tokJ£££LH3 GopightU .. HAL CCHSEIGHT DEPOSOi THE MARGIN OF HESITATION THE MARGIN OF HESITATION BY FRANK MOORE COLBY M Author of "Imaginary Obligations" and "Constrained Attitudes" NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1921 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. r o ©CI.A627634 PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. NOV -8 '2 -ho j cr- CONTENTS I Trolley Cars and Democratic Raptures 2 II Thinking It Through in Haste 11 III The Language or Feminist Debate 23 IV Pleasures of Anxiety 48 V Hating Backwards 58 VI After the War in Thompsontown 71 VII International Cancellation 85 VIII The Lesson of Literary War Losses. . . 93 IX On Behalf of Harold McChamber 106 X Subsidizing Authors 113 XI Incorporated Taste 119 XII Barbarians and the Critic 126 XIII Reviewer's Cramp 135 XIV How to Hate Shakespeare 145 XV Confessions of a Gallomaniac 154 XVI The Classic Debate 173 XVII The Choice of Bad Manners 189 XVIII Tailor Blood and the Aristocracy or Fiction 205 XIX Our Refinement 213 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION THE MARGIN OF HESITATION TROLLEY-CARS AND DEMOCRATIC RAPTURES If the appearance of the people on both sides of the car shakes your confidence in the future of democracy; if, while your eye travels along those two deadly parallels of blank-featured human latitude, you mutter to yourself, " Blood will tell, and after all class systems are necessary," and wonder what the world will come to when it is left to the plain people, such exceedingly plain people, for example, as those five awful ones nearest the door; and if you feel all your radical- ism oozing out of you, including the initiative and referendum, recall of judges, short ballot, and proportionate taxation of swollen fortunes; and if, as six more of them get in each with a face like a boiled potato, you begin to distrust the whole foundation of popular rights, even trial by jury, even habeas corpus; if, I say, this sort of thing happens to you now and again, as no doubt it does, there is always an easy means of con- solation. 2 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION Photographs of European royal families were published almost every week during the war, and can be obtained from the files of the newspaper supplements. Clip them and paste them properly and they will cure this phase of democratic melan- choly. I have here a set of Hapsburgs whose faces if placed side by side would be as desolating as anything ever contemplated in the subway. Line a trolley-car with these Hohenzollern heads (without any helmets on them, naturally) and no one would suspect the presence of any person above the rank of gasfitter. He would merely suspect that the car was headed for the borough of the Bronx. Add to the rich supply of wooden visages in the various branches of these two families, all the pudgy, inane, commonplace, un- pleasant, or commercial countenances possessed by the members of every other royal or ducal dynasty for the past century or two; place them in two rows with only the heads showing, and you will feel as you would feel on the way to Coney Island on a Sunday afternoon, except perhaps that you will miss the kingly features of the Long Island railroad conductor, or the royal bearing of his youthful heir apparent, the brakeman. My own collection of royal personages — and I have no reason to think the photographs inaccurate — makes every morning subway trip seem like a royal progress. TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 3 But though reconciled to the future of de- mocracy, including that of the people in the sub- way, I cannot be sanguine about it. The pleasures of the advanced thinkers who assure me of it are denied me. I never have any luck in picking out the signs of the times. Even when I do suc- ceed in catching up with an advanced thinker I never share that bright and early feeling. For example, I once got abreast of a man much ad- mired in his day for mental forwardness. I for- get his name, but recall that it was short and energetic, and suited to this Age of Steel — some- thing like Chuggs, I think. He had been pent up as a young man in some college professorship, but had broken away and was lecturing on pro- gress along all the principal railways of the country. Professor Chuggs was one of those who as- sure us at short intervals that the present moment is the most egregious moment of the most egregi- ous year of the most egregious century that "the world has ever seen," and that the next moment will be more egregious still. He wrote a good many of those articles before the war which de- clared that China is turning over in her sleep and that Persia is buzzing; that in the waste places of Africa five business men will soon be blooming where one blade of grass had grown before ; that through the mighty arteries of commerce the Life- 4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION blood of civilization is coursing to the extremities of the earth; that already there is open plumbing in Patagonia and that steam drills are busy in Tibet. He used correctly all the terms employed in his business, including "giant strides." His magazine, "The On-Rush," which was de- fined in a sub-title as "A Handbook of the Coming Cataclysm," announced as its policy the avoidance of conformity with "every bourgeois conception," which, in its application seemed simple enough; for the writers had merely to find out what a bour- geois conception was, and then take a flying leap away from it, no matter in what direction. It opened with a "Hymn to Moral Rapidity," of which one stanza ran, as I remember, something like this : One thought in the bush is worth two in the head, And a dogma's the clutch of the hand of the dead; So pull, pull away from the sands of Cathay, And forge to the forefront and strip for the fray. Up and off with your mind in the morning. So it tossed systems of philosophy about like bean-bags, hit off each classic writer in a phrase careless but final, was on familiar joking terms with all the sciences, explained woman, silenced history summed up everything and everybody — the human race, the fathers of the church, genius, love, marriage, and the future state. In short, TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 5 each page was conscientiously prepared as a mus- tard-plaster to draw the blood to some unused portion of the reader's intellect. Yet it had no such effect. On the contrary, one gathered from it nothing more specific or ex- citing than that materialism was an inadequate philosophy, that socialism was in the air, that there was corruption in politics, that education did not educate, and that marriage was a good deal of a bother. Apparently the editor and con- tributors had nerved themselves by battle songs into repeating these common remarks of the tea- table, all in a tone of desperate valor, as if hourly expecting each one of them to> be their last. I suppose there must be " new thinkers" in this country, and that they must sometimes come out on the news-stands. Yet a "new thinker," when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought. The " new thinker," if I may attempt a definition de- rived from my own unfortunate magazine read- ings, i9 a person who aspires to an eccentricity far beyond the limits of his nature. He is a fugitive from commonplace, but without the means of effecting his escape. Not that I deny the approach of the social revolution. I merely say that since the social revolution will come about through the sort of people one ordinarily meets, it will not be par- 6 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION ticularly exciting. This extreme excitement of many social thinkers over the people one ordi- narily meets has nothing to do with the nature of the people; it is a free gift of the temperament of the thinkers themselves. Possessed of this light, gay, literary disposition they will often bubble over at the sight of persons and objects that leave almost everybody feeling rather spiritless. For example, an American so- cial thinker, presumably a middle-aged person and living in one of the most prudent portions of New England, that is to say near Mount Tom in the state of Massachusetts, can become ecstatic at the bare thought of an American business man. According to him this business man "plays with the earth mightily," and " grasps the earth and the sky, like music." Railroads remind this social thinker of Heaven. Life is no tangled web for him, nor is the world in the slightest degree unintelligible. War and wickedness and all that sort of thing used to trouble him a good deal, he says, but that was before he had really thought them out; now he feels quite comfortable about them. What is the use of "puttering," he says, "theorizing, historiciz- ing, diplomatizing?" Get down to business and look humanity in the eye. People, he finds, are not so bad as they seem, and the only trouble with them is that living in a machine age they have got TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 7 caught in the machinery. The way out of it is easy. It is simply a matter of inspiring million- aire business men. "The inspired millionaire " surrounded by his " inspired or elated labor " will soon be filling the world with the " awful, beauti- ful resistless tread of the feet of the men of peace." Now this may well be true. Nobody knows what might have happened already if Mr. Mor- gan, or the Rockefellers had had the advantages of Moses. Or take a simpler case. Suppose the president of the Boston and Maine railway passes a night alone with this social thinker on the cloud- capped summit of Mount Tom Massachusetts, and comes down the next morning with eyes aflame. He returns transfigured to his office and soon the inspiration runs all along the line, stock- holders dancing and praising God, trains starting on time amid Hosannas, and the seven devils that are in every baggageman turned into swine and drowned. Sanctification of other lines soon fol- lows, and there is no reason, assuming the divine nature of the guidance, why it should not spread rapidly throughout the world. There is no doubt that by inspiring millionaire business men suffi- ciently anything can be done. But for that mat- ter inspiration and revelation could work wonders through almost anybody — through a labor leader as well as through a millionaire. Who knows, 8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION for example, whether Samuel Gompers walking with the Lord might not have been just as effica- cious as John Wanamaker on the island of Pat- mos? However, it is unreasonable to look too closely into this matter. The main point is the temperament of the writer. Exaltation can be had by him on easy terms. On the other hand an equally talented British visitor on encountering the " average" American business man was recently excited in a directly opposite way, and yet almost as violently. The business' maft is always the same, says he, " from east to west, from north to south, everywhere, masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic;" " a child with the muscles of a man;" " a preda- tory, unreflecting, naif, precociously accomplish- ed brute." It is a rare man to whom as he travels about " everywhere " all business men will seem the same. It springs from a gift of nature. Each of these writers ran on passionately in this manner for many pages, quivering, ejaculat- ing, singing snatches of a psalm. They have " watered the desert," says the American admirer of business men, and " thought hundred year thoughts," and said, " Come " to empires and " Come " to the earth and sky. " Come, earth and sky, thou shalt praise God with us ! " They are the "masters of methods and slaves of TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 9 things," says the British rhapsodist, and " there- fore the conquerors of the world." Such are the blessings of this buoyant temper. For us rather jaded and humdrum persons it is impossible to regard the coal man, much as we dislike him, as a tiger, or to feel toward the rail- way station as toward the Holy Sepulchre. We too crave that vision of the Boston and Maine railroad tipped up like Jacob's ladder with the shining forms of presidents, vice-presidents and directors, ascending and descending, accompanied by corporation counsel. And it would give a pleasant spice of danger to our daily visits to the green grocer, could we, like that other enthusiast, regard him as a jungle beast. But that is the way with it. Some men are con- demned from their nativity to matter of fact, while others, surmounting all the obstacles of variety, exception, and experience, can find a " type " or a " superman," for the looking. The term " business man," like the term " biped," or " homo sapiens," leaves us cold and a little ab- stracted, but in the writers of brisk little papers on enormous subjects, this, or any other large, loose, shapeless, social designation will often arouse the keenest personal feelings and implant the stoutest convictions. They can get gooseflesh, or even the assurance of apocalypse, from the mere contemplation of generic expressions which io THE MARGIN OF HESITATION convey no emotion whatever to any of the rest of us, except perhaps that of being a little at sea. Finally another social thinker that I have recently encountered soars far away from the earthiness of these conceptions, far away from the earth itself, and looking down from this height on its misguided populations, thus addresses them : Begin all over again, he says. If the new charter of human rights does not re-create everything, it will create nothing at all. Make a clean sweep of all notions imposed from without; make a clean sweep of everything bequeathed to you. Away with God, church, king, priest, ruling class, the aristocrat, and the old-fashioned republican, the school as it now is, privilege of every sort, chari- ties, inheritance rights, national frontiers, colonial power, and so on with much circumstance as to the range and depth of this damnation, but with no information as to the ways and means of doing the next thing that remains to be done after the damnation is achieved. For the next thing, he insists, is this : Be the people of peoples, and set up at once the universal republic, founded on equality and justice. And he is just as elated and just as sure that the thing will be readily accom- plished, as if he had never traveled in a trolley car and never looked hard at the sort of Utopian ingredients that all trolley cars seem forever des- tined to contain. THINKING IT THROUGH IN HASTE Though often entranced by that brilliant group of cosmic problem-solvers — Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw and others — I insist on my personal iresponsibility for the state of Mankind as a whole. These men are much too busy nursing civilization. They regard it as a sort of potted plant which they fear to find frost-bitten of a morning. This is especially clear in certain writ- ings of Mr. H. G. Wells, in which he shows an impatient desire to tidy up the whole world at once. At one swoop he would remove the shirts from our clothes-lines and the errors from our minds. The world is too large for his feather duster ; he had thought to find it a smaller planet that he might have kept at least half-way clean. Now see what he has on his hands — everything in a mess, Africa backward, China careless, the sex relation by no means straightened out, socialism, imperialism, industrialism, planless progressivism littering up things, a great war and its greater failure, and nobody caring a rap — at times it seems to his housewifely spirit almost too much for one person to manage. And then that infernal 11 12 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION human diversity — slow minds, stupid minds, minds made up too soon, or not at all, closed minds, tough minds, tender minds — what is to be done with them? He burns to do something. In one of his books he describes himself in fancy as going about the country and, with the keenest pleasure, spearing all Anglican bishops. Though I am myself a stranger to the sport, I believe the pleasure of spearing bishops is exaggerated. For once begun it must lead logically to a daily drudg- ery of slaughter among the great crowds of folk who are not intellectually independent or morally daring — lead, in short, to the massacre of those who are not particularly exciting, a large task and tedious, owing to their quantity. I wonder if we commonplace persons are not right after all in a certain instinct of distrust to- ward these gifted writers. We believe implicitly in their fancies and not at all in their facts. We believe in the world they have invented and not in the world they have observed; and we distrust them utterly as world-pushers. The signs are plain — terribly plain sometimes — that it is when they have the smallest notions that they say their largest things. In common with other admirers of Mr. H. G. Wells, I am always charmed by him and his heroes when they are thinking things out and see- ing things through, but I am profoundly disap- THINKING IN HASTE 13 pointed by the sort of thing they think themselves into. Mr. Max Beerbohm described the situation with perfect accuracy a few years ago when he represented a Wells hero, after a "lot of clear, steady, merciless thinking" about the muddle of the universe, as finding the solution in the "Pro- visional Government of England by Female Foundlings." I reproduce a passage of this most righteous parody, which is based, I think, on The New Macdhiavelli: True, there was Evesham. He had shown an exceed- ingly open mind about the whole thing. He had at once grasped the underlying principles, thrown out some amazingly luminous suggestions. Oh yes, Evesham was a statesman, right enough. But had even he really be- lieved in the idea of a Provisional Government of Eng- land by Female Foundlings? * * * "You've got to pull yourself together, do you hear?" he said to himself. "You've got to do a lot of clear, steady, merciless think- ing, now, to-night. You've got to persuade yourself that Foundlings or no Foundlings, this regeneration of man- kind business may be set going — and by you." This is not in the least unfair when you consider Mr. Wells's exultant discoveries during the last half dozen years or so, down to and including his recent discovery of God. Here are just a few of the problems and their solutions : The future of America : This to his mind re- quired instant settlement. It was absurd that 14 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION nobody should have a plan. They were letting America drift — that is what it amounted to — and he simply could not bear the thought of it. "Let America slide?" said he to himself on the way over. "Let a whole continent go to the dogs just for the lack of a little, clear, straight, beauti- ful thinking? I should be a coward if I shirked it." The solution came to him before he reached New York and was confirmed in a conversation a day or two afterwards. The idea, I think, was that we should all marry negro women, so far as there were enough of them to go< around. What is humanity as a whole doing? That was another question which everybody was dodging at the time out of sheer mental indolence. What is the nature of the world process? His hero thinks it out. His hero "takes high, sweeping views, as larks soar." He spends five years in South Africa, two years in Asia, six months in America, and sketches briefly civilization as it has pottered along in all those continents. "Pottered," that is the word for it. For what is civilization? What is it? Why, hang it all, it's a "mere flourish out of barbarism." What is Bombay? What is Cal- cutta? Mere "feverish pustules on the face of Hindustan." Something must be done about it. He thinks still harder and at length it flashes on him — the very thing — why had he not thought of it before — a plan at once simple and vast, a plan THINKING IN HASTE 15 that was immediately practicable, yet of enormous future potentialities, a plan . Well, the plan was, I believe, the incorporation of an interna- tional book concern which should publish the best works in all languages, along with satisfactory translations. Then there was the whole sloppy subject of the British Empire — King, army, colonies, Parlia- ment, Church, education, London Spectator, and all that. A pretty mess they had made of it, and not a blessed soul paying the least attention to it; so another Wells hero had to think it out. "Why," said he, "the Empire and the monarchy and Lords and Commons and patriotism and social reform and all the rest of it is silly, SILLY beyond words," and the hero in his irritation flung him- self right over into Labrador to think it out, and finally, after weeks of cold, hard, bitter, ruthless ratiocination, he cut down to the very roots of it, and he emerged from Labrador with a Plan. The plan consisted, I believe, in the publication of a book to be entitled Limits of Language as a Means of Expression — title subsequently changed to From Realism to Reality. Another hero of lark-soaring mind is annoyed by the senseless refusal of almost everybody to shape his life in such a manner as will redound to the advantage of the beings who will people the earth a hundred thousand years from now. 1 6 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION A plan must be found. The thinking required is terrific, but he does not flinch, and at last he has it. It is the publication of a magazine called the Blue Weekly, whose motto is to be Love and Fine Thinking. Meanwhile, aside from the sweeping of his heroes, Mr. Wells in his own name was doing some rather brisk chamber-work about the uni- verse. He let in the light on the labor question, as one might open a blind. He shot his mind back to the twitching, thrusting protoplasm of the Carboniferous slime and he shot it forward to the final man, half-angel, who should stand on the earth as on a footstool and stretch his hand among the stars, and he delivered a lecture on that final man before some learned body. He gave a ship-shape account of the human race in twenty pages or so, seeing it through the ape-man stage, barbarism, and civilization, and well along toward the Great Solution, and then at the end put it all into a diagram, not too long for a busy man to carry in his pocketbook; it ran from complete savagery all the way to the great, harmonious, happy future state, and it was only about five inches long. Some people complain that a Wells hero really does not think at all but merely explodes into fragments of periodical literature. I cannot see the force of this objection. Of course, Mr. Wells THINKING IN HASTE 17 is not, in the austere sense of the term, a thought- ful person, and he does not make his characters engage in any such dry, lonely, and unpopular process as thinking. If he did, they would be quite generally repulsive. But he does somehow contrive the illusion that a good deal is going on in their minds, and he makes them spit out be- tween clenched teeth a platitude that you will often mistake for an astonishing idea. That is the measure of Mr. Wells's skill. The hero's mind does really sometimes seem to soar over the whole of civilization, when it is merely coquetting with last month's magazines. Analyze the conversation in a Wells novel, and it will remind you sometimes of the cumulative index to periodical literature, and sometimes of the table of contents of a text-book on geology; but what other novelist could give you the im- pression that an index to periodicals was a fiery thing or that a geological title-list was almost passionate? I for one surrender instantly to the persuasiveness of Mr. H. G. Wells, and when the thoughts come red-hot from the hero's brain, they almost always warm me up, even though I have met them months before, cold and clammy, in some magazine. But then comes that awful moment of deflation, when the hero finally thinks things out — thinks things utterly down and out — gets what he is after — the great solution or the 1 8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION great keynote, or the mighty mission that is pro- portionate to the mighty measure of his mind — and the solution is something like the Endowment of Maternity, and the keynote is, perhaps, God bless our home, and the mission is, for example, the chairmanship of an international commission for the promotion of poultry farming. It is, of course, exorbitant to demand of Mr. Wells that the great idea when once attained shall come up to our expectations, but he might at least kill the hero off while still pursuing, and never let him bag the game. It is unsportsman- like to start him off after the largest sort of scientific moose, and then have him end up by stealing somebody's magazine farmyard chickens. Something of this sort happens in a good many of his novels, and I believe it results from his too great preoccupation with the details of an unim- aginable future state. Out of an apparently impenetrable past, says Mr. Wells, science has reconstructed the mega- therium, and he swears that the megatherium is every bit as real to him as any hippopotamus he has ever met. Why then is it not possible, he asks, that the same amount of scientific energy should ultimately evoke from an impenetrable future the creatures that shall succeed us on this earth ? No- body approaching science by way of Mr. Wells can deny this cheerful possibility. If, from the THINKING IN HASTE 19 past, science can produce a pre-horse or eohippus, it may of course call up from the future an after- horse or hystero-hippus, if it has not already done so, and if, on looking back, it finds the ape-man or pithecanthrope, it might conceivably, on looking forward, chance on one of Mr. Wells's angel-men, which, in its mad desire to raise the devil with the English language, it would call either an angel- anthrope or an anthropangeloid. No one will dis- pute the point with Mr. Wells. The only important point to the reader is what happens to Mr. Wells when he is too much pre- occupied with these two extremes. However real the megatherium may seem to Mr. Wells, to him the hippopotamus for fiction's purpose is infinitely better company. The imagination can play around a hippopotamus but on a megatherium it can only toil. In the same way, owing to the lack of a generally understood social background, ape-men, cave men and the like are always failures in con- temporary novels, and half-angels are worse still. Fiction cannot proceed in a social vacuum and the future space which a Wells hero thinks himself out into is, socially speaking, void. That is why he comes back so empty-minded that he snatches at the first progressive-sounding magazine title he finds. It is unfortunate that a writer who can deal delightfully with actual human beings should think himself clean out of all 20 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION relation to them. In several of his books Mr. Wells is wholly concerned with the thinking out, not at all with the people who do the thinking. This is especially true of a certain story in which a bishop finds his way to God. It is not important that Mr. Wells does not make the bishop see God or that he does not make us see religion, but it is important that he does not make us even see the bishop. We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way. I confess, however, that when Mr. Wells is really eloquent about his Great Solution, no mat- ter which one it may be, he is apt to have me under his thumb for hours. Suppose, for example, he should become very much excited about malted milk, and see in it a solution of every problem that now troubles society. I do not know whether Mr. Wells has as yet written a novel on malted miilk, though he has championed other causes in his fiction that did not at first sight seem to me more promising. But I do know that if he should write a novel on malted milk, it would, for a while at least fairly sweep me off my feet. I should believe that malted milk, steadily consumed through the ages, on and on, would really produce that final perfect human race dreamt of by the hero of the narrative. It may be that for his wide and probably painful magazine readings he is THINKING IN HASTE 21 taking an ironical revenge and that these Great Solutions are only a sort of practical joke on his contemporaries. In that case, I have been often taken in. The only excuse for thus singling out Mr. Wells is that he is in these respects representative. Vast numbers of contemporary humanitarian writers never rise above this level to which he sometimes descends. Moreover this body of writing which has obviously not taken the trouble even to catch up with the past is admired on the singular ground that it has overtaken the future. It is the journal- ism of prematurity. It is the subject or the occasion of those breath- less articles on the "modern spirit" and the way we speed along; on the revolutions of taste within a decade; on the terrific onward modern plunges of the novelist of last week; all written by excitable commentators who exclaim with astonishment and sometimes alarm at the contemporaneousness of their contemporaries. But it is well known that these audacities and modernities in no wise account for the hold of a book on the attention. Thoughts just as bold and newly dated have often put us fast asleep. In books it is not the progress that is exciting, it is the person you are progressing with. There is not a day without its prosy iconoclasms, when some of the dullest people ever known will blaze 22 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION away at God, government, the family, and the moral sense with the most violent intentions and the drowsiest results. When the ideas are all about us in the air there does not seem any great audacity in presenting them. It seems rather like calmly blowing back our own breath into our faces. "Modernity" is an accidental quality of the books to which I have referred, having no more to do with their essential worth than has the day of the month on which they were printed. Be- cause everything is swept away that preceded the date of publication, and to-day's superstitions are substituted for yesterday's superstitions, and be- cause there is an unaccountable tendency to deify the middle of next week, which is not a very in- teresting object of worship, it does not follow in the least that it is a modern book. It does not even follow that it is in any essential sense a book at all. Literature does not stay behind with progress; it moves along with experience. THE LANGUAGE OF FEMINIST DEBATE I do not agree with certain representatives of Roman Catholic opinion that the modern sociolog- ist does more harm than good. I would not burn a modern sociologist or even abolish him, if I could. Considering him as an indefatigable rodent burrowing among the roots of social com- plexities that he cannot understand, I rather ad- mire him, but when he comes to the surface too soon, as he often does, and proclaims enormous certitudes as to the soul of this nation or that, and as to the direction that human society is bound to take, I should like to get him back into his hole again. And I question the value of a great many of his biological and evolutionary analogies. Take the man who some years ago reached the con- clusion after the most violent sociological endeav- ors that the average politician was something of an ass. Why need he have fought his way to such a simple consummation, when he might so easily have jumped to it? Not that he said in so many words, politicians are asses. He put it sociologic- ally. Party cries and iterative watchwords, said he, biologically, psychologically, and sociologically 23 24 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION regarded, are modes of appeal to the instincts of the herd, inherited from remote, probably pre- historic, zoological ancestors. But when you an- alyze this it comes to nothing more than saying that politicians are like the prehistoric ass, which adds little to our knowledge, and even as a term of abuse is not much more effective. "The scarlet paint and wolf-skin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon mark of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature." I see no value in this discovery. Had soci- ology never been invented I should have known that the dragon-mark of a medicine man ~ as fven more primitive in its appeal than the smiles of comparatively ancient types of presidential candi- dates. Laughter, he went on in his strange thoughtful- ness, laughter occurs sometimes in political life, but sociologically considered it is "comparatively unimportant." Nevertheless let us consider it biogenetically : "It may have been evolved because an animal which suffered a slight spasm in the presence of the unexpected was more likely to be on its guard against its enemies, or it may have been the merely accidental result of some fact in our nervous organization which was otherwise useful." Why all these sociological hypotheses of laugh- FEMINIST DEBATE 25 ter? My own hypothesis is just as good: Laugh- ter, I contend, is nothing more than an attenuated hiccough, pleasurably reminiscent of the excesses of our ancestors. Sociologists can never let laugh- ter alone, though you would think it was the last thing they would want to bother with. There was one of them the other day who after a patient study of Aristotle's Portico, Bergson on Laughter, Bain on the Emotions and the Will, Kuno Fischer in "Ueber den Witz," Cicero on Oratory, Stanley Hall on "The Psychology of Tickling, Laughter, and the Comic" and some twenty other authorities, came to the conclusion that "Laughter at any rate is highly relaxing," but as this seemed a little too informal, he hastened to express it as a "pyscho- genetic law." "Laughter," said he, "is one of the means which nature has provided to preserve psychic equilibrium and prevent more serious out- breaks." In its former state no one would have noticed this remark, and now it has become a sociological law, highly prized, I believe, in seri- ous quarters. One never can tell the sociological possibility of some little thing that seems hardly worth the saying. Thus if you say, he swears like a pirate, you are not sociological. But sup- pose you pull yourself together and say: Pro- fanity in that it relaxes the inner tension by a sudden nervous discharge and offers a means of escape from social inhibitions, is, when phylo- 26 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION genetically considered, nature's method under the conditions of modern civilized life of providing an outlet for primitive emotions which in an earlier period were apt to take more socially injurious forms, such as piracy. You will then be taken for a sociologist. I do not say you will really be a sociologist, but you will look like one, especially if you add a bibliography. Sociology, as I have lately seen it streaming from the press, seems to consist of two main varie- ties. There is the sort above mentioned that tells in a strange language what everybody knows al- ready. You recognize your own thoughts, though terribly disfigured. Then there is the full-winged or apocalyptic kind that tells you what nobody ever could know. This is the sort that sweeps the heroes of Mr. H. G. Wells off to Labrador or India in order to think out civilization, and that propelled an excellent French sociologist, during the war, straight through the soul of the entire German people. But I am here concerned especially with the effect of social studies upon the language of fem- inist controversy. I recall, for example, a solid treatise greatly admired in its day, written by a German woman of enormous industry. Toward nonsense in all its forms she maintained an attitude of extraordinary seriousness. She did not even call it nonsense, but enveloped it in scientific-sound- FEMINIST DEBATE 27 ing terms that made it seem quite dignified. Let Michelet remark in a thoughtless moment, "You must create your wife — it is her own wish," and she straightway defined it as a "subjective erotic fantasy." Some of the simplest and most familiar types of men disappeared beneath her Greek de- rivatives. For example, there was he who swag- gers a good deal in his own household and is "tame and feeble" everywhere else — he who for all ordinary purposes might with perfect adequacy be termed a silly sort of man. This simple defini- tion by no means contented her. She said he "experiences a dyscrasy," and that "between his sexual life and his career as a citizen there exists a latent contradiction which secretly is, perhaps, as great a trial to him as to the wife who is de- pendent on him." A licentious, domineering man, a weak, passive, crafty, false, or ludicrous woman, is an acratic person — that is to say, a "partially developed being whose whole personality is deter- mined by teleological sex characteristics." They are exponents of "centrifugal sexuality." On the other hand, persons like the Christian saints are iliastric, "the highest type of centripetal sexual- ity." Better still are the synthetic folk whose sexuality is an equilibrium of the centrifugal and the centripetal sexual tendency. She seemed to have caught some bad verbal habit from almost every science she had studied, but she had no 28 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION doubt suffered the most from sociology. Take, for example, the simple and familiar precept that women should advance in morality and intelligence so far as possible without shattering the outward decencies. What mind uncorrupted by the social sciences would conceal it under this? To emancipate oneself from the ethical normative of femininity, which fetters individuality because of the teleological limits of sex, is a distinct right. But to pre- serve its formal quality is the task of a free personality. There was one good result, however, from her excessive industry. She did some excellent de- structive work on the subject of Woman in Gen- eral. Many pages of her arguments may be summed up in the single and apparently sound thesis that Woman, with a capital letter, is a myth, and that only women are realities. After a care- ful study of men's general statements about Woman she concluded that Woman is merely a "subjective fetish of sex," having no existence out- side the brain of the thinker. She made the fol- lowing collection of the foolish and contradictory remarks of the thinkers : There is Lotze saying that "the female hates analysis" and therefore cannot distinguish the true from the false. There is Lafitte saying that "the female prefers an- alysis." There is Kingsley calling her "the only true missionary of civilization," and Pope calling FEMINIST DEBATE 29 her a rake at heart; Havelock Ellis saying that she cannot work under pressure, and Von Horn saying that in the fulfilling of heavy requirements she puts a man to shame; M. de Lambert that she plays with love; Krafft-Ebing that her heart is toward monogamy; Brissac that "souls have no sex," Feuerbach that they have; Laura Marholm that "the significance of woman is man," Frau Andreas Salome that woman is one "who en- deavors to realize an ever broader, ever richer unfolding of her innate self;" Havelock Ellis that nervous irritability has ever been her peculiar characteristic; Mobius that women are "strongly conservative and hate all innovation;" Hippel that "the spirit of revolution broods over the female sex;" Lecky that woman is superior both in in- stinctive virtues and in those which arise from a sense of duty; Lombroso that there is "a half- criminaloid being even in the normal woman;" Bachhofer that "Law is innate in women;" and von Hartmann that the whole sex is unjust and unfair. This seems a fair illustration of the condition of men when they write about Woman. In con- temporary writings their state is even worse. In reading all the little papers on this giant theme I have often wondered what it is that so balloons Man's thoughts of Woman just when he is about to print an article and at no other time — the sort 30 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION of man who could not fathom a single concrete personality. Why this mad rush of certainties with Man and Woman and Marriage and Society and God and Cosmos crammed into nutshells and all dispatched in about five thousand words. By what apocolocyntosis or pumpkin-change should the head of a journalistic comprise of a sudden a "Female Cosmos" merely because he wants to write an article ? By what miraculous distention was an entire Superwoman squeezed into the tight, three-cornered intellect of Mr. Bernard Shaw? For some of the most charming writers of our day seem subject to this strange inflation. Woman, the Female Cosmos, "vast, broad, universal, and liberal; "Woman, the Superwoman, "ever pursu- ing Man at the behest of the Life Force" — what in the world is any middle-sized intellect to do about her? One thing is certain: There is no possible chance of disproving anything that the light literary character who invents her may have chosen to lay at her door. Refutation in this airy region is impracticable. Yet no matter how frivol- ous the writer may be, some feminist attempts the refutation. A few years ago, for example, some harmless professor of biology let his mind sweep from the feminine germ cell all the way down to Mrs. Pank- hurst, and filled a page of a Sunday newspaper with guesses as to Woman's place in nature, in FEMINIST DEBATE 31 human history, and throughout all future time. For aught a finite mind could tell, they may have been good guesses, but it is not likely that even the professor himself had any deep conviction that in so large and blank a matter he was guessing right; he was thinking rather of filling that page of the newspaper. Yet his words were taken seriously at the time, and several women writers are even now rebuking him for his "views," though I am sure he was guiltless of holding any. Nobody has any "views" on the subject of Woman. When a man begins a sentence with the word "Woman" you may at all times, everywhere, blame him for the beginning, but you have no right to quarrel with any way in which he may choose to let it end. Yet to these careless, large assertions women retort seriously, even bitterly, and will often toil with might and main at their refutation. Once, for example, the woman suffragists throughout this country, stung by the taunt that they had lost the cunning art of domesticity, plunged into the wildest household activities. For weeks they sewed things by hand, boiled them, and put them up in jars, and when they were finished threw them all into a public building in New York City and dared the world to come and see. It was to show that despite their strength of mind they had not lost their womanhood — in 32 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION reply to some magazine article whose writer had long since forgotten what he said. And there was one point especially on which all argument was thrown away. There was no use in trying to reason a hominist out of his profes- sional timidity. When he said, as his wont was, at short intervals, that he feared the neglect of home and husband if women voted, it would have been wiser to take no notice. Whenever the hom- inist quoted his St. Paul and cited those cherished examples from history — Penelope, Griselda, Ruth, Boaz, and the bride of Peter the Pumpkin-eater — there was always a retaliatory article instancing powerful and public-spirited women of to-day who' in spite of everything had retained their woman- hood. This very laborious repartee was unnecessary. The husband marooned in a kitchen with his wife off voting all day long, was not an image that haunted us greatly in our daily lives, vivid as it seemed in the pages of certain essayists. Taking American husbands as they were this was never a natural anxiety. The chief task of the woman suffragists in this country was to prove that women had interest enough in politics, not to allay the fear that they might have too much. Times have changed, and politics may now be discussed even at the womanly woman's hearth- stone, but it ought always to be remembered that FEMINIST DEBATE 33 we owe to the advancing woman, terrible as she was, this emancipation of the American male. It was not the rule in the American household that the man repressed the woman's political aspira- tions; on the contrary he generally encountered the sternest feminine opposition to any full ex- pression of his own. For a long period there were few American husbands who in their own families dared to be as political as they wished. Looking back on that grim domestic tyranny of the cold shoulder and the absent mind, the yawn, the interruption, the glazing eye, the sudden vanishings in the midst of sentences really eloquent, who can picture the American man as trying to keep women from get- ting into politics ? They were all so obviously try- ing to keep politics from getting out of him. This practical side of the matter was once summed up by a friend whose point of view rather appealed to me. "In regard to woman," said he, "I have no sympathy whatever with anti-feminist fears of the neglect of the family. If, with the march of mechanical improvement, housekeeping grows easier, what is to be done with the released housekeeping force? Turn it back, say the anti- feminists to the expanding woman, and house- keep more fiercely. Let that great managing tal- ent which once ranged from corn-field to nursery, rocked the cradle, smoked the ham, reaped, spun, 34 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION milk, stewed, chopped, and sewed up everybody, wreak itself on one man, two children, five rooms, and a bath. "Think of the households in which domesticity boils in its too narrow channel with a dispropor- tionate force, the souls which go out into wall- paper, the excesses of conjugal scrutiny and child- care, the surplus anxieties, the many needless strenuosities of wedded life. An active-minded married woman in these days without outlet is bound to overdo her marriage. Suppose you mar- ried a very efficient person, and the only object of that efficiency were you. Take a woman of marked executive, though latent, ability — a woman who might have been Zenobia if she had had the chance. Would you, in a small suburban home, care to be Zenobia's Palmyra ? Anti-feminists in- cluding a large body of sentimental epigram- matists have had much to say of the home as woman's kingdom and the sanctity of woman's sphere. But would any one of them wish to be a woman's sphere? Husbands of able but old- fashioned wives are worn to the bone by their wives' unduly limited activities. They would gladly see their feminine forces dissipated." "The main danger, as I see it," he went on, "is that they will not be sufficiently dissipated. I am afraid of the great pressure of released mother- power upon purely personal affairs. In the politi- FEMINIST DEBATE 35 cal domain, if anyone tells me that women, now that they have the ballot, will vote more foolishly Hhan men, I can reply tranquilly that that is incredi- ble. In the economic domain, if anyone tells me that the average woman is not fit for the large re- sponsibilities of business enterprise, I can reflect comfortably that there is nothing whatever in the modern world to show that the average man is, either. In both of these fields moreover, the great feminine innovation is already so well along that nobody will be startled much by the further steps that it will take. But when it comes to the personal domain, my mind is less adequately prepared, and in some respects unreconciled. There is a hard reasonableness about women in all matters that pertain to health and ruthless hy- giene is pretty sure to sweep over the community in the long run if their will prevails. Owing to certain dispositions into the details of which it is not now necessary to enter the duties of mother- hood under the new regime will be considerably reduced. Great quantities of mother-power thus released will be poured into the public life where it will take the form of health control, minute, inquisitorial and all-embracing." "A single woman can often make a man uncom- fortable by the application of her cool reason to his irregularities in food, drink, underclothing, getting up and going to bed. In the new regime 36 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION every adult citizen will probably be exposed to the equivalent of one hundred units of mother-power. A certain warm casualness that is promised in the domain of the sexual relations does not in my opinion offset the icy regularity of the tobacco- less, wineless, physiologically matronized state which is indicated by the most advanced and thoughtful leaders of the movement. "I may learn in time to flit from concubine to concubine as a matter of course, as is earnestly de- sired by an Austrian feminist. But of what use is this element of variety, if every moment of my life is under the merciless scrutiny of the Inquisi- tress-General of Diet, the Women's Eugenical Board, the Committee on Private Life Inspection, and the Bureau of Sanitary Propagation. I am perfectly willing to renounce that attitude of pro- tection toward woman which her leaders denounce as the expression of a slave morality, but I am somewhat concerned by the amount of real pro- tection she is threatening to bestow on me. One gathers from recent literature not merely that mother-right is coming into its own. One gathers that mother-right is coming into almost every- thing. But that may be merely intentional over- statement in order to startle one into paying attention, just as a suffragette used to break the windows." As to breaking windows, by the way, who could FEMINIST DEBATE 37 blame woman for answering wildly to the confused arguments that were brought to bear upon her? Any one who can recall the incoherencies of woman suffrage argumentation must, I think, ad- mit that however mad the suffragists seemed, the opposing hominists seemed even madder. It may well be that suffragettes went insane in an honest endeavor to meet insane objections. When they threw pepper on a statesman perhaps it was de- signed as an answer to some such anti-suffrage argument, as "Woman is a capsule covering empti- ness alone. Only man can make it full." It does not seem a reasonable answer, but then I cannot imagine what a reasonable answer would be, and a normal mind might be dislocated in finding one. It was not easy to follow a woman's reasoning when she smashed a statesman's hat in, tore his buttons off, burned buildings, broke glass, ripped Bellinis and threw apples at everybody, and as arguments they seemed irrelevant to the question of the suffrage. But it was no easier to follow the hominist when he exploded after his own manner in generalities. Indeed, the missiles of the mili- tants seemed more applicable to human affairs than did the hominist's enormous certainties about Woman as the supreme being, holding up the universe amidst the "poetry of the pots and pans;" Woman as the universal principle of Thrift; Woman as the Queen Elizabeth who decides 38 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION "sales, banquets, labours and holidays;" Woman as the Aristotle who teaches "morals, manners, theology, and hygiene." I do not wonder that women became confused when they read these things and replied with ob- jects equally relevant and considerably more con- crete. When a learned and entertaining writer took a long breath and called a suffragist "a jade, a giantess, a Hanoverian rat, a San Jose scale, a noxious weed, and a potato bug;" when another still more profound person declared that women do their thinking in "henids," whilst "in man the henids have passed through a process of clarifica- tion" and that "the very idea of a henid forbids its description; it is merely a something" — I am not surprised that the individual mentioned was somewhat haphazard in her replies. I do not maintain that throwing a cabinet min- ister downstairs is either so desirable or so inter- esting as the essays of the brilliant and well-known hominists from which I have quoted. I merely contend that it is just as reasonable. Sex-patriots are indeed a fierce folk, be they feminists or hominists, and they have no patience with people who in a modest bewilderment re- frain from taking sides. That is why the usual treatise on "Woman, Her Cause and Cure," con- tains so little for us outsiders. It is intended as a missile for the contrary-minded, not as a message FEMINIST DEBATE 39 to those who have not yet made up their minds. Is Woman that supreme being whose "two strong arms are the pillars that sustain the universe" or is she that "capsule covering an emptiness which man alone can fill?" There is the naked choice. Writers on Woman would think it base to hesi- tate. And they are angry if you try to pin them down to the particulars of actual experience. Writers on Woman hate to be pinned down to anything. It is a leaping kind of competition be- tween feminists and hominists and each side thinks nothing of taking six centuries at a dash. Up- in-the-air habits have been formed in consequence. But on the whole I think the hominist cut the sor- rier figure in the great debate. The nature of actual women seemed never to have entered his mind. Once visited perhaps by Ruth, Penelope, or some female relative since deceased, his mind was now deserted save for a few mottoes and the rush of the wind in empty spaces. There was one, some years ago, the spirit of whose writings admirably typified his kind. He was a man of stern and ancient faiths, a believer in early woman, and compulsory charm, alter- nately angry and alarmed over the needless changes since the time of Homer. He said women were sterile and dying out; also that they were deadly vermin always multiplying. Sometimes a woman seemed to him a little weed soon to be up- 4 o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION rooted; at others he would shrink from her as from a boa constrictor. Again he would describe her as a rat. Epithets that seemed to destroy one another were seized by him apparently in the hope that they would destroy her. Each sentence re- garded by itself was vigorous and interesting, and even seemed to have a meaning when you forgot the sentences that went before. Great is the glory of that woman, he said, who is not talked of for good or evil, who hath a veil upon her head, who vaunteth not herself, — she that is meek, and is not puffed up, and walks in quietness, and is mysterious, and suffers long. He chose as models Helen, Briseis, Penelope, Arete, Clytemnestra, Chloris, and a few others from the Greeks, and three from the Bible, and he said that women had since then degenerated. To-day, he said, all women were like "dogs in a dance," and the veil was rent and woman was ashamed. He first proposed as a remedy that the right kind of woman should fall in a cold-blooded virgin fury upon the sugar-mouthed idle kind who lived within melliferous walls. But in another mood he found this inadequate and declared that the only desir- able form of society was that in which all women dressed in skins. Dissatisfied with this in turn, he finally decided that it was better for everybody concerned that women should live in trees. Women were never really happy, he said, unless FEMINIST DEBATE 41 they lived in trees, and on that point his argu- ment rested. This book was perhaps more ad- mired than any other of its class, for it was quoted in all the serious journals in Europe and America and translated into many foreign languages; and it may be for aught I know, part of the bedside reading at this moment of ten thousand hominists. Now the question arose at once whether he really cared for all these feminine virtues he had praised and if so 1 why he had no word of com- mendation for the sort of modern women who excelled in them. A collection of feminine sim- plicities such as he had praised was published soon afterwards by a woman writer. Why single out Penelope for meekness, for example? Arunta women, said she, are much meeker, for if an Arunta woman leaves the house and walks about, her brother has the privilege of spearing her. Was Penelope after all more pious or self-effac- ing than an everyday modern Koniag? she in- quired. "In Alaska a Koniag woman fasts and lies wrapped in a bearskin in' a corner of her hut when her husband goes whaling." Woman "vaunteth not herself" among the Zulus for a Zulu woman may not even speak her husband's name. Charm, mystery, veil on the head, walking in quietness, and all the rest are as she pointed out nowadays plentiful, sometimes with cannibalism, sometimes without. In other words, the answer 42 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION of this feminist to this hominist was simply that if he really desired these virtues in women he had only to look about the world. There was no need whatever to regret the passing of the Greek and Hebrew meek ones. There were Thlinket women to-day who were much meeker. There were at this moment sweet natures on the Upper Congo and among the Tshi, Wagogo, Kaya-Kaya, Aleuts, Bantus, Ostiaks, and Yarabaimba — sweet femin- ine natures absolutely unspoiled. The writer of the book in question did not, of course, mean anything. He did not want all idle women killed. He did not want all women to wear skins. He did not really care for tree- women and he probably never knew a man who did. Simple sweet natures, such as he imagined in the time of Homer, such as now abound along the Congo, would on the whole have bored him. And if the women of his family or acquaintance had been reduced to any such elementary condition as his language demanded, he would have been the first to complain. Not only did this hypocrite neither seek nor relish any of those tender, meek Wagogo or Kaya-Kaya simplicities in his con- versation with actual womankind. At bottom he disliked them. But I wonder if those conscientious women who wrote on feminism had gone about their business in a little more light-hearted way, whether the re- FEMINIST DEBATE 43 suits would not have been more permanent. At- tacking an institution is not necessarily a gloomy occupation. On the contrary there is no limit to the genuine pleasure felt by many abounding writ- ers of our day on finding themselves on a planet where there is so much to dislike. Had these writers, bubbling over with the joy of demolition, been born on a star whose social system suited them, imagine how cheated they would have felt. Here, things being in a sad mess, they are happy, hitting out. But the women writers on feminism seem to think it follows from the painful nature of the subject that the style of writing should be painful too. I recall, for example, another of them who in a vigorous volume on the sex relations established the fact that men and women in this world are as a rule very badly mismated and then made some reasonable guesses as to the cause and some reason- able suggestions as to improvement. It was a solid piece of work, written from the point of view com- monly regarded as pernicious, that is to say, with an open mind toward social experiment. It was not a book for the mentally sheltered classes. One could not, for example, have discussed it with one's aunt, and one would hardly have wished to show it to a United States Senator, but it was an honest, independent endeavor to systematize ideas that had been in the air for fifty years or so. The 44 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION chief objection to it as a controversial treatise was that it was steeped in gloom and clogged by the jargon of the social sciences. Contemplation of the horrors of wedlock and the horrors of celibacy, the woes of all who are wrongly mated or too much mated or not mated enough, had lowered the writer's vitality. As she walked the streets of a bright afternoon she was weighed down by thoughts like these. There is hardly one person in a hundred of those who bear the name of human, devoid of some obscure, in- calculable stigma, from which every anti-social growth may proliferate like a cancer and endanger the very foundation of human society. This weakened her as a combatant. She went heavily into the fray encumbered by sociological and biological terms. She never let an obvious thing get by her unsaid and she hated a simple way of putting it. In highly complicated language she argued that although marriage was an inherit- ance from ape-like pre-human ancestors, it did not follow that married people nowadays need all be- have like apes. Language like this has retarded the woman movement. Language like this would probably have retarded any movement. The writers, of course, were not primarily to blame for it, because the books they had been reading were just as bad or worse. FEMINIST DEBATE 45 Peel almost any page of sociology and you will find little commonplaces that were long since ban- ished from intelligent conversation. As a woman, this writer if she met you face to face, would never think of telling you that you are not obliged to behave exactly like a monkey or that for several reasons you may be justly proud of European civil- ization, or that an institution when superfluous will often pass away, but as a feminist she can do so without turning a hair. The other eminent apostle of the cause would probably think twice at the dinner-table before remarking that woman ought to advance in morality and intelligence while observing the outward decencies. Dinners are often very dull, but I doubt if even at the most fashionable you could successfully make this remark to the woman you took in. But as a fem- inist you can carry it off with a high hand. Social philosophies have to> bluster in this large language in order to conceal the smallness of the personal basis on which they rest; and when in the sex-conflict the two sides pelt each other with universals, it is because they are ashamed to mention the rather small particulars. A hominist, for example, will often seem to wish to save the world from an invasion of unsexed Amazons when he is merely fleeing from some single female relative. The feminists reply in the same manner, damning some tiresome man by 46 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION, everything that they can find in text-books of sociology, biology, and anthropology. If hominist and feminist ever squabbled in real life after their fashion in the printed page one might be overhearing some day on the train some such conversation as this : He : My dear, you are quite wrong about the children's school. You do all your thinking in henids. There is a half-criminaloid in every normal woman and you seem particularly normal to-day. She: I might have known you wouldn't understand it, George. How could you? Sprung from a germ-cell that has fused itself with the larger, self-contained organ- ism, the ovulum, you'd naturally take a narrow point of view. I don't like to say it, George, but you have always been acratic. And I have never known the time when your whole personality was not absolutely determined by teleological sex characteristics. I ought not to have brought up the subject of the children's education again, but I did hope that this time you might be able to control that little tendency toward subjective fetichism, and — He: Their school is plenty good enough and you'd see it yourself if your psycho-physical constitution enabled you to overstep the limits fixed by femininity, but the female ever hates analysis. Never by any chance in your discussions with me can you grasp the simple notion that the significance of woman is Man. The female's peculiar characteristic, as Havelock Ellis says, has always been her nervous irritability, and you drive me almost — She: Havelock Ellis J Why drag in that man? Do FEMINIST DEBATE 47 you consider him an iliastric person? The children aren't getting on in their studies one bit and they aren't making the right sort of friends either, whereas Fanny says at the Butler School — but why expect the children's welfare to interest you? As Woman I am quite accustomed to your point of view. Among the Bobi the father always ate his eldest-born. The children of the Bangu-Zigzags, torn from their mother at the age of two, are made to sleep in trees. The ancient Poot father on the island of Zab slashed the cheek of each of his daughters with a pointed rock dipped in the juice of the toto-berry. Among the Khai-muk, Teh-ta, Thlinket, Mendi, Jabim, Loanga Bantu — but what's the use? You come by it all so honestly. PLEASURES OF ANXIETY What with the tango and the slit skirt, eugenics and the pest of women's thinking, the growing impudence of the poor, the incorrect conversion of certain negro tribes, and the sudden appear- ance of a rather strong article on feminism, civil- ization in this country, and perhaps everywhere, was drawing to its close in many a serious maga- zine article, some years ago. I made rather a conscientious survey of the matter at that time, and I recall to this day some of the shocking par- ticulars. Down goes the dike, said one; and it seems to have been the only dike that could have prevented "our civilization from being engulfed in an overwhelming flood of riches, and from sink- ing in an orgy of brutality." Now that religion has gone, said another, "the old-fashioned prin- ciples of right and wrong have also largely dis- appeared." Turning a few pages, I found the "ulcer in our new morality;" a few more, and I saw the "canker at the root of education." Then I learned how low this nation was rated by a connoisseur of all the nations of the globe. "Of all the countries I have ever met," said he, as his 48 PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 49 mind reverted along the parallels of latitude to the thirty-seven populations he had intimately known, "this country, to speak candidly is the least desirable;" and so he cast off the country as one who throws away a bad cigar. And consider society's danger from astrologers. Abolish astrologers at once, said another con- tributor, and also spiritualists and quacks and prophets; for if we do not, all clean culture will soon rot and vanish, killed by the germs from this "cultural underworld." There were dozens of bodings just as dark as these in other numbers. But there was always a consolation. When perils came out in the new numbers, it quieted one to turn to the old perils in the bound volumes of the file — yellow perils, black, white, brown, and red ones, horrors of house-flies and suffragettes, and all the evil kind of micrococcus, back to imperialism and the bicycle skirt of fifteen years before, and to read, say, of Carrie Nation ravaging Kansas, and the California lady who used to hurl college professors through the win- dows, thus destroying academic liberty, and Mc- Kinley "blood-guilty" and sitting on a "throne," and Thanksgiving day changed to Shame day or the Devil's own day by some Boston contributors, and the Stars and Stripes painted black and "re- placed by the skull and cross-bones," and blood- shed in fiction, and hazing at West Point, and the 5o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION United States government "shaking Porto Rico over hell." And every time saved by a miracle — the same old family miracle! I could not deny that civilization was then in danger, but it did seem to me that in any serious magazine it always must be in danger. And it so happened at that time that every writer was spared all anxiety about any actual danger. The one thing not noticed on any of the quaking pages I have mentioned was the shadow of the great war, which was then approaching. The contributor of a peril to a magazine is not, as a rule, an unhappy person. On the contrary, he is often a large, calm man, with a good appe- tite, and more cheerful in his mind than we. If one could feel toward any menace to humanity as one used to feel toward tales of Jack the Giant Killer, just believing enough for a little goose- flesh, there would be more fun in it. Any man who is about half convinced that he and a few others are the sole remaining friends, of civiliza- tion finds some dramatic zest in life. It is a mis- take to assume that men who earn their living by anxiety are at all anxious in their private lives. And it is the same way with all great political despairs in private conversation. The most de- pressing talkers you ever meet are not themselves personally at all depressed. On the contrary, they are, at bottom, rather gay persons. The hopeless- PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 5 1 ness of the situation really adds, for the purposes of conversation, to its charm, by absolving from the need of any personal effort other than the pre- sumably agreeable one of talking. In middle aged conversation there is always a certain cosiness in political despair, and the thought of a large gen- eral disaster coming on has, at any rate, one bright side in the way it warms up elderly con- veners. I do not mean to deny that the disaster may exist even when it is talked about. I merely mean that if a disaster did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. For some time past in common with certain other fellow-beings, I have read the more or less radical journals with greater interest than the other kind. What is worse, I enjoy various eccentric and perhaps fanatical or one-idea'd peri- odicals more than I do those of sober cast and steady habits and institutional point of view. I confess a strong distaste, probably a vulgar one, for all that class of periodicals which no gentle- man's library used to be without. In America I have found more pleasure in periodicals, which would be reckoned by the safe person as unsafe, than I have in the daily journalism of broadly based opinion on the one hand or the monthly journalism of no opinion at all on the other hand. I mean literally pleasure, for in this preference I have not primarily my country's good in mind, 52 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION or the future of civilization, or my own or any- body else's moral safety. I suppose I share these peculiar and ill-regulated tastes with about six million persons in the English-speaking world. We are considered a small band, and dangerous, for some reason, though the thing that most often strikes me is how numerous we are and how mild. Nevertheless it is a minority and most people that I know, for my acquaintances are mainly among the majority, do not find pleasure in this type of journalism, and they too profess to regard it as dangerous. In this for the most part I be- lieve they are hypocrites — not of course in their expression of a lack of pleasure but in the reasons they give for it. I deny that their dislike is born of any sense of civic danger. It is the product of ennui. Peo- ple will run, and always have run, grave risks to existing institutions so long as they are amused. When they are not amused they express alarm for the safety of the institutions. It is simply their emphatic way of saying that they are not amused. Thus you will often hear a man say of a certain periodical that it ought to be suppressed, its editor hanged, all its contributors tarred and feathered, and the premises fumigated by the health board, and then add casually that he has picked it up from time to time and simply could not read a word of it. Or you will see an elderly club mem- PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 53 ber so incensed by some article on birth control (hard enough, Heaven knows, for any one to keep his mind on, but not remarkable in any other way) as to be hardly capable of coherent speech, and find him five minutes later with all the pornographic French weeklies on his lap, soothed again and beaming, as if reassured after all in regard to the bloom of innocence that he had almost feared was passing from the world. Not that I pretend to know which is the better for him — the awful Anglo-Saxon solemnity of the article on birth control or the unconquerable hil- ariousness of certain French minds on subjects more or less akin to it. But neither does he know and he simply does not care. For the rule here applies as it does to a large part of current criti- cism that distaste sounds more emphatic when ex- pressed as moral disapproval. With most of us the moral counterblast is nothing more than the angry rendering of a yawn. For one person who is repelled by the views of the sort of periodicals I have mentioned there are a hundred persons repelled by the manner of presenting them, and their objections to that man- ner, so far as I have heard them expressed, seem to boil down to two main grievances : In the first place an apparent desire on the part of the writers to conceal their thoughts, and in the second place, and what is more important, a degree and con- '54 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION tinuity of seriousness, unattainable, even on the assumption that its attainment is desirable, by any person in the outside world. I believe there is a basis for both charges. Con- cealment of thought, however, — vindictive though it often seems — is, as a rule, involuntary. Social studies are commonly the cause of this defect, — or courses taken during impressionable years at American schools of political science where any lucid way of putting things is always hated, if it is known at all. As to the sort of seriousness of which readers complain I confess I sometimes cannot see the excuse for it. The radical mind seems never to permit itself an instant's respite from its cares. At least I have never happened to meet one of them in print when it was taking it. Pen in hand there seems only one of two things for it to do: Either to tell people how they ought to act or blame them for not doing so. It is invariably harassed by the cares of a sort of gigantic paternity, and it slumbers not nor sleeps. If it did its watching only over Israel it might lead, comparatively speaking, rather a jolly life; but take its duty to Asia for example. Asia is, to you or me, for comfortable intervals at least, only a distant continent on the map. Asia is never for a moment anything of the sort to a man of these responsibilities. Asia to him is as PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 55 a little child constantly running some hairbreadth escape. Russia, says he, is not only the acid test of diplomacy; it is the acid test of intelligence. Now of course that is perfectly true, but if you follow him carefully and far enough you will observe that Africa also is an acid test and so is South America. You will observe also that sex, woman, Bolshevism, Shantung, war babies, North Dakota, feeble-mindedness of peace com- missioners, Ireland's wrongs, syndicalism, the rail- way bill, Poland, classicism, ultra-realism, or any- thing else he may have thought about, supplies the acid test of what to think; anl that, as the months pass by, he has gradually narrowed the area of permissible thinking, that is to say the zone of opinion conforming to his own, first to a strip, then to a long line, zigzag and perilous, so narrow that two can scarcely walk abreast on it, and then if they should chance to fall to quarreling one would inevitably be lost. Now if you will turn back six months on the track of this serious person — : a thing that appar- ently the serious person never does — you will find half a dozen questions reported as about to flame, which, somehow, never flamed at all; and you will find a score of problems which if not solved at that particular instant were to have brought us to the verge of the abyss but which have not been solved since then and seem to have 56 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION been forgotten even by the writer — along with the abyss. In short, a six months' retrospect of him seems to reveal something seriously amiss with his seriousness. It would seem, after all, that some of the responsibilities were needlessly incurred, or that there were well earned intervals of moral repose of which he might have taken ad- vantage. A special and temporary reason for it in this country may have been a too close relation with the universities. There has often been an inter- locking of college and editorial faculties to an ex- tent most discouraging to an adult general reader who prefers not to continue to be taught — or at least not taught as in a university from which he was probably glad to escape. College and editorial chairs have often got so mixed up that a writer forgot which he was sitting in; hence, floods of didacticism were poured upon the pub- lic that were really intended for Sociology B. And as to chairs of English literature they were notori- ously wheeled chairs, all of them, and likely to turn up at any time in serious journalism, for when a man once firmly settled down in one of them, he never got out, and even after resignation would be rolled about in it all through life, rolled generally into some editorial office. But any one at all familiar with the pen-habits of Americans ought to know that the sort of per- PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 57 sons he thinks he is meeting in these serious pages do not exist. He will not mistake the heavy hand for the heavy heart and he will not imagine that those anxieties, running all the way from babies' milk to the state of Europe in the twenty-fifth cen- tury are really felt. He will realize the tradition of serious journalism which demands as a matter of course that a man shall conceal any tremor of indecision in regard to any subject that comes along, no matter how tremendous. And he will not confound a human attitude with a simple mat- ter of conventional technique. HATING BACKWARDS So far as I can recall that course in modern history after these many years, human liberty was born somewhere in the Thuringian forest. The precise spot for the moment escapes me, but the professor knew it, perhaps had visited it. He was willing to admit that other races had their missions, not without some value to the world, but on this one thing he insisted : Had it not been for that blue-eyed, fairhaired, broad-chested early Teuton there could have been no political liberty as we enterprising western people understand the term. The Latin idea: All authority from above down — by the grace of God. The Teutonic idea: All authority from below up by the will of the people. There you have it in a nutshell — two irreconcilable ideas whose conflicts and alterna- tions make up the history of modern Europe. Latin elements in history : The Papacy, Holy Ro- man Empire, divine right of kings, passive resist- ance, Inquisition, Counter-Reformation, every form of obscurantism, every reactionary move- ment down to the present day. Teutonic ele- 58 HATING BACKWARDS 59 merits: Rise of the Free Cities, Third Estate, Witenagemot, trial by jury, British Parliament, representative government, and every popular revolution, or progressive tendency down to the present day. In short, if from the point of view of modern liberal sentiment anything in the world went wrong there was a Latin devil at the bottom of it, and if it went right there was always that early Teuton to be thanked. Nor let us forget his deep-bosomed spouse, at whose chastity so many historians have exclaimed with a degree of astonishment that seems unaccountable, for they themselves could not have been wholly without ex- perience of chaste women in their lives. But per- haps they believed that chastity also occurred for the first time somewhere in the Thuringian forest. Every reasonable American soon grew tired of this worthy couple and I fancy the Teutonic ex- planation of civilization made very little impres- sion on the minds of our growing youth. But this sort of nonsense was rather prevalent in those days. We had formed the habit during many years, it will be remembered, of shipping to Ger- many hordes of imitative, unimaginative Ameri- can scholars — a wise thing to do if we compelled them to stay there, but we very foolishly let them come home again. Hence in my unduly pro- longed academic experience I was forever en- countering unfortunate creatures who had fallen 60 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION betwixt the two stools of civilization, and did not seriously belong anywhere. A good many of them served no other purpose than to spread a sort of German measles in -our academic life. However, most of us made a quick recovery. There have never been many people in this coun- try who really cared whether the superman of his- tory was a blond or a brunette. I, for example, am a party man, as passionate political candidates are fond of saying, but in the remotest epochs of universal history I have usually rejected my pres- ent party ties. At all events I have always ap- proached the affairs of early German forest life rather in the spirit of a mugwump, and I have never cast my vote for any divinity that ran for the office of historic Providence on an exclusively Teutonic platform. On the other hand, during the late war, I escaped the opposite danger of the anti-Teutonic interpretation of history of the theory of German diabolism. I owe this to good luck and not to any merit of my own. For I have no doubt that it was only the shortness of the war, after the entry of my country into it, that saved me from that same faith in the exclusively German origin of evil which pervaded the writings of my emi- nent contemporaries. In exhibiting their excesses here I have no desire to blame them but only to illustrate the grotesque and unnecessary forms HATING BACKWARDS 61 that patriotism has latterly assumed, particularly among the learned and literary classes. All through the war the ablest English and French publicists, journalists and men of letters were busily engaged in reducing history to* melo- drama with the Teutonic element as the villain of the piece. The French were especially thorough in their methods — so thorough indeed that they went far beyond the capacity of human detestation. It was not enough to hate all Ger- mans of the present day, it seemed, or even to hate them through eternity, as M. Paul Bourget so earnestly advised, but they must be hunted out at the beginning of their history and hated all the way down. So back these writers went in their turn to that same tiresome early German couple, looking for a prehistoric scandal, and they found that their forest life was a devilish loose one at best, and that they lied like thieves even before they were out of the forest. As an instance of this irrelevant and almost superhuman indignation, I will cite the labors of a widely known French sociologist who set out to attack the Germans sociologically at the begin- ning of the war, and was about finishing his third volume when the war ended. As a man, he felt toward contemporary Germans just as you or I did during the war. As a man, he was, in com- mon with you and me, so deeply absorbed in the 62 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION Germans under his nose that he did not much care about the Germans of a thousand years ago. That is to say, had you proved to him that excel- lent Germans may at one time have existed, say in the underbrush of that Thuringian forest, quite early in the Christian era, it would not have al- tered his opinion in the slightest as to the Ger- mans that he saw existing. But, being by some accident of birth a sociologist, and hence a stranger to the rude pleasures of our common speech, he could not say what he liked about the Germans as he knew them. He had to be as sociological as he could. I must grasp them, he said, biologically, ethno- logically, psychologically, historically, and at last, synthetically; I must seize not only the social soul, but the individual soul, omitting no element, however slight, in their mental, moral, or material life at any moment of their history. It seemed rather a dog's life for him to lead, but he went ahead with it. He grasped them biologically long before they were out of the forest, and he fell upon them phylogenetically the moment they emerged. He found them, as savages, more savage than other savages. He gripped them enthnologically about 300 A. D., showing that at that time, as now, they surpassed all the other races of the world as liars. He next seized with no light clasp, every HATING BACKWARDS 63 exposed portion of the German soul he could lay his hands on down to the close of the middle ages, during which time they were chiefly en- gaged in resisting the approach of civilization. The purer the German, the darker the deed, summed up well enough the middle ages. When the Germans through no merit of their own had reached the modern period, he grasped their soul again ; and he grappled with it anew in Frederick the Great's reign, when it turned out to be about the same as it had been hitherto; and then he made sure that it remained the same for the last two centuries. In short, the soul of the German people, as seen any time these last two thousand years, looked to him for all the world like the soul of the kaiser, as described in the contem- porary columns of the Allied periodicals. So it turned out just as he had suspected from the newspapers before he began to write the book. Now the German soul to this honest and in- flamed sociologist was nothing whatever but the spiritual equivalent of a German trench, at that moment on the soil of France. The sweep of his soul over the soul of the German people was tremendous, ranging quite easily from Velleius Paterculus to Mr. Houston Chamberlain and back again, but its motive power was certainly not that of any mere scientific curiosity, psychological, historical or sociological. Its flights over German history were merely those 64 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION of an aeroplane, looking for a place to drop a bomb. To sympathizers with his. cause this pur- pose seemed altogether laudable. If all the sociologists of war-time had been hollow, and made of the best steel, and if through a well- directed group of them shells could have been shot at the rate of 1,600 every minute and a quarter at a given point in the enemy's lines, there were a great many of their readers at that time who would have gladly seen them brought into action. But when they shot only their own sociology it was a different matter, for it was not nearly so dangerous to the foe as we should have liked to have it, and besides, from the moment of discharge, it ceased to be sociology. Thus there resulted a great waste and a misunder- standing all round and not a German was brought down by their compound adjectives. "As soon as war was declared there were let loose those mys- tic influences which prepared it and which were synthesized by the ideal of universal domination." This was not a sociological explanation of a peo- ple's mental attitude. It was simply a sociologist's manner of swearing. A plain man in a fight knows at least that he is fighting, whereas your sociologist as he blazes away regards himself as quietly engaged in scientific research. And why this pious fraud of scientific termin- ology? As a matter of fact this sociologist in HATING BACKWARDS 6s his laboratory was less scientific in his analysis of the German soul than a French soldier at Verdun in war time. He was afraid to note any exception to this rule, and the poilu at the front was not. To the broader mind of the poilu, with his calmer sociological outlook, there were several kinds of Germans. To this scientist there was only one. The poilu, with scientific poise and a mind open to inconsistent facts, knew that he could shoot just as straight even if acknowledging that there were some decent Germans in the opposite ranks. This socio- logist believed he could not write straight if he mentioned a single decent German. The difficulty with the crowd psychologist seems to be that he does not allow sufficiently for the effect of his own crowd on his own psy- chology. In this case the crowd psychologist had written hundreds of learned pages all to the effect that it is impossible for any one to escape the contagion of the crowd. "Not only," said he, "do men of different races not understand each other but they have the greatest difficulty in imagining the possibility of holding a different view from their own." "The evolution of the sentiments is independent of our will. No one can love or hate at pleasure?" "Mental con- tagion affects also the isolated individual." "Race hatred is as widespread among the savants as 66 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION among the people." "Men of different races do not understand each other, above all because the generality of their opinions are all derived from the suggestions of environment acting upon the unconscious hereditary elements of which the characters of the race are formed." He did not, like an ordinary person refer casually to these laws. He elaborated them into volumes, like a sociologist. But not a word did he say about his own miraculous immunity from their opera- tion. As a matter of fact he marched on through this book as in a regiment — psycholigical proposi- tions streaming like banners, sociological laws beaten like drums, analyzing the German soul as others would sing a battle hymn and trying to grasp the history of the Teutonic peoples exactly where in war time it should be grasped, that is, by the throat. His psychology emerged just where his patriotism began, forming a healthy circle. In short, he gave his crowd psychology completely over to the service of his country. It was, in his own opinion, the best thing he had, and one had, therefore, to applaud him, for giving it, even while admitting that others had given much more. But a man of his mettle could certainly have dispatched the German soul much better without sociology than with it. It was foolish to enter the German soul with that quiet HATING BACKWARDS 67 air of sociological precision instead of with a war- whoop when it came to the same thing in the end. War-whoops are more effective and less mis- leading. It was not from kindness toward any Germans, however early, that many of us at that time ob- jected to hating them so far back in their history. It was simply because it seemed to us a tactical mistake to consume in the pursuit of early Ger- mans a warlike energy which might be put to some use against the very latest ones. Yet a large number of the ablest writers during the war would when confronted with a German criminal of any kind fall into an absent-minded fury upon his remotest ancestor. They seemed not to under- stand that nothing they could possibly say against Alaric the Visigoth would change in the least our sentiments- toward any modern German of our acquaintance. I never understood at the time and I do not understand now, why they could not skip those early Germans. No sooner did the bombs begin to fall again upon the Rheims Cathedral than some one wrote a letter to a news- paper about the morals of the Marcomanni, and if there was a pro-German in the neighborhood he retorted that according to Tacitus the family life of the early Germans was very pure. This brought out a third man with a quotation from another classic author to the effect that so early 68 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION as the first century A. D. every German was al- ready a scoundrel. And they put this sort of thing into all their war books. I gathered from many of these writers that the longer you looked at an early German the less you would like him, but I could not guess from any one of them why it was necessary to look at him at all. If it was for the nourishment of warlike sentiment — and that seemed to be the purpose of these authors — it was surely much better to look at any German political leader, or at any pan-Germanist pamphlet or at almost any German Lutheran divine. When one had for his contemplation an event so rich in hostile significance as the sinking of the Lusitania, for instance, it seemed a pity to turn back and curse the Cimbrians. Suppose Tacitus was quite wrong in saying that the early Germans were often chaste and sometimes sober, if that is what he did say; suppose after immense historical exertions I could have proven that they were never sober and seldom chaste; why should I have bothered people by mentioning it? I did not deny that the doings of that German forest married couple, say about the year 50 A. D., might well have been perfectly scandalous, but I did deny that the point was of the slightest belligerent value to us in our existing frame of mind. Should we have happened on some Hohenzollern, for example, engaged in poisoning a well, it would HATING BACKWARDS 69 have been no relief to our feelings to hear some one with a far-off look in his eyes exclaim, "Why, how like Ariovistus !" — even if it should be estab- lished that Ariovistus had poisoned a well. We could not at that crisis hate a Quadus of the first century; we could not even hate an Alemannus of the second, not because we doubted that they were detestable, but because we had not the time. Ger- mans of our own day were too engrossing. One can easily understand that an academic person, like any one else, should at the very sound of the word German at that time, have been car- ried away by his feelings, but it does not follow that he should have been carried so far away as into the fourth century. A hot tempered man away off in the fourth century smashing miscel- laneous German objects gave many of us during the war rather an impression of carelessness, when there were so many things that needed attention nearer home. If it had really seemed that this manner of writing would bring down the German empire any sooner, there were several millions of French sympathizers in this country even in the time of our neutrality who would gladly have seen it going on, and some of us would no doubt have taken a hand in it. I for one, would gladly have had a fling at Alboin the Langobardus if I had believed it would aid in taking a single German 70 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION trench. If it would have helped General Joffre to have us hate the Germans backwards, we would have burned the Germania of Tacitus, ex- purgated Caesar's Gallic War, and tried to get Velleius Paterculus into the schools. If it had seemed necessary to hate them forwards, we would have founded a society of detestation on the model of "Souvenez-vous," a French associa- tion already organized, and by means of "books, pamphlets, albums, placards, lectures, films, pic- tures, class-room manuals, New Year's gifts, prizes, plays, commemorations, anniversaries, and pilgrimages," every one of them perfectly odious, we, too, might have committed ourselves through all eternity to keeping resentment aglow. But it was only fair that we should know in advance why it should be done ; and that was a point never cleared up by any of these eminent writers, dur- ing the war or afterwards. AFTER THE WAR IN THOMPSONTOWN I wish to say, at the start, that I see no sin in the sudden wealth of Thompsontown. I am not going to denounce the profiteers of that city or draw any moral lesson from it whatever. I do not believe that the wealth of its inhabitants, was in its origin, either moral or immoral, or that it had anything to do with the relentless working of any economic law. The people of Thompson- town became rich by accident. They did not, in the ordinary sense, make money; they were ex- posed to it and caught it, like a cold. To attribute the new wealth of Thompsontown to any form of business activity, lawless or otherwise, is totally to misconceive the situation. Great droves of business men became rich through their inactivity; to have avoided money they would have had to dodge. Hat men — I select hat men, because the civili- zation of Thompsontown all came from hats — hat men did not conspire to raise the price of hats; nor was there any great, organizing super- hat-man who amalgamated hats, driving little hatters to suicide. Hat men made fortunes out 71 72 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION of hats, simply because people insisted on their doing so. I mean this literally. I mean that the hat man would have had de- liberately to thwart his customers, if he had not put up the price of hats. Some hat men did at first keep down the price of hats, and their cus- tomers scattered all over town looking for the same hats at higher prices. As wealth increased in Thompsontown, hat buyers not only preferred a worse hat at a higher price, but would walk a mile to get it. The sort of people who became rich in Thomp- sontown had no personal preference whatever be- tween any two hats when considered simply as hats, but only when considered as symbols of opulence. A five-dollar hat gave a five-dollar feeling and a fifteen-dollar hat gave a fifteen-dol- lar feeling, and so on, and that is all there was to it. Feeling varied with the price, not price with the feelings. Feelings varied with the price, the object purchased remaining the same. Until the people of Thompsontown learn the prices of things, they do not know what to think about them. Now these thousands of people in Thompson- town have made money merely because they did not break off habits which, perhaps, after all, they could not have broken off. People with shops in State Street became rich just because they did AFTER THE WAR 73 not close their shops in State Street. Fortune favored every dealer just because he did not cease to deal. They did not seize an opportunity; they merely waited to be seized by it; and while there were exceptions, it is safe to say in general that the new wealth of Thompsontown was the reward for going where you usually went and sitting there. Then came the problem of spending it. They bought automobiles, of course, two or three at a time apparently, and they paid sixty dollars for silk shirts, and forty dollars for shoes, and the women wore things in the street that made even them uncomfortable, and State street became in several ways the equal of Fifth Avenue. You stood an equally good chance of being killed by an equally good motor-car, there was as much in- convenience in getting about, and the noises were almost identical. There was nothing gay or high- flying about it, but you cannot blame them for that. Spectacular spending has always been exag- gerated and outside print, the madder prodigalities are hard to find. People who buy ten thousand dollar tooth picks, do it by stealth. God sees, and Mr. Upton Sinclair — but not the rest of us. But nobody seemed to be doing with his money anything that he particularly wanted to do. No- body ever showed an eccentricity. Nobody could be said in any sense to be having his fling, and 74 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION while the newly enriched have not the abandon anywhere that you expect of them, in Thompson- town they are particularly tied down. Not only has there never been anything to fling to in Thomp- sontown, but there have never been the sort of people who could fling. Monte Cristo would go in a limousine to the Men's Forum of the Central Baptists in Thompsontown; Heliogabalus would buy a thousand-dollar overcoat; and each would do it not by way of preliminary indulgence, but after exhausting every other joy. Double their fortunes and they would go in two limousines to the Men's Forum of the Central Baptists and buy two thousand-dollar overcoats. And while it was true of everything bought by the great, new, nonplussed hordes of the sud- denly prosperous, down to shoes, shirts, under- wear, things applicable to the most unimaginative needs, it was particularly true of things into which the personal fancy might more freely enter, such as household furniture, ornament, bric-a-brac. But personal fancy never did enter. Money came before desire had emerged, and the joy of getting was in counting the cost of what you got. To the ten thousand newly enriched citizens of Thomp- sontown one thing was literally as good as an- other, and divergent prices had to be invented as the only means of telling things apart. This had always been something of a difficulty AFTER THE WAR 75 in Thompsontown and the city itself is really the result of this embarrassment. People who were not utterly distracted as to what to do with their money would never have built it as they did. The public buildings were all put up for about $500,- 000 apiece, and for no other imaginable motive. The richer you got the less you cared what, in an architectural way, happened to you, so long as it was a good deal. If a multi-millionaire, you let them build you anything, provided it was big enough, and they usually decided on an orphan asylum with a front door like a valentine. All Main Street was built up by well-to-do people who had not the slightest personal inclina- tion as to the sort of places they wanted to live in. Its domestic architecture is a sincere and ade- quate expression of that frame of mind. There is not a house in Main Street that does not assert emphatically the owner's sentiment: What does it matter where I am? — and there is really no reason for preferring any house to any other, aside from the price. Cost in Thompsontown has always been the true key to the nature of things. Political economy has not a word of sense to say to such phenomena as the newly rich of Thompsontown. What becomes of the law of supply and demand when applied to the front par- lors of Maple Street? If you charged enough for bunches of bananas, you would see a bunch of 76 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION bananas in the front window of every house on Maple Street. You will find anything in a house on Maple Street, if it costs enough; and that is the only reason why you find it there. You cannot account for these things in the manner of econom- ists ; it is absurd to suppose that anybody wanted them. But, in saying that the new wealth is not the result of enterprise, I do not mean that Thomp- sontown is an unenterprising or from a practical point of view a backward place. On the contrary, it is famous for its energy. If I were Walt Whit- man I could sing as well in Thompsontown as on Brooklyn Bridge. I could sing all day of hats and corset-covers, of shoes, nails, lead pipe, soap, and gas fixtures, regarded as embodiments of Thompsontown will-power. Nor do I mean any- thing invidious in respect to progress. In public spirit, Thompsontown has caught up to Syracuse, and it has surpassed, I believe Zeno- bia, Esopus, Rome, Thebes, Ephesus, Priapus, every city in that part of the State. Community song, community bath-tubs, community churches; public teas, talk, and chicken-dinners; welfare works ; public outdoor movements if you want to go outdoors; public indoor movements if you want to stay inside; helping hands held out so thick that it is impossible to slip between them — there never was a better town to lose a leg in or AFTER THE WAR 77 in which to be saved from a life of shame. Thompsontown is filled with public spirit almost as soon as the spirit is made public, no matter what the spirit is. A headline carried for eight days by the better sort of newspapers becomes an institution there. No sooner had the new patriotism been in- vented — I mean the kind that would hang Thomas Jefferson to a sour apple tree — than the clergy of Thompsontown were solid to a man for the de- portation of anybody that it occurred to anybody to deport; and the whole town became so safe and sane that it would have brained an anarchist be- fore it knew he was one. It would be a madman who complained that Thompsontown did not, in a public way, keep abreast of things. But private spirit does seem somewhat lacking in Thompsontown. Citizens of it are magnificent in groups, but, detach the individual from his group and he loses color — like a fish scale. And the lack of personal differences makes it hard to imagine a personal preference, and as you meet rich people singly you lose respect for the rights of property and the laws of the land. Robbing them does not seem like robbery; it seems like rescue; it is impossible to think they desire their possessions. Pillage seems rather attractive. You could not hate a Hun who plundered Main Street; you could only wonder at him. If a bomb 78 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION fell anywhere, it would do a lot of good. That is the trouble with looking at the new wealth of Thompsontown ; it makes you a reckless man. It is impossible to avoid the reflection that even with a soviet in the City Hall and the whole town liv- ing in phalansteries and the dullest Utopia ever dreamt of come to pass, there could, after all, be no diminution of those personal diversities which present day society is said to keep alive — varieties of art and mental interest, individual expression, fancy, freedom of view, idiosyncrasy — and no danger at all of the dead level dreaded by the orthodox. For the personal diversities do not exist and the level could not be deader. And freedom of mind, always so hard to attain in Thompsontown, became impossible after the war, when the town shook with the fear of Bolshevism. Indeed, it was dangerous to possess a mind after the lectures on Bolshevism began in the People's Athenaeum. I recall one which ran about as follows : There was no such thing as Bolshevism in the sense of a body of social and economic theories and ideas, said the speaker. The Bolsheviki had no theories and no ideas, and the only thing that need be said about their programme was that it was a programme of crime. They were simply all murderers, bandits, and degenerates paid by Germany to plunder and kill. They were ex- AFTER THE WAR 79 clusively the product of German intrigue. Many years before the war the Germans said to them- selves, "Let us create the Bolsheviki who will so weaken the Russian state that we may get control of it." So they created the Bolsheviki. After the war, when the Bolsheviki were ap- parently weakening the German state as well as the Russian, that also was the result of a German plot. The Germans were pretending to be Bol- shevists in order to frighten the Allies into mak- ing softer terms of peace. Bolshevist uprisings were arranged in Germany and in some instances made to look like revolutions. Here and there people would be massacred or a premier assassin- ated or an alleged Bolshevist hacked to pieces, but in this the Germans were not serious. They were only trying to make the Allies think they were. A German may be sanguinary, said he, but he is never serious. When they were killing each other in the streets by the hundreds they were laughing in their sleeves at the impression of seriousness they were producing upon other people. Germans are always up to some such tricks when they kill each other by the hundreds, said he. When they were suppressing Bolshevism in Berlin, they had no objection to Bolshevism. They were not even thinking about Bolshevism. They were simply thinking, "What a splendid hoax on the Allies!" Nor did the setting up and 8o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION pulling down of Soviets arise from any interest in Soviets. They did not care either one way or the other about Soviets. The setting up and pulling down of Soviets was a mere ruse to produce the impression that Soviets were being set up and pulled down. Fortunately, the Allies were not duped by this affection and accordingly the pro- gramme failed. And now, according to the speaker, began the huge final German conspiracy which, if not balked, would sweep from the world every vestige of civil- ization. Germany's plan was to ruin the world in order to rule it. To do this she was about to engage along with Russia in a campaign of Bol- shevization in all the nations on the earth. This would not adhere to a fixed programme but would, in every country, take the course that soonest led to chaos, whatever that course might be, and when chaos was accomplished Germany would at once help herself to anything she wanted in it. There was but one remedy. Bolshevism everywhere must be stamped out instantly by force. I repeat these too familiar remarks because al- though they had long been matter of journalistic routine in the respectable press of three countries their effect on Thompsontown was very inflam- matory, and a tragic consequence was narrowly escaped. Eager to destroy Bolshevists when there were no Bolshevists in Thompsontown to destroy, AFTER THE WAR 81 the patriotic element in the town turned in its wrath upon old Professor Henderson. Now it would be impossible to imagine a man more remote from all the issues that agitated Thompsontown than old Professor Henderson. Some ante-natal circumstance had destined him to Thompsontown and he went on living there out of sheer absence of mind, obviously irrelevant to everything in it. As a political philosopher, he had been known for thirty years outside Thompson- town for his singular faculty of animating sub- jects commonly put to sleep in American univer- sities. He was also one of the few humane writers on history during his generation, and he had actually brought a touch of life to the minds of other writers of history, which of itself to any one acquainted with American historians seemed superhuman. For the rest he was a specu- lative and inquiring sort of person who ap- proached subjects somewhat in the manner of Socrates, trusting that in these modern days he would escape the cup of hemlock; and in this spirit he discussed the fundamentals of political philosophy, turning patriotism inside out, turning the virtues upside down, that is to say, doing everything that people have done in the discussion of political philosophy, ever since the Greeks be- gan. In short, everybody knew him from his writings for the sort of man who gave other 82 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION people's intellects something to do and thus kept other people out of mischief. There might have been some things in Professor Henderson's writ- ings that would have shocked a policeman, but if the policeman had read them all through he would almost certainly have decided not to arrest him. But he seemed of a sudden dangerous to all the authorities of Thompsontown. The Eagle-Record set out in pursuit of him in six leading articles; and four speeches were made against him at the Veterans' Lodge. There was a hunt for suspic- ious circumstances, and the suspicious circum- stances were found. They consisted of detached passages from his books, which sounded rather sanguinary. It was understood that the prosecut- ing officer was about to move and people said it would serve the old pro-German right. Four young men who had spent their war-time in New Jersey talked of lynching; and the Rev. Madison Brace, brother-in-law of the millionaire proprietor of Neuralgia Syrup, referred in his sermon at the Tabernacle to the "poison of Bolshevism instilled into the minds of youth under the guise of political philosophy." Then to the surprise of everybody the matter was dropped and it leaked out after- wards that all the seditious passages in his books were found in the Bible or in the Areopagitica of Milton. Now, as I write this, immediately after the nar- AFTER THE WAR 83 row escape of Professor Henderson, I do not find the situation altogether depressing. On the con- trary I see a chance for the return of a certain measure of mental liberty to Thompsontown. I believe that instances of this nature may carry their own cure even in Thompsontown and that more steps in this direction will result in some- thing so extreme that it will set free enough plain sense to sweep it all away. For assume that this incident had been a trifle more extreme. Suppose, for example, that some uncommonly vigilant con- stable of conversation employed by our League of Patriotic Speech had caught Professor Hender- son at something heinous — poisoning a State Street man's mind, say, by talking about a higher patriotism — or caught him with the Divine Mon- archy in his hand speculating. Suppose then after being thrown into jail Professor Henderson is brought before a judge who is a constant reader of all the League's publications and a person ex- tremely cautious in his thoughts and the judge decides, without a crease in the marble solemnity of his countenance, to sentence Professor Hender- son to five years in chains. It would not necessarily be a dark moment for Thompsontown when the chains were fastened on Professor Henderson. On the contrary, it might be the dawning of its day. There might begin a new spirit of understanding and geniality from 84 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION the very moment when Professor Henderson was thrown into chains. He is so obviously the sort of person who ought not to be in chains that out- side Thompsontown the sense of incongruity would be instantly and widely awakened; and some of the sense might find its way back into Thompsontown. Wit might sift in through little cracks in the walls of editorial rooms hitherto supposed to be altogether thought-proof. Com- mon sense might descend upon the people in waves upon waves. And with the striking of the chains from Professor Henderson might come the clear- ing away of the whole nightmare of indiscriminate and unintelligent repression and some glimmer of a notion as to who are enemies and who are not in the world around. Having once reached the outer limit of burlesque, Thompsontown might perhaps revert in the direction of reality. INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION From hasty and disconnected reading of the treaty discussion I may have became confused in mind, and I am not sure that I recall exactly the names, dates, and other details of a certain article by an expert in foreign affairs that I re- cently encountered, but I can at least reproduce the spirit of it. It was on the subject of Lower Magnesia, with which the writer says every reader ought to be as familiar as he is with the Banat of Temesvar. Now the Lower Magnesians are, he says, of the purest Jingo-Sloven breed, and for nine hun- dred years they have burned for reunion with their kinsmen of Mongrelia, from whom, as every- body knows, they were ruthlessly torn by Fred- erick Barbarossa. From that day to this they have hated the North Germans to a man, and the duty before the Peace Conference was perfectly clear. It should either have erected Lower Mag- nesia into an autonomous principality within the limits of the ancient Duchy or Citrate (that is to say, between the Bugrug mountains and the river Mag) , or it should have united it with Mongrelia. 85 86 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION Instead of that it was provided, by articles 131- 422 of the treaty, that the question should be left to a plebiscite. This gave the Germans their chance and they did exactly what the writer, know- ing the German character, expected them to do. They secretly raised an army of 700,000 men and threw it into coal holes from which it was to emerge at the moment of the plebiscite, disguised as Magnesian school-teachers. This was done so secretly that even now no one among the Allies has the slightest suspicion of it. The writer him- self knows how secret it was because he has it on the authority of a secret document, which docu- ment is so secret that its existence is unknown even to the man who possesses it. I should like to see set up along with any frag- ment of the League of Nations that may still re- main when these words appear in print, a sort of clearing-house for international impressions. Clearing-house may not be quite the word for it, but it suggests what I believe to be the necessary limitations of the plan, which would not concern itself with the correction of impressions but only with the setting off of one impression against an- other. As the press of each country is at every moment, contradicting itself, cancellation on a large scale would inevitably result. That all writers on foreign affairs are simply guessing is, I believe, a safe rule to lay down. In- INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 87 deed they themselves seldom pretend to be doing anything else, and I have no doubt that the better sort among them are often shocked by the serious way in which they are taken by those whom they seek to entertain. Of course I do not deny that the dark forces, dangerous undercurrents, and sinister designs evoked by the writers on foreign affairs do sometimes actually exist. I simply mean that their existence ought never to be inferred from their evocation. Their evocation is constant, their existence only occasional. Take, for example, the vast Anglo-Saxon con- spiracy as conceived by a dozen French journal- ists at this moment (thought it may be forgotten the next moment) and the equally vast French conspiracy as conceived by a dozen English and American ones. Dozen for dozen these writers seem to me, from their manner of writing, almost equally astute. They all have the same air of certitude and the same reticence as to the reasons for it. Dozen for dozen they are evenly matched so far as I can see, as regards access to those sure but unmentionable sources of truth, which are known only to the writer on foreign affairs, and as regards intimacy with those highly placed and serious persons, not to be named without violating a confidence, who though stonily impenetrable to all the rest of the world, pour out all the secrets of their bosoms as soon as they learn that the 88 THE 'MARGIN OF HESITATION person they are talking to writes for a newspaper. In short, I see no reason why these two groups of expert writers on foreign affairs are not equally entitled to my confidence. Nor do I deny that both conspiracies may as a matter of fact exist. I admit that the American and British governments, working in the dark, may have cemented that Anglo-Saxon blood-pact for the extirpation of all the Latin races in the world. And I admit that, unseen by any human eye, the French premier and his commander-in- chief may have perfected that gigantic plan for the Gallo-Latin domination of the universe. Das- tardly designs, both of them, I say, and I certainly have no desire to throw anybody off his guard in respect to them. But there is one thing I will not admit about this whole black devilish business that may be brewing around us under cover of the night, and that is that any writer in either group, whose article I have happened to read, really knows any more about the thing than I do. They not only do not mention any reason for supposing that the respective plots exist or any person who believes in the plot's existence but they do not even tell you how — whether by dreams, ghosts, portents, flights of birds, thunder on the left side, songs of sacred chickens, or hierophancy — they themselves got a glimmer that the plot does exist. In other words, they seem to take for granted INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 89 the plot's existence and then prove in great detail the horrors of it — which is precisely the opposite of what any serious person in possession of the dreadful information would do. He would work with might and main to prove to other people the plot's existence and he would then take for granted their appreciation of its undesirable results. Even if the world is rent in twain by one or both of these conspiracies upon the publication of these words, I shall still insist that none of these writers had the slightest notion that it would come to pass. The nonchalance of writers who say they see a world in flames, would be incredible if they thought they saw it. No man in private life would casually say to the surrounding family of an evening that in well-informed circles on the second floor he had learned — or that, from au- thorities on the first floor, credibly reported to be in the confidence of the janitor, he had gathered — that the upper stories of the building were at the moment on fire, nor would he, on remarking the serious nature of the affair, return to the read- ing of his newspaper. These writers would never shoot a dog in the light spirit in which they damn a nation. When it comes to the shooting of a dog, writers are always able to produce some sort of an excuse. I may add that when the world does actually burst into flames the writers I have mentioned are not the ones who notice it 90 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION Now the impartial display of this sort of thing by the central body to which I have referred would show, I think, that the suspicion of hostile designs has as a rule no basis in the public mind, or even in the writer's, but is a mere matter of journalistic routine in every country; that of course there are exceptions but that this is the rule. And then if it culled from each national press the narrowest thoughts of its narrowest thinkers, for submission without remark to the quiet scrutiny of many lands, who knows that the countries might not be drawn together out of sheer distaste for the sort of people who held them apart? The combing out from each press of all its chauvinists, of all its imperialists, colonial expansionists, and power- worshippers, of its glory-talkers and debaters of prestige, inventors of wounds in the national van- ity, moral idiots of the beau geste, people with patriotic proud-flesh, Buncombes and Bobadils and royalists of France, and American manifest-destin- arians, glorifiers of a provincial grudge, exploiters of a mean and proximate past with no basis in a true tradition — this mere combing of them out into common heaps as common nuisances to na- tions — who knows that it might not work of itself some miracle of mutual comprehension? A progressive writer in his latest volume, on the world's future, is madder in his dreams of universal democracy than he was in the volume be- INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 91 fore. The peoples of the earth are all alike every- where, he seems to say, and if you break down the political dykes that divide them, they will all flow together in a sea. There are no real moral frontiers, or religious, ethnic, intellectual, or economic ones, and there are no real differences rooted in the past. No nation ought to have a past peculiar to it, says he; it is a foolish thing invented by the soothsayers. Nations should have a common past and listen only to their common story, and try to forget their own peculiar yarns, mere family gossip for the most part. Forget who your father was and try and realize that your brother is a Calmuck; and if the thing is done with a good will all round, think of the warmth of the universal intimacy. I confess I have not much hope of an early ad- vent of this universal warmth. Even Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans do not look alike to me, despite the large, impressive, undeniably cordial and brotherly circumstance that all of them are bipeds; and I am no more capable of surveying them with the super-patriotic eye of this detached observer than I am of taking the point of view of an angel flying over them. But the attitude of this writer seems to me in one respect mundane and even practical. If peo- ple are not so much alike as he says they are, at least they are less unlike than anyone would sup- 92 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION pose them to be from the language of the inter- national impressionists; and since these folk are forever inventing imaginary differences, it seems worth while, in the interest of international com- ity, to emphasize a point of likeness now and then, perhaps even to exaggerate it. Since the international impressionists never have any reason for their impressions of the respective nations that they write about, why not follow the instincts of humanity and be equally well im- pressed by them all? For a moment at least, that is the logical consequence of reading them. After reading a sufficient quantity of the language of international comparisons I am forced for a short time almost into an attitude of brotherly love, owing to the lack of proper food for hatred. THE LESSONS OF LITERARY WAR LOSSES Several good British writers apologized during the war because for one reason or another they could not keep all their literary work on a war footing. One of them, for example, author of a number of agreeable novels in the spirit of Anthony Trollope, thought it necessary to notice the complaint of certain critics that his pleasant story about life in an English country house was am "anachronism" — presumably because no shells dropped on it. He tried to reason with these monomaniacs, arguing that interest in quiet things is not obsolete even in war time and that a novel- ist may legitimately go on doing the sort of thing that he thinks he can do the best. It would seem to a sane person fairly obvious. Reasonable people at that time were not blam- ing novelists because their writings were not con- cerned immediately with war. On the contrary, they were rather saddened by the too palpable effects of the war on the work of many of their gifted contemporaries. From the point of view of man power it may have been desirable to get a novelist into the war, but from the point of 93 94 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION view of literary advantage it was found after three years' experience that it was often undesir- able to get the war into a novelist. Of course, a regiment of novelists marching to the front, each determined to bring down a German, might have been a cheering spectacle, but the sight of those novelists all marching home, each determined to bring out at least one war novel and possibly two, would have been on the whole depressing. For it was clear to any one who looked into the matter at all closely that one of the disasters of the war was the fancied necessity of writing about it on the part of persons who were manifestly designed by nature for something else. On read- ing an article by Mr. Kipling, for example, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that the loss to letters was far more serious than the damage it did to the enemy's cause. Fill an author with a titanic theme and you do not make him titanic; you often merely burst him ; and one could scarcely turn the pages of a serious magazine during the war without stumbling over the ruins of what had once been a man of letters. The fact that they had perished nobly did not console me for their having gone to pieces, nor do I think it unfair to raise the question now whether they perished needfully. Consider, for example, the case of a brilliant British writer, who, I believe, wrote against the LITERARY WAR LOSSES 95 Germans about once a week after the war began and was unable to break the habit off till two years after the war had ended. He acquired the ability of hating the Germans all through the Middle Ages. He could hate all of Prussia from the earliest times down to the present moment, and all the Teutonic Knights, and every minute in the life of each Elector of Brandenburg. If shells were bursting on the women of his neigh- borhood, he would attack at once and with the utmost fury trie character of Frederick the Great, and in the course of the same article in his London weekly paper he would find time also for an un- favorable mention of the writings of Walter von der Vogelweide. Now, his feeling toward the Germans was precisely my own and that of almost every one I knew, and I need not say that any havoc he may have wrought among the Germans was welcome to me. I did not wish to see the Germans escape from this agreeable writer. But I should have liked to see him escape from the Germans if it had been compatible with the public interest, and I raise the question whether, if he had done so from time to time, many of them would after all have really got away. For, natur- ally enough, in writing constantly upon so mo- notonous a subject as the moral defects of this morally primitive people this writer fell into a sort of rudimentary routine. It was impossible 96 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION to write against the German morals as we knew them without being rudimentary, for you were addressing them, so to speak, from the threshold of civilized life. It was as if you were contem- plating the original ape-iman in circumstances so acute that even an anthropological interest in him was, for the moment, impossible. The Germans as we understood them at that moment were not a subject around which the im- agination of a civilized man really cared to play. As the daily news of pillage, rape, assassination, and mendacity arrived, (and no exceptions to these rules> were ever published) curiosity about them was soon sated and interest in them, though for the moment keen, was of so elementary a nat- ure as hardly to admit of a varied literary ex- pression. A rather coarse cartoon was a suffici- ently delicate reply to the most subtle diplomatic language of a German statesman. In short, the entire situation from the moral point of view was, one may say, extremely crude. So it happened that the monotonous succession of barbarities by which this morally backward people made its presence felt each week evoked from this writer each week a monotonous succes- sion of ejaculatory moral sounds, which were no doubt suited to the nature of the subject, but which, I believe, could have been just as compet- ently rendered by a large number of persons, not LITERARY WAR LOSSES 97 one of whom could do certain valuable other things which this writer was capable of doing. And therein lay the waste. Of course he acquired great facility. Waked up suddenly out of a sound sleep, he could begin instantly, "Another brutal aspect of the burning of babies alive is " and finish the article almost mechanically. But I be- lieve almost any one could have been trained to find the brutal aspects of the burning of babies alive. Let us suppose the Germans had taken another backward step — a step not difficult to imagine, and one that they might have taken had the general staff thought it desirable. Suppose that proceed- ing logically from the idea attributed to the Kaiser that "For me humanity is bounded by the Vosges," they had actually regarded all people to the west of the Vosges, in common with other animals, as material for food and that cannibalism among them became as well established and as customary a thing in our estimation as, say, the murder of a woman or a child. The fact that the Germans ate their prisoners, let us say, received among the Allied nations all the attention that such a subject naturally would deserve. Imagine it displayed everywhere on posters, noted in state messages, recorded in minute detail in the daily press, and assuming its proportionate share in ordinary conversation — 98 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION in short, taking firm hold of the common mind. In these circumstances it seems to me doubtful that any great amount of literary talent need have been devoted merely to showing that the course of the Germans was objectionable. The case against cannibalism need not have been made out with any great skill and could have been safely left to much more commonplace persons than Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Professor Gilbert Murray, Maurice Donnay, M. Albert Capus, M. Pierre Loti, and many other essayists, novelists, playwrights, and scholars whose person- alities during the war were not to be distinguished from any other portion of the newspaper. Sir Gilbert Parker need not have sent me and every one else in my office building a handsome, care- fully prepared pamphlet answering the Hin- denburg-Ludendorff defense of cannibalism on grounds of military necessity, and Mr. William Archer would not have had to develop with any particular ability his reply to the philosophic con- tention of Professor Oswald, Professor Haeckel, and other leaders of German thought, that the eating by Teutons of a non^Teutonic race was not to be considered as cannibalism. The argument of Count von Reventlow that cannibalism was the corollary of pan-Germanism, necessarily involved in the very conception of the Germanic absorption of inferior races, though ad- LITERARY WAR LOSSES 99 mittedly logical, would probably not have required an elaborate reply. And as more of our fellow citizens found their way to the German sideboard the less need there would be that the ablest men of letters of their time should devote their en- ergies to the bald and iterative expression of anti- cannibal views. I do not mean that they should not have written against cannibalism if they had wished to. I merely mean that to judge by an- alogies their longest essays might have been less effective than the simple publication of a German bill of fare. People foresaw in a general way the literary effects of the war. They knew that it was likely to devastate light literature in the fighting nations, but they could not have anticipated the startling concrete results. They knew, of course, that an essayist hit by a bomb would cease writing, but they could have had no- idea that the essayists who were not hit would be so strangely altered when they went on writing. There was no external scar on the persons of dozens of eminent writers, who had presumably remained in perfectly safe places and suffered none of the privations of war; yet from the reader's point of view they were hardly recognizable. Before the war it was generally supposed that the effect of a strong feeling upon a light literary character was on the whole beneficial, and there ioo THE MARGIN OF HESITATION are many to this day who argue that the reason wlhy American light literature is usually so very light that no one can feel it, is because there are no strong, high, noble feelings in the writers them- selves. I have heard it suggested that my friend, Mr. Harold McChamber (whose career I have sketched in another chapter) , had he been borne aloft on some great tempest of emotion, would have been George Meredith — or just as remarkable — and that if the inner life of Profes- sor Woodside were disturbed a modern equiva- lent of Dante's Inferno would emerge. But what were the results of shaking up dozens of delightful authors during the war? Simply, that soon after August 4th, 19 14, they became almost completely unreadable, and have remained so ever since. This is not said in an unfriendly spirit. The cause of these writers was my own; nor do I re- spect them any less as men for their having rather gone to pieces as writers. Indeed, they may be regarded as sufferers from internal injuries honor- ably sustained; for the casualties of war are subtle and various. The bomb that takes off a private's leg may render a good poet perfectly useless for several months. Down went thousands of stout British seamen in the Battle of Jutland and away went Mr. Chesterton's commonsense, as he argued with LITERARY WAR LOSSES 101 some equally stricken German that the fight was not really a German Salamis, but, on the contrary, a British Waterloo 1 . While lives are nobly lost at the front, wits are lost as nobly in the magazines, and after a battle there are almost as many mis- carriages among verse writers as among mothers. To the right-feeling reader, the foolish thing he encountered in war time on the formerly in- telligent page seemed a sort of literary lesion, patriotically incurred. But he was under no obligation whatever to go on reading the page. The healthy inner violence of the writers did not take an adequate outward form, and the fact that their hearts were eminently in the right place, afforded a moral, not a literary gratification. It showed how vain are the current recipes for the amelioriation of belles-lettres. Passion and a high purpose, and freedom from the least taint of com- mercialism, a great subject and a stirring time — all the ingredients recommended by American magazine critics for twenty years in the recon- struction of trhe world's literature — went to the making of the very worst volumes that these au- thors had as yet achieved. Scorn has been highly valued as a literary mo- tive, but the scorn of the satirist was no longer beautiful in the contempt and anger of his lip, and when he dipped his pen in gall — a proceeding much esteemed by literary commentators — the gall ioa THE MARGIN OF HESITATION turned out to be the very thinnest of writing fluids. Consecrate a litterateur and to your astonishment you cannot read him. Put him in a battle mood and he gives you nothing to think about, no ex- ploding thought of any use whatever, except per- haps to throw at some enemy whom probably it will not hurt. The lesson of the war seems to be adverse to all the current theories of inspiration in literature. If you inspire light literature too much, apparently, there is merely a blow-out. This, by the way, must dishearten the group of critics and novelists who, at intervals these past twenty years, have been telling other critics and novelists what is the matter with them. The amount of disagreeable contemporary reading these devoted men have forced themselves to do for this purpose is prodigious. One of them said that after having gone through all the contemporary writings of France, Russia and Germany, and found them rather bad, he read everything at all tiresome in America, and found it worse yet. An- other not only knows the exact difference between Mr. Harold McChamber and Mr. Curtis Lane — which of itself is rather a subtle matter — but he can tell to a dot why and how much they both fall short of genius. Mr. Barton Worcester says the hovels of Mr. Harold McChamber are "shams;" mere "puddles of words," "stale, distorted" and full of "mil- LITERARY WAR LOSSES 103 dewed pap," but he can pass the stiffest sort of examination in them all, and will quote you page after page of the longest, evidently having learned them by heart. He knows why Mr. Harold Mc- Chamber is so much worse than Mrs. Pauline McHenry Donald — he even knows why each of them exists — and he has solved a hundred other just such knotty problems. You cannot help ad- miring these conscientious, indefatigable men, going on and on against their wills, borrowing novels from the cook; following up the elevator boy and becoming learned in the subject of his literary contemplations. But you cannot help rather pitying them. Now, the result of all this hard labor and liter- ary anguish may be summed up quite simply. The faults of American writings, according to these critics, all arise from the lack of proper motives in the writer. They do not say it in so many words, but they plainly imply a genuine belief that if they could substitute some of their own better moral and artistic purposes for the present motives of any novelist, however silly, that novelist would soon become quite sensible. One critic is certain that if the American novel- ist would stop caring so much about old women and little boys he would surely be considered a much better artist. A second critic believes that if authors would 104 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION be less anxious to appear orthodox and cease con- spiring to suppress all mention of the sexual re- lation they would improve. A third critic thinks inner freedom is the certain cure. And one thing follows from the arguments of all of them as absolutely certain : Extract the commercial mo- tive from any author, however bad, and he will be bettered. There is not the slightest foundation for any one of these beliefs, as the lesson of the war re- minds us. Too many gifted authors were, with a lofty purpose for a splendid cause, writing com- plete nonsense. Too plain was it, even among writers at one time quite remarkable, that moral exaltation is often followed by literary decay. As to the harmless, ordinary American author, over whom the critics above cited have toiled so hard, there is no help for him from their methods. On the contrary, if they had their way with him, they would simply make him uncomfortable without benefiting the reading public in the least. Why free the inner life of Mr. Harold McChamber, when in all aesthetic probability none of it could escape? Suppose Mr. Harold McChamber gave himself up utterly to Mr. Worcester; went to a lonely place with him and listened every day, and Mr. Worcester really interested him in Shake- speare or Mr. Ezra Pound, and tugged and heaved him toward the higher plane, Mr. Mc- LITERARY WAR LOSSES 105 Chamber in no wise resisting; suppose finally that the white flame of Mr. Worcester actually passed over into Mr. McChamber. Mr. McChamber's artistic substance being the same, there would be no change in his manner of writing, and the small, discerning class of readers whom Mr. Worcester has in mind would probably never know that Mr. McChamber was burning bright inside. It simply would cost Mr. McChamber five million readers and fill him with a violent emotion which he lacked completely the ability to express. In fact, it is a rash man who in view of the lesson of the war, will recommend any definite external or internal crisis for the amelioration of any author — good or bad. The most agreeable authors of t!he time went monotonously insane un- der conditions which, on the principle of a great body of current literary comment should have im- proved them. ON BEHALF OF MR. HAROLD MC- CHAMBER In those exalted circles where the condition of American popular novelists is regarded with grave concern, it is assumed that certain of them have stooped to conquer. It is assumed that they were at one time capable of a higher class of work but deliberately turned away from it to pander -to the public. It would almost seem from some of these articles that the novelist before becoming popular has a battle with his conscience, saying to himself in so many words, "Shall I pander?" and then after a brief struggle answering "Yea." Then he sells one hundred thousand copies and is lost to Art. I have sometimes; become quite sentimental about him on reading these articles for it would appear from them that the poor creature really knows how low he is and must suffer a good deal from remorse, even while outwardly cheerful. Yet the situation cannot be so bad as that. Indeed there is evidence that the situation does not exist at all, outside the minds of these critics. Let us take the following instance, for which a parallel can be found by any one who looks for it : 106 HAROLD McCHAMBER 107 Mr. Harold W. McChamber, of stout com- mercial stock crossed now and then with a Baptist clergyman, was born at South Bend, Indiana, in 1873, graduated at Cornell University, wrote for no matter what newspaper and no matter where, and achieved his first literary success, a very mod- est one, some twenty years, ago, with the publica- tion of Sally of the Bogs. This was an intensive study in ashen grey realism, which won immedi- ately a succes d'estime for the extraordinary ver- acity of its local color. Not one serious reviewer failed to remark on its "atmosphere" or to say that it was "convincing" or to discern unmistak- able "signs of promise" in the author. Miss Edna Ladell in the New York Times Saturday Supplement after saying that it at once made her "sit up" declared: "The reality of it all grips, compels, fascinates, overmasters. Everywhere the great devouring, permeating, ob- sessing bog. You see it, smell it, taste it. Every- where the suck of the mud, the splash of the frog, the cry of the bittern, the glint of twilight on the pools, blackened stumps, moss, dank leaves, turtles, the smell of decaying roots and wet shoe- leather. And the lives of the simple characters are bog-driven, bog-confined. With supreme artistry he has given us an actual slice of raw drip- ping, oozy bog-life. A veritable masterpiece." Except for a writer in the New York Sun who io8, THE MARGIN OF HESITATION called it an "unpleasant story of mud and rheuma- tism" almost every other reviewer seemed grate- ful for the way it brought the bog home to him; and the late Mr. W. D. Howells in a cordial let- ter to the author said that as an authentic por- trayal of an Indiana bog community it was un- paralleled in American fiction. He compared it to Miss Edith Bamborough's picture of mid-Tennes- see mill-town life, to Mrs. Buxby's powerful grasp of the southern Georgia sand-hill country, to Miss Amy Barton's mastery of northwestern Connecti- cut upland farm society, and to Mr. John D. Pott's remarkable realization of the atmosphere of the Erie Canal. He applauded Mr. McChamber's courageous break with the cheap traditions of con- ventional romance, and urged him to continue as he had begun, saying in conclusion, " You have made that little corner of the land your own." Mr. McChamber did not, as is well known, con- tinue as he had begun, but on the contrary within less than two years produced one of the six best- selling historical novels of the period and from that time to this has repeated that success at sur- prisingly short and regular intervals. Also, as is well known, in gaining this vast new audience he lost that penetrating old one which had discerned the beauty of Sally of the Bogs; and henceforth if serious reviewers noticed him, it was to contrast HAROLD McCHAMBER 109 his early artistic endeavor with his present com- mercial achievement. In literary circles his work was soon taken as typical of those broad, low levels that a discrimin- ating taste will instinctively avoid. When one said the "Harold McChamber sort of thing," it was sufficient. Whenever one American writer de- plored in a serious American magazine the in- feriority of all other American writers he almost always included Harold McC'h amber's novels among the things that made him sad, and in every article in the Atlantic Monthly on the commercial squalor of contemporary novelists Mr. McCham- ber's name was on the list of those whom money had depraved. To read Harold McChamber was equivalent to saying "pants," tucking a napkin in the collar, vocalizing sneezes, vocalizing yawns, chewing gum, naming a child Gwendolen, having a popper and a mommer and a parlor with the "September Morn" hanging in it, and a husband who is always "he," a wife who is always "she," and children who always are the "little tots" or "kiddies." Not that the people who read Harold McCham- ber necessarily did these things. On the contrary a great many of his readers were precisely of the clas9 that would scorn them die most. But had their social discernment remained on the same level as their literary taste, as evidenced by this 1 1 o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION liking for Harold McChamber they would have done these things and worse. As to Mr. McChamber these critics would not admit that he might have fallen by accident to this low plane of vulgar entertainment, or that by natural abilities and inclination he might have sim- ply gravitated to it. They clearly implied that Mr. McChamber had deliberately, guiltily de- scended to it, stopping his ears to the divine voices that bade him stay on high. Now Mr. Harold McChamber, whom I may say, in passing, I have known intimately for many years, is the last man in the world to have had any such complication in his inner life. In writing his books he never passed consciously from a high plane to a low one, or stifled an artistic impulse or battled with his higher self or lowered his stand- ard to suit the taste of other people. The simple truth about Mr. McChamber is that his own taste and that of an enormous number of other people turned out to be just alike. He never had to study the people's demand, because he de- manded what they did. He, too, liked Ruritanias at the same time that other people liked them and with real enthusiasm he made one. He, too, liked to read about a corrupt man who ran for office, so he made one run. When people were fond of strong, primitive heroes in wild places, he, too, was fond of them. HAROLD McCHAMBER in He did not in a spirit of low commercial cunning compound those iron-backed creatures with four moral qualities and the love of nature in their souls. The call of the wild really called him also. And the democratic "urge" really did urge him when its turn came round, and as soon as religious unrest appeared in the magazines he, too, became religiously unrestful just in the nick of time. Knowing Mr. McChamber personally, I deny absolutely that an attempt on his part to climb a -high and steep artistic acclivity would have had any advantage whatsoever. It would have re- sulted in dislocation, not ascent. It is not true that the fidelity of the local color in Sally of the Bogs made it, from an artistic point of view, re- markable. The only remarkable thing about it was the thoroughness with which the local color was laid on. Reviewers at that time, hospitable to good intentions in that field, always mistook pho- tography for description. It was their habit, too, to find signs of promise. Hardly any of their coming writers ever came. And that was the best that even tihls little group could say for him — that he was coming — whereas within a month after the publication of Captain Bludstone, Mr. McCham- bers received fifteen hundred letters from de- lighted readers who believed he had already come, and he had a keener pleasure in producing it. "When I wrote Sally," he said, "I toiled over 1 1 2, THE MARGIN OF HESITATION it; when I wrote Bludstone I really felt inspired." He said he could not get that scene between the hero and the wounded tiger out of his mind for days. He considered it as strong as anything he had ever written, except that one in The Boiling Vat, where the poor young man, with the square jaw and the honest grey eyes that seemed to look you through, faces the powerful president of the Big Three System and says just what he thinks of him, knowing that it will cost him his place and destroy his chance of marrying the president's daughter — slightly above the middle height, brown eyes with a glint of gold in them, color that came and went, tawny hair with a trick of straying over the tips of the delicate ears, a light carriage as if poised for flight, and a rippling laugh. In short, Mr. McChamber has never had to study the arts of popularity. He has what may be called a rep- resentative nature. I have seen in his morning's mail after a new novel letters from an ex-President, two Senators, two relatives of the Vanderbilt fam- ily, five elevator boys, two out of the forty im- mortals in our National Academy, and one brake- man on the Elevated Railway. And in achieving this he has never swerved a hair's breadth from the path of his literary inclinations. His mind spontaneously contains the very thoughts that would have been elected to it, had the people voted on its contents. SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS I have never been able to understand the reason- ing of those kind-hearted people who from time to time recommend, seemingly in all seriousness, the subsidizing of the deserving poor among American authors. As a writer my mouth waters at the thought of it, but I cannot with a clear conscience urge it. One's humanity would be torn in two by the problem presented in its application. To clothe a naked author would be an act of per- sonal kindness; it would also be, very likely, an act of public cruelty. If, for example, a commit- tee of the Academy of Arts and Letters were to set out regularly to rescue all the mute, inglorious Miltons, the result while pleasing to the Miltons might be exceedingly disagreeable to everybody else owing to the committee's probable taste in Miltons. How do these wise men know that a committee for saving more authors from starva- tion would really be any better for the literary situation than a committee for causing more au- thors to starve, or that a committee for endowing authors to continue writing would work out more desirably than a committee that endowed them to stop ? 113 1 14' THE MARGIN OF HESITATION I say committee, of course, because we always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist. Alone, after a few trials, one would probably come to his senses, but in a committee we come to one another's senses, which is merely a convivial man- ner of going out of our own. It is not that the plan looks merely to the preservation of an author as a man. It looks to his continuance as an author. Mad decisions of this sort could be taken only in committee. It is different with other occupations. Toward bank-clerks, for instance, one could be cooperatively humane without endangering to any great extent the mental lives of other people. A "nation-wide" bank-clerk life-saving service would be no more invidious or unreasonable than many other civic bodies now existing, and it might perhaps with safety go further than simply pulling bank-clerks out of water and drying them. In might even take measures to aid them to return to bank-clerk- ing. Even a committee could probably tell not only whether a bank-clerk ought to live but whether he ought to be a bank-clerk. But suppose seven novelists, while looking for a democratic "urge," fall into the Harlem River, and are drawn out by some committee on the con- servation of deserving fiction. Beyond the work of complete resuscitation the committee obviously SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS 115 has no right to go. To restore those novelists warmed and comforted to their respective fami- lies, without regard to the quality of their literary work, is defensible on grounds of common human- ity. It pertains to the preservation of human life. But one step beyond that point, one single measure for aiding and abetting any or all of them in the writing of novels would carry the committee into a subtle and dubious domain requiring fine, far- seeing discriminations such as no American com- mittee on any subject has ever been known to pos- sess. It pertains to the preservation of a literary life. The bodies of those seven novelists, whirling in the tide underneath the arches of High Bridge, would be, I admit, a pathetic sight, no matter what they had written. But only so long as they were regarded merely as men. If they were re- garded exclusively as novelists and from a strictly literary point of view, the occasion might be al- most joyous. So little can one say in any long view of the matter whether their survival as active novelists would do more good than harm to the human spirit. One man's life may be dearly pur- chased at the price of ten thousand ennuis. I do not deny that the committee might do literature a service by hitting once and again on the right novelist to conserve; but so might a lightning- stroke by killing the right one. Why add one 1 1 a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION blind chance to another in the hope of coming out straight in this ratiher delicate affair? Or take a case which would seem to me wholly deserving and in which I ought certainly to sym- pathize with the subsidizing point of view. Hav- ing nearly finished my book on "The Religion of Inexperience," a constructive work in moral eradi- cation, written with energy and vision, seizing pos- terity's thought by the forelock but transcending somewhat the mental powers of my contempo- raries, I appear one morning with my six starving children at the Anne Street Headquarters of the Rockefeller Committee on Indoor Literary Relief. It turns out better than I could have hoped. Not only am I tided over my present difficulties, but three weeks later there is a meeting of two college presidents, a professor of sociology, a writer of a successful novel, an historian, and the director of a bank, and out of the confluence of these six intellects there comes, as indeed anything might come, a decision in my favor. "The Religion of Inexperience" is achieved, published in four volumes, respectfully considered. I find people polite and not unwilling to admit that I may be passing on to posterity. As I have the reputation of writing over everybody's head, giants arise from time to time and say they under- stand me and from my own point of view and that of several others the world has gained a SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS 1 1 7 great deal. Yet if I apply in an unselfish spirit the law of literary probabilities the odds seem to run the other way. The other things I might have done better are so numerous. At no stage of the whole affair, for example, has there been the slightest indication that God did not really mean me for a plumber or that that was not the true reason why I almost starved. Had I starved a little longer, I might in desperation or moved by some wayward impulse have begun to plumb, discovered a real passion and talent for the art, earned my own living by it instead of by puzzling people to no purpose, and so the ending would have been much happier all around. Misplace- ments of this sort are always occurring in letters, and committees do not readjust them. We seem to be as much at sea in this matter as they were about 120 A.D., when the critic cursed the town for keeping alive so many poets and cursed it again for starving so many of them; wanted to know how a man could behold the horses of the chariot of the sun if he had to grub for a living, and wanted to drive most poets back to grubbing for a living as soon as he observed their manner of beholding the horses of the chariot of the sun; said you ought to fatten poets to make them sing, and became violently angry the moment a fat poet began singing; blamed a rich man for feeding a pet lion instead of sub- 1 1 8! THE MARGIN OF HESITATION sidizing some author at much less expense, and was all for feeding the author to the lion on read- ing what he wrote. He wanted authors protected, but the literary choices made by the protector almost drove him mad. Juvenal, of course, was wholly unreasonable, but his state of mind cor- responded quite exactly to the confusion of the case, and the confusion is still with us. He had no solution but the lame one that Caesar should select and subsidize the author, and he had al- ready completely damned the average Caesar. But Caesar certainly seemed to be just as good a solution as any of those modern monsters with five respectable pairs of legs under a round table; those headless decapods that we call upon nowa- days as committees to do our dubious jobs. INCORPORATED TASTE When college commencement coma or old- alumni-sleeping-sickness stole over the senses at a meeting of the American Corporation of Let- ters not long ago, the audience had no just grounds for complaint. No one of course had a right to expect that a meeting of so respectable a body would be either inflammatory or gay, and it may seem invidious to commemorate it here as an occasion of more than usual dullness. Yet the pulse and temper- ature of that dignified public body did seem a little subnormal, even from the standard of digni- fied bodies generally. How could that charming and impulsive writer so subdue the seductions of his own mind as to sink for the time being into an utter presiding officer ? Why need that learned professor have read a literary paper prepared presumably by a member of the Sophomore class? And how could that busy public official contrive to give so strong an impression that nothing, abso- lutely nothing, was going on inside him? Grant the necessity of every unimpeachable sentiment and every platitude. Allow for that 119 1 2a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION American platform change whereby an individual, clearly distinguishable in private life from the social scenery around him, melts, spreads out, is personally obliterated, coalesces with the homo- geneous mass of leading citizens, irreproachable, featureless, placid, fluent, explanatory, and null. Still there are those who whisper that no man could so completely and for so long a time con- ceal his intellect, if he had one; that an active mind would surely at some moment kick the cover- ing off. Decorum carried to a certain point breeds horrid passions in the human breast and the gen- tlest platitude pushed too far may drive men in the desperation of their ennui to deeds of inhum- anity. That is a peril against which dignified civic and academic bodies would do well to guard on such occasons. These scenes of excessive public calm might breed a violence that would blow a perfectly innocent, middle-aged gentleman clean out of the wages of Who's Who? That was the danger as I saw it and the only danger. Yet that was not at all the point of view from which the critics blamed it. This very meet- ing called forth strange rebukes. Some said it was fastidious, undemocratic; others that it made vile concessions to the public taste. There was no coherence in their remarks upon it but there was as usual an undercurrent of dislike. Whenever the annual meeting of the Corporation of Letters INCORPORATED TASTE 1 2 1 comes around there is always an ardent hope that it will misbehave. The comment of clever out- siders is usually ironical. One is supposed to be amused every year when someone else refers to its members as "immortals," and if one can not annually make the same remark about people who take themselves too seriously, one must at least seem to take pleasure in hearing it. People proud of their sense of humor insist in precisely the same words each year that there is something funny about it, and if there is any falling off in the vivacity of your annual assent, they snub you. Newspaper reporters attend each meeting of the Corporation of Letters in the hope that this time the members will appear in togas with bay leaves in their hair, or at least in court dress carrying swords. And although nothing of a broadly comic nature has ever occurred, the out- ward effect of this infant, and, to my mind, in- nocent institution, is still to set people to winking at one another once a year, without a word of explanation as to why they wink. To be sure, you do hear comments from time to time on the taste shown by the Corporation in the selection of its members, but they are not es- pecially significant. People are too familiar with the casualties of club membership to think that any group of men can add to their number reason- ably. Strange creatures sift into any club. The 122 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION best of committees on admissions can no more ex- clude them altogether than the best of housekeep- ers can exclude house flies. There is always a certain number of club members who have bred from eggs laid in the walls or under the carpets; it is impossible that any one should have let them in on purpose. Principles, standards, and the intelligence of the persons who make the choice, are no safeguards in this perilous domain. Had the nine muses been obliged, in committee, to nominate a tenth, luck would have had it that she s'hould turn out an idiot. No reasonable person can blame the Cor- poration for a certain proportion of mishaps in membership. As to the true source of this undercurrent of hostility, I can only make a guess. I should say that it springs from the feeling that the Corpora- tion is itself a mistake, rather than that it some- times makes one. The critics seem to think that any such institution in an English-speaking com- munity would be likely to be made up of merely leading citizens, and they feel that from the point of view of everything essential to letters leading citizens are as a rule injurious. They believe it would always encourage what is respectable and never by any chance encourage what is more than respectable, and that respectability in letters is too much encouraged as it is. They think that when INCORPORATED TASTE 123 art or literature achieves anything permanently desirable it is something that no committee of suc- cessful American citizens would have antecedently recommended or would be likely to discover after- wards inside of two generations from the date of its occurrence. To the chaos of public taste they believe it contributes only an element of pomposity leaving the chaos just where it was. In short, they loathe institutionalism in taste, having a horror not of standards, but of any corporation that would tell them what they are. I may not do justice to this point of view be- cause it is not one with which I sympathize, but I should imagine that the argument of its uphold- ers would run about like this: There are two classes of literary and artistic workers : the trans- muters and the transmitters. The transmuters are those whose minds leave an impression on what passes through them. They survive by a force that is elemental and beyond analysis, and often unpleasant to the most eminent of their con- temporaries. They could no more be a poet laureate than could Shelley. They could no more get into an academy than could Flaubert. By eminent, shining, contemporary civic bodies they are usually left aside. An academy is an institu- tion for honoring the people who could get along without it. An academy is always rich in members of the other type ; that is to say, the transmitters. 124 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION These are the men who leave all things, both in art and in literature, precisely where they find them. They are of immediate social value for purposes of repetition. They are the active, in- dustrious, socially blameless individuals, who write most of the books that are sold, hold most of the good positions, are the soonest known, and the soonest forgotten, being wholly of the sub- stance of their hour and their place, and the ma- jority in every institution. In society these people may be useful as a bal- last; in art they are always a dead weight. Band them together and you add one more to the al- ready too large number of organizations for the suppression of human diversity. Suppose, they say, an academy had existed at the middle of the last century. By the time Longfellow was receiv- ing more encouragement than he deserved it would have encouraged him still more. On the other hand, it would have discouraged Poe either nega- tively or positively. Very likely there would have been a fine row with Poe, and another sore spot carried to the grave by that unhappy mortal. Take it all in all, an academy organized for the deliberate purpose of discouraging all that a ma- jority of its members most approved in con- temporary literature would probably work out just as well as, or better than, the other kind. A learned body actuated by malevolence towards INCORPORATED TASTE 125 literature has never been tried. Perhaps it might accomplish something. All of which seems rather high-flown and in- consistent with the probable attitude of these critics in their daily lives. They are probably themselves members of some humdrum institution and are not worried lest it crush out brilliant eccentricity. Such a body has to do with letters, not as a divine calling, but as a profession w'herein men earn their bread. It has to do> with levels, and is not to blame for guessing wrong on peaks. People do not blame a university for withholding the degree of bachelor of arts from anybody but a prophet. University decisions are as a rule stupid, and universities muddle along on the whole usefully. A group of authors is of course a de- pressing sight, authors being too much alike as it is, but a grouping of authors is no more likely to snuff out a genius than a genius is to snuff out the group. It is moreover so analogous to other com- binations that if a man set out to attack it, he would be involved in too vast a crusade. If one obeyed an impulse altogether artistic, one would go up and down the land pillaging. BARBARIANS AND THE CRITIC As I remember it, at the Athenian Club that evening there had been a meeting of our Com- mittee on House Management in which the ques- tion of buying awnings for the north windows was debated from nine o'clock till half-past ten, when it was unanimously referred to a sub-com- mittee without power consisting of the chairman, the treasurer and the secretary, who were to make recommendations at the next meeting. Then came supper and after that Mr. Harbing- ton Dish read a paper on American verse reform in which, while deprecating the radical views of certain writers, he insisted fhat tlhe situation was very serious and that something ought to be done. I recall only two of his suggestions: First, that rhymes if retained at all in the new era that was now upon us should always be at the beginning and never at the end of the line ; and, second, that the verse form once popular under the Anglo- Saxon Heptarchy ought to be revived. There was much applause, but after it the meeting broke up rather suddenly, the members slipping away so quietly that Jarman and I who were seated in the 126 BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 127 two big armchairs by the fire did not realize at first that we were alone. "It's the worst thing he ever wrote," Jarman was saying about a writer of our acquaintance, "and it's by all odds the most successful — and not merely in sales, either. You should see his letters, from people really distinguished, people you'd never suppose would be taken in by it. And all that talk about his vision, keen social criticism, sense of the underlying forces of modern life, breadth, depth, audacity ! Why the whole thing's nothing but a compilation of the ideas in the air, without a single individual, distinctive, " Jarman's feet were on the fender, precisely in my line of vision and I remember noticing that he wore tan shoes. I closed my eyes for a few mom- ents and when I opened them again the shoes had changed to a kind of bath-slippers and as I glanced up I saw he was now clothed in a thin, white, •sleeveless garment of strange cut. "Why Jarman, what in the world " said I. "Mr. Jarman went out ten minutes ago," said the person in white, in a low-pitched voice, and at the same time bent forward, revealing a swarthy wrinkled face, with prominent curved nose, and dark eyes of extraordinary brilliance — a man over sixty^five, I should say, lean but vigor- ous. "May I ask to whom I have the pleasure" — 1 28i THE MARGIN OF HESITATION said I, edging my chair to a point from which I could reach the fire-tongs if necessary. "The man of Aquinum," he said "the Aquinas, not that upstart Christian dog, Thomas, I believe you call him. What right has that corruptor of my own tongue to the name of my own birthplace when my claim is prior to his by eleven centuries? But that's the justice of you barbarians to an honest man of letters. Who was the Aquinas for a thousand years before the jargon of the tiresome Thomas was ever read by anybody, I'd like to know. Just answer me that." "I am not acquainted in Aquinum," I said, "and I am sorry to say I know nothing about the Aquinas family, but perhaps if you mention your entire name " "Oh, well," said he, "if your modern thoughts can travel back any further than last week Wednesday, perhaps you will recall one D. Junius Juvenalis." "Juvenal?" said I. "Why, yes; it was you, wasn't it, who said children should be treated with the greatest reverence and then wrote a lot of things that had to be cut out of every edition that was likely to fall into the hands of young people. Oh, and let me see, there was Dr. John- son's poem London and the one on Vanity, and "Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed" and that sort of thing. You're in the dictionaries of BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 129 familiar quotations — nearly half a page. I always get you mixed up with Oliver Goldsmith, I don't know why; but I believe people generally do get you mixed up with somebody else. If you will pardon my saying so, I think the prevailing im- pression of you at present is rather indistinct, and still fading perhaps, especially here — the war, you know, and electricity, aviation, submarines, motion pictures, breathless progress of the social sciences, new education, new woman, new poetry, the referendum and recall, world federation, eugenics, the rights of labor, and the democratic push. It seems rather an unfortunate time to choose for spending your — your outing, if I may call it that. I should have supposed that Oxford in 1760, say, would have been about the latest occasion. In short you will find us, I fear, a little distrait, forgetful " "Be quiet for a little while, barbarian, and I will try to explain. It is precisely because I am not forgotten that I am here. My name, of course, is seldom mentioned and I have not heard for fifty years a correct quotation of any of my words, but my thoughts go on among you. They go on damnably. It is not for the pleasure of meeting them that I am come. Quite the contrary. I am sent back here in punishment like other poets that have sinned. Race hatred was my undoing. I called it my Roman patriotism, and I cursed those 13Q THE MARGIN OF HESITATION absurd Hebrews and the 'esurient Greekling' and those outlandish Egyptians and sneered at the Gauls and railed at all those ill-bred Eastern fel- lows that overran the town, and I felt quite virtu- ous in doing so. And for helping to perpetuate the great race lie and the geographical inhumani- ties which are still your curse, I am damned to revisit my own thoughts as they float about in the world through the ages, the same old thoughts, dressed up in barbarous foolish phrases, passed from one silly mouth to another, turned into tink- ling rhymes by the worst series, of imitators that ever a man had — Let observation with extensive view Survey mankind from China to Peru. Great poetry, that! That man Johnson had no word-sense. I never said anything of the sort. What I said was Omnibus in terris quae sunt a Gadibus — " "Wait a minute," said I, "I don't quite — " "Well, what I said didn't sound in the least like his pedantic, mincing, repetitious stuff, or Dry- den's either for that matter, or Chapman's or that series of Oxford dons. Why can't they let me alone? That's the curse of my thoughts. They are never forgotten. Not a day passes without some one's spinning them out in a literary essay BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 131 for a magazine all about the discerning few and the undiscerning rabble or in tedious conversation at some club, like yours. Take, for instance, the talk of your critical friend, Jarmanus, what's his name, about the mean rewards of merit and the triumph of mediocrity. You'll find the whole of it in Sat. VII, line 9 to 99 — Qui nihil expositum soleat deducere, nee qui Communi feriat — " "Yes, yes," I interrupted, "but please don't talk Yiddish or whatever it is. I am a modern New York man and I agree with our most progressive educators that any classic sentiment which cannot be adequately expressed in the English language is not worth reading. You were saying?" "I was merely repeating something I said about the best selling fiction of my day. I thought I had put it rather better and more compactly than your Mr. Jarman did or that man in the Atlantic Monthly a while ago who spread four sentences of mine over eight pages, -or any of the fifteen others within the last six months. Is there ever a moment when commercialism is not being lamented by your cultured critic of the day, who in a literary sense is no wise distinguishable from your cultured critic of the day before? Writing on this theme, they are as like as the white sow's litter, and I have to read them all. By the Great Girl's bow and quiver, by the salsipotent fork, by 132 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION the javelin of the Wise Lady, by the Cirrhaean spikes, by the boiled head of my own baby served in Egyptian vinegar, I curse the whole insanable cacoethical cohort of scriptitating " "Hold on! What — what's the matter?" "I. was just thinking that I should have to read in the next number of the Edinburgh Review or the Nineteenth Century the self-same things, only ill expressed, that I said to Umbricius at the Capene arch that evening in the summer, I think, of 120, when he was moving his furniture out of town. Queer that I who wrote Occidit miseros crambe repetita " "There you go again." "I say it's queer that I of all people should be condemned throughout all time to stuff myself with the warmed-over cabbage of my own com- monplace. I didn't mind coming back for Shake- speare when he stole that thing about 'Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,' but I haven't had an afternoon in Hades since Matthew Arnold wrote about Philistines, and nowadays with every dull person writing about the money-god there is no rest. Why, once when I 'hoped to pass the week-end in Hell I was called back to read Mr. Upton Sinclair on the sin of paying a thousand dollars for a toothbrush — a matter which I had settled finally in Sed plures nimia congesta " "Please don't do that." BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 133 "And what with the constant reappearance of my ideas on mothers-in-law, the newly rich, suc- cess, waste, s'how, luxury, gambling, graft, the social climber, divorce, woman from the point of view of the anti-suffragist, woman as the target for brightly cynical remarks, alcoholism, prosti- tution, country life, subsidization of authors, high cost of living and forty other burning modern questions, it looks as if I should never — . And the hideous uniformity of your vapid writers in their common delineation of our thoughts; the large wastes of identical language. Forty novels in a row with the thoughts all dating from the reign of Domitian and all expressed alike. Belles- lettres produced by machinery. But though the monotony of the modern manner is terrible, that is not the worst of it. What I can't stand is the stench — " "Stench?" I asked. "Smell of decaying reputations. Nothing worse to a fairly immortal nose than the smell of a pass- ing modern reputation. Impossible to stay within a mile of your national capital, and the literary people are almost as bad. I tried to drop in on a group of Imagist poets on my way here just now, but I nearly fainted." "I hope," said I, drawing my chair away, "I haven't been too — " "Oh, no, not you. That's why I chose you in- 134 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION stead of a celebrity. People without any reputa- tion to decay are comparatively odorless." At that moment the room turned upside down and spilled him out of it and I was tossing about in space till I heard Jarman say, "I've been shak- ing you for fully five minutes. If you want to catch the i 32, you'll have to hurry." REVIEWER'S CRAMP One would think that the most dogged of fire- side defenders would be satisfied with the moral purport of a novel that I read some years ago. Nearly all the characters in it who offend against the marriage bond — and there are quite a lot of them — come to a bad end. In fact, in the interest of literary variety it would seem that sudden death, delirium, blasted hopes, social perdition, and the wages of sin in one form or another were distributed with an almost too perfect moral pre- cision. From the birth of the first illegitimate infant in an early chapter down to the moment in the final pages when the last illicit lover has his skull crushed in, the mills of God are made to grind in a manner that ought seriously to dis- courage the carnally minded. Yet instantly there were many commentators who denounced the book as dissolute. One of them said he was shocked by the "de- liberate devotion of such a pen as the author's to the defiance of the social conventions and ideas of duty and morality." Another wanted to know how "parents and guardians can prevent young people from reading such horrid low class tales." 135 i3 with his per- manent interest. Dozens of more radical writers may be found everywhere who are exceedingly dull. The value of "The Way of All Flesh" is in its texture — the weaving together of a thousand small things — and not in a few large, central thoughts. Essentially it is in the best tradition of the English novel. Also it is hopelessly entangled with the classics. He had to make his hero take honors in them at the university in order to get the muscle to attack them. He is a prize-fighter who knocks out his own boxing-masters in his in- dignation at having learned nothing from them. But I suppose the arguments I have been quot- 1 86 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION ing are merely the little missiles of debate. I doubt if any one really thinks it is a matter to be settled by the points at which persons happen to be perching in society at the present moment. I suppose these writers would admit that the classics are not and never have been chiefly valuable as the means of success. They are obviously valued as the means of escaping its consequences. They are not esteemed for getting one on in the modern world, but for getting one pleasantly out of it — that is to say for the exactly opposite reason to that which social statistics, psychological measure- ments of mental growth, testimony of engineers, educational specialists, chemists and bank directors always emphasize. Men turn to the classics in the hope of meeting precisely the sort of people who would not write these articles on the classics. Men turn to the classics to escape from their contemporaries. Cur- rent arguments do not affect the central point, namely the wisdom of breaking with a tradition that has bound together the literatures of the world for twenty centuries and has vivified a large proportion of the greatest authors in our own. 'But I do not believe that any muddle of present- day educational policy can do any lasting damage. Suppose it goes from bad to worse. Suppose after ceasing to be required, the study of Latin and Greek ceases even to be admitted. Suppose this CLASSIC DEBATE 187 is followed by another plunge of progress that would dazzle even Mr. Wells and a mere parsing acquaintance with a Latin author is regarded as not merely frivolous, or eccentric, like fox-trotting or button- collecting, but as downright heinous, like beer-drinking in the teeth of a Prohibition gale. Imagine even graver changes — imagine the era of scientific barbarism dawning in 1925 as the un- scientific era of barbarism dawned in 476 and Soviets set up everywhere in America, and paper scarce as everything would be under Bolshevism, and Latin and Greek books turned again into palimpsets and obliterated and replaced with strange dark Bolshevik texts presumably all writ- ten in the Yiddish language. Nevertheless, at the blackest moment of black Bolshevism they would still be read just as they were still read at the very darkest moment of the ages which we call dark. The Bolshevists could be no worse for them than were the German tribes. Here and there half-human Bolhevists would preserve a text just as here and there the less fanatical monks did, and there would be a vast deal of subterranean scholarship at work, all the keener on account of persecution. Probably Bolshevist suppression would do no more harm than the teaching of American Germanized college professors did dur- ing the last generation. In fact, it might actually 1 8 8! THE MARGIN OF HESITATION be a great deal better if we were to persecute the 1 classics than to teach them as we do. When you read the notes in the usual school Vergil, simple illiteracy takes on a certain charm. Make Latin and Greek illegal, and caves in the mountains will gradually fill up with refugees bear- ing dictionaries — refugees from the great sprawl- ing documentary modern novel, from modern philosophies gone stale in ten years, from new thoughts better expressed twenty-four hundred years ago, from the yearly splash of new poets swimming along in schools, from religions of good digestion, competitions for public astonish- ment, the shapeless solemnity of presidential mes- sages and serious magazines, in short, from all the incoherency and formlessness of the tremendous opinions of the too familiar present moment which somehow for the life of him nobody can manage to remember the next moment. It may not be a bad experiment. It will inevitably be followed by a renaissance. THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS An Englishman's burdens are hard enough to bear without a London writer's insisting that from this time on he shall expand into "warmth and cordiality" at the first meeting with a stranger; and the writer, though right in his view of the importance of Anglo-American goodwill, is wrong in saying that the chill of the British introduction causes suffering in this country. The grimness of that first moment has already become tradi- tional and it is now expected by every people in the world. There is no hardship in the long silence and the leaden eye when you are prepared for them and know they mean no harm. On the other hand an encounter with a suddenly expand- ing Englishman would be shocking, in its sharp reversal of all precedents. . There is no reason why the Englishman, like other solids, should not have his melting point. If he unbent on first acquaintance, he would seem like a ramrod that melted in the sun. Smile after the first handshake, says this writer, and be natural — as if anything could be less natural to a well-bred Englishman, than any such wild social turbulence. No one ex- 189 1 9a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION pects warmth from him out of hand any more than one expects a hen to lay a soft-boiled egg for him; and a wise man will blame the one no more than the other. After all, why is their way worse than ours? There is no greater hardship in having to dig conversation out of an English- man than in having to dig yourself out of the con- versation of your fellow citizens. But there does seem to be a misunderstanding between those two small classes in the two coun- tries who are mainly concerned with the outward gentilities. And in regard to the true nature of snobbery, they are certainly at odds. I think our side has the right of it — my patriotic bias, perhaps. "How the Americans do love a Duke!" is a frequent comment in certain British journals, and they then proceed to the sober generalization that "the United States is a nation of flunkies and of snobs." Whoever will be at the pains to follow British weekly journalism will find this sentiment repeated every little while. He will observe among this class of writers that vulgarity is a matter of geography, being reckoned from Pall Mall as time is from Greenwich. Now as to snobs, New York's streets are of course often choked with them. A duke, an elephant, a base-ball pitcher on Fifth Avenue, may at any time be the center of a disproportion- ate and servile attention from both the American THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 191 people and the press. Yet the cult of the egreg- ious and the greatly advertised has never the deep devotion of sound snobbery. Take the American newspaper view of "so- ciety," for example. You would certainly have to call that snobbery. A friend of mine once became quite indignant on the subject and wrote about it bitterly. According to the newspapers, said he, all the blessings and misfortunes of life fall only on people who are "in society." He wanted to know why in Heaven's name they print such "arrant nonsense," and he asked, "If we are not all snobs, why try so hard to make us so ?" Now of course this country is full of climbers. No one here is content with that station in life to which it has pleased God to call him; and if he were, some female relative would surely push him along. And since we are all trying to "get on," with a pretty fair chance of it, for our dullest people are always at the top, it is not strange that we should value all the little symbols of on-getting, and being "in society" is one of them. What if "society" does stretch as far as the wives of six plumbers at a luncheon? What if the term itself fades into a mere newspaper gesture or habit and a society reporter at a scene of South African carnage would probably, by mere reflex action, write, "Hottentot Society Girl Spears Five?" That does not turn readers into snobs. On the i9Z THE MARGIN OF HESITATION contrary, it confuses the snobbery they had before, and leaves them without a social chart or compass. A snob cannot tell from an American newspaper what to be snobbish about. The acreage of our newspaper snobbery is of course enormous. Even England, the Sinai of top-hat commandments, land of Turveydrop, George Osborne, and Sir Wil- loughby Patterne, England itself shows not so wide and foolish an expanse of newspaper snob- bery. But the true measure of snobbery is not in area, but in depth. At the bottom of a true snob his snobbery is united with his religion. Re- spectable British papers do not, like our own, mix up all sorts of people under "society" and chatter about them every day; to them it is a real thing and holy. Our papers confound snobbery; theirs treat it with respect. Try as we will, we cannot really tell who's who; we know that we are guess- ing. At the root of American snobbery is the cruel canker of distrust. "Society," as an Ameri- can newspaper concept, includes any member of the Caucasian race not necessarily rich or even well-to-do, but better off than somebody else some- where. If interest in it is snobbish, it is one of the broadest, least invidious forms of snobbishness ever known, approximating, one might say, a pretty general brotherly love; for it draws the mind to a Harlem sociable, and attracts the human soul to the strange, wild doings of Aldermen's THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 193 wives at their tea-tables in Brooklyn, probably clad in goatskins. It is not for an upstart and volatile people to dispute the calm supremacy of authentic snobbery. Your true snob is not inquisitive at all, for he has no sense of any social values not his own. He does not flourish in a sprawling and chaotic con- tinent. It is among the tightly closed minds of tight little islands that he is seen at his best. Our snobbery is not a sturdy plant, for its vigor is sapped by that social uncertainty at the root of it; and what is taken for it here usually springs from quite alien qualities — curiosity, a vast social innocence, and a blessed inexperience of rank. To be sure, if King George came to New York some one might clip his coat-tails for a keepsake ; and it is quite probably that Mrs. Van Allendale, of Newport, if asked to meet him, would be all of a tremble whether to address him as "Sire" or "My God." But what has this in common with the huge assurances of true snobbery — its enorm- ous certainty of the Proper Thing, in clothes, peo* ple, religion, sports, manners, and races, and its indomitable determination not to guess again? I wish I could do justice to the type of British literary journalism in which this sort of thing ap- pears. I have tried many times in the twenty years of my observation but never to my satisfaction. I suppose it will do no harm to try again. I shall i 9 4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION have to typify it under the imaginary title of The Gentleman's Review, because to pick out a single one of the several competitors- would be invidious. The essential point of The Gentleman's Review is that it is written by persons of the better sort for persons of the better sort. And not only must the writer be a better sort of person; he must constantly say that he is a better sort of person, and for pages at a time he must say noth- ing else. I have read long articles which when boiled down told the reader nothing else. I have read articles on socialism, patriotism, labor pro- grammes, poetry, the vulgarity of America and of the Antipodes, and on divers other subjects which did literally tell nothing else to the socialist, laborer, poet, or American or Antipodean outcast who read them. The gentility of the writers is never merely suggested; it is announced, and usually in terms of severity. A coal-heaver read- ing The Gentleman's Review would be informed in words of unsparing cruelty that he is low. In- deed, it seems the main purpose — at times the only purpose — for which the Review exists — to tell coal-heavers and other outside creatures that they are low. And by outside creatures I mean almost everybody. I mean not only all Americans, all Canadians, and other inhabitants of a hemisphere which, to say the least, is in the worst possible taste as a hemisphere, besides being notoriously ex- THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 195 ternal to the British Isles. I mean almost every- body in the right kind of hemisphere. I mean almost everybody in the British Isles, or even on the better streets of London. Only a handful of people can read the typical article of The Gentle- man's Review without feeling that they are at the bottom of a social precipice. The ideal of the true-born Gentleman's Re- viewer is not only social exclusiveness, but mental exclusiveness. He does not argue against an idea of which he disapproves; he shows that idea to the door. In a long paper on some form of radicalism he will say at the start that he must really refuse to speak of radicalism. The right sort of people do not speak of radicalism. They have dismissed it from their minds. And he de- votes his paper to developing the single point that the only way to deal with radicals is to expunge them from your list of acquaintances the moment you find out that they are radicals, and thereafter not to say a single word to them beyond conveying the bare information that they have been expunged. I recall just such a paper as this, and I recall the impression it made on seven extremely dignified persons whose successive letters to the editor, all dated from respectable London clubs, declared that in the opinion of the writers the danger of radicalism could not be averted in any other way : Gentlemen must dismiss radicals from their com- igQ THE MARGIN OF HESITATION pany just as they had dismissed radicalism from their minds. That done, radicalism would perish. A writer on a Labor-party programme in The Gentleman! 's Review would no more think of meet- ing the arguments for the Labor-party programme than he would think of meeting the laboring-man himself. Why bother to prove a Labor-party programme unsound in face of the towering ab- surdity that there should be such a thing as a Labor party and that it should have such a thing as a programme? There are social certitudes that gentlemen do not discuss. When Labor raises a question, the Gentleman's Reviewer, if he is true to type, will simply raise an eyebrow. When woman's progress was blackening the sky, I read dozens of article in The Gentleman' 's Review on woman's suffrage from which I am sure no reader could make out anything whatever except that a shudder was running through some gentlemanly frames. At the threat of a revolt of the working- class some time ago, The Gentleman's Review became speechless almost immediately as to the nature of the revolt. It could only say that some labor leader had been impolite to a member of the upper class, and that it feared the lower classes might, if they kept on in their present courses, become impolite to the upper ones. The thought of other perils more horrible than that shocked it to silence. But perhaps it could not THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 197 think of other things more horrible than that. There are things in this world that minds of this gentlemanly quality really must decline to meet. They are most of the things in this world. It is at its best in rebuking other people's man- ners while unconsciously displaying its own. Take American manners, for instance. Forty years ago it was saying we were rude because we were young. It is still saying so. "Centuries of polite interna- tional tradition" — we are to understand that it took at least that much to make a Gentleman's Re- viewer — are not behind us Americans. "Instinc- tive delicacy and sympathy with the feelings of others" — such as is displayed in the pages of the Review — "are not commonly possessed by the very young" — meaning, of course, possessed by Americans. Why, then, aspire to the courtesy and tact of ripe old world-wise Europe? As a rude young thing I should not think of aspiring to it, if I did not read on the very next page, perhaps, that the whole share of the United States in the late war, from the very beginning 1 of it to the very end of it, was merely a "military parade." Then the "delicacy" and the "sym- pathy" and the "polite international tradition" of this fine old world-wise representative are sud- denly brought not only within my reach, but within easy reach of almost any one. The cook and the bootblack and the garbage-man and I, and every 19& THE MARGIN OF HESITATION sort of low American, including colored people, may now burst out spontaneously and joyously and unashamed with all the crudities inherent in our natures, knowing that we can go no farther in manners of this type than the writers quoted have already gone — for the simple reason that there is no farther to go. If that is the degree of "tradi- tional international politeness" required by the rich and mellow culture of an older world, why need a Ute or a Yahoo despair of it? Raw man from Oklahoma though I am, utterly unfinished, confined almost exclusively to the companionship of cows, backgroundles's, uncouth, and in social ex- perience a tadpole, even I can be as delicately urbane as these exponents of an Old World culture. Now I confess I have idealized the situation in representing this element as the sole constituent of any single periodical. It may constitute only a part of a magazine or newspaper, and it may appear only sporadically. Several magazines which it pervaded largely at one time have since died of it, and others seem about to die. But it is still to be found in reassuring quantities, though scattered, and one could at any time, by judicious selection, make up a Gentleman's Review. I believe it is not only harmless, but desirable. It is not representative of the English people or of any English class. It is the unconscious bur- THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 199 lesque — often a very good one — of insularity, and the world is the better for a good burlesque. It is no more like the courteous and witty English- man one meets in life or in books or in the news- papers than is James Yellowplush. If Major Pen- dennis or Podsnap came to life again and turned into literary persons, they would write like The Gentleman' s Review. And it is pleasant to meet again the Pendennises and Podsnaps. Finally it has supplied many objects of entertaining satire to the best English writers of plays and fiction during our own generation. There is only one bad thing about it and that is entirely the fault of my fellow- countrymen. Owing to the unfortunate colonial- ism of the American literary class, there are quart- ers in which this sort of thing is taken seriously. I believe when that happens it is a surprise, even to the Gentleman's Reviewer himself. I believe even he is secretly aware that, whatever nature's reason for presenting him to a patient world may be, it cannot be for any such purpose as that. In regard to American manners, by the way, what nonsense we ourselves are in the habit of writing; why these serious articles every now and then on the decline of American manners? One appeared only the other day in a New York magazine. Declined from what, I wonder. We have no manners now, to be sure, but there is not a sign that at any moment of our past history we 2oa THE MARGIN OF HESITATION ever had any. One would suppose that the prim people who tell us from time to time that the "subtle note of real distinction is fading from so- ciety" would be at some pains to ascertain when and where it had bloomed. The "graceful civil- ities of our grandfathers have vanished," they say. But do they mean literally grandfathers? If so, that would take us back to about the era of Mr. Potiphar and the Reverend Cream Cheese and ormolu and universal drunkenness. If they mean great-grandfathers, one has a notion that about that time the Hon. Lafayette Kettle and Hannibal Chollop were not uncommon types. If they insist on the eighteen-thirties, the "subtle note of real distinction" must have been extremely hard to find, to judge from de Tocqueville and Mrs. Trol- lope, while in the decade before that, Stendhal and the younger Gallatin had never found a trace of it. Sometimes they wave the hand in a general sort of way to the "gentle courtesies of a hundred years ago," but it was at about that date, I believe, that Tom Moore was complaining that our man- ners were rotten before they were ripe, while at the close of the eighteenth century we find that very agreeable French gentlman, M. Moreaud de Saint-Mery, remarking the singular brutality of the gentle families of Philadelphia — not in a very exacting temper, either, for he merely insisted that people ought to show more of a spirit of social THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 201 helpfulness than to go on skating while their friends were falling through the ice and drowning. And these being merely the haphazard recollec- tions of extremely desultory readings, one natur- ally infers that the bibliography of bad manners must be enormous and that the dates in it, as the history of the country goes, would probably be of quite respectable antiquity. I do not deny that there may have been "graceful civilities" at some time or other, possibly at Plymouth Rock; I merely say that these writers never by any chance produce the proof of it, despite one's pardonable skeptic- ism. These decorous little lamentations on de- cline do, indeed, boil down to nothing. It is as if one should say, the "subtle note of real distinction" has within the last five years faded from the sub- way, or manners are no longer courtly on the uptown evening car. The frequent appearance of these articles brings out an important point of difference between French manners and our own. An Englishman might write such articles, but a Frenchman, I believe could not. Sensible Americans go to France for the purpose of escaping the type of mind that produces them. They have nothing to do with manners, but are merely treatises on toothpick orthodoxy. One of them begins with an anecdote of a "distinguished foreigner" who, when asked what he thought was 2oz THE MARGIN OF HESITATION the most striking American characteristic, replied, "Your lack of respect for your superiors." After rubbing that in for the proper hygienic interval, the writer advances to a series of salutary reflec- tions like these: "Notching can be further from the truth than the conception that personal delicacy means personal weakness," and the "unmannered man adds nothing to the picture of life." Why add to the national stock of uneasy self-conscious- ness? Surely there is no country on the face of the globe where so many people to the square mile are fidgetting over some perfectly worthless pro- priety. Silent prayer is the only recourse for any honest writer of this type, The moment he preaches manners to us he puckers us up still more. And there is this further peril in the thumping hortatory evangel on the need of being personally delicate and refined, delivered by people who from their manner of writing seem as much alike and rudimentary as doughnuts. If they keep it up they will surely start a Movement. We can or- ganize for politeness just as well as for mother- hood or for reading poetry, and a Federation of Clubs of Gentlemanly Endeavor may be even now in the wind. The very next writer of this article might in the natural order of things find himself president of a "nation-wide" organization for the promotion of personal delicacy, or at least chair- man of his State committee on drawing-room THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 203 charm. I can hear the speech at the founder's din- ner, for, of course, the thing would begin with a dinner: "Gentlemen, the mark of this era of social awakening is, as you well know, the spirit of or- ganized social service. People have organized in our day even in order to chew their own food, and the associations for digestion, for child-rear- ing, for controlling child-birth, for eating bran, going barefoot, reading prose, keeping healthy, and looking at birds are innumerable. What the individual used formerly to attempt in a feeble manner on his own account he now does efficiently by co-operative endeavor. Things that in the old days no one supposed could be organized are now discharged by thoroughly competent societies. For example, as you probably know, American poetry was organized not long ago, with head- quarters at Boston, the secretary being some mem- ber of the Lowell family, I believe ; and every one of you is doubtless familiar with the practically complete organization of posterity under eugeni- cal auspices. Now, if after two and a half centur- ies personal delicacy, and that subtle something which distinguishes the manners of other peoples, notably the French, from our own cannot be had by individual initiative, it is high time we employed the measures already so successful in other fields. It is unreasonable to protest against our pro- 204 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION gramme on the ground that personal delicacy can- not be organized. The same argument was ad- vanced against the organization of agricultural credit several years ago. Nor is there any force in the argument that at intervals of three months for twenty years articles of equal merit have ap- peared in American magazines, each pointing to perfect breeding without apparently doing any good. Our propaganda involves the printing of five such articles every month, to say nothing of the leaflets, folders and newspaper paragraphs tKat will pour in a steady stream into every corner of the country. It is a campaign of education that we have in mind. To any one who objects that no scheme for the promotion of personal delicacy has ever yet succeeded, I reply always with the simple question: "How many well-printed, attrac- tive folders were sent out?" and he always sub- sides immediately." TAILOR BLOOD AND THE ARISTOC- RACY OF FICTION Although, as is well known, tailoring ran for three generations in the family of George Mer- edith, it would seem from a recent biography that his own blood was nearly free from it at the age of two. At that age when another boy (aged four) came to visit him, he showed, according to his biographer, such a marked hauteur of manner that the other boy left the house, never to return. The aristocratic element in the blood had, he thinks, even then overcome the tailor corpuscles. Though hauteur at the age of two seems to this biographer incompatible with tailor origin, he does not on that account reject the tailor origin. He does not, like other writers on Meredith, in- vent a noble father for Meredith, or omit his birth altogether, or call it "mysterious," or dismiss it with the usual gasp: "Born of a tailor; who would have thought it!" On the contrary, he decides to make the best of this whole bad tailor business. They were fashionable tailors, at any rate, he says, and they may have fitted clothes to admirals in the Royal Navy; and the grandfather, the 'Great Mel,' had associated on equal terms 205 206 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION with county families — was quite the fine gentle- man, indeed; and George had inherited the gentle- man part of this grandfather, while escaping every trace of the tailor portion. I am not a syndicalist and I have no especial sympathy with a tailor soviet. I certainly should no more care to live under a tailor dictatorship than under that of any other labor union. But if the tailor revolution had to come, and the bombs were flying and the streets flowing with the blood of customers, I should be happy to see certain writers on George Meredith fall into the hands of the infuriated mob. A reasonable view of the relation between tail- oring and aristocracy has been quite beyond the power of Meredith commentators — most of them having gone all to gooseflesh at the bare thought of it. And yet Meredith could never have written about upper classes as he did, if he had not been the son of a tailor. Only as the son of a tailor could he have imagined so many of those radiant beings among the daughters of earls. As the son of an earl, he would probably have imagined them among the daughters of tailors. At all events, we should not find them among the daughters of earls in any such proportion as we now find them in his novels. Tailor-distance from an aristocracy in our day is the only safe distance for purpose of enchantment. ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 207 And I wonder if our own "best society" would not have stood a better chance in fiction if Ameri- can novelists had been sons of tailors. Not of course that tailor birth would have made up for the lack of certain other qualities that Meredith possessed, but it might at least have helped a little. There has never been enough illusion about our upper class, especially among the talented. In fact the more talented people are, the less enthusi- astic they seem to be about our upper class. Gifted novelists who know our upper class will die in exile rather than go on knowing it. Bare acquaintance with our upper class drove Henry James from this country for ever; better acquaintance with it made him the most loyal subject of the British Crown. Others have rebounded from contact with our upper classes into the mountains of Ver- mont. A gifted writer who has once met the better sort of people in New York will often re- main for ever after rooted in the Middle Ages. Nothing seems to kill so quickly all enthusiasm for our upper class as contact with it. Even the chance of contact checks the flow of fancy. It is possible that a really interesting figure in our upper class could be created only in the back- woods by a writer of great talent who had never once emerged. But tailor-distance from our upper class might have done something. It is conceiv- able that a glamour might be cast over our lead- 2o8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION ing families at tailor-distance, by a strong novelist who was naturally good at glamour-casting. A cook could not write a good American novel of caste, being in too close contact with the family, but a tailor might. No American novelist of the first rank, I be- lieve, has ever taken American social distinctions with a tailor seriousness. Something of a tailor seriousness in that matter will be found of course among many good American story-writers, but they are not of the highest rank. Tailor-birth, for example, would hardly have enabled the late Richard Harding Davis to improve on his New York heroes and heroines, probably would not have have resulted in any change at all. Tailor-birth would not have enabled Mr. Robert W. Chambers to throw more of a glamour over the golden few than he has thrown without it. But the fiction of well-bred people in this country has never had the benefit of that Meredith combination of tailor- birth and great talent. Suppose Mr. Howells had been tailor-born while remaining equally gifted, for example. He might have turned on that upper class of Boston a kindling and imaginative eye. He might have imagined Meredithian aristocrats in Boston — in- teresting people who did as they pleased. High birth in Boston need not have been the unpleasant thing he describes — making everybody feel what ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 209 a blessing it is to be born low and elsewhere. High birth in Boston, seen through the social haze of tailor-distance, might have seemed to him desir- able. At all events he would not have learned that every well-bred Boston person must be undesir- able. He would not have made it a law of his fiction that, whereas interesting people who do as they please are imaginable, they are not even by the wildest riot of the fancy ever to be placed among the upper class of Boston. Tailoring would have mitigated these rigorous results of a too close observation. Despite the confusion of classes in our time when you never can guess what people will be like from the sort of families they are found in, Meredith could still believe that Blood will tell. And he believed blood told delightfully and in the most minute detail. He believed that aristo- cratic noses were found on women of the higihest class instead of belonging as they generally do to shop girls. He believed in a noble bearing peculiar to lords which is really common to police- men. He imagined in earls the magnificent and aristocratic poise and the beauty of Italian day labourers. He believed duchesses walked like duchesses, when, if we may judge from photo- graphs, they must, rather, have tumbled around; and he believed that people were as stately as he thought they ought to be when he looked at the 210 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION dignified and imposing castles that they lived in. And wit ran in direct ratio to the good birth of his characters, and not inversely. That was the final touch of tailor sublimity. Meredith not only made aristocrats witty in their homes; he made polite society dine out wittily. Brilliant talk, such as is carried on by Jews, and tolerated nowhere in the best society, was attributed by Meredith to the class of people by whom the dullest things in the world have been said and about whom the dullest books in the world have been written. Henry James, born in a Harlem tailor-shop and never straying far away, Henry James, with three tailor ancestors looking down from the walk upon him, might have imagined five divinely com- plicated women east of Central Park, — at least he would not have absolutely refused even to try, on the ground that they were unimaginable. Henry James might have worked wonders of aristocratic subtlety even here, had he remained innocent enough, and tailoring was one of the few remain- ing guarantees of social innocence. I do not say that glorious creatures like Laura Middleton, or Diana, or Aminta, or the other goddesses of George Meredith could have been freely sprinkled in our upper class by any imagina- tion short of Meredith's, even with Meredith's three-fold tailor start. But I do say that much migiht hiave been done for our upper class in fiction ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 211 by an imagination raised to the third tailor^power by inheritance. It never has* had this supreme literary chance. What are known as social ad- vantages in this country have been fatal to any- thing like a poetic conception of our upper class. Never show a gifted novelist above the basement stairs, if you wish him to retain an exciting sense of social altitudes. Keep the better sort of liter- ary men away from anybody of the slightest social importance, if you wish any glamour to be cast. Aristocracies of fiction will never be perceived so long as the eyes are open. In spite of the Saturday Review, and parliamen- tary speeches, and the London Times, and Justin McCarthy's Reminiscences, and the vast volume of aristocratic British memoirs published by the score every year in Meredith's lifetime and our own, he created by sheer force of genius, guided by an inherited inclination, the illusion that the very highest families in England could be amus- ing in their homes. Meredith successfully em- bodied such a vision of aristocracy as nowadays can be confidently entertained only by three old maids washing dishes in a farm house. It is ab- surd to imagine, as the biographer does, whom I have quoted at the beginning of this article, that there was no tailor in the blood. In the present muddle of a changing social order, with the upper class being slowly educated 2 1 2 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION by the classes below, and getting the little wit it has from them, and all the clever people in one class flying immediately into another, up or down, with blood telling the wrong story and usually a very dull one ; with people everywhere turning out to be just what they ought not to be from their antecedents and surroundings, and with the most remarkable of public characters commonly the most deadly objects to the private gaze — in these conditions of our generation, a feat such as Mere- dith achieved becomes increasingly difficult. It requires, at the least, the advantage of a tailor ancestry. OUR REFINEMENT I do not object to that excellent lady who is to be found at intervals in the literary columns of a serious magazine wondering sweetly what the May-fly thinks in June. On the contrary, a May- fly is a good enough excuse for wonder and wonder is a good enough excuse for the most exciting kind of imaginative exercise. There is no reason why the intimations of immortality con- veyed to ladies by May-flys should not be a perma- nent part of every serious magazine on earth, I do not object, that is to say, to the situation itself. I object only to one appalling circumstance. It is always the same lady and she is always say- ing exactly the same sweet things, and the lan- guage she says them in is not a living human language. The objectionable thing is the awful iterativeness of its subhuman literary propriety. And it is the same way with all those other things expressive of literary refinement, expressive of nothing else, but recurring with a deadly cer- tainty, weekly, monthly, perennially, and perhaps eternally. Those pious papers on the comic spirit, by American professors of English; those happy 213 2i 4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION thoughts on the pleasure of reading good books rather than bad; on the imperishable charm of that which is imperishably charming; on the su- periority of the "things of the spirit" over other things not mentioned but presumably gross, such as things on the dinner table ; humorous apologues of Dame Experience conceived as a school-anis- tress; tender souvenirs of quaint great-uncles; peeps at a sparrow, nesting — it would be a sin to blame them from any other point of view than that of the future of the English language, for the subjects are irreproachable and the motives that actuate the writers on them are as pure as the driven snow. But they are the mimetic gentilities of what may be called our upper middle literary class and they are not expressed in any living language. Indeed they tend to rob a language of any hope to live. Not, of course, that English style is a mere matter of vocabulary or that the most rollicking use of the American vernacular in utter Shakes- pearean defiance of propriety would bring Shakes- pearean results. But distinguishable writing does after all derive from an immense catholicity and a freedom of choice, not only from among words that are read but from among words that are lived with. Nor can it possibly dispense with what the French call the "green" language — least of all in this country where the "green" language has OUR REFINEMENT 2 1 5 already acquired a vigor and variety that is mot to be found in the books. Take for example a passage from almost any serious article in an American magazine, say in regard to the reconstruction of American educa- tion after the war, for nobody had the slightest notion what he was writing about when he was writing on that subject, and there is never any idea in the article that might distract attention from the words. "It can scarcely be denied that the vital needs of the hour call for something more than the disparate and unco-ordinated efforts which were unhappily often the mark of educational endeavor in the past. That looms large in the lesson of the war. If it has taught us nothing else the war has at least taught us the necessity of a synthetic direction of educational agencies toward a defi- nite and realized goal, humanistic in the broad and per- manent sense of the term, humanistic, that is to say, with due reference to the changing conditions of Society. The policy of drift must be abandoned once and for all and for it must be substituted a policy of steadfast, watchful — etc." Not that I have seen this particular passage in •an article on the reconstruction of education, but it might be found in any of them. It is exactly in the vein of all that I have happened to read; and jn the best American magazines you will sorne- itimes find four pages of eight hundred words apiece all made up of just such sentences. 2 1 6 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION Compare it for imaginative energy, ingenuity, humor, any literary quality you like, with the fol- lowing selections from a recent volume on Ameri- canisms and slang : "See the elephant, crack up, make a kick, buck the tiger, jump on with both feet, go the whole hog, know the ropes, get solid, plank down, make the fur fly, put a bug in the ear, haloo, halloa, hello, and sometimes holler get the dead-wood on, die with your boots on, horn- swoggle, ker-flap, ker-splash, beat it, butt in, give a show- down, cut-up, kick-in, start-off, run-in, and jump off, put it over, put it across, don't be a high-brow, road-louse, sob-sister, lounge-lizard, rube, boob, kike, or has-been." The style of this paragraph is by no means so good as would have resulted from a more careful selection, for the words are taken at random and most of them are stale. Moreover, the words are not nearly so imaginative or vigorous as seven- teenth century terms, since forgotten by the minc- ing generations. The text, for example, is not for a moment to be compared with that of Sir Thomas Urquhart's "Rabelais." But even as it is, it is immeasurably better than my educational extract and it is just as pertinent to the subject of education — probably more so. The substitution of these lists for the usual university president's magazine contribution on educational reconstruc- tion problems would have helped just as much, if not more, to the solution of the problems, besides OUR REFINEMENT 2 1 7 being pleasanter to read. Such lists might, I think, replace with advantage much of what is called "inspirational literature." "New Thought," for example, might have spared itself thousands upon thousands, of its pages by simple repetition of these lists. There were many barkeepers — in better days, of course- — who, if they could have learned the literary language without losing grip on their own, might have made good writers. There are no professors of English literature who could learn to write the language even if you gave them all the advantages of barkeepers. They lack the bar- keeper's line, reckless imagination in the use of words. They cannot appropriate a word, or stretch it, or make it do something it had not done before, or still less create it out of nothing. They could not even interest themselves in the "green" language ; their interest arises only when it is dry. Never, like a washwoman, or a poet, could they 'add to the capacities of human speech. Their lives are spent in reducing them. Language would never grow if ruled by the American upper middle literary class. It would stiffen and die. Our college chairs of English and our magazines for "cul- tured" persons probably do more to prevent the adequate use of our common speech than any other influences. Distinguishable English sometimes may be 2 1 8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION found in an American newspaper ; it is never found in an American literary magazine. In some cor- ner of a newspaper you may find a man writing with freedom and -a sort of natural tact, choosing the words he really needs without regard to what is vulgar or what is polite. People are apt to read it aloud to you without knowing why; they like the sound of it. That never happens in a literary magazine. Nobody in a literary magazine fits words to thought; he fits his thoughts to* a borrowed diction. Nobody in a literary magazine cares a hang about the right word for the ex- pression of his thought but he is worried to death about diction. All the best contemporary literary essays are written in diction and there is no> more telling the writers apart, so far as their style is concerned, than if they were all buried in equally good taste by the same undertaker. Diction is the great funereal American literary substitute for style. Indeed that is what they mean when they praise an author's style. They do not mean that he has his own style of writing; they mean that he is in the style of writing. Measured by the vitality of masterpieces, news- paper English is sometimes fairly good; literary magazine English is never good. Bad English is English about to die, such as you see in the maga- zines ; the worst English is English that has never lived — it is the English of American belles-lettres. OUR REFINEMENT 219 That is one of the reasons why I hate the self- improved, traveled American whom I meet in books and periodicals. I hate him also for what seems to me the servility of his spirit in the pres- ence of other people's past. I dare say it may be because I envy him his advantages. That is what the cultivated person always implies, and he wond- ers how any one, in view of the national crudity, can have the heart to find fault with these mis- sionaries of taste from a riper culture who have learned the value of artistic milieux and literary backgrounds. After all, he says, what Henry James would call the "European scene" may still be commended to Americans, and surely It is just as well that they should be reminded now and then of what Professor Barrett Wendell used so admirably to term their "centuries of social in- experience." Nevertheless as he goes on I not only feel that I am coarse, but I like the feeling of it; and for the sake of other people of my own coarse type I will present -here the excuses- of vulgarity. I have never been in Paterson, N. J., and I have never been in Venice, and so far as direct esthetic personal consequences to myself of golden hours of dalliance in the two places are concerned, I am therefore unable to offer a comparison. But during my life I have met many returned travelers from Venice and from Paterson and I have read 220 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION or listened to their narratives with as much atten- tion as they could reasonably demand. Theoretic- ally, I accept the opinion of enlightened persons that Venice is superior, in respect to what edu- cators call its "cultural value," to Paterson. Prac- tically, and judging merely from the effects upon the respective visitors, I am all for Paterson. I have never met a man who returned from Pater- son talking like the stray pages of a catalogue, of which he had a complete copy before he started. Paterson never took away part of a man's mind and replaced it with a portion of an encyclopedia. Nobody ever came back from Paterson damaged as a man and yet inferior as a magazine article. For the careless person I should recommend Ven- ice; for the culture-seeker, Paterson. Overstrain, that misery of the conscientious self-improving man, with its disagreeable effects upon other peo- ple, could be avoided in Paterson. Out of ten essays on Venice that I have read, nine were writ- ten by fish out of water who might have swum easily and perhaps with grace in the artistic cur- rents of Paterson. !A self-improved American delivered an apolo- getic discourse the other day on the American de- ficiency in backgrounds. Culture cannot take root, he said; families float; everybody dies in a town he was not born in; art bombinates m a vacuum; literature gathers no moss; manners, when they OUR REFINEMENT 22 1 exist at all, are accidental; history is clean gone out of our heads, while every Englishman is familiar with Bannockburn ; poetry cannot be writ- ten, and it is foolish to try, on account of the dearth of venerable circumstance; no traditions, no memories, no inheritance — in fact, no past at all; not even a present of any consequence, but only a future; and into this future every man, woman, and child in the whole foolish country is moving — though it is not through any fault of theirs for the unfortunate inhabitants really have no other place to go to. I bear no grudge against the author of this discourse as an individual, but only as a type. In- deed, I am not sure that he is an individual or that I have reported him correctly, for no sooner does any one begin in this manner than his words run into the words of others, forming a river of sound, and I think not of one man, but of strings of thern — all worrying about the lack of back- grounds, like the man who cast no shadow in the sun. I deny that it is any one's voluntary attitude ; it is a lockstep that began before I was born, and I have no doubt it will continue indefinitely. Seven centuries after Columbus's injudicious discovery they will still be complaining, with a Baedeker in their hands, of the fatal youth of North America. For they live long, these people, because, as in certain lower orders of animal life, apparently, 222 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION there is hardly any life worth losing, and the family likeness they bear to one another is aston- ishing. The very ones that George William Cur- tis used to satirize as shining in society are still to be found among us at this moment, but tney are engaged for the most part in contributing to the magazines. In one respect they seem more the slaves of other people's backgrounds even than Mrs. Potiphar was. Mrs. Potiphar only believed that the right sort of liveries were not produced in this country, whereas they swear that the right sort of literature can never be produced in this country — or at least not till our backgrounds are ever so many centuries thicker than they are now. I am unable, looking back, to see any value what- ever in these decades of sheer sterile complaint of ■sterility, because no ruins can be seen against the sky, because no naiads are dreamed of in the Hudson or mermaids in Cape Cod Bay, and be- cause most people who are born in Indianapolis seem glad to get away from it when they can. For one sign that we have changed too fast I can produce two signs that we have not changed half fast enough. If there is no moss here on the walls of ancient battlements there is plenty of moss in our heads, and, so far as tenacity of tradition is concerned, I can produce a dozen United States Senators who are fully as pic- turesque, if only you will regard them internally, OUR REFINEMENT 223 as the quaintest peasant in the quaintest part of France. Backgrounds are not lost here just be- cause we move about; backgrounds are simply- worn inside, often with the ivy clustering on them. Who has not talked with some expatriated Boston man and found him as reposeful, as redolent of sad, forgotten, far-off things, as any distant pros- pect of Stoke-Pogis ? In fact, it seems as if these pale expositors of backgrounds had merely visited the monuments they praise — inside some Boston man — and that, I confess, is the most irritating thing to me about them. They have never really looked at anything themselves, but only learned from others what they ought to seem to see. And it is absurd to tax us with a lack of memory, when in some of our most exclusive literary circles there is notoriously nothing but a memory to be seen. There is too much Stoke-Pogis in a Boston man, if anything, in proportion to other things. Even the casual foreign visitor has noticed it. I have great respect for the religion of the Quakers, whose name, I understand, comes from the phrase of a founder about quaking and shak- ing in the fear of the Lord. And if that is the real reason why they quake I believe they are justified not only in their quaking, but in trying to make other people quake. But these Delsartean literary quakers correctly tremulous in the pres- ence of antiquity, these "cultured" minds, not only 224 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION palsied by their own advantages, but intent on palsying others, bring back no good report to any- body in regard to the good things in the world. I do not know whether a poet, like a sugar beet, requires a soil with peculiar properties; and, in regard to the poet, I do not know what the peculiar properties ought to be. Zoning of verse, comparative literary crop statistics, mean annual density of ideas, ratio of true poetry to square miles and population within a given period, are all outside my limitations. The theory that bone- dust fertilizers are the things for poets does not always seem to work, even when the bone-dust is that of the Crusaders, and I have read lyrics from cathedral towns which, though infinitely more decorous than the brass band of my native village, were equally remote from literature. Still there may be something in it. But I do know, even better than I wish I did, two generations of writ- ers on the theme, who have been saying, with hardly any deviation in their phrases, that this is the land where poets cannot grow; and I know them for the sort of persons who, if by chance a poet should grow in defiance of their theory, could not tell him from a sugar beet. They are unaware of any growing thing which stands be- fore them unaccompanied by bibliography. Un- less there were antecedent books about an object they would not know that the object was a poet. OUR REFINEMENT 225 As the words culture and refinement have been applied and as they have been exemplified in American letters they have come to carry a curse for all save little bands of unpleasant and self-con- scious persons who are themselves fidgetting about it. "Culture" is not absorbed, but packed in, al- ways with a view to being taken out again with- out a wrinkle in it, and it does nothing to the man who gets it, but he means to do a lot with it to you. It is absurd to suppose that the human con- tainer of it takes any personal interest in his contents. Of course I am not speaking of the essence of the thing, but only of the implications of the word as they have been seared into our social experi- ence. I do not mean that humane learning blasts an American, but I do mean that among those who are known as cultured Americans learning is not humane. And I am not condemning the present moment. It has nothing to do with the rudeness of young people, jazz bands, the corrup- tion of the English language, the cut of gowns down the back, war psychology, the Bolshevism of college professors, fox-trotting, the neglect of the classics, movies, commercialism, syndicalism, indecencies on the stage, popular novels, femin- ism, or any other of the unheard-of horrors that the middle-aged mind associates with the break- down of civilization. There is no sign that Amer- 226 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION ican civilization is breaking down in this respect, for the simple reason that there is no sign that American civilization in this respect ever existed. There is no- sign that among any considerable body of cultured Americans learning was ever humane, and it is lucky for us that vivacious men at every period of our national life have revolted from it. Ten years of Greek study would not have hurt Mark Twain, but ten years' contact with the sort of persons who studied Greek would have destroyed him. Historical studies would not have suffocated Walt Whitman; even after read- ing Bishop Stuibbs he might have remained our poet of democracy. But association with modern historians would have done for him. Had Walt Whitman taken the same course that I did at a school of political science, he would have gone mad or become a college president. What was it that so pinched the mind of Henry Adams, readers of the Education of Henry Adams are always asking, though one would think the answer could not be missed. It was Boston and Cambridge in the eighteen-fifties and an acute personal consciousness of membership in the Adams family. It was a lucky thing for both Jews and Christians that Moses was not a cul- tured Boston man, for the Ten Commandments would not only have been multiplied by fifty, but a supplemental volume of thousands of really OUR REFINEMENT 227 indispensable gentilities would have come out every year. No man knew better than the late W. D. Howells the Sinaitic rigor of the social scruple when the descendant of the Puritans once turned his conscience away from God and bent it upon culture. The genial tale of The Lady of the Aroostook might well have been a tragedy. Indeed, the passion of a man bred in the right Boston set and immensely conscious of it — a man who read the right books in the ri^ht way, knew the right people, visited the rig>ht places abroad — the passion of such a man for a girl who not only said "I want to know," but who had never heard of a chaperon — there is a situation not only tragic in itself, but close to the edge of violence, termin- able, one would say, only by accidental death, murder, or suicide. Desdemona was smothered for less. That Mr. Howells should see it to a comparatively cheerful end without calling down the lightning proves merely the magic of his hand. But Mr. Howells did not conceal one painful consequence. Hero and heroine both were outcasts from culture for evermore. Never again did they enter the doors of the right people of Cambridge. "He's done the wisest thing he could by taking her out to California. She never would have gone down here." This was the doom that culture pronounced in the final chapter. For, although at nineteen years of age Lydia ceased 228 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION to say she wanted to know, the early stain re- mained. She bore it to the grave. And this end- ing was entirely just and Mr. Howells did not ex- aggerate in the slightest degree the rigors of the law, for, though Lydia as he made her was the most natural and adorable creature imaginable, he was right in saying that in the cultured circles of the time and place she would not have gone down. The taboo of culture is of course no new thing, but dates from a comparatively ancient grudge in our brief literary history. People are ashamed of their culture nowadays, a friend of mine was say- ing, and he went on to oite instances of the ex- clusion from human intercourse of all those mat- ters of general interest which make intercourse human. And why are you so afraid of general ideas? one visiting Frenchman after another has asked me, and I have never yet been able to think of a suitable reply. And they go back to France on no better terms with the English language than when they came. It is impossible to arouse any enthusiasm for our spoken language in a French- man, for he does not believe that conversation in his sense of the word is ever carried on in it. And he is certainly right. The range of a quite ordinary Frenchman's every-day talk is not gen- erally permitted in this country. Religion may be discussed with a French chauffeur on a footing OUR REFINEMENT 229 of naturalness absolutely out of place at an American authors' club. You may confess a literary taste to a French washwoman, but not to a New York banker. The philosophic specula- tions of French barber shops would be shockingly pedantic at our dinner tables. Of course the main reason why the conversa- tion of a novelist does not differ from that of a shoe manufacturer is simply because as a rule there is no real difference between them. But there is sometimes another side to it. The man of letters who excludes letters from his talk is not necessarily ashamed of them. But he knows the traditional association in this country of culture with ennui, and he knows that it is amply justified. Acquaintance with the personalities of cultured groups naturally disposes a sensitive mind to the cultivation of an appearance of illiteracy. Thought is not a social nuisance in this country, but thinkers generally are. Hence, when seized by an irresistible impulse to express any sort of an idea, a well-bred man will always leave the room, just as he would do if seized by an uncontrollable fit of coughing. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 012 243 478 3 0\