ; they took their wine with a light heart 
 and their ideas with a fitting gravity. Or perhaps 
 it was not their own fashion either, for they were all 
 of them in familiar touch with the past, and no 
 doubt drew upon it a good deal in forming con- 
 sciously or unconsciously their sense of life and its 
 proportions and bounties. Thus they could not 
 
A Modern Paradox 91 
 
 have been quite unconscious of another occasion a 
 long time ago which had its resemblances to the 
 present one, and brought them, on this evening, into 
 pleasant touch with a great tradition. And they 
 could not have brought themselves to frown very 
 severely upon the ancient circumstance that of old 
 had produced such delightful results. But if they 
 thought of this at all it must have been afterwards, 
 for what happened was not planned, and sprang 
 naturally out of the promptings of the moment. 
 
 If it had been planned it would have been in a 
 measure cruel, for the situation that developed be- 
 fore the end was not altogether free from pain. The 
 four men had indeed much in common below the 
 level of their differences, but they had gone their 
 different ways and emerged with different concep- 
 tions, and these struck across each other at times 
 with the sharp clash that for all of them was the 
 spice of the occasion. But they held their ideas 
 seriously, and one of them shortly found himself in 
 an alliance that must have been hard to bear. 
 
 He was the one least known to the others, so that 
 if he had come a little shyly among the three old 
 friends who had gathered on the traveler's return, 
 feeling, with a sensitive nature, a little remote from 
 the rest, his separation was the more acute in the 
 end. For though he found himself aligned with one 
 of the others, it was an alignment full of chagrin 
 and bitterness, and left him poignantly alone. He 
 was a man of peculiarly gentle disposition, and so 
 was removed doubly from the others by the sensi- 
 tive manners that kept them from offering the sym- 
 pathy that they felt. The bent of his faith was 
 
92 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 humanitarian, and he was aUied to that modern 
 school that kindles eagerly at the sight of poverty 
 and deprivation, and offers itself generously to the 
 task of remolding an obdurate society. 
 
 Of the others, one was a frank democrat of the 
 old intellectual breed, hard-headed, dry, direct, diffi- 
 cult to kindle but once alight burning with a good 
 flame. The third was perhaps the most interesting 
 of them all. He was a Grecian and a historian, with 
 a body of tremendous bulk and energy, an explo- 
 sive flow of talk, and an eye that flashed at moments 
 but at others was serene, aloof, or kindly in its 
 quick appreciations or its reflective abstraction. 
 Grote was his bete noire — a Whig pamphleteer was 
 his phrase for that historian — and served, by con- 
 trast, to emphasize the aristocratic leanings of his 
 own social faith. 
 
 Their host was the fourth. He had but recently 
 returned from England where he had spent a sab- 
 batical in reading and reflecting. If in his record 
 of what took place on this evening he played no part 
 it was rather because he had had his say at previous 
 compotations than because in fact he said nothing, 
 for his habit was rather copious than otherwise. But 
 the situation that developed, and which made him so 
 sedulous a recorder, developed without need of him, 
 and the report was long enough as it was. An 
 October dawn was threatening the east when they 
 parted. 
 
 They had had a late dinner and had returned to 
 their host's fireside and decanters. Their talk was 
 of the problem that the traveler's reflections had 
 brought up, and was full of the endless friendly 
 
A Modern Paradox 93 
 
 clash of their various opinions. It was because the 
 humanitarian's point of view was the one most 
 provocative — being most current — that someone 
 suggested that it be given a full and uninterrupted 
 hearing. From that suggestion the rest followed. 
 They settled themselves about the table and before 
 the fire, and the humanitarian began. 
 
 They were all of them moved by the generous 
 ardour that animated his brief exposition, perhaps 
 the more so that they saw in his gentleness of tone 
 and expression the fine restraint of an appealing 
 reasonableness. 
 
 ^'I know," he said, '^that you began your demo- 
 cratic career as a revolt against aristocracy. I had 
 almost said ^we,' and with your consent I will say 
 'we' hereafter, for I feel a part of you now, though 
 then my fathers were little more than serfs in a 
 country that had scant sympathy for that revolt. 
 I have naturally my own sympathy for it. I can 
 not help feeling, however, that as we have gone on 
 through the century and a third since then we have 
 preserved some exaggerations that were proper 
 enough at the moment of reaction, but which are 
 not proportionately important when the moment of 
 reaction is over. I mean especially our mode of 
 thinking in terms of classes. Democracy nec- 
 essarily began by a concern for the oppressed 
 classes, but as it became less and less a reaction and 
 found itself launched on its own bottom and set out 
 on its own voyage the logic of such thinking has 
 seemed to me inconsistent. The impulse of democ- 
 racy was, after all, at bottom not sympathy with 
 
94 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 oppressed classes, but sympathy with oppressed in- 
 dividuals. And sympathy with the wants and needs 
 of individuals is the constant principle of the demo- 
 cratic ideal. 
 
 "Democracy must, of course, act by majorities; 
 but majorities differ from classes by the obvious 
 distinction that majorities are recruited vertically 
 through all strata, not, like classes, horizontally. 
 And they are created by opinion, personal reflection, 
 individual longings and affections. They are created, 
 that is, by those aspirations of the individual for 
 which democracy exists. If you will think, then, of 
 sympathy with the wants and needs and aspirations 
 of the individual as the principle that applies pro- 
 gressively in all stages of the developing democracy, 
 you will, I think, see the point of what I should like 
 to say. 
 
 "It is on the basis of this principle that I wish 
 first of all to criticise the schools. I mention the 
 schools because I think that there more than any- 
 where else do we cling, by the inertia of institutions 
 and the force of traditions, to that first impulse of 
 reaction, and to that mode of thinking in terms of 
 classes, which was inevitable at the first leap away 
 from aristocracy. And I mention them, moreover, 
 because it seems to me that they are the agent 
 which can do more than any other agent of democ- 
 racy to express its active sympathy — do more, that 
 is, to give real force to its underlying principle. The 
 rest of the action of democracy is largely the admin- 
 istrative routine common to all governments; but in 
 the schools it does something fundamental: it gets 
 down to the individual who is so appealing to us, 
 
A Modern Paradox 95 
 
 and gets down to him at the time when he is most 
 pliable, when whatever influences are upon him are 
 determining the degree to which his wants and needs 
 and aspirations can ever be fulfilled. And so what- 
 ever is said about the schools is said about democ- 
 racy in the large. For the schools, I might say, are 
 the democracy — its essence in dynamic action. 
 
 "The schools have, I think we should agree, clung 
 pretty close to the tradition which they began with, 
 and which they inherited from the older schools of 
 the aristocratic society from which we sprang. It 
 was natural enough. We wanted in our first re- 
 action against aristocracy to give to every one the 
 particular things which we had seen him specifically 
 deprived of under the old regime. Our thoughts 
 were mainly to get away from the hostile shore we 
 were escaping from, but we were intoxicated with 
 our plunder and we began by dividing the spoils. 
 We were not yet calmly settled to the responsibil- 
 ities of steering our own course. The schools seem 
 to me to be still in the attitude of those early years 
 though we have long since ceased to value the par- 
 ticular booty that we go on dividing. 
 
 'That old education was a class education. It 
 was calculated to fit a few people to a definite 
 stratum of society, and to a definite work which 
 pertained to that stratified society. It was, for that 
 class, a training for vocation. It was definitely 
 adjusted to a definite end which pertained uniformly 
 to that class. It thought, so to speak, in terms of 
 class, and formed the minds of its youth to think in 
 those terms. And it was right. It was an adjust- 
 ment to definitely perceived conditions. 
 
96 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "As for us, however, though those conditions no 
 longer hold, and though we no longer need bravely 
 to assert ourselves against them, and though we 
 have no classes at all, our schools are still in that 
 attitude of class self-assertion, and still, instead of 
 acting on our own dynamic principle, cling to that 
 education that was adjusted to those now dead 
 conditions. 
 
 "Now that I am launched among platitudes let 
 me utter briefly the two or three others that stand 
 in my way before I go on to more specific, and, I 
 hope, more stimulating matters. The conditions 
 that are changed are these. Instead of a govern- 
 ment of the many by the few, we have a government 
 of the many by the many. Instead of a class whose 
 private business is the public business, we have a 
 government by the many whose private business 
 is variously something else. Now, the older edu- 
 cation did as an education should do: it served the 
 whole need of those for whom it was calculated. 
 I repeat this obvious truth because it brings me to 
 the heart of my own belief in the matter with the 
 assertion that our present schools, supported by a 
 democracy whose principle is a S3mipathy with the 
 wants and needs and aspirations of the individual, 
 fail to perform an equally right service for those 
 whom they are calculated to serve. They are not 
 really serving those for whom the sympathy that 
 creates them exists. 
 
 "If I may go on I should like to point out wherein 
 and to what extent this seems to me to be true. 
 Some modifications have taken place in the schools, 
 I know, and, I believe, in the right direction. The 
 
A Modern Paradox 97 
 
 pressure of conditions has been too strong to be 
 wholly withstood; but by and large the schools re- 
 main the same. In some respects they should re- 
 main the same; children should, in all our views, 
 learn their three R's. But now in the upper grades 
 and in the high school they fall heir to a set of 
 studies that are largely linguistic and literary and 
 historical; I need not specify that combination of 
 Greek, Latin, French, German, English literature, 
 and history which, added to mathematics and some 
 science, make up the last half of the usual public 
 school course. I should like, if I may, to call this 
 course by a convenient name for the moment, to 
 avoid the necessity of tedious repetition. The term 
 'literary' will serve roughly to designate and de- 
 scribe it. This literary course then, it seems to me, 
 fails really to meet the whole needs of the democ- 
 racy, as it did meet the needs of the ruling class. 
 It would be strange that it should meet equally well 
 such widely diverse conditions. 
 
 "Among these literary studies there has been in- 
 troduced, here and there in recent years, a type of 
 study differing widely from them, and devoted to 
 particular ends — vocational studies I mean — 
 agriculture, mechanics, carpentry, bookkeeping, 
 sewing, cooking. I know how the mention of these 
 homely, workaday matters jars on the delicate ear. 
 Their linsey-woolsey seems coarse after the silken 
 fineness of the more elegant studies. The discussion 
 seems at once to drop into the commonplace and the 
 banal. And yet, if we are democrats it is perhaps 
 preponderatingly with such linsey-woolsey wants 
 and needs and aspirations that we sympathize. We 
 
98 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 can not be democratic by sympathizing only with a 
 set of wants and needs and aspirations which we 
 have arbitrarily and against their will set up for the 
 people. We must take them as they are, and 
 follow the democratic principle whithersoever it 
 leads. 
 
 "Where these vocational studies have been in- 
 troduced they exist side by side with the others, 
 each kind taking time that might be devoted to the 
 other. At the best, however, they are a minor part 
 of the whole course, and in most places they have 
 not been introduced at all. And so we may think 
 of the general situation in the schools as having been 
 created by the literary course. If we examine the 
 schools, then, we shall see the great mass of pupils 
 leaving before they reach the high school, and of 
 those who do enter the high school we shall see but 
 a meagre proportion going on to graduation. 
 
 "Those who leave before the end of the course 
 leave for some reason. They leave, I think, for one 
 of two reasons. Economic pressure — poverty — is 
 the name of one. As to these, it seems to me that 
 the pertinent question is — What has the school 
 done for them? The pressure that makes them 
 quit school forces them to hunt for work — work 
 of the kind that they can get with their youth, and 
 their inexperience, and their untrained hands. They 
 can not seek apprenticeship; they must have im- 
 mediate returns. And I can only ask in sympathy: 
 What has the school done for them in their peculiar 
 need? Their peculiar need is to be rescued from the 
 great mass of the unskilled among whom lie the 
 most of our poverty, and squalor, and hopelessness. 
 
A Modern Paradox 99 
 
 It is but little use to say that the schools have other 
 ends to serve. For these miserable ones it serves no 
 other end. They have quit it. And in the time 
 when it still might have done much for them it 
 failed to do the one thing which would have been of 
 help. 
 
 "For the rest, they quit because the studies offered 
 them failed to hold them. If they are of the kind 
 to be repelled by those studies, and to quit school for 
 lack of understanding and lack of interest, they too 
 are of the kind to go out into the world of work. 
 They can be more nice in their search; they can 
 pick and choose; but they might have been kept in 
 school, have been better informed, better disciplined, 
 better prepared for whatever tasks they fall to. And 
 of these I should ask: What studies would have held 
 them? Obviously not those which are now forced 
 upon them. Obviously, if any, it would have been 
 those which respond to those interests which drew 
 them from school — training in those vocations 
 toward which they are now drifting. 
 
 "If we look on the other and still darker side of 
 the shield we may see in the world at large — made 
 up for the most part of those whom the schools have 
 had their brief chance at and failed to hold — in- 
 competence and shiftlessness, skilless hands that 
 might have felt the simple joys of intelligent labor. 
 I do not know that human joy of whatever kind is 
 great, or pure, or lasting; but I know of none so 
 great, or so pure, or so lasting as this joy, accessible 
 alike to the humblest and the highest, of labor in- 
 telligently done. But now instead we may see un- 
 skill, uninterest, ignorance, and in their trail poverty 
 
100 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 and destitution. The tragedy of poverty Hes not so 
 much in what we see as in our sense that it tends to 
 reproduce and perpetuate both itself and the state 
 of mind which produces it, in the children whom it 
 brings forth in such vast quantities. 
 
 "Our homely democratic sympathy, then, recog- 
 nizing the situation, would try to break the vicious 
 circle of this inbreeding poverty by adjusting the 
 schools to the thwarted needs which lie behind it. 
 Though it would admit that no system could do 
 away altogether with poverty, yet it would argue 
 bluntly against whatever impulses preserve a dis- 
 cipline which serves the aspirations of only those who 
 need that sympathy least. 
 
 ''To this argument from principle it would add 
 another based on the necessary practical working of 
 the democratic regime. The democracy is of course 
 made up of all those who live under it without dis- 
 tinction of birth or wealth or aim. But since the 
 ideas and purposes of these individuals are of ne- 
 cessity various it must proceed in its activities on 
 the basis of majorities. It can not put every man^s 
 desires into laws. The minority must submit. 
 
 "In the matter of the schools, then, the democ- 
 racy should logically respond to the needs of the 
 majority. And we have, I think, explicit indication 
 of those needs in that great majority whom the 
 present education fails to hold to the end. The 
 majority must first of all make a living. That is 
 their duty, not only to themselves but to their 
 children whom they arbitrarily bring into the world. 
 And that is their duty to the community upon which 
 those children are arbitrarily thrust for better or for 
 
A Modern Paradox loi 
 
 worse. These children in their turn for the most 
 part take their places somewhere in the industry of 
 the community — one a farmer, one a bookkeeper, 
 one a mechanic, one a housewife, and so on, ac- 
 cording to their wants and needs and aspirations, and 
 those harder compulsions that arise from necessity. 
 And since it is their trained aptitude for their chosen 
 tasks that determines their ultimate condition, the 
 democracy which would not only govern them by 
 the restraints and adjustments common to all gov- 
 ernments, but would proceed on its own dynamic 
 principle of active sympathy, must, it seems to me — 
 here where it has its intimate personal chance to 
 express the very heart of its ideal — take its ex- 
 pression in adjusting its schools to that all but uni- 
 versal need of making a living. Democratic educa- 
 tion, then, I should say, is a training for vocation. 
 
 "I hope I may not weary you if I end by re- 
 iterating my criticism of the schools as they are con- 
 ducted to-day, for I think that we shall never attain 
 to a genuine democracy until we have made our 
 schools democratic. The present education which 
 they afford, wholly or partly literary, I should still 
 call aristocratic. I have said nothing of the relative 
 values of the two types of studies for those who now 
 complete the public school course. But if we should 
 suppose that the present course met the wants and 
 needs of all those who completed it, yet they are so 
 far in the minority that it stands, it seems to me, 
 self-convicted of being an adjustment to the de- 
 mands of the few. In another sense also it is aris- 
 tocratic. It is — pardon my bluntness — a relic of 
 an older system that flourished when education was 
 
102 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 an aristocratic privilege, adjusted to the needs of a 
 privileged class. That class no longer exists. Its 
 habits and qualities of mind are not to be despised 
 perhaps, but they are for the few who have leisure, 
 not for the many who must win a livelihood. And 
 those few who are to have leisure in our democracy 
 can, and in the real world about us often do, obtain 
 that education of privilege by private arrangement 
 elsewhere. And so the education of our existing 
 schools, growing out of an aristocratic ideal, and 
 remaining over from an aristocratic regime, may be 
 suited to that ideal and that regime, but not to a 
 democratic ideal and a democratic regime. As a 
 relic, clinging by inertia to the heart of the new or- 
 ganism, it clogs the free action of that organism. 
 More inharmoniously still it functions in its old way. 
 It is an aristocratic influence in the midst of a 
 striving democracy. 
 
 ''Such is my faith about these matters which I 
 believe lie close to the interests of us all. We are 
 slowly departing, I think, from that older sense of 
 society in which a government was felt to be some- 
 thing in itself, distinct from the persons who lived 
 under it — an entity apart and aloof. We are 
 coming nearer to a sense that it is an arrangement, 
 an agreement, between free individuals. And as we 
 come nearer to those individuals we perceive that 
 in the end it is they individually v/ho are the largest 
 conscious entities of which we are aware — they 
 individually who think, who hope, who aspire, and 
 they individually who feel that happiness, or blessed- 
 ness, or, by whatever name, that gratification of the 
 consciousness which has never long been supplanted 
 
 1 
 
A Modern Paradox 103 
 
 as the end of all human action. In democracy I see 
 the first tentatives in the direction of that concern 
 for the separate man which would seem to be the 
 only logical basis of government. Our democracy 
 is imperfect: it still thinks in terms of government, 
 saying from above what shall be the wants and needs 
 of its people; it still thinks in terms of class, edu- 
 cating its people according to the aspirations of a 
 class. But I see that mode of thought slowly break- 
 ing up, and in its place a fluid adjustment to that 
 largest conscious entity that can have aspirations to 
 be gratified — the consciousness of the individual 
 man. 
 
 ^'I have spoken of the schools because it is there, 
 and there almost alone, that democracy, the essence 
 of it, has its chance at the thing with which it 
 sympathizes. It is there that it can be more than 
 passively tolerant, can be constructively active, can 
 make its sympathies dynamic — can, in a word, be 
 democratic." 
 
 He ended thus, and the others were silent, stirred 
 by that quiet emotion that goes with the voyaging 
 intellect. They had listened impressed, each con- 
 scious of a sympathy with the speaker that no burst 
 of eloquence could have roused so well as the 
 simple, appealing reasonableness of his manner and 
 his words. And he had set the tone. 
 
 The host turned at last to the Grecian, who sat 
 with his great bulk deep in his chair, his eyes resting 
 curiously upon the speaker. He was a fighter, 
 though a fair fighter, and the others looked with some 
 apprehension for the effect upon the gentle humani- 
 
104 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 tarian of the clash which they anticipated. The ex- 
 plosive energy that swept in gusts at sudden mo- 
 ments across his speech, was often disconcerting. 
 
 "I must speak," he began, ''in a sense from a 
 place aloof and apart, and speak of what I would 
 have rather than what I expect to have. For every- 
 one is agreed that the organization of society that is 
 called aristocratic has had its day; and though the 
 term has a derivative meaning that is not without its 
 appeal, it has, if I may use the expression, a derived 
 meaning that justly, perhaps, has made it abhorrent. 
 It is, at least, so far in the realm of lost causes that 
 unless I can win to my aid the forces of humani- 
 tarian sympathy — which I conceive to be the de- 
 termining influences of the time — I must be ex- 
 onerated from seeming to plead for an order in which 
 I have personal hopes of distinction." 
 
 The humanitarian smiled frankly, and they all 
 joined him, relieved, seeing in the unwonted gentle- 
 ness of the Grecian's manner and the quietness of 
 his restraint the delicacy with which he had adjusted 
 himself to the tone set by the sympathetic humani- 
 tarian. 
 
 ''I am not willing wholly to forego, however," he 
 continued, ''the pleasantness of that derivative mean- 
 ing of aristocracy, though that meaning is largely 
 ideal. We are speaking to-night of ideals. But there 
 is a distinction which I should like to make before 
 going on to its defence. I utter it for my own warn- 
 ing, hoping that if I put it into words it may keep 
 me from falling into the worst error of doctrinaire 
 theorists. It is not infrequently said that it is un- 
 
A Modern Paradox 105 
 
 fair and illogical to compare an ideal with an op- 
 posing reality, contrasting the crystalline perfection 
 of the one with the living defects of the other. And 
 this fallacy I find myself constantly and com- 
 placently guilty of. But in escaping from this fal- 
 lacy it is easy to fall into a slough of futility in com- 
 paring ideal with ideal. I suppose that with all of 
 us our social ideals in their purity are methods of 
 human perfection. And so since our ideas of hu- 
 man perfection are not likely, for us here, to vary 
 widely, there is danger of the inanity of comparing 
 equally perfect things. I take it, however, that no 
 living institutions are perfect — that defects and 
 deteriorations are inevitable, however flawless the 
 ideal. The quality of the living institution depends 
 upon the quality of the human nature that governs 
 it; and to admit the frailty of human nature has 
 always been men's chief comfort. And so when we 
 make a choice of systems or institutions we make a 
 choice of probable defects as well as a choice of 
 good. Life is, in this sense, a matter of a choice of 
 evils. Our logical task is not, then, the comparison 
 of ideals, or of ideals with realities, but rather, in so 
 far as possible, to discover the probable mean, and 
 compare attainables with attainables. 
 
 ^'I must, however, speak first of the aristocratic 
 ideal, for it is the one thing sufficiently stable to 
 base my structure upon. I need not search for this 
 ideal beyond the word itself, and I affirm it to be, 
 as the word implies, government by the best. I 
 need not dwell long upon such familiar ground, but 
 before I go on to its defence I should like to men- 
 tion the equally familiar form which this ideal has 
 
io6 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 normally taken. It has never, historically, quite 
 lived up to Plato's description of the aristocratic 
 organization, but it has largely resembled it. In 
 that description there is the provision, so hard to 
 democratic ears, that men shall tend to remain in 
 the condition to which they were born. The aristo- 
 cratic order of society is the arrangement of the or- 
 ganism, with definite and stable gradations from 
 bottom to top. And at the top are those who, by 
 leisure, by training, by freedom from the narrower 
 cares of livelihood, and by a kind of specialization 
 in the large relations of humanity, govern the or- 
 ganism and set the standard and the tone for the 
 whole. This is, in very brief, the aristocratic ideal. 
 
 "I mention this in the beginning, and mention it 
 thus bluntly, for I wish at the outset to strike the 
 harshest note in the harmony to which this system 
 tries to attain. The reality itself is not so harsh as 
 the ideal — a relationship which I suspect to be re- 
 versed in the democratic regime. I might point out 
 that in the aristocracy from which we democratically 
 rebelled the roll of its great men has from the earliest 
 times largely traversed this ideal stability. Black- 
 stone boasts of it. Whatever softening effect this 
 fact may have, however, upon the severity of the 
 aristocratic ideal, and whatever corollaries might be 
 drawn as to the conditions which produce great men, 
 I shall pass over them for the present because of 
 another significance which I see in this traversal of 
 the aristocratic system — that aristocracy adapts 
 itself to human nature as it is. Its premises are 
 reality, not a faith. 
 
 ''I should like you to examine this reality at the 
 
A Modern Paradox 107 
 
 base of the structure. Democracy is founded on a 
 belief in the perfections of human nature; aristoc- 
 racy, on a sense of its imperfections. Aristocracy 
 builds upon the imperfections even of those in whose 
 interests it seems to be established. And now you 
 will see, perhaps, another reason why I was so eager 
 to avoid a comparison of ideals and a comparison of 
 perfections. Aristocracy, based upon sordid reality, 
 would, in such comparisons, seem dull and grey be- 
 side the glowing colours, the moving ideality of the 
 democratic faith. I could hope but little to touch 
 your sympathies. 
 
 "This, however, is by the way. What I wish to 
 point out is the underlying fact — that democracy 
 is based on ideals and aristocracy on realities — that 
 democracy builds upon its ideals, and aristocracy 
 builds toward its ideals. That is why, as I conceive, 
 real aristocracies have always been of slow growth 
 while democracies have sprung up in sudden revolts. 
 The one is based upon the more permanant traits 
 of human nature, and the other upon sudden bursts 
 of enthusiasm stirred by the nobility of a generous 
 conception. Democracy rises while that enthusiasm 
 is at white heat, and lasts until it cools. Then as 
 the democratic impulse dies, and the normal range 
 of human qualities and defects regain their normal 
 proportions, the tendency sets in again toward aris- 
 tocracy. I should say that if this is true aristocracy 
 has a deeper, more solid, more permanent, and surer 
 foundation than democracy. 
 
 ''All this, however, has in itself, I am aware, a 
 theoretic ring. To bring it back to actuality, then, 
 I should like to cite the realities upon which aris- 
 
io8 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 tocracy seems to me to be based. If the best-laid 
 plans of men go agley because of human weakness 
 and imperfections, I can hardly cite more relevant 
 realities for the starting point of any scheme than 
 just these weaknesses and imperfections. It is upon 
 a calculation of these realities that aristocracy is 
 based. 
 
 The greatest of them is, perhaps, the one we have 
 just considered in another light — the impermanence 
 of generous motives as compared with the constant 
 and inevitable pressure of selfish motives. If we 
 are to have government — and I suppose that we all 
 contemplate government in our schemes — some one 
 must attend to its administration. Government is 
 hardly a simple task that can be done offhand. It 
 must contemplate the whole range of complex human 
 relations that hold within the wide scope of a nation. 
 And if just and equitable action is hard to attain to 
 in single instances, as it is shown to be daily in the 
 law courts where the circumstances are simple and 
 defined, the just and equitable administration of the 
 far more complex affairs of a whole people will re- 
 quire a great and penetrating wisdom. 
 
 "To meet this demand an aristocracy — I speak 
 of the accomplished fact, for aristocracy is the result 
 of slow and natural adjustments, not of deliberate 
 plan — provides selfish motives for those who train 
 themselves for the arduous duties and responsi- 
 bilities of government. It gives them honour, rank, 
 title, wealth, leisure, and it gives them freedom to 
 pursue the widest variety of individual aspirations. 
 For this class the public interest is its private inter- 
 est. To maintain its privileges it must train itself to 
 
A Modern Paradox 109 
 
 maintain its power. And since in the nature of the 
 case the members of this class are few, it must main- 
 tain its power by qualities of mind. They become 
 a specialized class whose business it is to govern, 
 and to cultivate those finer aptitudes and percep- 
 tions and appreciations which are necessary to the 
 understanding of the varied interests and relations 
 with which they have to deal. 
 
 "I know that there is something exasperating in 
 this frank manner of putting my case — that aris- 
 tocracy builds upon the sordid realities of human 
 self-interest. It seems to try to take the wind from 
 the sails of criticism. None the less I have fallen 
 into it because it seems to me to grow out of the 
 reality of the situation. I should, I think, rather be 
 ashamed of it if it were but a device of my argument. 
 But in the mixed quality of human affairs I see in 
 this unlovely reality of human selfishness at least 
 the virtues of permanence and stability — virtues 
 imperative in solid foundations. Aristocracy, how- 
 ever, justifies itself, not upon the basis from which 
 it builds, but upon the quality of the product at 
 which it aims. It is because I believe that an aris- 
 tocracy has a higher aim than a democracy, and has 
 a more reasonable chance of accomplishing its aim, 
 that I believe in the aristocratic order of society. 
 Let me then try to justify myself by explaining this 
 aim and this reasonable hope of its accomplishment. 
 
 "Out of the selfishness of these underlying mo- 
 tives, and out of the leisure and training which they 
 provide, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that a 
 finer product can emerge than is possible in a regime 
 in which everyone has to divide his interests, and 
 
no A Lover of the Chair 
 
 having to make his way by some narrower pursuit, 
 must devote time and interest to it that might be 
 devoted to the larger cultivation of his mind. This 
 statement sounds harsh, I know. It is harsh. But 
 I think it is simply the harshness of truth. It is 
 possible to doubt, I suppose, whether this concen- 
 tration upon the wider interests, the larger relations, 
 of humanity will produce a more perfect understand- 
 ing of them. Yet I believe that none of us do doubt 
 it. Even the humanitarians have assumed the prin- 
 ciple that specialization makes for a more perfect 
 understanding and greater ability in those whom he 
 would train for more intelligent labor. It is but 
 logical to suppose that a body of people who can be 
 relieved of other necessities and can thus devote 
 themselves to this wider discipline will attain to the 
 qualities it aims at more perfectly than those whose 
 discipline is divided. 
 
 '^It is perhaps more reasonable to doubt that this 
 particular type of attainment is a nobler thing than 
 that of the dual discipline of a democracy. Yet I 
 believe that you have no real doubts even here. 
 You believe that to grasp the wider relations of life 
 requires a finer type of mind. At least in every or- 
 ganized activity or trade you put the finer mind at 
 the head where the larger relations have to be mas- 
 tered and governed, and you consign the individual 
 tasks to the simpler minds. If this is so — if we do 
 feel this larger grasp to be the nobler thing — I 
 think that it is not unreasonable to suppose that a 
 system which disciplines its rulers to a more perfect 
 grasp of this nobler thing and tends to make their 
 ideas prevail will produce a more perfect civilization. 
 
A Modern Paradox iii 
 
 This is the end proposed for itself by an aristocracy. 
 This is the attainment upon which it rests its justifi- 
 cation. 
 
 ^'Certainly we could hope for such an attainment 
 if other things were equal. But it is the aristocratic 
 belief that other things are not equal, and that that 
 inequality is in favor of the aristocracy. In the 
 large it is said to be the biological tendency for kind 
 to reproduce kind. If this is true, then those who in 
 the slow evolution of an aristocracy have become by 
 qualities of mind members of the ruling class will 
 tend to reproduce others of the same kind. But I 
 should not hold to this. It may be after all that by 
 gifts of birth one class is much like another. Even 
 so, however, the subtle influences that surround a 
 child born to this class can not in a sense but fa- 
 miliarize him from birth with the broader and nobler 
 type of consideration. And when we know that this 
 child, whose thoughts from the cradle have been 
 formed on these broader lines, is put for many years 
 through a formal discipline on these same lines, we 
 may expect from the class to which he belongs, 
 made up of others of the same training, a higher 
 type of accomplishment than could come from the 
 general mass of the democracy whose training has 
 perforce been divided. It has specialized, so to 
 speak, on the noblest range of human thought, 
 prompted in a large sense by the same motives that 
 drive the citizens of a democracy to specialize on 
 narrower lines. And so I think we may expect from 
 it the cultivation of a finer product. 
 
 '1 know that this contemplates a corresponding 
 restriction upon the rest of the people of an aris- 
 
112 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 tocracy. But an aristocracy looks to degree and not 
 to quantity. If it were possible to add the wisdom 
 of two men together, or of a million men, as it is 
 possible to add their strength or their wealth, then 
 a class might be wiser than its ideal teacher, Plato's 
 disciples wiser than Plato, as a regiment is stronger 
 than its colonel; and a democracy might be wiser 
 than an aristocracy. But faculties of the mind are 
 a matter of quality, not of quantity, and no amount 
 of lesser degrees added together can equal the attain- 
 ment of a single mind cultivated to a higher degree. 
 ''There is, then, to stimulate this high degree of 
 attainment, the strong motive of self-preservation, 
 or class preservation. And there arises, too, out of 
 this situation a class consciousness by which a code 
 is established — a code of manners, of honour, and 
 of intellectual attainment. In following this code a 
 man may have no higher motive than to identify 
 himself with his class, but this motive is, I believe, 
 one of the most powerful known to men. The devil 
 of loneliness has us all in his grip, and moves us, 
 through the devices of speech, or dress, or badge, or 
 manner, or attainment, to proclaim our affiliations — 
 to cry out to all the world that we belong. 
 
 "Collectively for the aristocrat there is the need 
 to keep this code purified and elevated, both because 
 successful policy is founded on clear thinking and 
 sound principle, and because pride of place and 
 self-respect are most permanently founded on solid 
 grounds. Stimulus to develop, coupled with oppor- 
 tunity to develop, and these joined to a select pubHc 
 opinion that gives a high aim to that development, 
 and all this disjoined from any need to truckle to 
 
A Modern Paradox 113 
 
 the untrained simply because they are many and 
 powerful — these influences, I believe, will make 
 for a higher degree of attainment than the influences 
 that hold in a democracy. 
 
 ^'I am not without my own smile at the colors of 
 this picture that I have drawn. None the less I 
 have laid them on wittingly, believing that they 
 paint certain tendencies that do not exist, or do 
 not exist in so high a degree, in a democracy. I can 
 not see in the democratic theory provision for just 
 these ends which to the aristocrat are the noblest 
 aims of society. And in the democratic reality about 
 us it seems to me that as we recede farther and 
 farther from the aristocratic tradition there is less 
 and less provision and less and less concern for these 
 ends. 
 
 ^'In a democracy it is the average that obtains 
 rather than the best. For a time after its founda- 
 tion, while the aristocratic respect for the best still 
 tinges the habitual thoughts of the many, they try to 
 elevate to positions of trust those who by quality 
 and training are recognizable as superior. But as 
 time goes on and the many realize more and more 
 their own will and their own power, they grow mis- 
 trustful of a superiority which they do not under- 
 stand. And they put into power those who, they 
 believe, more nearly resemble themselves — or more 
 likely and worse, the clever and unscrupulous who 
 can flatter and deceive them into such a belief. 
 Then, as they see the corruption of the incompetent 
 or unscrupulous whom they have elevated into office, 
 they refuse to take it as an evidence of their own 
 unwisdom, but come more and more to mistrust the 
 
114 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 institution of representative and deliberative gov- 
 ernment. They demand that legislators and ex- 
 ecutives cease acting on their own wisdom and be- 
 come the automatic mouthpieces of the popular will. 
 In time they go still farther and demand the count 
 of noses in the recall and referendum. At this stage 
 they have ultimate assurance that the ideas that are 
 enforced shall be the spontaneous average of the 
 wisdom of the community. 
 
 ''Now it is inevitable that this average shall be 
 less elevated, less wise, than the best — even than 
 the best existing in the community. For the com- 
 munity may be supposed to contain the normal range 
 of humanity, from high to low; and averages are 
 inevitably lower than the highest. If democracy is 
 the expression of the average it is the establishment 
 of mediocrity. Democracy is mediocrity. It is so 
 by its own theory. 
 
 "I can think of no injustice deeper or more sweep- 
 ing than the condemnation of a whole people to the 
 levels of mediocrity. It is inbreeding. It forms a 
 vicious circle. Youth grows up to it. The educa- 
 tion of the masses responds to it. Literature and art 
 cater to it. And these influences in turn intensify 
 it. The finer minds must sink toward it or be with- 
 out influence. As I look about me at the democracy 
 I see only confirmations of this belief. I see less and 
 less concern for the nobler thoughts and attainments 
 of the past, more and more catering of the school to 
 the lower wants of the people, more and more popu- 
 larity for mediocre books and mediocre plays. 
 Mediocrity is in the saddle. It rides roughshod 
 over the finer aspirations of those who are, as many 
 
A Modern Paradox 115 
 
 are, above the average; it tramples the nascent pos- 
 sibilities of many who might, by inborn traits, rise 
 to the nobler levels of thought; it destroys the fine- 
 ness of the spectacle of life for those who are born 
 to inferiority. It is a ruthless swashbuckler among 
 the refinements of life. It is a tyranny. 
 
 "An aristocracy justifies itself, not primarily on 
 personal grounds, but upon the belief that the ideas 
 which it makes prevail are finer and more elevated 
 ideas than the average ideas — not the ideas of 
 mediocrity but the ideas of the best. It believes 
 that the reaction of these prevailing finer opinions 
 upon the community is in reality a more elevating 
 and nobler influence than that of the opinions of the 
 democracy — that it tends to create a finer populace. 
 It establishes standards. It raises the whole people. 
 
 "In the ideal organization of an aristocracy, with 
 its classes below the governing class in nice gradation 
 from the bottom upward, every function of society 
 would tend, by virtue of specialization, to be per- 
 formed more perfectly. Is this hard upon those 
 below the top? If it is, still here is the striking 
 point — that we have the spectacle of such an actual 
 gradation in the democracy about us. It seems 
 harsh indeed to recognize such subordinations by 
 law; but the reality remains the same. And the 
 aristocratic condemnation of every man to a par- 
 ticular range of development — reprieved in cases 
 of exceptional ability or promise — has personal 
 compensations in the more perfect discipline which 
 it involves. Happiness is not the result of particular 
 definable circumstances, but of the nice adjustment 
 to circumstances. 
 
ii6 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "No actual aristocracy, moreover, has been so 
 rigidly organized that exception has not been pos- 
 sible where unusual ability has made an actual mal- 
 adjustment. Chaucer's father, they say, was a 
 liquor dealer; Woolsey's was an Ipswich butcher. 
 Even Plato's ideal organization made provision for 
 such shifts. And so, however harsh the aristocratic 
 scheme sounds in cool exposition, there is some 
 reason to believe that in the attainable reality there 
 would emerge a higher average quality, a greater 
 personal happiness, and perhaps a surer elevation of 
 talent and genius, than is prevalent in a democracy. 
 
 "Your ruthless aristocrat, building thus not solely 
 upon an ideal, but trying to get the best out of hu- 
 manity as he finds it, with its conflicting weaknesses 
 and aspirations, sees another fact in the reality be- 
 fore him that relieves his possible compunctions. 
 He sees that the wants and needs and aspirations of 
 the great mass of the people — to omit those ex- 
 ceptions of which I have just spoken — correspond 
 strikingly with the position to which aristocracy 
 would condemn them. They might, and no doubt 
 would as they do even now, rage in personal resent- 
 ment against the asserted superiority of those who 
 were above them; but they do not want the qualities 
 that create that superiority. They want what they 
 now have, only in greater quantity; and it is to this 
 that aristocracy would condemn them. 
 
 "In looking into the evidence of this dark saying, 
 I come to the most painful part of my defense. I 
 know, however, that you will forgive my bluntness. 
 You smiled when I began by saying that aristocracy 
 was a lost cause unless it could win to its aid the 
 
A Modern Paradox 117 
 
 forces of humanitarian sympathy which are the de- 
 termining influences of the time. Well, they have 
 come to its aid. The training for vocation which 
 they would substitute in the schools of the democ- 
 racy in place of the literary studies is just the train- 
 ing that genuine aristocrats, if they had their way, 
 would force upon the many as the quickest means of 
 creating their aristocracy. 
 
 ''The aristocrat believes, let me repeat, that the 
 best form of society is one in which every part is 
 trained to fill its own niche and perform its own 
 function — one man a shoemaker, another a farmer, 
 and so on throughout — and at the top those whose 
 training has been broad enough to enable them to 
 see widely the whole field, and control the relation- 
 ships between the specialized parts. It is, to repeat 
 the comparison from your own practice where you 
 are really concerned for the fineness of the product, 
 the organization of the factory. The method to that 
 end, in the slow, imperceptible growth of aristocracy, 
 would be to train a farmer to be a farmer, a me- 
 chanic to be a mechanic, and so on throughout, dis- 
 placing with instruction to that end the wider dis- 
 cipline which would tend to direct his mind to larger 
 and more universal matters. The more narrowly is 
 he limited to a training for the one niche which he 
 is to fill, the more snugly will he fill that niche, and 
 the more will he be dependent upon that niche for 
 his place in the social scheme. He will fit no other 
 niche. He will be fixed in that one place. He will 
 be subordinated to those who, disciplined to a com- 
 prehensive view of the whole, will have the direction 
 of the whole. Vocational training is a training for 
 
ii8 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 that end. It is par excellence the aristocratic edu- 
 cation." 
 
 He paused for a moment after the heated flow of 
 his talk, and when he resumed it was in a quieter 
 tone. 
 
 "You have felt, I think, that the aristocratic ideal 
 is heartless. And yet I believe that it may claim for 
 itself all the sympathy which the humanitarians 
 claim as the basis of their modifications of the 
 schools. The humanitarians would act in sympathy 
 with the wants and needs and aspirations of the 
 many, and consulting them find that they want and 
 need and aspire to those things which vocational 
 training can bring them. The aristocrat too would 
 respond to just those wants and needs and aspira- 
 tions. He believes them to be genuine. He believes 
 that the mass of the people are right even though 
 they do deceive themselves by calling this demand 
 for vocational training democratic. They have a 
 way of calling what they want by names which they 
 like. It is a flattering deception, but it does not 
 alter the facts. 
 
 "If they want democracy they must want the 
 general spread of those qualities of mind which 
 make for a wide grasp of the relationships which 
 hold within the broad range of a whole people. But 
 they do not want those qualities. And their in- 
 stinctive wants are right. They know, if not re- 
 flectively yet definitely and instinctively, that they 
 are not fitted for those larger views of life demanded 
 of those who control and those who create and en- 
 courage the finer products of the human spirit. 
 
I 
 
 A Modern Paradox 119 
 
 What they want, as we have but now been told, are 
 things of the body. What they are able to ap- 
 preciate are jobs and things measurable in money. 
 They have no fitness and no desire for those things 
 which the literary studies of the older education 
 aimed at. Not all, there are many noble exceptions, 
 but in general. They have tried them in their first 
 reaction against aristocracy, asserting that the es- 
 sence of democracy was the universal right to those 
 things which the aristocracy had reserved for itself. 
 But they have not really wanted them — the things 
 themselves. And as they have come farther and 
 farther away from the impulse of reaction, and have 
 realized more and more their freedom to have what 
 they really want, they have chosen according to 
 their kind, chosen the things which they had before, 
 chosen the things which a ruling class would give 
 them again. 
 
 "Incidentally they have justified the aristocratic 
 contention that a permanent democracy is im- 
 possible — that the movement of democracy, after 
 its first spiritual reaction, is inevitably toward the 
 cultivation of its lower needs. It disguises these 
 needs in elevated phrases. It speaks of the dignity 
 of labour. It proclaims the equal worthiness of all 
 necessary tasks. It idealizes a standard of living. 
 And it settles itself to the systematic gratification of 
 its sensuous wants, leaving the cultivation of the 
 spirit again to the few. Insensibly thus, amid the 
 shouting of its old sacred words, which have little 
 by little lost their old meaning, it slips back into 
 the control of those who have cultivated their gen- 
 eral intelligence. 
 
120 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ''It looks back to the founders of the democracy 
 from whose ideas it has defected — its Washingtons 
 and its Hamiltons — and calls them aristocrats be- 
 cause their idea was to spread to everyone the ideals 
 that had before been the possession of the aristo- 
 cratic few. It chooses for its present leaders those 
 who assert the rightness and nobility of its own 
 tendencies. They hasten its progress in the way it 
 is going. Once it has become self-conscious of its 
 own desires, hearing them put into words by its 
 leaders, it puts them into accelerated effect in its 
 training of the young. This is the decisive step. 
 
 'Tn the end the thing to do is to do nothing. Aris- 
 tocracy springs from evolution, not from revolution. 
 The democracy by its own will, though blindly and 
 in self-deception, is bringing about the end which 
 the aristocrat desires. It is training its children to 
 take definite niches in the social scheme by limiting 
 the training of their intelligence to the narrow range 
 of specialized tasks. It calls this training "educa- 
 tion," believing by hearsay that education is the 
 bulwark of democracy. It has forgotten that when 
 this truth was uttered the word education meant the 
 broad training of the intelligence by those disin- 
 terested studies which direct the mind toward the 
 larger relations of men. And going forward in this 
 blind and mistaken faith, it is narrowing the outlook 
 of its children by centering their attention upon a 
 narrower and narrower range of ideas as they re- 
 form the schools more and more on vocational lines. 
 It does, indeed, soothe its conscience by giving them 
 incidentally a superficial smattering of many things 
 of the higher order — language, government, his- 
 
A Modern Paradox 121 
 
 tory, sociology — but its heart is not there. They 
 emerge with a false sense of having mastered what 
 only a long and dire discipline can give them the 
 foundation of; and their shallow, jejune, and con- 
 fident utterances but confirm the belief that that 
 little had best been unlearned. Gross ignorance is 
 not so insidious. Still the thing to do is to do 
 nothing. This training not only fits them better to 
 their little niches, but it makes them content. It is 
 better than the Roman way of keeping them quiet 
 with bread and circuses. Instead of being a drain 
 upon the treasury it gets work out of them, and in- 
 creasingly efficient work. 
 
 ^'Such is my defence. And if in the end I find 
 myself shoulder to shoulder with the humanitarian, 
 whose gentle and generous sympathies have won us 
 all, I should like to share in the approval which those 
 sympathies command. Though I have proved my 
 partisanship by another route I have come to the 
 same conclusion in the end. I believe that an aris- 
 tocracy would make for a happiness far more real 
 and permanent than does the present order of 
 society. The unrest, the uncertainty as to where 
 one belongs, the chagrin at finding oneself too near 
 the top of the table, the offensiveness of those 
 clamorous to assert their equality, the elevation of 
 the unworthy, the vaulting ambition that o'erleaps 
 itself, the unskill that finds no joy in labour, the 
 precariousness of the disinterested pursuits, the ab- 
 sence of organized encouragement for the nobler 
 activities of the spirit — all these causes of unhap- 
 piness aristocracy would tend to reduce. It would 
 have its own tendency to self-indulgence and the 
 
12 2 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 relaxation of its exigent standards. But there would 
 be its own selfishness to spur it on to the only means 
 it would possess for maintaining its own power and 
 privilege — the cultivation of the mind to a gen- 
 uine superiority. 
 
 "From such a class, setting standards of taste 
 and intellect, the better products of art and litera- 
 ture could be assured of encouragement which the 
 democracy seems less and less inclined to extend. 
 If truckling there were, it would be a truckling to 
 minds that were trained, not to minds that were un- 
 trained, to a class with cultivated standards, not to 
 a mass with no standards. The leaders of the nation, 
 looking down from an assured position, would no 
 longer have to call things by wrong names to win 
 the suffrage of the ignorant — would no longer call 
 ability to read, literacy; apprenticeship, education; 
 glibness about art, culture; governmental aid to 
 private interests, democracy. Spades would be 
 spades, and the implements of thought, words, could 
 retain their real value to the rescue of clear thinking. 
 
 "For these reasons and for many more I believe 
 in aristocracy. And in this belief I cast my vote 
 with the humanitarians in favour of that training 
 of the people to vocation, which marks the final 
 departure from the democratic ideal, and the in- 
 ception of the aristocratic evolution." 
 
 He ceased, and they sat staring at the fire. The 
 host glanced at the humanitarian and read in his 
 face, perhaps out of his own mind, a chagrin that 
 contained no resentment, but no less a chagrin, that 
 pulled at the corners of his mouth, and held his eyes 
 in brooding concentration upon depths far within 
 
A Modern Paradox 123 
 
 the glow of the fire. He had a fleeting sense that 
 the aristocrat had been too hard upon his gentle 
 victim, followed by a surer sense that nothing but a 
 love of fair play could have led him to impress so 
 harshly upon the generous humanitarian the de- 
 ception by which he was guided. 
 
 The pause which followed was so painful that 
 when the moment of precipitancy was past the host 
 turned to the democrat of the older school. It was 
 understood by now that they were to have it out 
 from all sides. 
 
 ''Will you let me," he began somewhat briskly, 
 relieving the tension of the moment by his dry, 
 driving manner, "will you let me state my whole 
 case even though it covers ground that has been trod 
 more than once to-night? There will be an ap- 
 pearance of repetition, but there will also, I think, 
 emerge differences that can best be detected in their 
 logical setting. And these differences are the bent 
 of the twig. 
 
 "As to my own plea, then — curiously I have 
 found myself, as I have listened to the defence of 
 the humanitarian movement and the defence of 
 aristocracy, more often agreeing with the aristocrat 
 than with the democrat — with his logic I mean. 
 Yet curiously again, in the end it is they who are 
 partisans and I who stand alone. The alignments 
 are strangely complex. 
 
 "I am democratic in my social faith. I too be- 
 Heve that the constant character of democracy is 
 its opposition to the aristocratic suppression of the 
 masses. I have, therefore, no love for aristocracy, 
 
124 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 but I believe that it had among its evils some very 
 real virtues. It accepted responsibilities. My 
 criticism of aristocracy, even if I could approve its 
 fundamental theory, would be of its human tendency, 
 from which democracy is not free, to self-indulgence. 
 If we are, therefore, as has been said, to compare 
 attainables with attainables, I need not, I think, 
 cite specific examples to show that revolts against 
 attainable aristocracies have taken place because of 
 their tendency, in spite of the selfish interests that 
 make in the opposite direction, to relax the rigours 
 of their discipline and indulge their personal and 
 more selfish inclinations. The results of such self- 
 indulgence seem to me so much worse, so much more 
 unjust, in an aristocracy than in a democracy that 
 I must, though I had no counter-theory of my own, 
 side with the latter. I must defend myself, then, by 
 examining the grounds of this partisanship. Let me 
 go hastily over the preliminary commonplaces. 
 
 'We commonly speak, I know, of a man's doing 
 himself an injustice. Yet I think we attach a very 
 different moral value to such an act from that of an 
 injustice to some one else. It is this difference which 
 moves me in the comparison we are now concerned 
 with. That privilege should go with responsibility 
 as reward of work is just enough. That privilege 
 should mount at the expense of work, as in the 
 aristocracy from which we have broken, is natural 
 enough. Its consequences would be even tolerable 
 if the ones who attained the privilege paid the cost. 
 In an aristocracy, however, with every decline in the 
 sense of responsibility the common people are the 
 ones who pay with suffering, and with every increase 
 
A Modern Paradox 125 
 
 in self-indulgence the common people are the ones 
 who pay with contributions and exactions. That is 
 why, on the whole, a democracy is fairer and juster 
 than an aristocracy. For though a democracy is not 
 free from the same human weaknesses it has to 
 suffer the penalties itself. Though in both cases it 
 is, I know, simply individuals who suffer, I have 
 not made a distinction quite without a difference. 
 For in a democracy those who suffer have power of 
 redress. Whether they use their power is not the 
 point. Democracy gives it to them, and aristocracy 
 withholds it. 
 
 ''There is another injustice in an aristocracy even 
 more serious than the first; and this brings me to 
 the main premise of my argument. By the theory 
 of its organization it distributes privilege and re- 
 sponsibility by the accident of birth, and in the 
 same process passes over all those who by the same 
 accident are born among the mass of the people. 
 That kind tends to reproduce kind is a principle 
 that one is, I think, at liberty to doubt in the deli- 
 cate matters of mental and moral aptitude. Great 
 men have not normally had great sons. Even our 
 aristocrat has said that England's great men have 
 emerged from the classes below the top; and if this 
 is true of greatness I think we may suppose it equally 
 true of lesser degrees of human value. A system, 
 then, that in any way tends to limit or curtail or 
 suppress the very thing for which human organ- 
 ization may be supposed to exist — the cultivation 
 of all attainable human values — seems to me to be 
 mocking itself with contradiction. An aristocracy 
 does, by its own theory, exert such limitation. 
 
126 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "Even the large social loss of this suppressive 
 action might be borne with nothing more bitter than 
 regret if it did not involve something far more in- 
 tolerable. I mean injustice. I am grateful to our 
 humanitarian for that passage in which he spoke of 
 the individual as the largest conscious entity of 
 which we are aware, and the largest unit which could 
 rejoice or suffer or have aspirations. For when we 
 look at society minutely we find that the moving 
 thing, the thing that touches our hearts most nearly, 
 is the individual man. And though we may give 
 names to classes of people, and talk of them coldly, 
 we have, when we come to the individual, come to 
 the final goal where justice or injustice has its reality 
 and stirs our eager approval or our burning resent- 
 ment. And the mass of the people is made up of 
 these appealing individuals no less than the ruling 
 class. 
 
 "When therefore we look at the people as indi- 
 viduals, possessed of dreams and desires and long- 
 ings and hopes for all those things which men have 
 thought worth striving for — honours, distinctions, 
 knowledge, wisdom — the injustice of thwarting in 
 all but a few these noble aims that are common to 
 all men seems repugnant to every democratic soul. 
 One irreducible individual would seem to have as 
 strong claim upon opportunity in his brief life as 
 another. Accident has brought him here or there. 
 He has but one chance at life. And to thwart that 
 chance arbitrarily, on no basis intrinsic to the oc- 
 casion, is to commit a bitter and irreparable in- 
 justice. 
 
 "It is the stirring sense of this injustice that has 
 
 J 
 
A Modern Paradox 127 
 
 roused men from time to time in all ages to fight for 
 democracy against aristocracy. It was the sense of 
 this equality of right to opportunity that produced 
 our own Declaration of Independence, smiled at so 
 superiorly to-day, and which led our fathers to 
 rebel against a tyranny that seemed to deny it. 
 This, then, was the democratic idea, the impulse 
 that has ever stirred generous spirits to rebel against 
 the arbitrary repression of the people — to spread 
 to everyone the opportunities that in an aristocracy 
 are the privilege of the jew. 
 
 "This was the essential aim of our democratic 
 revolution; but it was based on an idea still more 
 fundamental. It was belief that the people wanted 
 these opportunities and were worthy of them that 
 supported the heroic protest which lay at the found- 
 ing of the democracy. For given a people known 
 not to care for those nobler ends which universal 
 opportunity opens to them, or known to be too 
 deeply sunk in their own sensuous wants to be 
 worthy of generous self-sacrifice, and who would 
 turn a finger to secure democracy for them? The 
 democratic faith is not that a base people should in 
 justice have what they want, but rather that our 
 particular people are a people of noble aspirations 
 and should not be thwarted of their liberty to de- 
 velop the nobihty that is in them. Democracy is at 
 bottom a faith in the nobility of the people. Not 
 that by the wildest dream all the people of a democ- 
 racy could be expected to desire those nobler ends, 
 but that the essential democratic action is to give 
 everyone a chance — and a chance at those things 
 that only the few had before. Not that all will 
 
128 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 want them, but that the whole mass is leavened by 
 those who do. 
 
 "I pause at this point, for here I have diverged 
 from the conclusions drawn by that modern humani- 
 tarian sympathy that has such an appeal for us all. 
 I have diverged, because my own sympathies are not 
 so unqualified. They are for the individual, it is 
 true, but not for the individual in all his wants, 
 high or low. They are for the individual in his 
 aristocratic deprivations. As democratic S5mipathies 
 they must be for the individual deprived of par- 
 ticular things. There could be no democratic point 
 in a sympathy for wants that were already fulfilled. 
 Democracy must feel for wants that were denied. 
 I can conceive a sympathy for the man in all his 
 wants and needs and aspirations, but I cannot be- 
 lieve that that is democracy. I know that such is 
 the current and popular definition — that democ- 
 racy is the government that expresses the will of 
 the whole people, no matter what that will. But 
 such a definition can hardly be wholly true. Some- 
 thing in our right definition must reside in the 
 nature of the will. For if, for example, — I take 
 not impossible suppositions — the will of the people 
 should be to establish an aristocracy or to enthrone 
 a ruler, we could hardly call the will or the act 
 which carried it out democratic. The will of the 
 people must be of a particular kind. Something in 
 our definition of democracy inheres in the nature of 
 the ideas upon which the people act. 
 
 "The essential nature of those ideas, then, the 
 nature which makes them democratic, I can conceive 
 to be only this — that a noble people aspire to noble 
 
A Modern Paradox 129 
 
 things of which they have been deprived; that this 
 deprivation is unjust; and that the distinctive demo- 
 cratic action is the opening up to their attainment, 
 not of the things which they had before — there 
 would be no point to that — but of those things 
 which an aristocracy had closed to them. Such, as 
 I conceive it, is the essence of the democratic faith. 
 
 ^With this animating idea in mind, then, I should 
 like to make some applications and defences which 
 I believe are not impertinent, before I go on to what 
 I may call the practical necessities of democracy. 
 Our humanitarian has spoken of the schools as the 
 principal agent in the dynamic expression of democ- 
 racy. I suppose it is the schools that give the most 
 effective expression to whatever political philosophy 
 holds among a people. I can see no other point for 
 governmental schools. And but now, as our friend 
 traced the aristocratic influence of the vocational 
 schools, the sense of their power intensified my own 
 conviction as to the kind of discipline the democracy 
 would needs establish if it wished to remain a 
 democracy. 
 
 ''In the aristocratic regime, with the masses of 
 the people held to their places in the grand hier- 
 archy, the severest deprivation and the bitterest in- 
 justice lie in the restricted range of their education. 
 Specialized by a ruling class to insure in them the 
 greatest amount of efficiency and to get out of them 
 the greatest amount of work, they are limited in the 
 range of their finer human possibilities by the nar- 
 rowed bounds in which their growing minds are 
 exercised. No aristocracy, to be sure, ever quite 
 wholly enforced such restrictions, but the tendency 
 
130 
 
 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 was in that direction, and to the degree to which it 
 succeeded was due the generous force of the demo- 
 cratic protest and reaction. In the pursuit of its 
 own ideal, then, the democracy estabHshed schools 
 to spread to all, to the degree to which they wished 
 to take advantage of it, the opportunity to gain this 
 larger and more comprehensive vision which was 
 before the opportunity of the few. It opened up to 
 them the wider ranges of thought, and gave them 
 the chance to be more than the half-men they had 
 been. Democracy for its own part has never suc- 
 ceeded wholly, but its attempt has been in this di- 
 rection; and the degree to which it has succeeded 
 has been the degree to which it has justified its 
 ideal as against the aristocratic ideal. 
 
 ^'It opened up to them history, and the facts and 
 significance of human experience. It opened up to 
 them literature, and the facts and significance of the 
 dynamic traits of human nature. It opened up to 
 them language, and gave them access to the thoughts 
 of other peoples. If these revelations had no practi- 
 cal bearing on the problems of making a livelihood, 
 it was not the making of a livelihood that the people 
 had been denied by an aristocracy. These revela- 
 tions gave them something really democratic. They 
 had the value of disinterestedness; they disciplined 
 the democratic mind in a type of thought unbiased 
 by the consideration of profit or of momentary ad- 
 vantage. They constituted a culture that lay at the 
 base of the broadest and noblest development of the 
 human spirit. They gave to the many the specific 
 thing of which they had been aristocratically de- 
 prived. They did the particular thing which it had 
 
A Modern Paradox 131 
 
 been worth while to fight for, perhaps to die for, in 
 the revolution which had made the democracy 
 possible. 
 
 "In the older regime the people worked: they 
 cooked, they sewed, they farmed, they sold goods 
 over the counter, they kept books, they built houses, 
 each man to his last. But the large expansion of 
 their minds among the data of all humanity, and in 
 the nobler ranges of disinterested thought, was no- 
 where provided for. For the democracy to give 
 them vocational training, then, to train them to the 
 narrow range of data and relations that inhere in a 
 single trade or industry, with the aim of fitting them 
 to make a living in that industry — for it, in other 
 words, to give the people what they already had, 
 only to intensify the narrow bounds of their in- 
 terests by early specialization, and then by calling 
 that training ^democratic' to soothe those simple 
 minds untaught to detect the fallacies in ideas be- 
 yond the range of their special training, seems to me 
 to be deeply false and deeply wrong. 
 
 "All this, done in sympathy with the wants and 
 needs and aspirations of the people, may be a wiser, 
 and juster, and finer thing than democracy. But 
 such a sympathy is not democracy; it is sympathy. 
 It is universal; it faces in every direction; it has no 
 distinctive aim. As for democracy, I have tried to 
 say what its aim is. It, too, is animated by sym- 
 pathy with individual men, but it sympathizes with 
 a particular variety of their needs — with the 
 harshest of their deprivations. It tries to give them 
 their human right to develop to the utmost their 
 human possibilities. 
 
132 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "Yet perhaps I have been too hasty in my 
 criticism. Perhaps, just as democracy is moved by 
 a desire to spread the opportunity for spiritual de- 
 velopment, humanitarianism is moved to spread 
 material comfort. The plea for vocational training 
 is open to such interpretation. It may in the end 
 prove true that their wants and needs and aspira- 
 tions are material ; that the people are not fit for the 
 training of their spirits. Such a belief may be well 
 founded; but it is not a democratic belief. 
 
 "Have I, in all that I have said, been reading into 
 democracy too spiritual an ideal? Have I been 
 ignoring the historic Stamp Act and the commercial 
 impulses of our own Revolution? Have I, shielded 
 from the bitter pressure of common needs, been 
 speaking like a closet philosopher, imputing to the 
 many, wants which they do not feel, and aspirations 
 of which they have never dreamt? If I have I can 
 see no point in democracy. For certainly democracy 
 is not the agent best suited to material ends. A 
 people fitted by exclusive training for particular 
 tasks will become more efficient in industry and 
 commerce. Efficiency is increased by division of 
 labour and the specialization of the parts. Aris- 
 tocracy, then, is the regime for that end, for aris- 
 tocracy is more efficient than democracy. And no 
 doubt the parts are even more physically com- 
 fortable, perhaps even happier, each fitted to its 
 niche and rewarded according to its fitness. If our 
 sympathies for the physical welfare of the parts 
 predominate, then this specialization is the course 
 our action will take. We will make our schools vo- 
 cational. We will train our masses to special trades. 
 
A Modern Paradox 133 
 
 We will discipline them in material efficiency. But 
 we shall not be acting on the democratic principle. 
 We shall, as was said, be drifting toward aristocracy. 
 
 "If a man were only an animal, then his physical 
 ease would be enough. But he is a man. And it 
 seems to me that democracy has no point save as 
 it does something that an aristocracy cannot do for 
 the distinctively humane part of him — for his spirit. 
 I think it is not to be questioned that a youth trained 
 in the schools to be a farmer will be a more efficient 
 farmer than one who has spent the time of that train- 
 ing in history and Latin and mathematics. Yet some 
 price must be paid for spiritual development. And I 
 can see no distinctive idea in democracy unless it is 
 that to give to everyone some degree of spiritual de- 
 velopment is worth the price of lesser material effi- 
 ciency, even a lesser physical comfort. Such, I 
 believe, is the animating idea of democratic edu- 
 cation. I can conceive no other. 
 
 "I have come midway in my defence. I have de- 
 scribed what seems to me the ideal that animates 
 and justifies the constant democratic reaction against 
 the aristocratic tendency, and determines the dis- 
 tinctive purpose of the democratic government. 
 And I have applied this principle to the schools es- 
 tablished to accomplish and to perpetuate the demo- 
 cratic ideal. My position may have seemed ar- 
 bitrary. One of you on behalf of humanitarianism 
 has said that the people do not want the broad de- 
 velopment of their spirits, and the other on behalf 
 of aristocracy has said that they do not want it. 
 Both have affirmed that they want what the aris- 
 tocracy has always condemned them to, — jobs and 
 
134 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the lower offices of life. As a democrat, however, 
 I have no ground to take but a belief that the hu- 
 manitarian and the aristocrat are wrong. I disagree 
 with you, arbitrarily perhaps, but the point is one 
 upon which whatever position one takes, whatever 
 way one faces, he does so arbitrarily. He takes his 
 ground on the basis of a spontaneous judgment. 
 Democracy is a faith. I may have reasons which to 
 me seem sufficient; but in the last analysis I know 
 that I have taken my ground, as you have taken 
 yours, by virtue of a faith that is in me. 
 
 "If I may be allowed this faith, then, what I go 
 on to say will, I think, seem reasonable. I have 
 come to the consideration of democracy as a practi- 
 cal thing. An ideal is futile without practical action. 
 Democracy is not only an ideal; it is a government. 
 This may be a commonplace, but its truth was no- 
 where recognized in the exposition of the humani- 
 tarian regime. Aristocracy and democracy both 
 provide in those who rule a discipline which trains 
 their minds in the broader relations of men. Indus- 
 trial humanitarianism fails to provide for the ad- 
 ministrative wisdom of its rulers. The affairs of a 
 democracy must be carried on, and they must be 
 carried on by somebody. Somebody must have the 
 necessary wisdom. And wisdom lies only in men's 
 minds. Since in a democracy, therefore, its ma- 
 jorities are responsible, it must discipline these 
 majorities in the kind of wisdom which makes for 
 administrative effectiveness, and effectiveness in the 
 democratic direction. 
 
 "The relationship between the discipline of these 
 majorities and the democratic government is too 
 
A Modern Paradox 135 
 
 obvious to need more than passing illustration. 
 Upon the quality of the discipline which gives them 
 their judgment and taste will depend the quality of 
 the men whom they elect to office, the quality of the 
 laws which they enforce, the quality of justice, the 
 nature of the public policy, the kind of literature 
 encouraged by their reading, the type of life en- 
 couraged by their example, the quality of the theater, 
 the quality of the arts, the quality of scholarship 
 endowed and encouraged, the beauty of the cities, 
 the grace of social life. Above all, upon the kind of 
 discipline by which their judgment and taste have 
 been determined will depend the very discipHne it- 
 self by which that judgment and taste are to be 
 perpetuated in their children. 
 
 "That is why the schools are a governmental in- 
 stitution. In so far as they have any point in the 
 practical workings of a democracy they have it by 
 virtue of their service in disciplining the majorities 
 of a democracy in the kind of wisdom needed to 
 guide them in the democratic path. In this matter 
 something may be learned from aristocracy. The 
 aristocracy disciplines its governing class in the 
 broader field. And though the problem of democ- 
 racy has its striking differences from the problem 
 of aristocracy, they are differences so far from re- 
 lieving it of the necessity of jealously disciplining 
 its citizens to a large and generous wisdom, that they 
 cry loudly for a yet more rigorous discipline in that 
 wisdom. One of you has mentioned the aristocratic 
 disbelief in our ability to maintain this discipline. 
 Democracy is, we may agree with him, immeasur- 
 ably harder to maintain than an aristocracy. It has 
 
136 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 a people trained to wider interests than the lower 
 classes of an aristocracy, a people less compactly 
 organized, more restless, more shifting. And to 
 govern them it has no class set apart, trained to rule, 
 stimulated by selfish incentives, rewarded by honor 
 and privilege. As a problem, then, it requires a 
 higher intelligence to solve, and those who disbelieve 
 in it do so on the ground of a disbelief in the power 
 of a whole people to make the necessary self-sacrifice 
 and train themselves, at the expense of their private 
 interests, in the type of learning necessary to the 
 wise direction of affairs. 
 
 "But a belief in democracy is incompatible with 
 this doubt. Democracy believes in the moving 
 power of its ideal, and in the existence of a dynamic 
 generosity in its people, or it is not democracy. It 
 believes that these are sufficient to take the place of 
 rewards and privilege and honor. A democracy 
 must believe these things, for these beliefs are 
 democracy. 
 
 "The second difference, already implied, is that, 
 though the whole people are responsible for its wel- 
 fare — its policies, its justice, its civilizing activ- 
 ities — they cannot be disciplined exclusively to 
 meet these responsibilities. Each man has his 
 private interests and duties calling him strongly, and 
 he must bring up his children to similar conflicting 
 duties. This conflict creates the fundamental prob- 
 lem of practical democracy, just as it creates, with 
 specific variations, the fundamental problem of all 
 government. 
 
 "The gist of the matter is then that these two 
 types of interest clash, and that in a democracy, 
 
 J 
 
A Modern Paradox 137 
 
 with no governing class, everyone must make a 
 sacrifice of private to public service. This sacrifice 
 is the price of its democratic liberties. Moreover 
 the respective disciplines for these ends conflict. 
 Training for private interests has been explained to 
 us. It is concentrated upon a narrow field, with the 
 end in view of material returns. For the public 
 interest the discipline must necessarily be broad and 
 fundamental, with the end in view of habituating 
 the mind to a disinterested perception of things as 
 they are — of training the mind to think with clear 
 judgments upon those data and those relations which 
 hold, not in a single field but in all fields — not in a 
 single task but in the comprehensive task of the 
 whole nation. 
 
 "The need of this latter kind of discipline is 
 sufficiently obvious. And I can find no logic that 
 will let me conclude that training in the data and 
 relations of a single trade will make for as broad 
 and deep a wisdom as discipline in matters that lie 
 at the base of all relations of a people — human 
 nature, human thought, and human experience, as 
 revealed in literature and history. Where else is 
 the citizen to gain a large political wisdom? It was 
 in this broad discipline that aristocracy trained its 
 rulers. It trained them to no especial tasks, but by 
 traditions founded upon a sense of the ends to be 
 attained, gave them an education which informed 
 them of the best that had been thought and done in 
 the past by men in all countries and in all ages. It 
 trained them to minute and careful thinking in this 
 broad field. It did not teach them to farm their 
 estates, or to make shoes or bridges, or to cook, but 
 rather to control the large activities of the nation. 
 
138 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "It may have failed. It is the democratic behef 
 that it did fail. But if it failed, it failed not because 
 it learned its large lesson too well but because it 
 grew self-indulgent, and having power, abused its 
 privileges and neglected its responsibilities. It failed 
 because it did not learn its large lesson well enough. 
 Somehow the democracy must learn those lessons 
 which the aristocracy neglected. Somehow it must 
 discipline its responsible majorities in that broad 
 grasp of human relations which makes for admin- 
 istrative wisdom. That is the practical democratic 
 problem of education. 
 
 "Democracy has no other practical object to serve 
 in its schools than to solve this problem. If the 
 people cannot specialize, after the manner of a 
 ruling class, and can as a whole get but a part of 
 that discipline at best, that would not seem a reason 
 why that part should be done away with; rather a 
 reason why it should be cherished and intensified to 
 the utmost. Knowledge and wisdom are not the 
 kind of thing that once attained can be handed down 
 from generation to generation like heirlooms. They 
 exist nowhere but in individual human minds, and 
 to be maintained have to be re-created there from the 
 ground up in every generation. As a consequence 
 there can be no slackening of the educative process. 
 Nowhere more than here is eternal vigilance the 
 price of liberty. The practical needs of the democ- 
 racy, then, coincide with the ideal needs, for the 
 broader wisdom of which the people were deprived 
 is the same wisdom that is needed for the govern- 
 ment for which they are now responsible. 
 
 "Even more strikingly true is the converse of this 
 
A Modern Paradox 139 
 
 conclusion. In a democracy, where the citizens 
 have private interests distinct from the public in- 
 terest, the chief public danger lies in the over-devel- 
 opment of private interests. Therein is the chief 
 enemy of democracy. I need not point out in con- 
 firmation our trusts, our corporations, our municipal 
 conditions, our lobbies. For the democracy, there- 
 fore, to suffer the lessening of that discipline of its 
 citizens which is so necessary for its wise adminis- 
 tration, is to break down its chief safeguard. For 
 it further to accede to their selfish demands and 
 substitute a training which makes in each man for 
 an intensification of his own private interests, is a 
 governmental action making directly and blindly 
 for its own undoing. At one stroke it is removing 
 the safeguard and strengthening the enemy. 
 
 ^'Democracy has no enemy to fear but itself. 
 Government by the few has the eternal menace of 
 the suppressed many. But government by the 
 people need fear nothing but its own will. It may 
 do what it pleases. It may insensibly change its 
 desires; it may follow an altered will to the forma- 
 tion of a new regime. But if it desires to remain a 
 democracy it must safeguard that desire. It must 
 fortify itself against those selfish interests which 
 everyone must possess, and which by democratic 
 theory everyone should possess. It must by a 
 liberal and disinterested discipline impart a generous 
 conception of the spiritual idea of democracy, and 
 impart the wisdom that is necessary to the wise ad- 
 ministration of its affairs. The theory of democratic 
 education, then, is that it should bring up its youths 
 in that generous conception, strengthen their gen- 
 
140 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 erous desire for its service, and train them in an 
 abiHty to grasp and administer its affairs in harmony 
 with that generous conception. For it, therefore, by 
 direct and conscious action to weaken the discipHne 
 of that part of the man which serves the democracy, 
 and by the same stroke to strengthen that part of 
 him which conflicts with the democracy, is to make 
 by far and deep reaching influences for its own 
 destruction. 
 
 "I have said that self-indulgence, the use of pub- 
 lic power to private ends, and the decline of the 
 sense of public responsibility, have marked the 
 downfall of aristocracies. Until a moment ago, how- 
 ever, I had felt a blind security for the democracy 
 thinking that though the whole people might grow 
 self-indulgent there lurked no enemy near to rise 
 up in revolt against the evils of its decadence. I 
 had not seen that though the democracy need fear 
 no revolution it declines no less surely when the 
 generous spirit of its own natal impulse dies. If in 
 the end that spirit does die, it sickens first, like the 
 spirit of aristocracy, at the entrance of self-indul- 
 gence. In the democracy about us there is evidence 
 that the moment of sickness has come. There is the 
 use of public power to private ends, the decline in 
 the sense of public responsibility. Even the little 
 time asked for discipline to public service is be- 
 grudged, and that time is turned over to private 
 ends. Instead of self-devotion to public service, on 
 the part of the many, the many are bending the 
 public service to self-devotion. 
 
 ^'Still, though I am not blind to the discourage- 
 ments of the moment, I have not lost my democratic 
 
A Modern Paradox 141 
 
 faith. I believe that, given a people of intelligence 
 such as ours, it is possible to make a democracy 
 nobler and juster than the aristocracy from which 
 we have sprung, and toward which, as has been 
 shown us, we are, alas, beginning to turn again. I 
 do not think that it is too late to face about and 
 pursue once more our own proper course. But 
 whether we want to face about, now that we have 
 tasted the poisonous sweets of self-indulgence, I do 
 not know. One of you says that we do not; the 
 other says that we do not. 
 
 ^'I believe that the one essential thing in the 
 maintenance of the democracy is the broad disci- 
 pline of its youths. And when I look at that dis- 
 cipline I see it gradually narrowing. I believe that 
 the one enemy of democracy is the private interests 
 of its people. And when I look about me I see that 
 instead of strengthening its discipline to counteract 
 the force of these interests the democracy is bending 
 its discipline to their enhancement. When I search 
 in obscure corners, hoping to find remnants of the 
 disinterested pursuit of wisdom so necessary to 
 democracy, I see it wholly dependent upon private 
 generosity, retreating to private foundations. With 
 the masses of the people narrowed in their educa- 
 tion to particular tasks, and bent in the habits of 
 their minds to an exclusive regard for their private 
 interests; and with the few who are not so special- 
 ized disciplined — like an aristocratic class, by 
 private endowment — in the broader learning that 
 is needed for a grasp of the complex relationships 
 of the whole, I can see only a slow trend toward 
 aristocracy. 
 
142 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "Still I have not despaired. I believe that the 
 democratic spirit may survive the stimulus of those 
 oppressions from which it revolts, and may recover 
 even from its present sickness. But I believe that it 
 can survive only by the broad, disinterested dis- 
 cipline of its youths — a discipline which will take 
 them when they are young and generous, give them 
 the deep foundations of that nobler development of 
 which in such moving numbers they were once de- 
 prived, habituate their minds to the disinterested 
 outlook from which clear thinking and generous 
 action spring, form them in the liberal wisdom of 
 the ages, and teach them the wide relations between 
 men, which lie at the base of a wise and moderate 
 administration of the interests of their people." 
 
 He ceased, and they sat again in silence, smoking 
 and gazing at the fire. Two of the four of them, at 
 least, were saddened by the thoughts of the 
 evening — by the dangers which threatened the 
 generous interests which they had so nearly at heart, 
 and by the subtle and complex relationships which 
 their oppositions and their no less disconcerting 
 agreements had revealed. It was, therefore, with 
 chastened spirits though with genuine warmth of 
 friendship that they uttered the commonplaces of 
 good-night. 
 
V 
 
 IN PURSUIT OF THE ARTS 
 
 I. CUDGELS AND COMMON SENSE 
 
 IT was a revealing touch to our friend's quality 
 that as he grew older it was his tolerance and 
 not his crabbedness that should have increased. He 
 grew more sociable, more dependent on the world, 
 by virtue of the humanity that had always lain be- 
 hind his militant front. The militant in him had 
 leave to cool with the passing of years. It was 
 still in reserve, indeed, as events showed, but it no 
 longer went about with its sword drawn. He took 
 more time now to go about, and more people dropped 
 in on him for talk. In the circle about him it was 
 said that he improved. He did; but he spoiled the 
 effect of this comment for one informant by laugh- 
 ing that it came, after the manner of the world, only 
 when he had stopped improving. Obviously he 
 was still the ironic observer. 
 
 And he was observed. Acquaintances saw him 
 one winter haunting the galleries and picture shops, 
 an attractive figure, grown a little thicker with 
 middle age, amenity in the slight stoop of the neck, 
 and vigor in the erect shoulders. His face was 
 brooding rather than animated, and only when the 
 eyes were looking into yours did you catch the 
 something lucidly human in him that was at once 
 both boy and man. The eyes lingered, upon you 
 
144 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 at the time, and afterward, when he had gone by, 
 in your memory. It was said that women hated 
 him for the truths he told, and still clung to him as 
 a staunch friend. 
 
 His going about this winter among the show 
 windows of Bohemia was a genuine quest. He was 
 interested in beautiful things for their own sakes, 
 as the phrase is, and that would have been enough. 
 But it was characteristic of him that he should in a 
 measure complicate whatever point of interest ab- 
 sorbed him; and his interest in art was thus com- 
 plexly the ramification of something else. He was 
 unable to take it simply, because for him its re- 
 lation to that something else was its thrilling point. 
 He had a passion for seeing life whole, for catching 
 its proportions. His ancient grievance was that a 
 fine sense of proportion was the rarest thing in the 
 world — yes, in both senses. 
 
 When therefore after a certain autumn exhibition 
 he had caught himself sliding into the seductive sun- 
 set land of aesthetic speculation and reading, he 
 brought himself up with a sharp tug at the reins. 
 Certain of his friends promptly rallied him for what 
 they called his Puritanic uncomfortableness in the 
 presence of beauty. He acquitted himself of such 
 a charge, however, and with a good deal of good 
 evidence. His discomfort came from another source. 
 He found his ancient grievance against the confident 
 h5^ocrisy of the five senses grumbling back into 
 consciousness, like an old rheumatic wound. And if 
 he could take it now a little more serenely, as time 
 will inure its victims even to pain, still there were 
 moments when it made him wince and cry out. And 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 145 
 
 if he did cry out now and then, so that his bare 
 words, repeated, would sound harsh, one who was 
 present and who had a grain of salt in him would 
 have caught in the light of his eye and the tone of 
 his voice the saving spark of humor that turned 
 his railing complaint into but a negative way of 
 picturing his own vision. 
 
 His temper, for all its amelioration, was the fight- 
 ing one still, and the fighting temper perforce holds 
 in a kind of tolerant contempt the passive enjoy- 
 ments of peace. That is the peculiar angle from 
 which its owner looks out upon the world. He will 
 forever have his dragon to fight. And however 
 much he values the palace, it will be upon the 
 dragon at the gate that he demonstrates his devotion. 
 To be content with the positive depiction of his 
 notion was what, at the cost of peace, our friend 
 therefore could not bring himself to. It was too 
 tame a sport; it drew to itself too many of the 
 slothful and the self-indulgent. 
 
 It was in part the spectacle, especially in the arts, 
 of beautiful talkers who lived parasitically by foster- 
 ing a cult, and the great horde who on their side 
 responded to the flattery of it, that won his active 
 disgust. But more particularly it was his old love 
 of seeing life whole, of seeing it in measure and 
 proportion, that sent him back characteristically to 
 the center for a perspective. He could not escape 
 from the sense that life was a matter of living and 
 that the center was the conception of a decent life. 
 It was there at all events that he took his perpetual 
 refuge. 
 
 The literature he had just been through was an 
 
146 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 amazing mass. It had no help for him at all. It had 
 brought into its service a whole gamut of appeal — 
 cleverness, eloquence, sentiment, gossip, and 
 romance; and many kinds of treatment — aesthetic, 
 scientific, historical, archaeological, and metaphys- 
 ical. But aside from a characteristic beauty of 
 binding and print it was wonderfully barren. He 
 was aware of thousands of honest painters, and 
 sculptors, and musicians struggling at their work, 
 Two or three he knew, at home and abroad, and one 
 who had won fame in two continents. But they 
 were silent — talkative enough at night in the studio 
 with glasses clinking — but silent and hard-working 
 over their brush or chisel or score. And they had a 
 kind of tacit hate for the great horde of cult 
 mongers. 
 
 ^'Don't you read the literature of your subject?" 
 he had asked one of these friends one day as they 
 lounged through the Louvre. 
 
 The other looked at him quizzically for a moment 
 before he replied, and then, — ''Certainly — here," 
 he said, and his hand waved at the walls of the Salon 
 Carre. In a moment he added, ''Biography, of 
 course, and history. You belong to your own 
 metier, and you want to know it from the bottom. 
 But the rest — " He gave a gesture that together 
 they had seen and loved in an excursion they had 
 taken together in old days into Bohemia — the 
 geographical Bohemia — a wringing of the hands 
 on wilted wrists, that pointed utter though whimsical 
 despair. They laughed the quiet laugh of old 
 memories. 
 
 At the moment our friend had put the painter's 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 147 
 
 disgust down to the worker's characteristic intol- 
 erance of the theorist. But now, after a long dive 
 into the luke-warm seas of this literature, he wrung 
 his own hands in the Bohemian pantomime. It was 
 of a piece, for the most part, with a mass of stuff 
 about literature — ''Dante's Vision," "Wordsworth's 
 Nature," "Browning's Philosophy" — for those who 
 wanted to shine among the ignorant without the 
 intolerable trouble and boredom of reading the 
 original. And if he had found the literary pabulum 
 thin and sickly, tricked up with sentiment and 
 mystic emotion, he found the artistic pabulum yet 
 worse, with the greater license of the vaguer sub- 
 ject. He had independently a vigorous sense of 
 meaning for the words spirit and soul or he would 
 have retreated from this literature with a hardened 
 loathing for both. As it was, the words insight and 
 message were forever spoiled for him. 
 
 His criticism of this literature, apart from his 
 personal disgust, was that it wrought itself up en- 
 tirely within the circle of its own substance — that 
 it failed to anchor itself in the charted waters of the 
 general consciousness and went drifting off into 
 the chimerical seas of its own romantic dreams. 
 Well, that was just what he hated. 
 
 Among his friends was one whom he liked with 
 unreasoning affection, ignoring differences which in 
 anyone else would have been irritating and repellent. 
 With youth, and a dark, handsome Spanish face, a 
 serious but not humorless concern for the gentler 
 matters of life, and a gift of expression that had 
 tempted him into poetry with justifying results, this 
 friend surprised those who knew his type and per- 
 
148 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ceived his vogue with a modesty that sometimes 
 almost became humihty. The most diverse ac- 
 knowledged his charm. He was philosophical, 
 aesthetic, epicurean, humanitarian, classic, satiric, 
 romantic, stoic, by turns and in combination, re- 
 flecting the bent of his companions and his mood. 
 He had a quick sympathy that could be roused by 
 any appeal to his feelings, and an intensity of re- 
 sponse, an ardor of approval, a self-effacement be- 
 fore the conquering idea, that led to the general 
 agreement that the crowning quality of his charm 
 was sincerity. 
 
 Our friend at first demurred at this verdict. In 
 the end, however, he agreed. But he agreed with a 
 discrimination that helped him later to probe to the 
 human roots of his own philosophical leanings 
 in this moot region of the feelings and the senses. 
 Here was a t5^e of sincerity that based itself on the 
 emotions, and expressed itself in the kindling eye 
 and fervid tones that in personal intercourse are the 
 touchstones of genuineness. It differed, as the 
 weathercock differed from the compass, from that 
 other, uncompromising sincerity that offends all the 
 world by sticking with stubborn conviction to one 
 point. It arose out of a character that was at any 
 moment all of one piece, one whose intellect never 
 contradicted the feelings, whose lyric vein was so 
 dominant that the reason was but the ready con- 
 jurer of expressions to clothe the emotions. It was 
 a genuine sincerity, but it was the sincerity of the 
 weather. It had no inner antagonism to cast doubts 
 on its own consistency. It took life altogether 
 passionally; its test of truth was the immediate 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 149 
 
 thump of the heart. Memory and reason, if they 
 should have contradicted the passing emotion, would 
 have been discredited as the creatures of an ex- 
 perience that was dead — valueless conservatives 
 clinging with pathetic loyalty to the outworn con- 
 ditions among which they had been born. 
 
 He saw, therefore, in this friend of his, a type — 
 heightened indeed beyond the normal run of men, 
 but so much the more the type — of the modern 
 man who had substituted the immediate for the 
 remote, the aesthetic appeal for the moral principle, 
 and who gave to art its conquering modern vogue — 
 the man who had suppressed his inner duality. He 
 saw in this suppression the elements of modernism — 
 sincerity, enthusiasm, sympathy, a carelessness of 
 the past, a rejection of tradition and authority, a 
 ready response to the feelings, and an unlimited flow 
 of reasons to justify the current emotion. And he 
 saw in the aestheticism of his time a symptom of 
 the malady of which he conceived culture to be sick. 
 
 Just now he was interested in art — our dualistic 
 friend — and in his eternal pursuit he began pretty 
 near the bottom. He began with the senses. The 
 window at which he sat looked out on a quad 
 hemmed in by Gothic buildings whose low eaves 
 stemmed the tide of ivy that flowed up the many- 
 windowed walls. Some gardener of old had set elms 
 within the corners, and below his window a cherry 
 tree had sprung up from a pit dropped in the grass 
 by some unrecorded lounger. As he sat now, looking 
 out on the scene of which he never tired, two 
 students, leisurely exceptions to the busy norm, lay 
 in the shade of the early leaves and their lazy voices 
 
150 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 came up to his open window. The moment won a 
 Hvely response from him. He felt its perfection. 
 
 The point of his present distinction, however — 
 he was always making distinctions — was that this 
 was not all that there was to be said about it. There 
 was something else in him beside and behind the 
 sense of its external beauty, even behind his grati- 
 fication at the sense of this beauty — something to 
 which it reported. It was something that perceived, 
 was gratified, and could be critically interested and 
 amused by the process of automatic gratification. 
 He knew that this pursuit might be endless without 
 taking him very far, for he might always find an 
 awareness in his mind that would envelop suc- 
 cessively each preceding awareness, like those classes 
 of classes of a certain modern school of mathematical 
 logicians. But he saw that there was something 
 gained by this process of going at least one step 
 behind the simple, grateful sensations. He had a 
 more masterly control over the allurements of them. 
 
 There were enough people around him who 
 stopped at the first stage. With most of them, in- 
 deed, he had a hearty sympathy — frank, genial 
 beings, the bulk and sinew of humanity, who ate 
 and drank and golfed without pretense and without 
 curiosity. He liked them. They made up the 
 spectacle of life, the pathos and romance of its 
 comedy. They were in both senses the hosts of the 
 world, among whom the thoughtful were but the 
 rare and suffered guests. The worst that he had 
 against them was that in their idleness and leisure 
 and unreflecting pleasantness they gave acclaim to 
 a class of practitioners whose pretense was to be of 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 151 
 
 the reflective part of mankind, but who were in 
 reaHty Hke themselves — merely sensational. He 
 was thinking of the art-mongers. Against the art- 
 mongers he had on principle a vigorous grudge. 
 
 Grudge was indeed a vigorous word, as he smiled 
 to realize, feeling his own great love of the senses. 
 His whole past was a web of brightly colored visions; 
 he acknowledged his captivity to the marbles of 
 Praxiteles, to the canvases of Leonardo; music 
 haunted his reflective moments. In one sense he 
 had a reputation for sensuousness that made him in 
 some quarters disliked and mistrusted. He in- 
 dulged his minor vices. Asceticism seemed to him 
 a pretty poor virtue — a feeder of pride, a breeder 
 of intolerance. He Hked to find in others the hu- 
 manizing touch of moderate indulgence, the com- 
 munity of the weed, the gemuthlichkeit of friendly 
 beer, the sociability of wine. There seemed to him 
 something weak in a too fearful avoidance of tempta- 
 tion, in the too sedulous care for the flesh. There 
 it was, the flesh, gross perhaps, asking for beef and 
 brew, but the ironic condition of there being a spirit. 
 And he had not seen that his countrymen in denying 
 it certain indulgence had made a nation notable fof 
 their spiritual attainment. 
 
 There seemed, indeed, a kind of frank safety in 
 answering its demands by a mild and temperate 
 dipping into the admitted vices. Their frank labels 
 marked so well and so openly the dangers that 
 hedged them in. The real peril lay in the subtle 
 disguises by which a more recondite sensuousness 
 passed itself off as something nobler. And herein 
 lay his case against the arts. By calling themselves 
 
152 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 something else they evaded the bounds of temper- 
 ance, and by adroit labeHng they secured the frank 
 of those virtues that need no curb in a sensuous 
 world. 
 
 He doubted, tentatively, whether the arts were 
 altogether something else. He allied them offen- 
 sively with the pleasures of the senses, exasperating 
 humorless devotees, and making for himself the re- 
 pute that he was not sensitive to the subtle appeals 
 to the spirit. This charge was so easy to put upon 
 him, and had illustrations of sensualists who did see 
 nothing in art so pat to its hand, and won partisans 
 so readily, that in most quarters denial was useless. 
 None the less he uttered his heterodoxy for the 
 sake of amusing experiences that invariably 
 followed. 
 
 When put to it the devotees had little to say for 
 the spirituality of art — little to say that they could 
 say. What it did for them was, it seemed, some- 
 thing that they could not say. It did something 
 unutterable. In the face of his amused smile it was 
 exasperating for them to have nothing more in its 
 defense than that they liked it, enjoying the sen- 
 sations and emotions that it induced. It was no 
 less exasperating to them that he could say as much 
 for himself. 
 
 They did indeed maintain that there was some- 
 thing else behind — something spiritual, something 
 indefinable because to the perception of it there was 
 no other medium than the particular piece of art 
 that had produced it — that each specimen of art 
 conveyed a unique spiritual experience. In the safe 
 elevation of such vagueness they were unassailable. 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 153 
 
 When in his vulgarity he suggested that mutton 
 also conveyed a sensation that was unique and un- 
 utterable he did nothing but convince them of his 
 grossness. To say that wine, too, elevated the 
 spirit to conceptions that had no other means of 
 access, and that all their claims for art applied ex- 
 actly to his claims for sensuousness, was, they said, 
 to take advantage of a duplicity of language, a pun, 
 a poverty of the verbal. medium. When he objected 
 that language was at least infinitely less vague in 
 the expression of ideas than any other medium, he 
 was confronted by the assertion that the highest 
 reach of language lay in its suggestiveness rather 
 than in its simple and exact expression. He was 
 referred to a thousand lyrics. The implication in 
 this reasoning was that as language approached the 
 arts in the vagueness of its signification it served to 
 confirm the arts in their claim for significance. 
 
 They pointed out men — Walter Pater, for ex- 
 ample — who had shown what definite ideas art 
 could stimulate. There was his notable passage on 
 the Mona Lisa. It was but a further exasperation 
 to suggest that this definiteness — whatever these 
 writings possessed — was the definiteness of lan- 
 guage and required language for their expression — 
 that Pater was a man of letters expressing in letters 
 his own thoughts. 
 
 The worst was that he himself laid claim to par- 
 ticipation in all that art had to offer. There was 
 no mode of refuting him but by derision. It was 
 clear enough that the inexpressible may have lain 
 in him as well as in them. He had indeed sedu- 
 lously visited the galleries of Europe, had spent 
 
154 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 long days in Paris studios, and long nights in 
 friendly wranglings with artists and art critics; he 
 had worn thin underwear and shabby clothes in 
 forced expiation for the purchase of beautiful pic- 
 tures and costly rugs. But these evidences only 
 served to make him out a traitor in his thoughts to 
 what he owed so much to in fact. 
 
 He had long, indeed, given over such ill-natured 
 bickerings. And on the whole the world is good 
 humored and its memory is short. So it came about 
 during this winter, with the sight of him in the gal- 
 leries and the rumors of his pictures, that a naive 
 group of women invited him to address them on the 
 subject of modern painting. He was tempted to 
 accept, but the good angel of his amenity prompted 
 him to send them first an outline of his points, and 
 they found some reason for postponing the occasion 
 indefinitely. It never came off, but the informal 
 prospectus got about somehow to a wider circle than 
 the address would have reached, and caused some 
 fuming among the local representatives of Culture. 
 
 The matter was one of the kind that accumulates 
 myths. The name of Art had not had a questioning 
 breath breathed upon it in the local hearing, and the 
 faintest whisper no doubt sounded like blasphemy. 
 It certainly grew to blasphemy in rumorous repe- 
 tition. Our friend was too well used to such mis- 
 representations to wonder at them, but in the more 
 charitable mood of his middle years he felt less 
 arrogant and more willing to explain — perhaps a 
 little more anxious for sympathy. At all events he 
 took the occasion of a local exhibit to send to a 
 morning paper a criticism that might serve to ex- 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 155 
 
 plain the points he had made in the misunderstood 
 and maltreated outline. 
 
 His hatred was of sham and of the wind-blown 
 mists that had come to be the atmosphere in which 
 art was breathing, and he hit harder than he quite 
 realized. He counted on the amenity of common 
 sense to dulcify his blows, and forgot, in the interest 
 of making his ideas tell, that art had got Hfted out 
 of the reach of common sense. 
 
 There was a tempest. It took him by amaze, for 
 his points had seemed to him obvious, but more 
 because he would not have believed that the par- 
 ticular enemies he had aroused had the moral 
 strength to be robustly angry. They were; and for 
 a time life scintillated around him with stirring 
 flashes of romance. He would have said that none 
 now cared enough about matters of art and intellect 
 to lose sleep over their battles, but he found that 
 they did — two, at least. 
 
 For one March dusk, a week later, he discovered 
 a pair of shadows following him, and near a de- 
 serted corner he was set upon with honest fists that 
 had little token of decay. The pair were gallant 
 enough to halt him and issue their challenge before 
 they set to, and if they were two to his one they 
 may have reckoned on his stout cane. He had the 
 wall of them; and a good stick and a good arm are 
 better than two men. He felt their fists before he 
 felt the thrilling tingle of a blow of his own and 
 saw one of them stagger. The other gave over and 
 went to the aid of his companion, and half running 
 dragged him away. 
 
 Our friend shook his arm. The feel of his blow 
 
156 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 was in it, and the crushing fall of the stick, and it 
 sickened him. He had a sudden sympathy for his 
 assailants and for their anger and their attack. 
 From their voices they were young and their wrath 
 had been stirred over a principle and had kept hot 
 for a week. All these things appealed to him. 
 There were high spirits and high blood there. 
 Neither then nor afterwards could he think of the 
 attack as cowardly. He had the advantage to his 
 generosity, as he smiled to reflect, of being the victor. 
 
 He said nothing of the affair, and never heard of 
 it or of his assailants from outside. But he noticed, 
 in writing again on the same subject, a more sym- 
 pathetic note in his style. The personal contact, 
 and the knowledge that what he had said had 
 reached home somewhere — rare enough in his ex- 
 perience — touched him with a more intimate sense 
 of the human aspect of his ideas. Years before, he 
 would have called the change sentimental — the ul- 
 timate damnation of his youthful vocabulary. But 
 he could smile now and indulge the gentler mood, 
 knowing that a good deal of such softening might 
 leave him still free from the repute of sentimentality. 
 
 His ideas did not change. He still hated the 
 crude, dehumanized intellectualism that science was 
 foisting on humane affairs, and he still hated the de- 
 intellectualized emotionalism that had run mad in 
 the arts. He had a vision of harmony — of 
 judgments and motives born of a nice balance of 
 all the faculties. What he saw about him was each 
 faculty snatching up some part of life and running 
 off with it to its own natural extreme. 
 
 "You forget," one of his friends remarked, "that 
 this is the age of the specialist." 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 157 
 
 "Ah," he returned, "that is just what I can't 
 forget — the age of one-sided judgments. You re- 
 member the Pretorian Guards. For a reasonable 
 life weVe got, don't you see, to keep the military 
 subordinate to the civil power — to keep the 
 specialist subordinate to the judgment that co- 
 ordinates." 
 
 "You belong, then, to those modern philosophers 
 who deny the difference of the faculties?" 
 
 Our friend smiled. 
 
 "So far from it!" he exclaimed. "For they too 
 are tarred with the same stick. They see the 
 reasoners running off to one extreme and they rush 
 off to another. But if what they believed were so 
 they would have no case against the reasoners or 
 any others, for the reasoners would simply be using 
 their one faculty, according to the formula. No, 
 the thing is to distinguish clearly in order to pro- 
 portion and harmonize — to be intellectual in order 
 to be able to judge and restrain the emotions, and 
 to have feelings that illuminate the intelligence — 
 that is the balance I dream of." 
 
 "And what has that to do with the arts?" 
 
 "Ah, everything in the world," he returned. 
 
158 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 II 
 
 SENSE AND THE SOUL 
 
 "You intrigue me, you artists/' he said to his 
 friend the poet, one late afternoon as they 
 sat before the window, smoking as was their wont, 
 and looking out on the spring that was invading the 
 quad. 
 
 It was a grateful hour — the time of day when 
 bodily energy has worn itself into fidgetless repose, 
 and the mind, through with its pedestrian business, 
 tries its wings; when silences are eloquent of peace, 
 and filled with the moving mystery of deepening 
 colors in earth and sky, and talk may touch itself 
 with poetry and yet be but the nice prose of the 
 moment. It was the time of year when memories 
 go backward and with light touch cull out magic 
 moments of childhood's wonder and content, or re- 
 flect upon old sorrows the mellowing beneficence of 
 time. 
 
 It was at such hours and such seasons that the 
 poet had come into the way of dropping in to spend 
 the dusk in silence or in talk, or in both, as the 
 moment went. To-day it was talk, perforce, for his 
 host had not yet shaken off the world. The stains 
 of his afternoon journey were still on his mind, and 
 he was still brushing them off while his guest was 
 composing himself in the window. 
 
 ''I dare say," smiled his friend. "And these 
 things have a way of being reciprocal. But what 
 have we done now?" 
 
 "Nothing new. What you have always done — 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 159 
 
 taken a simple sensation and clothed it in awesome 
 terms." 
 
 He reached to the table by his side and drew out 
 a handsome volume from under a pile of handsome 
 volumes. 
 
 "Here is a sample," he went on, turning to a 
 marked passage. "Listen to its mystic phrases: 
 'Nothing but the rare strains of great music can 
 reach the spiritual height of this half-seen, somber 
 landscape.' Now in sober truth do you think that 
 a picture can be spiritual, or the rare strains of 
 great music? For my own part I think them very 
 pleasant sensations. They seem to me to differ 
 physically, but not philosophically, from the smell 
 of orange blossoms or the taste of mutton." 
 
 The poet sat back in his chair, his eyes brooding 
 on the lacy edge of the elm tree outlined against the 
 sky. 
 
 "Gross!" he murmured at last, "oh, gross! Give 
 and take, my friend, is the legend over the door of 
 your mind. That is why some of us like to come 
 here better than elsewhere. But gross!" 
 
 "None the less my question is fair," pursued his 
 host. "I don't say that the taste of mutton stirs as 
 pleasant reactions in me as the smell of orange 
 blossoms, or that these in turn thrill me as Wagner's 
 Waldweben never fails to do. I admit the grossness 
 of mutton, but I should say that the matter is simply 
 a gradation within the same field — sensations that 
 we like or dislike in varying degrees." 
 
 "There you are," cried the poet. "You go grub- 
 bing like a mole in the cellarage. But you will 
 never find it there, your answer. You must come 
 
i6o A Lover of the Chair 
 
 out into the sunlight. Don't you see that all your 
 intellectual distinctions are underground burrowings, 
 and that you won't find this natural thing, the 
 spirit, in your darkened, artificial rooms." 
 
 ''Your music, then, and your landscapes, and your 
 lyrics — " 
 
 ''Ah, of course they are artificial too. But don't 
 you see where they lead you? Your thoughts, your 
 reason, your logic, are all matters of symbols — 
 symbols too of your own invention — a clever net- 
 work between arbitrary fixed points. But your arts 
 go direct to something else, to something native and 
 spontaneous in you. There are gross pictures, and 
 gross music, and gross verse. But there is a kind 
 of music, and of pictures, and of verse that, as you 
 say, are high in the scale of our liking. But the 
 difference is more than that we like the one and not 
 the other. For somewhere in the scale there is a 
 subtle line beyond which there enters, in some 
 degree, the element of beauty. And beauty is a 
 perception of the soul." 
 
 "Why soul?" 
 
 "For no reason, I am afraid, that the reason can 
 see. But in our intuitions we know that it exists, 
 and we know it in the measure of our feelings, not 
 in the measure of our logic. Do we have souls? 
 With reason alone we should never have thought of 
 such things. The perception is one of the emotions, 
 and so I think we have a right to say soul. Your 
 lover in mid-ecstasy is surer of a soul than your 
 bank clerk in mid-career down a column of figures. 
 And your poet striding the moor with the blast in 
 his face is surer of it than when he is seated at his 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts i6i 
 
 typewriter making the last fair copy of his verse. 
 And this perception of beauty is the soul in one of 
 its essential exercises. What I fear for you, sir, 
 whom I love beyond any of your kind, is that though 
 you like certain sights and like certain sounds, you 
 have none of that sense of beauty whose whisper- 
 ings make you know that you have a soul." 
 
 ^'A soul," his host mused. ''Yes, here we may 
 talk freely. I like to go back to old out-fashioned 
 discussions. And the soul is out-fashioned if any- 
 thing is. Besides it is one of your characteristic 
 words. It is a point I should like to clear up. I am 
 really in earnest. So you must remember my un- 
 derlying sympathy if I push you a little hard. For 
 it seems to me that you and your kind stand at the 
 very center of one of our modern weaknesses." 
 
 ''I am fortified." 
 
 "Well, in this sense of beauty, and in the emotions 
 that go with it and make you aware of the soul, tell 
 me, is it just that thrill of feeling and nothing more 
 that makes you call it soul?" 
 
 "How do you mean?" 
 
 "I mean that when you have an intuition of the 
 soul, either you have simply the emotions that ac- 
 company beauty, and you call that emotion soul, 
 or that emotion makes you aware of something else 
 and you call that something else soul. And I want 
 to know which you mean." 
 
 "Why, then, that something else." 
 
 "Ah, then what is that something else?" 
 
 The poet paused for a moment, and a slow, 
 pleasant smile lighted his eyes. 
 
 "I know my answer won't satisfy you," he an- 
 
1 62 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 swered, "for there you sit looking for it without, 
 with cold eyes. And its very quality as soul makes 
 it invisible from without. But I take your challenge. 
 I should say then, that it is an intuitive consciousness 
 of something within that responds to what we have 
 called beauty." 
 
 "To beauty alone?" 
 
 "No, to beauty among other things." 
 
 "But you don't budge from the spot. If I should 
 speak of an intuitive consciousness of something 
 within me that responds to this wine, I suspect that 
 you would refuse to call that something soul. But 
 the descriptions are the same. And so I must ask 
 you again for the distinguishing quality that makes 
 the one soul if the other is not." 
 
 "If I speak," the poet returned, "I must speak of 
 an intuition. An intuition is just what you will not 
 allow." 
 
 "No," our friend protested, "my grossness does 
 not go so far as that. I know that all the cunning 
 in the world could not put into words the subtle 
 aroma of a violet. But I know that it exists. That 
 is a sensation, you say. But just there is my 
 trouble. I cannot distinguish between what you 
 have called intuition and the senses themselves." 
 
 "But the one is above the earth; the others are 
 of it. The one lifts you out of yourself; the other 
 is the response of the flesh itself." 
 
 "But why? You are skeptical, but there are 
 odors that catch me, lift me out of myself, out of 
 the world, and bring to me lucid, magical moments. 
 And in such moments I feel the vivid conviction of 
 a freedom from the grossness of material Hfe." 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 163 
 
 "Ah, then you too feel an intuition, and feel the 
 presence of the soul." 
 
 "I wonder. And there are sounds in nature and 
 in music, and sights in life and in art, that carry the 
 same conviction." 
 
 "Then why not soul?" 
 
 "My difficulty is still that all this seems to me 
 merely a way of speaking of the senses and our re- 
 actions to them. But sense and soul, even in the 
 vernacular, stand in opposition. 
 
 "I see what you mean," said the poet. "Not that 
 soul may not be grasped intuitively, but that if it is 
 anything to speak of, if it has anything to it but a 
 ravishing vacuum, it must have something to say 
 for itself by which it can be distinguished from the 
 primary intuitions of sense. And it must prove its 
 distinctive worth. That is a fair enough demand." 
 
 "Can it be met?" 
 
 They sat before the window for some minutes 
 before the poet resumed. 
 
 "If I am to imagine a world without beauty," he 
 began slowly at last, "to imagine myself with all 
 my moments conscious only of gutters, and slums, 
 and Calvinism, steel bridges, trousers, pot houses, 
 coal mines, anthropology, legislatures, divorce 
 courts, fashion, slang — it would be to imagine my- 
 self without the subtle sense within me that I am 
 worth more than the dust. But I have had other 
 moments. I have seen the sunrise. Once I saw an 
 English lark in the sky. I have seen fair faces, 
 quiet manners, silks clinging to graceful forms, 
 crocuses in March snows, the quad of Oriel, the 
 Venus de Milo. I've listened to Bizet and Schubert, 
 
1 64 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 heard the wind in the pines on the edge of Pacific 
 slopes. I have read Keats and Euripides. And it 
 is in such moments that I know that these and not 
 those are the things to strive for. I know what 
 direction in these matters Hfe should take. I know 
 which soars toward heaven and which sinks to hell. 
 I don't know why I know it, but that I do know it, 
 that it gives an impulse that lifts the whole of life 
 into a thing above the scum, and that it vitalizes and 
 enhalos certain aims — of this I am certain. And 
 so I say soul." 
 
 They sat another few moments in silence. 
 
 "I am disarmed," said his host, picking up the 
 discourse. "I confess that when you began a little 
 while ago to use the word I imagined dire things of 
 you. I supposed that you had in mind something 
 that you couldn't describe. I know that life has its 
 underlying mysteries — that the simplest thing — 
 the smell of the sod that comes into the window 
 here and makes us both thrill with the sense of 
 spring — can only be accepted and not explained. 
 Why I like it I don't know. It is one of the primary 
 mysteries. 
 
 "What I was arming myself against was a new 
 and gratuitous set of mysteries. Your friends of the 
 artistic shop go beyond the pale, and when they 
 say soul, many of them, they seem to intend some- 
 thing merely mysterious. It is often open to doubt 
 whether they themselves know what they mean. 
 But here at last you have used the term intelligently 
 enough. You have averred that beauty is a 
 faculty of the soul and that the soul is the seat of 
 those spontaneous preferences by which we dis- 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 165 
 
 tinguish higher and lower, better and worse. You 
 have put meaning into the terms. We are on solid 
 ground. We know definitely where we are." 
 
 "Definitely?" The poet had a touch of mockery 
 in his smile. 
 
 ''Ah, you grow literal. No, not definitely, but 
 sufficiently for the purpose." 
 
 They looked at the last orange band of day in 
 the west. A white star was set in the green iris 
 above it, and the first quarter of the moon hung 
 overhead. 
 
 'TVe been wondering what the purpose was," 
 the poet said at last. "Sometimes I've been unkind 
 enough to think that what you have wanted is to 
 bring beauty — " he waved a hand toward the 
 sky — " down to the narrow confines and dull terms 
 of earth." 
 
 "I have. I have." 
 
 "Heaven help you!" 
 
 "For I would make life beautiful." 
 
 "By cribbing and confining it to paltry terms of 
 reason?" 
 
 "To terms that make it significant. For don't 
 you see, say what we will, we can never alter the 
 eternal fact of beauty. The intuition of it stays 
 the same whatever the phrases we use. But the 
 discussion of it belongs to the workaday world. 
 And so it is important, when we do discuss it, and 
 not simply experience it, to use terms that make it 
 commensurate with the world we are discussing it 
 in. Why, else, discuss it? And after all we are 
 concerned with art. If we talked of beauty it was 
 only incidentally. Beauty exists. But art is a 
 
1 66 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 practice, and belongs to the part of living that we 
 control. We have it or not, or in such and such a 
 proportion, as we will. And it is to that end that 
 it is worth stopping for a moment in the contem- 
 plation or creation of beauty to discuss it — to find 
 its nice place and proportion in the workaday process 
 of living.'^ 
 
 ''And yet," said the poet, ''I don't like your dull- 
 ing intrusion of the reason." 
 
 The last light of the sun was gone, and the quad 
 below was frosted with the moon. 
 
 "It was you who clarified the point," his host 
 smiled. 
 
 "Ah, evil communications — " 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 167 
 
 ni 
 
 ART AND THE REASONERS 
 
 It was not until a day late in the spring that 
 they caught up again the thread of the arts. 
 The evening before, wild with a boisterous north 
 wind and a purple drift of clouds, had promised a 
 fine morrow. The poet had proposed an early start 
 and a visit to the dunes by the lake, to put the 
 season's best day to a good use. His friend had 
 demurred for a moment. He had not hunted out 
 Nature for many years, and he misdoubted the wel- 
 come she would extend to him. He had consented 
 at last, however, and next morning the two men 
 made the journey. 
 
 If they talked on the way, youthfully, forgetful 
 of the years, as men will at the first setting out on 
 a day's jaunt, they had little enough to say from the 
 moment they touched the loose sands, at first from 
 the soft footing that used their breath, and after- 
 wards, when they had made the swale between two 
 hummocks that had hid the lake, from the presence 
 of what they had come for. For they were young 
 enough still to feel for a time the spell of the place — 
 the tumult of the lake, the endless stretch of flat 
 beach, the dunes, piled and scooped and hollowed — 
 a world of blue and white, and of yellow sands, with 
 here and there the green of streaming grasses, 
 dwarfed oaks straining landward, and vivid lupin 
 with its blue flower reflecting the sky. They were 
 taken possession of by the roaring waters and the 
 battering wind, and by the sting of sand, and the 
 glinting sunlight. 
 
1 68 A Lover ,of the Chair 
 
 They wandered about among the fantastic archi- 
 tecture of the dunes, or sat in sheltered hollows 
 where the sand sifted down on them and filled the 
 wrinkles of their clothes. They were silent, a lift 
 of the hand saying all there was to say. The poet, 
 however, after the first half hour, was restless; 
 something, the wind, the roar of the waves, some 
 inner wish unsatisfied, kept him ill at ease. Once 
 he started up with a growl, when a trim-bearded 
 man with a tin canister slung from his shoulder 
 came into their vista. The invader was walking 
 slowly, with eyes riveted to the sand at his feet, and 
 apparently lecturing to two boys, who followed 
 listening, their own eyes on the sand. 
 
 To our friend there was something pleasant in 
 the sight of these three naturalists, so blind to the 
 large impression of the scene, so ardent in their 
 attention to particular details. With his love for 
 the spectacle of life, and the sense of its mingling of 
 many interests and many activities, there had come 
 now and again in the course of the morning a whisper 
 of emptiness in their own attempt to escape from it. 
 He responded sensitively, indeed, to the thrill of 
 sight and sound, and for moments together he could 
 forget that life held anything beyond, or need hold 
 anything beyond. But a vague discomfort, some- 
 thing more than the sadness of beauty, hung like a 
 haze in the atmosphere of his mind. And now it 
 became dimly articulate. He pictured the three 
 naturalists home again, tired, with faces burning, 
 garrulous about the day's finds and silent about its 
 beauties; but with the consciousness of that back- 
 ground of boisterous air and vivid color and sweep- 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 169 
 
 ing lines forever endearing the memory of their pre- 
 occupation. By contrast their own search for the 
 pure thrill, detached from a justifying substance, 
 seemed weak and futile. 
 
 By a tacit consent, while the afternoon was still 
 young, they turned back to the city. Once or twice 
 on the journey the poet roused himself as though to 
 speak, and then sank back in silence. When they 
 alighted he insisted on taking the other home. He 
 was eager; he had unfinished things to say. 
 
 His friend was interested, amused. The poet too, 
 then, had found the thrill insufficient. A little sadly 
 he recognized that their time of pure illusion had 
 passed. Nature had lost its personal immediacy; 
 its sympathy was gone, and the communion that 
 was once the solace of such wanderings no longer 
 held its old rapport. They were humanized. The 
 significance of their day in the open, if it was to 
 have a significance, had now to come from them- 
 selves, to be wrought out, to be rationalized. 
 
 When they had settled themselves in the poet's 
 snug study, and had broached a bottle of the Ma- 
 deira for which among his friends he was as re- 
 nowned as for his verse, the restlessness of the day 
 found its relaxation. It took form, on the part 
 of the poet, in a hearty objurgation of the trio of 
 naturalists. Our friend was amused and silent, see- 
 ing in this outburst the poet's rebellion against the 
 manifestations he had felt in himself. 
 
 "I am weary of the reason," he said, "and the life 
 of reason. Look at it around us here. Everything 
 is a matter of calculation. Sometimes I would have 
 the old life of duels and drink, roistering and prison 
 
1 7© A Lover of the Chair 
 
 for debt again. It was human at least. Things 
 are in the saddle. And about things there's nothing 
 but calculation. There used to be young men moon- 
 ing about with sonnets in their brains. Well, they 
 were better than young men keen about the stock 
 market. Freedom and justice used to make young 
 orators glow; and now it's all statistics and eco- 
 nomics. There used to be fierce partisans of Achilles, 
 and Hector, Ulysses, Themistocles, Coeur de Leon, 
 Cromwell, and now there is nothing but a set of 
 clerks grovelling among dusty documents. And 
 where of old we used to have young men who would 
 weep over the Apology, now we have these striplings 
 following that parched worm-monger, brainbound, 
 grubbing there in the midst of beauty, as insensible 
 to it as the snails that the sandpipers turn and wheel 
 and turn again to find at the ebb of the waves. I 
 want to see the old generous days again when life 
 was human!" 
 
 Our friend was moved. He too, in his own way, 
 had mourned the mechanical cast that economics, 
 efficiency, and the scientific method were giving to 
 those aspects of the intellectual life that could flower 
 best untouched by that baleful trio. But he knew 
 that the poet, from his own point of view, like the 
 Bergsonian who years ago had warned him against 
 the reason, was not free himself from the need to 
 reason and seem reasonable. He detected an in- 
 teresting distinction that might be worth pursuit. 
 The poet's note of rebellion was commonplace 
 among the romantic and artistic sects. It had oc- 
 curred to him not infrequently that their aversion 
 to the reason was often evident, not only in their 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 171 
 
 words, but also in the quahty of their ideas, and 
 that art itself was suffering grievously from their 
 malady. 
 
 "Once upon a time," he said, "you will remember, 
 we talked about beauty and the soul. I sha'n't soon 
 forget it; you did something that is hard to for- 
 give — you convinced me against my will. I dare 
 say that it wasn't altogether wasted for you, for you 
 gave us both a clearer sense of a very delicate point. 
 Well, that was what I should call reasoning. You 
 will remember that your conclusion was that the 
 soul was the center of our intuitive aspirations." 
 
 "Spontaneous ones, not reasoned." 
 
 "Yes, spontaneous. But there lies the point. You 
 were not satisfied to have your intuitions. You 
 wanted me to understand and agree with you — take 
 the same attitude to beauty that you took. And 
 there you were. You reasoned. There was nothing 
 else for it. You are sociable; you like your friends, 
 and want to share your sense of the world with them. 
 That is one use of the reason, and I imagine that 
 you for one would never be willing to give it up. 
 You are even a poet. But there's another use. The 
 soul, you say, is the center of spontaneous, intuitive 
 preferences — beauty, courage, wisdom, honor, 
 justice, religion, and all the other high aspirations 
 that make us head in one direction and not in an- 
 other. And living is an affair calculated at its best 
 to carry out these aspirations." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And these aspirations are spontaneous, not 
 reasoned." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
172 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "Then there Hes the second use. Which aspira- 
 tions shall we follow, and in what proportions? For 
 they spring up of themselves, and sometimes at in- 
 opportune moments; and often they conflict. Shall 
 I buy a certain Tudor sideboard that I long for with 
 my love of beauty, or the Plutarch that I long for 
 with my love of wisdom, or pay off the family debt, 
 that I groan under with my sense of duty, or help 
 poor Oakly the bankrupt, in the next street, that I 
 feel sorry for with my sympathy? The color of 
 life, personal and social, depends, doesn't it, upon 
 such judgments, and upon the proportions that our 
 responses take in following them?" 
 
 "Perhaps. Go on." 
 
 "You don't love the spectacle of monasticism, all 
 religion and little beauty, with its evasion of the full 
 moral struggle of social life. But that monasticism 
 represents one set of proportions, and is dictated by 
 an intuition that has high claims upon the soul. I 
 mean religion. And you don't care for the spectacle 
 of Calvinism, all morals and religion but no beauty. 
 But there's another set of proportions. Benvenuto 
 Cellini is a more pleasing spectacle perhaps, but I 
 doubt whether you would care for a life built on his 
 proportions. Even he had his religion and his fine 
 courage, as well as his sense of beauty. Baudelaire, 
 Paul Verlaine, George Moore nauseate you; you 
 don't care for their proportions." 
 
 "And you — you would throw us to the mercy of 
 the three grub-hunters who passed us to-day, crawl- 
 ing through paradise with their noses in the sand?" 
 
 "Hardly. And yet they stand for something. 
 They have a sense of reason, and if they would only 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 173 
 
 stick to science, as they so roiled you by doing to- 
 day, I should have no objection to them." 
 
 "You do chafe at them, then?" 
 
 "And respect them too. For I can't help seeing 
 that the reason is the authority for us all." 
 
 "Again!" 
 
 "With a distinction. It's just the distinction that 
 you seem not to make — between the scientific 
 reason and the moral reason. We've allowed the 
 scientists to get us all adrift in the matter. They 
 haven't made the distinction either. But their 
 reason is not my reason nor yours. We are con- 
 cerned with the moral reason. It's the moral reason 
 that is the final authority. Is that a bold statement? 
 I dare say that some day they will come to ac- 
 knowledge its truth." 
 
 "I don't know just where you are taking me," the 
 poet smiled, "but you've turned down a pleasant 
 lane, and I'll go with you for a way. It's not much 
 worn, this lane." 
 
 "I know. The whole current of traffic just now 
 is over the scientific road. The opinion that is go- 
 ing about is that science is the final authority in all 
 things. Well, it isn't." 
 
 His host sat up with reviving interest. 
 
 "I'm inclined to agree with you," he returned. 
 "Still let me take up the cudgels. I can remember 
 the thrill of the moment when the scientific vision 
 came on me first — of hierarchies of laws governing 
 the greatest motions and the subtlest reactions of the 
 outstretching universe, from the stars down to the 
 least quiver of conscious emotion. The conception 
 is thrilling. I've rebelled and hid away the thought 
 
174 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 in the dark cellars of my mind. But I can't forget 
 it." 
 
 "But that is not science." 
 
 "How do you mean — not science?" 
 
 "It's a vision; it's poetry." 
 
 "But science?" 
 
 "Something humbler, I should say — a body of 
 human knowledge. After all, what more is it? 
 They used to smile with scorn, half a century ago, 
 at our naive old anthropocentric notions of life, and 
 praise science for releasing us from such egotistic 
 fancies. They strutted and swelled about a good 
 deal, those old scientists, in their humility. They 
 were proud of their discovery that humanity was 
 only a cousin to the brutes, an accident of the great 
 process, a mere worm. Well, they never got away, 
 of course, from the anthropocentric attitude. Their 
 pride was in their own very human accomplish- 
 ment. I'm not at all sure but that they were more 
 anthropocentric than the old theologues ; the latter at 
 least conceived a God outside themselves. 
 
 "The point is, isn't it, that to be sure we may be 
 mere worms under the feet of universal law, and 
 everything from the motions of the stars to the 
 subtlest quiver of emotion may be determined by an 
 inevitable mechanical necessity, but that science 
 isn't universal law; it is only human knowledge, and 
 can never be anything more than human knowledge. 
 
 "The old scientists — what a race they were! — 
 egotists of the sublimest kind ! I can't help, myself, 
 admiring their colossal pride. It's the stuff of all 
 great and spectacular heroism. What they tried to 
 do — really thought they were doing — was to look 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 175 
 
 down on poor humanity from the point of view of 
 the gods. Only, of course, Hke all other mortals, 
 they couldn't. They had no more knowledge than 
 human knowledge. How could they? And their 
 pride was a very human pride in their human knowl- 
 edge." 
 
 ''I see your point," the poet mused — "that being 
 human we can't get above our own point of view. 
 If we could, still it would be our own point of view, 
 ad infinitum. The world is important for us be- 
 cause we're here, and its values for us are inevitably 
 its human values. But still if the scientists — I'm 
 drawing from that vision that I hate — are, in their 
 human way, attaining a knowledge of those uni- 
 versal laws, why aren't they the final authorities in 
 human affairs?" 
 
 "You come to the subtle point," his friend re- 
 turned. "I don't know that I have the skill to put 
 it, but I should say something like this. All these 
 things that we exercise moral judgment in — things 
 that are involved in this matter of authority as we 
 have used the word — all these things are outside 
 the specific range of science. If there is something 
 resembling universal law, then that law will go on 
 operating no matter what we do. Disease is as much 
 an expression of it as health, misery as much as 
 happiness, anarchy as much as order. What does 
 universal law care? If science were all in all we 
 might let things drift. It would be as much pleased 
 with blight as with blooming orchards. But don't 
 you see, humanly we desire some operations of that 
 law more than others — health instead of sickness, 
 justice instead of injustice, comfort instead of dis- 
 comfort. 
 
176 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "Being human we inject certain preferences into 
 the pot. And I suspect that at bottom we value this 
 body of human knowledge called science, and cul- 
 tivate it so sedulously, because we believe that it can 
 serve us in attaining these preferences. We set up, 
 don't we, an idea of human character and an idea 
 of social relations that we think admirable. And on 
 the basis of those ideas we go in for science, or don't 
 go in for it, or go in for it in a certain degree. What 
 else is there, ultimately, to prompt us in the matter? 
 Certainly not universal law. It goes on with or 
 without our approval indifferently — as much 
 pleased when a man dies of consumption as when 
 he dies of old age. 
 
 "Universal law goes on whether scientists are 
 there to search into its secrets or not. But whether 
 there shall be any science is a matter of moral 
 judgment. Shall a man be a barber, or a lawyer or 
 a scientist? Not science but moral judgment de- 
 termines. Shall an institution cultivate science; 
 shall a community have such a thing; shall there be 
 such a thing; what direction shall it take; what use 
 shall it be put to, or not be put to? All of these 
 things are matters of moral judgment." 
 
 "Yet science gives you authentic guidance." 
 
 "Information rather, isn't it? Just as the 
 plumber gives you information about pipes but 
 doesn't help you as to whether to tap the mains 
 surreptitiously." 
 
 "There is a distinction." 
 
 "And so I say that in the large it is the moral and 
 not the scientific authority that is final." 
 
 "And the point of all this?" 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 177 
 
 ^'Ah, was there a point?" 
 
 ^'I'm sure there was." 
 
 "I remember. When you think of the reason and 
 rebel against its hardness and coldness, and its me- 
 chanical obtuseness to the humaner things that you 
 care so much for, isn't it the scientific reason that 
 you have in mind?" 
 
 "I dare say. But what has this to do with beauty? 
 There it is — a thing in itself. Little it recks for 
 you and your moral reason." 
 
 "Exactly. And little the universal laws care for 
 us and our moral reason. But here we are. Life is 
 a matter of living in the midst of all the things that 
 are given — the donnes of existence — beauty 
 among the rest. And there we are. The question is 
 how to make out the kind of life we aspire to among 
 all the conditions and pressures and demands that 
 we find ourselves among willy nilly. If beauty were 
 the only claimant the case would be simple, but it 
 isn't, and for very few is it even the chief. Hence 
 the question of proportion; and hence the need of 
 reason." 
 
 ''That is all very reasonable," said the poet with 
 a resigned smile, "and very dull. But contrast this 
 morning with this last hour; which shall we both 
 remember the longer, and with more pleasure?" 
 
 "Contrast prose and verse, wages and wine," 
 smiled his guest. "I grant the dullness, but it is 
 you romanticists who have made it necessary to go 
 back over the old ground. It was conquered ground 
 once." 
 
 "What will you make of it once you have retaken 
 it?" 
 
178 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 "Another long story, and equally dull. Besides 
 there is a tawny sunset to light us to dinner. Come." 
 
 ''I dare say you care no more for the reason than 
 I do," said the poet, reaching for his hat. 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 179 
 
 IV 
 
 madame's taste 
 
 They set out one afternoon afoot, with no 
 other intention than to end up before a good 
 dinner and bring to it a worthy appetite. They 
 decided promptly upon an obscure Httle restaurant 
 some half dozen miles away, of which they had been 
 told, and where certain things were to be had. The 
 way thither was by one of those long streets of our 
 American cities that can acquire no atmosphere 
 about their names because they cut mechanically 
 through a score of atmospheres — streets which 
 plunge ahead, looking neither to right nor to left, 
 and pass from opulence to poverty without a pause, 
 without a bow, and reveal but the more cruelly the 
 ancient stratification that democracy has had no 
 power to fuse. 
 
 As they went they talked of other wanderings in 
 other cities, and inevitably of London, where per- 
 haps more than anywhere else the lover of streets 
 may find the things he loves — the irregularity that 
 gives to each stretch its own character, the jogs and 
 turns, the alleys, the passages, the buildings infinite 
 in their dingy ugliness but with the charm of some- 
 thing human in their huddled adaptation to the 
 ancient stresses of the maze; the surprise of un- 
 expected gardens, of quiet churchyards, of market 
 squares; the humanity that seems to have sprung 
 from the stones, so adapted are the types; above all 
 the names that bring to the bare present the enrich- 
 ing association of past times, household words of 
 
i8o A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the mind to which life is endeared by the sense of 
 the long human struggle. 
 
 By contrast the way they were going seemed bare 
 and mechanic. They knew, indeed, that part of their 
 loss, part of what they missed, was due to their in- 
 digenous eyes, that custom had robbed them of the 
 surprise that a traveler from other parts would 
 have enriched the spectacle with, that what they 
 saw revealed itself to them too plainly and left no 
 room for surmise. But they knew too that some- 
 thing was missing there — that in the bare economic 
 struggle which alone seemed to express itself in the 
 variation from block to block as they tramped on 
 was not the stuff to accumulate, even in the passage 
 of time, the particular things that had endeared the 
 greater ugliness of the older Babylon. 
 
 For a moment they questioned the justice of this 
 accusation, it was so tainted with the dear plati- 
 tudes with which a business community refreshes 
 itself in its pauses for breath. How they hated 
 those voices that were so little different, explicitly, 
 from their own! And they recalled with sad mer- 
 riment that interjection of Thackeray's — that 
 ''other quacks, plague take them" with which he 
 put the ineffable last touch upon himself and upon 
 the world of Vanity Fair. But they knew they 
 were right. The getting of a living was important, 
 as were other contributions levied by nature, but it 
 was not the thing that stirred the loyalty that — 
 each in his own way — they had for what was 
 human. And as they passed along the endless suc- 
 cession of house-fronts suggestive of so little but that 
 eternal office of nature, more and more dingy as 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts i8i 
 
 they went on but without variation in kind, they 
 drew their conclusions in silence. 
 
 From the region of fenced gardens they had come 
 into the region of unfenced gardens, then into the 
 region of narrow houses wall to wall, then into a 
 shabby region where boarding houses and modistes, 
 and bakeshops and midwives held forth on placards 
 or brass plates, then on to miles of tenements with 
 here and there weedy lots between that held flaunt- 
 ing billboards begging the public to change its 
 tradesmen; and at last were come to a region so 
 ugly with blear-paned shops, and dingy beer saloons, 
 and dark dens of poverty up the narrow stairs be- 
 tween, that the poet groaned aloud. 
 
 It was on the farther edge of this region that 
 they were to find the little restaurant where certain 
 things were to be had. The poet had had explicit 
 directions from someone who had been there, but 
 his memory, though vivid, was at fault. Knowing, 
 however that they were in the neighborhood of it 
 they began inquiring. No one seemed able to tell 
 them where it was. It was getting on to dusk, a 
 time when most prospects succumb to the charm of 
 deepening colors and softening shadows, but to the 
 ugliness around them it added only the horror of 
 increasing gloom. Screaming children, drunken 
 men, rowdy groups of loafers, shabby beshawled 
 women swarmed the littered walks and gutters. The 
 roar of the street cars and traffic mingled with the 
 roar that came out of the open doors of the saloons 
 in a ceaseless din. 
 
 They put their heads into the front doors of 
 steamy eating houses, their noses attacked by the 
 
1 82 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 thousand smells of rank food and rank humanity, 
 and their ears by the crash of dishes and the roar of 
 voices. They retreated to the street to be jostled, 
 to be ignored, to be brazenly solicited. Once they 
 penetrated to the interior of a garish palace, red and 
 gold, with colossal nudes looking down on the flashy 
 sordidness of the gayety at the tables below them. 
 Again they backed into the street. 
 
 ''Let us get away from here," the poet groaned 
 again. 
 
 "Nil humanum — " his friend smiled sadly. 
 
 "You are right. Let us go on looking." 
 
 They ranged along the squalid house- fronts weary 
 and ashamed. At last with the aid of a child, whose 
 hard face stared at them from under a ragged shawl, 
 they were taken, with misgivings, into a gloomy 
 basement under high street steps. It was a sinister, 
 lowering spot. Their guide left them with a shriek, 
 at the wealth in her hand or at the ruse she had 
 played them, they could not tell. 
 
 They were in a little hall, grim, bare, lighted by 
 a single gas burner. A door opened half way down. 
 An ancient waiter with black, short jacket and white 
 apron stood bowing in the doorway, his black sleek 
 hair shining under the gas flare. Reassured they 
 went in to the inner room. 
 
 They knew at once that they had arrived. Their 
 first impression was of silence, and then of something 
 more penetrating and more restful — a hard and 
 clean simplicity. It was a low basement room set 
 out with a dozen black tables and black kitchen 
 chairs with flat backs and narrow waists. The walls 
 were white. At the front was a high white- 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 183 
 
 curtained window. A red rose on the sill and a red 
 rose on each table were the only touches of color. 
 
 At the back of the room, on a little platform be- 
 hind a comptoire sat Madame, large, shapeless, 
 stolid, with a peasant's face, her black hair flat on 
 her small head. Our friends took places not far 
 from this throne, followed by the waiter with card 
 and menu. He hung above them patiently, bent at 
 the hips, in the half humble, half fatherly way of 
 old French waiters who have attained wisdom from 
 their vantage ground. He beamed when the poet 
 spoke in his own tongue. 
 
 When he was gone the two men sat in silence. 
 They were the only guests as yet, and the place had 
 uninterrupted leisure to sink into their consciousness. 
 Its quiet, its unadornment, its bare honesty, had 
 much to say to them that they could not retell at 
 once. They felt together its rebuke. It was not 
 pretty; it was not cunningly contrived. It was the 
 expression of something simple and austere. They 
 agreed that it was beautiful, and that Madame, with 
 her impassive face that Millet might have painted, 
 humanized it. 
 
 No doubt, as they knew, it was partly the mem- 
 ories of old inns in Normandy that charmed them, 
 and partly too the refuge it had been to them, the 
 sudden contrast, the unspeakable ugliness it had 
 been an escape from. All that, however, had its 
 point; the place had for their grateful sense but the 
 more bravely maintained its ancient virtues amidst 
 the squalor and sordidness of the neighborhood. 
 And if now it had come to be known to a few, like 
 themselves, from so different a world, it must have 
 
1 84 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 had its years of sordid local struggle before such 
 knowledge could get abroad. 
 
 ^'You have been here long, madame?" the poet 
 asked. 
 
 ^'It has been many years, monsieur/' she an- 
 swered, impassively. 
 
 They would have liked to talk to her, to ask 
 questions, to gain the tale of her childhood, of her 
 migration, of her experience during those many 
 years, but something that they both felt, the re- 
 buke of their idle curiosity, held them back. Be- 
 fore their dinner arrived the tables had begun to 
 fill up, and their chance was gone. 
 
 Only twice did the stolidity of Madame's face 
 and attitude relax. Once the door by her side 
 swung open and a nurse, herself scarcely more than 
 a child, entered carrying a black-haired baby and 
 set it upon the comptoire before her. The nurse 
 withdrew without a word and left the two together. 
 It was like a ceremony. In a little while a young 
 woman, slender, and with a face solemnly happy, 
 came in and took the baby away. Scarce a word 
 passed between them. 
 
 ''They were born here, lived here, daughter and 
 grandchild?" the poet asked of the waiter who stood 
 beaming on the tableau. 
 
 "Yes, monsieur," the waiter replied. 
 
 ''You are thriving now?" 
 
 "Yes, monsieur, now." 
 
 "There was a time, then — " 
 
 The old waiter glanced down the room, and then 
 turned again to the two guests at the table by the 
 rail. 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 185 
 
 "I speak of what I have seen, messieurs," he be- 
 gan. "What I speak of is past and gone, and we are 
 as you see us. But there was a time — " 
 
 He was called. Twice again he drew near to their 
 table but both times he was drawn away before he 
 could go on. 
 
 "It is as well," said the poet. ''One can piece out 
 the tale." 
 
 ''Still, I should like the particulars," his friend 
 demurred. 
 
 But the chance was gone. Reluctantly they left 
 when the dinner was done. 
 
 "Les messieurs have been well served?" Madame 
 asked as they bowed good-night to her. 
 
 The poet answered from his heart, and for a 
 moment her face again softened. 
 
 Our friends passed out of the dingy hall into the 
 dingier street, where the night life had already 
 begun — the shouting, the strains of music from the 
 lighted saloons, the shrieks of children gathered 
 about the doors, the shawled women gossiping in 
 shrill groups, loafers leaning against dark walls, 
 reeling figures mumbling to themselves, dirt, and 
 decay, and darkness. 
 
 It was the afternoon of the next day that they 
 had it out, as our friend irreverently put it, about 
 this experience, and incidentally about another prob- 
 lem that still hung over their minds. They had 
 come home from their dinner wearied by their 
 walk on the hard pavements, and even more by the 
 monotony and sordidness of much of their impres- 
 sions — despite Madame's — but with the sense that 
 
1 86 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 they had not got at the thing that to them was the 
 thing of importance. They had not got at its 
 significance. 
 
 The poet was the first to break out once they 
 were together again. He launched into invectives 
 against what he called our modern division of hap- 
 piness. It was apparently new to him. How he 
 had lived his forty years and been oblivious to so 
 much that lay just beyond his elbow he could not 
 have said. The truth was he had seen it with his 
 eyes, had read of it in the daily and monthly prints, 
 but never before had had it brought home to him 
 with the full force of its yesterday's attack upon 
 his sensibilities. And he was still bewildered about 
 it. 
 
 "Poverty," he mused. "I was born in a poor 
 family, but it was a dry poverty — scant meals, 
 scant clothes, and a fierce pride. It was not like 
 this — loose, relaxed, rotting. This is horrible." 
 
 "What can we do?" our friend asked, sadly 
 enough. It was his old problem; he had never 
 found the idea that should thrust it aside. 
 
 They sat in silence for a while. 
 
 "If I were one of those we rubbed elbows with on 
 the street last night," the poet broke out at last, 
 "I should have my fling at the fine delicate structure 
 I was groaning at the base of. I should have 
 nothing to lose, and to-day I can't quite justify 
 myself for playing safe where I am. It's as though 
 I were sitting tight just because I do have something 
 to lose." 
 
 Our friend smiled, without amusement. He 
 caught, in the crude terms of this outburst, the force 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 187 
 
 of its first attack before the sad complexity of the 
 problem had come home. It was the point at which 
 the new school of generous young radicals impo- 
 tently stopped. 
 
 ''You've never felt so before?" he asked. 
 
 "Not just in this way. And I can't believe that 
 you are going to say that I'll grow hardened and 
 sink back." 
 
 "I dare say that you will. But that isn't just 
 what I was going to say. I was going to wonder how 
 you have escaped so long. For now, clearly, alas, 
 you too have been caught." 
 
 "I don't understand you," the poet puzzled. "It's 
 as though you had suddenly turned up hard. I 
 don't want you soft, you understand, but I don't 
 want to quit until I see that you aren't quite cruel." 
 
 "Ah, we shan't quit. It's just that that's impos- 
 sible. The thing is how you have kept from be- 
 ginning until now." 
 
 "I've been, I suppose, in an ivory tower." 
 
 "I dare say, for die shock you've just had is the 
 thing that's been shaking us for a score of years. 
 I don't quite know how to put it. It has a thousand 
 aspects. The one that strikes me now is this. Every 
 age has its own way of feeling the raw edge of life, 
 and this is our way. It's a matter of reactions. 
 When tyranny's the thing the poets climb down 
 and are shocked and join the revolution. There's 
 the Eighteenth Century in France. When it's 
 hardened tradition and sophistication, when con- 
 vention, title, and rank are in the saddle, it's neg- 
 lected individuality and merit that cry out. 
 There's the Eighteenth Century in England. And 
 
1 88 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 now wealth's the thing, and poverty fills us with 
 horror." 
 
 "And you, because you can sit aloof and see it 
 as one of an eternal series of revolts against evil, is 
 it to seem to you, therefore, the less important? 
 Is it the point of learning that it takes away faith 
 and hope?" 
 
 "I know that it must seem so — not to you; you 
 are merely putting the case — but to those others 
 who are so kindly eager to set it right sweepingly, 
 in the large. In a sense they are right. It does 
 make one a little harder hearted — not about the 
 particular case, but about the general case." 
 
 The poet knew, through many bitter complaints, 
 that his friend was liberal in his charities both with 
 time and money. The complaints came from char- 
 acteristic sources, and were to the effect that he de- 
 moralized, in his own degree, the current efforts to 
 deal from above with the problem of poverty, pre- 
 ferring to gratify a kindly conscience rather than 
 to be a good citizen. 
 
 "Is it a case for hard-heartedness at all?" the 
 poet asked, hypothetically ; for knowing his friend, 
 the question, as he saw, was personally absurd. 
 
 "For cool-headedness," the other returned ab- 
 ruptly, "which goes for the same thing with many 
 of those we are talking about. The thing isn't so 
 simple as they, in their immediate sympathies, are 
 in the way of feeling. They go at poverty itself — 
 as though that in itself were the evil! It is evil 
 enough, heaven knows, but it's not the evil." 
 
 "So I should have said, till we had our sight of it 
 yesterday. Since then I haven't been so certain. 
 It was horrible." 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 189 
 
 ''Not that it wasn't horrible, but that poverty 
 wasn't the cause," his friend added. 
 
 ''Why not? It breeds there, and the brood grows. 
 What but poverty keeps them there?" 
 
 They sat for a moment looking out of the window. 
 
 "There was Madame," our friend put at last. 
 
 "Ah!" The poet's eyes swept round with a new 
 and sudden light in them. 
 
 The point was prolific between them in the silence 
 that followed. It came to them without stint that 
 there was Madame. 
 
 "Nothing by way of relief of poverty could have 
 done it," our friend considered. 
 
 The fact was before them. It sent itself crashing 
 through a good deal of the flimsy structure of cur- 
 rent humanitarianism around them. And after they 
 had looked among the wreckage with compunction 
 for the spiritual life the structure was thought to 
 have housed, they turned away. They had sym- 
 pathy for the ardor they saw housed there; they 
 acknowledged that often there was generosity in it 
 to the degree of nobility. But what, for the two of 
 them as they looked into the ruins, had been re- 
 vealed, was that the worship going on there was, 
 simply, not spiritual. 
 
 "You count sympathy as nothing, then, and 
 service?" the poet asked, the halo of the current 
 terms still lingering in his vision. "I should have 
 called them spiritual." 
 
 The other looked at him with the amused smile 
 that won him the repute of hardness. 
 
 "Until you had begun to think," he returned. 
 "The trouble with the humanitarian shop is that 
 
1 90 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 there is so little thinking in it. When you had begun 
 to think you would have seen at once that sympathy 
 was a good only when it was for a good thing, and 
 service was a good only when it was for a good thing. 
 But whether they minister to the life of the spirit or 
 minister to chaos — that is the question. And the 
 humanitarians have, by and large, simply stopped 
 short of thinking out that question. They have 
 stopped short of first thinking out the life of the 
 spirit — the real thing — the thing itself." 
 
 "Of which sympathy and service may be a part, 
 though." 
 
 "Ah, a tremendous part. Because there at last 
 they are in their own natural homes. They sweeten 
 life there, and give it warmth and kindness, socialize 
 it, make it spread outward. They humanize it. Do 
 I talk sentimentally?" 
 
 "But as to Madame?" 
 
 "What the humanitarians so egregiously don't 
 rise to," commented our friend, "is just that the 
 thing that carried Madame through was spiritual." 
 
 "We've got to face the fact," amended the poet, 
 "that she also had her exquisite cooking." 
 
 "Which left her still on the spot — that spot." 
 
 They hung upon that for a moment. 
 
 "What isn't so easy to see," resumed the poet at 
 last, "is how, if you were put to it, you could get 
 those others there to take up with the qualities that 
 have redeemed Madame — the spiritual ones." 
 
 "Clearly not by putting at the bottom of our creed 
 and theirs that the great difficulty was the lack of 
 funds. There were many times Madame's funds in 
 the horrible place next door." 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 191 
 
 "But not the cooking." 
 
 "You come back to that. Well, the cooking was 
 spiritual." 
 
 After they had had their smile our friend took up 
 the point from where he had put it. 
 
 "I mean spiritual," he continued. "There was an 
 idea in it, a conception of the thing that was good, 
 a persistence in it because it was the thing that was 
 good. It was a job well done — kept up, mother to 
 daughter, for a score of years, and against what 
 discouragements! There was the dining room, un- 
 speakably bare and poor, and beautiful. They 
 stuck to a virtue that was in them." 
 
 "But they had the virtue. How about those 
 others? What virtue had they?" 
 
 "Ah, there we are," said our friend, with the glow 
 of finality. 
 
 The younger man, still fresh from his new emo- 
 tions, looked up puzzled. 
 
 "And yet I don't see just where." 
 
 "Somewhere near the center. I mean that there's 
 the great task — what's waiting to be created — the 
 ideas — the current sense of the thing that's above 
 all worth doing — the thing Madame had in her, 
 and the things that that can stand as a type of. 
 You see what I mean. Humanitarianism misses her; 
 it is so hopelessly economic. The present sense of 
 things misses her; it is so hopelessly economic." 
 
 He paused a moment, and his eye lit up with 
 raillery at the vein he must seem to have fallen into. 
 
 "I see that I'm on the verge of cant," he laughed, 
 "railing at economics because it is materialistic. 
 Economics isn't deplorable because it's materialistic. 
 
192 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 We're all of us, God help us, materialistic. It's de- 
 plorable because it doesn't attack the problem. If 
 we get out of the muddle we're in, it will be because 
 we have found the solution elsewhere. And that 
 is why Madame's seems to me so significant. For 
 Madame's there in the midst of that sick spot has 
 solved the problem. And the Palace hasn't; it has 
 helped to create it, for all its funds. Madame had — 
 how shall I say it? — an idea, a conception, taste, 
 and something that made her cling to it — even 
 there." 
 
 They pondered the point for a moment. 
 
 ''I see," the poet said at last. ''And yet — " 
 
 "And yet," the other repeated with old-time fire, 
 for he had given a dying cadence to his last words. 
 
 "And yet," the poet persisted, "the task you point 
 out, the spread of right conceptions, ideas, tastes, 
 is slow. Meantime — " 
 
 "Ah, meantime," he began, and then with a re- 
 turn upon himself, and the old irony that had made 
 him so many enemies among those who could not 
 understand him, "meantime let us sit aloof and rail 
 at the age. And when we have done with railing, 
 and have looked out with purged eyes on the world, 
 I dare say we shall realize that the struggle is eternal 
 and the problem never to be solved. Perhaps that 
 is a happy thing. Utopia would be an intolerable 
 place. But here taste, and intelligence, and char- 
 acter have a chance to keep fit in the struggle. For 
 the struggle is the thing." 
 
 They were not quite done with Madame's. 
 Summer had given way to fall when one afternoon 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 193 
 
 they resumed their dropped thread, as though, sym- 
 boHcally, as the poet would once have said, their 
 intellects were reviving with the dying of nature. 
 Their depression at the contact of poverty was long 
 past, and other interests that for a time had hung 
 in abeyance had come forward again, and had 
 claimed and been given an open welcome. The re- 
 turn was naive and unconscious on the part of the 
 poet, but the older man recognized it as that process 
 of hardening that he had predicted, and that had 
 seemed at the time a suggestion of his aloof cyn- 
 icism. He could understand how to some it might 
 seem so, but with his friend he would not have had 
 it other than it was. It was a recovery of perspec- 
 tive. And he preferred a poet with a perspective to 
 one addition among the humanitarians. 
 
 How far the poet had reverted, indeed, was shown 
 in the fact that he returned to Madame, but took 
 her up, not on the side of her relation to poverty, 
 but — by what at first seemed an invisible thread — 
 on the side of her relation to the arts. 
 
 "With your scorn of the arts," he said, leaping 
 to the subject from two or three removes, "you one 
 day used a phrase that struck me — amazed me." 
 
 The other looked his inquiry. 
 
 "You spoke of Madame's taste." 
 
 "Ah, she had taste." 
 
 "You put it first — at the bottom." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "Haven't you rather surrendered?" 
 
 The other looked up with the kindling eye of his 
 awakened interest. 
 
 "At discretion," he smiled. "I fancy we have 
 come to an understanding." 
 
194 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ''On the contrary," the poet protested, "what so 
 clearly stands out to me is just that I at least 
 haven't. As for you, you never doubt. But I — 
 your sudden words about Madame's taste swept me 
 back to my own position when I thought I had given 
 it up. And there I am now." 
 
 His friend smiled. That he never doubted was 
 a note that had come to him before, and it dis- 
 turbed and amused him. He had doubted almost 
 everything, and perhaps most of all himself. But 
 he took his ideas hard, perhaps because he had 
 come to none of them without winning to them 
 through a sea of doubts. 
 
 Friends of his spoke of his course as paralleling 
 the miser's. But he pointed out the liberality with 
 which he showered his opinions upon them, and 
 they joined his laugh and withdrew their point. 
 They had the amused recollection of long winter 
 afternoons and longer nights spent with him by his 
 fireside, where nothing had drawn them but that 
 liberality. They had disagreed with him freely, and 
 sometimes been angered, or even wearied, but they 
 had always come back. He had created a place 
 among them, and they resorted to him, finding there 
 something that they could find nowhere else. Once 
 over his hospitable threshold they came into an 
 atmosphere that serenified even their most stormy 
 clashes. When they crossed it they left behind them 
 a good deal of the world, for all the vestiges of 
 Havana and Xeres that greeted them there, and 
 stepped into the presence of many things that were 
 large, and calm, and permanent. 
 In another sense, however, the parallel of the 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 195 
 
 miser was happier. For as he grew older he grew 
 more and more centered in his one pursuit, and 
 though he went about more, and consorted more 
 with his friends, he let the militant causes of the 
 moment more and more alone. He liked ideas for 
 their own sakes; and if he never lost his sense that 
 life was a matter of living, and that ideas got their 
 quick vitality and their human importance from 
 their contact with reality, still they grew for him 
 increasingly real in and for themselves. They were 
 his real estate, he used to pun. And when he looked 
 about him at the things that most other men 
 struggled for, and got praise from the arbiters of 
 the age for struggling for, they seemed as tolerable 
 prey as any. To him, naturally, they seemed in- 
 comparably the best. 
 
 More than one of his critics — for he had by 
 now a book or two to his credit — to his debit, alas, 
 he admitted — had smiled at this passion of his, 
 perceiving that for all his devotion he had somehow 
 missed the note of originality. They were right, but 
 they missed the point. For what he was after, as 
 he himself knew when he looked back on his own 
 long quest, was not the invention of new ideas. He 
 had indeed the humor to doubt his prowess in that 
 matter, and to blush inwardly at the supposition 
 that he had been all along the champion of his own 
 genius. What he was after was not novelty, but 
 truth. 
 
 There was something about that very attitude, 
 it was true, that in a forgetful age might of itself 
 pass for originality. It was rare enough. But his 
 own value for it, characteristically, was just that it 
 
196 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 was not new — it had been the attitude of the men 
 he Hked best on the shelves around him. And if 
 almost all of them were on the shelf, and almost 
 none of them among the lively intellects of his time, 
 still there he was with his passion for ideas of that 
 kind. It was his own passion. 
 
 It was for that reason, no doubt, that other men 
 of ideas more original than his should find some- 
 thing restful in his company, and in the equilibrium 
 that even their disagreements by his fireside tended 
 to make for. They came away sometimes discon- 
 tent in the suspicion that their own originality 
 was often a hole and corner affair, and they liked 
 him for the moment none the better for that. But 
 in time the suspicion that their science, or their 
 aesthetics, or their humanitarianism, or their scholar- 
 ship was not, after all, all that there was to be said 
 about life, sent them back again reluctantly. They 
 hated robustly to give up the importance of hole 
 and corner, but they were, first of all, intelligent, 
 and they did come back. 
 
 None of them, perhaps, so often as the poet. He 
 had a freer play of mind, and a more susceptible 
 spirit, and he valued more than most of them the 
 peculiar thing that he got from that contact. When 
 now he put his question about Madame's taste he 
 was not only genuinely touched by the problem, 
 but he had a lurking, affectionate malice, and he 
 liked to watch the whole apparatus of his friend's 
 mind in motion to dispose of an atom. 
 
 The disconcerting charm of that mind, however, 
 was its consciousness of its own humors. Its owner 
 now looked at the younger man thoughtfully, settled 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 197 
 
 himself into his great chair, and then, catching the 
 gleam at the back of the poet's eye, narrowed his 
 own into a smile. 
 
 "Have you hardened — you?" he asked. 
 
 The other sobered. He caught the echo of his 
 own old phrase. 
 
 "I've been thinking — " he began, and then 
 stopped at the amusement in the glance that con- 
 fronted him. He caught in it suddenly a point that 
 put them a long way forward in their journey. 
 
 "Ah, you are generous," he said. "You catch me 
 home. But if I do acknowledge that there is where 
 reason comes in, still — " 
 
 It came over him in higher and higher waves, 
 under the other's gaze, that there was where the 
 reason did come in. He waited for a moment strug- 
 gling to emerge and get his normal breath. 
 
 "There is where the reason comes in!" he ex- 
 claimed again. Then catching the malice in the 
 other's smile he hurried on. "Say that I have saved 
 myself from going over body and soul to the hu- 
 manitarians by thinking it out, by what you call 
 the reason — I see the point; I come to it. But it 
 was agreed between us, wasn't it, that at the bottom, 
 giving the first bent to our sense of what was good, 
 was a set of primal tendencies, preferences — love 
 of justice, love of beauty, religious aspiration and 
 many others — and that reason came in afterward 
 and judged, adjusted, umpired, proportioned be- 
 tween them — did something of that nature — but 
 that the first direction was given by the other thing, 
 the primal aspiration. And here you have granted 
 just that arrangement by putting Madame's taste at 
 
198 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the bottom of her virtue. She wanted her kind of 
 thing and not the Palace kind of thing, and she stuck 
 to her kind of thing against all the odds, and solved 
 the problem in the end." 
 
 "Your sketch is fair." 
 
 "And I am thrown back upon my old position." 
 
 "That salvation is an aesthetic matter?" 
 
 "Just so, and in practice is to come through the 
 arts." 
 
 The older man sat for a time in thought. His 
 friend studied the thoughtful face before him. 
 What welled up in it before long was a kindHng 
 look of amused intention. 
 
 "Will you go on a quest?" he asked. 
 
 The poet nodded. He knew those reflective urban 
 adventures of his host. For the most part they 
 were undertaken alone, but he had sometimes been 
 admitted to a share in them, as but now at 
 Madame's. Or was it that when his friend went 
 with him his pleasures became reflective adven- 
 tures? At all events he knew how the ordinary set 
 pleasures of the city looked pale and tasted flat 
 after them, not from any austere disapproval arising 
 from the stern spectacle that often they had to con- 
 template, but rather from the richer pleasure of the 
 adventures themselves. Their comedy was real; 
 it was organic; it enriched the very life they were 
 leading. An hour's browsing in some second-hand 
 book shop, half reading, half catching beyond the 
 edge of the book the dusty life of the place, and its 
 dusty owner, and its dusty frequenters, left him 
 deeper memories than most pleasures could leave. 
 Once they had sat out a gloomy afternoon in the 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 199 
 
 workshop of a solitary bookbinder, and listened, 
 while the deft fingers performed the most delicate 
 tooling, to a Rabelaisian flow of coarse humor and 
 honest wit. And the books that came from that 
 bindery had thereafter another flavor. 
 
 Their present adventure was to be of a different 
 kind, but still it was to have the stamp of belonging 
 to the life they were leading. The poet, remotely 
 at first, was beginning to catch the savor of this 
 love of the organic, this passion for weaving the 
 parts of his daily life into a broad pattern, and this 
 tying in of loose threads. The old glitter of dis- 
 connected change and variety lost, for moments, 
 its charm. At times he laid it reluctantly to the 
 recession of his youth — and perhaps it was age 
 that was changing him. But at other times he 
 could wish that his youth itself had squandered 
 itself less in disconnected change and variety — 
 had built itself in more structurally. And in such 
 moods he lent himself more reliantly to his older 
 companion, who, in revenge, never seemed to him 
 old, but rather to have kept a quiet zest of youth 
 about him. 
 
 He sat now with the smile of anticipation in his 
 eye. 
 
 "All we shall need in our scrip," he said, "is a 
 single curiosity. If it was taste that Madame 
 started with, had it any relation to art?'^ 
 
 "Where shall you take me?" 
 
 "Into the most curious places in the world." 
 
 It was autumn and the season was on. Ex- 
 hibits were opened, concerts and operas were be- 
 ginning, coteries were eager with the summer^s 
 
200 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 arrears of novelties. A new Russian dancer was 
 being widely announced. Two Russian novelists 
 had just been translated. From France came word 
 of a revolutionary school of painting. A colossal 
 symphony was to come from Vienna interpreting 
 the gist of Nietzsche's philosophy. The great uni- 
 versities were announcing the growth of amateur 
 play-acting, amateur story-writing, and aesthetic 
 dancing, in place of intellectual studies. Vers libre 
 was bringing in a wholly new group of poets. The 
 season indeed promised to be lively in aesthetic 
 circles. 
 
 The two friends set out. They missed nothing. 
 Their experiences accumulated. Before the end of 
 the autumn something began to emerge — it was 
 the comedy of their pursuit. They admitted that 
 if it had not emerged they would have had to de- 
 sist before they came to the point. They saw 
 indeed much that was good; some things that were 
 noble. But their concern was not primarily with 
 objects of art; it was with the human spectacle. 
 And the human spectacle in those purlieus repaid 
 them. 
 
 The poet developed a new note in his laughter. 
 It crept in first one night as he saw the solemnity 
 with which two avid-eyed young poets watched the 
 lithe, slim body of the Russian dancer, and took 
 what went on inside them for their souls. A kind 
 of sickness had already mingled with his laugh at 
 their murmured confidences; it was with horror 
 that he heard them, in fervid tones, quote a couplet 
 of his own: 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 201 
 
 Oh, dusty, impure question — Is she pure? 
 It is enough that she is beautiful. 
 
 When he dared he stole a look at his companion; 
 he hoped that the murmurs had passed him un- 
 heard, or the lines been unrecognized. But he 
 could glean nothing from the serene countenance 
 by his side. 
 
 Surreptitiously one day he looked into the two 
 Russian novelists. Something had come over him; 
 they had the Russian quality, but they amused 
 him. Once that Russian poignancy had set up a 
 great tumult in his emotions, and like the two poets 
 in the balcony, he had used to discover soul in that 
 tumult. This time as he read he seemed to catch 
 the secret of it. Multitudinous, formless, stormy, 
 hopeless, they saw life with their keen, barbaric 
 senses and nothing more. Their stuff was not or- 
 dered, intellectualized. It meant nothing; and 
 they could make nothing of it. It was a welter. 
 
 In his own poetry, following the great tradition, 
 he knew that his pain and labor had been, for all 
 his vacuous protest, to make intelligible, to in- 
 terpret. Even in the couplet that he groaned to 
 remember he had tried to reinterpret the significance 
 of beauty. He might like to blot those particular 
 lines — would give a good deal to just now — but 
 their intention had been a significant intention. 
 These somber minds, however, understood nothing, 
 put nothing in order, tried to put nothing in order, 
 gloried in their tumultuous disarray. They 
 rendered up the chaos, not because they understood 
 
202 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 it, but because it was there. They lugged it out, 
 not to say something true about it, but to heap it 
 up and gloom around in their hopeless helplessness 
 before it. 
 
 He smiled as he welcomed the sudden release 
 from his old obsession. He felt in himself a sudden 
 peace in the clarity of his understanding. And he 
 smiled again, partly at himself, and partly at the 
 simplicity of the perception — that peace came 
 just from the escape from chaos, just from the un- 
 derstanding, the putting things in order. He 
 caught, consciously for the first time, the point of 
 literature. 
 
 He had not thought it all out before a new ex- 
 perience sent the two friends wandering through 
 the streets in comfortable release from an evening 
 of local chaos of their own. They had gone to- 
 gether to a dinner at an artistic and literary house. 
 They had been charmed by the simple beauty of 
 the interior, the costumes of the ladies, the appoint- 
 ments of linen and crystal and silver of the dining 
 room, the rich draperies and pictures and rugs of 
 the drawing room. At dinner the talk had begun. 
 The poet felt uncomfortable. The Russian novel- 
 ists, the colossal symphony interpreting Nietzsche, 
 the cubists, the futurists, vers libre, went into the 
 crucible of talk and came out glowing. Strauss's 
 "wrangling inharmonies," Matisse's "tremendous 
 barbarities," futurist "mysteries" fell from cul- 
 tured lips without the smile of judgment. They 
 were the "movement of art." 
 
 There was the charm of exclamation, of en- 
 thusiasm, of bandied allusion, of soft lights, of 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 203 
 
 modulated voices, of the near presence of an au- 
 thor and a sculptor. But the poet was un- 
 comfortable. He suddenly saw it from the out- 
 side. He saw it with his understanding. For a 
 moment he could regret the brightly colored land 
 of illusion and irresponsibility he was leaving. It 
 was endeared by so nearly everything that endears. 
 And he was quitting it for a drab land of disillu- 
 sionment and responsibility. He wondered for a 
 moment why he was going. Then he knew that 
 he couldn't help it. Back of his senses and his 
 delights there was something else that understood 
 and smiled. And that something else was he. 
 
 What supported him over the moment of regret 
 was the shocking recollection that it was just in 
 such circles as these that all the horrors of the 
 Russian novelists, and frantic French decadence, 
 and German unintelligibility got their passport. 
 Here at least art had not done the thing that he 
 had always defended it for doing. It had not 
 created a sure taste for beauty even in matters 
 simply artistic. And as for those other, wider 
 values of taste — as for Madame's . . . 
 
 "It isn't beauty we're after now," someone was 
 saying near him. "We've changed all that. What 
 we're after is reahty." 
 
 He had heard that implicitly said a hundred 
 times before; now he listened with wonder. He 
 remembered the Russian novelists with a vengeance. 
 
 Once or twice in the course of the evening he 
 caught his friend's eye, lonely, observant, reflective, 
 amused. He himself had turned away, his sensi- 
 tiveness to what was going on around him 
 
204 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 heightened to the point of pain. Finally he hunted 
 him out, and when they decently could they 
 departed. 
 
 Once on the moonlit street he got his arm under 
 that of his companion and turned him toward one 
 of their old haunts by the lake. He was in no 
 mood for loneliness or sleep. 
 
 It was an Indian summer night, crystal above, 
 and a thin haze among the tree-trunks and over 
 the meadows of the park. For half a mile they 
 walked in silence. Then the poet laughed. 
 
 "After all," he said, "these people are only cari- 
 catures of the real thing." 
 
 "The air is better here," his friend returned. 
 After a moment, pausing by the wooded edge of 
 a lagoon, he asked, "Are those Lombardy poplars 
 or cypresses?" and waved his hand toward a row 
 of slender trees that shot up out of the mist into 
 the clear moonlight above. 
 
 "I don't know; they are beautiful." 
 
 They stood a moment watching them, and then 
 passed on. 
 
 "Why beautiful?" the older man mused. 
 
 "I don't know. Once I could have given you 
 mystic reasons. To-night I don't know. All I can 
 say is that they are beautiful." 
 
 "Aesthetics, then?" 
 
 "It seems a little too simple, but you found the 
 trees beautiful?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I dare say most men would." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "Well, perhaps that is aesthetics." 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 205 
 
 ''You are humble to-night." 
 
 The poet laughed. "I've been humbled," he 
 said. "I've been in such company before — been 
 part of it — and now I've seen it. What I can't 
 help seeing is that it's just the people brought up 
 on art that are wishing on us all these things that 
 aren't beautiful. It hasn't given them taste." 
 
 "Perhaps those things are beautiful to them." 
 
 "If they are, then aesthetics is anything — and 
 nothing — whatever you like." 
 
 "That is what you have just said about the 
 trees." 
 
 "No. When I spoke I was thinking about men 
 by and large, to-day and yesterday — of some- 
 thing with a touch of universality — not anything 
 that anybody likes at any time, but something that 
 lies deeper, is more fundamental — something 
 based on their common sense of the thing. Do I 
 talk cant?" 
 
 "No. But you go in a circle." 
 
 "Not that all men have it," the poet spun on, 
 "or even most men, but some men." 
 
 He paused. The other was silent, attentive; in 
 his eye was a gleam of appreciative irony. 
 
 "From this point on I stumble," the poet con- 
 tinued, a touch of hopeless humor struggling in his 
 voice. "I know what I mean by beauty; I know 
 what I think is beautiful. I know that I fall in 
 with certain others, love what they love. And that 
 is what I praise. Other things I hate; I abhor 
 Matisse. Well, I dare say Matisse hates what I 
 love, and in general uses my own language to 
 justify himself and condemn me, mutatis mutandis. 
 
2o6 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 Does it get me anywhere to say that the best taste 
 is that which refines on the common sense of beauty 
 of the race. At least it indicates a standard and 
 a direction. It isn't quite anarchy. But what is 
 clear about the present is that we have a prodigious 
 art and it is anarchic, and a prodigious aesthetic 
 public brought up on it, and it doesn't make for 
 beauty." 
 
 They had come to the lake shore and had ad- 
 justed themselves on a bench. The moon lay shat- 
 tered on the rough water, and the pebbles grated 
 with the rush and recession of the waves on the 
 sloping beach at their feet. But the poet's mind 
 was preoccupied. Suddenly he looked up. 
 
 "I have said that now for the third time," he 
 laughed. ^'And Madame, I begin to believe, didn't 
 belong to aesthetic circles." 
 
 They hung in assent upon that for a while, and 
 the silence and the warm night, and the wind and 
 the waves and the moonlight were glorious about 
 them. 
 
 "But the real thing," the older man said at last, 
 " — aren't you a little hard on the real thing?" 
 
 "There's something to be said for that," the 
 other returned. "I get a glimpse here, now, that 
 I don't quite catch clearly. It's a glimpse of art 
 as a kind of final product, a last expression, of 
 whatever taste we have, — a kind of ultimate 
 flower — " 
 
 "Hence the fluttering of our infinite butterflies," 
 the older man threw in. 
 
 "Ah," the other smiled. "And perhaps they 
 have their use in spreading the pollen. But I don't 
 like to see it all left in their hands." 
 
In Pursuit of the Arts 207 
 
 "Whose then?" 
 
 ''There we are!" the poet exclaimed. "We shall 
 have to think it out." 
 
 There was their point. They laughed. The 
 poet threw in one more phrase: 
 
 "In relation to all the other things they so egre- 
 giously don't think about at all." 
 
 There was another matter that had dropped by 
 the way, and the older man, with his uneasiness at 
 the consciousness of untied threads, reverted to it. 
 
 "We have left Madame unexplained," he said. 
 
 "And I dare say we shall, even in the end," the 
 poet replied, "but we've rescued her from the 
 aestheticists." 
 
 "And ourselves. But there's something else. I 
 go back always to your conception of the soul. 
 And I can't help thinking that if Madame had had 
 a fish shop instead of her restaurant she would 
 still have solved her problem, by virtue of some- 
 thing else in her that we should not have been 
 tempted to call aesthetic — a satisfaction to some 
 inner demand in her nature — some other prefer- 
 ence of her soul — that somehow she had caught 
 a glimpse of and fostered until she would have 
 been unhappy to thwart it. Whether in some 
 transcendental sense you wish to call the ultimate 
 attractiveness of that impulse (Esthetic — " 
 
 "Ah," the poet interposed, "but with that range 
 of attractiveness art has nothing to do. You involve 
 us with Croce and the decadent philosophers." 
 
 "And there we are at last," his friend returned. 
 
 As they wandered homeward through the dim 
 park our friend remembered how in his youth an 
 
2o8 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 older friend of his had said words that had clarified 
 
 his own vision, and how he had come afterwards 
 
 at midnight to the lake shore and sat on the bench 
 
 they had but now quitted, to calm and adjust his 
 
 dizzy thoughts. And now, as he looked at the poet, ^^ 
 
 whose friendly arm was linked in his, he wondered 11 
 
 hopefully whether he himself had not at last, and 
 
 in his own way, handed on the torch. 
 
PART TWO 
 
 POOR RICHARD 
 
 LONG afterwards, in the desultory reading of 
 his more settled years, he came one day 
 upon a passage that set him in pursuit of his own 
 childhood. In the raucous comedy of his ado- 
 lescence, in the later years of his sophomoric 
 militancy, and in the unheroic dullness of middle 
 life, that childhood had never for long failed to 
 come flashing back upon him at inexplicable 
 moments, from unexpected sensations too faint to 
 have caught for themselves his reflective attention. 
 Yellow sunlight falling through trees upon a wall; 
 vague odors in a country lane of a summer after- 
 noon; the luminous blue that sometimes whitens 
 the sky at the horizon on a windy morning; a 
 moment's harmony of thirds in voices or instru- 
 ments at random windows or in the droning tones 
 of street organs — such sensations, without reason 
 of exceptional beauty or traceable reminiscence 
 brought back to him for lingering half hours the 
 limpid emotions of his boyhood. 
 
 At such moments, so affecting were the contrasts 
 with the grayer tones of his current life that he 
 clung to his vision with eagerness, with a romantic 
 sense that there was something infinitely desirable 
 
210 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 in the innocence and purity of his childhood's out- 
 look. He had seemed of late to be losing, through 
 the hardening sophistication of time, deep and 
 moving and intimate values that thought and 
 knowledge were bringing no adequate compensa- 
 tions for. His more normal moments tried to re- 
 assure him; but he mistrusted his more normal 
 moments, knowing that they knew nothing of the 
 magic of his occasional moments. The inner con- 
 viction of reality that intensified these emotions 
 never haunted his hours of objective thought. 
 
 So it came about that his childhood clung to his 
 consciousness with a persistence that he did nothing 
 to discourage; and though as the years went on the 
 flashes of the old light fell less and less frequently 
 on the world that he looked out upon, he still had 
 occasional glimpses of it to thrill him and darken 
 the moments of commonplace return. 
 
 It was with curious eyes, therefore, that he came 
 one day upon the record of the life of a child who 
 had died at ^'5 yeares and 3 days old onely ... a 
 prodigy for wit and understanding," and whose 
 story had come down over a gap of nearly three 
 centuries because the father, who had paused over 
 his affairs to drop a tear "of grief and affliction," 
 was that courtly diarist of an age so peculiarly re- 
 mote from ours — John Evelyn. The record was 
 the more moving that the grief with which the few 
 lines were penned seemed so largely irrelevant. 
 The pathos to modern hearts seemed to lie not so 
 much in the loss of what the father mourned, as 
 in the thought that it was there at all to be lost. 
 
 For "at 2 yeares and halfe old he could per- 
 
Poor Richard 211 
 
 fectly reade any of the English, Latine, French, or 
 Gotic letters, pronouncing the three first lan- 
 guages exactly. He had before the 5 th yeare, or 
 in that yeare . . . got by heart almost the entire 
 vocabularie of Latine and French primitives and 
 words, could make congruous syntax, turn Latin 
 into English and vice versa, construe and prove 
 what he read, and did the government and use of 
 relatives, verbs, substantives, elipses, and many 
 figures and tropes — made considerable progress 
 in Comenius's Janua . . . and had a strong passion 
 for Greeke. The number of verses he could re- 
 cite was prodigious, and what he remembered of 
 the parts of playes. He understood the historical 
 parts of the Bible and New Testament to a wonder. 
 He was far from childish in anything he said or 
 did/' 
 
 Poor little Richard, ''incomparable hopeful 
 blossome!" 
 
 And yet the reader of this sad record, conscious 
 of a childhood of his own so unspeakably different, 
 and wont to regret the loss of just those things that 
 had made it so different, found himself out of all 
 wont, through a perverse habit of mind, looking 
 back at his own so much happier case with no 
 little doubts. 
 
 It had indeed been a childhood rich in the things 
 that are thought of as peculiar to childhood. The 
 little town in which he had been born was spread 
 out upon long hills in a country half forested and 
 half tilled, broken into small woods and fields like 
 the background of an old print. He could see 
 from the hilltop of his own world a broad shallow 
 
212 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 valley and hills beyond, blocked with color and set 
 with the half-hidden gleaming white houses pe- 
 culiar to that countryside. He remembered it 
 always in the high colors of spring and fall, and 
 always in sunshine. 
 
 The town itself — to him big, menacing, al- 
 luring, to be invaded for short distances, and to be 
 fled from in terror till the click of the gate shut 
 it out behind him — lay beneath his hilltop in 
 clear and bright hues. Its cobblestones, swept 
 and garnished, its tall spires, its crowding trees, 
 made up a magic region seen from within the gate, 
 prolific of benevolent peddlers whose great carts 
 at a gesture sprang open to reveal sesamic treasures 
 exchangeable for worthless heaps of rags and 
 papers; of strange terrifying dogs of another race 
 than the kindly and understanding mongrel of his 
 own world; of damp and jocularly clad fishmongers 
 whose stirring horns summoned a wrappered and 
 capped population to morning gossip at the gutter; 
 of rare organ grinders whose droning pipes, nearing 
 and retreating, fused with the lazy colors of the 
 afternoon. 
 
 Behind the walls of his own world his most 
 bizarre relationships were with trees. Touches of 
 human expression in them caught in him quick 
 responses. There was a dwarfed oak whose an- 
 gularity was touched with pathos by a friendly, 
 deprecating way it had of holding out its large, 
 frank leaves; a dandified maple that cradled long 
 his ambitions and at last his scratched and 
 trembling body; an eccentric, reserved russet 
 apple tree that stood aloof from the common ram- 
 
Poor Richard 213 
 
 bows and guarded the stable door. If such in- 
 terpretations were childish he was indeed a child, 
 and long custom gave to them a kind of reasonable- 
 ness that he had no wish to refute. 
 
 There was something less explicable but more 
 moving in the sharp impressiveness of a deep and 
 gloomy grove that lay beyond the cobblestones 
 across the way. In the morning when a low sun 
 fell upon its front it held only such terrors as might 
 with high courage be defied to the edge of the 
 shadows. He remembered one such adventure 
 when he had fought off his fear even beyond the 
 sunlight, and though he had failed at the last 
 moment to bring off the precious buckeye that had 
 lured him so far — for terror seized him while his 
 fingers were still short of the prize — his experience 
 served to rationalize the situation for his future 
 guidance. Thereafter of a morning he could walk 
 without fear to the edge of the dense shade, know- 
 ing that fear was powerless to come upon him 
 across the barrier. And if he taunted it with its 
 impotence as he strutted up and down the irregular 
 line, his temerity was not without a defiant courage 
 against the possible moment when a passing cloud 
 might wipe out the bounds and leave him in its 
 clutches. 
 
 Sunset was the time, however, when the grove 
 assumed its most fascinating terrors, when the still- 
 bright sky behind it left it black and impenetrable. 
 To his ear, on windless evenings, came strange, 
 subdued movements, subtle treads, soft whisper- 
 ings, filling the grove with the undefined mani- 
 festations of the objective thing that he had never 
 
214 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 wholly distinguished from his subjective fear. The 
 grove was the haunt of owls whose evening awaken- 
 ings filled the darkness with mysterious questions; 
 and with brooding doves whose notes near and far 
 seemed to come from no separate source, but 
 rather to be the mournful voice of the woods them- 
 selves. 
 
 By no means all of his hours were spent so es- 
 sentially alone as was inevitable in the presence of 
 such moving perceptions. His world behind the 
 high, vine-hung walls of the garden was, naturally 
 it seemed to him, the gathering place for others 
 from without. But in some ways, in spite of 
 brothers and of neighbors of his own age, just as 
 he found a difference between his own and the 
 outer world, he discovered a difference between 
 himself and those around him more subtle than 
 the common daily difference, and sharply separa- 
 tive even when they were boisterously present 
 about him. Sometimes when they were closest he 
 would find a barrier shutting him in most narrowly. 
 It was exaggerated, extreme, but it foreshadowed 
 the faculty that later played its determining part 
 in his life. 
 
 Suddenly when the play was lulled there would 
 come over him a troubling sense of inner isolation. 
 The stones, the grass about him, the companions 
 whom he could touch with his hand, his own body, 
 and the heat of the sun or the cool of the breeze, 
 the sounds and odors that came to him clearly, 
 seemed but the dream-spun creations of his 
 thought, illusions that no test of the senses could 
 dispel. His senses themselves were in no better 
 
Poor Richard 215 
 
 case. Even his thoughts^ projecting the outer 
 world before him, became objective presences be- 
 fore an ultimate consciousness that he always came 
 to at last before the bubble of his troubled per- 
 ceptions broke. 
 
 When this illusion of an illusion had passed and 
 the world about him had resumed its external re- 
 ality he had no wish and no power to bring it back. 
 That it was an illusion he felt with all the clarity 
 of his more normal moments. In time such rare 
 moments ceased to trouble him, but the recollection 
 of them never so wholly departed that he lost the 
 sense of an aloof consciousness from which to look 
 out even upon his own thoughts and feelings. 
 
 The occasions that were most likely to bring such 
 imaginings were otherwise curiously intimate. 
 There lay in the midst of the garden a broad flat 
 stone covering the mouth of an ancient well, and 
 its afternoon coolness in the shade of a low syringa 
 no doubt conduced to the invention of a form of 
 play unusually sociable. To fill their pockets in 
 their journeys into the outer world with lumps of 
 colored sandstone; to search for days among the 
 gravel for precious "keels"; and then to sit on the 
 well-stone in a circle of five or six, and grind, stone 
 upon stone, hour upon hour of a summer's after- 
 noon, watching their cones of colored sand grow 
 tall, and tinting them with the powdery dust of 
 the "keels" — such was their favorite pastime. 
 And in those hours to talk out of depths of inno- 
 cence and ignorance! They had seen five or six 
 or seven winters, and their world was a small 
 garden on the edge of a small town. And yet they 
 
2i6 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 talked of history and politics, of wars and parties. 
 If a maturer cynicism would have found no con- 
 tradiction there, finding no need of knowledge or 
 experience for endless talk or bitter partisanship, 
 it would here have been disarmed by the innocence 
 of the malice from which such animation arose. 
 A powderhorn from Revolutionary days, and a 
 sword from the Civil War, hanging in the paternal 
 hallway near the portraits of the ancestors to whom 
 they had been grim enough instruments of fight, 
 had stirred their imaginations and kindled their 
 loyalties. In their hearts, still too tender to hurt 
 a robin or a toad, it was a secret grief that the 
 spots of stain and rust were not from the blood of 
 their enemies. And the names British and Rebel 
 gave whispering intensity to hours of peaceful 
 grinding. 
 
 To his later amused reflections the thought that 
 politics had stolen into the garden and laid its 
 shadow upon their minds seemed an incongruous 
 touch upon the idyllic aloofness of his childhood. 
 But he knew that in reality it had hardly been 
 so — that the bare names of parties about which 
 their talk had played had had no content, were but 
 stirring connotations calling for loyalty and hos- 
 tility — much perhaps as in the grown-up world — 
 and not unfit for association with that other 
 connotation which they called God. They had 
 not seemed incongruous then, and the association 
 was made promptly and loyally. God was a 
 Republican. 
 
 Though his childhood was perhaps unusually 
 full of companionship — of children, of servants, 
 
Poor Richard 217 
 
 whose work never ceased to seem to him some su- 
 perior form of play, of the whole range of relatives, 
 from the visiting ones of his own years in eternally 
 clean frocks, to the reverend elder whose pro- 
 digious hat and gold-headed cane seemed the very 
 crown and scepter of life — the moments which 
 most colored his later reveries were the moments 
 when he was most alone. He was not lonely or 
 melancholy. It was perhaps that in unwonted si- 
 lences his mind caught best the faint responses of 
 his own spirit. 
 
 It was in such moments that the clear brightness 
 of colors stole upon his conscious senses — the 
 deeper tones of the garden, the contrasts of the 
 grove against the sunset, the harmonies of the out- 
 look across the town and the hills, and perhaps 
 more than all the cloudless sky, remote, varied, 
 eternal, without detail of distracting substance, the 
 essence of the emotion of color. It was to the 
 purity of such perceptions that his later moments 
 made their magic return, adding to their own 
 effectiveness the deeper note of reminiscence, and 
 binding his life together in a cumulative pattern of 
 sensuous emotion. 
 
 Though his life was thus largely healthfully out 
 of doors the house too was rich for him, though in 
 a different way. There were characteristic colors 
 there too, indeed, and he never lost the moving 
 sense of atmospheres that breathed from the har- 
 monies of subdued light in certain well-loved 
 rooms — particularly a library in whose deep- 
 orange draperies and rugs, brown leather chairs, 
 
2i8 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 and brown books, he never in after years ceased 
 to find the spirit of leisurely reading — warmth, 
 and quiet, and a calm cheerfulness. Often when 
 the sun of a late winter afternoon began to sink 
 and yellow in the west and blend with the warm 
 tones of the draperies, he would come hither, and 
 unconscious of the causes that at once stirred and 
 soothed him, would sit in quiet, watching the 
 deepening colors till the growing darkness brought 
 imaginings more in keeping with the house itself. 
 
 He had his shrinkings from the dark when it 
 found him lingering over his play in the garden; 
 but his fears there were simple and direct — frank 
 terror of the invisible and the unknown. Within, 
 however, when the light faded and the quiet 
 robbed his senses of their immediate occupations 
 and assurances, the invisible became populous with 
 a curious company of silent, recurrent figures, 
 habitues of his half-frightenedj half-fascinated 
 fancy. They took possession of their accustomed 
 spots and bound him to his accustomed chair — 
 old people for the most part, with white hair and 
 thin white hands, seated by the fireplace or standing 
 in reverie by the windows ; the tall figure of a priest 
 forever mounting the stairway to the silent 
 chambers above, and through the rooms a woman 
 moving to and fro in stately sorrow. In time repe- 
 tition eased his fears and gave his awe a touch of 
 friendliness, but it never eased the weight of an 
 undefined sadness that hovered over that silent 
 household. 
 
 It must have been — so his maturer reason 
 went — that the darkness gave too sharp a sensi- 
 
Poor Richard 219 
 
 tiveness to his imagination, and that the broad 
 lines of his first fanciful pictures were too vivid to 
 be escaped from again. At all events his imagina- 
 tion worked more normally and subtly and with 
 much more variety by day, though it worked with 
 much the same materials. Out of what old pic- 
 tures in books or on the walls, old costumes in attic 
 chests, slow reminisences of elders by the winter 
 fire, his imagery was pieced, his later memories 
 found scattered though incomplete traces. But it 
 is certain that in the house by day when the others 
 were absent, or quiet, or better still in distant 
 rooms in murmuring conversation, his mind was 
 filled with pleasant pictures of a life varied, full, 
 quite different from his own, and always changing. 
 They never ceased to be fancies. But they had 
 more than the thin evanescence of his out-door 
 play. They were clothed with reality, and with 
 an authority that he respected to at least this 
 degree — that if he let his fancy play within doors 
 it was they who had the right to people it. Out of 
 doors his fancy was gothic, filled with dwarfs and 
 talking birds and animate stones. There there was 
 no restraint upon him. But within he was rigidly 
 humane. The house itself gave the suggestion for 
 this difference, no doubt, and he followed the law 
 it imposed. It was old and homely, and filled with 
 the simple accumulation of more than one genera- 
 tion of his ancestors. It was a house, and so a 
 human product, and his response was to act in 
 kind. Many years later, searching seriously among 
 his tastes and preferences, he found a complete and 
 vivid ideal of a quiet and full domesticity whose 
 
220 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 axiomatic values went back for their sanction to 
 these early fanciful responses to the spirit of the 
 house. 
 
 His childhood lasted on much these terms until 
 his thirteenth or fourteenth year. There was 
 growth and development, it is true, but in kind it 
 remained little changed. It was a healthy child- 
 hood, and if there was a more than usual dreami- 
 ness and objective make-believe there was in that 
 no distorting asymmetry. He was frankly and 
 pleasantly undeluded by his fancies. And it was 
 a very natural childhood in the full modern sense 
 of that term. If he had learned good manners it 
 had been less by precept than by having nothing 
 else to imitate. No doubt he had had his moments 
 of wilfulness that were punished, and of selfishness 
 that were rebuked. But they were less significant 
 than the unconscious influence of a kindly home. 
 
 In the early part of his childhood he was taught 
 nothing consciously. If he learned his letters in 
 his fifth year it was the accidental reflection of an 
 elder brother's learning, picked up as he had picked 
 up the names of colors among the stones and 
 "keels" of his play, or as he had picked up the 
 syllables from the backs of the Britannica on the 
 library shelves before he could read in his primer, 
 and with no sense of their significance. The li- 
 brary, where he spent long hours of winter after- 
 noons, and where indeed he listened to readings 
 that flashed strange pictures upon his mind, had no 
 distinct meaning for him. He took the books there 
 for granted. They were among the natural conditions 
 of existence, like the house and the garden. 
 
Poor Richard 221 
 
 In the latter half of his childhood he went to 
 school, it is true, but school came to him in the 
 natural course of events, just as he fell into the 
 way of the immemorial games that children have 
 never let die. There was nothing in his going that 
 savored either of compulsion or privilege. And in 
 the school there was nothing to reveal the sharp 
 change, for which the school stands, from bar- 
 barism to urbanity. For the modern kindly 
 methods of teaching had already begun to dis- 
 place the older harsh tyranny of the traditional 
 schoolmaster. He glided into the precincts of 
 learning, therefore, on the wings of play. He 
 learned without knowing that he learned. And 
 his school hours, like those in the garden, were 
 happily spontaneous. He had not, to be sure, 
 fallen heir to the full development of this sym- 
 pathetic method. And before the end of his child- 
 hood he encountered rebelliously enough teachers 
 who derived from the older traditions. Defeat, 
 chagrin, and his first suffocation sense of impo- 
 tence before tyranny came upon him memorably 
 from these experiences; but they were too rare to 
 break his spirited opposition or alter his long- 
 confirmed attitude toward the school. He remained 
 to the time of his adolescence a child of play. 
 
 So it was that years later, when his habits of 
 make-believe had turned insensibly into habits of 
 reflection and reverie, he could look back upon a 
 childhood peculiarly natural and spontaneous. It 
 was a childhood unusually happy, and though com- 
 monplace in its environment and external equip- 
 ment and not uncommon in its internal tempera- 
 
222 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ment and native gifts^ yet of its kind and in itself 
 rarely perfect. 
 
 It was with troubling surprise, therefore, that he 
 found himself not so wholly shocked as it seemed 
 to him he should have been at the pitiful record of 
 that child of the older century, who had died at 
 "5 yeares and 3 days old onely, after considerable 
 progress in Comenius's Janua and with a strong 
 passion for Greeke.'^ It seemed to him that he 
 ought to have looked with horror upon a code that 
 could permit such a life and cause such a death. 
 Instead he began to have doubts of the code that 
 had guided his own first years. It had always been 
 a matter of thankfulness with him that his child- 
 hood was beyond the reach of circumstance, and 
 would remain for him perfect no matter what un- 
 toward straits he might fall into. And now an 
 ironic fate, changing his point of view, told him 
 that neither his childhood nor anything past, 
 present, or future, was beyond the reach of cir- 
 cumstance. He felt no bitterness. His childhood 
 still shed its moving and illuminating reflections 
 upon his present. But reflectively, and with the 
 calmer emotions that go with the rational per- 
 ceptions, he came to see a curious waste running 
 through it. 
 
 His old sense of its value was indeed still posi- 
 tive. It was, he still saw, a perfect childhood, from 
 the point of view of childhood; and he never 
 ceased to have moments of protest that this ten- 
 derly luminous and rich thing should be anything 
 less than an end in itself — should be a means to 
 an end grosser and tougher than itself — should 
 
Poor Richard 223 
 
 need therefore to be twisted out of its own bent to 
 serve as a beginning for something less delicately 
 appealing and less perfectible. But he knew that 
 childhood was not the end of life in point of pur- 
 pose any more than in point of time; and though 
 he gave over the attempt to define that purpose, 
 he knew that the most romantic, though they had 
 been known to put it to a child to solve, had never 
 attained even to that wisdom until they had ceased 
 irrevocably to be children. 
 
 So it was that though he was touched with a 
 half angered pity when he came one day upon the 
 grief-stricken words of that courtly father mourn- 
 ing the death of a child who had been so ''far from 
 childish in anything he said or did," he saw a little 
 way past his own prejudice to something that lay 
 behind the shocking cruelty of that little tragedy. 
 He saw it perhaps the more readily in recollection 
 of the violent shifting and tossing and aimless pain 
 of his own later years of adolescence, and the help- 
 lessness of his youth. For he saw that however 
 exaggerated was the case of poor Richard Evelyn, 
 it had been animated by an idea perhaps nearer 
 the truth than the idea of his own. It had looked 
 forward. It had looked forward to something that 
 he came strongly to realize the lack of in his own 
 mature spirit. And when he glanced thoughtfully 
 about him, nation wide, at his own generation, 
 brought up in ways not very different from his own, 
 he saw that they too had missed it. 
 
 This sense of loss took objective expression for 
 him in the commonly observed lack of poetry of 
 his time and people. But this lack seemed to him 
 
224 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 significant of something larger. It was itself more 
 than an objective lack to be deplored. And it was 
 not to be explained by the garish newness of his 
 country. When his country had been newer still 
 it had been richer in just that thing. What he 
 detected in himself and in the intellectual quahty 
 of the times was a lack of that richness of con- 
 sciousness and that clarity and simplicity of vision 
 that finds its expression sometimes in poetry but is 
 essentially the same for the deepest and justest 
 thought upon human affairs in whatever form. 
 
 This observation, which he had long shared in- 
 deed as a commonplace with many thoughtful ob- 
 servers of American life, came now into a new 
 association in his mind. His childhood had been 
 typical, typical at least in the influences that had 
 formed it. And he saw something in those influ- 
 ences that it seemed not fanciful to connect with 
 his own and his country's deficiency. He himself 
 had had a strong impulse toward poetry. It had 
 been dogged enough, and had kept him in his later 
 years tied to his poets, his prosody, his tropes, his 
 diffident exercise book, long enough to have caused 
 him a mild and humorous surprise at the meager- 
 ness of his output — a meagerness not so much of 
 bulk as of substance. 
 
 He was not looking for genius in himself; he 
 was looking for pedestrian respectability. But 
 when he came to write he had nothing respectable 
 to say. The flashes from his childhood that came 
 upon him, intense and simple, luminous with the 
 lyric essence, brought with the force of their im- 
 pulse and the limpid clarity of their outlook nothing 
 
Poor Richard 225 
 
 to look upon. His perceptions had played, in those 
 younger years, upon a substance which maturity 
 could never broaden or deepen. The moments 
 when his young spirit had first entered his per- 
 ceptions had been occupied with matter which his 
 growing mind could never expand — sounds and 
 odors, forms and colors which were the same to 
 his childhood as they would ever be to his youth 
 and his age. 
 
 And they had determined his deepest preoccu- 
 pations. These preoccupations had intensified 
 wastefully only the changeless uniform percep- 
 tions, the common intuitions of sense for which 
 the single word suffices — things static, impene- 
 trable to thought, useless alike to the discursive 
 reason and to the significant element of poetic ex- 
 pression. His childhood years had spent their lyric 
 enlightenment upon the simple bodily sensations, 
 and not upon those moving relations that range in 
 the human field and give to the objects of sense 
 that significance that makes them humane. 
 
 The result was a poetry like most of the poetry 
 of his age and country, a poetry not without a cer- 
 tain visual charm and grace in the concrete ele- 
 ments, but in its thought either vapid or else 
 crudely expository. Actually his best fell far be- 
 low the best of its time, but it had the contemporary 
 quality. There was one set of stanzas that he had 
 long saved, at first for extraneous reasons, and 
 afterwards for the completeness with which they 
 seemed to express the wistful, sweetly nostalgic 
 thinness of his typical culture. 
 
2 26 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 Here, long leagues from the burdened town 
 
 Where memories crowd and fret, 
 Leagues along on the trackless down 
 
 Let us wander and forget. 
 
 How were we to remember here 
 
 Tidings of yesterday, 
 Where die June winds, sweeping the heavens clear 
 Of flocking cloud and smoke-rack drear, 
 
 Drive the soul's mists away? 
 
 Had we not ere last year's seeds were sown 
 
 Wailed ills now suffered not? 
 Shall we not ere this year's seeds are strown 
 
 To-day's ills have forgot? 
 
 Were it not enough that the warm June wind 
 
 Play in your tangled hair? 
 Were it not enough in the grass to find 
 Starry daisies and rue entwined 
 
 With phlox for your tresses fair? 
 
 Shall we lament while the shepherd sun. 
 That has shone for his shepherd lovers 
 
 Since old Theocritus' race was run, 
 High in his June flight hovers? 
 
 Can we think back to the first spring days 
 On the boon of life and the years — 
 
 The boon of the taste of life — and gaze 
 
 In our hearts where a deathless minstrel plays 
 
 His fresh and young and eternal lays. 
 And still shed present tears? 
 
 Here on the leagues of the trackless earth 
 The warring will is merged 
 
Poor Richard 227 
 
 Into the Mother that gave it birth, 
 By a thousand voices urged — 
 
 The querulous cry of the land-lost tern 
 
 Vain-searching for the sea, 
 Rock nooks where tiger lilies burn. 
 The shaded damps of the maiden fern, 
 Wild rose scents where we may discern 
 
 Nature's sweet alchemy. 
 
 Here where the waist-high thistle vaunts 
 
 His sky-kissed purple flame, 
 Here where the mullein's high shaft taunts 
 
 Primrose of sad sweet name. 
 
 How were we, where the crocus first 
 
 Broke through the runneled snow. 
 And where the proud shy violet erst 
 Forth on the high March noonday burst. 
 
 To renew our meed of woe? 
 
 And you, love, when your dreaming eyes 
 
 Lift yearning to the sun. 
 Does not your soul lose its own emprise. 
 Its own impatience, its own surmise. 
 And feel at rest with the earth and the skies. 
 
 With the universe at one? 
 
 Here, then, leagues from the troubled town 
 
 With its ceaseless surge and fret. 
 Leagues along on the trackless down 
 
 Let us wander, and forget. 
 
 There it was, simple, sensuous, rhythmic — in- 
 stinct with the accessories and perfectly innocent 
 of significance. 
 
 When at last he had come to realize that the end 
 
2 28 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 of maturity was not merely to thrill in his child- 
 hood fashion at the intensity of his perceptions, but 
 rather to find the human significance of them, he 
 did indeed turn his mind from this fruitless ex- 
 ercise to thought itself. And though he suspected 
 himself of lacking even in his logical processes a 
 foundation that an earlier start might have af- 
 forded him, it was not so much that he was not 
 able to think logically as that his thinking was in 
 a way hard and geometrical. It lacked in a certain 
 mellow harmony of reason and emotion, a full rich- 
 ness and depth, a lyric illumination, that he knew 
 was the essence of the deepest humane expression. 
 If he could have transferred to his intellection 
 the moving intensity that his childhood had cast 
 upon his sense perceptions, he knew that his poetry 
 and his thinking could have had a value that he 
 was powerless to bring to them now. He saw that 
 however intense that childhood's preoccupation 
 had made his sensuous thrill, that intensity was 
 now incommunicable, and so wasted. 
 
 His childhood had gone all in one direction. It 
 had enriched and intensified certain apprehensions 
 through the intimacy with which they had been 
 woven into the very texture of his spirit; and those 
 apprehensions were with him yet, more intimately 
 than any other later acquisitions could ever be. 
 But they were futile. They were not of the stuff 
 of manhood. His manhood had gone, perforce, 
 and because it was manhood, all in the other di- 
 rection. It had had to begin over. It had had to 
 acquire all its substance anew. For the stuff of 
 manhood could hardly be the emotional intensity 
 
 1 
 
Poor Richard 229 
 
 of a perception of blue sky, of autumn browns and 
 yellows, of thrilling odors, and of sweet sounds. 
 He knew that there was something still childish in 
 the dulcet cadences of even the noblest celebra- 
 tions of those perceptions for their own sakes — 
 often in Wordsworth, sometimes in Keats, and less 
 worthily in most of the poetasters of the present. 
 There was need for a little more iron in the poet^s 
 soul. 
 
 The thing was that the romantic naturalists were 
 all for leaving out of the story the one thing that 
 was to give the story its point. And he had grown 
 up under the shadow of their wings. They were 
 all for what was natural; and what they called 
 natural was the thing that was spontaneous. His 
 own point of rebellion, however, was that the sig- 
 nificant thing about life lay in what men had made 
 of it. And what men had made of it — accumu- 
 lated in the records of what had been nobly thought 
 and done in the past — was just what by being so 
 charmingly natural and spontaneous, he had so 
 far, and for long thereafter, so wholly missed. 
 
 But these things, though he had later set himself 
 to acquire them consciously and with untiring in- 
 terest, could never, he knew, and in the event never 
 did, become bone of his bone. They never became 
 of the very texture of his thought, the form of his 
 mind, as they must have become before he could 
 have been specifically a poet, or, lacking that 
 genius, have attained to that richness of conscious- 
 ness that lies behind the subtle mastery of the best 
 that life has to offer to the heart and to the mind. 
 They never became the intimate stuff of his spirit. 
 
230 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 Not that he would have brought back the era 
 that had been so harsh to poor Richard Evelyn. 
 That age had had its excesses as evil perhaps as 
 his own. He cherished still the positive values of 
 his spontaneous freedom. But he could not forget 
 the quick sensitiveness of his responses to what- 
 ever vague rumors of the human past had filtered 
 down to him — from sword and powderhorn, pic- 
 tures, old costumes, stories, the talk of elders, the 
 atmosphere of the house, to which he had reacted 
 with visual presentments with all the humane spirit 
 he had. He could not forget that this sensitiveness 
 to what was humane might have been fed with 
 what was significant as well as with what was in- 
 significant, calculated instead of casual, and might 
 have been informed instead of left formless. And 
 he could not forget that even the school, when it 
 came to take over the task, did little to alter the 
 way of his mind that his childhood had set him out 
 upon, confirming the natural impression of such a 
 childhood that from the casualness of play with 
 the visual objects around him should arise the 
 things of value out of which his maturity should 
 be made. 
 
 It was with such thoughts, then, that he came to 
 catch, behind the harshness of that age that had 
 seemed so hard upon its children and so productive 
 of poets, something of its animating spirit. The 
 old severity, which had been too stern in its ex- 
 cess for that incomparable blossom of the Res- 
 toration, had had a heart, though it had had a 
 mind also. For it knew that though the child lost 
 little of the glamor of childhood no matter what 
 
Poor Richard 231 
 
 its preoccupations, having the power to color what- 
 ever it touched with its own luminous and endear- 
 ing atmosphere, the man's thoughts would be for- 
 ever more enlightened, more rich, more subtle, if 
 the indurating discipline of the child's preoccupa- 
 tions had been bent from the first upon the things 
 that his maturity would find of the supremest 
 value. 
 
 As it was, the illumination that so intensified the 
 magic of those rare moments when the light of his 
 childhood flashed back upon him never animated 
 the substance of his maturer reflections, never gave 
 them that inner conviction of reality that breathed 
 a spirit into the inanimate world of his sensuous 
 perceptions. He had lost something forever. 
 
II 
 
 THE AWKWARD AGE 
 
 HIS early youth was curious, and yet typical. 
 It had none of the serenity of his childhood; 
 it was marred by an April suddenness, a March vio- 
 lence; it was abrupt, explosive, extravagant. It 
 came upon him with strange and disturbing signs. 
 In his earlier days, in the simplicity of his outlook, 
 his mind for all its occasional harkenings to the 
 voice of his spirit had been singularly free from 
 any consciousness of itself. Experience and feeling 
 had glided into experience and feeling with un- 
 questioning calm; and though he had often reacted 
 vigorously, like a healthy animal, to the immediate 
 push of his surroundings, his consciousness had 
 been direct and naive. It had been troubled neither 
 with the larger bearings of his problems nor with 
 the new and tyrannous stirrings of conscious 
 emotion. 
 
 Then suddenly these stirrings came upon him. 
 They roiled the clear shallows of his spirit. New 
 voices spoke to him inarticulately, and he had no 
 experience of how to answer them and no terms 
 in which to ask for help. Disconcerting tears 
 sprang into his eyes from feelings of which he 
 knew the force and the depth, but whose nature 
 was strange and sometimes terrifying. 
 
The Awkward Age 233 
 
 It was a period in which his spirit welled up and 
 overflowed. He needed channels and curbs, and 
 channels and curbs were just what his typical 
 breeding had eschewed. The overflow found no 
 driving current to clarify its waters. It stood 
 creaming and mantling, stagnant and clogged. 
 Twenty Hues of Homer a day — anything hard 
 and regular and humane — might have put firm 
 ground under his feet. A touch of the birch might 
 have taught him that some mental things were as 
 damnable as some moral things. But he had no 
 Homer and no birch. He mooned, callowly, hours 
 on end. 
 
 In other respects the first years of his youth 
 were a time endeared to his later humor by the 
 pathos of their awkwardness, their flounderings, 
 their rebellious sincerities. A sudden disconcerting 
 self-consciousness broke in upon him. His boy- 
 hood habits were at a loss. Like his voice that 
 broke suddenly between bass and childish treble, 
 his manner broke between jaunty assurance and 
 helpless childish tears. He was restless. He did 
 not know how to control his new being. His 
 spirit was awkward — all hands and feet. He was 
 ashamed. And he disguised his softest and most 
 radiant moments in strident noise. There were 
 times when he was all activity, filling the house 
 with clamor, or, rebelliously disobedient, wander- 
 ing from home in forbidden company. At other 
 times he spent his hours in the house over books 
 that he did not understand, proudly conscious of 
 family councils solicitous for his bodily health. He 
 picked up strange, harmless oaths and uttered them 
 
234 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 at calculated moments. He began to launch upon 
 the dinner table, not the artless chatter of events, 
 but sudden bombs of opinion. His course began 
 an uncertain diagonal across the grooves of his 
 childhood, and the friction rasped but interested 
 him. He was stirred by his rough jolting. His 
 new course seemed inexplicably right though he 
 could find no defense for it. His impotence and 
 irritation when he was put to it to justify his de- 
 fiant opinions developed a phrase that came to be, 
 in its petulent iteration, characteristic of his whole 
 boyhood. ''I protest!'' he would cry, prefacing a 
 dictum that seemed to him rebelliously true; and 
 when amused elders pointed out the humor of his 
 invariable protestation, his spirit cried out from 
 stil) greater depths his rebellious "I protest!" 
 
 There was no conscious pathos and no softness 
 in his rebellion. It was militant, noisy, crude. It 
 was irrational even to his own perception, and not 
 of a kind to win understanding from others. But 
 it was not morose or brooding. He had over him 
 a watchful parental sympathy, and though this was 
 personal and patient rather than actively critical 
 and corrective, it saved him from morbidity. He 
 was never wholly turned in upon himself. And 
 there was enough laughter in him and in them to 
 keep him healthy. Like his childhood, however, 
 his youth was left to its spontaneous courses. And 
 when the explosions came that marked the moments 
 of his growth he was helpless enough before their 
 energy, and bewildered enough in the regions where 
 they left him. 
 
 The first of the explosions that marred his youth 
 
The Awkward Age 235 
 
 struck at him deeply. In his childhood the church 
 had been one of the normal unquestioned con- 
 ditions of life, perhaps the more that his own grand- 
 father, in surplice and bands, had warmed the 
 mystery of the weekly service with his kindly face 
 and familiar voice. From his earliest years the 
 name of God had been on his tongue with the 
 simple, frank familiarity of household acquain- 
 tance, and accepted with the same simple faith with 
 which he had accepted the deeds and dangers of 
 unseen ancestors. The weekly service, its constant 
 association with his grandfather, the nightly prayer, 
 had worn therefore a deep groove in his mind. It 
 was but natural that in the sudden expansion of 
 his feelings and the mystic deepening of his per- 
 ceptions the touch of infinity in the thought of 
 God should have stirred him deeply. 
 
 In the humbling immensity of a starry night the 
 skies, no longer fiat and one, but many, and near 
 and far, flashed on his imagination their immanent 
 mystery. They would have done so of their own 
 suggestion, but it was there too that in the cos- 
 mology of his traditions he placed that other mys- 
 tery with whose articulate symbolism his churchly 
 associations had made him long familiar. And on 
 the azure background beyond the uttermost stars 
 his fancy traced the faint entrancing imagery of 
 heaven, like evanescent etchings on the blue depths 
 of steel. Without deceiving him it was still very 
 real, perhaps the more that here the new reach of 
 his emotions could play without restraint and his 
 new hunger could be richly fed. At night when 
 the quiet of the household promised seclusion he 
 
236 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 would draw his bed silently to the open window 
 and lie rapt before the pageantry of the skies, until 
 sleep overtook him with its vivid, tyrannous 
 pageantry of dreams. 
 
 All this period had its engaging side. The quick- 
 ness of his moods, the sudden boyish softness, the 
 shame-faced self-consciousness, the undeceptive, 
 boisterous disguises, the freedom, the naturalness of 
 his awkward, petulant intensity, the sweep of his 
 fancy — all these things had for those who watched 
 him from without with half-understanding, the 
 clear charm that lies in the unspoiled sponta- 
 neities of developing life. Even for him, in his duller 
 years, though he knew the dangers to which his 
 utter freedom had exposed him, its spell quickened 
 in him unbidden yearnings that defied his better 
 judgment. 
 
 But his judgment weighed more calmly and 
 steadily the reaction that followed. The new un- 
 conscious, vigorous logic that filled him with quick 
 rebellious opinions, wandering restlessly abroad for 
 food, fell in some moment of idle reading upon a 
 report that there was no God. It pointed out the 
 miseries of life, and with quick logic shattered his 
 faith in that enveloping goodness that had stood 
 for him vaguely as a bulwark against wrong. His 
 own moments of personal desolation had never put 
 doubts in his mind. Rather they had cast him 
 more intimately upon that sympathy which his 
 faith created for him. But the objective picture 
 of the suffering of others, stirring his own sympathy 
 and his will to help, brought to him nothing but 
 blame for a God who was all powerful but who still 
 
The Awkward Age 237 
 
 failed to stir a hand in relief. Even this, however, 
 might not have outlasted the fever of his sympathy 
 if the writer had not gone on to smile in scientific 
 terms at the superstition of a heaven beyond the 
 stars. If the deductions were not inevitable from 
 the data cited, yet his inexperience was helpless in 
 the face of his reason ; and when he again looked at 
 the stars it was in anguish, and his fancy found no 
 tracery of heaven on the hard blue background of 
 space. 
 
 His heart recoiled in terror from his thoughts. 
 Looking at the stars he said to himself that there 
 was no God. There was no God, he said to himself 
 in the long miserere of the Litany. And in saying 
 this he seemed to himself to have become a monster. 
 Yet he had no power to change at will the report 
 of his logic. Every vestige of his passional 
 nature — duty, inclination, fear — was arrayed 
 against his intelligence, but he had no choice; his 
 intelligence was he. His desolation was not as for 
 a loss; it was as for a deed of horror unforgivable. 
 He was an outcast hungering at the gates; and 
 always as he took a step to enter he said as in duty 
 bound, "There is no God." And he turned back 
 wearily and in despair. His misery was intense. 
 He prayed incessantly the short desperate prayer 
 for faith. 
 
 In the end old habit and the fervent emphasis of 
 his desire battered at his reason and numbed it into 
 submission. Before that time came, however, he 
 wasted himself in hopeless pain, and created in his 
 own life a devastated area that even the passage 
 of time could never color or soften or endear. His 
 
238 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 treasonable intellectual ardor had lived, no doubt, 
 because of the intoxication of a newly found power, 
 and had died because, when the burst was over and 
 the point was understood, there was nothing more 
 to do about it. He was instinctively hungering, not 
 for intellectual labor, but for the excitement of ex- 
 ercise, and he was sufficiently of his time to have 
 but little sobering labor to temper the excesses of 
 his excitement. He was naturally all for sponta- 
 neity and excess. 
 
 He was not done with his acrid atheism. In the 
 wasteful vagrancies of his youth he came back to 
 it again and again. In the meantime he became 
 suddenly subdued and commonplace, as though all 
 the ardors of his spirit had gathered themselves for 
 a flight, and, defeated, had withdrawn, wearied and 
 broken. 
 
 Other preoccupations followed to divert his mind 
 to outward things. The family fortunes, never 
 great, and not founded on the ardent, straight- 
 forward acquisitiveness that characterized the 
 normal middle-class prosperity about him, slowly 
 declined. Straitened circumstances narrowed 
 the range of his growing powers and curiosities so 
 that for a long period an apparent stagnation, and 
 very real external limitations, rendered his case in- 
 distinguishably common. In one respect, however, 
 his case was not wholly representative; it did not 
 occur to those in charge of these declining fortunes 
 that he should abandon what seemed to them the 
 normal freedom and leisure of youth and take part 
 in the daily toil that sustained the family. 
 
 Cut off from the active pleasures of his growing 
 
The Awkward Age 239 
 
 associates by successive migrations and successive 
 stages of poverty, he turned from the outer world 
 to the world of books. In his later memories there 
 was a curious duality in the period of his life that 
 followed. On the one hand there was the in- 
 creasingly dingy world of reality. Cares marrqd 
 the faces of those who had made idyllic the old life 
 in the house behind the walled garden. There were 
 now dark and narrow rooms in place of the sunlit 
 brown and orange library and the haunts of his old 
 dream people; there was a sordid neighborhood 
 whose unlovely life obtruded itself upon his wonted 
 seclusion; there were narrow unclean streets that 
 must be traversed daily where glaring billboards 
 took the place of lawns. On the other hand there 
 was oblivion from all this searing ugliness in a 
 slowly opening world of romance, whose bright 
 colors and gleaming pageantry, whose unreined 
 freedom and intensity of emotion gave him, now in 
 his period of expanding powers, all that he had to 
 feed upon. It was an opiate whose dreams rapt 
 him away from reality into a world that by em- 
 phasis, by love, by every appeal to his gentler 
 tastes, became more real for him than reality itself. 
 Though no doubt this opiate saved him from 
 many of the influences of the unlovely life into 
 which he had fallen, and guarded him from re- 
 actions that might have been, if more healthily 
 active, at the same time more of the kind of that 
 sordid life itself, yet it had the dangers of an 
 opiate — it was an evasion, not a correction, and it 
 fastened itself upon his habits seductively, pointing 
 no way out except through deeper and deeper 
 
240 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 draughts of its own poison. He fed uncritically 
 upon whatever came in his way. That was the 
 inevitable penalty and privilege of youth. But 
 though he had enough guidance to keep him free 
 from actual coarseness, he was left to run into the 
 more dangerous shallows of vulgarity. If his taste 
 was ever to improve it must be by way of wading 
 through a soft bog that was more likely to sink him 
 altogether. 
 
 In the event he carried some of the stains with 
 him for the rest of his life. At least he never re- 
 covered wholly from the delay. When in the course 
 of time his mind had settled into the stability of 
 rational judgment and he could discriminate and 
 guide himself, he was by that very fact beyond the 
 plastic moment when the unconscious impinge- 
 ments of his attention could still weave the native 
 texture of his mind. By that time its warp was 
 already set and its pattern sketched. 
 
 As it was, in the bright monotony of the read- 
 ings of those years he fell upon that last word of 
 excess, Les Miserables, more pernicious than the 
 inanities of his earlier indulgence because it was 
 the product of genius. Thereafter his world of 
 romance was lifted into a still higher aloofness from 
 the world about him. In this state he remained for 
 a year or two, reading further but often coming 
 back to its pages more deeply thrilled by its repe- 
 tition than by the paler though newer reflections of 
 its spirit from other surfaces. It was consecrated 
 by a solemnity that nothing could surpass, neither 
 in heaven nor on earth. What his notion of Hfe 
 was growing to be, under this influence, he could 
 
The Awkward Age 241 
 
 not have told so well as he could have told a few 
 years before in his brief moments of rational re- 
 volt. His mind was lulled to sleep. He had no 
 humor, no iron in his soul. 
 
 And yet, underneath, the suppressed elements of 
 his more rational nature were accruing. The oc- 
 casion of their release was a happy one. Perhaps 
 nothing could have better served to bridge the wide 
 gap between the portentous solemnity of his 
 Miserables years and the more balanced years that 
 followed. He had by some chance never been to 
 the play. The isolation of his native town, the 
 principle of simplicity in his early breeding, the 
 enforced simplicity of his later years had all made 
 against it. But rumors of its enchantments had 
 reached him, especially in that long period in which 
 he was living on enchantments, and the opportunity 
 when it came inevitably drew him. 
 
 No doubt it was a poor enough affair. It was 
 an open air performance and the weather came off 
 cold. The play was As You Like It. He came to 
 it from among his sordid streets in the August 
 twilight, and hung about the still closed entrance 
 impatient of delay yet excited by every noise and 
 occurrence that seemed part of the awaited event. 
 He paced, eager and shivering and alone, before 
 the gate, listening to voices behind the ticket 
 window, watching the muffled figures that rolled up 
 in carriages and disappeared within. He entered 
 at last with a thin trickle of spectators, and sat 
 with them under the trees in a little shivering group 
 before the rustic stage. Beyond that he had no 
 further recollection of them or of their world. 
 
242 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 They no longer existed around him. He was trans- 
 lated; he was drunk with a vision of a world that 
 was new and luminous. There was no illusion here as 
 he had known illusion in his romances. Here was 
 reality before him to hate, to pity, and to love. 
 And he hated, he pitied, and he loved it. 
 
 On the chair beneath the trees sat his thin body, 
 its legs twisted about the legs of the chair, its hands 
 deep in pockets, and its collar shiveringly turned 
 up. But he did not know it. His heart was in the 
 Forest of Arden. It was a real world of feeUng 
 for him, and where yet a magic and nimble wit, 
 striking in him a quick spark of response, clarified 
 the turgid flood of his emotion. There was here 
 something new and something stirring. His young 
 heart thrilled with the sudden perceptions of his 
 mind. Though he seemed not to have lost in sym- 
 pathy, nor to have lost his own part in the magic 
 events, yet he found himself suddenly aloof, seeing 
 through and through the hearts and minds before 
 him. Clear and bright colors fell upon the moving 
 scene; he was transposed; a new lightness of heart 
 seized him. Rosalind, Touchstone, Jacques — 
 they were beings of another order into which he 
 had but now been born. And when the epilogue 
 was spoken, and the bright figures had disappeared 
 into the dark depths of the forest, he sat still and 
 expectant; for him that world had not gone out. 
 Even when a rough hand touched his shoulder and 
 turned him away, he obeyed mechanically, not 
 seeing that the others were gone and he was alone. 
 He walked home through the dark streets in an 
 airy cloud, and his feet did not touch the hard 
 stones. 
 
The Awkward Age 243 
 
 Days passed before he again felt the earth, and 
 he welcomed the nights when he could lie on his 
 pillow and live again without interruption in the 
 magic world of his new discovery. Something had 
 taken place in his mind — something that turned 
 him away from the opacity and truculence of 
 Victor Hugo. Light and translucent, the new world 
 stimulated him as the old world had lulled him to 
 sleep. He lost something of his old helplessness in 
 the presence of feeling. His mind was pricked into 
 alertness, and in his new responses he was intoxi- 
 cated with a new joy. At home in a dark attic, in 
 a heap of lumber, he found, relic of more pros- 
 perous days, a pile of illustrated folios of Shakes- 
 peare, and into these he plunged with eagerness. 
 There was much that he did not understand, but 
 he read none the less avidly, with now and then a 
 flash of delight that only later he knew to be the 
 thrill of a responsive mind to the stimulus of wit, 
 the leap of a perception, the thrust of an intuition. 
 He found once more, after a dull lapse, the power 
 to stand aloof above his feelings. He could laugh 
 again, catching the irony of his new master. In 
 time, to be sure, the first brightness of his new 
 outlook faded, but it never so wholly dulled as had 
 his early religious revolt. It had more food to sus- 
 tain itself with. All Shakespeare lay before him, 
 and little by little he plowed forward. Then he 
 found Scott; and Scott lasted him till he was wholly 
 saved. 
 
 But though he read his new authors, and ex- 
 ercised with them a clearer, fuller faculty than with 
 the old, he had not essentially changed. They were 
 
244 ^ Lover of the Chair 
 
 still for him an opiate, an escape from his sordid 
 world. He was still a passive reader. If his mind 
 was active it was only when the page was open 
 before him, and only under the stimulus of de- 
 light. It was only receptive. He was true to the 
 beginnings of his training, and though his tastes 
 were year by year dedicating him to a preference 
 for what had at one time been called the scholarly 
 life — a hfe guided by a love of letters — his 
 mental habits were not with equal steps being 
 stiffened by discipline to the rigors of that pur- 
 suit — not even being informed that it had rigors 
 to be trained for. He was on his way to add one 
 more to that modern army of vagabonds who 
 wander picturesquely over the broad highway of 
 letters, revealing their soul's adventures with a 
 mountebank's shameless facility, and accorded a 
 happy parasitic living by a public eager to be 
 amused and flattered. 
 
 There was in him, however, something that saved 
 him from such a fate in the end, though he never 
 wholly recovered from the long years of passivity. 
 It was high time. He was nearing the end of his 
 early youth. When youth was past he might, it 
 was true, add to his knowledge, but the cast of his 
 mind would be set, and the subtle mode of his 
 thought and the play of his spirit would be forever 
 determined. Shakespeare and Scott had done 
 something real for him, joining to their sentiment 
 a touch of rational perception, and giving him a 
 thirst for further indulgence in his growingly con- 
 scious faculty. 
 
 They were not wholly gleaned when he fell upon 
 
The Awkward Age 245 
 
 an old volume of Emerson. It was one of the 
 ironies of his haphazard development that it should 
 have been a volume of the vaguely general essays 
 instead of the Representative Men, and it diffused 
 his thoughts skyward into the rarefied upper alti- 
 tudes, rather than laterally over the tangible sur- 
 face of history. The one would have held him as 
 well as the other, for it was the play of perception 
 that stimulated him, and his attention might have 
 been brought to more and ever widening human 
 interests. The old volume, however, brought him 
 to something that he had not experienced since the 
 brief candle of his religious revolt had guttered 
 out. It brought him actively to exercise his own 
 intelligence. Like St. Francis in the legend, when 
 he came upon a thought that struck an answering 
 spark in him he would close the book and read no 
 more, but sit and brood upon the soaring flight of 
 the idea. His reflections were vague, no doubt, 
 diffuse stellar fancies, mystic outreachings into the 
 unknowable, but they had the virtue of being ac- 
 tive, and they felt the restriction of needing to 
 seem rational and explanatory. 
 
 The accident that brought about this activity 
 was fortuitous enough, and wasteful enough. It 
 was the chance of a sudden storm that found him 
 the Emerson in an ancient chest of scraps. It sent 
 him back in senseless repetition of much of the 
 first period of his adolescence when he had thrilled 
 so tremulously at the impingement of beauty in 
 the world around him. But it added something 
 that to his later reflections he knew to be the 
 determinant of his later bent. In seeming to give 
 
246 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 an explanation, however vague, of an existence of 
 whose mystery he was growingly conscious, his 
 winged fancies struck in him a new and strong 
 gratification. 
 
 His new experiences were extravagant. His un- 
 regulated ardor went its own course. Vaguely but 
 ardently he set out in search of explanations. With 
 his battered Emerson in his pocket, and with a 
 lightness of heart and keenness of interest that had 
 known no intermission since his starry night in the 
 Forest of Arden, he wandered abroad into the pied 
 meadows of a world of romantic perceptions. From 
 what ancient springs of kinship with the earth, and 
 what heritage of natural philosophy in the depths 
 of his common nature his sudden lore sprang he 
 could not have told. But his Emerson struck in 
 him immediate responses of acquiescence and 
 understanding as of unguessed memories of ancient 
 revelation. Romanticism, he knew in a later 
 period when he had had the advantages of a com- 
 pleter aloofness and the keener irony of maturity, 
 was but the natural philosophy of adolescence. 
 But at the time, with the joy of adventure, he took 
 it for humane truth. And when he could he left 
 the contradictory coil and trouble of the .town, and 
 hunted for it in the acquiescence of the woods 
 beyond. 
 
 He felt himself vibrant there with intense and 
 pleasurable sensations — subtle distinctions of 
 greens on the tangled floor, sorrel and wort, the 
 leaf of the violet and the dog-tooth lily; the varied 
 patterns of branches spread against the sky, the 
 dense texture of foliage where the sun struck full 
 
The Awkward Age 247 
 
 upon distant trees. In restful silences he heard 
 the whispering growth of the grass, the feathery 
 fall of limp leaves, the movement of unseen insects; 
 he caught the faint sweet odor of the decaying sod, 
 and felt the rising coolness of the ground on his 
 outstretched hand. He seemed to himself to be a 
 part of the consciousness in which nature realized 
 her own existence. 
 
 Such romantic indulgences were natural enough 
 to his youth, though for him they were a part of 
 the ground he had covered years before. They 
 would have been sufficiently empty, however, if an 
 active mind in him had not, at this second oc- 
 currence, set to work upon a troubling observation 
 that recurred again and again to baffle him. A 
 sharp separateness forever stood between his own 
 consciousness and the moving spirit of the outer 
 world. He rebelled. He rebelled perhaps the more 
 passionately that this disturbing sense came upon 
 him most strongly at moments when his identity 
 with that world seemed to him most yearningly to 
 be desired and most nearly consummated — in 
 moments when the sight or sound or scent of touch- 
 ing loveliness moved him to the depths of his soul. 
 In his impotence, at such supreme moments, to 
 push past the veil, he recognized the undertone of 
 sadness that forever haunts the presence of beauty. 
 He failed then, signally enough, to recognize the 
 incommensurable duality between his innermost 
 consciousness on the one hand, and even the deepest 
 reaches of his senses on the other. But he was 
 aware of his own failure to attain that identity to 
 which in moments of emotion he seemed to come 
 
248 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 so near. And he tried to build a cosmology that 
 would bridge the gulf. 
 
 It was pleasurably consistent as he made it — 
 this cosmology. It brought the wide compass of 
 his observations and his dreams into positions in 
 which they could all be viewed in one set of re- 
 lationships. And if his experience of life was meager, 
 and he distinguished imperfectly between the con- 
 sistently logical and the empirically real, he at 
 least was doing with his data what was asked of 
 him in the rules. And his product was in kind, if 
 not in depth, like that of his master. His immor- 
 tality of development, and his conception of evil 
 as but milestones on the endless journey to per- 
 fection, were as logical as the logic of desire ever is. 
 
 For the first time in his life, now that he had 
 stepped beyond the companionship of his authors, 
 he felt the need of someone to share his dreams. 
 There seemed a kind of futility in their isolation 
 in his own mind. He was not long in finding others 
 of the same bent, products of the same age and the 
 same youthfulness. Together they strayed afield, 
 and sitting on some bank sang, a little consciously, 
 but earnestly and with justifying heartiness, their 
 prose eclogues of nature and immortality, ridicu- 
 lous and divine. Or on long winter evenings within 
 doors they soared into an empyrean where after 
 the end of this life's possibilities they were again 
 to take up their thrilling journey. 
 
 How long this enthusiasm would have lasted he 
 had some indications from the cooling subsidence of 
 their later meetings. It was not from his sense 
 that the truth of these dreams had faded, but that 
 
The Awkward Age 249 
 
 in the end the conferences grew thin with the ex- 
 haustion of matter. They had reached the 
 end of their tether, and having estabUshed a vast 
 cosmos they found little left to do but live their 
 lives in the light of its setded relations. But this 
 life itself was the dull life of poverty, narrowed to 
 an earthly routine, and his mind was active, and 
 hungry for stuff to feed upon. After his seductive 
 taste of ambrosia he was restive under an earthly 
 dietary. He had drunken of a divine nectar and 
 the waters of the kitchen tap were flat in his mouth. 
 He began to suffer under the romantic irony. 
 
 He was saved from a despondent reaction, how- 
 ever, by a circumstance to which his unballasted 
 condition had made him peculiarly liable. Before 
 the meetings had become quite graveled for matter 
 they were heard of by an elder of active intelli- 
 gence, who had wind of their speculative activity 
 and found it sufficiently interesting to attract his 
 S5niipathy and curiosity. He made occasion to meet 
 them in his library, and with the spell of his own 
 intelligence and in the seductive atmosphere of books 
 and learning which the young vagrant breathed 
 again in grateful remembrance, he released the 
 checks of a new explosion. Whether by virtue of 
 an acutely planned attack, or by virtue of a pregnant 
 state of mind in the youth, it was accomplished with 
 the sureness and precision of time as the clock moved 
 from evening to the small hours of a summer's 
 dawn. The vast, complex flower of a new concep- 
 tion grew visibly in his mind, unfolding between 
 sunset and sunrise. 
 
 In all his readings he had come upon little or 
 
250 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 nothing to put him in touch with the dominant 
 thought of his own day. Science was a word among 
 other words, with no more quickening Hfe for him 
 than many another ; and evolution had never stirred 
 in him even an echo of the cry that was ringing in 
 the world about him. Whether it could ever have 
 effected in him the intoxication of that night if he 
 had plodded to it through years of slow development 
 is doubtful. As it was, suddenly but systematically 
 unfolded before him, petal by petal with a thousand 
 deft touches as the hours flashed by him unheeded, 
 it made him drunk. He saw suddenly the vast cos- 
 mology of his romantic speculations melt away into 
 the vague azure unknown beyond the skies. And 
 the bright apex of his system, that had shone there 
 so vividly, its rays diverging downward upon all 
 that he knew and all that he could ever know, he 
 saw now to be but an ignis fatuus of his own mind. 
 There was a sharp pain in his heart, an hour of 
 poignant, clinging regret; and then the new light 
 flooded in upon him and dazzled him. 
 
 He saw now that men themselves stood by the 
 apex of light, and that all the illumination there was 
 in the dark world diverged outward from men's 
 minds till it was extinguished at the vague frontiers 
 of empirical knowledge. He saw, suddenly revealed 
 in the magic of a word, the slow growth, through 
 the ages of the past, of nebulae, of worlds, of or- 
 ganic life, of intelligence, of civilization. In man 
 he saw the growth of all the knowledge there was, 
 groping its way through the humble senses to wider 
 and wider acquaintance with the knowable, till men 
 stood in humility before the vast, acknowledged un- 
 
The Awkward Age 251 
 
 known. Such were the Spencer ian terms of his new 
 revelation. 
 
 The vision crashed sensibly through his brain, 
 and dazzled him with a blinding light. He groped 
 his way home, unconscious of his companions, in a 
 luminous halo. Echoes of the evening were bidding 
 him take his place in the devoted army of martyrs 
 who strove up the misty mountains of knowledge, 
 humbly hopeful of a moment's fitful view of higher 
 peaks beyond, and humbly grateful if in the end, 
 weary and broken, they might die clasping to their 
 breasts a feather fallen from the wings of truth. 
 Whether he slept he could not tell. His dreams and 
 his waking thoughts were alike. And though he 
 arose next day and went through the routine of his 
 old habits, the light still dazzled him, glowing 
 brightly in the periphery of his vision. 
 
 Slowly the personal significance of his counter- 
 conversion sank in upon his mind. He gave up his 
 Christianity — even the vague pantheism into which 
 it had latterly grown. But he had no regrets. He 
 gave over the aesthetic contemplation of his late cos- 
 mology for a militant atheism that for the moment 
 saw no humor in his scoffing ironies, so soon had he 
 forgotten the gentler faith. He visited churches to 
 witness the weak foibles of kneeling believers. He 
 wrangled with his betters, and came off with the 
 easy victory of the scoffer. He abandoned his old 
 reading with a sudden sense that it was archaic, 
 based on an old and naive conception of men and 
 Providence. And he took up with current writers 
 whose daring pleased his strident revolt. In a word 
 he went through in pathetic miniature the spiritual 
 
252 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 history of the half century that was getting on to 
 its last decade. 
 
 There was here, without doubt, some gain for 
 him. He had lost his isolation. He no longer 
 climbed into his ivory tower, but stalked up and 
 down the highway with his bat upon his neck, ready 
 for adventure — a knight errant in spirited defiance 
 of the dragon superstition. He seemed to have 
 found the formula of life. The word evolution 
 seemed to flash upon him the past foreshortened 
 into a single perspective behind him, and the future 
 into a single perspective before him. It was all 
 very simple. 
 
 In time, however, he found it fraught with more 
 difficulties than seemed reasonable to his moments 
 of contemplation. He found in himself a multitude 
 of ignorances that shamed him. His mere enthu- 
 siasm was not enough to convert others whose eyes 
 were set on other vistas. He needed more knowl- 
 edge. And he found in himself, too, as months went 
 on and he came to old roads where his feet had 
 often trod, traitorous sympathies that made him 
 hesitate. Old faiths, old feelings, old enthusiasms, 
 that had lain asleep in his mind awoke at discon- 
 certing moments and pleaded their claims with him. 
 They pleaded the more effectively when he came 
 one day upon a persuasive voice that touched, with 
 perhaps a questionable but no less disconcerting 
 logic, a foible in his latest militancy. This voice 
 echoed the doubt that all beliefs were but the 
 products of the passional nature. And when he 
 examined his own new belief, conscious of his own 
 ignorance, he found that for himself, whatever the 
 
The Awkward Age 253 
 
 general truth or falsity of the doctrine, the doubt 
 was justified. His last belief, like its predecessor, 
 had been won by his enthusiasm. It was not built 
 upon that empirical knowledge that it postulated as 
 the one thing worthy of respect. Whether he was 
 in any worse case, philosophically speaking, than the 
 great prophets of that movement he did not inquire. 
 For his own part he was no better in relation to his 
 new scientific cosmology than to his older romantic 
 one. He had accepted the one, as he had accepted 
 the other, from a passionate need to orientate him- 
 self. He was logical in his bent. But now his logic 
 confuted him. 
 
 He awakened to a longing for more knowledge 
 and more guidance. His friend, the mentor of his 
 last conversion, urged him toward science. But 
 when he saw before him the vista of years spent in 
 minute search for the details of physical fact, some- 
 thing within him revolted. He began to see dimly 
 that science itself, for all its prophets, did not solve 
 the problem he was interested in. After all, science 
 was only a body of human knowledge. And though 
 men should in time know infinitely more than they 
 knew now, there would still be the humane problem 
 of how they should use their knowledge. Not in 
 clear terms, but gropingly, he apprehended that the 
 central human problem was the problem of the eli- 
 gible life, and that at its utmost science was but one 
 contribution to it. He was interested in that central 
 thing in the human universe — humanity itself. 
 Only years later did he see how right he had been in 
 his young intuition that, for all the room science was 
 taking in the world, it was, humanly speaking, but 
 
2 54 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 the servant, precise and reliable, of the moral part 
 of human nature. 
 
 Now, however, he mistrusted his perceptions. 
 And his passion for the center not only kept him 
 from being contented with a pursuit of the details 
 of scientific knowledge, but deprived him of the 
 guidance of the best minds around him. He could 
 not know then, as he knew years later, the malady 
 of which he was sick — that something in his native 
 bent and in the accidents of his experience had put 
 him out of tune with his time, had given him a 
 passion for the general in an age of the particular, 
 and for the humane and moral in an age of the 
 physical. And his training had given him neither 
 the data to satisfy his bent nor the habit of concen- 
 tration, of disciplined patience, of systematic pro- 
 cedure, that should give substantial body to the ab- 
 stractions of his thought. 
 
 And so, without guidance, and vaguely troubled, 
 he sank back into his old desultory reading. Even 
 his reading, after his disappointments and disillu- 
 sionments, had lost something of its old power 
 with him. He seemed, in his shallow experience, to 
 have plunged into life and to have emerged with a 
 sense of its emptiness. But he was still young, and 
 at the bottom of his heart there clung a hope that 
 refused the doubts of his experience. Somewhere 
 there must be a center, and a knowledge of the 
 center, and a guidance that could lead him on the 
 high path of those longings that so persisted in the 
 mysterious depths of his spirit. 
 
Ill 
 
 PSEUDODOXIA EPIDEMICA 
 
 THEY were undergraduates, and their experi- 
 ence was that they did not fit, that they were 
 not taken care of. The significance of their case 
 lay in the fact that they were, as distinguished from 
 others who seemed to fit so well and to be so well 
 cared for, just those for whom that care might have 
 been supposed to be calculated. As for them, to 
 begin with they were willing enough to fit, anxious 
 enough to be taken care of. What else could have 
 been the content of the thrill of one of them, who 
 might have been any one of them so typical was he 
 of the rest, as he first neared the college campus 
 and caught the gleam of roofs above its treetops? 
 
 It was late September, and cold, and a northeast 
 wind pushed the drippings of his umbrella against 
 his face. The wide, empty suburban streets were 
 washed clean, and gleamed darkly under the gray 
 sky. Other figures passed him now and again, mere 
 wind-whipped vehicles for umbrellas — rapt, self- 
 centered. He too was rapt, but outwardly, and he 
 stood minute after minute unable, or unwilling, to 
 break the spell that bound him. Gleaming gray 
 sky, gleaming gray streets, the rain drifting heavily 
 southward; before him the drenched green of the 
 campus and the solid red of aspiring roofs — there 
 
256 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 they were before him, and there was he — face to 
 face, the seeker and the sought. There was no 
 other content to the spell, no other content in the 
 seeker's mind. While it lasted there was for him no 
 beyond. It was a supreme moment. To move 
 would have been to take a step into the future, to 
 begin a new and uncertain course toward an uncon- 
 ceived goal. To stand still was to prolong the mo- 
 ment of ultimate achievement. No doubt to turn 
 back now would have been to cancel the validity of 
 the moment — so much of futurity lay in the spell 
 that held him — but the value of the moment lay 
 in its perfect culmination of the past. It was the 
 moment itself, not the future consequences of it, 
 that brought fulfillment to the yearnings and hopes 
 that had been his for so long. They were full to the 
 brim in his sense that at last he had come to college. 
 The time came when the moment could hold no 
 more; and when he finally moved from the spot it 
 was a movement into the future. That he moved 
 forward was a confession of faith, a confession of 
 his anxiety to be taken care of. Above everything 
 else he needed to be taken care of, for he had re- 
 sponded, with an innocence that made his abandon 
 dangerous, to many of the subtle whisperings of the 
 time spirit, and he now stood at the gate of his 
 college far more really adrift than he had seemed 
 even in the whim of his fanciful musings. For his 
 time had fallen at the end of the century, and he 
 was sensitive enough to its spirit to have registered 
 in his own soul many of its sweeping negations. If 
 he had had the momentum of strong family tradition 
 he might have rounded this headland witii its cross 
 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica 257 
 
 currents and shifting gusts, and caught the breeze 
 again within the haven of the college. But he was 
 average American enough to have inherited no cul- 
 tural traditions that could carry him here. At home 
 on the paternal shelves he had seen from childhood 
 respectable ranks of books, but the Liddell and 
 Scott, and the Xenophon there, more worn of covers 
 than of contents, had as yet come to mean no more 
 to him than long ago had meant the A-ANA, 
 ANA-ATH, ATH-BOI of the Britannica that he 
 had learnt from long gazing before he had mastered 
 his school primer. As for the rest it was significant 
 of the vagueness of the family tradition that Shake- 
 speare and Hugo and Sir Walter were left to span 
 the gap between Xenophon and a battered volume 
 of Emerson. 
 
 There was, however, a Xenophon, and perhaps 
 still enough of what had brought it there to have 
 kept him from filling out his notion of ''education" 
 wholly at the suggestion of the time spirit. He was, 
 none the less, susceptible enough to have been 
 thrilled with the spell of the word itself without 
 reference to its content. It was an open sesame, 
 the more powerful that its possibilities were so 
 hidden. But if it lacked substance it was rich in a 
 peculiar connotation that had grown out of the life 
 that had fallen to his lot — a life of poverty and 
 family failure that had found its consolation in an 
 escape, more or less perfect, though doubtless tinged 
 with the futility of self-deception, into the limbo of 
 the imagination. Poverty and failure had drawn 
 him into an isolation that had left him no alternative 
 but books; and books, indiscriminately devoured, 
 
258 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 had led his escape through bright ways so remote 
 as to deepen the sordidness of that world that had 
 thrust him aside. On the one hand had been toil 
 that brought no rewards, and material anxieties that 
 were none the less real that the stakes were so 
 pitiably small; on the other a spacious region in 
 which was set free in him every yearning of affection, 
 every ardor of will, every energy of imagination, 
 that the real world so effectively thwarted. Latterly 
 too, as the thought of college had grown into the 
 hope of a permanent and material escape, the real 
 world and its toil had sunk to the status of a mere 
 means. What wonder that the real world had grown 
 dim, or that that other world, animated for him at 
 least by every natural exercise of his spirit, had 
 grown more humanly real? 
 
 If in this plight he had built up for the word a 
 connotation that had for him no content of definite 
 meaning, he had at least this advantage from his 
 vagueness — that he had not filled it with a meaning 
 definitely false. However much he shared with 
 others of his time the idea that education meant a 
 way out J the way out for him had come to be by 
 the gate of the spirit, never as with others by way 
 of that material world that had grown so dim to 
 him. If he had, by the failure of family tradition, 
 no clear sense of the road that would take him into 
 the region of the spirit, he at least had no tempta- 
 tion to follow those clearly marked as leading some- 
 where else. That he had no clear sense of his own 
 road, however, was not a matter to daunt him now, 
 for his faith was unshaken in the willingness and 
 competence to guide him of those who had that 
 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica 259 
 
 guidance in trust. Thus much of definite content 
 had come to him in the word "college" — perhaps 
 from the battered Emerson — that its very reason 
 for being was that it stood in the midst of the tur- 
 moil of material life to guide its voluntary entrants 
 into the life of the spirit. So he had gone, when the 
 opportunity came, to a college that had as yet few 
 temptations for those whose chosen way out lay 
 through the acquisitive vocations, and he found him- 
 self now at last on the very threshold of that new 
 life. 
 
 In another respect, however, he was not so free 
 from the spell of the time spirit; and if he had re- 
 frained from filling the word "education" with a 
 worldly content by escaping the spell in one of its 
 aspects, he had emptied it of a possible spiritual 
 content by falling under the spell in another. Re- 
 ligion had for him, as for his whole generation, 
 passed into quiescence. It was, perhaps, in his con- 
 sciousness of the loss rather than in the loss itself 
 that his case was in any way notable. The spell was 
 general enough ; to know that you were under it was 
 the rare feat. No doubt his family tradition was 
 operative here, for there had been ministers of the 
 church so continuously in the known history of the 
 family as at one time to have created the surmise 
 that he might inherit the ministry together with the 
 churchly name that had come to him from his ma- 
 ternal grandfather. He was, as a consequence, sen- 
 sitively aware of the passing of the religious spirit. 
 Others there undoubtedly were to whom religion had 
 always been vague or merely formal, and for whom 
 the vast inheritance of organization, of institution, 
 
2 6o A Lover of the Chair 
 
 and more effectively of vocabulary and childhood 
 association, still sufficed to give them all the religion 
 of which they had ever been aware. To him, how- 
 ever, came the sharp consciousness of the passing 
 of that spirit both from his own outlook upon Hfe 
 and from that of the generality about him. It had 
 come first, this realization, with a struggle in which 
 it was thrust aside and apparently stifled. But the 
 struggle had not been without its fruits in an ulti- 
 mate and shocking counter-conversion that had car- 
 ried him, until its force was expended, into the 
 militant ranks of the opposition. That he had be- 
 fore long retired from the fight was due, as he him- 
 self came to realize, to that persistent habit of mind 
 which in secular matters so closely allied his hopes 
 and ambitions to things of the spirit. But however 
 time had mollified the militant combativeness of his 
 rationalism, he never again lost his rational point of 
 view. 
 
 For him, therefore, whose vague notion of edu- 
 cation was at the other extreme from the practical, 
 and whose religion had weakened and died, and 
 whose traditions were so at a loss beyond the pale 
 of vocation and religion, the situation would have 
 seemed dire had he not in his youth and inexperience 
 put so implicit a faith in the identity of the college 
 with that secular inner life that had become so real 
 to him. What wonder, therefore, as he stood on 
 the threshold filled with a faith so far more in- 
 spiring than knowledge, that the moment was one 
 of supreme consummation! The uncertainty that 
 had oppressed the hopes of the immediate past and 
 weighted with doubt the only motives that had en- 
 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica 261 
 
 nobled it, at last had a refutation too dramatic, too 
 tangibly set forth in the event itself, to let it be any- 
 thing less than supreme. If an enticing sun had 
 made, at this first moment, the view before him the 
 common visual property of other passers, or had 
 lured thither the sophisticated habitues to whom it 
 was as an old story, loved but unheeded, the moment 
 might have been a less perfect dramatization of the 
 event in his own mind. But as it was, the very 
 solitude of his possession — fit cUmax of the solitude 
 of his hopes — constituted its dramatic fitness. It 
 was of a piece with what had gone before. Hence- 
 forth, no doubt, he would share it with others; now, 
 cleared of extraneous detail, green and gray and 
 red, against the ominously gleaming gray of sky 
 and rain-swept streets, it was there for him. It 
 was, until the moment overflowed, his alone. 
 
 So innocent a faith he had that he would be taken 
 care of, and so ignorant was he of what that care 
 should be, that it was not until he found himself, 
 a year later, at the same spot, that the beginnings of 
 doubt assailed him. What — he came to ask in the 
 shock of that vivified memory — was it all making 
 for, this diversity? For he still clung to his vision 
 of the inner life, and to the hope, not yet dulled, but 
 not yet confirmed, that the college might solidify 
 his fluid sense that there was something there to 
 build up. But he saw now that though he had done 
 well all that had been asked of him, and lent himself 
 eagerly to the unrelated tasks that had come one at 
 a time to his hand, he was still as vague, as to end 
 and means, in his sophomoric sophistication, as he 
 had been in his pathetic freshman ardor. 
 
262 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 His sophomoric confidence, however, was not 
 proof against the uncertainties of the situation. The 
 prodigious array of ^'courses" which in printed 
 schedule bulged his pocket served only to heighten 
 the feebleness of the hope that something would 
 emerge to which his separate tasks were contrib- 
 uting. That nothing had emerged he was fully 
 aware, but in his sophomoric contempt he could 
 have forgiven his freshman futility if he could have 
 felt a trust that the courses he was now to choose 
 would even dimly make for a satisfaction of the 
 longings that still dogged him. He knew that if he 
 had wanted to enter the law, or medicine, or en- 
 gineering, or any of those professions that seemed 
 to him but the intensification of that real world 
 which he wanted so to rise above, he could have 
 found schools to guide him with advice — advice 
 which he might not have understood but which none 
 the less he would have obeyed with the same faith 
 that had been so insufficiently fed by the college he 
 had chosen. Not that he had even now a clear 
 sense of what perplexed him; he only knew that he 
 might have made his choice from that array in the 
 bulging schedule less blindly if he had had even a 
 dim feeling for some structure to which his choice 
 was to contribute. He felt the gnawing discontent 
 of aimlessness. 
 
 His subsequent selections, far from quieting this 
 unrest, only served to heighten it. For he had gone 
 to the kindly dean with longings too inarticulate in 
 his own mind to be worded in the bustling publicity 
 of the ' 'office," and within the crowded minutes his 
 numbered ticket allotted him. In the hour of wait- 
 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica 263 
 
 ing in line he attained in the presence of those 
 others to a sense of the official impersonality of even 
 his own affairs. The mechanism of this collegiate 
 machine loomed before him so deper'sonalized as to 
 make an emotional appeal a mere impertinence. In 
 elaborating itself for the personal service of the in- 
 dividual youth whom it hoped to enrich in the end 
 with a personality, it seemed somehow to have 
 attained to an entity to which the youth himself be- 
 came merely provender. Who was he, in response 
 to the tonsorial ''next" that summoned him into the 
 presence, however kindly, of the clerical dean, — 
 who was he, to interrupt the regularity of that busi- 
 nesslike procession with a passionate appeal for a 
 philosophy of life! And if the dean found no fault 
 with the casual choice marked down on the busi- 
 nesslike card before him, how was he to know how 
 casual, how blind, that choice had been? He too 
 was but a servant of that machine, not chosen to 
 impart to each successive entrant in his morning's 
 work a philosophic outlook. 
 
 But for our youth, the sense that he had com- 
 mitted himself for months to come, for a precious 
 fraction of the whole time his college was to do so 
 much for him in, to a choice that had been so casual, 
 so blind, heightened the unrest that the retrospect 
 of his first year had already stirred in him. That 
 the separate studies themselves were unable to help 
 him he was by now dimly aware. They fell apart 
 one from another; they refused to cohere. In- 
 ternally each was self-sufficient enough, carefully 
 labeled, and rounded out by an examination; but 
 the examination might be the valedictory to all the 
 
264 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 knowledge and wisdom the course contained. After 
 the valedictory each might be forgotten. The whole 
 that was to be attained was not a structure; it was 
 not even an accumulation; it was only a book- 
 keeper's record of "having had" successively, for a 
 moment each, a sufficient number of parts. Our un- 
 happy youth was as yet, however, unaware of the 
 more general case. That the kindly dean of the 
 college — the college that existed only to guide men 
 to the hfe of the spirit — had help for others, but 
 had none for those whose generous desire was to 
 enter that life, had not as yet stirred in him the 
 bitter smile which before the end came to be his 
 habitual response to all laudations of the college. 
 He could only feel the baffling pain of not having 
 got what he could not have defined. 
 
 If, however, discontent at his displacement cut 
 him off from associations that arise from community 
 of work and enthusiasms, he fell heir to others tra- 
 ditionally more prolific of ardent friendship — those 
 that arise through community of disaffection. In 
 the emptiness of his life he had clung to what had 
 given him his first feeling for the distinction between 
 the haphazard life around him and the more stable 
 life of the spirit. He still read in his old objectless, 
 unguided, desultory way, in the literature of his own 
 tongue, and had insensibly drifted into the elaborate 
 department of his college that concerned itself with 
 that literature. And there it was that he fell in 
 with others whose tempers and hopes and experi- 
 ences and disappointments were so like his own 
 that their mutual sympathy was spontaneous and 
 lasting. That their association was so lasting was 
 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica 265 
 
 due, as they came to realize, to the circumstance 
 that they remained to the end so obstinately un- 
 digested a particle in the inwards of their college. 
 
 In one sense they were happier than most of their 
 fellows — in the way of friendship — and that 
 atoned for much. They went to fetes, and laughed 
 with their acquaintances, sang and smoked, and were 
 happy on the surface — even below the surface, in 
 the possession of that friendship that was the most 
 permanant thing that came to them from their col- 
 legiate years. There was, no doubt, as much ac- 
 cident in their first meeting as usually goes to the 
 happy or unhappy incidents of life; but they came 
 to feel a kind of beneficent fatality in the circum- 
 stance that seemed to rescue them so consciously 
 from the futility of the college itself. There were 
 three or four or five of them, with the dubious ad- 
 vantage of a community of poverty. But they had 
 other genuine advantages; one of them had a talent 
 for friendship, another for trenchant analysis and 
 criticism, another for happy irony, and another for 
 sensitive appreciation. So happy a combination of 
 qualities — and even their poverty might be called 
 happy in isolating them and keeping them from 
 eking out the emptiness of their college life with 
 purchasable gayeties — such a happy combination 
 made their intimate life incomparably rich. 
 
 It was a life of daily association, with a routine 
 of habit and custom that kept it from morbidity. 
 There were long Saturdays that took them, week 
 after week, the rounds of the second-hand book- 
 shops, picking up here and there what their meager 
 purses could afford of old writers whom they had 
 
2 66 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 come, in their evenings of reading, to love as much 
 for their present association as for their intrinsic 
 worth. There were dingy cafes, where the waiters 
 came to know their favorite dishes and comment on 
 their occasional absences, and where they spent long 
 mealtimes bandying passages from their day's finds, 
 and munching those unbelievable pastries called 
 Bismarcks. There was the impossibly remote top 
 gallery at the symphony concert, where they found 
 themselves, for the moment, landed on the coast of 
 an alluring Bohemia, urban neighbor of Arcadia. 
 There were, in defiance of to-morrow's lessons, long 
 evenings of reading and Broseley's churchwardens, 
 and midnights of wildest metaphysics when even 
 the dormitory lay in silence; and late strolls on the 
 lake shore where the glare of distant iron mills 
 dimmed the stars and cast a ghostly light on the 
 breakers that roared at their feet. 
 
 Through it all ran the stirrings of generous friend- 
 ship, which had for a time at least the virtue of 
 being enough. Even long afterwards, so whole was 
 the sufficiency of this aspect of their lives in spite of 
 the haunting misery of their more far-seeing mo- 
 ments, that one of them could write, with perhaps 
 no more enlargement than usually goes to the lauda 
 temporis acti, truer to the revery no doubt than to 
 the life itself, a reminiscent epistle that might have 
 been inspired by that very ballad of Thackeray's 
 from which they learned of the Latakia that became 
 their favorite weed — 
 
 Dear Marsden: In the days of yore 
 When we, three lusty peers or four, 
 Or sometimes five, 
 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica 267 
 
 Flourished on nought, and ate and slept 
 The better for 't, and grew adept 
 At sophomoric talk that kept 
 Our souls alive, 
 
 We little thought we'd come to praise 
 Those fine Elizabethan days 
 
 Of poverty. 
 Now that we've come to man's estate, 
 With widening parts and stiffening gait, 
 Would we not brook again that fate 
 
 With charity, 
 
 If we could have those days again, — 
 The eager soul, the ready pen. 
 
 The easy jest. 
 The careless strut, the merry eye, 
 A temper calm, a spirit high, 
 A ceaseless curiosity 
 
 And interest? 
 
 Oh, once again to enjoy that riot. 
 That reckless Rabelaisian diet, 
 
 Bismarck and salad! 
 Those high siestas after tea. 
 With briar, cob, or Broseley, 
 And dream- compelling Latakie 
 
 Of Thackeray's ballad! 
 
 Once more at Ferris's to dine 
 
 Where spirits high compensed for wine 
 
 And luxury! 
 Thence to the orchestra in time 
 To accomplish swift that torrid climb, 
 And hear old Mozart, his sublime 
 
 Sweet symphony! 
 
2 68 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 Do you recall how by your fire 
 
 We read — oh, land of heart's desire! — 
 
 Old Conrad's "Youth"? 
 Rare Harlow, Wendhall, Palinson, 
 Shall we e'er meet in Muir again 
 To talk, to smoke, to dream, save when 
 
 We dream in sooth? 
 
 Not one of them but was humbly grateful to the 
 college that it had done thus much for them, that 
 it had made possible so rich and intimate a friend- 
 ship. But from the rest they stood aloof, and though 
 they were personally happy, yet that constructive 
 passion that had thrown them together left them 
 acutely discontent with the centerlessness of their 
 collegiate life. They loved their college, its green 
 quads, its gray buildings, its dormitories with their 
 fullness and variety of the pageant of youth. If 
 their mutual relations were so rich, however, their 
 common outward relations with the more official as- 
 pects of the college were militant with criticism. 
 Their talk was fed by their constant inharmony with 
 the life they were standing apart from. They won 
 for themselves the current epithets for those who 
 hold aloof and criticise. They were, it was said, 
 befoulers of their own nests, indifferent, laughing at 
 all ardor and enthusiasm. They cried out passion- 
 ately at times that it was those others who were in- 
 different — those others who took whatever came, 
 with uncritical lightness, to whom one thing was as 
 good as another. But they were overwhelmed with 
 the loud clamor of denial. Yet so far from in- 
 different were they that it was their very yearning 
 for something to center their ardor upon, to be en- 
 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica 269 
 
 thusiastic about, that stirred their own unrest, their 
 own criticism of a nest that had proved for them so 
 inhospitable. 
 
 What they were after — and though they did not 
 know it in so definite a formula it was a no less 
 ardent search — was wisdom rather than informa- 
 tion. ^What," they put it again and again to each 
 other in moments when the life about them seemed 
 overwhelming in its diversity and cross purposes — 
 "what the deuce is it all about?" What they felt, 
 whenever they came to choose anew from all that 
 the college offered them so lavishly was that just 
 the larger whole which could stir the loyalty and 
 devotion within them, was, though the thing they 
 longed for, and the thing for which they had come, 
 just the thing that escaped and was lost between 
 those neatly packed, self-sufficient parcels. To 
 others, perhaps, those parcels were enough, but to 
 them whose wanderings took them about the tu- 
 multuous city that seemed so blind, so mad, in its 
 purposeless energy; whose desultory reading in- 
 spired them to a speculative inquiry fed by ideas 
 that transcended their immediate experiences; and 
 whose talk bluntly put to all their readings and ex- 
 periences the most searching questions their errant 
 minds could form — to them those parcels of in- 
 formation lacked the only significance that could 
 have inhered in them — relationship to some larger 
 vision, for a sense of which they so ardently longed. 
 
 Once, late in their course, they came upon a phrase 
 which fixed for them thenceforth the malady of their 
 college from which they were made to suffer, and 
 their triumphant repetitions of it on numberless oc- 
 
2 70 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 casions were no doubt exasperating to their less dis- 
 contented fellows. Pseudodoxia Epidemical Their 
 college was "not a single discourse of one continuous 
 tenor, of which the latter part rose from the former/' 
 as Dr. Johnson, for whom they formed a rebellious 
 love, said of that work of Sir Thomas Browne, "but 
 an enumeration of many unrelated particulars." 
 Pseudodoxia Epidemica indeed! They were not 
 prigs. They had a normal, healthy resistance to 
 the cultural process, but there came a time when they 
 rose to a sense of rebellion at the very freedom which 
 the college gave them, and which their fellows 
 gloried in — a time when they would have wel- 
 comed a minute compulsion which would have re- 
 lieved them of the pain that each new necessity of 
 choice forced them to suffer. Those others had, 
 perhaps, aims which they could conceive before 
 they were fitted to attain them; but for them, their 
 purpose was one that only discipline itself could 
 train them to conceive. 
 
 Their last days were bitter. How could they have 
 been otherwise? They had their friendship, but 
 that was now soon to be broken up, and from their 
 college they had got nothing permanent. The facts, 
 the information of their studies, had disappeared, 
 and they had never attained to a point of view, a 
 standard of judgment. And though they had done 
 what the college had required of them, and done it so 
 well that the college had awarded them all the honors 
 in its gift, their own sense of its service was that it 
 had but enabled them to see with disabused senses 
 how empty, how futile it had proved to be, how 
 feebly it maintained the austerities of its great tra- 
 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica 271 
 
 ditions, and for themselves how vague their sense of 
 a structure to which the play of their spirits might 
 contribute, how empty the future for their spirits 
 with all hope of guidance gone from them. 
 
 What wonder that beneath the final gayeties with 
 which they tried to celebrate the one thing which 
 the college had given them — friendship — there lay 
 a passionate bitterness that their college had left 
 their spirits as uncentered as it had found them at 
 the beginning? They were passionately bitter, but 
 their bitterness was the smouldering of a faith in 
 their spirits — a faith that still burned in them that 
 there was something there to build up. 
 
IV 
 
 IN QUEST OF THE CENTER 
 
 HIS later fortunes — our youth who had passed 
 so rebelliously through his college years — 
 were ironic and curious. The college had left him 
 without a point of view, without an attitude to life; 
 and so strongly bent was his mind, wrought upon 
 by his family heritage, his early poverty, his years 
 of rebellious faith in the life of the spirit, that a 
 point of view, an attitude to life, was for him, pas- 
 sionately, the one thing for which he cared. His 
 college, however, which he would have said had done 
 nothing for him, had done thus much: it had found 
 him desultorily reading Emerson, Arnold, Coleridge, 
 and Sir Thomas Browne; and had left him desul- 
 torily reading Spencer, Haeckel, Ibsen, and Bernard 
 Shaw. But even of them he had disconcerting doubts. 
 His uncentered mind still had before it the search, 
 not for a goal but for a starting point. 
 
 He wandered far, and in his quest he touched 
 upon many of the devotions, the theories, the phil- 
 osophies, by which those of his time were trying to 
 comport themselves as both players and pawns in 
 the game. The vagaries of his course were what 
 his college had left him subject to: he had no bal- 
 last, no compass, and no impulsion but a passionate 
 desire to arrive. His mind, uninformed, and un- 
 
In Quest of the Center 273 
 
 formed by a knowledge of the significant thought of 
 the past, did its thinking in crudely generic terms. 
 And in his ignorance and the crude generality of his 
 thought he mounted, with a triumph that was not 
 without its pathos, to the conception of many a 
 world-old commonplace. 
 
 It was one of the ironies at which he himself was 
 able to smile, that he never in reality left the college. 
 He could smile, though bitterly, at the sudden light 
 that his appointment threw on the emptiness of his 
 own college years. He was a part of the fountain 
 now, he himself, for all his ignorance. The mirthless 
 humor of the situation increased in him the impatient 
 recklessness that had roughened his manners and 
 made his speech harsh. 
 
 His acceptance made him aware that even his 
 own failure in the college had not wholly daunted 
 his faith that what he had not got was none the less 
 there. As he looked out at the world it was still 
 the college that contained the mystery, though he 
 had failed to come upon it. And no doubt it was 
 the sense that there he might still wander in his 
 search that had given him the thrill with which he 
 had welcomed the chance to stay within its walls. 
 He did not at the first moment realize how soon the 
 irony of his own position would envelop him. It 
 was but the greater when it came upon him, that he 
 was to profess the very literature from which the 
 college itself had in a measure weaned him. 
 
 Were those others, he presently came to ask, as 
 vague as he as to what ultimate thing he was driving 
 at? Were they perhaps unaware, those grey-beards, 
 
2 74 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 that there was a structure toward which they should 
 be building? Were they unaware of their own 
 vagueness? It came home to him doggedly, how- 
 ever, in spite of the rebellion which made him so 
 arrogantly impatient with the blindness of those who 
 could not penetrate his own shallows, that he was as 
 yet a mere novice elevated no doubt more for his 
 promise than for his attainment. He spent his first 
 year, therefore, in search and inquiry, with more pet- 
 ulance than he could justify in his more urbane mo- 
 ments, but without rancor and with an open mind. 
 Did those others know, those others who — so 
 specifically did he probe — were beside him and 
 above him in his own work, what the deuce it was 
 all about? From his own older observations he 
 knew that they were divided into factions with 
 curious mutual contempt. One of these factions was 
 concerned with the emotional values of language and 
 literature, and the other with their historical origins. 
 For his own part, by virtue of the impulse that had 
 first brought him to the college, he would instinc- 
 tively have fallen among the emotional interpreters, 
 had it not been for a circumstance that had arisen 
 from the vagrancies of his early experience. As it 
 was, however, this circumstance held him aloof from 
 both. The prompt result was that he came to be- 
 lieve that the thing he had so long hunted for with- 
 out success he must find elsewhere than in the pur- 
 suit of his own business — perhaps even elsewhere 
 than in the college. The effect on his own work 
 was that it became a curious hybrid intrinsically no 
 nearer his sense of right than either of the factions 
 he was holding aloof from. But for him it had the 
 
In Quest of the Center 275 
 
 virtue of not having crystallized into what he felt 
 to be definitely wrong. He suffered, however, a 
 renewal of the misery that had so long dogged his 
 thinking moments. He had attained to no sense of 
 life; he was still adrift. 
 
 The circumstance that held him so aloof from the 
 tendency of the factions was the remembrance of 
 his own early poverty, and his quickened sympathy 
 for the sordid chaos of the city in which his days 
 were fallen — remote considerations enough in 
 their apparent detachment from his problem, but 
 for him marking inevitably the way of his approach. 
 As the year crept by that followed the beginning 
 of his duties his reflection threw him more and more 
 into doubt, and at last into utter negation of the 
 value of the routine of his teaching. What was its 
 point in its isolation from the general life? Echoes 
 of such a cry came to him in his reveries, in his 
 wanderings about the city, in the reading he had 
 fallen into. He understood the general life with all 
 the vividness born of harsh experience, and slowly 
 but without bitterness he generalized it into an in- 
 justice that constituted the great human problem. 
 What indeed was life for if not for those who lived 
 it? And what were its institutions for if not to 
 make it more perfect for them? But the college — ! 
 His impatience grew. 
 
 In retrospect the tenuous thread of accidents that 
 had rescued him from a lifetime of sordid struggle 
 for bread seemed to have been saved from breaking 
 so fortuitously that he could not think of it without 
 a shudder. It had miraculously not broken ; and he 
 had gone to college. Was he now, however, he who 
 
276 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 knew so keenly what poverty meant, to isolate him- 
 self from all connection with the common lot? Was 
 the college after all merely an escape? Did it not 
 gain its significance from its service to humanity? 
 It was just that significance that he was unable to 
 see in the reality before him. He knew that poverty 
 was too common an accident to be ignored, yet here 
 was he, luckily rescued from it, in the attitude of 
 indifference. The snug remoteness of his daily rou- 
 tine revolted him. He cast himself passionately 
 among the humanitarians. 
 
 So unused was he to the drive of a positive en- 
 thusiasm that in its first moments he gave an un- 
 checked rein to his humanitarian impulse. He saw 
 with new eyes the chaotic city about him, its squalor, 
 its depravity, its waste of humanity. He saw, more 
 bitterly than all, young children growing up in sur- 
 roundings such as to condemn them, before they 
 could raise a voice in protest, to a lifetime no better 
 than the life they were born to. In the intensity of 
 his feelings he saw the subjective equality of men 
 in the right to happiness. And the spectacle he 
 saw before him was one of appalling inequality. The 
 eternal mystery of consciousness, the haphazard dis- 
 tribution of identity, the inequality of natural gifts, 
 he could muse upon without destroying his sense 
 that for much of the variety of fortune to which con- 
 scious identities were born humanity itself was re- 
 sponsible. 
 
 With that acceptance of responsibility, aptly 
 enough, there had come to him, as to many, the 
 sense of power to meet it. At a critical moment his 
 mind had been seized and formed by the evolution- 
 
In Quest of the Center 277 
 
 ary conception. It would not have been possible 
 now, if it had been desirable, to cast his thoughts in 
 any other mould. Perhaps because, with the scien- 
 tific movement, the humanities had dropped into 
 a minor place, it was easier for the people of his time 
 to think of human life in terms of biology than it 
 would have been for an earlier generation. The 
 scientific world had gone with Darwin and Huxley 
 and Spencer. With it as with them the biological 
 analogy had becom.e the biological identity. And in 
 biology the whole of the past had come to be summed 
 up in a word: Evolution. The conception was in- 
 toxicating. At last men seemed to have grasped 
 life as a whole. The sense of its slow and painful 
 duration and development, slowly and painfully ac- 
 quired by the old humanists from the records of 
 human thought and experience, was here foreshort- 
 ened by the flash of a definition that revealed the 
 process of life from its beginning, and cast light 
 ahead into the future. Boxed into the brief compass 
 of a word life seemed somehow easily dirigible. 
 
 Round about lay the whole body of scientific 
 knowledge to be mastered and enlarged and applied 
 to human life; and before stretched the new route 
 of humanity whose destiny now lay in its own self- 
 conscious power. Life could be rationalized. In- 
 stead of the haphazardry of chance which had made 
 such fearful waste and suffering as he saw about 
 him, there could be ordered a social process in which 
 every individual should be brought to the highest 
 possible development. Here was a service, it seemed 
 to him in the sweep of his new outlook, to which he 
 might devote himself without the hesitations that 
 
278 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 had dogged his professional Hfe. He spent a period 
 bitterly regretting that in his first vision of science 
 there had not been revealed to him the connection 
 between science and the human problems with which 
 he was so persistently concerned. The emptiness of 
 his college years might then have been filled with 
 just that significance for which he had so passion- 
 ately longed. 
 
 In the midst of such musings he stood, one dusk, 
 at a down-town street corner half filled with shame 
 that he still held aloof from the real work of life. 
 Stores and counting houses and factories were clos- 
 ing, and clerks and operatives tired from the routine 
 of the day thronged the streets. Wistful girls' faces, 
 still young, still pretty, but with the mark of the 
 curse already upon them, peered at him as he stood, 
 himself wistful and sympathetic, at the side of the 
 human stream. Once or twice he caught in an un- 
 derstanding face an answering sympathy, and he 
 glowed with a rush of feeling that confirmed mys- 
 teriously his sense that his academic aloofness was 
 essentially wrong. The warm pulse of humanity 
 throbbed at his heart. Once there passed him an 
 evil fellow cursing his drunken wife. There was 
 no redeeming virtue in the man's own face; he too 
 was sodden with drink. But our youth was more 
 touched with the incident as it was than if the man 
 had been better himself. Here was no mere per- 
 sonal tragedy of virtue victimized by vice. That 
 would have been of the native warp of life. Here 
 was something larger in which responsible society 
 itself was the oppressor, crushing out the possibility 
 of virtue from both victims. He shuddered at the 
 
In Quest of the Center 279 
 
 picture. And back in his mind there came a mock- 
 ing voice repeating what he had said that morning 
 to the generous youths whose minds he was helping 
 to train: 'The beauties of the Faerie Queene lie in 
 that very detachment from reality that has freed the 
 poet's fancy from all sordid restraints." How paltry 
 it sounded, cold, aloof, remote from the actual life of 
 suffering man, and to be indulged only by ignor- 
 ing the substratum of human misery! Was the col- 
 lege, after all, only a private device of the elect to 
 enable them to escape from the intrusive responsi- 
 bility of life? And was he, having escaped, to devote 
 himself to freeing others from this responsibility? 
 
 He returned at night within the college walls with 
 a sense of emptiness and discontent more poignant 
 than he had ever known. The expensive elegance of 
 the college architecture, far removed from the sor- 
 did squalor he had but now caught a glimpse of, re- 
 volted him. His comfortable supper revolted him. 
 The Faerie Queene on his study table revolted him. 
 And the thought that he would in another day be 
 back at the task of leading youths out of a vital 
 concern for life — he who knew so well the colossal 
 injustice of civilization — taunted him insupportably. 
 He had lost his humor, but he laughed outright, 
 mockingly, at the spectacle he made for himself. In 
 the madness of the moment he dramatized for the 
 morrow an impassioned revolt before his startled 
 class, a wild fling at the smug process he was assist- 
 ing at and they were submitting to. He felt fiercely 
 that he could endure it no longer. 
 
 And in the white glow of his passion there came 
 to him a revelation. Never before had he been so 
 
28o A Lover of the Chair 
 
 intimately, so wholly himself, so free from the ob- 
 structive trammels of criticism and doubt. Never 
 had he felt so at one with himself, internal assent 
 going out to meet impulse. Criticism and doubt! 
 He saw that what he had been wasting his years 
 looking for in the college was an intellectual unity 
 in his conception of life. What wonder he had found 
 nothing! It was suddenly borne in on him that life 
 was a matter of living, and that its unity lay not in 
 an intellectual grasp but in an impulse vitalized by 
 emotion. He attained in a moment to a sense of how 
 essentially and obtrusively an outsider was that in- 
 tellect that had taken its seat in men's minds to the 
 disturbance of their internal unity. He had found 
 himself at last! 
 
 His next step, as he came to realize, was but a 
 confirmation of one of the findings of his passion: 
 the reason was an intruder. But the confirmation 
 came from so different a source and with so differ- 
 ent a coloring that he had shifted his loyalty to his 
 intelligence before he recognized the path he was 
 following. 
 
 In his present loyalty to his passions, however, the 
 immediate restlessness of inaction was intolerable, 
 and he left his room in search of quiet for his spirit. 
 It was perhaps an echo of that rationalism that was 
 inherent in him that sent him now to an advocatus 
 diaboli in the form of an obscure Grecian whose 
 aloofness was complete, yet whose very aloofness 
 had a quiet authority that appealed to him. Tonight, 
 however, when weary of mind and body he had 
 sunk into the great chair hospitably drawn up before 
 
In Quest of the Center 281 
 
 the fireplace, and had taken a mellow cigar from 
 his host's inlaid humidor, the very seductiveness 
 of the moment in those pleasant surroundings cried 
 out to his conscience. The Persian rugs under his 
 feet, the great racks of books against the walls, the 
 few rare pictures, the rich curtains, even now seemed 
 to dull the vividness of that other spectacle that 
 had so crystallized the impulses of his generous 
 sympathy. 
 
 He could, he knew, have broached the burning 
 question within him, and won a sympathetic analy- 
 sis of his case from his quiet friend; but he had no 
 need: the rich seclusion of this burial among the 
 records of the past, of this content with life at second 
 hand, was eloquent of the findings that would come 
 of such an analysis. His host had confronted too, 
 no doubt, the problem of Hfe; and the shelter of the 
 cloister was his solution. 
 
 The evening was not, however, without its im- 
 plicit broaching of the issue. They looked together 
 at curious old books with quaint pictures, at rare 
 first editions, and talked lightly of the strange, fitful 
 aberrations of the human spirit — of the sophists, 
 of the schoolmen mediaeval and modern, of the 
 Blakes, the Newmans, the Tolstoys in their vain 
 eternal quest for the quiet of the soul. But the 
 older man, with delicacy, had no unasked dogmatism 
 for his guest; and the younger man was too uncer- 
 tain of his own purposes to risk subsequent affront 
 to advice which he knew he might evoke. They 
 spoke of Plato. His host, with a smile, drew from 
 beneath the light on his table the blotted draft of 
 matter yet fresh from his pen and incomplete. 
 
2 82 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 ^'A moment's mood," he said, smiling gravely, "but 
 here in the midst of the turmoil of a life that has got 
 beyond our control by its very numbers, and by 
 giving over the reins to numbers, I sometimes re- 
 volt. I am no poet, alas! but the spectacle of life 
 is sometimes too poignant for utter silence. These 
 lines are serious, but only half serious." 
 
 The younger man read the passage without 
 comment. 
 
 Colors flashing upon the retina; motion, change, va- 
 riety stimulating the eager vision; sounds jailing grate- 
 fully upon the ear, of poplar leaves on still midnights, 
 of flames upon the burning hearth, of winter winds in 
 the chimney, of low unhurried voices; love, or hate, or 
 ambition, or anger, or sympathy — above all, sym- 
 pathy — concentrating the soul upon outward things; 
 fair faces, fair forms, stately music, humane justice, 
 bringing the hush of wonder upon the spirit; the rush 
 of life, its traffickings, its moth-like beating about the 
 marsh-lights of pleasure, the heaps of broken wings and 
 bodies seen at dawn the sport of the forgetful winds; 
 the ardent sense that deep-seated in the soul is a vision 
 of simple order which, could it but find a voice, might 
 breathe a meaning into the chaotic elements — such 
 are the moments when reality impinges with intensity. 
 
 Then, sudden, a veil falls upon the spirit, and reality, 
 the vision of life, becomes but a vision indeed, becomes 
 but the shadow of a dream, so unmotived the exits and 
 the entrances, so purposeless the sufferings, so empty the 
 foolishness and the wisdom, so meaningless even the 
 happiness that alone could make the evanescent con- 
 sciousness of being worth the insistent pain of life. If 
 then life be but a dream — for that dreams come and 
 go and bring strange recombinations in kaleidoscopic 
 
In Quest of the Center 283 
 
 succession, the impatient soul might, not unworthily, 
 wish to choose for its own phantom passage its own 
 phantom moment, Then — 
 
 O Chronos, dream again, if it be sooth 
 
 That life be but the shadow of your dream, 
 
 And we its shadow puppets. Dream again. 
 
 Dream me a Greek upon the agora. 
 
 There to hold converse with wise Socrates, 
 
 When life was young, and wisdom in its youth 
 
 Unfettered by the phantom facts of time, 
 
 Held to the heart and soul of living men. 
 
 Then might I walk with Plato — still unguessed 
 
 The anguish of all time once he was gone. 
 
 And it were well to feel the human warmth 
 
 Of austere virtue bodied in a god — 
 
 A thing of beauty and a presence near — 
 
 It was a fantastic, futile, whimsical conception, 
 but the young man read it in his present state of 
 mind with an intensity that he tried to conceal even 
 from the author himself. Out of all proportion to 
 what it said it awoke echoes of old, long-silent voices 
 within him. And when he rose to go it was with a 
 strange complex of emotions that kept him from a 
 word of comment or applause. 
 
 He said good-night, and launched himself into the 
 empty streets to walk until he should again have 
 composed his newly aroused spirit. 
 
 Most curiously his passion of the afternoon had 
 died. The passion of the growth of months had 
 quietly ebbed — it smote him in his shame — under 
 the soft influence of an hour in the midst of luxury, 
 and talk of the enhaloed past. That his passion 
 should have died so easily, however, was but an 
 
284 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 additional impulse to his conscience. He would 
 follow the day's impulse though the passion had gone 
 out of it. His conscience dominated him. 
 
 Under the cool stars he looked curiously upon 
 this sharp duality that had suddenly disintegrated 
 itself inside him — no less that they both for the 
 moment pointed in the same direction. They were 
 of different orders, deriving from different seats of 
 authority. Their commands echoed from different 
 quarters. He questioned searchingly the paradox 
 that, between the two, his allegiance went with the 
 one that seemed the less native, the one that he 
 seemed even to love the less and whose right he could 
 not explain — his conscience. 
 
 Seeing his allegiance secure but without the en- 
 dearing impulse of feeling, he tried to rally his emo- 
 tions to his support to make his final obedience less 
 perfunctory. He recalled tauntingly his host's 
 phrase, ''here in the midst of the turmoil of life," to 
 describe the seclusion of that aloof library where it 
 was known that he spent all his leisure hours, and 
 of which a single hour had sufficed to thrust off into 
 unmeasured distance that turmoil of life and its 
 poignant injustices against which but a moment be- 
 fore our youth had risen in passionate rebellion. He 
 recalled his host's slighting reference to numbers. 
 He recalled the dream fantasy with its nostalgic 
 straining toward the past. But his passion still lay 
 dormant, if not dead. 
 
 He knew, however, that on the morrow he would 
 take some step in that service to humanity which he 
 had deferred so long. He pictured to himself the 
 humble tasks of relieving poverty, comforting 
 
In Quest of the Center 285 
 
 despair, instructing elementary ignorance. There 
 at least, however vague his present sense of practical 
 means, he should know what he was driving at. And 
 though it would be work done in obscurity, and go 
 perceptibly no farther than the few wretches whom 
 he could reach, it would at least for his own peace of 
 mind be something that he could see the significance 
 of. If he should go to it without passionate enthu- 
 siasm it would at least satisfy his reason and his 
 conscience. In the freedom of his mood he followed 
 an impulse and went again, alone now, on one of 
 those midnight rambles that had added their touch 
 of endearing lawlessness to his undergraduate friend- 
 ship. And when he came, by way of the old route, 
 to the lake he sat down on a deserted bench and let 
 his mind take its undirected flight. That it went off 
 into corollaries of his day's experience was in keep- 
 ing with his natural bent. He had an instinctive ab- 
 horrence of isolated data ; he was more concerned for 
 the relations of the fact than for the fact itself. The 
 particular facet of his day's experience that his pres- 
 ent corollaries sprang from was his discovery of the 
 duality of his internal government. It intrigued 
 him; and it intrigued him the more because though 
 he had known of it and could have phrased it any 
 time these many years, yet only now had it become 
 a practical reality for him. He had found it, so to 
 speak, in its own natural lair, working in its work- 
 ing garb in its own workshop. The cold psychology 
 of it phrased in analytical terms had never come 
 home to him. 
 
 It was incidentally to this last perception that his 
 eyes were suddenly open to the significance of the 
 
286 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 scholastic work he had taken up. For he caught a 
 fleeting glimpse of the peculiar fact of literature — 
 that unlike the sciences that dealt analytically and 
 mechanically with the human aspects of life, litera- 
 ture dealt with them where they were to be found, 
 and with all their clothing of emotional force. What 
 for him had always been so merely pleasurable came 
 upon him keenly as something else, something very 
 close to a revelation of truth as it existed for human 
 use. 
 
 The perception was as yet general, but he saw in 
 it a field for a wide and revealing development. And 
 it struck him as a touch of irony that the significance 
 he had struggled so long and so blindly for he should 
 see for the first time just now when he was on the 
 point of abandoning it for something else. But he 
 wrenched himself from these regrets and went on 
 arily into the pleasant speculations that he had 
 caught a glimpse of. 
 
 A pair of verses from his host's fantastic poem 
 repeated themselves in his mind, and associated 
 themselves significantly with the dual government he 
 had but now been so keen about. 
 
 And it were well to feel the human warmth 
 Of austere virtue bodied in a god. 
 
 His thoughts took easy wing; matters that before 
 had lain isolated and inert fell into clarifying rela- 
 tions. He realized now that the sense of external 
 authority, as distinguished from the internal pas- 
 sions, was, for all the anthropologists, the real basis 
 of religion ; and he felt for the first time — he who 
 at one time had expected to enter the church — a 
 
In Quest of the Center 287 
 
 spontaneous religious impulse. The inspiration of 
 the Hebrew prophets, always before to him a curious 
 phenomenon of a strange, isolated people, became 
 one with the inspiration of all those who had at- 
 tained in spirit to the seat of that external authority 
 that looked down serenely but inexorably upon hu- 
 man affairs. The familiar demon of Socrates, at 
 which he had smiled indulgently, became a reality 
 — the externalization by a poetic nature of that 
 same authority. Confirmations fell in from odd 
 nooks of his memory. A passage that long ago had 
 impressed him from a translation of the Antigone 
 sprang into new vitality — the maiden's tragic 
 obedience to 
 
 The unchangeable, the unwritten code of Heaven, 
 Which is not of to-day and yesterday, 
 But lives forever, having origin 
 Whence no man knows. . . . 
 
 The long back-swell from an offshore breeze 
 heaved and broke endlessly at his feet, and in the 
 darkness under the vast skies, against the great 
 background of silence there seemed something in- 
 exorable in the somber rush and recession of the 
 waters. There, indeed, was a part of nature, of 
 which he too was a part, and from which he had 
 what he had of life. But he saw something dimly 
 that was not working in the heave and flow of the 
 swells, something that arrayed itself, in a measure, 
 against the mechanic fatal forces that he shared 
 with the winds and the waves. Whether it too might 
 be a part of that nature he did not then stop to in- 
 quire, but he saw that it was a thing distinctively 
 
2 88 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 human, and that it intruded upon the situation with 
 a scheme of its own. 
 
 Rapidly as he sat there in the darkness, and with 
 perhaps a too facile generalization, he cast his senses 
 and his passions on the side of nature; they were 
 things that came with the coming of life and 
 flourished without cultivation in the naive freedom 
 of neglect. And the intruder was the intelligence, 
 with its own conception of a way of life that was 
 good, which came with its schemes for directing the 
 senses and the passions, guiding the one to special 
 aptitudes, and the other to special restraints and di- 
 rections. 
 
 He had his love for the senses. He had his love 
 for the starry night about him, and for the remem- 
 brance of sights and odors and sounds that bound 
 him in affection to certain places — the odors of 
 certain lanes, the noises of the house heard through 
 closed doors in obbligato to the gliding pictures of 
 well loved tales, the checkered countrysides of his 
 boyhood home. And in his friends he loved the 
 fresh spontaneities of smile and gesture, the play 
 of spirit, the touches of life. Indeed those were the 
 very things he loved. But he loved them when they 
 were directed and proportioned to the intruder's 
 scheme. For he had seen sensuality and gluttony 
 and malice and envy and anger and cowardice — 
 spontaneities as natural and lively as the beat of 
 the waves at his feet — and he had hated them. He 
 knew that though it was life he valued, it was life 
 tempered and proportioned. 
 
 In the rapid outline of his case he paused for a 
 moment over the conscience. It was not intelli- 
 
In Quest of the Center 289 
 
 gence, he saw ait once. It belonged to the affections. 
 Reluctantly he conceded it to the side of nature. 
 But he saw, too, that if it belonged there it was, 
 none the less, the tie between nature and the in- 
 truder — the sanction for the intruder's authority. 
 It was a spontaneous loyalty to the intrusive schemes 
 for the good. 
 
 He rose slowly and began his slow march home- 
 ward. There was a peace in his mind that he had 
 not known since the first innocent year of his col- 
 lege life. He was still, indeed, far from out of the 
 bog he had been struggling to get free from. But he 
 had at last a sense of the direction to follow. 
 
 Characteristically he saw the danger that in his 
 intellectual excitement he might dull his own sense 
 of responsibility to the external authority that had 
 taken residence in his conscience; and when the 
 afternoon of the following day found him free he 
 betook himself resolutely to one of those modern 
 '^settlements" where so nobly men and women of 
 refinement and intelligence had thrown themselves 
 on the general stream of humanity with the hope 
 of rendering a service perceptible and direct to 
 those who were most deeply submerged. He went 
 with a head cooler and a heart lighter than he had 
 had for many a day. He had, it was true, a sense 
 of loss — loss of the enthusiasm which yesterday 
 had promised to make him a passionate devotee, 
 and for which his gain of a rational self-direction 
 was not a direct substitute. He had not lost, how- 
 ever, what had lain at the bottom of his original 
 impulse — the sense that life was plastic in the in- 
 
290 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 creasingly self-conscious hands of humanity itself; 
 that devoted service in the moulding of the future 
 might be directly related to that end he had so 
 futilely groped for in the long blind wanderings 
 through his college years. 
 
 It was a shock to him, when he came to it, to find 
 that he had overlooked the matter of his own de- 
 pendence — that he had nothing to offer but his un- 
 trained services, and that he must live by his own 
 work elsewhere. He clung therefore to his college, 
 and offered to the settlement his leisure hours. He 
 plunged with devotion into simple duties among the 
 ignorant and oppressed, and with them at times his 
 sympathies brought him almost to the height of his 
 early passion. The great injustices of life came 
 home to him in the concrete. Victims of greed, of 
 bad laws, of good laws unenforced; children broken 
 body and soul by work, by evil environment; girls 
 dragged in the mire by men's evil passions; old age 
 crushed by relentless want, outcast and neglected, 
 dying in corners; worse than all, depravity that had 
 been born and bred to depravity; and more touching 
 than all, the silent heroism of the poor. 
 
 If in his present state he had been less rational 
 the force of his feelings might have carried him 
 wholly into the work of the settlement, for oppor- 
 tunity soon came by which he might have dropped 
 his connection with the college and earned his living 
 in the very service itself. He could smile, a little 
 ruefully perhaps but still smile, to see that his hang- 
 ing back helped to confirm the ill repute that the 
 reason acquires in some very worthy minds. But 
 in his old college days he had grown inured to the 
 
In Quest of the Center 291 
 
 easy blame of those who had Httle experience of 
 the inner drive of an idea. And now there had re- 
 vived in him in the midst of his labors, in spite of 
 his own uneasy sense of disloyalty, in spite of his 
 knowledge that reason often became the tool of sloth 
 and desire, the sharp restraint of a rational doubt. 
 And he hesitated. He had viewed humanity from 
 below, stirred by a sense of mastery in the vast 
 sweep of the term evolution, by the sense of life's 
 plasticity, and by the sense of human responsibility 
 and power; and he had tried to enrich the lives of 
 some of those who had been trampled to the bottom. 
 No doubt here and there he had helped. But he saw 
 with discouragement how feeble was the remedy at 
 best, and how wild the trampling. He had no 
 criticism for those who so nobly did the work of 
 relief; but he saw clearly that they were not fight- 
 ing the battle — that they were but caring for the 
 wounded. For him, he wanted to enter the fight 
 itself. 
 
 His old constructive passion was again clamorous, 
 and though he knew how empty his own college 
 years had been, and though he saw in neither his 
 own teaching nor that of his colleagues about him 
 anything that should make the college better for 
 those that followed him, there came to him a per- 
 ception that made him cling to the college in spite 
 of his doubts. In his harsh contact with the con- 
 crete injustices of life, there came the sharp rein- 
 forcement of the distinction he had attained to in 
 his own mind. As he looked about him he saw, in 
 print of life, wisdom giving to humanity the clue to 
 all it had of the good, and the unrestrained passions 
 
292 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 all it had that horrified him. He could only con- 
 clude that the task of construction lay in the de- 
 velopment of that wisdom, and in the restraint and 
 guidance of those passions. 
 
 In the meantime he had passed through a period 
 when he had gone heart and soul with the socialists. 
 They at least were fighting the battle itself. They 
 recognized the human responsibility for human evo- 
 lution, and seemed to promise in their seizing and 
 molding of the social process the rationalization of 
 what until now had been so cruel in its anarchy. 
 He studied anew his Marx, his Wells, the latter with 
 its stirrings of a kindly sympathy so like his own 
 that his criticism was lulled to slumber. But in 
 time it awoke, and he saw in the schemes of so- 
 cialism obstacles that checked him sharply in his 
 conversion. In the harsh questions that he put to 
 himself over the miseries that fell now so un- 
 ceasingly to his notice, there came to him doubts 
 even of democracy itself. 
 
 He had not accepted the humanitarian dogma of 
 responsibility without the rational privilege of ap- 
 plying it to whatever came within the humanitarian 
 net; and now he saw that if humanity were respon- 
 sible for the better conduct of the future it was also 
 responsible for the evil of the present. It was of 
 the essence of democracy that it opened up for ap- 
 plication to the problems of social life all existing 
 human wisdom. In the vividness of his horror at 
 the spectacle about him he could only conclude that 
 that wisdom was, in so far, at least, inadequate — 
 that it had not found human life so plastic or itself 
 
In Quest of the Center 293 
 
 so skillful as to make the spectacle perceptibly less 
 terrible to compassionate eyes. For the zeal of his 
 fathers who had established democracy he had the 
 defense that they were at least shifting the govern- 
 ment from the tried to the untried — from the tried 
 few under whom the evil of life had seemed un- 
 bearable, to the untried many who at least had 
 suffered and been disciplined in the lessons of that 
 evil. For him now, however, there was still the 
 spectacle of that evil — which democracy had not 
 cured — driving him to seek a new, a wiser, a more 
 compassionate moulder of humanity than those who 
 had been tried and found wanting. And when he 
 looked about him for a new and untried wisdom, 
 he found in socialism, at least, no shift. If the 
 people had been found wanting in the democracy, 
 it was still they who were, in the new scheme, to 
 mould a plastic humanity — the same wisdom which 
 had put evil men into power, passed evil laws, failed 
 to enforce good ones, and failed to right the very 
 wrongs and injustices that alone were driving him 
 to seek a remedy. 
 
 The moral struggle, the slow, self-denying labor 
 that went to the building up of character was too 
 personal, was in the very nature of the case too 
 individual to be much helped by governmental de- 
 vices. And when he heard the old plea that the 
 cure for democracy was more democracy he could 
 smile sadly at the pathos of the hope. For what 
 was there in any government to increase the virtue 
 and develop the characters of its people. And the 
 present one was perfect enough in theory to be as 
 good as the people who made it up. It was not that 
 
294 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 he had lost sympathy for the poor victims of in- 
 justice and degradation, but that he could see no 
 wisdom and virtue in a system apart from the wis- 
 dom and virtue in the people who administered it, 
 and he saw in democracy already the expressed 
 quality of just those people who would make up 
 the new regime. He saw no reason to suppose that 
 their quality would be better under a vastly more 
 complex and more difficult system. It was not, 
 either, that he despised democracy. He was bred 
 to it, and it had his loyalty. But he could not be- 
 lieve that socialism would be better. Indeed his 
 loyalty to democracy was loyalty to its freedom, 
 and in socialism there seemed to lurk a despotism 
 that destroyed even that. For freedom was moral 
 opportunity. 
 
 From this point he could sum up his case. If 
 wisdom were to mold humanity it was, he knew, 
 no one's wisdom but theirs. Theirs he had looked 
 at, and the spectacle of its products had driven him 
 afield for a time in search of more and other wisdom. 
 But at last he had come back; all the available wis- 
 dom to guide humanity lay in the minds of men, 
 and all men had been tried — the one, the few, the 
 many — and each in turn had been found in some 
 measure wanting. Now there was nowhere to turn. 
 The pursuit had come to the last ditch. There was, 
 however, this to be said — that if human evolution 
 did depend upon human wisdom there was still 
 something to be done. He had groped to this point 
 when the time came for him to choose between 
 service in the settlement and his place in the college. 
 And he chose the college. 
 
In Quest of the Center 295 
 
 It was not without misgivings that he gave up the 
 humanitarian work he had begun so earnestly. It 
 was hard to convince his aggrieved friends that he 
 had not proved disloyal to the promises of his old 
 enthusiasm. But for himself he knew that his loy- 
 alty was unmarred. He was a humanitarian still, 
 but he had shifted the field of his labor. With his 
 new conception the college became a place trans- 
 figured. There, he saw, was his work. He went to 
 it with a singing heart. 
 
 He signalized his spiritual return to the college 
 by another visit to the advocatus diaboli; and as 
 from the earlier one he came away charmed but in 
 rebellion at his host's cloistered seclusion and pre- 
 occupation with the past. He broached on this 
 occasion his own conclusions and his own eagerness 
 to get at the heart of his problem. The reply he 
 evoked was but a qualified approval. 
 
 "You are right, but you are too eager," said his 
 host. "You hope for immediate returns — for per- 
 ceptible results upon the evils and injustices that 
 none of us can shut our eyes to. But unless you find 
 deeper ground for your satisfaction than the per- 
 ceptible results of teaching itself, you will lose heart. 
 For your efforts will never show. There are re- 
 sults, ultimate and imperceptible; we must believe 
 that or give up. But the hope of quick returns is 
 the curse of modern life — in business, in education, 
 in the humanitarian movement itself." 
 
 Our youth still clung to the humanitarian hopes 
 that had committed him so recently to the college. 
 But the poison, evil or good, of his friend's criticism 
 clogged the flow of his spirits and drove him back 
 
296 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 into troubled cogitations that seemed for a time to 
 threaten the basis of all his hopes. In time the dull 
 pain at the fading of his illusions left him in listless 
 misery. But he checked his discouragement with 
 some vigor; and though he had grown sick of his 
 own thoughts, and sick of the large terms in which 
 alone he could cast them, he forced himself back to 
 his problem. 
 
 His rebellion was that what his friend had told 
 him came home to him as true. But he had so set 
 his heart on perceptible results that to go to work' 
 in bare faith, in a field where faith itself was dying, 
 was intolerably bitter. There were times when, im- 
 patient of the slow, uncertain effect of the literature 
 he was trying to create a concern for in those 
 younger men who had so little native concern for it, 
 he was tempted to stifle his doubts and in the face 
 of his aloof friend's warning and his own better 
 sense, go over to that other thing within the college 
 that seemed to get so much more directly at the im- 
 mediate affairs of men. He was tempted to go over 
 into sociology. 
 
 In the reflections which, now that he was used 
 to the drive of an emotion, he let loose hard on the 
 heels of an impulse, it was only the distrust of his 
 own stability that kept him back. So baffled was 
 he, so empty, that in despair he was driven into the 
 wilderness for fasting and prayer. 
 
 When he emerged there was a spark of Hght in 
 his soul, and though it did not at once illumine all 
 the twistings of his maze, it burned steadily and 
 gave him hope. 
 
 From the detachment to which he had attained 
 
In Quest of the Center 297 
 
 he reahzed how arrogant had been the passion of 
 that haste with which he had tried to seize upon 
 Hfe. He saw the shallow impatience of even that 
 slower process with which he had come back to the 
 college. He saw simply and with shame that what 
 in crude generalization he called wisdom was 
 to be got only from men who had it. The phrase 
 was simple, but its simplicity was not significant of 
 the revolution that it created in his humbled mind. 
 He perceived sharply a new distinction between the 
 intimate passions and senses on the one hand, and on 
 the other that wisdom which it was so important to 
 create and spread among a responsible humanity. 
 For whereas the former were inherent and born 
 anew in the body of every man, as he had seen on 
 that night on the lake shore, the latter, wisdom, was 
 not inherent, and would die outright if left to nature. 
 He saw now still more clearly the distinction for 
 which he had groped so blindly in his fruitless col- 
 lege days — that the spiritual structure was that 
 slow accumulation of wisdom which men had so 
 painfully been building through the ages — an in- 
 tangible structure which nature ignored, which lived 
 outside of nature, and which would vanish save for 
 its voluntary, painful re-creation by those who mas- 
 tered it anew. It dwelt nowhere but in men's minds, 
 and dwelt there only by perpetual conscious re- 
 mastery. 
 
 This, then, was the spiritual structure; this 
 marked the eternal distinction between nature and 
 human nature; this was the human product which 
 men must perpetually renew and augment if human 
 life was to be ennobled in its own peculiar kind. 
 
298 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 He bowed humbly before the idea, with a shamed 
 knowledge that he was but arriving at a sense of 
 life attained long since by many men in all ages. 
 But he took comfort in the thought that this attain- 
 ment itself was a part of that eternal re-creation 
 that must forever go on if the spiritual structure 
 were to endure. His mind swept over the literature 
 and history that he had used to read so desultorily, 
 so keenly, with so little sense of its significance, but 
 with so right an instinct for its worth. That was 
 the human accomplishment — the humanities. The 
 word put on a meaning not objectively different from 
 what he had always put into it, but subjectively 
 enriched and vitalized out of all resemblance. 
 
 He looked back from this fresh point of view 
 with a quickened understanding of his humanitarian 
 past. The word still had for him a connotation so 
 appealing to every gentler fiber of his nature that 
 he had need even now of his hard-earned submission 
 to the final authority of his reason. It was not 
 easy, this struggle against his own generosity and 
 against the silent reproaches of friends he had but 
 now so devotedly seconded. But he had tried the 
 humanitarians, and he had found them tainted with 
 impatience, by a shallow haste to apply remedies to. 
 the symptoms of the disease they had set out to 
 cure. And the evil itself — he had vague glim- 
 merings of a vision in which, properly speaking, it 
 was not really an evil — a vision in which he saw 
 the slow march of the human spirit upon the chaos 
 of pure animalism; whatever encroachments hu- 
 manity had made upon the stark horror of brute 
 
In Quest of the Center 299 
 
 life was so much gained — gained by the slow ac- 
 cumulation of a knowledge of life, the slow building 
 up of the spiritual structure. What he, and they 
 the humanitarians, had so much shuddered at was 
 the still unconquered field of the natural man — the 
 natural as sharply distinguished from the humane, 
 a remnant rather than an outgrowth. He saw that 
 if they and he found it an evil, they found it so by 
 virtue of a point of view made possible by that at- 
 tainment of the human spirit to which they were 
 latterly become so inimical. 
 
 For those who worked in the direct rehef of 
 suffering he still retained the warmest sympathy, 
 knowing that what they did was a good in itself. 
 But he was bitter — and he smiled now to realize 
 it — against what he knew so well from his own 
 recollection of himself — the humanitarian antag- 
 onism to those who devoted themselves to the mas- 
 tery and perpetuation of what men had already 
 gained. How antagonistic they were he was not 
 left without present reasons for knowing, for he was 
 filled with reproaches from many sources. But it 
 was not these that made him bitter; it was the per- 
 ception that it had been the humanitarian diversion 
 that had made it possible for him to pass his under- 
 graduate years so wholly blind as to what the college 
 and he were there for. In the restful security of 
 his present point of view he could be amazed by 
 those honors by which the college had proclaimed 
 that he had got the best it had to offer. Obviously 
 it had ceased to think of itself as the agent of that 
 perpetual re-creation in the minds of men of the 
 wisdom by which life was to be made humane. 
 
300 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 He was free now of the obstructive trees, and 
 could look back on his path and see the forest he 
 had been wandering in. He had come out not far 
 from where he had entered. He had spent a waste- 
 ful time in it. But he was not without something 
 in his bag. He had got an understanding of the 
 environing movement of his time; and he had found 
 his way out. The endearing quest for happiness, 
 striking across-lots direct for its elusive object 
 through the old pathetic deceptions of the senses 
 and the passions, and through the simple elemen- 
 tary passion for material possession, had lost its 
 way. They had forgot, these eager questers, that 
 only the slow development of wisdom could produce 
 the happiness they longed for. And even those 
 generous few who were sacrificing themselves to 
 care for the poor had forgot that in trying to bend 
 every instrument to the direct relief of poverty and 
 to the immediate wants of the multitude they were 
 destroying the means of whatever ultimate amelior- 
 ation of the human lot there could be. 
 
 The age of unprecedented concern for the poor 
 was an age of unprecedented wealth. Clearly some- 
 thing was wrong. When he looked to the ultimate 
 vision of the humanitarians he saw that the modi- 
 fications which they were making in social life, in 
 government, and in education all looked toward a 
 bodily, not a spiritual end — toward ease, and phys- 
 ical comfort, and a more general leisure. Leisure! 
 He knew that in the word leisure was implied a hope 
 for all those things of the spirit for which he himself 
 cared. But he saw how futile that hope was bound 
 to turn out in the event. He himself had been 
 
In Quest of the Center 301 
 
 poor. He had emerged from poverty by dint of a 
 care for the things of the spirit. He had found 
 leisure for the pursuit of those things. But though 
 he had longed for them passionately, and had gone 
 to those seats where by old tradition they were 
 supposed to be found, he could not find them. Even 
 so soon had they been driven into obscure corners 
 and discredited in the general repute by the hu- 
 manitarians in their impatience for the nearer ends. 
 And he saw in himself a symbol of that future time 
 for which they hoped, when all should have leisure, 
 but when, alas, the traditions of that life of the 
 spirit should have fled even from the obscure corners 
 in which at last he had so fortuitously found it. 
 
 The humanitarians had dominated the age. And 
 if they had not kept it from being an age of luxury 
 and an age of oppression — how could they with 
 their own ideal so much akin to the ideal of the 
 rich? — they had managed to discredit the disin- 
 terested pursuit of humane wisdom. For our youth, 
 however, who had struggled so long to orientate the 
 chaos of his own vision of life, and whose horror 
 was of the devotion of his spirit to an end which he 
 could not square with the order of that vision, and 
 who had learned to live without approval, content 
 with despised causes, there was exhilaration in the 
 sense that at last he had found what from the first 
 he had so ardently longed for. He saw how right 
 had been the instincts and vague desires with which 
 he had years ago sought out the college, how right 
 had been the rebellion of that little group of friends 
 who had so stubbornly resisted to the end the 
 temptation to fall into an easy and popular 
 acquiescence. 
 
302 A Lover of the Chair 
 
 He knew with bitterness that they had not wholly 
 escaped its spell — that if it had won their open 
 rebellion in failing to guide them whither they so 
 longed to go, it had none the less by its constant 
 pressure and by their exposure to every wind of 
 chance influence bent them at last, unconsciously, 
 to its own attitude. He saw how his best years had 
 slipped by leaving his mind ignorant, unformed by 
 that knowledge that he saw now to be the basis of 
 human wisdom. He abhorred the vague terms in 
 which he was condemned to do his thinking. But 
 his bitterness was blunted by his exultation that 
 however empty, however ignorant he had emerged, 
 he was at last aware of that spiritual structure to 
 which his own spirit had felt so vaguely akin, and 
 in which he had so long put his rebellious faith. 
 
 He carried his conception humbly to that obscure 
 Grecian who in his earlier gropings had so irritated 
 his humanitarian impatience, but whom he now saw 
 as a repository of what was most worthy in human 
 life. For in realizing that the spiritual structure, 
 the humanizing product of men's thought and wis- 
 dom, kept its tenuous life so precariously, and had 
 its life at all only in men's minds, he saw how su- 
 preme was the value of those men who shut them- 
 selves — perforce, to-day, alas — aloof from the 
 world, mastered the records of the past, wrote their 
 few volumes, taught, or perhaps merely preserved 
 by their example the tradition of the love of learn- 
 ing. And there by that fireside, where he had so 
 rebelled at those long ranks of books, he took up 
 the discipline which the college had denied him, in 
 pursuit of an end from which it had so nearly 
 
In Quest of the Center 303 
 
 weaned him. And though the years were gone, and 
 though his mind was formed in its own formlessness, 
 yet he turned eagerly to its tardy cultivation. He 
 began in reality the life of the spirit. For he was, 
 in the triumph of his vision, at last justified of his 
 abiding faith that there was something there to 
 build ug3 
 
 THE END 
 
4