UP STREAM 
 
 AN AMERICAN CHRONICLE 
 
U P S T REAM 
 
 BY 
 LUDWIG LEWISOHN 
 
 ^ 
 
 HON! AND LJVERIGHT 
 
 PrjjiUSiiF.KS : New York 
 
P555a3 
 
 UP STREAM 
 
 AN AMERICAN CHRONICLE 
 
 Copyright, 1922, by 
 
 BONI & LlVERIGHT, INC. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 X 
 
 §)0!.A6591O6 
 
 MAfl 13 72 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEB 
 
 Prologue . . 
 
 I. A Far Childhood .... 
 
 II. The American Scene 
 
 III. The Making of an American 
 
 IV. The Making of an Anglo-American 
 V. The American Discovers Exile 
 
 VI. The American Finds Refuge 
 
 VII. The Business of Education 
 
 VIII. The Color of Life 
 
 IX. Myth and Blood . 
 
 X. The World in Chaos 
 
 Epilogue . . . . . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 9 
 11 
 34 
 
 56 
 80 
 104 
 127 
 151 
 177 
 198 
 220 
 247 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/upstreamamericanOOIewi 
 
PKOLOGUE 
 
 The world is full of stories and many of the stories 
 are true. But they are not true enough. An artistic 
 pattern comes between the teller of the tale and his 
 reality, or a vague fear of stupid and malicious com- 
 ment or — especially in America — a desire to avoid 
 singularity. Yet, somehow, we must master life or it 
 will end by destroying us. We can master it only by 
 understanding it and we can understand it only by tell- 
 ing each other the quite naked and, if need be, the de- 
 vastating truth. 
 
 Some such perception and some such motive is in 
 the consciousness of every serious novelist and in that 
 of every thinker. But the novelist sacrifices to a form 
 and the thinker to a system. Each has had an anterior 
 vision into which he lets his facts and even his emo- 
 tions melt. And this anterior vision — of a fable in the 
 one case, of a logical structure in the other — is nothing 
 but a mask. For both the novelist and the philosopher 
 is only an autobiographer in disguise. Each writes a 
 confession; each is a lyricist at bottom. I, too, could 
 easily have written a novel or a treatise. I have chosen 
 to drop the mask. 
 
 It is not a simple thing to do. One likes to be decor- 
 ous. The folds of this mantle of civilization we wear 
 in public, and often enough, in private, are graceful 
 and accustomed. They give a dignity to the figure 
 that the mind may lack. But if no one will ever speak 
 out for fear of wounding his own susceptibilities or 
 
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 those of others, this hush of cowardly considerateiiess 
 and moral stealth in which so much of our life is 
 passed will either throttle us some day or sting us into 
 raw and mad revolt. 
 
 In every other country men have spoken out in 
 prose or verse and have recorded their experience and 
 their vision and their judgment on this civilization in 
 which we are ensnared. But no one has spoken out in 
 America. We have not suffered enough, and man is a 
 timid and a patient creature from whom nothing less 
 than the unendurable itself will wring a protest. 
 There are thousands of people among us who can find 
 in my adventures a living symbol of theirs and in my 
 conclusion a liberation of their own and in whom, as in 
 me, this moment of history has burned away delusions 
 to the last shred. But how many will admit that and not 
 rather yield to the insidious fear of those to whom they 
 owe deference or money or a social position in Gopher 
 Prairie or Central City? It is a nice question which 
 must be settled in each conscience. I have done my 
 share. 
 
 [10] 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 The city ;that I remember, the Berlin of the 
 eighties, was rugged and grey. But it had nothing 
 forbidding in its aspect, rather an air of homely and 
 familiar comfort. There were few private houses, but 
 people lived in their apartments in large, airy rooms 
 with tall French windows and neat, white tile ovens. 
 ; The streets were monotonous in appearance but ad- 
 mirably clean. There were no posters, no public ad- 
 vertisements except upon the pillars erected for that 
 purpose, the traffic of horse-cars, omnibuses and cabs 
 was orderly and convenient. The cabs, driven by red- 
 faced, loquacious cabbies in blue-caped coats and top- 
 hats, were cheap. My father and mother, though far 
 from rich, used them constantly, and I remember be- 
 ing driven for hours through the black-draped city on 
 that icy day in 1888 on which the old emperor's body 
 lay in state in the cathedral. 
 
 My earliest glimpses of beauty are characteristic 
 of the city. One was the windows of the Royal Porce- 
 lain Works on the Leipziger Strasse. With all the 
 exquisite sensitiveness of childhood I saw those won- 
 derful little figures and their porcelain veils and 
 draperies and delicately moulded forms. They were 
 so tiny and yet so perfect, and they thrilled me far 
 more than Rauch's equestrian statue of the great 
 Frederic or the chariot of victory over the city gate. 
 
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 The latter were dutifully impressed upon me by my 
 father ; my mother let me stand and gaze my fill before 
 the windows of the porcelain shop . . . But the great 
 sight to me, which I never saw without a lifting of the 
 heart, was a certain public square. One walked or 
 drove through a short street in which, villas stood in 
 gardens; at the end of that street one came upon the 
 square quite suddenly. To that moment I always looked 
 forward ; the sensation was like the sudden crash of an 
 orchestra. For the square spread out with an airiness, 
 a fine and noble amplitude of shape and proportion, a 
 grace and majesty at once that I despair of rendering 
 into words. I have seen nothing like it since. Perhaps 
 it seemed finer to my childish eyes than it was or is; 
 but I am willing to yield to that old vision as a true 
 one, since the seat of beauty is after all in the behold- 
 ing mind . . ♦ 
 
 Beyond the square lay the Tiergarten. Thither I 
 was taken on many pleasant afternoons. And I can 
 still see very clearly the statue of Flora surrounded by 
 gorgeous flower-beds and the monument to Queen 
 Louise and the "snail hill" swarming with other chil- 
 ' dren and their nurse-maids ; I can still hear their 
 merry cries ; I can still feel the stinging coolness on my 
 heated throat of the milk sold at the famous kiosks of 
 Bolle. But when I was four or five years old I would 
 beg my nurse to take me to the gold-fish pond. It was 
 generally still by the little artificial lake and I loved 
 the stillness ; the dark green f oilage was very thick all 
 around and the dusk fell early there. The mute dart- 
 ing about of the fishes seemed mysterious and soothing, 
 the stone benches were cool and strong and bare. I 
 felt in this spot without knowing it, the majesty of 
 
 [12] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 places withdrawn from the cries of men . . . Another 
 scene of the great park I remember : a winter scene. 
 Bare trees and the frozen river around the Rousseau 
 Island and the gay scarfs of the skaters. And sud- 
 denly dusk and a brazen sun-disc black-barred by 
 trees. Then the swift early winter night and the gas- 
 lamps of the streets and the warmth and security of 
 home . . . 
 
 But the out-of-door scenes of winter that I recall 
 are few: another square and the snow-flakes falling 
 thick and my father and I walking across it to a Vienna 
 cafe where he played chess on Sunday mornings. This 
 is one scene. And another is our sturdy maid carry- 
 ing me from a playmate's house to a cab through a 
 blinding blizzard. And the third is the Christmas fair 
 — long since abolished — -on the Bell-Alliance Square. 
 Twinkling lights in the frosty air, and booths noisy 
 and gay with cheap toys and cakes, and everywhere 
 the sharp odor of the fir-trees. 
 
 I loved spring more than even this — the cool, vir- 
 ginal, gradual spring of the North. The windows 
 were opened and children reappeared on the streets 
 and great boughs of lilacs were sold. Have the Ger- 
 man lilacs a headier and sweeter fragrance than ours ? 
 It seemed to fill the air and the heart; it meant the 
 winds of spring and people sitting in gardens and cast- 
 ing aside their cares. For the Germans, I can recog- 
 nise now, yield to the natural moods of the seasons. 
 Spring is to them still the spring of the folk-songs and 
 they would like to pack a bundle and wander out into 
 the land with lilac blossoms in their hats . . . My father 
 and mother took a cab on Sunday and drove in the 
 Tiergarten or else went by boat up the river Spree to 
 
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 Treptow and there we sat on pleasant terraces and 
 watched the life on the water. Even then I loved to 
 see men and youths in their skiffs with bare white arms 
 and legs and paddles flashing in the sunlight and took 
 a deep delight in the strong, silent, virile rhythm of the 
 rise and fall of their oars. And my father gave me a 
 cylindrical box of tin and taught me to recognize and 
 gather a few of the commoner herbs and grasses. Or 
 tried, rather, for even at five my mind was impervious 
 to the facts of science and soon I carried sandwiches 
 in my "botanising drum." 
 
 In the summer of my sixth year my father rented a 
 house by a lake in Straussberg near Berlin. The vil- 
 lage was still isolated. You took the train and then a 
 stage-coach to reach it. There were swans on the lake 
 and a boat, sheep in the meadows and goose-berry 
 bushes in the garden. Over all a deep, brooding, old- 
 world peace. My father employed weavers in the vil- 
 lage and I saw them in their houses at the hand- 
 looms. It was a city-child's first taste of country life. 
 And the crow of a cock across the fields or the bleat of 
 a sheep still brings to me a vision of the Brandenburg 
 country-side. When we returned to Berlin I entered 
 school and life became a grave and ordered matter. 
 
 n 
 
 Our home was a flat of seven rooms furnished with 
 more solidity than grace. Beds, tables and chairs 
 were of massive walnut and of a design so old-fash- 
 ioned that I see it returning into favor. All these 
 things had not been bought in shops. According to a 
 sound, old custom even then, I suppose, on the wane, 
 they had been made to order by a small master cabinet- 
 
 [14] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 maker. Here lived my father, my mother, my maternal 
 grandmother and I. Nor must I forget the faithful, 
 kindly Kathe who was with us and served us until that 
 home was broken up. 
 
 in 
 
 My people were Jews of unmixed blood and descent 
 who had evidently lived for generations in the North 
 and IMorth East of Germany. I have before me now a 
 picture of my grandfather taken in the sixties. Despite 
 the fact that he performed rabbinical functions to scat- 
 tered congregations in East Prussia, I observe that in 
 contravention of the law, his face is clean-shaven and 
 that he has no ear-locks; he is clad in the Western 
 European fashion of his day. He was a large man with 
 a liberal forehead, a humorous mouth and kindly eyes. 
 From old, half -forgotten anecdotes I glean something 
 of this character. He had much rabinnical learning, 
 but a whimsical contempt for the ritual law; his 
 familiar friends were the Protestant Pastor and the 
 schoolmaster of the village ; he was of frugal habits but 
 of something dangerously like incompetence in worldly 
 tEihgsI The power and intensity of the family belonged 
 to my grandmother, who was much his junior and who 
 survived him for over twenty years. It was she who 
 had run the primitive little factory that turned cotton 
 into wadding for the greatcoats needed in the severe 
 winters on the Eussian frontier; it was she who had 
 toiled early and late that her sons might have an 
 academic education. They were grateful to her and 
 provided for her in her old age with a fine generosity. 
 Of intimate tenderness to her they felt but little. She 
 was a tall woman and a dour. She had strong prac- 
 
 [15] 
 
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 tical sense but a tyrannical and gloomy temper. To 
 me she melted, the only child of her youngest and 
 of her only girl, and the memory touches me of her sit- 
 ting on the green rep sofa, glasses on nose, and read- 
 ing aloud to me the German fairy tales of which I 
 never tired. 
 
 My father and mother were first cousins. Their 
 racial and social origin was the same. So that I need 
 not dwell on my paternal grand-parents of whom I 
 know but little. The mother (my grandmother's sis- 
 ter) had died early. My grandfather had started out 
 in life as a tanner, but had succeeded neither at his 
 trade nor at anything else. I remember him well, for 
 he was our guest on every Sunday. His white mous- 
 tache and Vandyke beard gave him an air of false dis- 
 tinction, for his intelligence was limited and his man- 
 ners clumsy. My mother treated him with gentleness, 
 my father with a distant kindness. For my grand- 
 father, being poor, had turned over his oldest child at 
 the age of five to childless but wealthy, relatives and 
 this uncle and aunt had been, in the deeper sense, the 
 only parents whom my father had ever known. From 
 them, too, came the moderate but real prosperity that 
 we enjoyed. 
 
 Other forms and faces are much clearer in my 
 memory — a large circle of uncles and aunts and cousins, 
 all acting with a special tenderness to me as the young- 
 est child in the group. And chiefly I recall my mother 's 
 oldest and favorite brother. He was a man in the 
 forties when I knew him, very tall and very stout. He 
 was his mother's son. But her imperiousness and 
 moroseness had been tempered in him by a fine and 
 trained intelligence and by contact with men and with 
 
 [16] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 notable affairs. He had passed through the gymnasium 
 at Insterburg and then studied law at Konigsberg. 
 Thrice he had fought for his country, in 1864, 1866 and 
 1870, and from the campaign in France he had re- 
 turned with the iron cross. He had abandoned the law 
 and occupied a distinguished position on the staff of a 
 well-known Berlin newspaper. Punctilious and exact- 
 ing and a tireless worker, he showed the kindlier ele- 
 ments of his nature in a wide hospitality and for many 
 years his house in Berlin was the gathering place of 
 the younger graduates of his Burschenschaft and his 
 university. The letters which he wrote to my mother 
 in America in the course of two decades I am glad to 
 possess. The style is clear and expressive with a touch 
 of austerity, the contents unaffectedly high-minded, 
 melancholy (the badge of all our tribe) and warm- 
 hearted. 
 
 This uncle had married a Gentile woman and for 
 years the marriage was a stormy one. But his daugh- 
 ter, a fair, engaging girl somewhat older than I, was 
 the companion and playmate of my earliest years, and 
 the relations between my aunt and her Jewish kin were 
 cordial and unclouded. 
 
 In truth, all the members of my family seemed to 
 feel that they were Germans first and Jews afterwards. 
 They were not disloyal to their race nor did they seek 
 to hide it. Although they all spoke unexceptional 
 High German they used many Hebrew expressions 
 both among themselves and before their Gentile 
 friends. But they had assimilated, in a deep sense, 
 Aryan ways of thought and feeling. Their books, their 
 music, their political interests were all German. I 
 remember but one phrase disparaging to their Christ- 
 
 [17] 
 
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 ian countrymen. It was a curious one : * ' What can one 
 expect? The Gentile has no heart !' ' 
 
 Two scenes stand before me which symbolise the 
 character of the social group from which I sprang. 
 This is one : I am sitting in a half-darkened room and 
 my heart beats and my cheeks burn. It is Christmas 
 Eve. I look out through the dark pane and across the 
 street. Ah, there, behind an uncurtained window, a 
 tree with candles. Quickly I turn my eyes away. I 
 do not want to taste the glory until it is truly mine. 
 And at last, at last, a bell rings. The folding doors 
 open and there — in the drawing room — stands my own 
 tree in its glimmering splendor and around it the gifts 
 from my parents and my grandmother and my uncles 
 and aunts — charming German toys and books of fairy- 
 tales and marchpane from Konigsberg. And my mother 
 takes me by the hand and leads me to the table and I 
 feel as though I were myself walking straight into a 
 fairytale . . . 
 
 And the other scene : It was my grandmother 's cus- 
 tom, in pious remembrance of her husband, to visit the 
 temple on the chief Jewish holidays — New Year and 
 the Day of Atonement. And once, on the day of the 
 great white fast, I was taken there to see her. The 
 temple was large and rather splendid ; the great seven- 
 branched candelabra were of shining silver. The rabbi, 
 the cantor and the large congregation of men were all 
 clad in their gleaming shrouds and their white, silken 
 praying shawls and had white caps on their heads. I 
 can still see one venerable old man who read his He- 
 brew book through a large magnifying glass. The 
 whiteness of the penitential scene was wonderful and 
 solemn. Then the first star came out and the great day 
 
 [18] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 was over and in the vestibule I saw my grandmother 
 being reverently saluted by her sons who wished her 
 a happy holiday. 
 
 Two scenes. But the first was native and familiar 
 to the heart of the child that I was : the second a little 
 weird and terrifying and alien. 
 
 m 
 
 My father 's foster-father was a man of some educa- 
 tion and reading. Also an astute man who despite his 
 severe lameness conducted a successful importing 
 business from his armchair. His wife was a warm- 
 hearted woman, but incurably erratic and had ended 
 in hopeless madness when my father was a youth. It 
 is clear that the adopted child received great kindness, 
 was treated with indulgence or overindulgence, but 
 never received any rational guidance. He was taken to 
 France and Switzerland before he was fifteen, his 
 ample allowance permitted him to satisfy his tastes in 
 books and music and amateur scientific experimenta- 
 tion. But neither his mind nor his character under- 
 went any discipline. Thus he grew up generous but 
 wasteful. The bitter experience of later years cor- 
 rected that fault. It could not correct his over- 
 eagerness, his lack of intellectual restraint, his habit 
 of Utopian scheming, or the harsh self-assertiveness 
 by which he strove to deaden his own sense of failure 
 and insignificance. But neither could it impair his 
 beautiful unselfishness and courage or his tireless de- 
 votion to the things of the mind. In later years I 
 often found myself at variance with him in matters of 
 opinion and belief; yet in face of his unfaltering de- 
 
 [19] 
 
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 votion I was always consoled by the thought that I 
 have scarcely a sound interest in literature or philoso- 
 phy the impulse toward which had not come to me 
 from his teaching and from his example . . . 
 
 He completed the course of the Royal Realschule 
 at nineteen. He was too uncertain of himself to in- 
 sist on prolonging his studies at the university; he 
 already loved my mother and so he entered a well- 
 known house of woolen manufacturers. By this time 
 his foster-mother was hopelessly insane and his fos- 
 ter-father had fallen under the influence of an inferior 
 woman. He had no real home. And so his request to 
 be set up in business and to marry was readily granted. 
 At twenty-three he was a father. 
 
 I often reflect upon his tragic youth. He was only 
 a boy, crude, passionate, impulsive. He disliked his 
 business but dared not slight it. Upon him were the 
 eyes of my grandmother and of my mother's brothers. 
 Their scrutiny, I am afraid, was more severe than 
 sympathetic. The society in which he lived placed 
 great stress on dignity and seemliness of demeanor. 
 And so he tried hard to play the man and the man of 
 business. That, under these circumstances, he escaped 
 obvious disaster for eight years bears witness to his 
 feeling of duty and his endurance. 
 
 My earliest recollections of him are all of his hours 
 of escape from drudgery and care. He would sit in the 
 mellow gas-light of our sitting-room and read far into 
 the night. Or I would wake up and see him in the ad- 
 joining room, reading in bed by candle-light. And on 
 cold or rainy Sundays and holidays he would spend 
 hours and hours at the piano. He played most imper- 
 fectly at best, but he read his scores accurately and 
 
 [20] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 with fine musical intelligence and his halting technique 
 did not prevent him from hearing all the grace and 
 charm of Mozart, all the loftiness and solemn sweet- 
 ness of Beethoven . . . 
 
 My mother did not come to Berlin until her father 
 died. She was then only twelve years old. But a 
 deep and tenacious loyalty attached her to the bleak 
 East Prussian village of her childhood, and for years 
 she was never weary of telling, nor I of hearing, stories 
 of those early days. Thus I know how the intense, 
 dark-eyed little girl with the very red cheeks of a 
 northern climate hastened, wrapped in a heavy shawl, 
 through the snowy dusk to afternoon school, clutching 
 a candle with which to light her form. Or how, on 
 other days, she went eagerly to the house of a super- 
 annuated spinster who had been a governess in gen- 
 tlemen's families to learn French and crocheting and 
 tatting. She brought from that old home, moreover, 
 a fine heritage of folk-songs and tales and sayings. 
 Much that I learned from her lips as early as I learned 
 anything I have found since in the collections of f olk- 
 lorists and students of popular poetry and song. She 
 was all her life, despite her Jewishness, her wide and 
 sad experience and her artistic tastes, a spiritual child 
 of the German folk. A hundred times, when her hair 
 was white and her heart worn with sorrow and disap- 
 pointment, I have seen in her eyes, in her whole self 
 arise suddenly a ghostly but sweet shadow of the 
 sturdy East-Prussian lass — simple and deep-hearted 
 and of the very soul of her homeland. 
 
 Her education in Berlin was old-fashioned and lim- 
 ited. It was long before the days of the gymnasium 
 for girls. Yet within its narrow range the Hohere 
 
 [21] 
 
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 Tochterschule had thoroughness. My mother's knowl- 
 edge of French, at least, was sound and extensive. 
 Her chief interest, however, in those days, was music. 
 Her alto voice was well cultivated. When I awoke 
 to the consciousness of art I found that I knew — and. 
 could remember no time at which I had not known — 
 the words and music of practically all the great songs 
 of Schubert and Schumann, of Franz and Mendelssohn 
 and Brahms. So often, during my childhood, had I 
 heard them from her lips. 
 
 Her girlhood was not happy. The social environ- 
 ment was cruelly rigid ; one breathed according to law. 
 She wanted to enter a seminary for teachers; she 
 begged to be allowed to learn book-keeping. But since 
 there was no need, her brothers decided that it was 
 unseemly for a young woman to work outside of the 
 home. When the dusk stole into the small Berlin flat 
 and she was weary of music and embroidery, she would 
 go out in all weathers and hurry through the streets 
 and let the rain beat upon her face — intensely troubled, 
 rebellious against the forces that held her. Yet she 
 was quite helpless. For her strength never lay in 
 nimbleness of mind ; neither then nor later did she re- 
 flect closely; it lay in the fullness and richness of her 
 emotional nature. But she had been carefully taught 
 to distrust her impulses. She wrote verses and dared 
 not show them. Even so she was considered uncon- 
 ventional and shrank more and more within herself. 
 She entertained a deep affection for a young pianist 
 through whom she caught glimpses of a freer life. But 
 he was hopelessly poor and drifted away. She re- 
 ceived the most intelligent sympathy, after all, from 
 her young cousin, my father. They read the same 
 
 [22] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 books, loved the same music, nursed their enthusiasm 
 on the same plays. He was reputed, moreover, to be 
 the heir of a very large fortune. Neither knew that 
 his foster-father, as a matter of fact, had lost many 
 thousands in the financial collapse that followed the 
 inflation of the early; seventies. And she thought, 
 quite rightly, that money means liberty in the higher 
 and finer as well as in the coarser and more obvious 
 sense. 
 
 Once married, however, my father's crudeness and 
 violence wore on her; a moroseness in him which was 
 the result of the harsh pressure which he endured and 
 would not admit, estranged her. Again she was baffled 
 and solitary. Then her child was born. The tension 
 snapped. Into the channel of her maternal love she 
 poured all her passionate ideality, all her deep yearn- 
 ing, all her half -inarticulate ambitions, all the splen- 
 dor of her frustrate hopes. In the wild and tragic 
 munificence of her love she kept nothing for herself. 
 Utterly she transferred the centre of her being to 
 another. It was wrong ! Wrong to herself. The world 
 is wide and its paths are many and the fate of no man 
 is quite his own to shape. So that through my fail- 
 ures and misfortunes and enforced wanderings her 
 life was again beggared and often darkened. I loved 
 her and I mourn her with all my strength. Yet to her 
 great love I was — as any man would have been — but 
 an unprofitable servant. 
 
 17 
 
 My life until I went to school was an intense wak- 
 ing dream. The pretty toys I had interested me but 
 
 [23] 
 
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 little. I shrank from playmates not through timidity 
 but because they interrupted my imaginings. Their 
 amusements seemed aimless and their noise made me 
 feel sick and faint. Yet I was by no means a delicate 
 child; I was sturdy and broad-chested and passed 
 vigorously through two rather severe illnesses that 
 attacked me early. But just as the taste of certain 
 dainties that I liked gave me a pleasure that was almost 
 too keen, so disagreeable sense-impressions made me 
 dizzy and, on at least one occasion, violently ill. An 
 old aunt had died and my mother took me with her on 
 a visit of condolence. The room was full of black- 
 garbed women ; there was a faint stale odor of flowers 
 and a continuous buzz of conversation. It all seemed 
 hideous to me; I fainted and had to be carried home. 
 The only child whom I admitted to full intimacy was 
 my fair-haired cousin. She was musical, her voice 
 was soft, her ways with me were gentle. I loved to 
 touch the fine texture of her skin and the silkiness of 
 her long hair. Curiously enough I cannot remember 
 how, in those earliest years, we entertained each 
 other. I recall with the utmost vividness that I 
 thought her lovely, and that the sight of her touched 
 me like the lilacs of spring or the sound of singing . . . 
 Most of my waking dreams have vanished from my 
 mind. But two I entertained so constantly and so long 
 that I remember them as though they had been reali- 
 ties. I imagined a great garden in an endless summer. 
 In it were gathered under cool groves the few people 
 whom I loved. There were tables under the trees 
 laden with things to eat — roast duck and Baumkuchen 
 and clusters of large, cool, translucent grapes. A 
 Never-Never land. The other dream was more boyish. 
 
 [24] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 I saw myself, clad in green huntman's garb, a cock's 
 feather in my hat, riding swiftly on a small, lithe 
 horse. Whither or why? I don't know. That vision 
 of myself was enough and was a source of endless 
 delight. 
 
 When I was four years old I was sent to a Kinder- 
 garten. But I was so obviously unhappy and listless 
 that the principal asked my mother to keep me at 
 home. Then my grandmother taught me my letters 
 and my real life began. My first two books were col- 
 lections of stories written for little children and I 
 thought them delightful. But someone brought me a 
 small, greenish volume bound in boards. It was called 
 Bechstein's Marchen. Faded and tattered the little 
 book lies before me as I write. I turn the pages — to 
 this day I know them almost by heart — I look at the 
 small, stiff, quaint, inimitably haunting wood-cuts. . . . 
 Immemorial romance, sombre and magical world of 
 dim forests and mediaeval cities and doomed kings, 
 of shepherds and gnomes, full of old racial memories, 
 free as the imagination of childhood, deep as the heart 
 of man ! The style, I see now, was worthy of the mat- 
 ter — concrete, marrowy, quaint as the wood-cuts with 
 flashes now and then, of a wild, grotesque humor . . . 
 For the first time in my life I became insistent, begging 
 for books and more books. Thus I read Grimm and 
 Andersen for myself now and the Arabian Nights and 
 a large and precious volume called Al-Runa in which 
 were gathered fairy-tales of all peoples — German and 
 English and Norse, Romaic and Russian and the weird 
 and cruel legends of the Southern Slavs. I read until 
 my eyes ached and my forehead was fevered. If my 
 mother bade me go and play in the open I lay on the 
 
 [25] 
 
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 door-step without and wept in a passion of despair. 
 No wonder! I have lived with books and loved the 
 best things in more than one literature. Yet what has 
 the highest delight of later years been to that pure and 
 passionate joy, that ecstasy of absorption in which I 
 became one with the things I read and saw with my 
 own eyes castles by the shores of Norseland, dragons 
 on the banks of lustrous rivers and with my own ears 
 heard the blowing of the horns of Elfland. . . . 
 
 My condition was, of course, an unhealthy one, and 
 my mother dealt with it energetically. On four after- 
 noons a week I was sent to the Tiergarten in charge 
 of a young Kindergartnerin, on other afternoons my 
 mother took long walks with me, a habit which we con- 
 tinued for many years. I said that she dealt with this 
 matter energetically. But not with this alone. Her 
 love was no ignoble indulgence. It held no element of 
 moral sloth. My diet was determined by the family 
 physician, not by my liking. For every time I tasted 
 sweets or pastry, an American child of to-day tastes 
 them a hundred times. I slept on a pillow of horse- 
 hair; I used not the traditional feather-bed but the 
 hardier blanket. ... It never occurred to me that I 
 could fail to obey my father and mother ; it never oc- 
 curred to my cousin and the other children whom we 
 knew that they could fail to obey theirs. Thus be- 
 tween parents and young children the relations were 
 far more dignified and becoming, far more fruitful of 
 a fine piety than any I have seen since. There may 
 have been an occasional injustice. "We are all human. 
 There was no noise, no wrangling, no vulgar antagon- 
 ism. . . . After the care of my body, my mother's love 
 took the form of an intense and glowing ambition for 
 
 [26] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 me. I was to realize my highest possibilities, to de- 
 velop every faculty, to attain every ability and grace 
 that mark the complete man. I learned skating in 
 winter and swimming in summer, always under com- 
 petent instruction. I was taught music and gymnas- 
 tics. I have heard mothers complain with a cer- 
 tain wistfulness that it was time for their children to 
 go to school. I have seen them put off the evil day. 
 My mother with her German ideals felt altogether dif- 
 ferently. With almost an austerity of joy she wel- 
 comed the autumn of my sixth year. The great process 
 of development was now to begin in earnest. The day 
 was a solemn day for her. Consciously she now dedi- 
 cated herself to a double watchfulness, helpfulness and 
 devotion during the momentous years that were to 
 come. 
 
 The society into which I was born, whatever were 
 its virtues or its faults, had one notable quality: it 
 knew what it wanted. A few aims and their implied 
 values were fixed. The kind of school I was to attend 
 was never debated. It was an absolutely foregone con- 
 clusion that a liberal education was the necessary foun- 
 dation of right and noble living. My parents were 
 of modest origin and of modest means. But if anyone 
 had questioned my being prepared for the gymnasium 
 and proceeding from thence to the university, they 
 would have held it a prophecy of my early death. My 
 uncles entertained the same feeling concerning their 
 sons, and among the painful memories of my childhood 
 is the gray, tragic face of one of them whose boy had 
 that day failed to pass his Reifeprufung. So deeply 
 
 [27] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 did this conviction, which was considered beyond dis- 
 cussion, sink into my consciousness that, to this day, 
 the debate concerning the value of a higher education 
 so often heard among us in America, has no more 
 real content for me than a debate concerning the value 
 of bread. . . . 
 
 The gymnasium which admitted me to its Vorschule 
 was housed in an ancient building, four stories high, 
 constructed of heavy and rather gloomy stones. I do 
 not know where it was. I know that on my way to 
 school I passed one house that was almost hidden by 
 roses in the spring, and that I passed a handsome new 
 church $iat stood ,in a small, green square., The 
 wooden stairs of the gaunt, old schoolhouse were 
 deeply worn by the steps of generations of boys and 
 youths, the yard was bleak and paven, the rooms light 
 but barren of any adornment; the forms were dark- 
 brown with splashes of ink. 
 
 During the first week at school I learned to know 
 loneliness and homesickness and began to develop, 
 too, a certain quiet stoicism which staid with me for 
 many years and did me measureless harm. The 
 teacher, a lank, kindly man with a long, blond beard, 
 left the room for a little. He found it in uproar when 
 he returned. I had been quiet. But I, too, felt the 
 smarting taps of his cane across my shoulders. I did 
 not cry and I did not tell my mother until years later. 
 It was the only punishment I received at the school 
 during the two years of my attendance. Soon this 
 very teacher singled me out with much kindness, vis- 
 ited our home when I was ill with a heavy cold and 
 commended me to the teacher who followed him. By 
 this time too, I had made friends of several of my little 
 
 [28] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 fellow-pupils and the first wretched feeling of forlor- 
 ness had worn off. 
 
 The instruction was simple in its subject-matter: 
 reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, gymnastics and 
 i ' religion. ' ' I know now that it was remarkably thor- 
 ough. I am hopelessly stupid at figures. For six 
 weary years at high school and college I dragged my 
 numb mind through five or, at the best, three periods 
 of mathematical instruction a week. I could not tell 
 now, literally to save my life, the nature of a quad- 
 ratic equation. But I know the elementary arithmetic 
 learned in that German school. I don't need to multi- 
 ply simple figures, for instance. I know the answers 
 instinctively and at once. . . . The hour I liked best 
 was that known as "religion" As a Jew I could easily 
 have been excused from attending. But my parents 
 had no prejudices in this respect. And they were right. 
 For there was no hint of dogma, not even of moraliz- 
 ing. The teacher simply related to us the Old Testa- 
 ment legends in chronological order, and to me it 
 seemed as though I heard a new and fascinating set of 
 fairy-tales. I had a vision of the tower of Babel pierc- 
 ing a tropic sky, of long lines of camels under solemn 
 stars, of tall, dark maidens carrying pitchers to ancient 
 wells by the tents of Jacob. ... 
 
 The home-work was harder. My mother's intense 
 ambition for me made her severe. She bought a desk 
 for me which stood, as did its chair, on a little wooden 
 platform several feet in height. While I sat at this desk 
 she could, small as I was, stand beside me. And so we 
 worked together until my tasks were perfectly done — 
 until I had written my copy-book page and could recite 
 my verses without hesitation. These tasks, I think, 
 
 [29] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 grew longer than was quite wise during my second 
 year at school. I shed some childish tears of weari- 
 ness, I know, and my mother grew a little anxious 
 over my lack of zeal. 
 
 But life was not all work. There was the magic 
 of Christmas and Easter with generous vacations; 
 there was the delight of spring with flower-girls on the 
 curb. I had an allowance of one mark a week now and 
 spent most of it on posies for my mother and my 
 blond cousin. Above all, in winter there was an occa- 
 sional visit to a theatrical performance of some fairy 
 play — a pleasure almost too rich and keen to be quite 
 free from pain. Also there were children's parties. 
 But I cared less for these than for a quiet afternoon 
 with one of my fellows at school — a little lad of almost 
 girlish delicacy and of my own tastes. And there 
 were long walks with my mother, and skating in win- 
 ter with my cousin and summer outings. ... A rich 
 and happy childhood. Even my grandmother's death 
 darkened it only for a week or two. Nor, in my child- 
 ish preoccupations, did I hear the mutterings that pre- 
 ceeded the final crash of our prosperity and our hopes. 
 
 Years afterwards I learned, of course, all the dis- 
 heartening details of my father's financial ruin. They 
 would make but a dull story. Late in the year 1889 
 his foster-father died and left him about twenty thou- 
 sand dollars, the remnant of a once considerable for- 
 tune. With this sum he rashly engaged in an 
 undertaking of which he knew nothing — the importa- 
 tion of Italian fruits. He paid an exorbitant sum 
 
 [30] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 for the good- will of a worthless firm, for lighters that 
 did not exist, for customers that could not be found. 
 In three months he was ruined and, overcome by shame 
 and despair, fell ill. His illness was not of the body. 
 It was a slight attack of melancholia. The psychical 
 inhibitions were, of course, paralysing. Yet no one, 
 not even his physician, quite understood that fact. 
 He was urged to see friends and former associates, 
 to seek a position here and there. But it was impos- 
 sible for him to face the world. Aimlessly he wan- 
 dered about and reported (and probably believed) that 
 he had met only coldness and rebuffs. My mother, not 
 dreaming that his mind was sick, credited these re- 
 ports; they shook her faith in men and increased her 
 fundamental self-distrust. Thus in the midst of 
 friends and kinsmen who would, in the traditional 
 Jewish fashion, have scolded loudly but helped gener- 
 ously, my father and mother were isolated, embittered 
 and helpless. ... 
 
 A day came which I have never forgotten. My 
 father and mother stood in our living room. A shaft 
 of September sunshine fell upon them both. My father 
 held his hand to his mouth; one of his delusions was 
 that his tongue was slightly paralysed; my mother 
 turned the pages of a letter. Her eyes rested on him 
 in sorrow and perplexity Suddenly she spoke: 
 "Would you like to go to America ?" My father drew 
 himself up. A strange and almost unnatural relief 
 came into his face. "Yes," he gasped. Then he turned 
 to me with the first smile he had worn in weeks. 
 "Would you like to go to America, to Uncle S.f" 
 
 Long before, the youngest of my mother's four 
 brothers had emigrated to America. He was said to 
 
 [31] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 have prospered moderately there. The letter was from 
 him. The relief which my father had shown was fol- 
 lowed by a fever of activity. Though his life had been, 
 however rash and foolish, of an unblemished honor, 
 he councilled my mother to secrecy. She blamed her- 
 self bitterly in later years for having followed his 
 council. He was like a man trying to flee from himself. 
 Weeks of turmoil followed. I felt keenly the hid- 
 den terror and the loud confusion. My father was 
 possessed by the morbid notion that he himself would 
 have to carry all our luggage. He sold our furniture, 
 his excellent library; with difficulty my mother saved 
 the silver and linen and my books. ... It was autumn 
 and it rained and rained. My mother felt a thousand 
 hesitations. Again and again she was on the point of 
 speaking out, of appealing to her brothers. Pride and 
 self-distrust and my father's sudden, diseased energy 
 constrained her. Then, one day, the tickets had been 
 bought and, with a very ache of tragic foreboding, 
 she faced an accomplished fact. Deep in her heart 
 she nursed one bleak consolation. The two thousand 
 dollars with which my father intended to start life 
 in America were in her keeping. Whatever happened 
 she determined to cling to enough for our return pass- 
 
 ci c . . . 
 
 Hamburg! I shall never forget it, though I was 
 but a child of eight. A sky of slate, an angry wind, 
 ancient streets with tall, gabled mediaeval houses lead- 
 ing to a square, the stuffy hotel full of horse-hair cov- 
 ered chairs and sofas, the sad-faced man who ex- 
 changed German money for American, the broad Elbe 
 river and the fog-horns of the tugs and ferries. The 
 fog-horns ... I stop writing and listen. Beyond the 
 
 [32] 
 
A FAR CHILDHOOD 
 
 park, close by the river, the train comes in. Its whis- 
 tle blows a hoarse blast. Straightway — it never fails — 
 thirty years are swept away, I am in Hamburg again, 
 proud of my long great-coat, filled with a strange sense, 
 half of expectancy, half of terror, wondering at the 
 whiteness of my mother's face and the unspeakable 
 wistfulness in her eyes. . . . 
 
 At ten in the forenoon we boarded the ferry that 
 was to take us to our ship. It was the old Hamburg- 
 American liner Suevia. She carried only first-class 
 passengers and steerage. We were among the former. 
 The trip took several hours, I believe, but I am not 
 sure. Then the great ship received us and to me it 
 immediately became a world of wonder. At luncheon 
 I marvelled at the array of wine and water glasses 
 hanging like cnandeliers above the tables, at the swivel 
 chairs fastened to the floor, at the strange sounds on 
 the lips of other passengers. "They are speaking 
 English,' ' my father said to me. 
 
 Dark fell ; the ship was in motion ; my father paced 
 the deck, up and down, up and down. At last a shat- 
 tering doubt of this adventure had come into his mind. 
 My mother stood by the railing. She held my hand in 
 a convulsive grasp and covered me with the cape of her 
 long coat. The tears rolled down her cheeks as the 
 twinkle of the last shore-lights died and nothing was 
 left but darkness of the land she was not to see again. 
 
 [33J 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 The American Scene 
 
 The Suevia, scheduled to reach New York on the 
 ninth day, did not arrive until the fifteenth. Not a 
 fleck of sunshine all those days; a sky almost black, 
 a piping wind, a turbulent sea dashing up in huge steel- 
 gray waves with bottle-green under-curves and fierce, 
 white, fang-like edges. A primaeval, chaotic, brutal 
 sea. The great ship quivered and creaked and 
 wheezed ; the water slapped against the port-holes and 
 ran down the round, dim panes; almost hourly the 
 propeller was punched clear above sea-level and 
 whirred with a naked, metallic grind. . . . My mother 
 was hopelessly sea-sick the whole time; my father and 
 I led a dim, nebulous existence, when possible on deck, 
 when not, in the red-carpeted saloon. But the sea got 
 hold of the innermost core of my mind ; it became part 
 of my life, and in inland places I have often caught 
 myself tense with desire after its tang and roar. 
 
 Our land-fall was still gray but quiet. Afar off 
 lay a dim, hook-like shore. The voyage had liberated 
 my father's mind from terror and madness. He was 
 so strengthened and cheered that even my mother 
 smiled. To come to land at all seemed, after our tre- 
 
 1341 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 inendous experience, almost like coming home. But 
 the pier at Hoboken was rough and wild, a place of 
 hoarse cries and brute haste and infernal confusion. 
 A kindly German-American fellow-rjassenger helped 
 us ; saw to it that our luggage was not unduly searched 
 and put us in a rumbling hack on our way to an hotel. 
 It was Meyer's Hotel, a comfortable, unpretentious 
 place. We were worn out and rested well during our 
 first night on American soil under the strange mos- 
 quito-bars. 
 
 The place where my uncle lived and whither we were 
 bound lay far away in the South Atlantic States. But 
 my father and mother thought that we ought to rest for 
 a day or two and see a city so great and famous as 
 New York. A curious timidity kept us, however, from 
 venturing far through the grime and rattle. We 
 crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, I know, and saw the gilt 
 dome of the World Building, then the tallest structure 
 on this hemisphere, and the elevated railroad. But 
 we did not go up town nor into the financial section, 
 drifted somehow into a lake of mud shaken by trucks 
 and drays on Canal Street and retreated to Hoboken. 
 Being ill-advised we took ship again and spent 
 nearly fifty hours on a coast-wise voyage South. We 
 could eat no food. Negro stewards served it and over 
 it was the Strang© flavor of bananas and Concord 
 grapes. There was no storm or gloom now. But the 
 brilliantly radiant sea was rough and choppy and the 
 steamer small. The weather grew milder and milder 
 and when we steamed into Queenshaven harbor the 
 day was like spring. 
 
 The bay is one of the most beautiful in the world. 
 In its fold lies the old city with its gardens and veran- 
 
 [35] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 dans and its few slender spires. Golden-green islands 
 extend its curves. The coloring of sea and sky, in 
 whatever mood, is of so infinite and delicate a variety 
 as though the glow and splendor of all the jewels in 
 the world had been melted there. And over city and 
 bay lies a rich quietude that steals upon the heart 
 through the liquid softness of that untroubled air. I 
 heard my father and mother speak of the beauty of the 
 scene ; my own sense of it must have been vague. But 
 I cannot disassociate that early vision from an hun- 
 dred later ones. For that city and bay came to mean 
 my boyhood and youth, high passion and aspiration, 
 and later a grief that darkened my life. I close my 
 eyes : I can see every stone of the old city, every wave 
 of the bay. But my mind sees both garbed in a cruel 
 and unearthly sweetness. My bodily eyes could endure 
 to see neither of them any more. . . . Friends of my 
 uncle who were commissioned to meet us missed the 
 boat. My father summoned his scraps of English, 
 hired a four-wheeler and took us to the Queenshaven 
 Hotel. There these people found us, astonished that 
 my parents had not yet acquired the habits of poverty 
 but had gone boldly to the best hotel in the city. They 
 took us to their house where the children astonished me 
 by speaking English. It did not seem to me nearly 
 so curious in grown persons. I stared at the tattered 
 Negroes in the yard, almost too tired to be impressed 
 by any strangeness. In the afternoon our friends took 
 us to our train, shoved us into a day-coach and hur- 
 ried off. 
 
 I recall vividly the long, shabby, crowded car and 
 its peculiar reek of peanuts, stale whiskey and chew- 
 ing-tobacco. Half of the passengers were burly ne- 
 
 [36] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 groes who gabbled and laughed weirdly. The white 
 men wore broad-rimmed wool-hats, whittled and spat 
 and talked in drawling tones. I very distinctly shared 
 my parents' sense of the wildness, savagery and rough- 
 ness of the scene, their horrified perception of its con- 
 trast to anything they had ever known or seen. Soon 
 the dark fell and at the wayside stations queer, pan- 
 like lamps flared up in reddish ribbands of fire. At 
 one station a group of men entered carrying tall cud- 
 gels. They opened jack-knives and proceeded to peel 
 and devour these cudgels. My mother grew almost 
 hysterical; my father racked his mind and discovered 
 some half-forgotten information on the subject of 
 sugar-cane. ... At ten o'clock we reached Saint 
 Mark's and trudged out of the car. A man with heavy 
 moustaches and clad in a red sweater lifted me from 
 the platform. From my previous experience of life 
 I judged him to be a porter or a cabby. To my dis- 
 gust and amazement he called me by name and kissed 
 me on the mouth. It was my uncle. 
 
 n 
 
 In 1890 the village of St. Mark's in South Carolina 
 was raw; it had more than a touch of wildness and 
 through its life there ran a strain of violence. It con- 
 sisted of two principal streets, running diagonally to 
 each other and of half a dozen lesser streets that 
 trailed off into cotton-fields and pine-forests. There 
 was a cotton-seed oil mill, a saw mill and twenty to 
 thirty general merchandise stores. Three or four of 
 these were housed in one-story buildings of red brick. 
 For the rest the village was built of wood and many 
 
 [37] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 oX the houses were unpainted, showing the Drowned 
 and weather-beaten boards. There was a Methodist 
 Church and a Baptist Church, each with a grave-yard 
 behind it. North of the village straggled a Negro 
 grave-yard, its graves decorated with colored pebbles, 
 bits of irridescent glass and the broken shards of cheap 
 vases. Here and there, behind houses or in chance 
 lanes were small, black, one-roomed huts inhabited by 
 Negro women. These women were in domestic service 
 in the village and, as I learned later, plied, in addition 
 and quite openly, an equally ancient but less honest 
 trade. Despite eight or ten bar-rooms the streets were 
 quiet except on Saturday. Then the village flared into 
 life. Many hundreds of Negroes came in from the 
 sparsely settled country; they rode in on horses or 
 mules or oxen or drove rough carts and primitive 
 wagons, and were themselves generally clad in gar- 
 ments of which the original homespun had disappeared 
 in a -mass of gaudy patches. They traded and drank 
 and, child-like, spent their money on foolish things — 
 perfumes and handsome whips and sweets. Toward 
 dusk they reeled in a hot turmoil and filled the air 
 with that characteristic odor of peanuts and stale 
 whiskey and chewing tobacco. 
 
 I watched the village life with a deep sense of its 
 strangeness but almost without astonishment. Soon 
 I was merged into it and felt quite at home. No, not 
 quite. During at least a year, at lengthening intervals 
 of course, I felt a sharp nostalgia for the land of my 
 birth and its life. Suddenly, at the edge of the forest, 
 a sense of grief would overcome me. Somewhere be- 
 yond those dark trees, beyond leagues of country, be- 
 yond the ocean, lay our home. . . . And I would weep 
 
 [38] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 bitterly. And still, in my maturer years the edge of 
 a forest or else a few solitary trees at a great distance 
 bring back to me that old sense of wistfulness and 
 yearning — no longer for definite scenes or associations, 
 but for the mystery of delight I have not known, beauty 
 I have not seen, peace I have sought in vain. . . . 
 
 The Southern country-side awakened in me, child 
 that I was, a rich, an almost massive joy in nature. 
 About a mile beyond the lonely little railroad station 
 with its bales of cotton and acrid-smelling sacks of 
 yellow guano lay the "red hills." These hills were 
 not very high; I could climb them easily; they were 
 covered with very tall, very straight pine-trees that 
 seemed to me shaft-like and sky-piercing. Through 
 a fold of the hills ran a rapid, very shallow little brook 
 over a bed of clean, bright pebbles. In spring the 
 dogwood showed its white blossoms there ; in the mild 
 Southern autumn a child could lie on the deep layers 
 of brownish pine-needles and play with the aromatic 
 cones and gaze up at the brilliant blue of the sky. 
 
 The summer stirred me deeply. I had been used 
 to the cool, chaste, frugal summers of the North. Here 
 the heat smote; the vegetation sprang into rank and 
 hot luxuriance — noisome weeds with white ooze in 
 their stems and bell-like pink flowers invaded the paths 
 and streets. I felt a strange throbbing, followed by 
 sickish languor and a dumb terror at the frequent, 
 fierce thunderstorms. Both my intelligence and my 
 instincts ripened with morbid rapidity and I attribute 
 many abnormalities of temper and taste that are mine 
 to that sudden transplantation into a semi-tropical 
 world. . . . 
 
 I was a thorough child nevertheless and delighted 
 
 [39] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 in certain acquisitions which, the new world brought 
 me — a percussion cap pistol, a mouth organ, a Jew's 
 harp. Nor did I give up my old life. My books had 
 been saved and, one day, my father discovered that he 
 had forgotten a small balance in the Deutsche Bank. 
 For this money he ordered books from Germany, and 
 I came into possession of a set of very red volumes : 
 the marvelous chap-books of the Reformation age — 
 Griseldis, Genoveva, Robert the Devil, Dr. Faustus — 
 naive and knightly or magical and grim; and of two 
 slimmer volumes called Beckers Erzahlungen aus der 
 Alten Welt, which contained the Iliad and the Odyssey 
 in simple, lucid German prose. In the reading of these, 
 especially of the Odyssey, culminated the imaginative 
 joyjs of my childhood. I do not know Greek ; I cannot 
 read Homer in the original. Yet I am sure that I 
 know what Homer is. In a plain room behind the store 
 in which apples and cloth and furniture and plough- 
 shares and rice and tinned fish were sold to chatter- 
 ing Negroes, I sat with my book and clearly heard 
 
 "The surge and thunder of the Odyss ey" 
 
 and saw Nausikaa and her maidens, white limbed and 
 fair, on the shore of the wine-dark sea, and dwelt with 
 Odysseus on the island of Callypso and returned home 
 with him to Ithaca — not without tears — and listened to 
 the twanging bow-string that sped the avenging ar- 
 rows. The wood-cut that was the frontispiece of the 
 little volume showed Hermes on his mission of com- 
 mand to Circe. Above floats the god with his staff 
 and his winged cap and sandals. Below him stretches 
 the immeasurable stream of ocean. In the back- 
 ground, small and far but very clear, lies an island 
 
 [40] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 with a tiny fane of Doric columns. I gazed at the 
 picture for hours and knew the freshness, the grace 
 and the clarity of that morning of the world. 
 
 m 
 
 My uncle and aunt received us into their queer 
 little house which was huddled, as though for protec- 
 tion, against the shop. The walls of the house were 
 of the rudest ; the wind blew through knot-holes in the 
 timber. My father and mother were bitterly disap- 
 pointed. My uncle had sent the St. Mark's Herald 
 to Berlin and my father, who did not understand the 
 art and vocabulary of town-booming nor the society 
 items of an American village newspaper, assumed that 
 St. Mark's was a town of some importance and my 
 uncle a prominent citizen. And here he had come to 
 a squalid village, the guest of a man well-enough liked 
 by his fellow citizens but wretchedly poor. My aunt, 
 moreover, though a woman of some kindly qualities, 
 was a Jewess of the Eastern tradition, narrow-minded, 
 given over to the clattering ritual of pots and pans — 
 "meaty" and "milky" — and very ignorant. On the 
 very evening of our arrival, having at last withdrawn 
 to the one spare bed-room, my father and mother 
 looked blankly at each other. A chill wind blew in 
 thin, keen streams through chinks in the bare, wooden 
 wall, the geese squawked loudly in the muddy yard, my 
 aunt was heard scolding her little girls in a mixture 
 of Yiddish and English, a little, unshaded kerosene 
 lamp made the grim room look all the gloomier. My 
 mother sat down on the s^ringless bed, a picture of 
 desolation. The sudden plunge unnerved her. All 
 
 [41] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 through the voyage we had lived on our accustomed 
 plane of civilized comfort. Only here did the descent 
 begin. 
 
 She had one consolation that apparently justified 
 the whole adventure. My father was a changed man. 
 From now on and for many years he was full of energy 
 and buoyancy, splendidly patient and brave, always 
 ready to cheer her in her fits of loneliness and depres- 
 sion. He had shaken off the morbid inhibitions and 
 immediately started out into the village to see what 
 he could do. 
 
 The people of the village, storekeepers, a few re- 
 tired farmers, three physicians, three or four lawyers, 
 came of various stocks — English, Scotch-Irish, German, 
 even French and Dutch. But they were all descended 
 from early nineteenth century settlers and had be- 
 come thorough Americans. Everybody belonged to 
 either the Baptist or the Methodist church. The 
 Methodists were, upon the whole, more refined, had 
 better manners than the Baptists and were less illi- 
 terate. Among all the villagers there was a moderate 
 amount of hard drinking and a good deal of sexual 
 irregularity, especially with Mulatto women. I have 
 since wondered that there was not more. The life was 
 sterile and monotonous enough. They were all kindly, 
 even the rougher ones, not very avaricious, no drivers 
 of hard bargains, given to talking about shooting but 
 doing very little of it. (During the two years of our 
 residence two men were shot and in each case upon 
 extreme provocation.) Also so far as their light went, 
 they were liberal. This was well illustrated by the 
 position of the Jews in the village. Of these there 
 were about ten families, all recent immigrants, and so 
 
 [42] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 aliens in speech and race and faith. Most of them, 
 moreover, were quite prosperous. Yet between them 
 and these Southern villagers the relations were hearty 
 and pleasant and consolidated by mutual kindness and 
 tolerance. Only one Jew and that was my father, was 
 looked upon with some suspicion by the severer among 
 his Gentile neighbors. The reason was curious and 
 significant; he did not perform the external rites of 
 the Jewish faith and, upon entering a fraternal life 
 insurance order, he smiled and hesitated when asked 
 to affirm categorically his belief in a personal God. 
 
 He soon saw that there was nothing to be done in 
 St. Mark's except add another to the existing shops. 
 But since nearly every one seemed to have prospered 
 and since the quiet and the easy, democratic atmosphere 
 of the place appealed to him, he hesitated but little. 
 Help and good advice were offered alike by Jew and 
 Gentile and, at the end of a few months, we were in- 
 stalled in some pleasant rooms beside one of the few 
 brick stores on Main Street. There was the usual 
 heterogeneous stock of food and implements, furniture 
 and dry-goods. My mother went to Queenshaven and 
 bought adequate furniture for our little home. 
 
 Although she yearned very bitterly for her native 
 land, her friends and kin, for music and for all the 
 subtle supports of the civilization in which she was so 
 deeply rooted, life opened fairly enough. Domestic 
 service cost next to nothing, food was plentiful and 
 cheap. Even friends were not wanting. Our landlord 
 and his family, prominent members of the Methodist 
 church, saw soon enough that my father and mother 
 were of a different mental type and of different antece- 
 dents from the other Jews in St. Mark's. There fol- 
 
 [43] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 lowed an exchange of visits. Mrs. C. gave my mother 
 much good advice, explained to her many American 
 ways and manners that seemed very strange, and tried 
 to console her in regard to her most burning and imme- 
 diate problem — that of my education. This friendship 
 led to others. And so when summer came, we who had 
 no vegetable garden — and would have been just as help- 
 less had we had one — received daily attentions from 
 our Gentile friends: baskets of tomatoes or okra or 
 sweet-corn or bell-pepper. And one friend, a very aged 
 physician who liked and admired my mother and had 
 a dim but steady perception of her profound spiritual 
 isolation, sent her weekly a great basketful of roses. 
 My father, at the same time, found a congenial com- 
 panion in a young lawyer. The two played chess to- 
 gether and from him my father borrowed Shakespeare 
 and Byron, Dickens and Thackeray and Scott with 
 whose works he was, like all educated Germans, thor- 
 oughly familiar and whom he now read with avidity 
 in their own language. We saw a good deal of my 
 uncle and his family and their friends. But culturally 
 we really felt closer to the better sort of Americans 
 in the community, and so there began in those early 
 days that alienation from my own race which has been 
 the source to me of some good but of more evil. 
 
 IV 
 
 I do not know how I learned English. My memory 
 which is so clear on things quite trivial fails me at 
 this crucial point. My mother characteristically de- 
 sired to engage a teacher for me. And for this pur- 
 pose my uncle introduced the Baptist minister of the 
 village. At the end of one lesson, however, of which 
 
 [44] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 my memory is most faint, the Reverend Mr. Cross- 
 land declared that far better results could he obtained 
 if I were to attend his school. This advice was fol- 
 lowed and my next memory, in the matter of language, 
 shows me in my little German velvet suit and cap 
 seated aloft on sacks of cotton-seed in the postmas- 
 ter's shop and explaining, in some sort of English, 
 the peculiarities of German life to a crowd of tall, 
 rough tobacco-spitting but evidently tender-hearted 
 yokels. Tender-hearted! For they asked the quaint 
 little German boy to come again and again and never 
 teased him but were, in what must have been their 
 amusement, unfailingly gentle and considerate. 
 
 There was no public school in St. Mark's in my 
 time. And so the Baptist congregation had built a 
 school-house of rough unpainted timber on a barren 
 field beside the church. Here Crossland and one young 
 woman, in a single gaunt room, taught about an hun- 
 dred boys and girls, ranging in age from seven to 
 seventeen. Some of the children came a distance of 
 ten miles to school and to every available tree were 
 tethered Texas ponies or mules, some saddled, some 
 hitched to road-carts or buggies. Details that stand 
 out in my memory are the sombre glow of the cast- 
 iron stove on cold days, the plaintive notes of some 
 birds circling over the little Baptist grave-yard, the 
 hair — yellow as wheat — and the brilliantly white teeth 
 of one of the older girls. And two things inspired in 
 me a vague sense of fear: the switches with which the 
 Reverend Mr. Crossland occasionally beat the boys' 
 legs and the old cigar-box, filled with earth, into which 
 he spat amazing streams of repulsive brown juice. 
 Sometimes he would order a boy to empty and refill 
 
 [45] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 this box and I lived in terror of being singled out for 
 this office. I never was. But the existence of this box, 
 betrayed in one of my rare moments of talkativeness, 
 astonished my parents so overwhelmingly that they 
 forthwith removed me from the school. 
 
 My relations to my fellow-pupils were slight. There 
 was much friendliness on both sides, but a dreamy, 
 childish absorption kept me solitary. I am certain of 
 only this: that I was reprimanded for steadily aban- 
 doning the boys' side of the play-ground during recess 
 and losing myself among the girls. They were gentler 
 and aroused in me a faint, impersonal perception of 
 comeliness. . . . 
 
 The village possessed one other school which charged 
 a somewhat higher fee — two dollars a month, I think — 
 and boasted an aristocratic flavor. It was kept by a 
 broken-down gentleman of Huguenot extraction who 
 was said to have been immensely wealthy and to have 
 lived in a state of barbaric splendor before the Civil 
 War. Major Maury was a man prematurely old, 
 slightly deaf and shaken by palsy. His features were 
 almost hidden by harsh bunches of beard, and hair 
 grew in long strands out of his ears and nostrils. He 
 sat by a window, smoking a pipe and chewing tobacco 
 at the same time. There, in a weary, mechanical way, 
 he heard the lessons which we were supposed to have 
 prepared in the other bare rooms or on the porch of the 
 windy and abandoned cottage. The ten or twelve pu- 
 pils played and studied around that sunken-eyed old 
 man in a half-hearted kind of way; the manner and the 
 mood of the place float to me across the years in 
 images of chill discouragement and mouldering deso- 
 lation. 
 
 [46] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 But by this time my mother, with the energy which 
 marked those early days, had acquired a considerable 
 English vocabulary and had taken council of her friend 
 Mrs. C. She removed me from Major Maury's "acad- 
 emy" and proceeded to prepare me for entrance to 
 the High School of Queenshaven. It was a fine and 
 brave action. She h&d been in America less than a 
 year; her pronunciation was very imperfect; she had 
 to teach me with a German-English dictionary in hand. 
 Yet my days of mere dreamy loitering were over and I 
 have never had instruction more accurate or solid. 
 We had Appleton's Fifth Reader, Smith's English 
 Grammar, Noah "Webster's Speller, a geography and 
 an arithmetic. I have not seen those books since, but 
 I can visualize many of their pages to this day. 
 
 In the reader I came upon my first fragments of 
 English literature: Addison's Vision of Mirza, 
 Childe Harold's Farewell To His Native Land, and 
 The Death of Absalom, by Nathaniel Parker Willis. 
 I felt even then that the last piece was clumsy and 
 rhetorical, nor did Byron touch me; Addison's fable 
 seemed exquisite — as, indeed, it is — and I read it over 
 and over. . . . But stronger and coarser food for my 
 childish mind was at hand in the English books which 
 now came to me and which I evidently read with an 
 entire absence of effort. The first was, by a queer 
 chance, The Swiss Family Robinson. I recognized its 
 inferiority to my familiar German versions of Crusoe 
 and Gulliver, but its strange blending of the exotic 
 and the matter of fact drew me on and I sedulously 
 skipped the moralizing. ... At the same time, how- 
 ever, there was given me a set of yellowish, paper- 
 backed books. I recall the title of but one: Tom 
 
 [47] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 Tracy, The Newsboy. These were books of the Hora- 
 tio Alger type, but better done, I think, and not so 
 stereotyped. They took possession of my mind by a 
 strong and coarse compulsion. For I had been nursed 
 upon beauty. The clearness and grace of the Homeric 
 world, the pageantry of the Middle Age, islands in the 
 tropic seas at the ends of the earth — these were pos- 
 sessions of my imagination. And so these tales of New 
 York boys who were " manly" and "got on" seemed 
 to me of an overwhelming reality. The hideous moral 
 utilitarianism, the vulgar confusion of values in these 
 books passed, of course, entirely over my head. I 
 didn't want to get on; I hadn't a spark of ambition; I 
 never thought or prattled, as many children do, of 
 what I would be when I grew up. I read these books, 
 at the age of ten, with the same sense of deeply satis- 
 fied absorption in the fine, narrowy realities of life 
 with which, at the end of another decade, I first read 
 Vanity Fair and Mme. Bovary. 
 
 Suddenly, upon a day amid the steady radiance of 
 that Southern summer a blind, imperious impulse took 
 hold of me. Though always clumsy with my hands and 
 careless of manual skill, I hastened into our little yard, 
 gathered some abandoned boxes and built me a rude, 
 shaky little desk. It was too high to sit at. So I 
 stood and wrote — for the first time — verse and prose : 
 tales of disaster at sea, of ultimate islands, of peace- 
 less wandering. The prose and verse were mixed in- 
 discriminately, assonance sufficed in place of rime, all 
 I felt was an intense inner glow. It was all instinc- 
 
 [48] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 tively done in German. And I emphasize this fact in 
 the development of an American since that childish 
 outburst marked the first and last time on which I 
 used my original mother-tongue in writing as a matter 
 of course and without a sense of deliberately limiting 
 such powers of expression as I may have. . . . That 
 first impulse lasted, with daily but decreasing passion, 
 for some weeks. Then it died out. I neither wondered 
 nor regretted it. To me it was a solitary game, and 
 most of my amusements were solitary. Perhaps the 
 shifting from one language to another caused this, per- 
 haps a momentous change in my inner life which now; 
 took place. 
 
 Our friend, Mrs. C, was a very fervent member of 
 her church. She was too well bred to engage in crude 
 proselytising. But, seeing that we observed no Jew- 
 ish rites, she suggested that it would improve my Eng- 
 lish if I were to join her Sunday School class. My 
 mother who had precious memories of snow-swept 
 Christmas services in her native East Prussian village, 
 made no objection. My father, an agnostic reared on 
 Huxley and Haeckel, had no prejudices for or against 
 any religious cult. The question was settled much 
 more smoothly than, I imagine, Mrs. C. had hoped. 
 She was intensely interested in her new pupil, yet her 
 interest was never tactless or obtrusive. I have grown 
 infinitely far away from her teaching; I have nothing 
 but kindness for her memory. 
 
 The small, white church with its wooden belfry was 
 like a thousand others. It stood in a sun-flooded street, 
 behind it were scattered graves and then cotton fields 
 running to olive or brownish pine-forests. The calm 
 of the village Sundays was truly sabbatical and the 
 
 [49] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 clear, solitary ringing of the church-bell had a shrill 
 and primitive sweetness to my ears. I cannot tell by 
 what swift stages I entered into the faith and spirit of 
 the place. No persuasion was used and, apparently, 
 none was needed. My memory shows me almost at 
 once treasuring small, gilt attendance cards, exchang- 
 ing these for larger ones, quite at home in lesson-quar- 
 terlies, golden texts and the familiar hymn-tunes. The 
 best of the latter had much to do with my conversion. 
 They still seem to me, despite my present devotion to 
 far other kinds of music, to express in no ignoble way, 
 the triumphs and the aspirations of the Christian life. 
 . . . The other night, with a dear companion, I passed 
 a gaudy, modern church. A large congregation was 
 singing Eock of Ages. As by a common impulse we 
 stopped under the autumnal trees and listened. We 
 knew, without speech, the strange desiderium in each 
 other's hearts. For the poetry and beauty and the 
 deep human need voiced by the Church came to us with 
 that melody. Had we gone in, the banal prayers, the 
 tawdry and vulgar sermon, the silly self-righteous- 
 ness of the publicans and sinners within would have 
 irritated or amused us . . . But in those distant years 
 in St. Mark's the poetry and the beauty and the human 
 need alone reached my mind and my emotions. I al- 
 ways staid after Sunday School to attend the morning 
 service. But I am sure I hardly heard what the lank, 
 gesticulating minister said. I accepted the Gospel 
 story and the obvious implications of Pauline Christ- 
 ianity without question and felt — as I now know 
 through critical retrospection — a spirit and a faith not 
 wholly unlike that of the primitive Church. In the 
 phraseology of our Protestant sects, I accepted Jesus 
 
 [50] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 as my personal Savior and cultivated, with vivid faith, 
 the habit of prayer in which I persisted for many 
 years. 
 
 My old life, however, was not dead. I read Homer 
 and my German legends with the same imaginative 
 naivete as before. But I did absorb, unconsciously, of 
 course, a very large set of moral and social conventions 
 that are basic to the life of the average American. I 
 stress the word absorb. There can be no question of 
 reflection or conviction on the part of the child. But 
 at the age of ten my emotional assimilation into the 
 social group of which I was a physical member was 
 complete. I would not have touched any alcoholic 
 drink ; I would have shrunk in horor from a divorced 
 person; I would have felt a sense of moral discom- 
 fort in the presence of an avowed sceptic. I believed 
 in the Blood of the Lamb ... I find it hard not to let 
 an ironic note slip into these phrases. But they mark 
 the sober facts. If ever the child of immigrants em- 
 braced the faith of the folk among whom it came — I 
 was that child. Insensibly almost I withdrew myself 
 from my cousins and from the other Jewish children 
 in the village. The sons and daughters of Mrs. C. 
 were my chief playmates and, above all, a cousin of 
 theirs who stirred my ever watchful sense of beauty. 
 My parents I instinctively and unquestioningly ex- 
 empted from this division. Nor did I talk about these 
 things at home. I listened, as always, with deep pleas- 
 ure to my mother's stories of her old home; I was in- 
 terested in letters and gifts that came from our kins- 
 men across the ocean. But the old life grew fainter 
 in its influence; it seemed hardly any more a part of 
 this present experiencing. With the boys and girls of 
 
 [51] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 the Sunday School I went into the woods and fields 
 for flowers at Easter, and when, at Christmas, my 
 mother was saddened by yearning for her German 
 home, I sorrowed only in her sorrow, myself quite at 
 one with the life about me. 
 
 Ji 
 
 I need scarcely say that my parents did not so 
 readily adapt themselves to the folk-ways of the sur- 
 prising land in which they found themselves. My 
 mother especially, had an emotional tenacity which 
 made her road the harder. Nor did she find a degree 
 of compensation, as my father did, in the apparent ab- 
 sence of that pressure which he had experienced in a 
 denser moral and economic environment. She consoled 
 herself with the thought, however, that St. Mark's was 
 but a rude backwoods village and steadily hoped for 
 fairer conditions in some larger center of American 
 civilization. It was from this point of view that she 
 cultivated, in her scant leisure, a growing interest in 
 English literature and worked hard at my training in 
 the new language. 
 
 My father's case I have not stated adequately in 
 the words — absence of pressure. For many weeks he 
 was like one liberated from a dungeon. It was really 
 recovery from mental illness. But he did not realize 
 that and, in his impulsive way, attributed many extra- 
 ordinary virtues to American life. He discussed 
 politics with friends and neighbors — it was the Harri- 
 son-Cleveland campaign — read the old Eclectic Eeview, 
 Byron and Dickens, played chess, and neglected his 
 §hop or treated the Negro customers with contempt- 
 
 [52] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 uous disregard. His vision was fixed on far other 
 things. He was an excellent draughtsman and a store- 
 house of scientific knowledge. In Germany he had in- 
 vented an intricate and clever machine, had obtained 
 patents for it there, in Austria and in France, and had 
 then sold it for a moderate sum. He now read in the 
 circular of a Washington firm of patent lawyers of the 
 urgent need for a non-refillable bottle. He accepted 
 this statement with the naivete of a German and rigged 
 up a little work-room in the back of the shop. The 
 bottle was duly invented ; the device was a notably in- 
 genious one. With a few tools he himself made several 
 beautifully finished models, drew up the specifications 
 and — considered his fortune made. For weeks we lived 
 in a state of exquisite anticipation. How much would 
 be offered? Twenty-five, fifty, a hundred thousand 
 dollars ? My mother had her misgivings. But things 
 had gone so badly with the realities at hand that she 
 deliberately indulged in this beautiful dream ... It was 
 the last time . . . 
 
 Must I add that the bubble burst? A letter came 
 from the patent attorneys so glaringly dishonest be- 
 neath all its speciousness that there was no room for 
 further self-deception. Certain brutal facts had to be 
 faced: trade had never been good and my father's 
 small capital was all but gone. For a good part of the 
 second summer we lived on rice and beans and such 
 tinned goods as were left on the shelves of the shop. 
 In autumn there was a respite of hope, but it was 
 quite brief. Creditors became troublesome and my 
 father, thoroughly German in this too, never dreamed 
 that he could leave them unpaid. He and my mother 
 sold their costly watches and chains and the remaining 
 
 [53] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 stock in the shop brought a trifle at auction. "When all 
 debts had been paid there remained a little over four 
 hundred dollars. With this sum my father determined 
 to take his little family to Queenshaven, the nearest 
 city; of any size, and begin life anew. Throughout he 
 was brave, cheerful and active. And to be sure he 
 was only thirty-two years 1 old and quite unable to 
 estimate either the qualities of the environment to 
 which he was going or the fatal development of cer- 
 tain forces within himself. 
 
 To me it was like starting out on a bright adventure. 
 The days of the Southern winter were temperate and 
 golden and a city seemed a fine place to go to. There 
 would be the bay which I had seen and ships from all 
 the ends of the earth. The thought of school I tried to 
 put away from me. Then there was the fascinating 
 bustle of packing and departure and a journey on the 
 train which, though but four hours long, engaged my 
 imagination. The days were full of life and promise 
 to a boy of ten . . . 
 
 — A few years ago I passed through St. Mark's. 
 The train rolled along the old embankment on the edge 
 of which we used to gather wild blackberries. I am 
 told that the village has grown and is now a county- 
 seat. But it seemed small and remote. No doubt they 
 are hustling and booming far more efficiently now and 
 the smallness and remoteness were in my personal 
 vision. But I know that in the early nineties of the 
 last century there lingered in that village — as there 
 did doubtless in many other places — something of that 
 honest simplicity, that true democratic kindliness 
 which we like to associate with the years of the primi- 
 tive Eepublic. In the name of those qualities and the 
 
 [54] 
 
THE AMERICAN SCENE 
 
 ideals which they illustrate the capitalistic tout still 
 seeks to rob us, the brazen-tongued demagogue to be- 
 tray us. Those things are gone. But as part of my 
 imaginative inheritance as an American I own them by 
 virtue of the two ytears of my childhood spent in St. 
 Mark's in South Carolina. 
 
 [55] 
 
CHAPTER ni 
 
 The Making of an Amebican 
 
 Queenshaven. I hear the sharp, quick rustling of 
 the palmettos, the splash and murmur of the incoming 
 tide, the melancholy song of Negroes across the bay; 
 I see the irridescent plaster of the old walls at sun- 
 set, the crescent moon, so clear and, silvery, over the 
 light-house, the white magnolias in their olive foliage ; 
 I feel the full, rich sweetness of that incomparable 
 air : above all, I can feel — across the gulfs of time and 
 circumstance — the throb of the impassioned heart of 
 my own youth . . . Stale phrases ! I have tried be- 
 fore to describe the city. But I cannot do it. No man 
 who has been young in the deep and true sense can 
 render into words the scene of his youth. For that 
 has taken its colors from a poetry, a passion, a tragic 
 beauty that are beyond all speech. I see a sunset now 
 and remark that it is fine and turn away to worry 
 over yesterday's news from Russia and to-morrow's 
 article. When I was a lad in Queenshaven the solemn, 
 streaming sunsets over the bay were song and heroism 
 and immortality to me. "When the sun's great, red 
 disc set behind the dusky islands and the first stars 
 pulsed through the afterglow, I knew the universe to 
 
 [56] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 be divine and perfect and my eyes filled with tears. 
 Wordsworth is right in the psychology of his great 
 ode, whatever we may think of its metaphysics. Life 
 encroaches upon our innermost selves and hardens and 
 blunts them. The glory and the freshness are no more. 
 
 We arrived in Queenshaven on Washington's birth- 
 day. There was a parade which my mother took me 
 to see, but the parade did not seem amusing to either 
 of us and we went back to the house at which we were 
 staying. It was a boarding-house recommended to us 
 by Mrs. C. The house was a spacious one with a fine 
 verandah on each story; around it extended a large 
 though ill-kept garden. It was situated near the 
 centre of the town; for two airy rooms and board for 
 three my father payed eleven dollars a week. This 
 was considered a very fair price in Queenshaven in 
 1892. The only thing we had to provide was the fuel 
 for the two fire-places on chilly days. A supply of 
 this we stored on the back verandah. And so, in a day 
 or two, we were comfortably settled. Almost immedi- 
 ately, however, there came to us in some impalpable 
 way a sense of something we had never felt in St. 
 Mark's: invisible barriers seemed to arise about us, 
 a silence seemed to fall where we were, an iron isola- 
 tion to be established. All this was faint at first and 
 could not be put into words ; it took years to become a 
 definite, tangible thing; I did not fully or consciously 
 face it until it had been partly broken down. But that 
 was too late. It had done its disastrous work. 
 
 Queenshaven was then — and I have reason to think 
 it but little changed — a city of very rigid social groups. 
 The majority of these were denominational in charac- 
 ter: Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian. But 
 
 [57] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 any family in any of these groups, primarily the 
 Protestant ones, that attained any degree of educa- 
 tion or wealth, would tend to withdraw from its 
 original friends and social life and try, by any means, 
 to be reckoned among the small, conservative group 
 which consisted of the members and descendants of 
 the old Southern slave-holding aristocracy. For this 
 group was and is considered representative of the city 
 and has given to it all its flavor and romance and fame. 
 It was but a few years ago, for instance, that for the 
 first time a common man and not a member of a very 
 limited group of families was elected mayor of Queens- 
 haven. Now it is clear that my parents could find no 
 friends among the humbler Catholics or Presbyterians 
 as such. And it is equally clear that persons who were 
 shedding their next of kin as one sheds old clothes in 
 a struggle to attain social distinction were not going to 
 impede their progress by so much as the acquaintance 
 of a little family of German Jews. The interesting 
 question arises: Why, then, did not my parents join 
 either one of two other groups — a German- American 
 and a Jewish one? Their instinct in this matter was 
 a fine although a quite tragically mistaken one. They 
 conceived the country in which they had made their 
 home as obviously one of English speech and culture. 
 Hence, without a shadow of disloyalty to their German 
 training, they desired to be at one with such of their 
 English-speaking countrymen as shared their tastes 
 in art and in literature and — mutatis mutandis — their 
 outlook on life. They saw no reason for associating 
 with North German peasants turned grocers (although 
 they had the kindliest feelings toward these sturdy and 
 excellent people), nor with rather ignorant, semi- 
 
 [58] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 orthodox Jews from Posen. They had not done so in 
 Berlin. Why should they in America where, as my 
 father used to observe in those earliest years, a demo- 
 cratic spirit must prevail, and where neither poverty 
 nor a humble employment could keep an educated man 
 from the society of his intellectual equals. That was, 
 according to him, the precise virtue of America, the 
 fundamental spiritual implication of American life! 
 The result of my parents' acceptance of this principle 
 was utter friendlessness. They were left in a state of 
 solitariness which would have broken stronger and 
 better-balanced natures. The strain of wild eccentric- 
 ity in my father's character sharpened, my mother's 
 brooding melancholy deepened from year to year. 
 "When after nearly fifteen years in Queenshaven a 
 breach was made in that inhuman wall, my father was 
 hopelessly " queer" as a social being; my mother — 
 whose sweet and gracious presence atoned with peo- 
 ple for his rasping ways — had become morbid and 
 morbidly suspicious of this belated kindness. I look 
 back and see with a cruel clearness how that loneli- 
 ness ate into their hearts; how though they rarely 
 spoke of it, they were warped and embittered by it. 
 The same dreary tasks day after day, year after year ; 
 the same lonely lamplight in the evening; never a 
 knock at the door or the sound of a friendly voice. 
 And for the first ten years they were too poor to go 
 to the theatre or to concerts. 
 
 After various other attempts my father drifted 
 into the furniture business. He was employed by a 
 large house to sell furniture among the Negroes and 
 collect the installments from week to week. After a 
 day of this wretched toil — which he did well and for 
 
 [59] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 which, during the second decade, he was not ill-paid — 
 I have seen him spend the evening intensely absorbed 
 in Bradley's Appearance and Reality. Such was his 
 real life. And my mother was, in her native tongue, 
 a true poet. And never a footstep on the stair . . . They 
 had accepted the promise of American life. Nor, be 
 it observed, would their fate have been different in a 
 larger and more typical American community. Happier 
 it would have been, no doubt. For they would have 
 fallen in with cultivated Germans and Jews. But that, 
 clearly, does not touch the problem. It was in Queens- 
 haven that the Anglo-American ideal of assimilation 
 which they embraced could be tested and adjudged. 
 
 The situation, as I have said, took some years to 
 define itself. Immediately there was, for us all, the 
 beauty and stir of the town. For me, above all, there 
 was that house with its verandahs and its tangled gar- 
 den. The early Southern spring came upon the city 
 almost at once, first with lilies and the innumerable 
 blossoms of the wistaria, then with roses that, dotting 
 a gnarled, old vine, trembled at our very windows and 
 filled the verandah with petals. My mother and I took 
 daily walks and inhaled the fragrant loveliness of the 
 place and the season. But I was always glad to re- 
 turn to the house. I played at its being a castle and 
 myself, upon the verandah, a warder, a Scottish archer 
 at some dark keep in France. For at an auction house 
 my father had bought a very good set of the Waverly 
 novels and I was living in a magnificent world, a page- 
 ant of infinite variety and splendor. The tall, green 
 
 [60] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 double-columned volumes were rarely out of my hands. 
 Within a few months I had read all the novels, or 
 nearly all. I never succeeded in finishing Count Rob- 
 ert of Paris, although it has left with me a vision of 
 empty Byzantine halls through which is heard the ring- 
 ing echo of a solitary mailed tread ; I did not read 
 Waverly till years later. My favorites which were soon 
 definitely chosen I read tirelessly over and over: 
 Quentin Durward, The Talisman, The Heart of Mid- 
 lothian, Rob Roy, The Betrothed, The Black Dwarf, 
 Anne of Geierstein, A Legend of Montrose. I liked the 
 gloomy and the romantic ; that is clear. But character 
 was beginning to appeal to me too, and I tasted to the 
 full of the fine essential humanity of the Dean family, 
 of the Baillie Nicol Jarvie, of the redoubtable Dugald 
 Dalgetty. I worshipped Diana Vernon in all my wak- 
 ing dreams. My students in later years told me they 
 cannot read Scott. Strange. They were not common- 
 ly so sensitive to a lack of grace and finish in style and 
 structure. And what a creator of men and scenes and 
 actions Sir Walter was! What sweep he had, what 
 imagination, what ample power. As for me, I enjoyed 
 even those opening chapters of which I hear such 
 querulous complaints; I enjoyed the very notes and 
 puzzled out the crabbed Latin as soon as I could and 
 felt the pride of knowledge. I was glad many of the 
 novels were long. They seemed like the weeks and 
 months of childhood ; one could really live in them and 
 forget the troublesome world of duties and compul- 
 sions. 
 
 A few months later came another of those massive 
 revelations which are among the glories of our earlier 
 years : Dickens. In lank, acrid-smelling, paper-backed 
 
 [61] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 volumes came Pickwick, Nickleby, Chuzzlewit, Oliver 
 Twist, A Tale of Two Cities. Not, alas, David Copper- 
 field. The false, strained effort in A Tale of Two 
 Cities I was too young to perceive. Yet I know that I 
 could not live in it as richly and as fully as in the 
 others — books which again contained a world. Not a 
 world, I think now, that has much veracity or perma- 
 nent significance, but in its vast and busy imaginative 
 structure self -consistent, racy, and full of fine, concrete 
 things — beef and punch and stage-coaches and gaols, 
 thwackings and counting-houses, practical jokes and 
 prisons, mud and rags and laughter . . . 
 
 I still prayed every night. But these books ab- 
 sorbed me and I went neither to Sunday School nor to 
 church. My faith was tenacious enough, but it grew 
 less active. Then, by the merest accident, there came 
 a brief but burning revelation. The boarding-house 
 was kept by an Irish family, friendly and far from 
 ignorant. The head of the house, a small, straight, 
 white-bearded, crimson-faced man, very silent and al- 
 ways more or less in liquor, took a fancy to me. One 
 Sunday morning we began to talk. He had been a sea- 
 faring man in his youth and I found his talk sharp 
 with the tang of ships and voyages. I fetched my hat 
 and walked on with him. Somehow, presently, I found 
 myself beside him in the family pew in the old pro- 
 Cathedral and witnessed the celebration of a High 
 Mass. 
 
 The reading of Scott had not left me without an 
 imaginative perception of the rich historic dignity,, the 
 human associations of the Roman ritual. But it touched 
 to the very quick my sense of beauty. I was power- 
 less before it as I am before beauty still. The organ 
 
 [62] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 was the best I had ever heard and my taste in music 
 was even then not uncultivated. But the glimmering 
 vestments of the priests, the dreamy candles, the 
 strange bell, the elevation of the Host on which fell a 
 pencil of softened light — all these things moved me 
 profoundly. And I still think that, if one could but 
 grant the tremendous premises all these symbols do, 
 in a lovely and. human fashion, elevate and attune the 
 soul . . . When we came out of the dusky church the 
 sunlight seemed raw and like an affront. I went home 
 but did not speak of what I had experienced. All 
 week long, however, the altar candles shone like fiery 
 topazes in my waking dreams and the sonorous music 
 echoed in my t ears. I was sorry that I had not a rosary 
 as a visible symbol of that marvelous church. 
 
 I went to mass every Sunday. A Catholic family 
 of French descent moved into the boarding-house ; the 
 children and I became friends and so I was naturally 
 drawn to go with them. The services became my great 
 passion. I even went to Vespers, and more and more 
 it seemed to me that to be a priest of this Church 
 would be a calling that would satisfy every instinct 
 of my nature. Such was the first plan that I made for 
 my adult years . . . 
 
 Was it all a child's shallow religiosity? Not all, I 
 think. For I had a sense, shadowy and inarticulate, 
 but deep enough, of our homelessness in the universe, 
 of our terrible helplessness before it. I had seen some- 
 thing of misfortune and uncertainty and change and 
 my mind desired then as, with such frugal hope, it does 
 now, a point of permanence in the "vast drif tings of 
 the cosmic weather," a power in which there is no 
 variableness, neither shadow of turning. 
 
 [63] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 And I had a dream which added another demerit 
 to my inner life, a dream that has stayed with me in 
 its stark and preternatural vividness these many years. 
 I dreamed that I was in a large, empty room with 
 brown walls. The door opened slowly and as it opened 
 my heart beat with insupportable fear. My mother 
 entered and I saw at once that her face was ghastly 
 white. She did not speak. She looked into my eyes 
 and fell forward, and I heard the thud of her head on 
 the wood . . . From that time on my prayers were all 
 propitiatory. I often prayed and wept in an agony of 
 apprehension. I would stop on the street suddenly 
 and pray to ward off evil from her. I invented 
 strange, childish rituals in the efficacy of which I would 
 trust for a time and then abandon them for others. My 
 freedom from care was gone beyond recall and all my 
 religious emotions centered about an inner core of 
 gloom. 
 
 m 
 
 In October, 1893, after an oral examination which, 
 thanks to my mother's instruction, I passed with ease, 
 I was admitted to the High School of Queenshaven. 
 The school building is plain and dignified, somewhat 
 after the fashion of an English mansion of the eigh- 
 teenth century. What the school has become in re- 
 cent years I do not know. I have heard rumors of 
 courses in bookkeeping and shorthand and other dex- 
 terities that have nothing to do with the education of 
 youth. In my time it was a good school. The pupils 
 were all boys and they were taught by men. They were 
 young enough to be grounded in the necessities of a 
 liberal education without having their callow judgment 
 
 L64] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 consulted, and to be caned when they were lazy or 
 rowdy. The school had one grave fault : Greek was an 
 elective study, Through this fault my life sustained 
 an irreparable loss. Yet when I consider what might 
 have happened to my mind if the school had been like 
 the High Schools of 1921, I am filled with a sense of 
 gratitude. For I was enabled to lay the foundations 
 of a sound and permanent knowledge of Latin and 
 French ; I was taught to study with thoroughness and 
 accuracy under pain of tangible and very wholesome 
 penalties, and it was not the fault of the school that 
 my mind was and is all but impervious to any form 
 of mathematical reasoning. 
 
 I passed into the rough and tumble of school life 
 with a distinct shudder. There was no direct hazing 
 but there was a good deal of rather cruel horse-play. 
 You were apt to be tripped up and thrown on your 
 back, to have pins and needles stuck viciously into you, 
 to be held under the pump until you nearly choked. 
 Also, during the first year, I was taunted with being 
 a foreigner and a Jew. One boy especially tormented 
 me — a tallish fellow with huge mouth always distorted 
 by idiotic laughter, hateful, off standing ears and small, 
 greenish eyes. I was no match for him in strength and 
 he persisted in cuffing and thumping and taunting me. 
 I tried to avoid him, for I shrank from the thought of 
 touching him as shudderingly as I did from his touch. 
 Then, one day he clapped me brutally on the back 
 and yelled with laughter. Two scarlet lights danced 
 before my eyes and I leapt at his throat. Boys hur- 
 ried from all sides of the play-ground and formed a 
 ring around us. Cries arose: "Fight fair!" I re- 
 membered how the contemptuous thoughts raced 
 
 [65] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 through my brain. Fight fair ! Oh yes, give the over- 
 grown lout a chance to trounce me as a reward for 
 months of bruises and insults. I didn't want to fight 
 him and suffer more undeserved pain and humiliation. 
 I wanted to hurt him, to hurt him so effectively that he 
 would never again dare lay his red, bony claws on me. 
 I did. A teacher had to come into the yard and order 
 me to be torn from my gasping and bloody victim. I 
 had no trouble after that . . . 
 
 Gradually, too, I fell in with a group of boys that 
 belonged to the gentler families of Queenshaven. I 
 shall have more to say of them later, for these class- 
 mates passed together through school and college with 
 me and so lived on terms of daily intimacy with me 
 for eight years. Through their companionship, at all 
 events, I soon felt at home in the school, an equal 
 among equals in play and study. 
 
 I have said that our teachers were men. Real men, 
 I hasten to add, not the spiritual starvelings who are 
 content nowadays with the wage-slavery of the High 
 School. The salaries of these Queenshaven teachers 
 were rather better than such salaries are to-day and 
 the purchasing power of money was of course far 
 greater. The principal was the only man I have 
 ever known who truly embodied the peculiar ideal of 
 the Christian gentleman. He had both sweetness and 
 strength, profound piety and wide charity. I can still 
 see the beautiful benevolence in his searching blue eyes 
 and hear his clear, bell-like voice. I do not know 
 whether he consciously thought of the methods of 
 Arnold of Rugby ; it is certain that he practiced them. 
 The better natured of my schoolmates and I never re- 
 sented his punishments ; we knew he was incapable of 
 
 [66] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 inflicting them until in his kind and manly judgment 
 forgiveness would have been morally harmful to the 
 offender. His influence and example drew me back to 
 the Methodist church ... It is a sad reflection that this 
 good man's end was pitiful. A trusted brother in the 
 church absconded with all our principal's modest sav- 
 ings. They were small enough, for he was liberal in 
 his charities beyond the bounds of discretion. But this 
 blow both in its moral and in its physical aspect over- 
 whelmed him. He fell into a state of melancholia and I 
 remember him, in later years, a mild, vague-eyed, 
 broken figure on the Queenshaven streets. 
 
 I shall not linger over the burly and severe but 
 sound pedagogue who taught us history and physics 
 nor over the graceful youth — still young and vivid in 
 his middle age — who taught French and German with 
 a stringent accuracy and sternness that added virility 
 to his Greek profile and his curving locks. It is on our 
 teacher of Latin that I must dwell. I cannot estimate 
 his influence over me. To this day I find myself using 
 locutions and mannerisms that are ultimately trace- 
 able to him. He was — I beg his pardon for writing of 
 him as in the past, but to me he lives only in the past, 
 though admirably and fruitfully to others in their 
 present — he was the son of an Italian gentleman, obvi- 
 ously of gentle lineage and exquisite breeding. His face 
 and head and hands and form had in them something 
 indescribably Roman. Roman of the empire. But for 
 his severer modern morals he might have been a friend 
 of Petronius and, like him, an arbiter elegantiarum. 
 Or, from another point of view, a gentleman of the age 
 bf Queen Ann — a friend of Addison. Of course this 
 does not render the whole man. But he was singularly 
 
 [67] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 free from all the modern maladies of the soul — a 
 devout Catholic with a frugal and pagan delight in the 
 good things of the world, a lover of the arts without 
 morbid intensity or perverting ambitions, a believer 
 in that golden mean which he interpreted so well. I 
 need hardly say that the particular objects of his tire- 
 less and exquisite zeal were Vergil and Horace and, 
 among English writers, Milton and Tennyson and 
 Thackeray. 
 
 As a teacher he was strict, though always with a 
 light touch — stinging the lazy and loutish by some 
 ironic turn of speech. He taught us to appreciate a 
 fine and mellow Latinity as well as the human warmth 
 and living power of the literature we read. But he 
 was tireless, too, in the humbler portions of his task. 
 I find that I know my Latin accidence and syntax bet- 
 ter to-day than graduate students who "major" in 
 Latin at our universities. And I can still hear his 
 voice as, repeating some line of Vergil, he first awak- 
 ened me to the magic of a great and perfect style. 
 
 " . . . et jam nox umida coelo 
 praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos." 
 
 It was in the third year of High School. He was 
 teaching us to scan Vergil. We were repeating a 
 passage in unison. Suddenly he swung on his heel 
 and pointed his finger straight at me: "That is the 
 only boy who has a natural ear for verse ! " he cried. 
 A keen, strange quiver went through me. I realized 
 the meaning suddenly of that constant scribbling 
 which I had been impelled to during the preceding 
 months. I had a gift for literature ! I knew it now ; 
 I never doubted it again. My fate had found me. 
 
 [68] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 IV 
 
 I continued to buy little note-books and to fill 
 them with verse. I neglected my tasks at school and 
 bore my punishments stolidly. When my father ex- 
 plained problems in mathematics or physics to me, I 
 did not listen and took his solutions to school. They 
 were correct, of course, but I could not explain them. 
 I wrote dozens of stanzas a day; I was obsessed by a 
 strange, aching fever and found no relief but in verse. 
 The verse, of course, was childish — half sentimental, 
 half-religious — yet often full of a bitter and, as it now 
 seems to me, pathetic yearning. I can see myself — 
 (we had long moved into the two upper floors of a 
 pleasant enough house) — a boy of thirteen, on the up- 
 stairs verandah that faced the sunset, watching the 
 trees grow dark against the sky and the evening star 
 emerge. There I stood or sat throbbing with a passion 
 for poetry that I still think was rare and not ignoble. 
 No, for there was blended with it a profound humility, 
 an earnest realization of the utter worthlessness of 
 what I was writing and would write for years to come. 
 Only at the end of that long vista of years shone the 
 star of my hope. Some day, somehow, I would be 
 a poet. 
 
 I abandoned the German books of my childhood. I 
 stopped speaking German even at home. Seeking re- 
 lief from the passion and the yearning that consumed 
 me I read, half-surreptitiously, the African tales of 
 Rider Haggard or even cheap detective stories. But 
 this period of merely silly reading was brief. By a 
 happy chance I became acquainted with a writes* who 
 gave tone and vigor to my boyish mind and fixed it 
 
 [69] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 upon great ideas and great affairs. I am, of course, 
 aware now of everything that can be said against 
 Macaulay. But even now I can look with kindness 
 upon his swaggering omniscience, his two-penny op- 
 timism, his unscrupulous rhetoric. He led me when 
 I was half a child to Milton and Dryden and Johnson. 
 But for his noble love of letters I might have been 
 like those contemporary youngsters who find Paradise 
 Lost dull and The Hind and the Panther stupid and 
 The Lives of The Poets old-fashioned. And he gave 
 scope to my imagination in the world of man and his- 
 tory and with him I shared the pageantry of Olive's 
 conquests and was stirred by the trial of Hastings and 
 followed the campaigns of the great Frederic. My 
 acquaintance with him began curiously. Our principal 
 had sent me on an errand to another class-room. 
 There the teacher was reading to the boys a descrip- 
 tion of the black hole at Calcutta. The impression of 
 that passage stayed with me for many days. Finally 
 I asked a boy in that class the name of the author and 
 went home and forthwith demanded that author's 
 works. So on my thirteenth birthday, which was but a 
 few weeks distant, my parents gave me a plain three- 
 volume edition of the Essays. I was intensely happy. 
 I needed nothing more that whole summer. I read the 
 essays over and over again — the Addison, the Johnson, 
 the Leigh Hunt — and determined to become not only 
 a poet but a scholar and a man of letters. 
 
 For a whole year the reading of Macaulay was my 
 chief pleasure. I read novels, at times, of course. For 
 in my boyhood, as now, I always combined desultory 
 with intensive reading. And my passion for writing 
 verse increased rather than diminished. But the 
 
 [70] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 greatest revelation of my boyhood, the revelation that 
 awakened me definitely to literature as a fine art, came 
 during the last year of my High School course. For 
 during that year we read under our admirable teacher 
 the Odes of Horace. 
 
 What first enchanted me was the poet's metrical 
 systems, the nervous, sonorous Alcaic, the restrained 
 pathos of the Sapphic cadences, the surge-like sweep 
 and recoil of the great Archilochian measures. Was 
 ever language wrought into a larger music! There 
 were lines and fragments that I repeated over and 
 over to myself with endless rapture: 
 
 'Cras ingens iterabimus aequor/ 
 
 and 
 
 " . . . sors exitura et nos in aeternum 
 exsilium impositura cymbae." 
 
 And that other which, years later, I found had also 
 evoked the wonder and delight of Stevenson: 
 
 "aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum." 
 
 I cared for the poet's matter too: his mellowness, 
 his essential highmindedness, the sad serenity of his 
 acceptance of life, his sober wisdom, the playfulness 
 that is never very far from a characteristic Latin 
 sense of the transitoriness of all things. But what 
 influenced me most deeply was his stylistic finish and 
 I absorbed into my innermost being a hundred just 
 and terse and lovely phrases that I shall remember 
 as long as I remember anything. I looked at my own 
 verses and their flabby fatuousness made my cheeks 
 burn. I swore not to write again until I had learned 
 
 [71] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 to write, and set about learning by translating the 
 odes of Horace. I knew but dimly that a host of ma- 
 ture and learned writers had tried their skill upon 
 my poet. I was acquainted with Milton's rendering of 
 the "Quis multa gracilis," which,, with all proper 
 reverence, I did not think wonderful. So I hammered 
 away, quite guilelessly at my own versions. One of 
 them — it was of the radiant and yet melancholy "Dif- 
 fugere nives" (IV, 7.) — seemed to me not so bad. I 
 put the manuscript in my pocket. But every day when 
 I heard the keen voice of our teacher my courage 
 failed me. At the end of weeks filled with trepidation 
 and misery I handed him the folded sheet. We took 
 our seats. He spread out the paper before him on the 
 desk. I heard my heart beat and the blood buzz and 
 hum in my ears. His face grew very red as it did 
 when he was angry and my heart nearly stopped. He 
 looked up and gave me one of his vivid glances. "Did 
 you do that yourself ?" I could only nod. But evi- 
 dently he saw the desperate sincerity in my eyes. He 
 sprang up and smiled, and his smiles were very bril- 
 liant. "It needs improvement here and there," he 
 said. "But it's good, it's charming! You will go far 
 — far!" And he read it to the class. 
 
 I suppose we grow stolid as we grow older. Doubt- 
 less, too, I was more sensitively attuned than most 
 boys of fourteen. But the hours and days that fol- 
 lowed this incident were such as to outweigh a good 
 many of the sorrows and hungers of life. I took the 
 story home to my father and mother and they were 
 moved by it. For in their starved and lonely lives 
 they had set all their hopes on me. And these hopes 
 were liberal and fine. From that day on they shared 
 
 [72] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 my ambition that I was to be a scholar and a man of 
 letters, even though that meant a renunciation of the 
 world's material prizes and rewards. 
 
 During my last year at High School, however, a 
 difficulty beset me which during hours and days made 
 life seem hideous and hopeless. There arose, very 
 sharply and imperiously, the consciousness of sex. By 
 a degrading and stupid convention the problem of 
 sex is regarded as non-existent among Anglo-Ameri- 
 cans. No doubt, men tell jokes. ... So did the boys 
 with whom I went to school — pointless, nasty jokes. 
 But these boys, like many of my friends later, would 
 have regarded a discussion of sex, the immense cen- 
 tral problem of sex, as a little vulgar and more than a 
 little disconcerting. And myi Americanization was 
 complete. I shared that point of view or, at least, very 
 potently believed that I shared it. No power on earth 
 could have dragged from me a hint of my emotions. 
 I attended a Methodist church. I was a member of 
 the Epworth league. Naturally I soon fell into a 
 wretched conviction of sin and tried to double the zeal 
 of my religious exercises. Yet all my inner life was 
 like a clear pool that had been muddied and denied. 
 Neither prayer nor study were of much avail at cer- 
 tain hours. Relentlessly my mind drifted off into 
 imaginings that filled me with terror, but that seem 
 to me now, as I recall them, not only harmless but 
 rather poetical. I was the more convinced of the wick- 
 edness of my thoughts by the absurd exaltation of 
 woman which is so characteristic a note of Southern 
 
 [73] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 life. I had been taught by my whole social environment 
 to believe that woman is a being without passion, with- 
 out any feelings of the grosser sort. No one who has 
 not lived in the South will credit the universality and 
 blatancy of this preposterous folly. It imparts to the 
 Southern gentleman a courtesy to ''good" women 
 which no self-sustaining human being needs ; it makes 
 his behavior to women who are not "good" literally 
 currish. But these conventions had entered into the 
 very texture of my life. Nothing could have persuaded 
 me that I would ever have thoughts as "ungentle- 
 manly" as those I have just set down. A gentleman 
 believed that the South was in the right in the War 
 between the States, that Christianity was the true re- 
 ligion — (to be merely suspected of liberality in points 
 of doctrine added a bold, mysterious charm provided 
 you were a man and over fifty) — that the Democratic 
 party was the only means, under Providence, of saving 
 the White Race from obliteration by the Nigger, that 
 good women are sexless — "sweet and pure" was the 
 formula — and that in a harlot's house you must keep 
 on your hat. And we were trained to be "young gen- 
 tlemen." Well, the good people succeeded with me. 
 I shared their faith and their morals and my boyish 
 soul was tormented and warped. . . . Some years later 
 with a crowd of college-boys — all pretty drunk — I went 
 into a harlot's house. We came out as we had gone in. 
 I had wanted hard to take my hat off. The insult 
 seemed so futile and so cruel. But I didn't dare risk 
 the gibes of my comrades. I was a young gentleman. 
 In one respect only did I fail to achieve a complete 
 conformity. It was in the matter of games. This cir- 
 cumstance added, of course, to the distress of my de- 
 
 [74] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 veloping manhood. But the games were abhorrent to 
 me. Or, rather, the spirit of the games. For I loved 
 the ont-of -doors and the fine exhileration of physical 
 effort. But foot-ball and base-ball and basket-ball 
 were all competitive — aimlessly competitive. And this 
 struck me then, as it strikes me now, as incomprehen- 
 sible and odious. As an experienced college professor 
 I later confirmed the deliberate judgment of my boy- 
 hood: competitive, inter-school or collegiate athletics 
 weaken the mind by assigning purely fictitious values 
 to trivialities; they rob the best of our youths of the 
 joy and health of the body by setting upon that joy 
 and health something akin to a horse-jockey's outlook 
 and a gambler's corruption. I didn't, of course, ex- 
 press these sentiments. Both at school and later at 
 college I even attended the games in which our institu- 
 tions were engaged. But I really could not "root." 
 I did not want to be shamed before my fellows; but 
 there was a point at which I couldn't bear to be shamed 
 in my own eyes. 
 
 Amid these perplexities I plunged the more ar- 
 dently into my studies. Not always, not indeed gen- 
 erally, into those required of me, but into my own. 
 For at this time my father found it possible to become 
 a member of the Queenshaven Library Society and the 
 great dearth of books — no public library existed — was 
 over. This dearth had hitherto been a bitter problem 
 to us all. I had had to spend my tiny allowance wholly 
 for books : I still treasure small editions of The Scarlet 
 Letter and of Paradise Lost that I bought after a hun- 
 dred deliberations, brought home with infinite keen- 
 ness of delight and then tasted and absorbed with a 
 high and almost austere rapture. . . . The Library 
 
 [75] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 Society had been founded in the eighteenth century 
 and possessed an excellent stock of books. There were 
 on the shelves thousands of brown leather volumes im- 
 ported from England before the Revolution and in the 
 early years of the Republic. A more than respectable 
 array of modern books had been added. But those 
 brown tomes allured me. They seemed actually to 
 smell of letters and of learning. And, no doubt, on the 
 theatre of my own mind I played a little of a prig's 
 part. But I could have been worse employed and be- 
 fore the end of the summer that followed my fifteenth 
 birthday I had read the greater part of Swift and Dry- 
 den, Pope and Addison, Johnson and Goldsmith. 
 Swift and Johnson I reread constantly, drawing out 
 the books again and again. My opinion of life was 
 not high, and already I felt not wholly an alien amid 
 the stark gloom of the great Dean and the gentler 
 melancholy of Johnson. 
 
 My graduation from High School approached. I 
 had been an idle and sometimes a mischievous pupil 
 during the middle years of my course. But during the 
 last year I had retrieved everything. I graduated well 
 and was permitted at our commencement to read in 
 public one of my versions of Horace. The verses were 
 printed in the Queenshaven Courier and prominent 
 citizens noticed and praised me. Far away it all seems, 
 infinitely farther even than the space of the years be- 
 tween, and provincial and trivial! Yet I would en- 
 grave its memory upon that which is more enduring 
 than brass for the joy and hope it brought to my father 
 and mother — those patient, beautiful and saddened 
 souls. 
 
 [76] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 yi 
 
 It is clear then that, at the age of fifteen, I was an 
 American, a Southerner and a Christian. My home, 
 it may be urged, was foreign in spirit. But that was 
 true to a very much slighter extent than may be sup- 
 posed. For my father and mother were both bookish 
 people and all the books they read were English. Our 
 conversation, whether it turned upon these books, as it 
 often did, or upon my father's business or my studies 
 was all of the very texture of the civilization amid 
 which we lived. My mother with that self-distrust 
 which was always hers, spoke less and less of the 
 memories which formed so large a part of her inner 
 life. In a superficial sense I shared her joy, to be sure, 
 in letters and gifts from Germany. Or, at least, I was 
 happy in her happiness. For I was intensely sensitive 
 to her needs and moods. My Americanization was, 
 nevertheless, complete. It differed, to be quite scrup- 
 ulous, from the Americanism of my comrades at school 
 and college, but it differed by a touch of self -conscious- 
 ness and a touch of militancy. It was at this time that, 
 in my thoughts and emotions, I came upon a distinct 
 and involuntary hostility to everything either Jewish 
 or German. I seemed to have a premonition that, in 
 some subtle way, these elements in my life and fate 
 might come between me and the one thing in the world 
 I cared for supremely — the poetry of the English 
 tongue. 
 
 I recall a certain Christmas. My father's employer 
 had given him a present in money. And we three went 
 out into the Queenshaven streets. They were ill-lit and 
 there was no moon. But I remember the clear sparkle 
 
 \77] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 of the large stars over the small, dark houses. A chill 
 wind blew in from the bay, but the streets were dry 
 and clean. I cannot recall what my father bought for 
 my mother or for himself. But I asked for a copy of 
 Tennyson. And I took home with me the Globe edition. 
 I needed nothing more; my mind and my heart 
 were filled. Yet I did not read many poems to the 
 end. For their beauty overwhelmed me and a lump 
 came into my throat and my eyes blurred. Not at the 
 story or the sentiments to which, indeed, I scarcely 
 attended. But at the sheer beauty of the diction and 
 the versification. The May Queen and The Grand- 
 mother left me cold. I was rather ashamed for Tenny- 
 son that he had written them. The poems that gave 
 me such unbearable keenness of delight were The 
 Dying Swan, The Lotos Eaters, the Lines to Vergil! 
 . . . Soon thereafter, deliberately teaching myself to 
 read French for pleasure, I read for the first time 
 Taine's Histoire de la litterature anglaise and was 
 overcome with indignation and disgust at the famous 
 parallel between Tennyson and Musset. I borrowed 
 the Frenchman's verses which I understood but ill. 
 Well enough, however, it seemed to me, to think his 
 work almost vulgar and quite trivial compared to the 
 aristocratic sweetness, the noble attitude of England's 
 laureate. Could spiritual Americanization in a lad 
 have gone farther? Could anyone native-born have 
 held sentiments more correct with a higher passion 1 . . . 
 I buried the rebellious things in me deeper and 
 deeper — sex and doubt. I hated to admit the fact of 
 our social isolation. Not out of snobbishness. But 
 because I wished to live in harmony with the society 
 of which, by virtue of its English speech and ideals, I 
 
 [78] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 
 
 felt myself so integral a part. So I deliberately shut 
 my eyes to that exclusion which, of course, I felt far 
 less keenly than my parents. I saw something of my 
 comrades, I had my poetry; I took long daily walks 
 with my mother, walks which I loved. For her sensi- 
 tive sympathy never failed. My[ father did not care 
 for verse as verse ; my schoolfellows respected my abil- 
 ity without comprehending my tastes. She was my 
 confident and friend. 
 
 I spent the summer vacation that followed my grad- 
 uation from High School in turning out more versions 
 of Horace, in writing verses of my own and in enor- 
 mous reading. I looked forward to autumn and to my 
 entering college with subdued but keen happiness. I 
 meant to make a name for myself at the famous old 
 college and I also knew now the means by which I was 
 to conquer for myself a life of learned ease and poeti- 
 cal activity, and for my parents a secure and pleasant 
 future. I meant to be — consider the immense irony of 
 these boyish hopes and assurances — a professor of 
 English literature. 
 
 [79] 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 The Making of an Anglo- American 
 
 The campus of the College of Quoenshaven oc- 
 cupies several city blocks. Tall trees stand in it and 
 the shadows of their branches tremble in the sunshine 
 upon the Grecian portico and on the warm, brown 
 walls of the old building. A place of peace — gentle 
 with an eighteenth century repose. There are not 
 students enough for boistorousness, no bleak or snowy 
 weather ever adds a touch of roughness or hardship 
 to the scene. Xo engineering courses had been estab- 
 lished in my time: the chair of biology was practically 
 vacant. TVe strolled across the campus learning to 
 smoke cigarettes or pipes, reading- our Latin or our 
 English poets. Chemistry and mathematics were the 
 snakes in my Paradise. I could not crush them, but 
 I tried to forget their existence except during the 
 actual hours of recitation and laboratory practice. 
 The latter were hideous. Outside the leaves fluttered 
 and the swallows wheeled and poetry sounded with her 
 golden voice. And I had to potter around with noxious 
 and stenchful stuffs. Of the cosmic meaning of these 
 experiments no one told me a word. What I have 
 learned of the problem of matter as it affects our 
 
 [SO] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 thinking concerning man and God I have learned for 
 myself. I hated having to remember how you manu- 
 facture sulphuric acid or get zinc from its ore. But 
 these troubles were small and transitory. If I had not 
 been so long a pedagogue by trade, fiercely resentful of 
 the time an uniliumJriating science-teaching steals 
 from the humanities, these scars upon the memories of 
 my college life would be forgotten. For that life was, 
 npon the whole, hapj-ty and the sinister elements grew 
 to be so only through their consequences. 
 
 My freshman year was marked by several radical 
 and fortunate changes in the college. A new presi- 
 dent was called : an energetic young man, a scholar and 
 a thinker; my admirable old teacher of Latin was 
 transferred from the high school to our college; a 
 young man was brought from a Western university 
 to fill the chair of English. The last event was the 
 most important of all to me. For years Ferris was 
 the dominant influence in my life. He more than any 
 one made me what I was during my early manhood. 
 I bore him a true affection; I bear him that affection 
 still. Deep, strange, silent things seemed to divide us 
 for a time. But that division is over. We are to-day 
 upon a firmer ground of friendship and understand- 
 ing than ever before. Ferris was under thirty when 
 he came to Queenshaven, but already his hair was 
 completely white. His mouth was hidden under a 
 drooping blond mustache ; his prominent features were 
 his sensitive nose, his high, fine, narrow forehead, his 
 large violet-blue eyes. A fragile, gracious, spiritually 
 virile figure — a trifle slovenly, unkempt, with an 
 aborbed, aloof air that would yield to a very human, 
 quaintly sweet smile. He was very shy and had a 
 
 [81] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 touch of irony, in his speech. The average student 
 didn't like him; to the exceptional student he came at 
 once to mean much. To me — everything. I had had 
 practically no instruction in English and Ferris took 
 notice of me at once, of my ambition and of my talent. 
 He taught me how to train myself to write ; he gave me 
 generously of his time; he payed my efforts the fine 
 tribute of searching criticism and merciless veracity. 
 During the four years that I was his pupil I do not 
 think he praised me twice. But now and then a certain 
 earnestness, almost solemnity would come into his eyes 
 and then I knew that I had approached my goal a little 
 nearer. For I recognized in him at once a singularly 
 subtle and exquisitely tempered literary intelligence. 
 Delicate in health, drifting through the years down the 
 warm, enervating current of Queenshaven life, he has 
 done nothing. I suppose he still sits by the library 
 window or in his study, playing with a reed-stemmed 
 clay-pipe, savoring with that wonderful aesthetic taste 
 of his the finest literature, planning a little and sink- 
 ing back into his delicate Epicureanism. A stronger 
 body, a rougher life, a goad of love or hunger, a little 
 less consciousness of gentility — and he might have 
 been a master. 
 
 Gentility! He could not even in those years quite 
 forget that his father, a professor at Washington col- 
 lege, had been a friend and colleague of General Lee 
 and that he was a Virginian aristocrat. His mind had 
 fared forth boldly on all the quests of man ; apparently 
 his intellectual flexibility* and moral freedom were 
 boundless. But at the slightest translation of that 
 freedom into action, were it by so much as a vivid ges- 
 ture, a spiritual discomfort seized him and the gen- 
 
 [82] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 tleman conquered the man. Since art means passion 
 and since all passion has a touch of wildness, he was 
 ever too much of a gentleman to be an artist. Not with 
 his mind and heart, but with his unconquerable tribal 
 self he always loved something else — a quiet manner, 
 reserve of speech, an aristocratic nose — a little better 
 than he loved truth or beauty. To illustrate the right 
 humility before greatness he once told his students that 
 he would have been glad to blacken Shakespeare's 
 boots. He was quite sincere, but he would not have 
 stood the test. The real Shakespeare — the morbid 
 lover, the truant husband, the shabby actor, the poet 
 whose divine energy of speech must have leant storm 
 and flame to his daily discourse — that man would have 
 filled Ferris with discomfort and dismay. . . . We saw 
 a very great deal of each other in the course of the 
 years and I know that his affection for me was very 
 real. But he never, I think, quite forgave me for being 
 what I am. 
 
 My mother, with a woman's sensitiveness, had a 
 perception, unreasonable but very real, of the ultimate 
 truth. At home I spoke of Ferris daily during my four 
 years at college. He and his influence filled my life. 
 And often my mother would hint at a touch of disloy- 
 alty in him to me. I always defended him hotly, and 
 indeed her reasons were invariably quite wrong. But 
 the sting of the situation was that I knew her to be 
 in the right. In the best and deepest hours we spent 
 together there was in him a shadow of withdrawal from 
 me — a shadow of watchfulness, of guardedness. . . . 
 A shadow, but it was there. He too must have realized 
 it, must have reflected on it, for I also stood for some- 
 thing in his life, and I am unwilling to believe that 
 
 [83] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 such a nature as his yielded without a struggle to the 
 injustice of its tribal self. That shadow, at all events, 
 is gone now and it seems hateful to record it. But 
 I must do so since during many years it remained in 
 my mind as the symbol of an essential isolation. 
 
 n 
 
 Such feelings and reflections, of course, occupied 
 my mind but at occasional, comfortless moments dur- 
 ing my years at college. Had I been but a shade less 
 sensitive, even these moments would have been spared 
 me. My true life was given over to the absorption of 
 Ferris' teaching, of his intimate, unspoken, but ever 
 richly implied point of view. That point of view I 
 can sum up in but one word, and that word is — Eng- 
 land. His attitude to the intellectual and artistic life 
 of America was a little detached, a little patronizing, 
 a little amused. The serious thing in American life 
 to him was its continuing of those English social tra- 
 ditions within our older commonwealths of which he 
 was the product. But the home of his soul and of his 
 imagination was by some Surrey lane or Kentish field 
 or Westmoreland lake. To me, whose love of English 
 poetry had been so largely an aesthetic rapture, he 
 communicated those other and even richer associa- 
 tions which soon blended in my inner life, as they had 
 done in his, into a spiritual loyalty to England that 
 was all the deeper because we were forbidden the more 
 obvious loyalties granted to her children and her citi- 
 zens. We were glad and proud to be the dependents 
 and colonials of that mighty mother from whom came 
 the song and the beauty, the traditions and the fair 
 
 [84] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 imaginings that were the best of life to us. . . . Ferris 
 knew both French and German well. But he read 
 those foreign literatures with a cool and somewhat 
 arrogant curiosity. And, during my boyish years, I 
 absorbed that attitude as well. 
 
 England! How should I not have loved her? I 
 knew nothing of life. And there were 
 
 The magic casements opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn — 
 
 there that road to Canterbury along which the immor- 
 tal pilgrims fared; there were the gardens and the 
 learned seats where Milton studied and Gray brooded 
 and Tennyson wove those early all too golden verses ; 
 there was that other, lovelier city of the dreamy spires 
 where Newman's voice floated through Saint Mary's 
 chapel and the lad Arnold heard it and remembered it 
 forever. There was that motley city of the thousand 
 visions: Milton in blindness beholding the bowers of 
 Paradise; Dryden at Will's coffee-house and Pope, a 
 large-eyed, crooked child seeing the great, old man; 
 Addison writing The Campaign in shabby lodgings; 
 Johnson talking out of the depth of his noble, sombre 
 heart; the fiery Hazlitt, the exquisite Lamb gathered 
 about Coleridge in deep, heroic talk, and Shelley, wild- 
 eyed, weaving here too the colors of his incomparable 
 dreams. And far beyond the city were Windermere, 
 clothed so truly to me in 
 
 A light that never was on sea or land 
 The consecration and the poet's dream, 
 
 and, most sacred of all and most beloved — Laleham 
 churchyard where Arnold sleeps. How faint these 
 
 [85] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 fragments of that imaginative vision of England! I 
 summon it before me again as it arose in my soul in 
 those impressionable years in all its storied wealth, 
 in all its singing splendor. No bodily eye was needed. 
 I knew the whiteness of the Dover cliffs, the "league- 
 long rollers'* on the Isle of Wight, the sylvan Wye 
 "that wanderer through the woods," and that 
 
 wet, bird-haunted, English lawn 
 
 the thought of which came with a pang of beauty which 
 was almost pain. What wonder that in my mind, tak- 
 ing- color from my friend's, this England, this land of 
 tne soul, became indissolubly one with that British 
 empire which we conceived of as spreading the noble 
 things we loved to the ends of the earth. We rejoiced, 
 like the very children of her soil, in her "far-flung 
 battle line," and like the poet she drove out and killed, 
 heard with our very ears and with our very hearts 
 
 The measured roll of English drums 
 Beat at the gates of Kandahar. 
 
 In 1898 or 1899 I read an article on Kipling in the 
 Quarterly Review. I took his books from the library 
 and was at once drawn into the full current of British 
 imperialism. Of his verses, though I admired and imi- 
 tated them, I always had a lurking, unadmitted doubt. 
 But the stories took me by storm. And the best of 
 them are, indeed, beyond praise in their magnificent 
 concreteness, their Homeric freshness. The shallow- 
 ness and meanness of the man's outlook on life were 
 quite beyond my perception. I let what is surely the 
 enduring part of him persuade me to accept not only 
 the artist but also the politician. I heartily believed 
 
 [86] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 a Little Englander to be a fool and a contemptible 
 fool; I conceived of the Boers not as obstacles to con- 
 quest and rapacity but to the spreading of a heaven- 
 sent light. I believed that America was, by virtue of 
 our community of speech and literature with England, 
 a sharer in this light which was to be forcibly shed 
 upon all the dark places of the earth, and I found it 
 hard to forgive William Vaughan Moody for council- 
 ling us in his great Ode Written In A Time Of Hesita- 
 tion to let the island men of the Philippines go free. . . . 
 I found the other day, among old papers, a manuscript 
 ode to England which I wrote when I was eighteen. I 
 remember that Ferris praised it and, indeed, the verses 
 are not without merit. But it interested me as con- 
 firming so thoroughly the facts in my development 
 which I have here set down. I was a Pan-Angle of 
 the purest type; so was Ferris, so were my class- 
 mates — lads of English and Anglicized French Hugue- 
 not descent — so were the half dozen cultivated lawyers 
 and business men and journalists in the community 
 who, about this time, began to take an interest in me 
 and in my work. All, at least, except one. But he, a 
 wealthy Jewish physician who had turned Methodist 
 in his boyhood, avoided all questionable subjects, 
 prayed at love feasts in church and, though he sur- 
 reptitiously distributed alms among the poor Jews of 
 the city, achieved a complete conformity of demeanor. 
 My father, furthermore, became as fervid an admirer 
 of Kipling as myself. The poet's politics he scarcely 
 noted, for he had not my inner reasons for a blind ad- 
 herence to that faith. He did not want to be an Eng- 
 lish poet. . . . Acquaintances, with a warning gravity 
 of demeanor, whispered to me later that I haven't a 
 
 [87] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 sense of what England stands for in the world. "Who 
 was ever firmer in that faith? Not Eliot nor Hibben 
 nor a wilderness of blood-thirsty professors. Only 
 I've done a little living, a little thinking . . . especially 
 a little thinking since. That grave look in my friends' 
 eyes which used to impress me seems like the blank 
 gravity of idiot children. . . . 
 
 m 
 
 I still, during these years, attended the Methodist 
 church, taught Sunday School and was a leader in the 
 Epworth League. I did this partly because, up to my 
 junior year, my Christian faith, though cooler, was 
 still unshaken, partly through the influence and friend- 
 ship of the physician whom I have mentioned, but 
 also because I found a good deal of unreserved human 
 friendliness among these people. And I needed this. 
 The relations between my class-mates and myself 
 were very cordial; several of them often visited me 
 as I did them. Yet there always came a point at which 
 I felt excluded. They themselves belonged to a definite 
 social group. They neither drew me into this group 
 nor did they have the good sense or good feeling to be 
 silent before me concerning these more intimate af- 
 fairs. I do not think their exclusion of me was at all 
 a matter of reason or determination; it was quite in- 
 stinctive. By virtue of my work on the college maga- 
 zine and the attitude of the professors toward me, 
 they respected me. Personally they liked me well 
 enough and elected me, without hesitation, in due time, 
 president of our literary society and editor-in-chief 
 of the magazine. As tribesmen their resistance to me 
 
 [88] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 was tacit but final. A pushing or insinuating fellow 
 might, assuredly, have made his way. But my sensi- 
 tiveness was so alert that I, no doubt, at times created 
 division by suspecting it and at once shrinking away. 
 But of the fundamental fact there could be no doubt. 
 It was terribly confirmed to me by an incident in my 
 senior year. I was the most prominent student on the 
 campus. My classmates called themselves my friends 
 — voluntarily and without my seeking. And these very 
 f friends gathered to form the first chapter of a Greek 
 letter fraternity at our college and — lef t me out. 1 1 did 
 not know then that the fraternities do not admit Jews. 
 1 1 do not know now whether they practice this exclusion 
 tacitly or by regulation. I never spoke of the incident 
 either at school or at home. Our president who 
 founded the chapter does not know to this day that I 
 so much as observed the matter. I did, with a pro- 
 found discouragement, with a momentary grim pre- 
 vision of the future which I fought bitterly to blot 
 out lest I should lose all my hopes and see all my life 
 crumble before me at eighteen. I withdrew into my- 
 self with sullen pride and intensified ambition, con- 
 vinced that the incident was local, exceptional, unrep- 
 resentative and un-American. Such was my simple 
 faith. . . . 
 
 Gradually, too, I was losing the satisfaction that 
 I had once taken in the society of my Methodist friends. 
 For in my eighteenth year the world began to clear 
 for me. Until then my passion for literature had been 
 so exclusive that neither my reasoning power nor my 
 power of observation had developed. These were now 
 somewhat suddenly awakened and were the source of 
 constant, sharp revelations. I remember a garden 
 
 [89] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 party given by a bishop's widow to the young people 
 of the Epworth League. It was a very charming gar- 
 den with beds full of old-fashioned flowers; honey- 
 suckle and clematis covered the piazza that gave on 
 the lawn. There were chairs and tables and ice-cream 
 and cakes were served by girls dressed in white. The 
 glint of the sunlight on their smooth hair and the rus- 
 tle of their starched skirts gave me a faint, sensuous 
 pleasure. And one of the girls had a slow, liquid 
 laugh. The young men, in duck trousers and blue 
 coats, were clerks, with a sprinkling of students from 
 a Methodist college. For almost the first time I lis- 
 tened to the talk objectively — the kind of talk carried 
 on a thousand times a day in a thousand American 
 communities. It was mostly what is known as chaff, 
 feeble to the point of imbecility. How could these 
 people laugh at it? Laugh they did. But the laughter 
 though loud was without true mirth. For that requires 
 a vigor either of mind or temper that was far to seek. 
 It was all witless, stale and puerile beyond conception 
 — refined through sheer weakness, well-mannered and 
 yet incurably ill-bred. The pastor went from table 
 to table — a tall, bony, large-mouthed man. He spoke 
 of the beauty of the afternoon and of the delightfulness 
 of seeing young people so happy. His long, pale lips 
 writhed in smiles over his jagged teeth. As he pressed 
 my hand all I could think of was his fondness for 
 talking about purity, and of his wife, emaciated with 
 child-bearing, and their six or seven small, depressed 
 children. ... A withered, eager, bead-eyed spinster 
 told of a friend of hers who was a missionary in Mex- 
 ico. I wondered if the Mexicans, though less hygienic 
 and refined, weren't in all likelihood more interesting 
 
 [90] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 and vital than the spinster and her friend. If they were 
 ignorant, it was the ignorance of a primitive folk. 
 These people who held Genesis to be a scientific docu- 
 ment and whined over the damnation of the heathen 
 were ignorant by temperament, profession and pig- 
 headedness. I couldn't tear myself away until the 
 party broke up at sunset, because the girls uttered 
 their inanities with such sweet lips and such pallid 
 teeth. But I went home alone through the lovely dusk 
 of Queenshaven and my mind recorded one of the ear- 
 liest judgments that marked the passing of the boy 
 into the man. 
 
 But my growing isolation was more than compen- 
 sated for by a new joy in thought — its purity and hardi- 
 hood and strength. My father, wearying of my dog- 
 matic assents, insisted on my reading Fiske's Cosmic 
 Philosophy. I have not seen the book in years. I do 
 not know what I would think of it now. But it was an 
 admirable choice for an awakening intellect. I read 
 it with an icy fervor. A cool, strong light seemed to 
 irradiate my mind. This picture of the universe was 
 so overwhelmingly and evidently nearer the truth than 
 that represented by Christian doctrine that all my 
 emotional forts collapsed at once. I proceeded to read 
 Huxley and Darwin, Draper and Lecky. Yet I held 
 very fast to my faith in God and immortality and I 
 still prayed in the silences of my mind, though I could 
 not have justified the habit on any intellectual basis. 
 Nor did I doubt the correctness and elevation of that 
 system of Christian morals under which we live. In 
 a word, my attitude was that of so many thousands of 
 semi-educated Americans : I was rather proud of my 
 breadth of view on matters of theology and failed quite 
 
 [91] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 to suspect my refusal to think on other matters of far 
 more pressing practical import. I would have felt 
 quite at home in that half way house of the mind — 
 Unitarianism. And indeed, some years later, I did 
 sustain a brief and tentative connection with that re- 
 spectable form of faith. 
 
 iy 
 
 During the last two years of my college course my 
 plans for the future became more definite. I ' 'ma- 
 jored" in English and having taken all the courses 
 the college offered, my friend Ferris gave several 
 courses, both philological and literary, for me alone 
 and thus enabled me to do a year's graduate work 
 while I was still an undergraduate. I must emphasize 
 the fact that both he and several other professors (who 
 were my thorough friends) aided and encouraged me 
 in every? way and clearly took it for granted that I 
 would encounter no hardship in entering the aca- 
 demic profession as a teacher of the English language 
 and literature. My father and mother were also well 
 content with my plan; their German respect for the 
 dignity and authority of the academic life increased 
 their satisfaction. 
 
 I can say frankly — since my present self is so far 
 removed from that old, boyish self in Queenshaven 
 with its deep faith and ardor — that I prepared myself 
 for my chosen calling in no common way. I read Eng- 
 lish literature with a white heat of passion; the lamp 
 in my bed-room burned drv night after night. By 
 the time I was nineteen I had read and re-read and 
 pondered all the great things in English literature 
 
 [92] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 from Chaucer to Kipling, and I had read many authors 
 of the second and third rank — Jonson and Donne, Mar- 
 veil and Crashaw, Herrick and Vaughan, Prior and 
 Gay and Tickell, Collins and Smart, Crabbe and Cow- 
 per and Hogg, even Bowles and Lloyd, Patmore and 
 Frederick Tennyson, Clough and Beddoes and Locker- 
 Lampson down to Lang and Austin Dobson and, of 
 course, the immediate contemporaries. Yet these 
 names are but a few and written down at random. The 
 works of the great poets, even of those who like Lan- 
 dor are aside from the beaten road, had entered into 
 my very being. ... I have had little time to read 
 English poetry of late years. I do not need to. I 
 dip into my memory and those immortal numbers 
 sound upon my inner ear! The early books and the 
 seventh of Paradise Lost, the Epistle to Augustus, 
 Adonais and the Nightingale Ode, Kubla Kahn and 
 Work Without Hope, Tintern Abbey and the Ode and 
 the Sonnets, The Lotos-Eaters and Ulysses, The Last 
 Ride Together and A Grammarian's Funeral, Thyrsis 
 and The Scholar Gypsy, The Blessed Damozel and 
 Jenny, A Forsaken Garden and the elegy on Baude- 
 laire and the long, dreamy, murmuring melodies — like 
 the wash of a summer sea — of The Earthly Paradise. 
 ... In prose I was not so well grounded. But I knew 
 the greater prosemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries, especially my old favorites Swift and John- 
 son, and the object of my latest and deepest enthusiasm 
 in college, Matthew Arnold, reasonably well and the 
 novelists from Fielding to George Eliot intimately. 
 And I had read all the histories of English literature 
 available and dozens of volumes of critical essays and 
 most of the chief biographies from Boswell to Lord 
 
 [93] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 Tennyson's life of his father. Once, when my eyes 
 were being treated, my mother read to me the whole 
 of Dowden's Shelley and of Trevelyan's Macaulay. . . . 
 I have mentioned Matthew Arnold. My father dis- 
 covered the volume containing Culture and Anarchy 
 and Friendship's Garland and urged me to read it. I 
 felt the impact of a kindred mind and the book became 
 one of my deepest experiences, although its full import 
 was revealed to me only years later. I read all of 
 Arnold over and over again and I still think him the 
 clearest-souled Englishman of his century. And finally 
 there came — as was inevitable — Pater and Stevenson 
 as the last word in that other great art of prose which 
 I now took almost as seriously as the greater art of 
 verse. I took delight in the tales of Stevenson. But it 
 was characteristic of my youth and its environment 
 that his essays seemed to me not only charmingly 
 written — (they are, though with too obvious a display 
 of dexterity) — but wonderfully rich in wisdom. . . . Re- 
 cently, at odd moments of leisure, I have been reading 
 Hazlitt again. Almost more than any other English 
 writer he gives, in a voice so little muffled by the grave 
 as almost to ring in one's ears, the deep sense of the 
 texture and savor, the stir and pang of life. Regret 
 and longing, the glory and the disillusion — what poet 
 has rendered them with a more piercing note f Withal 
 his voice is always manly, direct, tempered by some 
 tonic quality within. In my college days I preferred 
 Stevenson. I did not see that Stevenson paints life 
 and feeling in but a few colors. These are bright and 
 very engaging and delicately used. But they fill in a 
 pattern quite arbitrary and unreal. The sentiments 
 
 [94] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 and ideals correspond to no well-considered vision of 
 the world. They are like the pipings of some splendid 
 bird in a world all dawn — a world that will never know 
 the heat of noon with its ardor of passion and pain or 
 the dark of night with its contemplation and its falter- 
 ing hope. . . . 
 
 Meanwhile I read both verse and prose, not yielding 
 blindly to the easy and abundant inspiration of youth, 
 but curbing that inspiration and guiding it with severe 
 and fastidious care. The uncriticalness of Southern 
 culture confirmed me in demanding the utmost ex- 
 actions of myself. There was a terrible lot of facile 
 and amorphous talking and writing. An eighteenth- 
 centuryish type of oratory still throve in Queenshaven. 
 Whenever its echo reached me I re-read Gautier's 
 stanzas on art and tightened the girdle about my loins. 
 
 I have recently looked at some thousands of manu- 
 script verses of that period. The poems are full of a 
 rhythmic ardor, yet never without restraint. There 
 are good lines and happy turns of expression and there 
 is no lack of imagination. Yet the stuff is quite worth- 
 less. For it is merely, as Arthur Symons wrote me 
 years later (not of my own work) "poetizing about 
 the old subjects in as nearly as possible the old way." 
 There is no directness of speech because there was, 
 after all, no directness of vision. It is all remote and 
 unreal. Mere " literature" in the sense of Verlaine. 
 Without the learned renaissance tradition of English 
 poetry from Surrey to Swinburne the verses were un- 
 thinkable. With that tradition and its results extant 
 they were superfluous. But they illustrate how I lived 
 and moved and had my being in the cultural tradition 
 
 [95] 
 
 <£ 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 of the Anglo-Saxon aristocrat. I was of those who 
 " speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke, the faith 
 and morals hold that Milton held" . . . 
 
 v. 
 
 Does all that sound priggish? It was saved from 
 priggishness, I believe, by its passion, by its inevitable- 
 ness. There was no blemish of worldly ambition in it 
 all. I thirsted to know, I hungered to create. But I 
 had, all during my sophomore and junior years, an- 
 other preoccupation, a humbler and, perhaps, a more 
 human one. There was a girl ... I saw her one day 
 at Sunday School. I met her that week at the Epworth 
 League. Straightway something within me began to 
 ache with a very definite, small, sharp, insistent ache. 
 For two years I had to study very hard or write very 
 feverishly to deaden that pain. Eeason and self -per- 
 suasion were quite powerless against it. Love at first 
 sight: a very powerful instinct of sexual selection. 
 Each phrase expresses half of the intense reality. The 
 girl was short and rather plump, she had a skin of fine 
 texture, small, white, mouse-like teeth, pale, brown 
 hair, good eyes of grey with long lashes, but a small, 
 prim, cool mouth. She wasn't pretty. Heaven knows 
 she wasn't clever. Her mother and her older sister 
 illustrated with deadly precision what she was certain 
 to become. And I saw all this and nursed no illusions 
 and yet a smile from her would ease me for a day and 
 failure to see her would throw me into helpless agony. 
 I was intensely jealous of her, though I knew her to be 
 quite innocent, not even given to flirting, and though 
 she was obviously anxious to give me every encourage- 
 
 [96] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 ment permitted by a very strict maidenly propriety. 
 What was that chilly preference to my fever and my 
 pain? This experience aroused in me, even in the midst 
 of my suffering, my earliest reflections — vague and in- 
 conclusive and rendered futile, of course, by my gentle- 
 manly conservatism — on a tremendous problem. If by 
 any queer and unthinkable chance I could have married 
 the girl, I would have done so — young and penniless 
 and helpless as I was. The knowledge that such a step 
 would have ruined me would not have deterred me for 
 a moment. I wanted her so! It was a good thing, 
 then, that society and custom and parental authority 
 made such a step impossible. On the other hand, it 
 seemed a raw cruelty that the passion of love at its 
 freshest and most vigorous should be a festering spear 
 in the flesh of youth. What a problem ! What a world ! 
 ... At the end of the second year I succeeded, by the 
 severest self -discipline, in freeing myself measurably 
 from this torment. I deliberately went out a good deal 
 with a vivid little beauty in whom a quiver of passion 
 constantly fought against but never overcame reserve 
 and principle. She was worth a dozen of the other 
 kind. Yet until I left college I had to avoid that fatal 
 girl with the round shoulders and the dreary mouth 
 lest I should feel again the old, miserable, sickening 
 ache. I marvel how with that scourge upon me I 
 could work so very intensely and continuously. But, 
 though I had next to no worldly ambition, I was 
 anxious to get through college. 
 
 I had a deep and urgent motive. I began to see how 
 the Queenshaven life was gradually telling on my 
 father and mother. To my love of them was added a 
 compassion that shook me to the roots of my being and 
 
 [971 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 a deadly fear that in my race against time and circum- 
 stance, my race for their welfare and their future, I 
 might arrive too late. I began to perceive objectively 
 how the meanness and the humiliations of my father's 
 business were beginning to shake his judgment and 
 to exasperate his moods ; how solitariness and repres- 
 sion were whitening my mother's hair. Her face re- 
 tained its girlish bloom and freshness almost to the 
 threshold of old age. She had hardly a wrinkle when 
 she died. But during my years at college her hair 
 turned quite white and my old terror for her became 
 intensified. 
 
 But I must not give the impression that our home 
 life was altogether gloomy. After all we had one an- 
 other and there were many cheerful hours and days. 
 "We were poor but never to the point of penury. A fine 
 care and wise frugality, especially characteristic of 
 my mother, made the modest income suffice for all de- 
 cent necessities and my studies and development were 
 not interrupted by any material cares. I sometimes 
 thought our diet monotonous. I didn't always like my 
 clothes. But essentially my indifference to such things 
 was quite serene. My father and mother, moreover, 
 were full of hope. My progress was obvious; my 
 teachers constantly impressed upon them the belief 
 that I had an enviable future before me. I had, too, 
 an excellent friend on the Queenshaven Courier, a 
 clever man, almost my father's age, who reprinted my 
 verses in the paper, got me to write articles and book- 
 reviews and so, almost insensibly, I became quite a 
 figure in that small, compact community. . . . How 
 little that meant, how in spite of fair seeming and fair 
 
 [98] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 speech all forces were arrayed against me, I did not 
 know until several years had passed. . . . 
 
 I recall a moonlit, starry night in May. My father 
 had gone to a lodge meeting. My mother and I paced 
 the piazza together, as was our wont. It was a few 
 weeks before my graduation. We spoke long and 
 quietly of the past and of the future — of my hopes 
 which seemed well-justified, of the important day that 
 was coming. We both went to rest, I know, with a real 
 serenity; of soul. . . . More than once later she re- 
 called that evening to me and asked me whether I 
 remembered it. Remember it ! I shall see those stars 
 and the shadows on the verandah and her eyes in the 
 dusk until I see nothing more forever. But the last 
 time she asked me I feigned f orgetfulness. I was be- 
 yond all speech. For the hopes had gone down in 
 shame and frustration and on her face was the mark 
 of death. . . . 
 
 VI. 
 
 My graduation was made a notable event in our 
 small circles. All the leading citizens of the town are 
 alumni of the college and are proud of its work and 
 its traditions. So they had followed my writings in the 
 magazine and in the papers, and when I took two de- 
 grees and delivered a commencement oration which, 
 for once, made some concessions in manner to the more 
 florid type of Southern oratory, they had a moment of 
 enthusiasm over me. This enthusiasm was shared by 
 the press of Queenshaven and by my class-mates. I 
 was a bit more of a hero than the youth who wins a 
 series of important foot-ball games for his university. 
 It was a very great day for me and an even greater 
 
 [99] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 day for my parents : the happiest they had known in 
 years, the happiest they were ever to know again. 
 Under the influence of this wave of communal approba- 
 tion a board of Episcopal clergymen elected me to the 
 chair of English in a local academy. But the aged 
 clergyman to whom the school really belonged arose 
 from a bed of illness and removed the trustees he had 
 himself appointed for electing a person distasteful to 
 him. He used this expression quite openly in a letter 
 to the Courier. The gentlemen on the board, however, 
 wrote me apologetic letters and my friends and parents 
 agreed that it wasn't, after all, my ambition to teach 
 in a denominational school. Besides, I was only just 
 nineteen and the world seemed all before me where to 
 choose. . . . By Ferris ' advice I registered in several 
 teachers' agencies and sent my master's thesis to a 
 scholarly journal by which it was duly accepted for 
 publication. 
 
 The long summer weeks dragged on and nothing 
 happened. One New England teachers' agency did, 
 indeed, suggest a place or two but nothing came of my 
 applications. Ferris assured me by letter that this 
 lack of success was due to my youth and inexperience. 
 Since he had councilled me from the first to apply for 
 a fellowship or scholarship in one of the large grad- 
 uate schools of the east, I accepted his explanation for 
 these happenings as well as for other experiences that 
 came when I applied for school positions within the 
 state. His advice was that I should stay at home for 
 a year, pursue my studies and write a few more schol- 
 arly papers to submit with my fellowship applications 
 the following spring. My father, ever the soul of un- 
 worldliness in money matters, agreed heartily to this 
 
 [100] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 plan and my mother was glad that she could have me 
 with her for another year. 
 
 That year stands out in my memory as a pleasant 
 one. I saw little of any one except Ferris, but I was 
 quite free to devote myself to the cultivation of my 
 tastes. And I wrote my first extensive piece of work : 
 an essay in biography and criticism about fifty thou- 
 sands words in length. Ferris pronounced it well- 
 grounded and well-written— a notable piece of work 
 for a mere youth. So when April came I applied for 
 fellowships at Harvard and Columbia and both Ferris 
 and I were hopeful of the results. From both univer- 
 sities, however, I received only pleasant acknowledge- 
 ments of the work I had sent in support of my appli- 
 cations, an invitation to pursue my graduate studies 
 and regrets that neither a fellowship nor a scholarship 
 were available. This was a hard blow. It was obvious 
 that I could not go on living on my father's kindness. 
 On the contrary, I was passionately anxious to help 
 him and my mother to free themselves from the bonds 
 of their Queenshaven life. I did not speak of this, for 
 I did not want to render their consciousness of it more 
 acute. But it weighed on me heavily. I thought and 
 thought and came to a resolve which many American 
 youths take lightly enough, but which cost me infinite 
 hesitation and pain : I would borrow money. The notion 
 of working my way through the graduate course never 
 occurred to me. For I was not concerned with text- 
 books or, primarily, with degrees, but with a life to be 
 lived, an absorption and dedication to be accomplished. 
 And this never presented itself to my mind as possible 
 upon any terms but those of a complete release from 
 sordid preoccupations. 
 
 [101] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 Unhappily for me the wealthy Jewish physician of 
 my Methodist days had recently died. Had he been 
 alive my way would have been easier. I felt close to 
 him and he was kind and generous. As it was, I had 
 to go to other prominent citizens and alumni of the 
 college. These men had all liked me and made much 
 of me for years ; I felt quite at home with them in all 
 essential matters and yet it was a terrible struggle. I 
 put off my errand from day to day; I went to the door 
 of some office and hadn't the courage to enter. A sen- 
 sation of physical nausea and of burning shame over 
 whelmed me. ... I have never been able to feel dif- 
 ferently. If I must ask for something, however clear 
 my right to make the demand or the request, the old, 
 sickening misery comes over me and I am helpless, 
 stupid, stammering, absurd. For the sake of others 
 I have had to ask things since then. For myself I 
 would never have the strength to face that sense of 
 spiritual nakedness and abasement. Perhaps it is from 
 this native feeling that there has grown my passion for 
 justice. The more just we are to our fellowmen, the 
 less need we wound and degrade them with our 
 wretched mercy. True justice — I do not mean the 
 tribal terrors or capitalistic voracities of our legal and 
 moral codes — true justice need not be tempered by 
 mercy. It excludes the necessity for mercy. You do 
 not need to be merciful until you have ceased to be 
 just. . .! 
 
 The Queenshaven gentlemen, it is but fair to add, 
 
 made my dreadful task comparatively easy. Several 
 
 of them met to discuss the matter and made up for me 
 
 a loan of three hundred and fifty dollars. I had really 
 
 wanted six hundred to see me through the year at 
 
 [102] 
 
THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 Columbia, since the tuition alone was a hundred and 
 fifty. But wild horses, in the vivid old phrase, could 
 have dragged no further begging from my lips. I 
 thanked them with what grace I could master and 
 proceeded to get ready for my great adventure. 
 
 Let any one who has an unclouded vision of our 
 American life, and not least of the academic part of 
 it, consider my undertaking. How often since have I 
 reflected on it, sometimes in a mood of bitterness, 
 sometimes in one of irony. I had lived utterly for the 
 things of the mind and the emotions. I was twenty 
 years old and knew less of practical matters than many 
 a child of ten. I had no social adroitness but the most 
 quivering sensitiveness and pride. I was passionately 
 Anglo-American in all my sympathies, I wanted above 
 all things to be a poet in the English tongue, and my 
 name and physiognomy were characteristically Jewish. 
 I had ill-cut, provincial clothes and just money enough 
 to get through one semester. Such was my inner and 
 outer equipment for pursuing in a metropolitan grad- 
 uate school the course which was to lead to a college 
 appointment to teach English. No one warned me, no 
 one discouraged me. It seems incredible that Ferris 
 had no inkling of the quality of my undertaking. But 
 he, too, kept silent. So I faced the future with a steady 
 hopefulness. Only when I sought to grasp what sepa- 
 ration from my mother would mean to her and me did 
 my heart sink. We tried to comfort each other, she 
 and I, by dwelling upon the certainty of a successful 
 career for myself. But during the last days we gave 
 up these feeble and hollow efforts and fell quite silent 
 before our unavertible fate. 
 
 [103] 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 The American Discovers Exile. 
 
 i. 
 
 In those days the steamers from the South landed 
 at piers on the North River. I was too deeply pre- 
 occupied with that first, tremendous, lonely plunge into 
 the world to watch the harbor or the sky-line of New 
 York. I stood on deck, grasping my valise tightly, 
 holding my hat. The sharp wind was full of scurries 
 of rain. It was almost dark when we passengers 
 trickled across the plank into the appalling mud of 
 the streets. The lower West side is, I still think, the 
 dismallest port of the city. On that day, coming from 
 the bland and familiar South and from a life that 
 touched reality so feebly, it seemed brutal, ferocious, 
 stark. . . . An indifferent acquaintance met me and 
 hustled me to the nearest station of the Ninth Avenue 
 "L." We climbed the iron staircase, scrambled for 
 tickets and were jammed into a car. It was the evening 
 rush hour and we had barely standing room. The 
 train rattled on its way to Harlem. At One Hundred 
 and Sixteenth Street we slid down in the elevator to 
 the street, frantically dodged people and vehicles 
 across Eighth Avenue, turned south and west and 
 stood presently before one of a row of three story 
 
 [104] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 houses wedged in between huge, dark buildings. My 
 guide introduced me to the boarding-house keeper, a 
 hard-featured, heavily rouged woman who seemed in 
 pain and in a hurry. They led me to a hall bedroom 
 on the third floor, lit a whirring gas-jet and, in another 
 minute, were gone. I put down my valise and took off 
 my overcoat and stood still, quite still, between the 
 bed-room and the chiffonier. I could touch one with 
 either hand. I was in New York. I was alone. 
 
 At such moments one's intentions to conquer the 
 world avail little. Especially if one is twenty. I heard 
 the far away roar of New York like the roar of a sin- 
 ister and soulless machine that drags men in and 
 crunches them between its implacable wheels. It 
 seemed to me that I would never be able to face it. I 
 huddled in that small, cold room in an old traveling 
 robe of my ; father's and bit my lips. But I had the 
 manhood not to write home in that mood. Indeed my 
 old stoicism had not deserted me and my parents never 
 learned of the grinding misery of my first weeks in 
 New York. 
 
 In the morning the October sun shone. At breakfast 
 the landlady seemed not nearly so menacing. I may 
 add at once that she was an intelligent and courageous 
 woman who had suffered much and undeservedly 
 and that we became great friends. She gave me on 
 that first day what simple directions I needed. I left 
 the house, walked to the corner and turned my face 
 toward the west. Morningside Heights with its many 
 poplars rose sheer against a sparkling autumn sky. 
 The beauty of it seemed much colder to me that day 
 than it does now. But it was beauty — something to 
 dwell with, to calm and to console the mind. I took 
 
 [105] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 heart at once and climbed the heights and presently 
 came npon the approach to the University library. 
 The river shone still farther to the west, with the 
 russet palisades beyond. But I hastened across the 
 quadrangle, eager for some human contact in this new 
 world full of cold power and forbidding brilliance. 
 
 Professor Brent of the department of English, with 
 whom I had had some correspondence, received me 
 with a winning kindliness. We had a talk the other 
 day and I observed him and remembered the old days. 
 He has grown grayer. Otherwise he is the same — the 
 lank, unathletic but not graceless form, the oblong head 
 lengthened by a pointed beard, the pleasant, humorous 
 but powerful glance, the easy pose, tilted back in his 
 chair, the eternal cigarette between his long, bony, 
 sensitive fingers. A scholarly and poetic figure, 
 languid enough, but capable of a steady tenacity at the 
 urge of some noble passion of the mind. That he was 
 a trenchant and intrepid thinker I always knew. How 
 magnificently he would stand the ultimate intellectual 
 test of this, or perhaps, any age, I was to learn much 
 later. . . . He introduced me to Brewer, secretary of 
 the department, a pale, hesitant, chill-eyed New Eng- 
 lander with a thin strain of rhetorical skill and literary 
 taste. 
 
 German was to be my second "minor", largely be- 
 cause it would be easy and would give me more time 
 for my English studies. And so I went to present 
 myself to Professor Richard who had also written 
 me a pleasant letter. I found him tall, erect, frugal 
 and incisive of speech, a spirit of great rectitude, of a 
 purity almost too intense to grasp the concrete forces 
 and passions of the fevered world; clear, high-souled, 
 
 [106] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 a little passionless, but all that without effort or prig- 
 ishness. His intellectual and artistic sympathies were, 
 of course, limited. But within its limits his was an 
 admirable and a manly mind. 
 
 The qualities of Brent and Richard did not, of 
 course, reveal themselves to me at once. Nor, indeed, 
 for long thereafter and then in private interviews and 
 at club-meetings. The lectures of these excellent pro- 
 fessors were dull and dispiriting to me. I found in 
 them no living sustenance of any sort. For years I 
 sought to grasp the reasons for this fact. I do not 
 think I grasped them wholly until I myself began to 
 lecture to graduate students and to have such students 
 in my own seminar. I came to the university with the 
 reading I have described. I knew all the books that 
 one was required to know in the various lecture 
 courses. What I wanted was ideas, interpretative, 
 critical, aesthetic, philosophical, with which to vivify, 
 to organize, to deepen my knowledge, on which to nour- 
 ish and develop my intellectual self. And my friends, 
 the professors, ladled out information. Poor men, how 
 could they help it? I thought in those days that all 
 graduate students knew what I and a small group of 
 my friends knew. I am aware now of the literally in- 
 credible ignorance of the average bachelors of our 
 colleges. ... I cannot, of course, absolve the profes- 
 sors entirely, though only the rigorous veracity that 
 gives its meaning to this narrative can force me to 
 admit even so much of friends who have stood by me 
 so long and so wholeheartedly as Brent and Richard. 
 They did not give themselves enough, nor freely 
 enough. They did not realize that, the elementary 
 tools of knowledge once gained, there is but one thing 
 
 [107] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 that can teach men and that is the play of a large and 
 an incisive personality. In a word, I was an ardent 
 disciple and I found no master. So I drifted and occa- 
 sionally "cut" lectures and wrote my reports and 
 passed creditable examinations without doing a page 
 of the required reading. I had done it all ! I read for 
 myself in entirely new directions — books that changed 
 the whole tenor of my inner life — and struggled to 
 make a living and wrote verses and walked and talked 
 and sat in bar-rooms and cheap eating-houses with my 
 friend Ellard — my friend of friends, whom I found 
 at this time and who is still animae dimidium meae. 
 
 n. 
 
 It was a grey, windy November forenoon that we 
 first talked on the steps of Fayerwether Hall. He was 
 tall and lank and thin to emaciation. An almost 
 ragged overcoat fluttered behind him, a shapeless, dis- 
 colored hat tilted a little on his head. His delicate 
 nostrils seemed always about to quiver, his lips to be 
 set in a half-petulant, half-scornful determination. 
 From under the hat shone two of the most eloquent 
 eyes — fiery and penetrating, gloomy and full of 
 laughter in turn — that were ever set in a human head. 
 He spoke with large, loose, expressive gestures and 
 with a strange, abrupt way of ending his sentences. 
 I felt drawn to him at once. Freedom and nobility 
 seemed to clothe him and a stoic wildness. A young 
 eagle with plumage ruffled by the storm. . . . ! I 
 asked him, I don't know why, whether he wrote verse. 
 And when he said that he did I knew instinctively that 
 his verses were better than mine, far better, and curi- 
 
 [108] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 ously enough I was not sorry but glad and, in a way, 
 elated. I cannot tell at this distance of time how rap- 
 idly our friendship ripened, but I know that we soon 
 saw a great deal of each other. 
 
 He lived in a small, crowded room up four flights of 
 stairs. A large kerosene lamp stood on his study 
 table. A sharp, triangular shadow lay steadily across 
 bed and wall. He was tormented by poverty and love 
 and by the intellectual bleakness that was all about us. 
 For two years he had been at Bonn and though by 
 blood a New England Brahmin of the purest strain, 
 the sunny comradeship and spiritual freedom of the 
 Ehineland city had entered into his very being. I see 
 him standing there in the blue cloud of our cigarette- 
 smoke chanting me his verses. I had never met a poet 
 before and poetry meant everything to me in those 
 days. A lovely or a noble line, a sonorous or a troub- 
 ling turn of rhythm could enchant me for days. So 
 that I was wholly carried away by my friend and his 
 poems. And we both felt ourselves to be in some sort 
 exiles and wandered the streets as the fall deepened 
 into winter, engaged in infinite talk. We watched as 
 evening came the bursting of the fiery blooms of light 
 over the city and again, late at night, met in some eat- 
 ing house or bar-room on Amsterdam Avenue where 
 the belated, frozen car men watched us with heavy curi- 
 osity. We found ourselves then, as we have found 
 ourselves ever since, in complete harmony as to the 
 deeper things in life. That that harmony has become, 
 if anything, more entire during the past seven crucial 
 years of the world's history, I account as one of the 
 few sustaining factors in my life and to it I attach, not 
 foolishly I think, an almost mystical significance. . . . 
 
 [109] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 I have been re-reading his poetry. I can detach it 
 quite coldly now from the romance of our early com- 
 madeship, from the comforts of our maturer friend- 
 ship. Nor am I as easily stirred as I was once. It is 
 inferior to no poetry that has been written on this 
 continent. At its best it is at least equal to the noblest 
 passages of Emerson and it is far less fragmentary, 
 far more sustained upon an extraordinary level of in- 
 tellectual incisiveness, moral freedom and untradi- 
 tional beauty. And there are many lines and passages 
 that in their imagination and passion and wisdom 
 cleave so deeply to the tragic core of life that they 
 might bring tears to the eyes of grave and disillusioned 
 men. . . . What has it availed him? His volumes 
 scarcely sell; the manuscript of his third one is being 
 hawked about from publisher to publisher. His verse 
 is handicapped by its intellectual severity and its dis- 
 dain of fashion — the poetic fashion of either yesterday 
 or to-day. But it has the accent of greatness and that 
 is bound to tell in the long run. 
 
 Other friendships there were for me at the univer- 
 sity, pleasant enough at that time, but all impermanent 
 save one more. I still count George Fredericks, sober- 
 minded, virile, generous, among my chosen comrades. 
 And I still think, with much kindness, of G-. now a col- 
 lege professor in the East, a fine, pure spirit, a New 
 Englander like Ellard, but unlike him striving quite in 
 vain to transcend the moral and intellectual parochial- 
 ism of his section and his blood. But, indeed, I sought 
 no companionship, taking only such as came my way. 
 For mean anxieties soon beset me as my slender bor- 
 rowings came to an end and I tramped the streets in 
 search of tutoring. A crowd of queer and colorful and 
 
 [110] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 comic scenes — sorrowful and humiliating enough at 
 that time — floats into my mind. In a gorgeous palace 
 near Central Park the footman eyed me contemptu- 
 ously and an elderly woman tried to hire me to con- 
 duct her evidently rowdy boys to and from school. I 
 refused curtly to do a nurse-maid's work. But walking 
 across the rich carpet to the door I heard my torn 
 shoes make a squdgy sound and almost repented. In 
 another elaborate establishment I gave, in a very 
 ready-made Louis XV room a single lesson to the 
 young daughter of the house. Next day a note came 
 dispensing with my services. I wasn't surprised. The 
 girl was pretty and I was hungry for charm and love 
 and she had evidently not disliked me. ... At last I 
 got a couple of boys to tutor (one a deaf-mute) and 
 lessons in scientific German to give to the staff of one 
 of the city institutions. Two evenings a week I was 
 ferried across Hell's Gate in the icy wind to give this 
 instruction. It was a bleak and tiresome business, but 
 it payed room and board and tobacco and an occa- 
 sional glass of beer. 
 
 Meanwhile I read the nights away. Fascinating 
 hints had come to me in Queenshaven, despite my 
 whole-souled absorption in English literature, of cer- 
 tain modern German plays and poems and novels 
 which seemed, by all reports, to differ wonderfully 
 from both Schiller and Heine, the two German poets 
 whom I knew best, and also from such popular mid- 
 century writers as Scheffel and Heyse. But very few 
 German books ever made their way to Queenshaven. 
 
 [Ill] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 Here, in the University library, I found them all and I 
 read them all. 
 
 I read them with joy, with a sense of liberation, 
 with a feeling that no other books in the world had 
 ever given me. I struggled against that feeling; I 
 seemed to myself almost disloyal to the modern Eng- 
 lish masters, to the very speech that I loved and which 
 I hoped to write notably some day. But a conviction 
 came upon me after some months with irresistible 
 force. All or nearly all English books since Fielding 
 were literature. This was life. All or nearly all the 
 English literature by which our generation lives is, 
 in substance, rigidly bounded within certain intellec- 
 tual and ethical categories. This was freedom. I now 
 understood my old, instinctive love for the prosemen 
 of the eighteenth century. They had the sense for life 
 — a life remote from ours, to be sure — but their sense 
 of it was manly and incorruptible. In Wordsworth 
 and in Tennyson I found substantially the same ele- 
 vated sentiments. Except in the narrow field of the 
 religious emotions, they and their contemporaries had 
 no sense for reality at all, only for pseudo-nobility. 
 And in English fiction, in 1904, all the people really 
 held the same elevated sentiments, sentiments which 
 were mostly false and unnecessary, and of course 
 couldn't and didn't live up to them. They were all 
 like poor Byron who half believed that one ought to 
 be a Christian and a church-going householder and 
 who was romantically desperate over his own wicked 
 nature. Or they were like the slim, pale-eyed son of 
 my old Sunday school superintendent. The lad had 
 an excellent tenor voice and joined a small opera com- 
 pany. On one of his visits home he said to me with a 
 
 [112] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 troubled look in his eyes: "I don't see why I should 
 be this way. My father's such a good man." ... Of 
 course I'm stating the case crassly and unjustly as one 
 always does and must for the sake of emphasis. And, 
 of course, I shall be held, whatever I say, to be approv- 
 ing a drifting with the passions of human life — like 
 that of Burns — instead of an understanding and use 
 and mastery of them. But it will not be denied by any 
 really honest and penetrating thinker that English 
 literature from Fielding until quite recently was curi- 
 ously remote from life, curiously helpless and unhelp- 
 ful and yet arrogant in the face of it. Such books as 
 Moore's Esther Waters, which I hadn't read, and 
 Wells' The Passionate Friends, which hadn't yet been 
 written, have introduced into English letters an en- 
 tirely new element of spiritual veracity and moral 
 freedom. And these were the qualities which I found 
 so pervasively and overwhelmingly present (yet with 
 no lack of beauty and music in structure and style) 
 in modern German literature. If in these books there 
 was a noble sentiment it was there because it had 
 grown inevitably from the sweat and tears, the yearn- 
 ing and the aspiration of our mortal fate — it was never 
 set down because it was a correct sentiment to which 
 human nature must be made to conform. I understood 
 very fully now the saying of that character in one of 
 Henry James' stories: "When I read a novel, it's 
 usually a French one. You get so much more life for 
 your money." I read French books, too. But compared 
 to the German ones they seemed, as they are, rather 
 hard and monotonous and lacking in spiritual delicacy. 
 . . . Someone gave me a copy of Hans Benzmann's an- 
 thology of the modern German lyric. I found there an 
 
 [113] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 immediate rendering of life into art, not mere isolated 
 elements of it selected according to a tradition of 
 pseudo-nobility and then fixed in the forms of post- 
 Renaissance culture. The pangs and aspirations of 
 my own heart — and of all hearts, if men would but be 
 honest among us — were here, the haunting echoes of 
 my inner life, the deep things, the true things of which 
 I had been ashamed and which I had tried to transmute 
 into the correct sentiments of my Anglo-American en- 
 vironment — I found them all in the lyrical charm of 
 these poets, in their music, which is the very music of 
 the mind, in their words, which are the very words of 
 life. They spoke my thoughts, they felt my conflicts ; 
 they dared to be themselves — these modern men and 
 women who were impassioned and troubled like myself, 
 who had not snared the universe in barren furmulae, 
 but who were seekers and strivers ! They didn't know 
 the whole duty of man ; they didn't try to huddle out of 
 sight the eternal things that make us what we are ; they 
 hadn't reduced the moral and spiritual life of the race 
 to a series of gestures of more that Egyptian rigidity. 
 They made me free ; they set me on the road of trying 
 to be not what was thought correct without reference 
 to reality, but what I was naturally meant to be. They 
 taught me, not directly, but by the luminous implica- 
 tions of their works, the complete spiritual unveracity 
 in which I had been living and in which most of my 
 Anglo-American friends seemed to be living. . . . 
 This whole process was, of course, very gradual on its 
 practical or outer side. Within me, too, the old ready- 
 made formulae would often arise to inhibit or torment 
 me. And from this conflict and turbidness of feeling 
 and vision there sprang some grave errors of action. 
 
 [114] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 But that was because my freedom was not yet a 
 rational freedom, nor one corrected by a power of 
 rational experience. My youth had been passed amid 
 so much falseness that my mastery of fact was quite 
 inadequate for the practice of a real moral freedom. 
 I had no way at all of seeing things as they really are, 
 no power of measuring the origin and direction of the 
 forces that rule men and the world. I was like some- 
 one to whom is offered the freedom of a great library, 
 but who had been deliberately mistaught the meaning 
 of the symbols in which the books are written. I knew 
 that it was my duty now to read for myself. I didn't 
 know how to read. I am struggling to express a diffi- 
 cult and momentous truth : The young creators of new 
 values come to grief so often not because their values 
 are wrong, nor because their rebellion is not of the very 
 breath of the world's better life. They come to grief 
 because they have no mastery of fact, because they 
 carry with them the false old interpretations and con- 
 ventional idealizations of man, and nature, and human 
 life. . . . Nevertheless the world now opened itself to 
 me in a new guise. I had been accustomed, as I had 
 been taught, to approve and to disapprove. Now for 
 the first time I watched life honestly and lost myself 
 in it and became part of it with my soul and my sympa- 
 thies, detached only in the citadel of the analytic and 
 recording, never more of the judging mind. I became 
 aware of faces — the faces of people on the streets, in 
 the cars, in the subway. And I no longer thought of 
 people as good and bad or desirable or undesirable, 
 but I saw in all faces the struggle and the passion and 
 the sorrow, sometimes ugly, unheroic enough always 
 
 [115] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 by the old, foolish tests, but full of endless fascina- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 To a modern Continental, French or German or 
 Italian, this whole matter will seem primitive and 
 absurd. He may be sure that I am touching on the 
 central weakness of the Anglo-American mind — its 
 moral illusionism. That mind is generally quite 
 sincere. It really arranges its own impulses and the 
 impulses of other men in a rigid hierarchy of fixed 
 norms. It has surrendered the right and the power 
 of examining the contents of such concepts as " right,' 9 
 "wrong," "pure," "democracy," "liberty," "prog- 
 ress," or of bringing these conventionalized gestures 
 of the mind to the test of experience. It has not, in- 
 deed, ever naively experienced anything. For it holds 
 the examination of an experience in itself, and with- 
 out reference to an anterior and quite rigid norm to be 
 a "sin." It hides the edges of the sea of life with a 
 board-walk of ethical concepts and sits there, hoping 
 that no one will hear the thunder of the surf of human 
 passions on thei rocks below. . . . 
 
 IV 
 
 A face, a voice, a gesture that seemed strange and 
 unheard of arose before me and I was stricken by a 
 blind and morbid passion. All the repressions of my 
 tormented adolescence, all the false inhibitions in 
 thought and deed now went toward the nourishing of 
 this hectic bloom. It was winter. A white and silent 
 winter. Playing with curious fancies we called our 
 passion roses in the snow. I committed every extrava- 
 gance and every folly. I knew nothing of life, nothing 
 
 [116] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 of human nature. I knew ethical formulae which, obvi- 
 ously, didn't apply — that were, at best, vicious half- 
 truths. Thus all the defences of my soul broke down. 
 I had never been taught a sane self-direction. The 
 repetition of tribal charms which were quite external 
 had been deemed a sufficient safeguard. Happily, 
 though my passion was morbid enough and caused me 
 untold suffering, it was blended with the love of letters 
 and with a keen though unwholesome romance. There 
 was nothing in it of baseness, nothing of degradation. 
 I am not proud of it but I am not ashamed of it. I 
 look back upon it and it blends, in strange tones, into 
 the inevitable music of life — neither good nor evil, 
 neither right nor wrong. We are both married now 
 and meet in pleasant friendship and remember half- 
 humorously that long ago — so long ago, it seems a 
 fairy-tale — we caused each other delights and pangs 
 and tears. . . . 
 
 But if I had a son I should say to him: "Dismiss 
 from your mind all the cant you hear on the subject of 
 sex. The passion of love is the central passion of 
 human life. It should be humanized; it should be 
 made beautiful. It should never be debased by a sense 
 that it is in itself sinful, for that is to make the whole 
 of life sinful and to corrupt our human experience at 
 its very source. Love is not to be condemned and so 
 degraded, but to be exercised and mastered. If you 
 are of a cool temper and continence leaves your mind 
 serene and your imagination unbesmirched, very well. 
 But let not your soul, if it is ardent, become contami- 
 nated and disordered by false shames and a false 
 sense of sin. Love in itself is the source of loveliness 
 and wisdom if it is gratified without falsehood and 
 
 [117] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 without abandoning the sterner elements of life. Nat- 
 ural things are made sinful only by a mistaken notion 
 that they are so. Account love, then, as inevitable and 
 lovely, but remain master of your soul and of your- 
 self and of the larger purposes which you were born 
 to fulfill." 
 
 To me, as to every American youth, it had been 
 said: " Passion, except within marriage, is the most 
 degrading of sins. Within marriage it is forgiven but 
 never mentioned as being, even there, unmentionable. 
 This is the law." Meantime all the men and youths 
 I knew slunk into the dark alleys of Queenshaven 
 whither I did not follow them. And curiously, in that 
 very act, they still believed the follies they proclaimed. 
 They were simply moral men sinning against their 
 own convictions. That astonishing ethical dualism of 
 the English mind — (so truly and so moderately set 
 forth by George Gissing in the memorable twentieth 
 chapter of the third book of The Private Papers of 
 Henry Ryecroft) — that ethical duality of conscience I 
 hold the chief and most corrupting danger of our life 
 as a people. It must be fought without ceasing and 
 without mercy. . . . 
 
 Of that duality there was nothing in my being. I 
 was bound or I was free. But having been a slave so 
 long I ran amuck in my freedom and in the recoil came 
 almost to utter grief. I was saved and made steadfast 
 only by the thought of those two watchers in the 
 distant South. However absorbed in that most pas- 
 sionate adventure, I never missed an opportunity of 
 going home at Christmas or even at Easter — planned 
 for it, saved for it, and always my mother's hand in 
 mine and her eyes upon me made me well again. 
 
 [118] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 Also I could now conquer many moods and free my- 
 self from them by fixing them in art. My verse was no 
 longer the echo of a sonorous tradition. It grew no 
 longer out of the love of poetry but out of the pain of 
 life. And from my modern Germans as well as from 
 a new and powerful movement in our English verse I 
 learned to write directly and truly. Somehow* in 
 Queenshaven, I had missed a poem which is not, of 
 course, the greatest, but assuredly the most important 
 English poem of the third quarter of the nineteenth 
 century: Meredith's Modern Love. The application 
 of English poetic art to the actual, the contemporary 
 and the real had there been inaugurated. In addition 
 I now read Henley and Housman's A Shropshire Lad 
 and The Love Sonnets of Proteus and, above all, I 
 found the two-volume edition of the poems of Arthur 
 Symons. Granting the hostile critic his monotony of 
 mood (but is not Shelley's mood quite as monotonous 
 in a different spiritual key?), and his morbidness 
 (though what is morbidness, after all?) and there re- 
 mains in his work the creation of a new style, a new 
 method, a new power. The conventional taste of his 
 generation still lags behind his method, but in it is one 
 of the essential forces of the future of English poetry. 
 
 The various experiences which I have set down so 
 briefly extended over two years. At the end of the first 
 year I duly took my master's degree and applied for 
 a fellowship. Among the group of students to which I 
 belonged it was taken for granted that, since Ellard 
 had completed his studies for the doctorate, I would 
 
 [119] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 undoubtedly be chosen. I record this, heaven knows, 
 not from motives of vanity but as part of the subtler 
 purpose of this story. The faculty elected my friend 
 G. I went, with a heavy heart, to interview Professor 
 Brewer, not to push my claims to anything, but be- 
 cause I was at my wits' end. I dreaded another year 
 of tutoring and of living wretchedly from hand to 
 mouth, without proper clothes, without books. Brewer 
 leaned back in his chair, pipe in hand, with a cool and 
 kindly smile. "It seemed to us," he stuttered, "that 
 the university hadn't had its full influence on you." 
 He suggested their disappointment in me and, by the 
 subtlest of stresses, their sorrow over this disappoint- 
 ment. I said that I had been struggling for a liveli- 
 hood and that, nevertheless, my examinations had uni- 
 formly received high grades and my papers, quite as 
 uniformly, the public approval of Brent and himself. 
 Hje avoided a direct answer by explaining that the de- 
 partment had recommended me for a scholarship for 
 the following year. The truth is, I think, that Brewer, 
 excessively mediocre as he was, had a very keen tribal 
 instinct of the self -protective sort and felt in me — what 
 I was hardly yet consciously — the implacable foe of the 
 New England dominance over our national life. I 
 wasn't unaware of his hostility, but I had no way of 
 provoking a franker explanation. 
 
 I forgot my troubles in three beautiful months at 
 home — three months seemed so long then — or, rather, 
 1 crowded these troubles from my field of conscious- 
 ness. I wouldn't even permit the fact that I wasn't 
 elected to a scholarship to depress me. Brewer wrote* 
 a letter of regret and encouragement that was very 
 kindly in tone. The pleasant implication of that letter 
 
 [120] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 Was, of course, a spiritual falsehood of the crassest. 
 He knew then precisely what he knew and finally told 
 me ten months later. But his kind has a dread of the 
 bleak weather of the world of truth, and approaches it 
 gingerly, gradually, with a mincing gait. He, poor 
 man, was probably unconscious of all that. In him, as 
 in all like him, the corruption of the mental life is such 
 that the boundaries between the true and the false are 
 wholly obliterated. 
 
 In, the passionate crises of the second year I often 
 walked as in a dream. And I was encouraged by the 
 fact that the department arranged a loan for my 
 tuition. In truth, I was deeply touched by so unusual 
 a kindness and I feel sure that the suggestion came 
 from Brent. If so, Brewer again did me a fatal injury 
 by not preventing that kindness. For he had then, I 
 must emphasize, the knowledge he communicated to me 
 later — the knowledge that held the grim upshot of my 
 university career. 
 
 Spring came and with it the scramble for jobs 
 among the second year men. My friends were called 
 in to conferences with Brewer; I was not. They dis- 
 cussed vacancies, chances here and there. It wasn't 
 the chagrin that hurt so ; it wasn't any fear for myself. 
 After all I was only twenty-two and I was careless of 
 material things. I thought of my father and my 
 mother in the cruel sunshine of Queenshaven. Their 
 hope and dream and consolation were at stake. I 
 could see them, not only by day, but in the evening, 
 beside their solitary lamps, looking up from their 
 quiet books, thinking of me and of the future. ... I 
 remembered how my father had believed in certain 
 implications of American democracy. I remembered 
 
 [121] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 ... I was but a lad, after all. I couldn't face Brew- 
 er's cool and careless smile. I wrote him a letter — a 
 letter which, in its very earnestness and passionate 
 Veracity must have struck like a discord upon the care- 
 ful arrangements of his safe and proper nature. For 
 in it I spoke of grave things gravely, not jestingly, 
 as one should to be a New England gentleman: I 
 spoke of need and aspiration and justice. His answer 
 lies before me now and I copy that astonishingly 
 smooth and chilly document verbatim: "It is very sen- 
 sible of you to look so carefully into your plans at this 
 juncture, because I do not at all believe in the wisdom 
 of your scheme. A recent experience has shown me how 
 terribly hard it is for a man of Jewish birth to get a 
 good position. I had always suspected that it was a 
 matter worth considering, but I had not known how 
 wide-spread and strong it was. While we shall be glad 
 to do anything we can for you, therefore, I cannot 
 help feeling that the chances are going to be greatly 
 against you. ' ' 
 
 I sat in my boarding-house room playing with this 
 letter. I seemed to have no feeling at all for the mo- 
 ment. By the light of a sunbeam that fell in I saw 
 that the picture of my parents on the mantelpiece was 
 very dusty. I got up and wiped the dust off carefully. 
 Gradually an eerie, lost feeling came over me. I took 
 my hat and walked out and up Amsterdam Avenue, 
 farther and farther to High Bridge and stood on the 
 bridge and watched the swift, tiny tandems on the 
 Speedway below and the skiffs gliding up and down 
 the Harlem River. A numbness held my soul and 
 mutely I watched life, like a dream pageant, float by 
 me. ... I ate nothing till evening when I went into 
 
 [122] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 a bakery and, catching sight of myself in a mirror, 
 noted with dull objectivity my dark hair, my melan- 
 choly eyes, my unmistakably Semitic nose. . . . An 
 outcast. ... A sentence arose in my mind which I 
 have remembered and used ever since. So long as 
 there is discrimination, there is exile. And for the 
 first time in my life my heart turned with grief and 
 remorse to the thought of my brethren in exile all 
 over the world. . . . 
 
 yi 
 
 The subconscious self has a tough instinct of self- 
 preservation. It thrusts from the field of vision, as 
 Freud has shown, the painful and the hostile things of 
 life. Thus I had forgotten, except at moments of 
 searching reflection, the social fate of my father and 
 mother, my failure to be elected to the fraternity at 
 college, and other subtler hints and warnings. I had 
 believed the assertion and made it myself that equality 
 of opportunity was implicit in the very spiritual foun- 
 dations of the Republic. This is what I wanted to be- 
 lieve, what I needed to believe in order to go about the 
 business of my life at all. I had listened with a correct 
 American scorn to stories of how some distant kinsman 
 in Germany, many years ago, had had to receive Chris- 
 tian baptism in order to enter the consular service of 
 his country. At one blow now all these delusions were 
 swept away and the facts stood out in the sharp light 
 of my dismay. Discrimination there was everywhere. 
 But a definite and public discrimination is, at least, 
 an enemy in the open. In pre-war Germany, for in- 
 stance, no Jew could be prevented from entering the 
 academic profession. Unless he was very brilliant and 
 
 [123] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 productive his promotion was less rapid than that of 
 his Gentile colleagues. He knew that and reckoned 
 with it. He knew, too, for instance, that he could not 
 become senior professor of German at Berlin (only 
 associate professor like the late R. M. Meyer), nor 
 Kultusminister, but he could become a full professor 
 of Latin or philosophy, and, of course, of all the 
 sciences. I am not defending these restrictions and I 
 think the argument for them — that the German state 
 was based upon an ethnic homogeneity which corre- 
 sponds to a spiritual oneness — quite specious. I am 
 contrasting these conditions with our own. We boast 
 our equality and freedom and call it Americanism and 
 speak of other countries with disdain. And so one is 
 unwarned, encouraged and flung into the street. With 
 exquisite courtesy, I admit. And the consciousness of 
 that personal courtesy soothes the minds of our Gen- 
 tile friends. ... It will be replied that there are a 
 number of Jewish scholars in American colleges and 
 universities. There are. The older men got in because 
 nativistic anti-Semitism was not nearly as strong 
 twenty-five years ago as it is to-day. Faint remnants 
 of the ideals of the early Republic still lingered in 
 American life. But in regard to the younger men I 
 dare to assert that in each case they were appointed 
 through personal friendship, family or financial pres- 
 tige or some other abnormal relenting of the iron 
 prejudice which is the rule. But that prejudice has 
 not, to my knowledge, relented in a single instance in 
 regard to the teaching of English. So that our guard- 
 ianship of the native tongue is far fiercer than it is in 
 an, after all, racially homogeneous state like Germany. 
 Presidents, deans and departmental heads deny this 
 
 [124] 
 
THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 
 
 fact or gloss it over in public. 'Among themselves it 
 is admitted as a matter of course. 
 
 I have not touched the deeper and finer issues, 
 though I have written in vain if they are not clear. 
 My purest energy and passion, my best human aspira- 
 tions had been dedicated from my earliest years to a 
 given end. It was far more than a question of bread 
 and butter, though it was that too. I didn't know how 
 to go on living a reasonable and reasonably harmon- 
 ious inner life. I could take no refuge in the spirit and 
 traditions of my own people. I knew little of them. 
 My psychical life was Aryan through and through. 
 Slowly, in the course of the years, I have discovered 
 traits in me which I sometimes call Jewish. But that 
 interpretation is open to grave doubt. I can, in reality, 
 find no difference between my own inner life of 
 thought and impulse and that of my very close friends 
 whether American or German. So that the picture of 
 a young man disappointed because he can't get the 
 kind of a job he wants, doesn't exhaust, barely indeed 
 touches the dilemma. I didn't know what to with my 
 life or with myself. 
 
 In this matter of freedom and equality and demo- 
 cratic justice, then, I found in my Anglo-American 
 world precisely that same strange dualism of con- 
 science which I had discovered there in the life of sex. 
 The Brewers in the academic world do truly believe 
 that our society is free and democratic. "When they 
 proclaim that belief at public banquets a genuine emo- 
 tion fills their hearts. Just as a genuine emotion filled 
 the hearts of my Southern friends (who used Mulatto 
 harlots) when in the interest of purity and the home 
 
 [125] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 they refused to sanction the enactment of any divorce 
 law in their native state. 
 
 I do not wish to speak bitterly or flippantly. I am 
 approaching the analysis of thoughts and events be- 
 side which my personal fate is less than nothing. And 
 I need but think of my Queenshaven youth or of some 
 passage of Milton or Arnold, or of those tried friend- 
 ships that are so large a part of the unalterable good 
 of life, or of the bright hair and gray English eyes of 
 my own wife to know that I can never speak as an 
 enemy of the Anglo-Saxon race. But unless that race 
 abandons its duality of conscience, unless it learns to 
 honor and practice a stricter spiritual veracity, it will 
 either destroy civilization through disasters yet un- 
 heard of or sink into a memory and into the shadow 
 of a name. 
 
 [126] 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 The American Finds Refuge 
 
 In my confusion of mind I didn't revise my dis- 
 sertation and left the university without my doctor's 
 degree. Brent was angry at this and I remember a 
 scene in his study. He strode up and down and re- 
 buked me with a sternness that showed his friendship 
 toward me. I sat huddled in a chair. I couldn't bear 
 to tell him what was going on within me. Whether he 
 guessed it or not, he made every effort to find me some 
 suitable employment. I suspect that he actually walked 
 the glaring streets that early summer from office to 
 office. He got me a sub-editorship on one of those huge 
 compilation sets which people seem to buy — queer 
 kinds of people that one never meets — and, one hopes, 
 read with profit. And this employment led, in the 
 course of a few months, to a position on the editorial 
 staff of Singleton, Leaf and Company. 
 
 In the meantime I went home, joylessly for the first 
 time. The glaring fact couldn't be hidden. I had no 
 academic position, however humble. Here, too, the 
 evil unveracity of early influences crippled my soul. 
 It was generally agreed that there was no Anti-Sem- 
 itism in America. It had been held un-American to 
 
 [127] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 assert that there was. ... So I even permitted my 
 father to suspect that I had, perhaps, neglected my 
 studies. I said that I preferred the career of letters. 
 "But this is hack-work," he retorted. "It's a be- 
 ginning," I declared lamely, "I'm only twenty- two." 
 My mother felt that a shadow lay subtly between us. 
 It seemed to me — foolishly, I know now — that I could 
 not offer her the affront of saying that I was doomed 
 to this failure because I was her child. ... A special 
 delivery letter came recalling me to New York. I 
 didn't want to go, I wanted to beg my father to let me 
 stay and think and plan some other future. But I had 
 grown up among a dumb folk who hold it ill-bred to 
 have a troubled heart; I had tried so hard to be like 
 them, for the love of their art, that I had gained no 
 power over life or speech. . . . 
 
 Often and often, in subsequent years, when I was 
 irked by the unresponsiveness of students or tired of 
 lecturing, the thought flashed through my mind: For 
 all that, thank Heaven, it's not Singleton, Leaf and 
 Company. I can, at least, see the sun and think my 
 own thoughts. And there arises in me the memory of 
 that large, scientifically clean building filled with the 
 hum of the engine that drove the monotype machine 
 and with the acrid odor of fresh print. A sharp elec- 
 tric light burned over my desk from eight-thirty to 
 twelve- thirty and from one-thirty to five-thirty, and 
 next to me stood all day a long, loose fellow whose 
 small, pointed head seemed fairly to dangle and 
 tremble, like an ugly and noxious flower, at the end of 
 his scrawny neck. He was constantly in a Uriah Heep- 
 ish ecstasy of contortion over the greatness of the firm 
 we served and the huge increases in advertising matter 
 
 [128] 
 
THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 to be "made up" for its magazines month by month. 
 This man and his green-eyed leer — there was some- 
 thing coldly lecherous in it — became to me a symbol 
 of my degradation. For it was degradation. Single- 
 ton, Leaf and Company did not consciously or pur- 
 posefully publish a line for its literary or scientific 
 value. The stuff was accepted or, more often, ar- 
 ranged for merely that it might sell. It did. But the 
 business had no more to do with literature or science 
 (except by accident: occasionally good work will sell), 
 than a breakfast food factory. The firm had its own 
 special ideals, to be sure. It accepted and then refused 
 to publish Dreiser's first great book. But except for 
 this gentlemanly avoidance of sex in literature, it had 
 no prejudices. It published, in my time, a most slan- 
 derous and ignorant piece, of Anti-Semitic propaganda. 
 Nor was any book or article too shoddy, too ill-written, 
 too superficial to put more money into the purses of 
 Singleton and Leaf. So far, so good. In our preda- 
 tory economic system such was the clear right of these 
 gentlemen. But why the odious corruption of which 
 my pitiful and shabby neighbor was the sign and sym- 
 bol? Why "get together luncheons" for the firm's 
 employees with speeches and base rhetoric and brazen 
 enthusiasm? Enthusiasm for the ill-gotten gains of 
 Singleton and Leaf! They were the masters and we 
 were the men. Very well. Why this unctuous lying, 
 this degrading of the souls of the wage-slave? The 
 proletarian printers were far more self-respecting in 
 this matter than the business and editorial employees 
 who fawned and "enthused" (vile word for a vile 
 thing) over the growth of the business. . . . Later I 
 often gave the best that was in me and often the last 
 
 [129] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 ounce of my strength for a wretched wage. But I 
 served the spiritual common-weal in no ignoble way. 
 And I could have served that common-weal in a far 
 humbler office with my human dignity unimpaired. 
 The meanest door-keeper in the house of the Republic 
 still serves — the Republic. There should not be money 
 enough in the world to hire any self-sustaining man to 
 minister to the voracities of those whose aims are alien 
 from his own and commonly demonstrably sinister. 
 When former students of mine tell me that they are 
 "making good" with this corporation or that and 
 boast of the power and wealth of those corporations, a 
 sense of bleakness fill me. The humble digger of the 
 earth may be a slave in body ; the young business man 
 or engineer who furthers the interests of his master 
 is a slave in soul. 
 
 All summer, a great and flaring summer, I watched 
 the tramps and "pan-handlers" on Union Square dur- 
 ing my luncheon hour. They dozed over stray news- 
 papers and smoked remnants of tobacco in disreput- 
 able pipes. They fascinated me — their white, un- 
 shaven faces, reddish eyes, frayed coats, ripped boots. 
 They stared at me — careless, unashamed, imperturb- 
 able . . . free, in that they had cast off responsibility 
 and subservience. Types of the eternal beggar, the out- 
 cast, the rebel, the unquiet one. He was beside the 
 gates of Niniveh — as in Union Square. But most of 
 us have an undying house-dweller and even house- 
 holder within us. "We need warmth and security and 
 respect. Especially when we are young. Yet I under- 
 stood the temptation of stepping out of the ranks and 
 drifting off into the land of unconsidered men. . . . 
 I understood it so well that I openly and frankly, at 
 
 [130] 
 
THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 Singleton, Leaf and Company's, showed my sense 
 of the absurdity and vulgarity of the whole business. 
 So the firm set me down as an able but queer and un- 
 ambitious person — one that sensible people could make 
 nothing of — and we parted on friendly enough terms. 
 I still have a letter of recommendation that Leaf gave 
 me. It seems queer and remote and unreal. It did me 
 little good. 
 
 But I met Mary that year. . . . Bread came some- 
 how. I wrote stuff for the Review of Reviews and 
 articles for the Times and she wrote verses for it. I 
 sold some poems to Collier's. We had each other. . . . 
 I recall September days full of a soft, grey drizzle. 
 The lights of the street-lamps trembled in a thousand 
 rays through the wet air. But we, under one umbrella, 
 recked little of the world. The weather cleared and 
 brightened as October came. We lingered on River- 
 side Drive and heard the rustle of the leaves under our 
 feet and waited until the sun set in a bronze haze over 
 the palisades. We sat on a bench under the bare pop- 
 lars with all the stars of heaven for our own. We were, 
 of course, aware of the necessary briefness of this 
 period, but we dwelt with all our might in the days and 
 hours — numbered days and hours — that were given us. 
 The windfalls grew fewer and fewer, the weather 
 colder and colder. With a brave and lovely bright- 
 ness in her eyes Mary took me to the boat. For the 
 present we were defeated and I had to seek refuge at 
 home. 
 
 Queenshaven was beautiful in its own type of 
 wintry beauty. The sunlight filtered through the blue 
 
 [131] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 air with a smooth, golden glow like honey. All objects 
 were defined with an indescribable clearness. The dry 
 spears of the palmettos rattled softly. My father and 
 mother were so glad to have me that, by tacit consent, 
 all troubling questions were dismissed. Also my 
 father's income had increased soemwhat and it seemed 
 to me that to be calm for a period and think hard was, 
 after all, the strictly practical thing to do. First of all, 
 it seemed clear to me then that I could not teach. Even 
 were it possible after long months or even years to get 
 a small appointment, I was unwilling to risk the sus- 
 pense and the humiliation. There was nothing left 
 me but such skill as I had in writing. But criticism 
 and verse would not suffice. Prose fiction was the only 
 thing at which one could earn a living. So I deter- 
 mined to become a short story writer and a novelist. 
 Perhaps I didn't reason the matter out quite so 
 coldly. Or else I let my reasoning be guided by a 
 strong and hitherto unsuspected impulse which stirred 
 somewhere in the depth of consciousness. The things 
 I had seen and lived through in New York with all the 
 impassioned observation and pain of youth seemed to 
 become denser at certain points, to gather — in my 
 imaginative memory — into definte motifs. I seemed 
 suddenly to be able to see them with a more penetrat- 
 ing eye. Fragments torn from the context of life 
 seemed to become organic, to lift themselves from the 
 more inert mass of experience and to take on an in- 
 dependent existence. What I needed next was a 
 method. I had never studied closely the technique of 
 modern fiction. A very sure instinct led me to Henry 
 James, to the clear, brimming stories of his middle 
 years : The Lesson of the Master, Broken Wings, The 
 
 [132] 
 
THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 Altar of the Dead. I soon knew what, for my purpose, 
 I needed to know. I didn't, I must say in justice to 
 myself, imitate Henry James at all. But no one with 
 the craftsman's insight can read these stories — I 
 lingered over about fifteen — without learning from 
 that close and scrupulous master the essential secrets 
 of imaginative narrative. 
 
 In a state of very high mental tension — extraordi- 
 narily clear and yet almost mystical — I wrote three 
 stories. Nothing I have ever done cost me so little 
 trouble. There was no change or erasure in the manu- 
 scripts. Yet I felt quite certain that the work had — 
 in structure, style, characterization — a real and a new 
 felicity. I am recording the feelings of the time; I 
 have not read the stories in years. But I was not 
 wholly wrong. For only a few months ago Dreiser 
 said to me: "Why don't you reprint those early 
 stories? I never saw stuff so full of a sense of beauty." 
 
 I typed my work and hesitated. A friend in New 
 York had once said thoughtfully: "Maybe you could 
 get stuff into the magazines more easily if you used a 
 pseudonym. Your name's very Jewish." I pondered 
 the matter. I did not know how absurd his notion was. 
 Should I use a pseudonym? Should I — it was possible 
 — make my name less foreign by a change in spelling? 
 I had a few difficult hours. Should I risk my last 
 chance? In spite of my recent experience I didn't feel 
 nearly so strongly on nationality and its rights in 
 America as I do now. Nevertheless I decided not to 
 betray myself even to the extent of concealing or of 
 altering my name. True, however, to the traditions 
 of my Queenshaven past, I sent my stories to the At- 
 lantic Monthly. 
 
 [133] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 In due time the editors of the Atlantic replied that 
 "they were not unaware of the quality or significance 
 of these sketches, but that even among the clientele of 
 the Atlantic there were, they feared, not enough people 
 who would care for them. ' ' My mother and father, in 
 their unalterable devotion to quality rather than profit- 
 ableness of achievement, were proud of this evidently 
 sincere statement. But I thought of Mary who was 
 coming to visit my mother, and the fear crept over me 
 that I might be doomed to penniless quality and un- 
 popularity. It occurred to me that I knew nothing of 
 the popular fiction of the day. So I tried to read 
 stories in the magazines. But I couldn't. Nor have I 
 succeeded since. The stuff pretends to render life and 
 interpret it ! and has no contact with reality at any 
 point. Dishonest, sapless twaddle, guided by an im- 
 possible moral perfectionism — a false perfectionism, 
 too, since its ideals are always tribal — and strung on a 
 string of pseudo-romantic love. I remembered, how- 
 ever, that I had once or twice 'read in the Smart Set 
 stories with a touch, at least, of vitality, earnestness, 
 verisimilitude. So I sent my rejected stories there. In 
 less than two weeks came a letter from Charles Hanson 
 Towne, who was then the editor. He accepted all three 
 stories and asked for more. 
 
 m 
 
 One knows the kind of anecdote that is told of tha 
 literary aspirant. That's what he is called. The kind 
 of advice — with its broad touch of commercialism and 
 bourgeois canniness — that is given him. Never be dis- 
 couraged! Eewrite! Send your stories in order to 
 
 [134] 
 
THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 every magazine in the country ! Watch what the editors 
 want! Success to him who sticks it out — two years, 
 three, five. Success — the current connotations of the 
 word are enough to make a voluntary outcast of any 
 self-respecting soul. Well, I said to myself, I had 
 made up my mind four months before to write stories. 
 The result showed the absurdity of the humdrum ad- 
 vice, the vulgar maxims of the tradesmen in letters. 
 It did — in the deepest sense. Only I drew impossible 
 inferences in the tense hopefulness of those days. And 
 my delusion was fated to completeness. Joel Chandler 
 Harris founded Uncle Remus' Magazine in Atlanta 
 and bought my fourth story, sending, almost by re- 
 turn mail, a letter of enthusiastic praise and a checque 
 for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. My father 
 was, characteristically, aglow; he saw visions of 
 grandeur. My mother's womanly and solitary heart 
 yearned over Mary. So Mary and I were married and 
 we all settled down in an old, roomy house in Queens- 
 haven. The house overlooked the bay and from our 
 study windows Mary and I watched the horned moon 
 float over the silken swell of the dark waters and 
 listened to the tide. . . . 
 
 Those altitudes of life are brief and have, upon 
 retrospect, a touch of utter pathos. To be upon them 
 you must, the world being what it is, be out of touch 
 with reality. There is the temper, to be sure, that 
 frankly accepts reality as sordid, mean, unresponsive 
 to our finer impulses and, turning resolutely from it, 
 strives after the illusions and takes refuge in the art 
 that depicts life "as it ought to be." And commonly, 
 in street and church and school among us, such people 
 call themselves idealists and scorn us to whom the illu- 
 
 [135] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 sion and the dream is too cheap a thing. To us there 
 comes, after the first flush of youth, the troubling sense 
 of being duped to no good or enduring purpose. We 
 come to live in an autumnal world of the spirit. . . . 
 Yet we are the true lovers of the ideal. "We refuse to 
 be put off with a wretched substitute. Either the values 
 by which we would live are valid in the world of reality 
 or they are not. If they are not, it is better and wiser 
 to know and to submit. The eternal children among 
 men, on the other hand, pass from toy to toy. Yet in 
 the end they must see — with what a late and grey and 
 piteous disillusion — that their toys are but tinsel and 
 wax and bran. . . . 
 
 Mary and I believed that here, in our American 
 place and time, fine, sound, veracious art would easily 
 gain for us the wherewithal for our very frugal needs 
 and joys. I wrought out my stories with the severest 
 exactions upon structure, verbal grace, inner truth. 
 Towne bought more of them. The editor of a weekly 
 of rather shady reputation asked for stories. A sense 
 of insecurity which gradually overcame me persuaded 
 me to sell him my manuscripts. If the stories were as 
 perfect as I could make them, what did it matter? Un- 
 happily all these people paid only a cent a word. I 
 spent two weeks of the most highly organized artistic 
 labor over a story and the material result was thirty 
 dollars — payable at some hazy date months ahead. I 
 summoned my deepest and serenest powers and wrote 
 a longer narrative and sent it to Harper's. Henry 
 Mills Alden saw its artistic points and half agreed to 
 buy it — if I would give it a happy ending. But the 
 story didn't end happily! I looked at Mary. She 
 should have had a new gown. And so, for the first 
 
 [136] 
 
THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 time, I went in for the trade of writing and altered 
 the ending of my story. But Alden didn't take the 
 story, after all. 
 
 A happy ending. Cheerfulness. Here are the rocks 
 on which I suffered my second ship-wreck in life. For 
 the Alden incident is merely the type and symbol of 
 many others. All the editors admitted that my stories 
 had very uncomomn merits. But they were too sombre. 
 . . . Once, just once, I wrote a story full of gentle 
 pathos. With a touch of irony I called it A Sentimental 
 Story. When it appeared editors from all quarters 
 wrote to me. Send us stories like your Sentimental 
 Story ! The abysmal folly ! I could no more recapture 
 that mood — so unlike my typical moods — than I could 
 bring back the perished hour in which that mood had 
 come to me. Of such considerations, as of the whole 
 nature af art, the editors seemed to be densely 
 ignorant. 
 
 I determined to make myself independent of the 
 magazines and their absurd requirements. I felt the 
 need of a larger canvas anyhow. So, writing just 
 stories enough for our barest needs — my father and 
 mother kept the pot boiling and paid the rent — I began 
 a novel. 
 
 My subject wasn't, I can see now, a highly fruit- 
 ful onet Nor had I yet quite transcended the notion 
 that one must follow to some definite end in circum- 
 stances the strands of the narrative. In other words, I 
 was still unaware of the endless flowing of the world, 
 of the utter absence of finality at any point except the 
 point of death. And also, a subtle and troubled sense 
 of what — through the editors and through personal 
 talk — I suspected concerning the attitude of my Amer- 
 
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UP STREAM 
 
 ican audience, prevented me, at many points, from 
 practising my art in its full severity. One must have 
 bread. . . . Yet, with every allowance made, the thing 
 was felt, seen, rendered. It was young, that first novel 
 of mine, but there were pages and chapters that both 
 in the texture of the prose and the shaping of the mat- 
 ter had a touch of life and beauty. 
 
 Often now I wrote on my sheer nerves. A sense of 
 discouragement had come over us all. Small checques 
 for stories dribbled in from time to time. But my 
 father had to work harder than ever. Instead of lift- 
 ing the burden of life from him and my mother I had, 
 in the material sense, added to it. The thing was un- 
 endurable and throbbed in me with the fierceness of a 
 wound. Then the manuscript of my novel came back 
 from a large publishing house, and in the smiting heat 
 of the Queenshaven summer Mary fell ill. 
 
 With a sense, at last, almost of despair, my father 
 and I borrowed some money. I had to get another 
 start, to lift the burden from him, to fight my own 
 man's battle. My mother and I had a sense of the 
 bitter tragedy of that parting, though we sought to 
 conceal it even from ourselves and though Mary was 
 full of cheer and sweetness and courage. Ferris rose 
 to the occasion and came to the train to see us off. 
 Perhaps he had a suspicion of how broken and defeated 
 I felt. 
 
 IV 
 
 "We took a small flat on Washington Heights. The 
 house was new, but it was dingy by, nature — cheap, 
 ugly, abominable. Yet we had the Hudson land- 
 scape almost at our door and we had money enough for 
 
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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 three months and the Smart Set owed me a checque or 
 two. So Mary and I picnicked in our little kitchen — we 
 had no dining-table — and felt more hopeful. And there 
 was a glow in our shabby study when Towne sent an 
 enthusiastic letter concerning the manuscript of the 
 novel and promised to get a publisher for it. 
 
 Meantime I had to make money. The respect- 
 able magazines would have none of me. They re- 
 jected my poems and stories with rigid regularity. 
 The editors never failed to praise my work and never 
 dreamed of buying it. There was something in it — on 
 that point they were unanimous and clear — which their 
 subscribers would not endure. Towne, my one edi- 
 torial friend, introduced me to the editor-in-chief of 
 the Munsey magazines, an agreeable, sweet-natured 
 Irishman. The latter and his assistant, always hard 
 pressed for copy, gave a little luncheon party for me 
 and explained to me the mysteries of the "serial." 
 The All-Story Magazine, The Scrap-Book, The Cava- 
 lier, were in constant need of serial stories of from 
 twenty thousand to sixty thousand words in length. 
 These serials had to be built in blocks of three chap- 
 ters, each block thus constituting a ten thousand word 
 installment. Each chapter had to end with a minor 
 device of suspended mystery, each installment with a 
 major device. The mystery must not be solved until 
 the last chapter of the last installment. Nor must it 
 be solved then by any method involving an explana- 
 tory or retrospective narrative. There must be little 
 description and no analysis. There must be a power- 
 ful love interest but no hint of sex. The pay for these 
 marvelous concoctions was two-thirds of a cent a 
 word. But the bait for the struggling hack lay in this. 
 
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UP STREAM 
 
 You could drivel to the tune of sixty thousand words 
 and the company paid on acceptance. I am glad to 
 record this significant little feature of our civilization. 
 No one else is likely to do it. And these magazines 
 sold enormously at that time. 
 
 They had given me some excellent wine at the 
 luncheon party and as I walked up-town on the Av- 
 enue the proposal seemed an admirable one with which 
 to bridge over the time until the novel should make 
 my fame and fortune. At home I took a soberer view. 
 I hadn't a particle of ingenuity; I had trained myself 
 in the austerest methods of the novelist's art. Flau- 
 bert, James, Conrad were my teachers. Above all, 
 George Moore. I wrote slowly, with infinite pains, 
 weighing each word for its values in flavor, color, tone 
 — hovering over the melody of the sentence, the har- 
 mony of the paragraph, desperate when the beauty of 
 the prose failed to orchestrate the strain of the mean- 
 ing. . . . But I had to make money. 
 
 I thought closely : There was no earthly way of 
 building a Munsey serial except upon a motif of pur- 
 suit. And it must be the pursuit of a criminal, a treas- 
 ure or a girl. Preferably of two — the criminal is 
 responsible for his original crime plus the disappear- 
 ance of the girl. Or a pursuit of all three — the crim- 
 inal's crime involves spiriting away the treasure and 
 the girl. Then, in the last chapter of the last install- 
 ment the hero defeats the criminal, obtains the treas- 
 ure, marries the girl. So far the thing worked out with 
 mathematical accuracy. Each yarn must then be indi- 
 vidualized by differences in setting and incident and 
 such touches of quaintness or breadth of adventurous- 
 ness as could be given it. I reread Henry Esmond 
 
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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 and The Master of Balantrae for that note of gallant 
 spiritedness which is common to both. Then, from 
 the half-forgotten narratives of a Queenshaven ac- 
 quaintance^ — a seaman turned shoe-merchant — I built 
 up my first synopsis. This synopsis was pronounced 
 good by the editors and I proceeded to the task of 
 composition. Now came the rub. I had to get rid of 
 my usual style and point of view. They were worse 
 than useless for the purpose. I had to write briskly 
 and in a falsetto. I struggled for days. Then came 
 the solution. I ceased composing with pen and paper. 
 On the typewriter I could assume the whole alien out- 
 look and tone and turn out, on good days, copy 
 adequate for the purpose without change or erasure. 
 I have written as high as six thousand words of serial 
 stuff a day, driving my Gibson hero over land and sea, 
 by hair-breadth 'scapes, until he had the villain (usu- 
 ally, by a pleasant American convention, a foreigner) 
 by the throat and a girl and a treasure in each arm. 
 
 I wrote and sold six serials against every human 
 and artistic instinct of my nature. Then I broke 
 down. The vein of base invention wouldn't yield an- 
 other drop; the insufferable falseness of the whole 
 business literally turned my stomach. I was ready to 
 do anything, suffer anything — only not write serials. 
 
 Meanwhile there was the novel, the thought of 
 which sustained Mary and me. Towne had given it to 
 Dreiser and Dreiser liked it. We had been reading 
 Sister Carrie which had just made its second and defi- 
 nite appearance, and Dreiser's approval repayed me 
 
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UP STREAM 
 
 amply for the snubs of the commercial editors and pub- 
 lishers. True that Dreiser had no style. Neither had 
 Balzac. And yet even those quaint vulgarities of 
 phrase, which he has since eliminated, helped to render 
 his subject in Sister Carrie. Occasionally, too, through 
 the sheer fullness and exactness of that penetrating 
 vision of his he strikes out curious, unlovely, journalese 
 little sentences that are worth tons of ordinary smooth 
 writing. And how he wrings and cleanses the heart 
 with the fates of his people ! There is no prof ounder 
 illustration than the character of Hurstwood in all 
 literature of the great saying of Goethe that every 
 concrete thing, if it perfectly represents itself, becomes 
 the sufficient symbol of all. We know this man as we 
 know few men in life. And we know, too, if we can 
 begin to feel the approach of middle age, that there is 
 a Hurstwood in each one of us. . . . 
 
 I went to see Dreiser and felt less shame over my 
 serials. For wasn't he editing The Delineator? The 
 old question of bread. His office high up in the But- 
 terick building had from its large windows one of the 
 most splendid and heroic views in the world — far 
 across the harbor of New York. There he sat, a large, 
 unshapely, sombre hulk of a man — (he has brightened 
 and softened since) — with head bent forward, folding 
 and eternally unfolding his handkerchief into ac- 
 cordion pleats. There was a brooding gaze in his near- 
 sighted eyes — the gaze with which he has seen life 
 more largely and truly than any other American novel- 
 ist. And he has let life interpret itself upon the basis 
 of its eternal facts. He has let life mean — life ! Not 
 some moralistic crochet that is the weapon of his own 
 intolerance. By virtue of that quality he is, in his 
 
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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 humble and homespun way, of the kin, at least, of the 
 masters. Of what did Homer approve, or Shake- 
 speare, or Rembrandt or Goethe f 
 
 Dreiser recommended my novel to the small firm 
 of publishers who had recently brought out Sister 
 Carrie. So, very soon, I had my first contract in my 
 pocket and was very proud of it, and Mary and I 
 walked on a memorable night under a huge, pale moon 
 on Wadsworth Avenue and reckoned out how much 
 we would have if our novel— we called it ours — sold 
 twenty thousand copies. If it sold only ten thou- 
 sand — ? Oh, it would be a beginning, and I could 
 write another in peace and there would be no more 
 serials. I sent an enthusiastic letter to my mother and 
 father and they trusted as we did. 
 
 The novel appeared. For a first book the critical 
 reception was remarkable. William Morton Payne 
 wrote of it in a well-known journal as a book "in which 
 the imperative demands of technique — both verbal and 
 architectonic — are never ignored, and which yet has no 
 lack of rich human substance. ... It is not a book for 
 the young person to read," he went on, "but one from 
 which the mature mind can get nothing but good and 
 which offers a singular satisfaction to the artistic per- 
 ceptions." Similar was the tone of other reviews. 
 There was generous praise, to be sure, but never with- 
 out some subtle implication of warning. A mythical, 
 at least, a theoretical "young person" was, somehow, 
 to be guarded against my book. A number of review- 
 ers took up the cudgels for this young person and be- 
 labored me in unmeasured terms. The Presbyterian 
 editor of the Queenshaven Courier, a friend of mine — 
 (I thought) — arose in his wrath and his terror for the 
 
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UP STREAM 
 
 young person and abused my book in terms that were 
 literally foul-mouthed. . . . An old college friend 
 from Queenshaven asked me, months later, what my 
 wife thought of the book. He asked it with the leer 
 of free-masonry in nastiness which moral men assume 
 in smoking-rooms. To him there was no difference be- 
 tween a smutty joke and a naturalistic novel. He 
 would have read Mme. Bovary in secret, as a "dirty 
 book," and hidden it from his wife. To her who was 
 "sweet and pure" he gives, I know, the works of 
 Robert Chambers and Harold Bell Wright. ... I re- 
 flected on the young person for whom American litera- 
 ture is kept "clean and wholesome." How old was 
 this young person? Evidently seventeen, at least. For 
 the most foolish parent would supervise the reading of 
 youngsters under that age without necessarily con- 
 demning the books withheld. And was the young 
 American at seventeen such an imbecile that the cen- 
 tral passions of life — their existence even — if pre- 
 sented and interpreted in art came in the nature of a 
 revelation? Or else so vicious that true books would 
 start him straightway on an abandoned career ? Surely 
 not ! Then it was but again the old, ineradicable lust 
 for lying, for unveracity of soul, for an unf eatured and 
 unmeaning harmlessness of surface — the old duality of 
 conscience which makes men pretend that the thing is 
 what it is not, but rather some foolish, blank, marrow- 
 less phantom. . . . Literature, to be wholesome, my 
 friend the professor of English philology used to tell 
 me, should portray life as it ought to be. How ought it 
 to be? Ah, cheerful, sober, kindly . . . like the Book 
 of Job, I suppose, or the Illiad, or the Divine Comedy 
 or Lear or Faust ! Without passion or sorrow or the 
 
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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 hardihood of thought. . . . Base-ball, prohibition and 
 the Saturday Evening Post. What spiritual impli- 
 cations of a national culture. 
 
 How could my poor little book brave such an array 
 of forces'? It didn't sell. It didn't sell at all. I wrote 
 another without one touch of the sensuous beauty of 
 the first — a bare, plain, austere transcript from life, 
 holding within itself, because it is of the very core 
 of realty, a massive moral implication. This book, of 
 which I am still proud in retrospect, was published 
 too. And Anthony Comstock, that human symbol of 
 the basic lies of our social structure, confiscated the 
 copies and caused the plates to be destroyed. I was 
 beaten, broken, breadless. I was a scholar and for- 
 bidden to teach, an artist and forbidden to write. Lib- 
 erty, opportunity. The words had nothing friendly to 
 my ear. 
 
 VI 
 
 Mary and I agreed that, so defeated, we couldn't 
 go home both for our own and for my parents' sake. 
 It would be only a palliative, after all. Somehow, 
 though all the forces of life seemed against me — my 
 health was poor now, too — I must struggle on. And 
 so there comes to me now from that period the memory 
 of many months, strangely quiet, for all the care and 
 need, and full of an almost eerie sunshine. I see Mary 
 and myself wandering across queer neighborhoods — a 
 sticky, swarming yet faintly genteel street called 
 Bradhurst Avenue — on our way to Third. Somewhere 
 about us we carried, carefully wrapped, the silver 
 spoons we were going to pawn. The gas-bill had to 
 be paid or the milk-bill. Then my father, in his ever 
 
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UP STREAM 
 
 watchful goodness, would send a money-order or a 
 small checque would come in and we would take a long 
 tramp just for fun. Up Riverside Drive to Dyckman 
 Street or into queer neighborhoods in the Bronx where 
 we discovered, among many other things, an empty, 
 sandy, forlorn little street called Shakespeare Avenue. 
 These wanderings rested my worn nerves. 
 
 I am not quite sure how we did live. My father 
 helped. Friends helped — friends of Mary and of 
 mine, now of us both — friends who had and have no 
 motive but their affection for us, our friends still, Jew 
 and Gentile, of whom it touches me to think. I wrote 
 reviews for The Nation and The Forum. I read manu- 
 scripts for a friendly publishing house. I gave a few 
 private lessons. But the situation was an impossible 
 one. It was only putting off week by week — how often 
 we did pawn the silver — a day of inevitable collapse. 
 
 I went back to Brent. It was a bitter thing to be 
 forced to do. He set in motion the whole machinery of 
 the department, he gave me the full weight of his influ- 
 ence. It was useless. I was refused at the University 
 of Virginia — because I was a Jew. I was refused at 
 the University of Minnesota — because I was a Jew. 
 The reason was scarcely veiled; it was not debatable. 
 Ellard was now teaching at Monroe. He plead with 
 his chief and Brent and Richards wrote to the man. 
 He refused me — because I was a Jew. . . . Brent felt, 
 rightly, that he was at the end of his resources. No 
 one could have done more. 
 
 It occurred to me, of course, that I might teach 
 German. But I felt, in a sense, insufficiently prepared. 
 My philological training, for instance, had all been 
 from the point of view of English. But Richards, like 
 
 [146] 
 
THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 Brent, had faith in me and brushed that consideration 
 aside. An instructorship at Princeton was vacant. 
 Bichards showed me the letter which he wrote to the 
 head of the German Department there. He spoke of 
 my abilities, of my character, of my personality. He 
 touched on the fact of my race and defended me with 
 noble emphasis from its supposed or real faults. I 
 was refused. . . . Some years later a university in the 
 farther West needed a professor of German. The 
 attention of the Dean there was called to my work and 
 reputation as a scholar and teacher. He wrote me a 
 tentative letter. I answered but never heard again. 
 Later he confided to a friend of mine that he had 
 sounded the trustees. It would have been useless to 
 propose the name of a Jew. . . . All the men who 
 had refused me at the various universities were Anglo- 
 Americans, pillars of the democracy, proclaimers of 
 its mission to set the bond free and equalize life's op- 
 portunities for mankind. I shall be accused, of course, 
 of making too much of this matter. Not so. I may not 
 be borne out by To-day. But there will be a To-mor- 
 row. It was a legitimate and searching test of the 
 democratic pretensions of the society which these men 
 represent and of the temper of that society. Their 
 reactions register accurately the spirit of the nativistic 
 oligarchy which rules us. . . . By this time Ellard 
 was thoroughly alarmed for me. He went to his friend, 
 the head of the German Department at Monroe and 
 laid the matter before him. Ellard 's friend — now for 
 years mine too, — is a German, the finest, deepest- 
 souled type. In six weeks I had my appointment to 
 an instructorship at Monroe. . . . 
 
 The months between April and October had to be 
 
 [147] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 bridged. But I got a piece of translation to do and 
 also, refreshed by hope for the future, I wrote one 
 more serial. In my leisure hours I wrote a text-book 
 in the field of G-ermanies so as to make a respectable 
 entrance into my new profession. I meant to devote 
 myself undividedly to it, for I was convinced now, 
 through experience and reflection, that my art product 
 could not, in this age, commend itself to the strange 
 minds of my countrymen. To poetry only did I hope 
 to devote some time in the future. But I was not aware 
 of all the conditions within the academic life, nor did I 
 count with the heaviness of the coming years. 
 
 I had not been at home in many months. Mary was 
 kept in New York by a misfortune among her kin. So 
 I went alone with a feeling, half of delight and half of 
 bitter, grinding remorse. I had a job. But I was 
 twenty-eight and the job paid one thousand dollars a 
 year. I had wanted to do so much. I came with empty 
 hands. I had seen the color of life now and was able 
 to estimate my chances. And so I knew that the good 
 dream of the years was over and that I would never 
 lift my father and mother out of the life they were 
 living, that I would not even be able ever to dwell near 
 them again, but always half a continent away. Final 
 and fatal issues. At home they did not make these 
 thoughts hard for me, God knows, but were glad in the 
 bit of luck that had come and my mother promised to 
 visit Mary and me in the West and so make the long 
 year of absence shorter. I stayed at home ten weeks, 
 happy weeks, though often I felt a tremor of unearthly 
 fear — all the old eerie dread for my mother. . . . 
 
 And in the quietude of my own mind I went over 
 the years that had gone by since I had first left home. 
 
 [148] 
 
THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 
 
 I went over these years bit by bit. What were their 
 fruits? In every worldly sense — not only in the base 
 one — I had been and I was a wretched failure. Yet I 
 could not help believing that I had good, even notable 
 talents. I knew also that sloth or shirking were not 
 among my faults of mind or character. Why, then 
 had it been so 1 It had been so, the answer came, be- 
 cause a man can make neither his gifts nor his char- 
 acter count except through those methods and insti- 
 tutions which society has organized. From these I had 
 hitherto been, in many subtle ways and in one way 
 that was gross and obvious, mercilessly excluded. 
 
 I had turned to creative art. But my stories and 
 novels had failed, because my way of looking at life 
 seemed strange and sinister to most of my country- 
 men. For my vision of it was not of a superficial, 
 kindly affair, all pleasantly prearranged. "If you do 
 so, you are good and happy, if otherwise, bad and un- 
 happy, and, what is worse, not like what other folks 
 desire to think they are." . . . For the last time I 
 read the successful novels of that year. That way were 
 fame and fortune. But the stuff made me feel doubly 
 hopeless and doubly innocent. The stories were cheer- 
 ful — like cheerful liars. They were not about harsh 
 things or noble things like myrrh or wine, only about 
 doleful things and sweetish things, like soup and 
 liquorice. They were not about love and aspiration 
 and death. They were about flirting and success and 
 old folks ' homes. They were not even pure, they Were 
 only proper. Life, in them, wasn't even austere, only 
 expurgated. They were false to the shallow core of 
 them, false and dishonorable. The period, it is to be 
 remembered was 1910. But even today an eminent 
 
 [149] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 artist like Sherwood Anderson finds the conventional 
 periodicals inaccessible and suffers the obvious conse- 
 quences. 
 
 Once more then, I accepted my fate. But it was 
 not easy. For the weeks rolled by and I knew that I 
 was going a thousand miles away and had no idea when 
 I would be able to earn money enough to come back. 
 Not for myself did my resignation to rigorous poverty 
 cut into my soul, nor for Mary — for she and I had 
 each other and friends and the years to come — but for 
 the sake of those two wan faces that disappeared from 
 my sight as the train pulled out of the Queenshaven 
 station. 
 
 [150] 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Business of Education. 
 
 Monroe is a forest city set among lakes. Indian 
 burial mounds dot the hills and beside one of those 
 blue lakes shy tepees appear overnight at certain sea- 
 sons. The air is sharp, tonic and primitive. The 
 storms of autumn sweep through the great trees with 
 a severe and iron music. City) and lakes and forests 
 have in my memory an air that is primaeval and yet 
 somehow touched with grace and learning. They seem 
 as established as a temple, yet as wild as an eagle's 
 wing. The university is set upon a hill; its walls and 
 groves are mirrored in the most beautiful of the five 
 lakes. For years Monroe and its memories had to 
 suffice me for my inner springs of beauty. To-day that 
 beauty, like so much else in the world, is scarred and 
 tarnished in my mind. . . . 
 
 Mary, was kept in the East by illness among her 
 people. I came alone to Monroe during the sparkle 
 and glow of its Indian summer. Ellard met me and we 
 passed some weeks in talking and rowing near the 
 yellow and bronze and scarlet of the lake shores. With 
 a fine sagacity that I have always found in the most 
 poetical spirits — not in mere artistic temperaments — 
 
 [151] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 lie gave me pithy and exact advice in regard to this 
 new career and activity and in regard to the char- 
 acters of the men with whom I was to live and work. 
 He took me to see my chief Vollberg — tall, elegant, 
 careworn, expansive, one of the soundest minds and 
 hearts in the world; to B., all burning eyes, domed 
 forehead, Socratic nose, sputtering, lyrical speech, 
 afterwards my special friend and comrade of that 
 group ; to F., accomplished, handsome, but too good a 
 lover of beauty to be worldly in an evil sense; to P., 
 with his snapping, black Slavic eyes and snapping, 
 ironic speech and vast learning. And these were only 
 a few of that astonishing German department which 
 was, in, my time, one of the goodliest fellowships of 
 comradly and learned men on earth. Most of them are 
 gone from there now — scattered and futile and alone. 
 They think of Monroe, I am sure, and B., at least, who 
 is still there, remembers that first departmental jaunt 
 in which I took part — miles of autumnal forest and 
 golden field and then an inn, and free and racy talk 
 on art and life and scholarship; supper of roast fowl 
 and potatoes and cool, yellow beer, and then the walk 
 back over the shivering tracery of the trees' shadows 
 on the long, moonlit road. Such memories are preci- 
 ous amid the waste and confusion of later years. They 
 ring and gleam across time from a saner and serener 
 world. . . . 
 
 The sense of both liberation and security which my 
 first academic position gave me, the beauty of Monroe, 
 the presence of Ellard, the forming of new friendships 
 — all these things caused me to take immediately a 
 very glowing view of my situation. Moreover, the 
 University of Monroe was at that time at the highest 
 
 [152] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 point of its effectiveness and power. It had been 
 neither crippled by legislative interference nor dark- 
 ened and distraught by war j it was as nearly as pos- 
 sible the free seat of learning of a strong and hopeful 
 democracy. Hence I felt something of a freedom and a 
 power that I had sought elsewhere in vain. What 
 helped me in addition was that, from the first, I proved 
 to be a very successful teacher. It is worth while 
 (dwelling for a moment on this fact. If I have harsh 
 things to say of our whirring educational machine, 
 they do not spring from the uneasiness of personal 
 irritation. From that first fall in Monroe to 
 the end of my academic career eight years later, 
 I had in the fullest measure possible among us, the 
 reward that makes a teacher's life endurable — the loy- 
 alty and the gratitude of my students. I exacted of 
 them always their best work and straightest thinking; 
 I tolerated no cheap phrases or tribal formularies in 
 my class-room. Hence my colleagues soon thought me 
 a little more showy than safe. The students never 
 failed me — in Monroe or Central City, in peace or war. 
 Why did I leave Monroe? Vollberg begged me to 
 stay. Ellard, in the grip of an intimate tragedy, 
 needed me. The Dean was persuasive. Well, certain 
 responsibilities, which shall be nameless, had to be 
 faced and every penny was important. I had been 
 so happy in Monroe that a strong instinct in me re- 
 belled against making it the scene of penury, grime 
 and chagrin. Also, a wild restlessness often came 
 over me when I remembered the more than thousand 
 miles that stretched between my mother and myself. 
 My old life in which I was so deeply rooted, my own 
 past and my family's, which I had come to see with a 
 
 [153] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 now warmth and sympathy and compassion — all that 
 seemed terribly far away and almost blot tod out here. 
 Thus an acute poacolessness stirred always at the 
 core of mo. At all events, when a friend ia the de- 
 partment was called to the chairmanship of the de- 
 partment in Central City and asked me to go with him, 
 I accepted the offer, though not without doubt and 
 hesitation. 
 
 Mary and I raised money somehow, went for a few 
 brief weeks to Queenshaven and came to Central City 
 to establish ourselves. That establishment was slow 
 and difficult and never complete. We had both been 
 accustomed to richer and racier forms ol' life than we 
 found in that characteristic city of the Middle West, to 
 a more flexible society, a freer air. But we were de- 
 stined to stay there for six years. It was there that I 
 watched the color of life and brooded upon death and 
 war and felt the pang- of youth leaving my heart ; there 
 I wrote several books that brought mo some small re- 
 pute and sat in final judgment on my poetry. There, 
 too, I thought at one time that I had learned the les- 
 son of resignation. . . . 
 
 I applied myself to the business of education. To 
 what we, in America, call the higher education of the 
 most democratic typo. For the university o\' Central 
 City is a state institution. It is coeducational. There 
 are between five and six thousand students and a fac- 
 ulty of nearly five hundred. The university is divided 
 into eight chief colleges to all but one of which — the 
 college of medicine— a graduation certificate from a 
 
 [154] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 high school admits the student. In a word, any boy or 
 girl in the state who has completed a high school course 
 may go to Central City and learn anything within the 
 whole realm of human knowledge which may seem most 
 effective in developing the individual. These state 
 universities represent a handsome ideal. If the teach- 
 ing were not propaganda, if the teachers were not 
 slaves. ... Yet from these universities fiery things . 
 may one day come. Not now. Let me remember. . . . 
 I stroll on the campus in spring as I have done 
 many times. The students are not disturbed by my 
 approach, for they stand in no particular awe of their 
 professors. Those that know me go on with their con- 
 versation, simply including me in it if I stop. They 
 know that my attitude is always comradly. I watch 
 their faces. There is not a vicious face on the campus. 
 I try to recall one among the hundreds of students I 
 have taught. I cannot. Dull faces, vacant faces. Not 
 one that expresses any corruption of heart and mind. 
 I look about me again and watch for one face that be- 
 trays a troubled soul, a yearning of the mind, the 
 touch of any flame. There is none. How many such 
 faces have I seen in class-room or campus? I count 
 them: one, two, three — well, four. I must except the 
 handful of Russian Jews. Thought and emotion are 
 their birthright. But my young Americans? Many of 
 the girls are dainty and comely. The peasant is oblit- 
 erated here in a single generation. The boys have 
 bright and cheery faces — rather more flattened and 
 less salient, upon the whole, than the girls'. A little 
 coarser in modelling and tinting. But all, all incur- 
 ably trivial. I listen to their talk. It is of games, 
 parties, examinations. Never of the contents of the 
 
 [155] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 tests. But of the practical fact that they have to be 
 faced. Who has ever heard an eager argument among 
 these students on any of the subjects — art, religion, 
 economics, sex — that are supposed to employ the minds 
 of men? Who has ever seen them keen about any- 
 thing except (symbolically speaking) football and 
 fudge? It is, as a matter of fact, considered rather 
 bad form among them to show any stirring of the mind. 
 It is considered " high-brow,' ' queer, that is to say — 
 different, personal and hence, by a subtle and quite 
 mad implication consoling to stupidity and emptiness 
 — undemocratic. 
 
 A Continental would ask: Why do they go to 
 the university? In Central City comparatively few 
 went for social reasons. An extraordinary proportion 
 of the students earn their maintenance wholly or in 
 part. They and their parents make real sacrifices in 
 the cause of education. I found few of those young 
 men and women really slack and trifling. There was 
 practically no disciplinary problem. The students 
 came to the class-room to learn something. I have 
 seen both French and German friends speechless be- 
 fore that contradiction. But gradually I fought my 
 way to its true meaning which is this : To the ' ' aver- 
 age, intelligent American" education, for which he is 
 willing to deny himself and pay taxes, means — skill, 
 information — at most, accomplishment. Skill and 
 knowledge with which to conquer the world of matter. 
 It does not mean to him an inner change — the putting 
 on of a new man, a new criterion of truth, new tastes 
 and other values. The things he wants at the univer- 
 sity are finer and more flexible tools for the economic 
 war which he calls liberty. And like tools or weapons 
 
 [156] 
 
/ 
 
 THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 they are external to him and are dropped when the 
 class-room period or the working day are over. He 
 then merges himself again into the great level of the 
 democratic mass from which he strives to be distin- 
 guished only; by the possession of those sharper tools. 
 By his outlook upon life, his distinction of taste, his 
 finer palate for truth he would hesitate to be differen- 
 tiated from his fellows. He would seem to himself in 
 danger of being a "high-brow" and a snob. Occa- 
 sionally I used to hear a gifted student, alive to the 
 deeper meaning of the humanities, passionately dis- 
 claim the values he had himself attained in a blind 
 terror of non-conformity. And I heard students say, 
 hot once or twice: "But the majority is of another 
 opinion ; I 'm probably wrong. ' ' And why not ? There 
 was the President of the university in Central City 
 who led the way. 
 
 The man has been on my mind all these years. And 
 the other day I made a record of him and of his mean- 
 ing. 
 
 During a recent crisis of our national history a 
 certain distinguished citizen of my acquaintance — 
 college president, insurance magnate, farmer, and 
 merchant — announced with an indescribable unction: 
 "My opinion is that of the average American. " His 
 broad lips tightened and his eyes became stony. He 
 turned up his sleeves, figuratively speaking, to enforce 
 his own loyalty upon all within his power. For loyalty 
 is what he called it and had always called it. He had 
 been loyal to his college and to his college-team, to his 
 party — the Republican — his state, his city and his 
 church. He had always acted from within a group and 
 
 [157] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 had always identified himself with that group 's opinion 
 of itself and with its attitude to other groups. The 
 qualities of these other groups he had always loyally 
 excluded from his experience. He had never permitted 
 himself really to see the rival team, the competing in- 
 stitution, or the other party. No wonder then that he 
 swept aside with a muscular gesture a suggestion that 
 he should, in this supreme moment, envisage humanity 
 as at least including the alien and hostile tribe. Once 
 somebody asked him: "Then you interpret loyalty 
 to a social group— college, church, city, nation — as an 
 identification of- one's own opinion with the majority 
 opinion held within that group at the quite arbitrary 
 moment when the group chooses to apply a test?" He 
 became truculent and oratorical. The question had 
 simply not reached his mind. His very conception of 
 loyalty had involved the submersion of his reason. He 
 was impenetrable. 
 
 And yet to my own knowledge, in the ordinary, con- 
 crete matters of daily living this man was both wise 
 and just. The old experiences of the race that had 
 recurred within his own life he had grasped firmly, 
 and concerning these his judgment was liberal and 
 ripe. He had been poor in his earlier years and his 
 underpaid colleagues found him to be both understand- 
 ing and helpful; he had been married several times 
 and had a saner insight than many supposed into the 
 intricate relations of men and women. He had, in all 
 such matters, an occasional bluntness of speech that 
 proved him to be free from the grosser delusions of his 
 fellows. "Wherever his personal experience guided his 
 judgment, that judgment was sound. On all other mat- 
 ters he talked like a child or a madman and, at critical 
 
 [158] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 moments, fell back upon the mass judgment of men 
 whose opportunities for experience were even more 
 restricted than his own. This process he called "loy- 
 alty" and it gave him the mien and temjjer of an in- 
 quisitor. In his personal life he experienced and rea- 
 soned from experience; the motives of his political 
 actions were savage and confused. 
 
 It seems to me that this man's character is a sym- 
 bol. Judgments formed without experience are vain and 
 in the void. But mankind has evidently not the power 
 of transmitting experiences that do not repeat them- 
 selves within the actual life of each generation. The 
 simplest know that fire burns and snow chills and even 
 that thrift makes for order. But so soon as intervals 
 elapse between experiences they are either obliterated 
 or transformed into romance. The ages pass and war 
 follows war. Mankind has not learned that the blow 
 returned does not heal the pain of the blow suffered, 
 neither does it touch the impulse that aimed the blow, 
 nor cure the suffering from which that impulse leaped, 
 nor make order of the moral chaos in which the suf- 
 fering was born. It follows that all judgments in re- 
 gard to war and peace, all corporate or collective judg- 
 ments in moments of crisis and on matters that have 
 not been constant factors in the lives of the individuals 
 who compose the group are wholly and necessarily 
 worthless. You may call an acquiescence in such judg- 
 ments by ringing names — teamwork, loyalty, patriot- 
 ism. It remains a savage thing and the chief enemy 
 in our path. 
 
 What are we to do? Have not even historians, 
 warders of the rarer experiences of the race, failed us 
 at crises ? The answer lies here, so at least it seems to 
 
 [159] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 me ; we can not change the nature of man, but we can 
 affect his mood. Christianity did that for some cen- 
 turies, the ideal of economic co-operation does so to- 
 day. We can attack the concept of loyalty as excluding 
 inquiry and experience; we can seek to merge the 
 mind's freedom with its own self-respect. We can be- 
 gin humbly. When the leader of the school foot-ball 
 team announces certain victory based on nothing but 
 his craving to show the superiority of his particular 
 group, his teachers can explain the spiritual vulgarity 
 of that impulse, insist on an imaginative grasp of the 
 rival team's likeness to his own and thus temper the 
 ferocity of the merely competitive instincts. We can 
 deprecate all forms of "booming" and "boosting"; 
 we can point out a humility which is also a nobler form 
 of pride. We can substitute a sense of personal and 
 inner worth for the misery and emptiness that fling the 
 individual into blind group-action to satisfy his primi- 
 tive will to superiority and power. We can show that 
 judgment without experience will wreck a society as 
 surely as it will wreck an individual, and that loyalty 
 to the humblest truth a man has found for himself 
 is better than to cheer whole acres of bunting or to 
 wear a gaudy ribbon in his coat. 
 
 ^f ■«■ *n* *W "ir IP w W 
 
 Our students, then, came to the university not to 
 find truth, but to be engineers or farmers, doctors or 
 teachers. They did not want to be different men and 
 women. It is in conformity with this popular purpose 
 that the elective system of studies has been pushed 
 back from the college into the high-school and that 
 state universities have been compelled, by actual legis- 
 lation is some cases, to admit high-school graduates 
 
 [160] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 simply by virtue of a definite amount of study with- 
 out distinction of content or quality. The recent intro- 
 duction of psychological tests when it is not, as in 
 certain private universities of the East, a weapon 
 against radicals and Jews, can be made to function in 
 precisely the same way. And I do not say that, given 
 the aim, the system is not practical. If the aim of edu- 
 cation is merely to gain rough, useful tools for striv- 
 ing with the world of matter, and to gain them rap- 
 idly — the system works. I suppose that these state 
 universities do turn out very fair engineers and farm- 
 ers and veterinarians. But when their job leaves 
 these men free they are but little different from people 
 who have not gone to college. They go to foolish plays, 
 read silly magazines and fight for every poisonous 
 fallacy in politics, religion and conduct. A professor 
 of geology in the university of Central City was pub- 
 licly converted by Billy Sunday. The fact that he was 
 not thereupon privately "fired," that he was still 
 thought capable of teaching his science, symbolized the 
 situation in its naked horror. 
 
 in 
 
 One or two of my colleagues and I were wont, in 
 our interpretation of literature and thought, to speak 
 freely in the class-room of those deep and serious mat- 
 ters concerning which it befits men and women to 
 think all their lives. A few students — a very few — 
 followed our leading. A number, also small, offered 
 a sullen resistance. The majority considered us inter- 
 esting, stimulating, a little quaint, and regarded these 
 lectures as pleasant exercitations which had no con- 
 
 [161] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 tact with reality. A student, for example, would take 
 advanced courses in philosophy and literature and re- 
 turn, with no sense of discrepancy, to the formularies 
 of a third-rate conventicle. Another, a girl with a face 
 full of intelligence and vivid sweetness, ' 'majored" in 
 French literature. She knew the language well and 
 had read widely. But Montaigne and Anatole France 
 never spoke to her. Her real interest was in Y. W. 
 C. A. work and she was anxious to become a mission- 
 ary. Her one desire was to save the followers of 
 Buddha through the doctrines of the Fifth Street Bap- 
 tist Church. 
 
 This phenomenon was a recurrent one. So let me 
 repeat : Our people do not believe in education at all — 
 if education means a liberation of the mind or a height- 
 ened consciousness of the historic culture of mankind. 
 Philosophy and morals are taken care of by the Fifth 
 Street Baptist Church. College is to fit you to do 
 things — build bridges, cure diseases, teach French. It 
 is not supposed to help you to be. 
 
 Convictions on all ultimate questions our students 
 brought with them ready-made or continued deliber- 
 ately to draw from sources other than ourselves. And 
 these convictions constitute the most rigid and the 
 palest inner culture by which, I suppose, any society 
 has ever tried to live. I wonder whether I can de- 
 scribe this inner culture objectively. I know it almost 
 tangibly. For years I read it in the eyes of my stu- 
 dents, noted it in all their reactions, bruised myself 
 daily against its dull and vicious edges. If I under- 
 stood this ethos rightly, it holds that the aim and end 
 of life is happiness in terms of blameless prosperity. 
 It very sincerely distrusts intensity or distinction of 
 
 [162] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 mind and carelessness of material success. These 
 things make for error and do not make for prosperity. 
 It does not believe in virtue — virtus, power, the crea- 
 tive instinct in the intellectual or moral world — but 
 wholly in such negative commandments as will con- 
 tribute to honest material well-being. You must not 
 drink fermented liquors, you must not criticize your 
 neighbor harshly, you must not — except in business 
 where the contrary is the supreme law — act selfishly; 
 you must not doubt that America has achieved an un- 
 exampled freedom nor that the majority is right — 
 "they say: 'the majority rules ' " — and hence you must 
 shun non-conformity to the fundamental beliefs of the 
 majority as undemocratic and un-American. Also as 
 un-Christian. For the Churches have substituted pro- 
 hibition for saintliness and a state of economic com- 
 petition in which blamelessness achieves prosperity 
 for the kingdom of God. 
 
 How, it will be asked, can such convictions — so 
 hum-drum, so middle-aged, so unheroic — armor as 
 with steel the impassioned spirit of youth? Alas, youth 
 in Central City had no rebellions or curiosities or 
 yearnings. Young things there were not wild things. 
 Adolescents neither wrote verse nor broke idols. A 
 thoughtful physician assured me that nine-tenths of 
 those young Americans with their untroubled eyes and 
 steady gaze were under sexed. And I found a weighty 
 confirmation in this: it was practically impossible, in 
 studying literature, to get an emotional response. 
 Those students had no emotional experience. Their 
 inner lives were supremely poverty-stricken. Nothing 
 in them cried out. In addition, their morality is one 
 of restraint and negation. So that whatever feeble 
 
 [163] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 sparks of personality might smoulder here and there 
 are smothered by the morals and beliefs of the mass- 
 li]fe. Thus personality itself came to seem almost 
 wicked and propriety synonymous with goodness. If 
 they could live so quietly in a moral world which 
 seemed to have no contact with reality, it was because 
 reality in them had little sharpness or insistence. They 
 had become what home and church and school wanted 
 them to be. The ideal of conformity, of colorlessness, 
 of taking the world to be a tame and shop-keeping sort 
 of affair had been achieved. . . . 
 
 Democracy was — was it not? — to set the individual 
 free, to make room in the world for all types of per- 
 sonality, to make life comradly, vivid, flexible? My 
 students had one positive instinct. It was quiet and 
 it never became cruel. But it was unbreakable: the 
 instinct of intolerance. They were quietly intolerant 
 of all qualitative distinctions — even in themselves. I 
 said to a class of seniors: "High-brow is usually a 
 term applied by ignorant people to those whose finer 
 qualities and insights they should seek to emulate." 
 My class laughed in its pleasant, courteous way. An 
 hour later in the library I witnessed this scene. A 
 blond, tousle-headed lad, my chief comfort during a 
 certain year, was trying to sell copies of a magazine 
 which, with the help of the Russian Jewish students, 
 he had tentatively established. The magazine was 
 crude enough. But it was alive. There was verse in 
 it, unrhythmed and gawky, but hopeful, and prose with 
 some close thinking in it and a social outlook and a 
 breath of the future. My friend Jim smiled at me 
 and shouted: "Buy the second number of The Torch!'' 
 One of my seniors passed, the daughter of a federal 
 
 [164] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 judge. She shook her smooth, comely head with a self- 
 satisfied little grin: "Too high-brow for me!" There 
 was an inimitably characteristic little upward inflec- 
 tion on the last word. She bought The Sly-Cat — the 
 students ' comic paper — you may be sure, and laughed 
 over its unspeakable inanities. It was natural, you 
 say. The act — yes. But the spirit of the act! She 
 refused The Torch with self-righteous triumph and 
 read The Sly-Cat with a solid sense of doing the right 
 thing — because it was the ordinary thing. She had 
 made a fetish of commonness — except in the matter 
 of money and clothes and motor-cars. So had they 
 all. . . . 
 
 IV 
 
 If they had met a solid front when they came to 
 Central City, had met detachment, resistance, the 
 critical and distinguishing mind! But the university 
 caters to the High Schools and these to the grade 
 schools and the grade schools to what the hardware- 
 man and the undertaker think their Johns and Wes- 
 leys and Ruths and Helens ought to learn. Here is 
 the incurable dilemna of democracy. A democratic- 
 community, in order to be free, wise, self -governed, 
 needs minds that are so — minds that will think closely, 
 resist delusions, discriminate and really will and 
 choose. An historic and philosophic culture is, in a 
 democracy, no longer a luxury or an accomplishment. 
 It is a bitter necessity. Lacking it, the group-life ia 
 at the mercy of every odious folly, of every brazen 
 demagogue, of every machine-boss, of every catch- 
 word. . . . But how shall we persuade our masters, 
 the hardwareman and the undertaker, that what John 
 
 [165] 
 

 UP STREAM 
 
 and Wesley need for good citizenship, for honest citi- 
 zenship, in the plain and literal sense, is not more skill, 
 bnt history, philosophy, economics, literature — a spir- 
 itual background, a sense of values, a vision of man's 
 life, of " Florence, Weimar, Athens, Rome?" It can 
 not be done. The sage can be disinterested and so can 
 the proletarian. The undertaker and the hardwaremam 
 striving always to be managers of a casket trust or 
 a plow share monopoly, are hopelessly committed to 
 the economic and intellectual status quo. Hence a 
 bourgeois democracy is rigid. This is its dilemma. 
 Whoever possesses or hopes to possess more than he 
 needs, more than a house, a garden, a room full of 
 books, is doomed to keeping static the order in which 
 he lives. 
 
 Well, in our present system of education the de- 
 crees of the hardwareman and the undertaker have 
 been carried out. Thus, in Central City, there are 
 charming buildings for the school of veterinary medi- 
 cine, handsome and commodious ones for agriculture 
 and engineering, domestic science, chemistry and for- 
 estry. The ancient arts and studies of man that give 
 vision and wisdom are squeezed in somehow. The stu- 
 dents see all that and it falls in with the notions they 
 already have of what is -useful and what is not. They 
 tolerate the required Freshman English because of a 
 dim something connected with business letters and ad- 
 vertising "dope." Their spoken English remains, as 
 a matter of fact, hopelessly corrupt. They used to 
 elect German because a "lot of science is written in 
 German." The war rather eased them of that dis- 
 cipline. Spanish, more recently, is chosen on account 
 of a vague notion about the South American trade. The 
 
 [166] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 proof of the reality of these motives is that in Central 
 City there was never more than one small section of 
 Italian. No science there that they know of, no busi- 
 ness either. The advanced courses in language and 
 literature, including English, are filled with girls who 
 can afford the agreeable and the useless. Greek is 
 dead. Latin is still studied by a handful of young 
 women who teach it in High School because "there's 
 so much Latin in English and so many scientific terms 
 are Latin." The reason of spiritual poltroonry. In 
 another generation the classics of the English tongue 
 will be as obsolete as a cuneiform inscription. 
 
 "A new Peneus rolls his fountains 
 
 Against the evening star ! ' ' 
 
 Think of that and the Middle Western student mind. 
 It is a murmur from an unimagined and unimaginable 
 world. The hardwareman and the undertaker have 
 triumphed. And their triumph is sustained in the 
 courts of last resort. The Rockefeller Institute has 
 made the most brazen attack on the humanities on 
 record. No wonder! What is wanted is the skilled 
 hand and the unresisting mind. A democracy of clever 
 workers incapable of close thinking, ignorant of 
 the experience of the race, can be dragged from one 
 delusion to another, given the shadow for the sub- 
 stance, brow-beaten and enslaved. Yet it can, all the 
 while, be gulled into a belief in its own freedom. Men 
 must have heroes. The masters of steel and oil and 
 their henchmen know that. But Milton and Shelley, 
 Kant and Goethe are dangerous heroes. Edison is a 
 safe one. . . . We used to argue that a civilized mind 
 would make even an engineer a better engineer. But 
 
 [167] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 the capitalistic state does not want excellent engineers 
 quite so much as it wants many engineers. It wants 
 degrees and college graduates by the thousand. . . . 
 
 To keep what little hope I had, what impulse 
 toward my work, I found it necessary to stop going 
 to commencement. One year we had eight hundred 
 graduates ; we conferred eight hundred degrees. The 
 long line passed in cap and gown. Seventy per cent 
 should never have gotten here. Seventy per cent could 
 stand no test — not the simplest — in fundamental think- 
 ing or judging or the elements of humane knowledge. 
 But the system is not a sieve; it's a cornucopia. . . . 
 The faces . . . the faces . . . unformed, unstamped 
 by any effort of thought. And then the band and the 
 ribbons and the smug, fond parents and the revolting 
 orators — cheap clergymen as a rule — who shout that 
 this institution is sending forth into life the trained 
 and chosen heralds of civilization. . . . Trained and 
 chosen! Good Lord! Even with our enforced slack- 
 ness, how did most of these raw young fools slide 
 through ? And since they did how, in the name of our 
 as, I once thought, common nature, did they escape 
 after four mortal years so uncontaminated by wisdom 
 and understanding! 
 
 It is clear that I have omitted so far what was a 
 powerful factor in our situation — a faculty of nearly 
 five-hundred. Could this group of men affect noth- 
 ing? Could it in no sense lead the democracy toward 
 better impulses and stricter standards ? There was a 
 time when I would have said yes. But the war came 
 
 [168] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 and, as we shall see — it is indeed notorious — these gen- 
 tlemen went to pieces. But even before the war the 
 trouble with the American professorate was its cow- 
 ardice and its effeminacy of mind. Two men there 
 were on that campus in Central City who in public 
 writing and private speech stood four-square against 
 the pulpiness and muddled utilitarianism of our educa- 
 tional machine. Just two — my friend, the professor 
 of philosophy and I. Others agreed with us quite sin- 
 cerely. We prodded them in vain. My friend is of 
 British extraction and I of Jewish. We were free of 
 that infinitely curious, characteristic American trait — 
 the easy-going, kindly, disastrous dislike of clean-cut 
 individual convictions. I emphasize the word indi- 
 vidual. When the war came these lambs roared like 
 lions. But then they roared in herds. In the old days 
 they had no convictions. If they had them they would 
 not express them. Because, observe, if you have a 
 conviction and express it, you are by that very fact 
 contradicting someone who thinks otherwise. And 
 suppose — though he hasn't whispered on the subject 
 — that other one is the dean of your college! You 
 might "hurt his feelings!" Let the republic slide to 
 the devil. But don't let us hurt anyone's feelings. 
 My friend and I used often to feel almost truculent 
 when we were barely self-respecting. Our colleagues 
 were as tepid as weak tea. ... At the faculty lan- 
 guage and literature club no one ever exercised sharp 
 criticism of another's paper or report. Truth? Sci- 
 ence? It takes "aliens" to get excited over such 
 things. And at nine-thirty they grew restive. They 
 were expected at home. The consummate terror in 
 which they stood of their uninteresting wives gave the 
 
 [169] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 last touch to the picture of their moral and intellectual 
 futility. 
 
 There are deeper reasons for the lack of intellectual 
 hardihood that marks our university faculties. Who 
 and what are these American professors? They are, 
 almost all, honorable and high-minded gentlemen. 
 They try, in a feeble way, to live up to the best light 
 they have, although, as Arnold said of their ancestors, 
 they're criminally careless about inquiring whether 
 that light is not darkness. But they are not men 
 driven by an inner urgency. They are not the servants 
 of an idea or of a passion of the soul. Most of them 
 could easily have been something else. They went into 
 teaching either because they had a pleasant taste for 
 learning and no particular taste for anything else; 
 or because they were timid and of a retiring nature 
 and didn't like the rough and tumble of the business 
 world. Or, because — in an appalling number of cases 
 — they simply drifted into the academic life. Thus 
 there is among them littlei intensity or power, little 
 courage or independence, much pinch-beck dignity and 
 lust for administrative twaddle. 
 
 The argument used to be current on that campus, 
 as it is on every campus, that strong men do not enter 
 the academic profession because there are no prizes in 
 it. "We were, it is true, wretchedly poor. That pov- 
 erty has increased year by year. Nor were we re- 
 warded by any great dignity of social standing or ap- 
 proval. Yet the argument was and remains but a 
 shallow one. The youth whose whole being is one con- 
 suming and unanswerable passion for literature or 
 science or philosophy, who shrinks at the very thought 
 of business or money-getting, cannot be deterred from 
 
 [170] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 the academic life by its slender rewards. For he seeks 
 and chooses that life in order to live at all. He must 
 choose it at whatever salary. No ; the ' ' strong man in 
 business'' argument is a fallacy. That strong man 
 could never have been the academic strong man. His 
 capability of being what he is is proof enough. He 
 did not, by an unescapable compulsion, love best the 
 eternal things of the mind. If he did, he couldn't be 
 spending his time in anything so trivial as making 
 money by multiplying or exchanging things. . . . The 
 best men in the university are those who couldn't pos- 
 sibly have been anything else. They are the ones whom 
 a wise polity would not condemn to humiliating penury. 
 They are the brains and the souls and the hope of the 
 land. The mere teachers, who might as easily have 
 been bank-officials or commission-merchants, are not to 
 be pitied. Let them be other things for a few academic 
 generations. Then perhaps the chosen servants of the 
 eternal life will come into their own. . . . But try to 
 urge that on a given campus. Do you mean So and 
 So should go? Exactly! But he is such a good hus- 
 band ! "Which means that the poor man is not only an 
 ass but a feebly uxorious ass. . . . 
 
 It goes without saying that the majority of those 
 who drift into the academic life are dreary specialists 
 with, angular, strawy minds. They often teach their 
 subjects competently in the narrow, technical sense, 
 but without richness or savor or human and philo- 
 sophical implications. Yet that is what the American 
 student supremely needs. He needs the electric touch 
 of personality; he gets uncoordinated information. 
 But many of my colleagues really had a kind of Phar- 
 isaism in this matter. Their attitude was : this is my 
 
 [1711 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 specialty; I am master of it; I don't pretend to more 
 and distrust those who do. In the early years — I grew 
 wary later — a colleague once asked me : ' ' What 's your 
 special line?" He knew, of course, that I was teach- 
 ing German. He meant : do I specialize in the sixteenth 
 century or the eighteenth, the Middle High German, 
 lyric or the Renaissance drama. I wasn't thinking of 
 his psychology and answered: "Oh, in some moods 
 I'm sorry I'm not teaching English, but I find German 
 literature more and more sustaining as time goes on. 
 Of course, there are advantages in — " The good man's 
 look of cool and incredulous amazement cut my inno- 
 cent outpourings short. 
 
 vi 
 
 The actual business of teaching was often dreary 
 enough. Largely because there was no proper division 
 of work. I taught a section of beginners and conducted 
 a seminar for candidates for the doctorate. I taught 
 intermediate classes. In a word, I was high school 
 teacher, college teacher, university professor on the 
 same day. I had constantly to practice and apply to 
 my subject three utterly different methods. The wear 
 and tear of that was great. It made against concen- 
 tration and harmony and hence effectiveness. There 
 was also a terrible amount of sheer, heart-breaking 
 waste. The elective system permits a student to take 
 just enough of a subject to illumine his special and 
 general ignorance. But I dare say that a qualitative 
 differentiation of work for the professors or compul- 
 sion upon the student to master something would both 
 have been considered undemocratic and are so consid- 
 
 [172] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 ered now. "When I used to present such considerations 
 my friends often thought me a pessimist, one who sees 
 life with a jaundiced eye. They had an eighteenth 
 centuryish kind of cheer. This is the best of all pos- 
 sible worlds. In our easy-going, democratic way we 
 shall muddle through. Through? Yes. But in what 
 direction? To what goal? Well, here we are in 1921. 
 The best civilization on the old Continent is dying. 
 We are fat and also the reactionaries, the Black Hun- 
 dreds, of the world. My friends in Central City are, I 
 swear, capable of not knowing or not permitting them- 
 selves to know either, but of still trying to muddle 
 through with optimistic phrases. . . . 
 
 Yet my very pessimism sustained me, urged me on 
 to new efforts, to the daily service of the cause. How- 
 ever tired I was, however discouraged, once in the 
 class-room I felt an energy that never quite failed me. 
 There might have been on that day one student — if 
 but one who heard me in the deeper sense and ac- 
 cepted, however imperfectly, the spirit of my teaching 
 — one who at least in the years to come would realize 
 through memory that once in his youth he had heard 
 a summons from the common and the mean, a protest 
 against the obliteration of all freer and finer values, a 
 call to become a member of that small company of elect 
 spirits who have been, in every age, the guardians of 
 the torch of the true humanities. For it is by its pro- 
 duction of such a company of spirits that a civilization 
 stands or falls. Number and size are a monstrous de- 
 lusion, machinery is a snare, wealth is trash. ... A 
 society which, as a whole, venerates Edison more than 
 Emerson is in danger of becoming a society of damned 
 souls in the only sense in which damnation has a 
 
 [173] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 meaning. What a platitude. Only, unfortunately, it 
 isn't a platitude in America — -it's heretical nonsense. 
 In America, observe ! Not among those Swedish and 
 German and Levantine and Irish critics and writers in 
 New York whose influence upon the civilization of their 
 native land is beginning to trouble the patriots. . . . 
 
 In my moments of half -humorous despair I used to 
 tell myself that my fine phrases did, at least, square 
 with the brutal fact. There never was more than one 
 .such student to be found. Not in a class, but in a year. 
 So and so many young women, of course, went through 
 the gesture of understanding. But the gestures were 
 quite like those they made at receptions — elegant con- 
 ventions by which to hide the true state of their minds. 
 Or else their reactions were sentimental. After an 
 energetic lecture on the ethical problem in Faust, an 
 immense, buxom, blank-faced young woman came lan- 
 guishing to my desk : ' ' Oh, Professor, you give me such 
 a beautiful feeling!" Such moments were discourag- 
 ing. They took the wind out of one's sails. I used to 
 cherish the ambition to teach at an institution for men 
 only. ... 
 
 Yet I shall not end this chapter upon so negative a 
 note. A I said at the beginning: My students were 
 very loyal to me. "Whether they understood me or 
 not — usually they didn't — whether I was teaching 
 them language or literature, they felt that I was bent 
 upon some business in which their souls were somehow 
 really concerned. That much nearly all of them saw; 
 for that perception they were nearly all a little grate- 
 ful. So that, in addition to conveying a certain amount 
 of knowledge, I at least did this during my seven years 
 as a college teacher: I caused a number of young 
 
 [174] 
 
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 
 
 Americans of the Middle West to regard with liking 
 and respect one who was frankly merciless to the 
 popular fallacies and the mass delusions amid which 
 they had to live. 
 
 I earned my small salary upon austerer terms than 
 most of my colleagues. I gave myself, not only my 
 knowledge of German. Nor was I idle during my brief 
 leisure, full as that leisure often was of an intense 
 anguish of body and mind. I wrote several books that 
 brought me little money but carried the name of my 
 university where it had not been heard before and 
 also visibly caused juster and truer views of the sub- 
 jects with which they dealt to prevail. I was, in brief, 
 a citizen passionately and fruitfully concerned for the 
 welfare of a society which had always received him 
 grudgingly and half-heartedly, but which he had never- 
 theless come to regard as his own. And because I 
 would not join in a cosmic orgy of stupidity and slan- 
 der, of foul myth and blood-soaked ritual I was finally 
 held to be in that place of my activity a meaner citizen 
 than any owner of leathern lungs and brazen lips. . . . 
 
 A friend told me the other day that my name is a 
 household word among the very cultured of Central 
 City. They regard me and work as, in an 
 intimate and delightful sense y their own. ... I 
 didn't contradict the tepid little lady. Those people 
 are capable of saying and feeling just that. The war 
 is over. My reputation is growing. Why shouldn't 
 they get a little pleasure and self-importance out of it? 
 They have forgotten the year of grace 1917 when no 
 hand but one was stretched out to help me, because I 
 would not be a hypocrite and could not be a fool. 
 
 [175] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 They're Anglo-Americans — these good people. They 
 are quite sincere. They do not know the difference 
 between truth and falsehood. If ever I visit Central 
 City they are capable of giving a banquet — with grape- 
 juice — in my honor. . . . 
 
 [176] 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 The Colob op Life 
 
 In the seventh month of the first year of our stay 
 in Central City there came a special delivery letter 
 from my father. He wrote that I must come home for 
 a few days at once, because my mother had to undergo 
 an operation which could not be delayed. ... I want 
 to describe these events without reticence. Literature 
 has a way of veiling pain — of talking about it. We 
 should look at pain as it is. If we are less furtive 
 about it, perhaps we shall spend more of our strength 
 trying to mend life, less trying to break each others' 
 lives. . . . 
 
 Mary tried to calm me. We had been in Queens- 
 haven that summer and my mother had seemed, as she 
 always did, in radiant health, preserving even then a 
 faint touch of the coloring and the freshness of youth. 
 But in my mind some dark, actually audible gong 
 seemed to ring out. Then the body responded. A 
 sweetish, gnawing sickness in the pit of the stomach; 
 a bitter dryness in the throat and mouth. For several 
 years that condition never left me. It returns often, 
 to this day, at the most trifling anxiety. 
 
 On the long journey South, caged in a sleeper, de- 
 
 [177] 
 
UP STKEAM 
 
 prived by a brutal tyranny of the tonic and relief of 
 wine, I shook in an uninterrupted cold fever. I had 
 no hope . . . Queenshaven looked like a toy city in an 
 eerie dream, my father's white face contorted into a 
 smile of welcome looked like a goblin's. "Mother is 
 up, perfectly strong." He tried to put a reassuring 
 note into this statement. But the trouble was — well? 
 Yes, cancer. Far gone. In a most vital spot. I nearly 
 doubled up with the sweetish gnawing in my entrails. 
 I tried to speak, but my mouth seemed to be filled with 
 lime. My father, patient and brave as always, re- 
 minded me: "Mother is up, you understand. We 
 must. ..." A fierce light flared up in my brain. ' ' Of 
 course we must!" She wasn't going to the hospital 
 till the next day. She wanted first to spend twenty- 
 four hours with me. . . . 
 
 She stood at the head of the stairs as always when 
 I came home with the soft lamplight on her beautiful, 
 white hair. But she was erect and her skin was smooth 
 as a girl's. Only a touch of paleness. ... I put my 
 arms about her and dared not weep. No, somewhere 
 within me I, too, found the strength to play my part. 
 We smiled and chatted and even ate. But all the while 
 I had a queer sensation. I heard my voice and the 
 words I spoke as though they came from another 
 speaker in the farthest corner of the room. When- 
 ever she left us alone, my father and I fell silent and 
 our contorted faces relaxed and we rested as men 
 catch their breath in the intervals of torture. . . . On 
 the evening of that day — a calm, bland day — we drove 
 her. to the infirmary. She was rather stunned and 
 rather frightened. She had hardly ever known illness. 
 But the room assigned seemed pleasant to her, the 
 
 [178] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 special nurse was a sturdy, sensible Scotch girl and 
 the Mother Superior who knew us and had some in- 
 sight into our situation was quite perfect in her seri- 
 ous, hopeful sweetness. . . . 
 
 The operation, next morning, lasted for over an 
 hour. My father and I walked up and down in front 
 of the building. We lit one cigarette from another 
 and paced and paced. We didn't say anything. Now 
 and then we caught each others ' eyes and looked away 
 quickly. We couldn't bear what we saw. At last the 
 Mother Superior stood in the doorway. From her 
 smile we knew that the operation had been successful. 
 I couldn't smile back and she looked at me question- 
 ingly. But I was beyond self-deception and easy con- 
 solation and all the softer feelings by which people try 
 to bear the unbearable. I knew that my mother, being 
 strong, would probably stand the operation, however 
 radical, well ; I knew that the surgeons were excellent. 
 I also knew, however, that there wasn't a chance of 
 the lymphatic system not being badly involved and 
 that before many months my mother would die — would 
 die by slow, intolerable poisoning, with all her hopes 
 frustrated — would die before I had had a chance to 
 bring any brightness to her saddened heart. My old 
 race against fate and death was lost. 
 
 I was able to stay for ten days. All day I sat be- 
 side her. She was feeling quite well. We had long 
 talks, her hand in mine. She had never taken the mor- 
 bid interest in disease that is so common, and was full 
 of hope for the future. So even these talks that made 
 her happy were a long torment to me. The fatal truth 
 kept beating in my head like a pulse. Then I had to 
 go. . . . 
 
 [179] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 The next six months ! Words are used up like dull, 
 cracked, edgeless knives. They cannot cleave to those 
 depths of pain in which, in the very centre of his being, 
 without any reservation, a man desires his death. Dur- 
 ing the first four months there was the added sting, 
 the withering irony, of good reports and cheerful let- 
 ters to write. It seemed — things being as they were — 
 almost more merciful when she began to sicken — when 
 she came to us to Central City, glad to be there, still 
 not without hope, though very ill and broken. And it 
 seemed more merciful, too, that when she could no 
 longer raise herself up and her anguish became so 
 acute as to require powerful narcotics — that then she 
 sank more swiftly into exhaustion than our physicians 
 had predicted and, on the noon of a brilliant October 
 day, died in Mary's arms. In the coffin she looked young 
 again and her face wore an expression of serenity 
 and severe sweetness which I had not seen on it for 
 many years. . . . 
 
 During many weeks, as a matter of instinctive self- 
 preservation, I sought refuge in certain idealistic as- 
 sumptions and speculations. I re-read The Critique of 
 the Practical Reason and even Browning. But it 
 was merely the kind of gesture by which a man tries 
 to ward off blows he is too weak to endure. The tenta- 
 tive and half -prayerful aspiration toward some extra- 
 mundane source of power and good which had re- 
 mained with me from my Christian youth died out en- 
 tirely. I saw the world in a harder and a drier mood. 
 I lost my last shred of respect for all religious and 
 ethical formulations — for all types of supernaturalism 
 and absoluteness in thinking — for everything except 
 such forms of beauty or freedom or justice as might 
 
 [180] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 mitigate our stark wretchedness on earth. It seemed 
 to me then, as it seems to me now, unspeakably mon- 
 strous that, in a world where people are poisoned by 
 cancer, they should persecute each other by social dis- 
 tinctions, ill-apportioned wealth, ethical bickering or 
 rob each other of a moment's peace in the brief, pitiful 
 sunlight in the name of any absolutist formulary, legal 
 or moral or religious. That sounds crude. But I am 
 not writing a philosophical treatise. And I am sure 
 that a description of the source in concrete experience 
 from which most philosophic and all poetic visions of 
 the sum of reality spring, would sound just as crude. 
 In a word, I abandoned all faith in any form of per- 
 sonal and transcendental idealism and gradually 
 adopted the hope for economic security and personal 
 freedom embodied in the revolutionary movement of 
 our period. No, I am not, like a good many liberals, 
 shirking the name of Socialism. But I would break 
 with Socialism as swiftly as with any other system, if 
 it were not to confine the power of society over the in- 
 dividual strictly to the sphere of economics, hygiene 
 and the necessity — not the character! — of education; 
 if it were not to leave the personal and moral life of 
 the individual absolutely free. I mean absolutely. I 
 do not mean that hoary iniquity, that vile excuse for 
 conscription and sex-slavery known as "liberty, oh, 
 yes — but no licence." I mean that every man shall 
 practice his own liberty, even though it seems licence 
 to another. I want a world — to return to that burning 
 symbol in my personal life — in which the beautiful, 
 sensitive, gifted spirit of my mother would not have 
 been warped and crippled by mean anxieties and social 
 exclusions and absurd ethical inhibitions, but one in 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 which she could have lived the years that the dark 
 powers behind the veil permitted her in freedom and 
 richness and the expansion of all her tastes and sensi- 
 bilities. And I think this outlook on life well-estab- 
 lished. It is not founded on speculation or tradition, 
 but on the granite basis of a tragic fact. 
 
 n 
 
 So I became, naturally, more concerned with so- 
 ciety and more watchful of it. Before this I had been 
 almost wholly engrossed in art and thought and learn- 
 ing. I now turned my attention upon this city and 
 state in which I lived and on the way in which my fel- 
 low-citizens were managing their affairs and mine. 
 
 A mayor was to be elected. The city had then over 
 two hundred thousand inhabitants. Its government 
 entailed some very difficult engineering problems. 
 Also, it was and is dispiriting in its ugliness. There 
 was its' educational machine. There were other intri- 
 cate matters. Now for this difficult office of mayor 
 we had six candidates: a business man, a printer, a 
 bank official, the chief of police, two lawyers. Let me 
 omit the two lawyers. I knew little about them except 
 the fact of their obscurity before election time and that 
 neither had a chance of being elected. Of the other 
 four, one of whom was elected, I can make certain very 
 definite assertions: they knew nothing of municipal 
 engineering, nothing of education, nothing of the ele- 
 ments of even the conventional doctrines of political 
 science, nothing of the experiments tried in the city- 
 government of other countries. In a word, they had 
 no equipment for the office to which they aspired. Nor 
 
 [182] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 was it likely that these elderly, semi-illiterate men 
 would equip themselves either during the brawling 
 campaign months or during their two years in office. 
 The stock reply of the conventional American is: 
 Lincoln had no education either. True. But man- 
 kind doesn't produce a certain type of moral genius 
 by the thousand. It can produce well-trained and in- 
 telligent officials. You cannot administer a common- 
 wealth by waiting for miracles. Those four candi- 
 dates, at all events, hadn't any claims to being demo- 
 cratic saviors of society. On the contrary. They were 
 men of the coarsest fibre — men with spiritually dead 
 faces, with something gross and callous, impudent and 
 yet furtive about their personalities and bearing. They 
 exhibited a curious, I had almost said, family resem- 
 blance in this respect. And it was ghastly to see how 
 these men, in the poster photographs during the cam- 
 paign, had tried to look the part expected of them — 
 benevolent and honest, "smart" and burly. The pic- 
 tures seemed to want to say to the voter: "Don't 
 think I pretend to know more than you. I worked hard 
 as a boy and supported my pore ol' mother. I never 
 had no time for book- learnin'. But I've got a cer- 
 tain amount of plain common sense, Mr. Voter, and 
 business experience and these I want to put at your 
 disposal. And I'm a jolly good fellow.' ' 
 
 In their speeches and proclamations these four 
 candidates made the same assertions. Each was going 
 to give the city an honest administration — no graft — 
 (as if that were a positive virtue, as if it weren't 
 shameful that the voter should have to choose on that 
 plane) — each was going to give us a clean city — (by 
 which he meant making life a bit more difficult for a 
 
 [183] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 few hundred prostitutes) — each was going to give us 
 an efficient and economical administration. Very well. 
 Only c every one knew that none of the men had the 
 equipment or the purity of will to do either. As a mat- 
 ter of fact the candidates wanted office either because 
 they thought it would help them in a business way or 
 through meanly personal ambition or because they had 
 been accustomed to make their bread and butter out of 
 a political job. Seeing their character, it was not diffi- 
 cult to imagine what concessions and promises each 
 made quite inevitably to the business men and finan- 
 ciers who backed him and provided the machinery and 
 funds for his campaign. 
 
 All this sounds commonplace enough. And indeed 
 it is. But I came upon it with a certain- freshness, a 
 certain innocence, an ability to be shocked by the 
 brazen and meaningless clatter of it. The world has 
 moved since then. But the character of political gov- 
 ernment in the affairs of cities and of states has not 
 changed. Its purpose is to deceive the common folk 
 and to fortify and extend the power of the privileged 
 classes. And since power ultimately means economic 
 power, since its one source is possession — possession 
 of land, tools, means of transportation — it follows that, 
 consciously or unconsciously, the whole function and 
 intent of political government is to keep possession and 
 hence power in the hands of those that now hold it. 
 And since this oligarchy controls the press and thus 
 controls both the news and opinion based on news, it is 
 clear that its self -perpetuation will not be broken — has 
 not been broken in any country — without some final 
 catastrophe. 
 
 [184] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 n 
 
 Have we, I asked in those years, no directer expres- 
 sion of the popular will. Yes. In matters that are 
 non-political, therefore non-economic and so moder- 
 ately indifferent to the possessing classes — in educa- 
 tion (though even here, as I have shown, it is to the 
 profit of the oligarchs to confirm popular folly) and 
 in the government of the personal life of men. Every 
 two years in those days the people of the state voted on 
 a prohibition amendment to the constitution; every 
 two years it was defeated by a smaller minority. To- 
 day we have national prohibition. New York liberals 
 wonder how it could have happened. They should 
 have watched the paralysis of will and impulse creep- 
 ing over a Middle Western state, a state full of what 
 has recently become known as the "home-town." 
 
 Each time the question came up I found my Anglo- 
 American friends succumbing a little more and a little 
 less willing to protest against the raucous propaganda. 
 It became in the end almost "bad form." In the first 
 place, twenty-one states were already dry — even Mich- 
 igan. So the terrible fatalism of democracy, inherent 
 in its worship of majority opinion and its fundamental 
 rejection of qualitative distinctions was making itself 
 felt more and more. If a disease spreads, expose your- 
 self to it. Why should you want something better than 
 others? I found my acquaintances almost so sodden 
 in their folly. Furthermore — it was a question of 
 morals and they had an unconquerable hesitation 
 toward taking a negative attitude on a question of 
 morals. Even those who were not at all fanatical and 
 themselves drank were willing to let things take their 
 
 [185] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 evil course: "It does nobody any good; it does some 
 people harnij I mustn't be selfish. . . ;" They looked at 
 me with estranged eyes when I said: "I'd be willing 
 to take an oath never to touch fermented liquor again 
 if only I could save our people from the infamy of pro- 
 hibition. ' ' 
 
 But most of my friends were, in some strange way, 
 hypnotized by the fevered fanatics of the Anti-Saloon 
 League and the Evangelical Churches. No one seemed 
 to understand the character of these poor creatures. 
 They can no longer bum witches or whip Quakers. 
 They have somehow lost their grip on the devil of old. 
 So they have made the substance known as ethyl al- 
 cohol into an overshadowing myth — the evil thing in 
 the world that must be fought and trodden under foot 
 and exorcised by Christian men. Since they cannot 
 quite in this age say that I am an unbelieving dog, 
 they say — with sternly pitying and averted faces — that 
 I shall die a drunkard. It is, of course, because in 
 their savage and yet festering souls they have never 
 caught a glimpse of the meaning of humane culture — 
 choice, self-direction, a beautiful use of all things. 
 These poor slaves of drink must either howl against it 
 or reel in barrooms. One knows the type : thin-lipped, 
 embittered by the poisons that unnatural repression 
 breeds, with a curious flatness about the temples, with 
 often, among the older men, a wiry, belligerent beard. 
 You have seen them with their shallow-bo ssomed, ill- 
 favored wives — stern advocates of virtue — walking on 
 Sunday self-consciously to church. The wine they have 
 never tasted, the white beauty they have never seen, 
 the freedom of art they have never known — all their 
 
 [186] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 unconscious hungers have turned to gall and worm- 
 wood in their crippled souls. 
 
 Yet to these maimed creatures — a bodily cripple 
 is a more wholesome sight — my friends in Central 
 City yielded more and more. They yielded to them 
 in all matters. A film was shown down town that Mary 
 and I wanted to see. It was useless. Before we could 
 go, the secretary of the Lord's Day Association had 
 caused it to be mutilated in the interest of our moral 
 being. ... I wanted to buy another copy of Dreiser's 
 The Genius. It had been forbidden by the Society for 
 the Prevention of Vice. I am not able, as some of my 
 liberal New York friends are, to take a humourous 
 view of this situation. To take that view of it is to be 
 in danger of supineness. Consider the matter clearly : 
 We are helpless against any irresponsible person who 
 shouts: Morality, Purity, the Home. Yet precisely 
 these difficult and rigid concepts must be broken before 
 a ray of civilization can light our gloom. For en- 
 tangled in them, tightly woven into them, is an amount 
 of concrete human tyranny, concrete human suffering 
 — days of despair and nights of agony — that is prob- 
 ably unexampled in history. The emotional acceptance 
 of these concepts has diminished even where a help- 
 lessness of the mind curbs the formation of a conscious 
 protest. The result is dumb misery and perversion 
 and the sickening and putrefaction of the impulses of 
 will and sex. "When psychical explosions come, they 
 necessarily take the form of war, hate, persecution, 
 lynching. Degraded by the oppression of Moralty and 
 Purity and the Home — in their current meanings — ■ 
 men summon the evil passions bred by their degrada- 
 tion to defend its instruments. . . . 
 
 [187] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 IV 
 
 In our early years in Central City Mary and I used 
 to go out into society a good deal. Later we acquired 
 a reputation for refusing invitations. I could endure 
 no more. For what was the use of going to places if 
 other people only sent their clothes and maimers and 
 left their real selves at home. It was, at best, a pan- 
 tomime, a ceremony, a decorative device, I cannot say 
 that most of our acquaintances in Central City were 
 successful decorations. Stereotyped phrases fluttered 
 in the air; ice-cream was served. The phrases sick- 
 ened me ; so did the ice-cream. 
 
 "What wore on me most was the appalling mental 
 vacuity. People said they were having a pleasant 
 time. Some lied. Others had sunk so low that their 
 remark was true. Since I, as a teacher and writer, 
 was supposed to have an official connection with the 
 arts, the women talked art at me — poetry and the 
 drama. Cold chills used to run down my spine. "Art, 
 my good ladies, is not what you suppose: it's not a 
 game — like bridge; it's not a ceremony — like a recep- 
 tion. It is the record and clarification of deepest 
 human experience. It raises into permanence and 
 beauty for our contemplation the experience of man 
 upon his way. Think of the day you saw your mother 
 die, of the hours you lay in bitter labor with your first- 
 born, of the moment when you came, a virgin, to a 
 man's embrace. These are sources of art. Or have 
 you ever been hungry or an outcast or fought single- 
 handed in a good cause?" If I had ever said that! 
 "Don't you think, doctor, that X. is a wonderful 
 writer?" "Of course, you ought to know, but I think. . . 
 
 [188] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 tliink. ..." So they twittered and chirped — elderly 
 women, too, mothers who ought to have come into some 
 earnestness with the years. They had. Only the life 
 of art and of the intellect is not a serious matter to 
 them and their kind. Money is a serious matter. So- 
 cial position is another. Health is a third. Then why, 
 in God's name, didn't they talk money and social posi- 
 tion and disease? Why were they not a little truthful? 
 I don't care about money and social position and I 
 hate to talk about disease except when I must and then 
 to a doctor. Yet everything human is interesting, so 
 it be forthright and comes from a deep source. . . . 
 But that's bad form. "Oh, I thought your lecture last 
 week so stimulating." She probably lied and I felt 
 like asking her what my lecture was about. Instead I 
 had to grin over my abominable ice-cream and say with 
 the proper intonation: "So nice of you to have come 
 to it. ' ' No, I abandoned that sort of thing and went, 
 instead, to a public-house with a friend. It was so 
 much more decent. Of course, I was popularly 
 credited with a tinge of vulgarity. But the people 
 forgave me. Even those who didn't, never let Mary 
 feel it. Until the war came they were kindly enough. 
 . . . The men, at these affairs, were largely background. 
 They followed the lead of the women. There was a 
 touch of mild, middle-aged archness.^ Flirting would 
 be too gross a word. There was no liberty of mind or 
 emotion or personality or speech. 
 
 The men alone present a different aspect. I was, 
 for instance, invited to a private and exclusive little 
 club of business-men and bankers and lawyers and 
 physicians. The club met at a rich man's house. The 
 place was furnished with luxury and in tolerably good 
 
 1189] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 taste. There was beer and tobacco and an atmosphere 
 of virile ease. It looked hopeful. Nearly all the men 
 had a local reputation for culture and were graduates 
 of Eastern colleges. Yet, as the evening wore on, I 
 grew more and more silent and when it was over I 
 was glad to get out into the cool, dark street alone. 
 For these men talked exclusively of things — the price 
 of real estate, of stocks and bonds and sugar. They 
 told stories of shady business deals and ;of political 
 corruption. Not, be it observed, in a spirit of criticism, 
 but with acquiescent good humor. The monstrous 
 implication of all their talk — I include both the dis- 
 tinguished occulist and the learned judge — was this: 
 here we have the best of all polities in the best of all 
 possible worlds; for in this polity and in this world 
 we make our money and have these houses and auto- 
 mobiles and fifty-cent cigars. Anyone, therefore, who 
 wants to change this order is a knave or a fool and 
 we would go to any length to crush him. Well-fed, 
 well-groomed, they sat in their impenetrable stolidity, 
 taking liberties with everything except their minds. 
 The gentleness which they had at receptions was quite 
 gone. There was something agate-like about them. I 
 understood at last how it is possible for men to hire 
 thugs and incite striking workers to violence and then 
 shoot them down. In mellower intervals they talked 
 golf and base-ball. . . . They treated me with finished 
 courtesy. But their courtesy didn't hide their essential 
 attitude: I was to them (by virtue of the interests I 
 stood for) a little higher than a fiddler, many degrees 
 lower, except socially, than "Babe" Euth. They didn't 
 mind an occasional condescension to art and learn- 
 ings. But these things are really, they seemed to say, 
 
 [190] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 luxuries for women. Nor did their own assertion of 
 personal freedom — the excellent beer they drank — en- 
 courage one. For they drank only at private houses 
 and private clubs. They drank with an evil secretive- 
 ness and a poisonous aloofness. Quite conceivably 
 they voted "dry." Their clubs are still supplied — 
 you may be sure. The decent and the democratic places 
 to drink are home — with open windows — and the pub- 
 lic-house. But a genuine as opposed to a pseudo-demo- 
 cratic bearing might have injured their financial 
 standing, their professional dignity. In public they 
 all talk liberty. In reality they were stealthier than 
 feudal lords. Later, no doubt, they became the sup- 
 porters of Navy Clubs and Defense Leagues and of 
 the modern Inquisition under Mitchel Palmer. . . . 
 
 Is there no rebellion against the dark unveracity 
 that degrades and muffles all the instincts of man? 
 Faint flutterings — pathetic in the sense of their own 
 feebleness and shame. Has any other people ever 
 expressed its Dionysiac mood so spiritlessly as in jazz, 
 the new dances, the common cabaret? And yet . . . 
 listen well to this raucous, syncopated,, music — not 
 music so much as sheer, rude rhythm — like the stamp- 
 ing feet and clapping hands of rude, old orgiastic folk- 
 dances. Now and then, in the tunes, you come upon a 
 vain and melancholy cry — a cry of torment, a cry of 
 liberation. Read the words of the popular songs — 
 sung in a million parlors every evening by shop-girls, 
 typists, laundresses, even college-girls to their 
 
 [191] 
 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 "beaux." They are illiterate and vulgar and inde- 
 scribably mean. But what imperious instinct cursed 
 and beaten into hiding will not show the ugly marks 
 of the slave! The choruses of these songs are ugly 
 because they t dare not be beautiful, stealthy because 
 they dare not be frank. But in dance and song and 
 ragtime there is a craving for rhythm — the rhythm of 
 the world that is sex and poetry and freedom. It is an 
 ugly, hoarse, tortured rhythm — like the dancing of a 
 crippled child. . . . The rhythm beats on and on. . . . 
 My friend the lawyer told me this story from the 
 records of the Central City courts. A fellow killed a 
 man and was sent to prison. His young wife sup- 
 ported herself and her child and her mother and faith- 
 fully waited for her husband. He came out of prison 
 and beat her and ran away and was heard of no more. 
 So the young 1 woman and her mother took a lodger. He 
 fell in love with the woman and they lived together. He 
 supported her and her mother and her child. But when 
 his own child was born the court arrested the couple, 
 sentenced them to the workhouse for adultery and 
 placed the children in public institutions. The records 
 do not tell us what became of the old mother, nor in 
 what state of mind the man and woman came from 
 the workhouse. Do you wonder that to the people love 
 has come to seem a shameful thing? . . . Men sit at 
 cheap burlesque shows with a leer. Why not? Judges 
 and clergymen and businessmen tell them that their 
 appetites — the source of all they have in life of poetry 
 and romance and the freedom of choice and adventure 
 — are bestial ; that they are not — the last ingenuity of 
 foulness — to be humanized, but to be whipped out of 
 sight like mangy curs. Then they expect them to be 
 
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THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 clean and handsome. . . . The man and the woman of 
 my story came out, I suppose, with a purer love, a 
 cleaner sex-life, a higher self-respect. . . . We shall 
 not have lovelier private morals until we have 
 destroyed public morality — the fang and claw of 
 Puritan capitalism. . . 
 
 There are nobler protests and more conscious ones 
 than dances and cabarets. There is the rebellion of 
 the intellect and of a few free personalities. Little 
 groups of men and women detach themselves from the 
 monotonous mass here and there. People jeer at Green- 
 wich Village — the shabby Latin Quarter of New York. 
 Even liberals are contemptuous. But do you expect 
 anything unstained and clear to-day? Even this is 
 something. The other day, after a long interval, I 
 wrote some verses. And they sum up something of 
 this whole matter. I called the verses The Greenwich 
 Villagers and represented these people as speaking 
 of themselves : 
 
 We're shabby and not always clean. We know. . . . 
 
 You come from Harlem and from Washington Heights 
 
 And look at us as though we were a show, 
 
 And crowd through foolish little inns for sights, 
 
 And, being liberals, are sorry for 
 
 Our fluttering aims and large futility. . . . 
 
 And when the lamps go out we seem to be 
 
 Hovering shadows in a dim corridor 
 
 That leads to places where a man forgets 
 
 Amid the blue fume of the cigarettes 
 
 Man's proper business for which earth was made : 
 
 Marriage and war and trade. 
 
 [193] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 But just because we do forget, because 
 
 In our small, callow, ineffectual way 
 
 We drift beyond success and all its laws 
 
 And warm our hearts with brief loves as the day 
 
 Dips red in the North River — therefore we 
 
 Are as a flicker of hope above the gray 
 
 Walls of your goodness and brutality. 
 
 We are the children of the land who fled 
 
 In Autumn when the winds of longing blew 
 
 Even from Pittsburgh and from Kalamazoo 
 
 From jobs in which our brothers served and rose, 
 
 From colleges with Doric porticoes 
 
 Where living things are fettered to things dead — 
 
 And we are nothing but the unresigned 
 
 Who in great darkness feebly speak the name 
 
 Of that rebellion which will save mankind 
 
 And from our poor, lost ashes leap to flame. 
 
 And so you may despise us more or less, 
 
 And hug your righteousness and your success, 
 
 And never dream that we poor lads in blue, 
 
 We girls with draggled skirts and close-bobbed hair 
 
 May be the saving of the souls of you, 
 
 Even as we tramp on Greenwich Avenue 
 
 Or loiter in the dusk on Washington Square. 
 
 But these things were far from Central City. Faint 
 rumors came. What, in those years, I definitely knew 
 and saw was the Federal Post Office stamping out as 
 either "seditious" or "obscene" anything it pleased. 
 From 1915 on the silence deepened — an ugly ominous 
 silence. Such, I dare say, was the silence in the In- 
 quisition chambers. Also, men began to break off 
 speech in the middle of a sentence and turn a little red 
 or pale. And they began to watch each other and fur- 
 tively to listen to each other for seditious remarks and 
 
 [194] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 plan and scheme how they could make business or pro- 
 fessional profit out of their neighbor's indiscretion. 
 And, anonymous letters and telephone calls kept busy 
 the offices of the District Attorney, who, although we 
 were to be "kept out of the war," was very accessible 
 to information that might come in handy later. . . . 
 
 YI 
 
 Yet then and even now the man on the streets 
 thinks that we have liberty. He has no true concep- 
 tion of its nature, and his spirit is corrupted by the 
 brutal romanticism of success. For he is right in 
 thinking that, within ever narrowing limits, he has one 
 kind of liberty — the liberty of economic competition. 
 He may, if he is clever and unscrupulous enough, steal 
 the resources that belong to all men and so enslave a 
 number of his fellows and become a plutocrat him- 
 self. He reads about Morgan and Eockefeller and 
 shakes his head with a leer: "Smart men." And per- 
 haps he has a day-dream of himself — now working at 
 thirty-five a week and rent going up and the children 
 without shoes — and well, who knows ? He may himself 
 "put through a little deal" some day and live "on 
 easy street!" He wouldn't vote the Socialist ticket 
 for hell ! Why, look at So and So ! Started at eight 
 a week. Now he's president of the Great Gorge Road. 
 Worth five millions if he's worth a cent. The man 
 pushes back his greasy derby and spits with a specu- 
 lative air. "Smart people in this here world, I tell 
 you." His wife reads her Sunday paper and glows 
 over accounts of the social doings of the local pluto- 
 crats. She drops her paper and dreams the same day- 
 
 [195] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 dream from another angle. And the cheap magazines 
 that float their way and the picture-shows they see all 
 glorify wealth and "getting on" and yet carefully re- 
 frain from arousing any social consciousness. For 
 generally the old millionaire repents and sinks into a 
 pool of domestic emotions and gives his daughter in 
 marriage to the poor young man. And our citizen's 
 wife nudges her husband and points to the young man 
 on the screen who is just about to marry the million- 
 aire's daughter and says: "Ain't he the perfect image 
 of our Johnny?" 
 
 Our man has the liberty of economic competition. 
 Of the slimness of his chance to avail himself of that 
 liberty he does not think. He can dream his favorite 
 dream. Also he has a vote. He can choose between 
 two candidates both offered him by essentially the 
 same masters. Also he can worship at either the Bap- 
 tist Church or the Methodist or the Campbelite. But 
 once let him think and arise from the dull mass and 
 cease worshipping the idols of the tribe and the mar- 
 ket-place! If he speaks he will be gagged; if he acts 
 he will be jailed. Yet it is only for that arisen and 
 awakened man that liberty has its true meaning. When 
 the personal consciousness emerges from the merely 
 tribal consciousness — there is the birth of liberty. 
 Hence in a deeper sense the common phrase is true: 
 liberty means progress — the liberty of individuals to 
 rebel against the mass-life, to repudiate mass-thinking, 
 to shatter the folk-ways, to be the instruments of 
 change. A society in which majority opinion and pub- 
 lic law have not risen to the tolerance of such free per- 
 sonalities is a society without liberty and without hope 
 
 [196] 
 
THE COLOR OF LIFE 
 
 from within. It may build machinery and heap up 
 wealth. It is as stagnant as a rotting pool. 
 
 One hears people talk fatuously about " evolution" 
 not revolution. They are usually of the economic 
 master class. What they mean is the preservation of 
 the status quo. They hope that they will always be 
 able to gather enough votes and control enough can- 
 didates and own enough land and tools and ships and 
 trains to perpetuate the present order exactly as it is. 
 Thus they defeat the hope of orderly change and create 
 the revolutionary spirit. For they stigmatize each 
 step in the developmental process as revolutionary. 
 And since all ultimate change is reached by successive 
 changes, since, in a word, the evolutionary process 
 consists of a series of revolutions, they, rob them- 
 selves, by their own unveracity and muddleheadedness, 
 of the easements in the process of change which might 
 well be theirs. Hence, though they may delay their 
 fall, they refuse foolishly to mitigate its horrors. It 
 is, an old story. Men do not learn by experience, as I 
 have said. Nor is it easy for them to believe that to 
 be true which contradicts their interests and their 
 hopes. We all share that weakness — capitalist and 
 proletarian, business-man and intellectual. Eui there 
 are minds which, having seen their hopes go down to 
 incredible disaster once, walk thereafter more warily 
 and humbly in the world and see the drift of things 
 which will not change for their liking and read coldly, 
 without regard to their hearts and desires, the signs 
 that flame in the cosmic skies. 
 
 [197] 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 Myth and Blood 
 
 In August the grass on the campus looked singed, 
 the trees and bushes stale. In the halls the graduate 
 students, registered for summer school, raised a clatter 
 that was somehow drained of energy. They went 
 through all the motions of intense life, but the inner 
 principle was lacking. White skirts, filmy bodices, 
 filmier stockings. Firm bodies that throbbed. But the 
 outer mind, carefully trained in the mimicry of self- 
 preservation, pursued points of pedagogical technique 
 with a bitter eagerness. A few were old and quiet. 
 There was also one small, consumptive-looking China- 
 man with a cold, remorseless appetite for knowledge. 
 He seemed to gnaw at my brain. The dusty class-rooms 
 pulsed with the hot air and the bodies of the young 
 women. "When one is young" — I was 'discussing 
 Schnitzler in my seminar that summer of 1914 — "life 
 is full of windows and beyond every window the world 
 begins." That saying seemed a ferocious irony in 
 Central City. We moved in a cruel hush behind black 
 bars. Our windows were all prison windows. 
 
 There were no signs in the heavens. There never 
 are. Only I remember one dry, blazing noon looking 
 
 [1981 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 intently at the stripped and wilted lilac bushes and 
 saying to myself: "Little Servia." It must have been 
 July. In August it would have been: "Little Belgium." 
 Those phrases are cheap and ugly and tattered to-day. 
 They are like the styles of a decade ago. No one is 
 saying: "Little Hayti." They are out of fashion but 
 lacking in the dignity of age; they are ugly without 
 quaintness, like shoulder-of -mutton sleeves. Some day 
 they will flame once more for that small community 
 of spirits which remembers and records the vicissitudes 
 of mankind. Then it will be written down how huge 
 populations devoid of gallantry or mercy, aching them- 
 selves through their emissaries to dabble in the blood 
 of any at their feet — in Amritsar or Balbriggan, Hayti 
 or North Africa, Jewish villages in Poland or black 
 belt towns in Georgia — took up the cry of "Hun" and 
 poisoned the minds of young people and little children 
 on three continents not against the fierce competitions 
 that end in hate and blood, but against the soul of the 
 German people. It will be written down in the history 
 books. But to the man and woman on the street his- 
 toric truth is pragmatic. Truth is what prevails. 
 That is one reason why I think this Christian-cap- 
 italistic civilization will be overturned. At its core 
 festers a cancerous lie. It feeds on spiritual tissue. 
 The superstructure will decay. ... 
 
 I shall not fight the war over. A mind that does 
 not see it to-day as universal guilt or else universal 
 blundering and fatality and does not mourn over every 
 portion of mankind with an intensity measured purely 
 by that portion's acuteness of suffering, is beyond the 
 reach of reason and humanity. I find a good many 
 
 [199] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 people admitting that now, but often with a shadow 
 of mental reservation. Aren't we, their eyes seem to 
 plead, a little, oh, just a little better than the Germans 
 — just we and the British, 7 That plea, that look, is 
 fatal. Only by giving up self -righteousness to the last 
 shred, only by an utter and universal brotherhood in 
 self-abasement can anything be saved from the wreck- 
 age. For those with that look in their eyes and also to 
 steady and keep true the drift of this story which is 
 not only a story but a symbol I recall and record : 
 
 The German militarists commanded the fighting to 
 be done with merciless severity. 
 
 British troops before going into action were habit- 
 ually given the following instructions: "The second 
 bayonet man kills the wounded. You cannot afford to* 
 be encumbered by wounded enemies lying about your 
 feet. Don't be squeamish. The army provides you 
 with a good pair of boots ; you know how to use them. " 
 (Stephen Graham: A Private of the Guards.) 
 
 From 1917 on the German High Command used 
 wildly desperate and brutal measures to win the war. 
 
 From the autumn of 1917 on, the hunger blockade, 
 which the government of the United States called 
 "illegal and indefensible" in 1914, produced rachitis, 
 a change and softening of the bony structure among 
 the civilian population of Germany. The chief suffer- 
 ers were children under five, adolescents between four- 
 teen and eighteen and women over forty. The little 
 children became crippled and could not walk; the girls 
 and boys crumpled up in the streets ; the women died. 
 
 The Germans had lost the ancient tradition of a 
 chivalrous respect for one's foes. 
 
 [200] 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 It was during their final retreat in 1919. " l I must 
 admit that the boche is a tenacious brute.' said a 
 young French lieutenant just back from the firing line. 
 'This Grand Division has been smashed to pieces, yet 
 the remnant fights just as hard. Cornered rats, I sup- 
 pose. Anyway, it shows that their discipline is still 
 strong, that men will sell their lives thus without 
 hope!' " (The New York Times, July 31, 1919.) 
 
 The armies of the allies went forth to defeat a men- 
 acing militarism. They believed what they were told. 
 
 The Germans "were men fighting blindly to guard 
 an ideal, the Heimat, some patch of mother earth. . . . 
 This everything that meant home to them they were 
 told was in danger, and this they went out to save." 
 (Evelyn, Princess Blucher: An English Wife in Ber- 
 lin.) 
 
 Lissauer wrote a Song of Hate, Begnier wrote 
 Serment, our population went to a propaganda film: 
 The Beast of Berlin. 
 
 Thackeray recalls the wars again Napoleon in his 
 lecture on George III. "We prided ourselves on our 
 prejudices; we blustered and bragged with absurd 
 vainglory; we dealt to our enemy a monstrous injus- 
 tice of contempt and scorn; we fought them with all 
 weapons, mean as well as heroic. There was no lie 
 we would not believe, no charge of crime which our 
 furious prejudice would not credit. I thought at one 
 time of making a collection of the lies which the French 
 had written against us and we had published against 
 them during the war : it would be a strange memorial 
 of popular falsehood." 
 
 A universal brotherhood of self-abasement! 
 
 [201] 
 
TJP STREAM 
 
 In Central City, invisible pulses began to beat all 
 about me in the air. I wrote : All the few hard- won 
 virtues of the free personality are going down to dis- 
 aster. The individual was merciful; the tribe is cal- 
 lous. The individual was reasonable; the tribe is in 
 the grip of dark, irrational instincts. Thus public 
 passions, however generous their apparent origin, 
 degenerate into wild unreason and beastiality. A pub- 
 lic passion of religion sees miracles ; a public passion 
 of hatred sees atrocities. Both are well attested in all 
 countries and in all ages of a religious or a war-like 
 mood. Immemorial savage impulses which the indi- 
 vidual dare not express are vented under the supposed 
 righteousness of a tribal sanction and decent men 
 become persecutors, lynchers and murderers. Such, 
 from any civilized point of view, is the basic tragedy 
 of war. The merging of the individual into the tribe 
 wipes out all the difficult gains of the cultural process. 
 It hurls us back into the red, primordial mists of hate 
 and cruelty and self-righteousness. The imaginative 
 vision comes to see and hear in the tense atmosphere 
 of still peaceful cities symbolical scenes of a forgotten 
 age — the flashing cymbals, the foaming devotees, the 
 shrill scream of the human sacrifice in the storm- 
 shaken grove. . . . 
 
 The great myth crystalized with a suddenness that 
 took one's breath away. A quick, thunderous passion 
 for a living sacrifice flared up. I am persuaded that 
 any other object would have served equally well. 
 Nearly all my colleagues in Central City owed the 
 sounder part of their intellectual equipment to Ger- 
 
 [202] 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 man sources; many had endearing memories of the 
 German land and its people. These potent subjective 
 realities were submerged at once. The flood, then, was 
 one that had always been pounding in the darkness 
 against the dykes of the mind. Historic accident or 
 fatality made a breach. The waters swirled. 
 
 They all led — the great, decent, American middle- 
 classes, business and professional — rigid and unnatural 
 lives. They led and stilLlead unreal lives. In France, 
 in Germany, in Italy, the same official codes and forms 
 prevail. But there the forms are large-meshed nets; 
 here they are eages of concrete and steel. The re- 
 spectable American unless he is quite rich cannot take 
 a moral holiday. Even when he takes it, his nature is 
 so inhibited and corrupted by an unreal morality that 
 Ms holiday becomes a debauch. He usually marries 
 rather early and marries a woman nearly or quite his 
 own age. Three or four children are born. When 
 the man is forty, his wife has no freshness left. She 
 is a little wrinkled and without emotional resilience. 
 It is tragic for the women, more tragic than for the 
 men. But they refuse compassion or cure by refusing to 
 admit the reality of the tragic facts. They insist on 
 what they call equal marriages and as they fade de- 
 mand more stonily the rigidness of the home as due to 
 their cooperation, their social worth, the sacred service 
 of their motherhood. It is very astute of them. They 
 deny out of existence the wildness of nature. The 
 churches aid them. The men, who are not thinkers, are 
 deceived into hideous repressions or ugly debauches 
 and either become insensitive or battle with a foolish 
 sense of sin. 
 
 It will be thought degraded to attribute the out- 
 
 [203] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 burst of so-called patriotic passion that swept this 
 country in any degree to the sex-repressions practised 
 by our middle-classes. But it was not due to terror 
 and revengefulness as in France, nor to terror and 
 ambition as in Germany. Nor were there historic 
 hatreds or old feuds or national memories involved. 
 Many elements unquestionably contributed to it. But 
 its peculiarly unmotivated ferocity, its hectic heat had 
 in it something unmistakably religious, orgiastic and 
 hence obscurely sexual. Upon Germany, the vicarious 
 sacrifice, was heaped all secret horror and shame and 
 corruption, to her were transferred all hidden sins and 
 rebellions and perversities. The nation became a 
 lynching party. Its mood expressed itself spontane- 
 ously through sex-symbolism. The rape of Belgium! 
 In propaganda films and plays, the German villain 
 was always represented as seeking the defloration of 
 American virgins. Faith, blood, sadism — an old trin- 
 ity. If this is ignoble it is because human nature is so. 
 Or, rather, because man through a pathetic delusion in- 
 sists that what in him is natural is ignoble. The fact 
 remains. Neither proletarians nor plutocrats were as 
 hectic, were as sick in soul with the war fever as the 
 intelligent, moral, thoughtful bourgeoisie. The campus 
 in Central City became like an infected place. The 
 young students were quite cool and sane. The middle- 
 aged professors with homely and withered wives and 
 strong moral opinions shouted and flared up and 
 wreaked themselves on William II — and Kant and 
 Nietzsche and Wagner and even Eucken. When they 
 saw me their eyes glowed strangely or turned fiercely 
 cold. I would not join the lynching-party. I had a 
 weakness for the lynchee. ... I was regarded as 
 
 [204] 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 good, loyal Southerners — guardians of Christianity, 
 morality, democracy — regard a "nigger-lover." The 
 parallel is exact. 
 
 in 
 
 , Yet my weakness for the lynchee was wholly un- 
 political in character. It included neither Prussian 
 pastors nor Prussian soldiers nor Bavarian priests 
 and ultramontanes, even as my sympathies cannot in- 
 clude England's Black and Tan constabulary or vulgar 
 imperialists or the fierce parsons of our own Pro- 
 testant churches. If, as I freely admitted, I did not 
 wish to see the empire stricken and abased, it was be- 
 cause it happened to be the temporary vessel, how- 
 ever imperfect, however riddled with flaws, of a spirit 
 of civilization which seemed to me then and seems to 
 me now of a sovereign preciousness both in itself and 
 also for all mankind. I can illustrate my meaning best 
 from the present moment. The year is 1921. The 
 reparations committee is sitting in Paris seeking to 
 reconcile the extortion of an incalculable indemnity 
 from the German people with a permanent crippling 
 of that people's industries, shipping, power and 
 wealth. The republic that signed the peace of Ver- 
 sailles is discredited at home and abroad; the lost 
 provinces writhe under a tyranny compared to which 
 the stupid Polish policy of the empire was merciful 
 and enlightened; the cities and industrial districts of 
 what was, seven years ago, the most orderly and the 
 healthiest country in recorded history are gaunt with 
 hunger and rotten with disease. In Berlin, the pro- 
 fiteers celebrate a witches' sabbath of wild and des- 
 perate debauchery. The bureaucratic classes who 
 
 [205] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 lived with dignity and security under the old order are 
 in a state of suicidal reactionary fervor; the workers 
 are too hungry and enfeebled to revolt. Fallen from 
 a position of boundless power and respect and intel- 
 lectual preeminence in the world, this nation is. hum- 
 bled as none has been in modern times. She is in the 
 dust and every demagogue and fool the world over can 
 void his venom on her. Old poets spoke of the terrors 
 of the thing they called Mutability and celebrated the 
 tragic circumstances of the fall of even the weakest 
 and vilest princes. Who, among men, can withhold 
 from a proud and gifted people a sombre and remorse- 
 ful sympathy? And yet. ... A strange thrill of life 
 is running through all those stricken German lands. 
 Matthew Arnold called that minority which reflects 
 and transcends the passions and lives creatively the 
 saving remnant. In Germany the saving remnant has 
 always been large and it is large to-day. Fools and 
 mere tribesmen crowd the cities and citadels, but each 
 of these places can be saved not by one righteous man 
 but by a thousand. It seems ironic enough to use the 
 word righteous; for righteous in a rigid sense and 
 according to standards that antedate experience is 
 precisely what these people are not. "What they have 
 done is to rend inner veils and to substitute for the 
 moral nominalism which is the ultimate source of the 
 world's sickness a vision that discerns men and things 
 and actions in their real and unique and incomparable 
 nature. They have offered defiance to that gigantic 
 Beast which Dante saw passing mountains, breaking 
 through walls and weapons, polluting the whole world 
 ; — that uncleanly image of Fraud whose face is the 
 
 [206] 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 face of a just man, so mild is its aspect, but whose body 
 is the body of a foul serpent. 
 
 La faccia sua era faccia d'uom giusto, 
 tanto benigna avea di fuor la pelle; 
 e d'un serpente tutto l'altro f usto. 
 
 Life is far deeper and more intricate than most 
 people permit themselves to know. They make it 
 shallow and simple by formulations: a man can love 
 but one woman; guilt must be punished; we must be 
 unselfish. Out of these formulations and others like 
 them they build bridges over the abyss of the soul. 
 But the bridges are bridges of ice which only a careful 
 chill can preserve. A day comes on which the deeps 
 begin to glow and the bridge bursts and there is chaos. 
 The Germans of whom I was thinking had gone on 
 quests into those deeps. They are going on those quests 
 now. They were careless of the character of the polity 
 in which they lived before the war ; I am not sure that 
 they are building their new one with a very practical 
 wisdom. But polities crumble and one form of the 
 state succeeds another and so far man has invented 
 none that is not irrational and tyrannical at its core. 
 The best we can achieve is an inner freedom, moral 
 and intellectual liberty, the power of standing above 
 the state, face to face with essential things. It is not 
 only the poets and the thinkers of Germany who have 
 done that, but undistinguished and unrecorded men by 
 the million — teachers and traders and waiters and 
 workingmen. When they talk they talk about life, not 
 about dead formulae, about the feelings and the 
 thoughts that are, not about those they would have 
 
 [207] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 others entertain. In 1916 a very humble German said 
 to me: "Life is curious. I was a socialist in the old 
 country and I've got no use for the government. No, 
 and I don't believe in conscription. So I didn't think 
 I'd have any trouble at all. But when people talk to 
 me about the war, they and I talk about different 
 things altogether. They talk about militarism and 
 Prussianism and they don't mean anything, good or 
 bad, that really exists. They mean something they've 
 made up out of their own minds. And when I tell them 
 facts — mixed facts — because the world isn't a simple 
 place, is it? — they're mad at me because I know some- 
 thing definite and real and they call me a damned 
 Hun. ' ' And another very plain man who came to me 
 said: "I'm in trouble with my boss, an American 
 gentleman, because I had a love affair with a girl in 
 the shop. 'But you're a married man,' he said to me. 
 'I know it,' I answered. 'Then what right did you 
 have to approach this girl?' 'I don't know,' I said, 
 'but I've been married twenty years and my wife is a 
 stringy woman with a bitter temper. And this girl 
 liked me and it was spring. And I said to myself: 
 here's this war and the, world's gone cruel crazy and 
 pretty soon we'll all be dead and rotten. There was 
 a lilac bush in the garden and it was twilight and so 
 I kissed her a few times. And I almost thought I was 
 young again and back in the old country and life was 
 just beginning and there was peace and a little hope 
 and beauty in the world. ' The boss looked at me as if 
 I was crazy. 'I'll have no immorality around here,' 
 he shouted. 'You're fired!' Now what sort of a man 
 is this? He called this immorality and I heard him 
 tell some young fellows about the immorality of going 
 
 [208] 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 to a street full of bawdy houses. He didn't pay any 
 attention to things, you see. He just had a word — • 
 immorality — and it made him angry at others and 
 satisfied with him self." 
 
 A word — and it made him angry at others and sat- 
 isfied with himself. . . . Poor Benecke ! He could get 
 no more work in Central City. A Hun and probably, 
 like all Huns, immoral to boot. He drifted away. But 
 he had given me another definition of the evil malignity 
 that lies at the root of moralistic generalizations and 
 a fresh sense of what I knew to be the saving and tri- 
 umphant virtue of the people to whom he belonged. 
 
 iv 
 
 Thus, too, to-day, poets and thinkers and publicists 
 and millions of men and women are striving in Ger- 
 many to re-understand and re-create a world in chaos. 
 Once more in 1921 as in 1914 Germany leads the world 
 in the production of books. There is trash enough — 
 morbid rather than empty, as among us. But there 
 are philosophies and visions so packed with thought 
 and experience that the many thousands of people 
 who buy and read them, as the editions show, must be 
 admitted to possess a culture and a discipline of the 
 mind and a knowledge of their own souls unheard of 
 in any other age or land. Likewise the imaginative 
 literature — novels and plays and especially the books 
 of the new lyrical movement — is drawn from sources 
 of perception and reflection which the average cultured 
 reader in other countries has not yet reached within 
 himself. I do not expect this thing which, for the sake 
 of my own mind's integrity, I must assert, to be be- 
 
 [209] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 lieved. Nothing is so., deep-rooted in us as a sense of 
 our ultimate superiority. We may appear to yield on 
 this point or that. At the core of the self is a granite- 
 hard conviction of tbe betterness of that self and its 
 friends and its group. Such is the spiritual malady of 
 the race. If once we could stop working with the con- 
 cepts " better" and "worse" which we identify with 
 higher and lower and so, in a primitive and subcon- 
 scious way, with above and below in physical modes 
 of being — master, slave, slayer, slain: if we could 
 bring ourselves to think in terms of fruitful co-existent 
 qualities in the psychical world, we would not struggle 
 against such cognitions as I am trying to convey; we 
 would have a much larger chance of deriving our self- 
 respect from serenity and justice rather than from 
 wilful ignorance and rage. 
 
 In Central City I once spoke to a colleague, a pro- 
 fessor of political science, of the literature and art 
 and thought of the Germans and of the wide dissem- 
 ination of these things among the people and made a 
 plea for an, at least, inquiring attitude toward such a 
 nation. He replied that what I told him was doubtless 
 true, but that it did not to his mind constitute a claim 
 to high national culture which resided rather in polit- 
 ical vigilance and political activity. I did not point 
 out to him — he would have regarded it as presumptu- 
 ous — the actual political supineness of Americans; 
 their extreme suggestibility and their utter careless- 
 ness as to the quarters whence their winds of doctrine 
 blow. I saw so clearly that he and I were shouting 
 across a gulf. Literature and art and philosophy were 
 to him not expressions and therefore forms of life, not 
 the spiritual organs by which men understand and 
 
 [2101 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 intercommunicate experience jjfchey were to him deco- 
 rative additions to life, like tin cornices on a shop 
 front. And it would have been useless to tell him that 
 the aesthetic and philosophical saturation of great 
 masses of the German people had naturally led them 
 to esteem political action lightly. For all such action 
 implies hard limitation. To choose such action at all 
 means a devotion to narrowly denned policies of 
 whose insufficiency and mere opportunism the reflec- 
 tive mind is at once aware. Thus in every day life the 
 unreflective man who is also the energetic one has the 
 philosopher at his mercy. To know little is to dare 
 easily, to have looked upon all sides of all mortal ques- 
 tions is to come near paralysis. Rude men in primi- 
 tive communities pass judgment and execute sentences 
 in matters that would have left Jesus dumb and So- 
 crates puzzled. Then they ride off, these posses and 
 lynchers, and eat their dinners in peace. 
 
 Yet the young poets in Germany who are listened 
 to by thousands and thousands — Franz Werfel and 
 "Walter Hasenclever and many others — are crying out 
 for more inwardness, not less, for a spiritualization 
 and conquest and absorption into the mind of all things 
 and all men; for a suspension of all moral judgment, 
 all strife and for the remoulding of the world through 
 love. They do not heed the traders and chafferers and 
 diplomats — Stinnes no more than Morgan, Simon no 
 more than Lloyd George. They are bent upon another 
 business and men and women who lack bread and meat 
 buy the books of these poets and creators of higher 
 realities and go home and read and transcend hunger 
 and cold, embargoes and reparations and the loss of 
 mines. And they lift their heads from their books, 
 
 [211] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 these readers, and hear that Lloyd George reaffirms 
 the single and absolute guilt of Germany in the war 
 and for a moment they remember a world which is still 
 ruled by such hollow and such savage fictions. But it 
 is only for a moment. Their bluish lids are lowered. 
 They read on. They are rebuilding the broken uni- 
 verse in their souls. 
 
 "What could I do with this vision and this knowl- 
 edge and this protest of mine in Central City? Men 
 talked such arrant nonsense that I committed a hun- 
 dred indiscretions, overstated and misstated the inti- 
 mate truths that I possessed and even, on the great 
 principle of John Stuart Mill that no truth, however 
 partial, needs so sorely to be emphasized as that which 
 a particular hour in history derides or disregards, 
 joined certain friends and colleagues in explaining to 
 a technically neutral country the political and military 
 actions of the German government. I did not count 
 the consequences nor, at bottom, greatly fear them. 
 Others were dependent on me and I did not dare to 
 fling away the meager sustenance which the university 
 doled out to me. But I knew very firmly, though I did 
 not always permit that knowledge to reach my con- 
 sciousness, that life could not permanently be bounded 
 for me by that campus and that town. If by defending 
 my mind's integrity, a catastrophe came . . . well, I 
 almost awaited it as one awaits rain and thunder on 
 a day of unbearable sultriness. 
 
 When America entered the war the president of 
 the university sent for me. A tall, thick, old man with 
 a hoarse, monotonous voice and a large, determined, 
 
 [212] 
 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 self-righteous mouth. A mouth like William Jennings 
 Bryan's — half business man's, half fanatic's. The 
 intellectual equipment of a Presbyterian elder in a 
 small town; the economic views of a professional 
 strike-breaker tempered by a willingness to be charit- 
 able to the subservient poor; the aesthetic and philo- 
 sophic vision of the Saturday Evening Post. He talked 
 to me like a war editorial in the New York Evening 
 Telegram and tried to make that talk persuasive to 
 me. He who believed, let us say, in the virgin birth 
 of Christ, tried to convince me that the countrymen 
 of Dehmel and Hauptmann and Strauss and Einstein 
 had mediaeval minds. A perverse imp leapt up in me. 
 I translated some observations of Goethe and Shelley 
 and John Stuart Mill and Whitman into his vernacular 
 and spoke. His eyes grew a little hard and forbidding 
 and shifted to the blotter on his desk. But he thought 
 me more unpractical idealist — his euphemism for fool 
 — than knave and promised, quite sincerely, that he 
 would guard my interests unless his hand were forced. 
 He made a virtue of this moral opportunism. Per- 
 sonally, he assured me, again sincerely, that he was 
 willing to be tolerant ; if the herd stampeded he would 
 trample with the best. Such was the notion of democ- 
 racy held by this essentially good and honest man. 
 
 I expected no more. But my friend, the professor 
 of philosophy, failed me. Not personally. They were 
 all kind enough. But intellectually. And that was 
 worse. He who had always protested against the 
 notion that truth could be discovered by committees 
 now made the war-psychosis of the crowd his criterion 
 of conduct and opinion. "How about the splendor of 
 . being in a minority, of resisting the mass, of suffering 
 
 [213] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 for an unpopular conviction, V 9 I asked him. He stul- 
 tified and denied himself, his intellectual past, his 
 moral character. He thundered against the ninety- 
 three German intellectuals who had believed what their 
 government had told them and himself accepted as 
 gospel the reports of the capitalistic and jingo press. 
 The German intellectuals are dead or have recanted 
 either explicitly in words or implicitly by supporting 
 the revolution. My friend has not been heard from. 
 He still teaches philosophy. 
 
 The crash came in a curious and, rightly looked 
 upon, an amusing way. In 1916 I had published a little 
 book on the modern movement in German literature. 
 It was an unpolitical little book. It tried to convey a 
 spirit, an atmosphere, a mood ... to show that the 
 best living writers were liberals, radicals, cultivators 
 of a Goethean freedom. I said, among other things, 
 that Nietzsche was indisputably one of the great mas- 
 ters of prose. The book fell into the hands of a real- 
 estate broker. One must savor that fact. One must 
 visualize the pudgy gentleman at his golden oak roll- 
 top desk in his private office. He has been reading the 
 editorial in his paper; he is fired to do his duty as a 
 man and an American. There is something wonderful 
 in the supreme innocence and directness of his mental 
 processes. "What, shall a man be supported by the 
 people's money who glorifies that which our sons are 
 going out to destroy at the cost of their blood? He 
 summons his secretary who pats her sleek hair with 
 brilliantly manicured fingers and shifts her chewing- 
 gum to the other cheek. He dictates and a glow fills 
 his bosom. The letter goes to the president and the 
 deans of the university, to the governor of the state, 
 
 [214] 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 to the trustees, to senators. The real estate broker — 
 like Dwight Deacon in Zona Gale's excellent story — 
 goes virtuously home and, at the head of his domestic 
 board, impresses an admiring family with his patriotic 
 vigor, his acumen, his importance. He looks instruc- 
 tively over his glasses, then for a moment glumly: 
 "Vera, did I hear you giggle? You may leave the 
 table. Upon my word ! Well, as I was saying : these 
 disloyalists . . . seditious talk . . . undermine morale 
 . . . contaminate the young . . . dooty of every wide 
 awake citizen. . . ." It goes on and on, the talk of 
 the eternal real estate broker, it goes on in peace as 
 well as in war : Be like me, be like me, think and feel 
 as I do, or I will drive you out, burn you, hang, draw 
 and quarter you and lick my lips at the trickle of your 
 blood. . . . And I, in my own small and dusty way, 
 was the eternal outcast, rebel, the other-thinking one — 
 guilty before the herd, guiltless in the dwelling-places 
 of the permanent, breaker of taboos, creator of new 
 values, doomed to defeat on this day in this little 
 grimy corner of the universe, invincible and inextin- 
 guishable as a type. Shall I ever conquer the real 
 estate broker? Shall I ever absorb him into myself? 
 And if I ever absorb him into myself shall I not be 
 he again? That is the question at the core of human 
 history. And it is fathomless. 
 
 XT 
 
 The president balked a little at the real estate 
 broker. Not for any deep reason. Only he had a dumb 
 feeling that the real estate broker was attacking the 
 thing from a wrong angle and interfering with his 
 own paternalistic and, upon the whole, humane and 
 
 [215] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 kindly management of faculty affairs. Yet he was 
 gradually being saved the nuisance of a final decision. 
 The matter was being taken out of his hands. 
 
 The campus had been turned into a training-camp 
 and swarmed with youths in khaki. They studied, 
 slept, ate, drilled, talked in mechanically formed 
 groups. A slow, stinging horror seized my flesh and 
 crept into my bones. They were being trained to kill 
 and be killed, to multilate and to be mutilated. They 
 were very cheerful. Each, at the innermost point of 
 consciousness, carried the invincible, mystical assur- 
 ance that he would come out unscathed. Each, like 
 all of us, was unable to imagine his own death. For 
 the universe is unimaginable to the individual without 
 his consciousness of it: his perception of it creates and 
 upholds it. Since he believes in its permanence, he 
 believes, despite reason and experience, in his own. 
 Such is the mystical and fatal delusion which, dis- 
 guised under the names of patriotism, courage, sac- 
 rifice, makes conscription and modern war possible. 
 If we could rip that delusion asunder, unswathe the 
 consciousness of common men from these sticky layers, 
 the enslaving state would crumble. The sight of those 
 cheery, healthy boys turned me sick. I saw them 
 blinded, waving bloody stumps, rotten with gangrene 
 in trenches under fire. I rebelled against that place of 
 irony and horror; I refused to take any precautions. 
 A leprous sun seemed to burn over Central City. Mid- 
 dle-aged men and women roared and wheezed, and 
 sweated with hatred and patriotism and urged these 
 young bodies to hasten to hurl themselves into blood 
 and ooze and ordure. 
 
 An oily voice, a sleek, voluble voice with a hard 
 
 [216] 
 
MYTH AXD BLOOD 
 
 contradictory snicker in it came to me over the tele- 
 phone. My presence was required on such a day at 
 such an hour in the office of the district attorney. The 
 voice purred reassuringly and then repeated the order 
 with a sudden, lustfully cruel bark. 
 
 It was the owner of that voice who received me — 
 white-haired, ruddy, cold-eyed but with a set, wheed- 
 ling smile fixed under a thick, heavy, dogged nose. He 
 took me into the district attorney's office, a large, 
 square, ordinary lawyer's room with shabby desks and 
 swivel chairs and rusty calf-skin volumes with red 
 labels. Sharp sunshine poured in through the tall win- 
 dows; a pigeon sped past; a bough tapped against the 
 stonework. The district attorney sat back in his chair, a 
 big, dark, bald man, not fat but fleshy; cold, meanly 
 sensual, a careless begetter of children, a good "pro- 
 vider," a family man, a politician, a "handshaker." 
 . . . He shook hands with me. I looked at his enor- 
 mous cheeks, his small, official eyes. A huge expanse 
 of shirt extended from his long chin to his belt. There 
 was something monumental about the man, but also 
 something obscene. I felt both the impenetrability 
 of him and the raw, voracious appetites. He was, of 
 all things, jovial! "Well, professor, I thought we'd 
 better have a talk." His pretense that we were good 
 fellows together was odious. "What have you against 
 me?" I asked. He leaned forward. "A stack of evi- 
 dence this high." "Let me see the evidence and con- 
 front me with the persons who provided it." "We 
 don't do that," he snapped. "Then how can I tell what 
 you're talking about?" He sat back comfortably and 
 drawled: "Didn't you say that if America entered 
 the war. ..." I had, as a matter of fact, said none 
 
 [217] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 of the things he repeated. In the privacy of my office 
 at the university I had made remarks that malice had 
 twisted, broadened, coarsened and then communicated 
 to him. I at once suspected the stupid woman who had 
 probably written him anonymous letters. I pointed 
 out to him that the evidence was garbled, not of a 
 character that would be admitted in any American 
 court of law and that it referred exclusively to the 
 period of American neutrality during which, from the 
 narrowest and most autocratic point of view, I had 
 been free to say what I chose. Instead of replying he 
 suddenly sprang up and roared. ' * What have you ever 
 done to show your patriotism? "What have you ever 
 done for this country'?" "I have taught and written. 
 . . . ." He roared me down. "You liked to do that! 
 What've you ever done for your country, I ask you!" 
 The thing went on for an hour. I tried to reach his 
 reason. He didn't want that to happen. At the end 
 of the session he shook his head gloomily. He would 
 see. . . . 
 
 Upon the whole he evidently thought me small 
 game. Several influential members of the faculty 
 wrote him in my behalf ; the president sent him a mes- 
 sage; he consented to my remaining in the service of 
 the state. But I did not remain. The colleagues who 
 pleaded for me did so not because they believed in 
 freedom, but because they had a personal kindness for 
 ine and some respect for my character; the president 
 protected me because he knew that I was poor and a 
 good teacher and because he did not consider my 
 wrongheadedness grave enough to warrant Mary's 
 being exposed to material surf ering. The tacit under- 
 standing was that I could buy a continued tenure of 
 
 [218] 
 
MYTH AND BLOOD 
 
 my job by silence, conformity, slavish submission. I 
 asked for a sabbatical year that was due me and was 
 granted the favor. 
 
 I fared very well and I am not insensitive to kind- 
 ness. But what I had hoped for came from no quarter 
 — a recognition, however faint, of the tenableness of 
 my intellectual position. A German colleague, an ex- 
 quisitely lovable, gifted, gentle soul, was fired without 
 mercy. He was ill in body and had a frail wife — an 
 American woman — and three small children. A poet 
 and a philosopher, he wandered about selling books, 
 tortured by the dull surfaces of an unfeeling world. 
 He finally took a small position in Mexico. There, at 
 the age of thirty-five, he died the other day. Hardship 
 had undermined his strength; the process begun in 
 Central City reached a fatal conclusion. Yet the men 
 there knew the beauty of his mind, his complete polit- 
 ical harmlessness, the fact that he had not come to us 
 an immigrant but had been summoned as an exchange 
 teacher to a great American University. But they 
 were utterly callous to his fate. They had studied and 
 philosophized with him and broken bread with him. 
 They cast him out to die. . . . 
 
 Why did they relent to me! Because of the native 
 tongue in my head, the things I had written, the fact 
 that in all fundamental senses I am an American. A 
 blind, half-conscious feeling of solidarity with me 
 guided them, neither the idea of justice nor that of 
 freedom. Yet this was a university and there they 
 taught then and there they teach now Plato and Kant, 
 Montaigne and Voltaire, Goethe and Shelley and even 
 Walt Whitman who "beat the gong of revolt and 
 stopped with them that plot and conspire.' ' 
 
 [219] 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 The Wokld In Chaos 
 
 A quiet corner of old New York seemed a refuge 
 from glare and hubbub. Around the corner was a 
 tavern where one could drink beer and listen to music. 
 The fiddlers were still Hungarians who played Grieg 
 and even Brahms and Magyar dances and Russian 
 folk-melodies. One could talk to one's friends in 
 whatever language the mood and the subject de- 
 manded. We sat there even as other like-minded 
 groups sat in London and Paris and Munich waiting 
 for the madness of mankind to spend itself. The 
 lamps of the tavern had orange-colored shades, the 
 wainscoating was black with age. The place was filled 
 with a soothing dusk and the blended odor of beer and 
 tobacco and Wiener Schnitzel. I was, at least, back 
 in civilization. There were no sweet slops ; there was 
 no gabble consisting largely of "dope," "guy," 
 "sport," "case," "jazz," "Hun." It is quite easy to 
 jest. But beneath the easy jest is a hard fact. Beer; 
 and wine and tobacco are the companions of poetry \ 
 and philosophy and love ; soda-water and banana- 
 splits and sport not as a diversion but as a business, of 
 moral lynching and the worst forms of sex slavery. 
 
 [220] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 . , . That tavern is gone now, swept away by the 
 barbarism of the Neo-Puritans. 
 
 For some weeks Mary and I relaxed our minds and 
 nerves. But my resources would not permit me to re- 
 main quite idle and an old friend brought me the offer 
 of a mastership in a private school. To teach English 
 and Latin to boys seemed a tolerable enough prospect. 
 
 The huge building arises before me, the immense 
 Y. M. C. A. building on the ninth floor of which the 
 Harley School was housed. On the very first day of 
 my activity a blast from some icy and infernal region 
 seemed to smite my nerves. On the third day I knew 
 that I had entered the lowest depth of civilization 
 where there are elevators and modern plumbing and 
 scientific ventilation and hygiene and cleanliness and 
 morality and where the soul is dead. There were one 
 hundred boys, varying in age from twelve to seventeen. 
 They were nearly all the sons of wealthy tradesmen, 
 brokers and manufacturers. They brought with them 
 from their homes a stony contempt for literature, art 
 and learning, for any form of reflection, for all toler- 
 ance, gentleness, humanity — for everything except 
 money, machines and blind force when that force was 
 exerted by them or in the direction of their strictly 
 material interests. I did not make these observations 
 hastily. I tried to exert a softening and a saving in- 
 fluence on one boy after another. So did one other 
 member of the teaching staff — a cultivated, spiritual- 
 minded, elderly New Englander. He and I compared 
 notes day after day, "We were dealing with souls 
 killed by machines and by the doctrine of force before 
 they had had a chance to be born. They listened to 
 neither my old friend nor to me; they were impene- 
 
 [221] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 trable to the simplest and most picturesque historical 
 or literary instruction. But they attended earnestly 
 to the malignant moral drivel of the Y. M. C. A. secre- 
 taries which consisted of two negative admonitions: 
 be ignorant of sex and drink no alcohol, and of one 
 positive one: smash! — smash the rival team, school, 
 and later the rival business or factory; smash the Hun 
 and the Bolshevik abroad; smash the other- thinking 
 one — liberal, socialist, foreigner — at home. And — this 
 was the constant corollary — in order to smash success- 
 fully, "get together," do team-work, never think, feel, 
 act, except with and through your particular pack. 
 This gospel of mass brutality and individual cowardice 
 and dishonor was studded in the chapel talks with the 
 names of successful men as exemplars — insurance 
 magnates, railroad kings, oil monopolists — and was 
 offered — such was the effrontery of these creatures — 
 in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 The great steel and concrete building is in a shabby, 
 swarming neighborhood near a railroad station. There 
 are lunch rooms and open-air food-stands at every 
 corner. The waiting room of the railroad station is 
 always crowded. The pupils of the Harley school, 
 many of whom came to school in their motor cars, 
 were always talking about the "waps" and " dagos' ' 
 and "kikes" who drifted to and fro on those streets 
 and squares. They spoke of them and laughed with 
 a cold, empty derision, a curiously unmotivated malig- 
 nity. How good those common people seemed to me; 
 how eloquent was the trouble and contemplation in 
 their eyes ! I talked with the street-car men and ditch- 
 diggers, barbers and prostitutes. These people's nat- 
 ural thoughts were very far from the war. It had 
 
 [222] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 been driven, an alien and meaningless thing, into their 
 consciousness. "The kings made it," they said, "the 
 rich made it." An unlettered Lithuanian plasterer 
 said: "Life is hard in Central Europe. The people 
 have not land enough to grow their own food. Either 
 the big rulers, East and West, must parcel out the 
 world-markets justly or there will be famine and revo- 
 lution." He caught sight of a policeman and added 
 as by rote : "I'm for the allies. Too much militarism 
 in Germany." 
 
 There was a school supper and I met the fathers 
 of my pupils. They were mellower, of course, and 
 their manners and speech were suaver. But they made 
 the psychical picture complete. Their contempt for 
 any form of thinking was indescribable. In their 
 minds the universe was like the blue-print of a 
 machine. Every detail was fixed and provided for and 
 established by some sanction which they could not ex- 
 plain but would not endure to have questioned. I 
 deliberately conversed in terms that differed slightly, 
 but only slightly, from the verbal formulae of the con- 
 ventional newspaper and the Y. M. C. A. secretaries 
 concerning the world situation. Fourteen hours later 
 a rumor had reached the head-master that there was 
 an unsafe man in his school. 
 
 A good many intellectuals, deceived by historical 
 analogies, by the public gifts of a few super-pluto- 
 crats, by a fitful patronage of the arts exercised by 
 wealthy Jews, assign to the financial and industrial 
 bosses the qualities and functions of an oligarchy. But 
 the oligarchs are rich without splendor and powerful 
 without imagination. They are not Medici ; they are not 
 even Junkers. They are only grocers. These men of 
 
 [223] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 large affairs have pigmy intelligences, the moral preju- 
 dices of villagers, the tastes not even of the tap-room, 
 but of the "parlor."- They influence legislation and 
 own the press and we have prohibition, censorships, 
 vice crusades. They are not aristocrats on the lowest 
 plane. They are not even amusing like the Prince 
 Regent and his strutting " bucks," not even pictur- 
 esque and cynical like the French gentlemen of the 
 ancien regime; they are stupid, uninteresting, meanly 
 barbarous. 
 
 n 
 
 The posters on the walls and fences bothered me. 
 Do you remember them? "The Prussian Cur," "The 
 Hun, His mark." These posters with their splashes 
 of crude red and their pictures of ape or wolf-like 
 creatures bore no relation, of course, either to the 
 people against whom they were directed nor to the 
 minds of the combatants on either side. They revealed 
 a brutality and obscenity in the spirits that conceived 
 and the hands that executed them which kindled in 
 me a little flame of terror at the civilization which, 
 unconsciously but firmly, I had always held to be fun- 
 damentally humane and secure. Nothing seemed im- 
 possible any longer. The barbarities of history, the 
 sacking of cities, the useless slaughter of men, the sell- 
 ing of people into slavery, the butchery for matters 
 of opinion and conscience 1 — all these had been but as 
 pictures of perished things to heighten by a melan- 
 choly yet not unpleasing contrast the glow of one's 
 own hearth, the serenity of one's mind. All that faith 
 in the sure, essential decency of life was broken. No 
 wonder that the courts passed inhuman sentences, that 
 
 [224] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 men were mobbed and lynched and tortured in prisons 
 and that the newspapers grew daily more lecherous 
 in their appetite for blood. . . . 
 
 The songs in the music-halls bothered me. 
 
 "America, she needs you like a mother. 
 Will you throw your mother down? . . . 
 
 "Like Washington crossed the Delaware 
 Pershing will cross the Rhine." 
 
 The crafty blending here of natural pieties with pack- 
 ferocity and pack-pride was hit upon by an old 
 and deadly instinct. Love was played upon and lurk- 
 ing fear. To stamp out from the beginning any stir- 
 ring of humane compunction, the public enemy was 
 carefully stripped of any of the characteristics that 
 distinguish man. Another very old and very effective 
 trick. "You are not dealing, countrymen," Cicero 
 said in his fourth invective against Antony, "you are 
 not contending with an enemy with whom any sort of 
 peace is possible. For he does not merely, as he once 
 did, desire your slavery, but in his madness lusts for 
 your very blood. His favorite game is one of blood, of 
 slaughter, of murdering citizens openly. You are not 
 dealing, fellow citizens, with a criminal and wicked 
 man, but with a monstrous and loathesome beast. . . . 
 cum immane tsetraqne belua. ..." (I tried to point 
 out the analogy to my pupils. They nudged each other. 
 They were sure I was quite mad.) 
 
 I used to watch the great audiences in the music- 
 halls. There were no mobile faces, no speaking faces, 
 nor many such as showed the scars of passionate ex- 
 citement or searching experience. Neither were there 
 
 [225] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 spiritualized and contemplative faces. The passions 
 behind these eyes were not spent, nor were they sub- 
 dued ; they were neither exercised nor controlled. They 
 were hounds not held in leash by their owners, but 
 leashless hounds that cringed and fawned before the 
 visible lash and rod o? this society and morality with 
 its peculiar law and order. Native or foreign born, 
 Jew or Gentile — these faces were the faces of modern 
 Christians : natural, pagan men living under the legal- 
 ized tyranny of the sickly asceticism of Paul. Fear 
 aping solemn resignation, or flabby, elderly content 
 was in their eyes and on the countenances of the young 
 a furtive gaiety, a harsh, empty delight conscious of 
 its own brevity and unimportance in a world given 
 over to morality and business. . . . No inner pride, no 
 natural erectness sustained these souls. So, in their 
 drained and inhibited lives, they fasten their pride to 
 mean things — skill at a foolish game, a garment, a bit 
 'of cooking, a personal oddity, a tawdry virtue lacked 
 by a neighbor. But these things do not suffice. There 
 is always to be observed a background of querulous 
 irritation. Hence, by a pitiful device, men transfer 
 their pride to forces outside of themselves — a fraternal 
 order, their bosses, the state. When the poor muddle- 
 headed, enslaved clerk says: "My concern did a three 
 million dollar business last year," or "America can 
 lick creation," he substitutes an alien and essentially 
 hostile force for his own soul which that very force 
 has robbed of the power of being self-sustaining, happy 
 and free. Therefore when, during the last year of the 
 war, I heard these audiences bay and cheer the foul 
 attacks upon an enemy who was not theirs, since there 
 is no such thing as enemy except in an evil and con- 
 
 [226] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 structive and lying sense, and when I saw them trans- 
 fer their self-respect to their slave-driver, the moral 
 and political state, I had an old, old vision — the 
 huge, monstrous idol, the sacrificial fires, the victims 
 driven by a lust for self-immolation into the scorching 
 flames. Yes, those dim, far-off ancestors of mine had 
 laid hold upon a profound truth : idols are purely evil. 
 Alas, they themselves set up the most menacing of 
 idols — a theocratic state. And that state persists. For 
 the modern state, whenever it is most hotly bent upon 
 oppression within and slaughter without, declares that 
 good and therefore God are on its side, that it, indeed, 
 embodies the purposes of God, and so the state be- 
 comes theocratic by its own fiat and an idol and men, 
 who are worshipping animals, writhe in their blood 
 and shame and spiritual nakedness at the idol's feet. 
 A black year. The war-fever throbbed. The boys 
 at the Harley school turned to me each day their bur- 
 nished and impenetrable faces. My father died. A 
 subtly but relentlessly hostile environment and an un- 
 worthy occupation had long ago broken him. His mind 
 had slipped into a twilight region of settled despair. 
 In one of his last moments of lucidity he had spoken 
 sorrowfully of the war and hummed an air of Mozart 
 and then wept gently. Thereafter he sank into an un- 
 relieved melancholy. When he came to die there was 
 nothing more to be hoped for him and so I felt no pang 
 for his death, only for his life and into my mind there 
 'streamed once more the strange and to me so strangely 
 freighted sunshine of Queenshaven. I sat beside his 
 body, pondering upon his fate, resolved to speak for 
 him a word that he himself had had no power to utter. 
 
 [227] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 All things hurt him. He struck out 
 To help him in the unequal bout; 
 Knowing he was doomed to lose 
 He hid with laughter cut and bruise 
 And jeered in desperate wildness since 
 He dared not let men see him wince. 
 In his worst stridency he knew 
 That some said "vulgar," some said "Jew," 
 And held in frantic leash a whole 
 World's sorrow in his stricken soul. 
 
 Yet he was patient, brave and kind 
 While stood the stronghold of his mind, 
 And coming from the shop or street 
 Where he had chaffered in the heat, 
 He built a world beyond the dim 
 Visions of them who wounded him. 
 Secure from them he ceased to scoff, 
 Stripped the ignoble gesture off, 
 Frugal in every common want 
 He played Beethoven and read Kant. 
 
 Now on his forehead blends with love 
 The dignity life robbed him of, 
 And on his dead and shrunken face 
 Falls the grandeur of his race. 
 
 m 
 
 Armistice day came with its sharp though barren 
 relief at the ending of the mere butchery. The Ger- 
 mans had laid down their arms. Wilson's fourteen 
 points were to reshape the world. Then came the 
 Judas trick of Versailles, the tricking not only of Ger- 
 many but, as is already abundantly clear, of all man- 
 kind. "If yon would know what a war was about,' ' 
 H. A. Brailsford memorably said, " study the terms of 
 
 [228] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 peace." The great capitalistic groups who control in- 
 dustrial populations had come to blows over coal and 
 Oil and tropical estates and trade-routes. The Western 
 group won and proceeded to ruin its chief competitor. 
 If millions of innocent people, including their own, if 
 all the true goods of civilization, if sanity and honor 
 went down to disaster in the process — what did it mat- 
 ter to them? They are still busy reducing Europe to 
 chaos and they are still talking in terms of guilt and 
 moral idealism. If they were honestly brutal the ruin 
 might be mitigated. There is something respectable 
 and wholesome about a Fisher or a Tirpitz. The lion 
 can be caged or shot and still considered a not ignoble 
 brute. Let him begin to rip out the bowels of men and 
 crunch the bones of little children in the name of this 
 man's good and that man's moral castigation, and he 
 becomes immeasurably more formidable as well as pro- 
 foundly loathsome. 
 
 The cynical observer, were one not too depressed 
 to be cynical, could enjoy, as never before, the spectacle 
 of the confused antics of mankind. Auckland Geddes, 
 the British ambassador, blurts out a partial but very 
 important truth: "Germany was being forced into a 
 position with rising food costs — look at the change in 
 the price of wheat in the first ten years of this century 
 — Germany was being forced into a position in which 
 she almost had to fight." But Makino, the Japanese 
 ambassador, ignorant, if one will believe it, of the 
 " pacification" of Korea and the theft of huge Asian 
 territories, declares: " Absolute and sincere re- 
 pentance — published repentance — without reserve and 
 without any attempt to save Germany's face is the 
 cornerstone upon which must rest any restoration of 
 
 [229] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 confidence. ' ' Repentance for what — the rising price of 
 food? Or the growth of population? No, the sturdy 
 democratic citizen answers, for William II! That 
 is the cynic's triumphant moment. For he does indeed 
 see an element of guilt in a great modern people's per- 
 mitting itself to be swayed by an orthodox Christian, 
 an amateur moralist, a romantic jingo, a mystical na- 
 tionalist. But the average conservative American- 
 pillar of a church, supporter of the anti-saloon league, 
 member of defense committees and fraternal orders, 
 proclaimer of America's moral mission — what right 
 has he to protest against William II? He is William 
 II. He glories in the rule of weak-minded assent to 
 dogma, rancid romanticism, far-flung navies, glittering 
 armaments. He lets the Congress spend the greater 
 part of the nation's income on what is called national 
 defense and means international provocation. The 
 religion of his fathers and loyalty to his country, right 
 or wrong, are good enough for him. So, precisely, were 
 they for William II. It is quite true that stupidity 
 rules. It rules the world. 
 
 IV 
 
 I was enabled to leave the Harley school and take 
 up an occupation for which I am reasonably well fitted 
 and which I found more satisfying to the mind than 
 any in which I had yet engaged. Quieter moods came 
 to me, though often still for months I saw in night- 
 mare or in sudden, waking vision those spick and span 
 classrooms, those keen, metallic faces and heard the 
 cackle and clatter of those insufferably alien voices. 
 I found, too, that the long noise and agitation of the 
 
 [230] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 war had paralysed the power of seeing, of absorption, 
 that it had estranged me from beautiful and enduring 
 things. 
 
 An autumn came which was like a return home. 
 Once more I saw shadows on the river and bronze 
 foliage and laid my palms against the cool trunks of 
 trees. Once more with less of inner fever to disturb 
 my sight I was able to survey the American scene. 
 
 The end of the war left us, as it left other parts of 
 the world, in an uproar of reaction and nationalism — 
 the two delusions that repression destroys and that 
 uniformity is admirable. The fact that history flatly 
 contradicts the first of these assumptions and the 
 whole course of nature the latter seems to trouble no 
 one. We have something very like witch-hunts upon 
 any one, especially in the public service, who is sus- 
 pected of having seriously reflected upon political or 
 economic questions ; we have a nation-wide, organized 
 effort to break down the slow gains of labor ; we have 
 a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, outbreaks of smoulder- 
 ing race animosities and the apparently inevitable 
 recrudescense of Jew baiting. The nation demands, 
 as the cant of the day has it, one hundred per cent 
 Americanism. 
 
 It is time for some one to speak a little boldly and 
 a little rudely concerning these childish fallacies. 
 Wherever two or three Americans of German descent 
 gather they talk about their loyalty to the constitution 
 and humbly submit that they ask nothing but the mini- 
 mum rights guaranteed to obedient citizens of the 
 sovereign and omnipotent state ; wherever two or three 
 Americans of Jewish descent gather they explain to 
 each other, for the benefit of the public (including 
 
 [231] 
 
XJP STREAM 
 
 \^y Henry Ford) that only one — or is it two? — of the 
 chief commissars of the Federated Socialist Soviet Re- 
 public is Jewish and that so and so many Jewish boys 
 fought to make the world safe for one group of pre- 
 datory imperialisms at the expense of another group. 
 The Irish alone, by virtue of something proud and 
 fiery and reckless in their nature, seem reasonably free 
 from this foolish and futile form of spiritual subserv- 
 ience. 
 
 The good man who is also the good citizen is the 
 man of self -governed mind and self-originating vision. 
 "I think a man's first duty," said Mark Twain, "is to 
 his honor, not to his country and not to his party." 
 And by honor he meant the honor of the mind. Estab- 
 lish your convictions on as sound a basis as you can ; 
 then cling to them. That is the only loyalty that has 
 any value. The mob that demands conformity of you 
 has no claim on your obedience. "It is made up of 
 sheep;" to quote Mark Twain once more, "it is gov- 
 erned by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It 
 suppresses its feelings and beliefs and follows the 
 handful that makes the most noise." To yield to 
 public clamor is, therefore, not only to betray yourself 
 but to give up the duty — your single duty — of creative 
 activity within the social group in which you live. Un- 
 scrupulous journalists, dependent on narrow capital- 
 istic interests, may whip up public passion against 
 you. As for the public itself? "The idea of what the 
 public will think, ' ' Hazlitt wrote with that triumphant 
 sagacity of his, "prevents the public from ever think- 
 ing at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private 
 judgment, so that in short the public ear is at the mercy 
 of the first impudent pretender who chooses to fill it 
 
 [232] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 with noisy assertions, or false surmises or secret whis- 
 pers. What is said by one is heard by all; the sup- 
 position that a thing is known to all the world makes 
 all the world believe it, and the hollow repetition of 
 a vague report drowns the still, small voice of reason. ' ' 
 Thus comes about the intimidation through the mob 
 which has no kinship with any service of the people. 
 It must always be remembered that ''self-government" 
 is not, alas, as John Stuart Mill justly pointed out, 
 "the government of each by himself, but of each by all 
 the rest. The people consequently may desire to op- 
 press a part of their number ; and precautions are as 
 much needed against this as against any other abuse 
 of power.'' On the subject of liberty there can be no 
 compromise. You compromise liberty and betray the 
 Republic when you practise unwilling conformity or 
 offer a propitiatory obedience to foreheads of brass 
 and lungs oif leather. For liberty, in the great words 
 of Lord Acton, "means the assurance that every man 
 shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his 
 duty against the influence of authority or majorities, 
 opinion or custom.' ' 
 
 The practice of such liberty does not, as you will 
 be told, dimmish a nation's power, only its truculence 
 and pugnacity. Nor should it be suspended but all the 
 more scrupulously exercised in times of war or the 
 danger of war when passion drowns all remnants of 
 reflection, terror begets hatred and hatred slavery and 
 destruction. The cry of defense is a trick. No numer- 
 ous and powerful people, at any rate, wages an un- 
 avoidable and purely defensive war. Nor is victory a 
 necessity or even necessarily a blessing. It is already 
 apparent that the best and truest friends of the French 
 
 [233] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 Republic were the " defeatists" of 1916 and 1917. 
 There is no certain good but truth, no certain effective- 
 ness but in an abstention from all force, no final con- 
 solation save the integrity of one's own mind. 
 
 The question of the nature of loyalty and liberty is, 
 once closely thought upon, plain enough. More intri- 
 cate, at least in appearance, is the problem of nativism 
 and the enforcement of cultural solidarity on the as- 
 sumption that this country harbors hosts and guests. 
 The assumption, being built upon an absurd analogy, 
 is baseless. The earth belongs to mankind and all 
 early history is the history of migrations. No people 
 in the world is dwelling in the land of its origin. 
 The Greeks came from we know not where and oc- 
 cupied the penninsula and the islands that are their 
 historic home ; tribes from the North West of Germany 
 sailed to Britain and made it England. The discovery 
 of America caused a late and perhaps last migratory 
 movement in which, so long as land and air are here 
 and over-population or war or persecution elsewhere, 
 all mankind has the biological and moral right to par- 
 ticipate. Priority of settlement gives no right to the 
 exercise of exclusion. Moreover the life of nations is, 
 humanly speaking, of enormous duration. In the per- 
 spective of historic time the intervals that separate 
 the coming of the early English and Dutch from that 
 of the early German or even Jewish settlers will shrink 
 to absurdly inconsiderable proportions. Whoever is 
 here, whoever comes here, has a right to be here and, 
 
 [234] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 since he submits to laws, a right to his share in destroy- 
 ing or in making them. 
 
 That a nation possessing a compact and autono- 
 mous culture should desire recent additions to its pop- 
 ulation to merge into its cultural life and enrich that 
 life is natural. But the process must come from 
 within. So soon as outer urgency is applied the inner 
 necessity and, therefore, the spiritual justification of 
 the process itself stands in grave doubt. No Anglic- 
 ization committees produced Dante Gabriel Rossetti or 
 Joseph Conrad, no Germanization committees pro- 
 duced Adelbert von Chamisso or Hugo von Hofmanns- 
 thal, no movement for the assimilation of foreigners 
 made French poets of Francis Viele-Griffin or Stuart 
 Merrill. Beautiful things are beloved because they are 
 beautiful, because there is in them an irresistible at- 
 tractiveness, because they are conformable to the needs 
 of the soul. The very existence of an Americanization 
 movement shows — when every allowance for our 
 peculiar conditions has been made — a discord, a pre- 
 matureness ; it shows a crudeness in the fruits of our 
 civilization which not force and clamor but only time 
 and the sun can ripen. 
 
 Americanization means, of course, assimilation. But 
 that is an empty concept, a mere cry of rage or 
 tyranny, until the question is answered which would 
 never be asked were the answer ripe : Assimilation to 
 what! To what homogeneous culture, to what folk- 
 ways of festival and song, to what common instincts 
 concerning love and beauty, to what imaginative pas- 
 sions, to what roads of thought? "We have none such 
 that can unite us. Two things are nation wide and en- 
 gage the passions of the Anglo-American stock : base- 
 
 [235] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 ball and the prohibition of wine, love, speculation and 
 art. Is the sharing of these two passions to mark the 
 assimilated American? I shall be accused of a per- 
 verse injustice. Quite wrongly. For the notion of 
 liberty on which the Republic was founded, the spirit 
 of America that animated Emerson and Whitman, is 
 vividly alive to-day only in the unassimilated for- 
 eigner, in that pathetic pilgrim to a forgotten shrine. 
 The prohibitionists of Kansas, the lynchers of Georgia, 
 the hard-headed businessmen in the chambers of com- 
 merce in a thousand cities, the members of the National 
 Security League, The American Legion, The Loyal 
 American League — what have these self-appointed in- 
 quisitors and Black Hundreds to do with liberty? 
 " Every man and woman who will not get in line must 
 get out!" Such is the avowed program of the Loyal 
 American Legion. Such has been the program of every 
 instigator of massacre or pogrom in history. These 
 people suspect liberty, just as they suspect civilized 
 food and drink, art, personal relations, as symptoms 
 of an alien and subversive spirit. 
 
 One cultural tradition we have in America and it is, 
 by at least a few years, the oldest : the linguistic and 
 literary tradition of the English race. But that tradi- 
 tion — the tradition of Chaucer and Shakespeare and 
 
 Milton is a learned and aristocratic one. It has 
 
 never humanized the folk of the British motherland. 
 How many Anglo-Americans share it? Ask the mem- 
 bers of the local chapter of the American Legion when, 
 in the name of American culture, they annoy a German 
 Singing Society— ask them to quote fifty lines from 
 the fundamental classics of the English tongue ! How 
 many immigrants, then, can share that tradition or 
 
 [236] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 become assimilated to it? One, perhaps one, in every 
 million. I am that one in a million. What Anglo- 
 American has lived with the poets who are the sources 
 of his great tradition more closely] than I? What 
 AngloAmerican has a deeper sense for the order and 
 eloquence and beauty of his own tongue than I? But 
 when, in old days, I desired to translate my American- 
 ism in that high and fine sense into action, I was told 
 that I was not wanted. Yet I was to be Americanized. 
 I am even now to be assimilated. Suppose I intend 
 rather to assimilate America, to mitigate Puritan bar- 
 barism by the influence of my spirit and the example of 
 my life ? Then a writer named, let us say, Stuart Sher- 
 man, declares that I pervert the national genius. But 
 suppose I am the national genius — Dreiser and 
 Mencken and Francis Hackett and I — rather than 
 Stuart Sherman or the late Hamilton Wright Mabie or 
 the smoothly assimilated Edward Bok? Ah, if we 
 could but all meet in the year two-thousand before 
 some great and spiritual tribunal. Until some such 
 day comes the question must remain an open one. . . . 
 
 The common folk cannot make my original choice 
 nor suffer my exclusion. An old and perhaps weari- 
 some story is to be told of them, but a story that must 
 be told again and again until a sense of true liberty and 
 of human values breaks in upon the darkness and the 
 degradation of our day. 
 
 I knew an old Jew from the South of Russia. He 
 wore a long beard and you could see where his ear- 
 locks had been. He had a habit of hiding his hands in 
 his sleeves. He read the Torah and the legends of his 
 people in the sacred tongue. He read Hamlet and 
 Faust in Yiddish translations. He read not only the 
 
 [237] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 political news but also the well-conducted literary 
 columns in the Yiddish papers and cast a thoughtful 
 vote. He sat in his cafe on Second Avenue and dis- 
 cussed many notable matters and drank tea and, oc- 
 casionally, a thimble-full of brandy and smoked Rus- 
 sian cigarettes. He was a wise man and a charitable 
 one and died poor. His son has become Americanized. 
 He knows neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. His English 
 is less foreign than his father's was, but far more 
 vulgar and corrupt. On his clean-shaven face there 
 is an indescribable blending of impudence and cun- 
 ning, servility and smartness. He is manager of the 
 Lake City Emporium, makes big money and thinks 
 the old man was a little weak in the head. He says, 
 having just made another particularly unscrupulous 
 f ive- thousand : "Yes sir, I'm an American all right. 
 This country is good enough for me. ' ' He likes to see 
 a game of baseball and sometimes drowses over the 
 Saturday Evening Post. His fat, sleek, indolent, 
 young wife blazes with diamonds. . . . 
 
 I knew an old German grocer from Mecklenburg. 
 He loved the poems of Claus Groth, the Low German 
 Burns, and quoted largely and with a fine, ripe appre- 
 ciation from the books of Fritz Reuter. He read Low 
 German papers. He was a member of a singing so- 
 ciety and was unlearned neither in the great folk-songs 
 of his people nor in the works of Schubert and Schu- 
 mann. He quenched his moderate thirst with beer. 
 His English was broken to the last. But in the Ameri- 
 can community which was his home for forty years 
 his name stood for careful honor and frugal wisdom. 
 His son has become Americanized. He reads the col- 
 ored Sunday supplements of the yellow press. He is 
 
 [238] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 a baseball "fan;" his favorite songwriter is Irving 
 Berlin; he drinks whiskey — on the sly. He wants a 
 political job in order "to live on easy street." Mean- 
 while he clerks around. Having exchanged his father's 
 game of skat for poker he ran through his inheritance 
 in two years in gambling rooms. He has Anglicized 
 his name. . . . 
 
 These are unhappily not extreme cases. They are 
 not rare. They are increasing in frequency under the 
 pressure of tribal tyranny. Nor have they, as I shall 
 be glibly and vaguely told, anything to do with char- 
 acter. For the basic truth of the matter lies here : If 
 you drain a man of spiritual and intellectual content, 
 if you cut him off from the cultural continuity that is 
 native to him and then fling him into a world where his 
 choice lies between an impossible religiosity and Pro- 
 hibition on the one hand, and the naked vulgarity of 
 the streets and of the baseball diamond on the other, 
 you have robbed him of the foundation on which char- 
 acter can be built. The slow gains of the ages are 
 obliterated in him. He uses the mechanics of civiliza- 
 tion to become a sharper or a wastrel. 
 
 Mr. Granville Barker, the British playwright, tells 
 a story which he will forgive me for borrowing. He 
 was taking a walk in spring on Staten Island. It was 
 Sunday. Behind a hedge sat an Italian laborer with all 
 the grime of the week on him, munching dark bread 
 and garlic and reading with great intensity. Mr. 
 Barker caught a glimpse of the book. It was a cheap, 
 well thumbed edition of the Divine 'Comedy. "The 
 children of this man," said Mr. Barker, "will probably 
 be Americanized. They will be cleaner and have bet- 
 ter wages and eat daintier food and perhaps have 
 
 [239] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 electric light in their houses. But will they sit behind 
 a hedge on Sunday reading an American Divine 
 Comedy of the future?" 
 
 The doctrine of assimilation, if driven home by 
 public pressure and official mandate, will create a race 
 of unconscious spiritual helots. We shall become ut- 
 terly barbarous and desolate. The friend of the Re- 
 public, the lover of those values which alone make life 
 endurable, must bid the German and the Jew, the Latin 
 and the Slav preserve his cultural tradition and be- 
 ware of the encroachments of Neo-Puritan barbarism 
 — beware of becoming merely another dweller on an 
 endless Main Street; he must plead with him to re<- 
 main spiritually himself until he melts naturally and 
 gradually into a richer life, a broader liberty, a more 
 radiant artistic and intellectual culture than his own. 
 
 VI 
 
 I gravely fear that he will not be permitted to heed 
 the warning. Those who have the whip will not lay it 
 aside. For the evils that are done and suffered in 
 human society flow from one source and that source is 
 hardest to reach. Probe to the core of any man's con- 
 sciousness and you will come upon a blind and stony 
 kernel of moral certitude. He has taken his accidental 
 tastes, beliefs, instincts, and has transformed them into 
 an absolute. Church, synagogue and mosque tell him 
 that this complex of instincts and opinions forged into 
 solidity by his will to conquer is the command of God. 
 The so-called liberal who rejects a revelation still har- 
 bors the unbreakable conviction that his moral faith is 
 supported by a super-personal sanction and wreaks 
 
 [240] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 his set of habits upon his fellows in the name of some 
 concept to which he assigns a false universality. Thus 
 the religious man, the righteous man, the patriot, each 
 is convinced that he knows what is absolutely right and 
 hence is justified in enforcing his Tightness and its 
 practices upon those whom he considers weak, wrong- 
 headed and perverse. From the entertaining of such 
 moral absolutes to the lynching stake and the torture 
 chamber the path, both logical and practical, is straight 
 and unreturning. The man who believes that his moral 
 Tightness is absolute, though he himself never touches 
 the hair of another's head, is a murderer and the ac- 
 complice of murderers. For only from moral certitude 
 can arise the exertion of force over others. To avert 
 your face from a neighbor who believes that society 
 needs a different distribution of property or that love 
 is a personal and not a legal matter is to lay hands of 
 violence upon his soul. To wage war for an island or 
 a coal-field is evil enough. But to wage it with an as- 
 surance of one's moral rightness and the enemy's 
 moral wrongness reduces men, as we of this genera- 
 tion have witnessed, below the fiercest and dullest 
 beasts. To fight for the right is the last of human 
 follies and degradations. It is to identify yourself 
 with God in order to be cruel without the temptation 
 of a humane relenting. By the delusion of absolute 
 moral knowledge and by no other means can the pa- 
 tient and kindly children of the earth be turned into 
 brutes with nerves of wire and hearts of granite. When 
 the great revolution broke out in Russia I felt a glow 
 and a brief hope. But that glow and that hope are also 
 fading. For the purpose of an economic revolution is 
 to release man from physical suffering and uncertainty 
 
 [241] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 and the resultant slavery in order that the individual 
 may be set wholly free ; it is not to cage and herd him 
 into another exclusive ideology with its dogmas, laws 
 and prophets. The aim of ultimate revolution must be 
 to destroy the herd and the herd mind and the herd 
 mind's hardening into that moral faith from which are 
 born persecution and disease and war. 
 
 So at the end of this journey of the mind I reach 
 the goal of ancient but eternal platitudes. No change 
 will avail in this world except an inner change. There 
 is no absolute but life, but the persistence of the in- 
 dividual and so of the race. No God has spoken, no 
 sanction exists. There is no inherent reason why men 
 should own property privately or in common, why they 
 should practice monogamy or some other form of 
 sexual union. Their aim being happiness and their 
 happiness consisting in beautiful and rational living, 
 it must be their purpose to discover what actions and 
 agreements will lead to such living. The conservative 
 replies that these actions and agreements have been 
 discovered. The free man's terrible and sufficient an- 
 swer must be a picture of the world at the end of 
 twenty centuries of capitalism and Christian morals. 
 It is a strange fallacy to regard unanimity as desirable. 
 Were men unanimous they would be animals with the 
 monotonous instincts of animals and the forever 
 changeless and recurrent gestures of those instincts. 
 Varieties of spiritual temper and outer experience 
 make life human. Each variety has relative truth, 
 relative value, relative beauty for him who is 
 impelled to live it. So soon as he seeks to im- 
 pose its dictates upon another, he asserts its absolute- 
 ness and not only commits a crime but destroys the 
 
 [242] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 multiplicity that makes the cosmos and invites the fea- 
 tureless monotony that is the negation of it. He may 
 persuade others by being or pleading, never by act- 
 ing. To deflect is to wound and even to touch is to kill. 
 And life, life only, not one kind of life rather than an- 
 other, is sacred. This sacredness must be felt by the 
 soul. We must learn to shrink from any exertion of 
 force as we do normally from murder. "We must give 
 up emotionally the moral legends- that justify our 
 tyrannies. The words of Shelley must be accepted 
 literally. Man is to be ' ' free, uncircumscribed, " he is 
 to be 
 
 Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king 
 Over himself; 
 
 he is to liberate himself from " guilt and pain" 
 
 Which were for his will made or suffered them. 
 
 Severely practical consequences arise from such a 
 conception of human existence. During the fiscal year 
 of 1920 ninety-two per cent of the national expendi- 
 ture of this country went for the army, the navy and 
 the results of war. The present fiscal year promises 
 to repeat the story. Thus over four billions of dollars 
 will be spent on the consequences and preparations of 
 destruction. These are figures to make the imagina- 
 tion halt. But analyze them and conceive of this vast 
 wealth spent annually, even within the present eco- 
 nomic order, on unemployment and old age insurance, 
 education and the endowment of motherhood. At once 
 the picture of life undergoes a radical change. There 
 are minor but still considerable sources of waste. Mil- 
 
 [243] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 lions are spent on missionary work — the feeble im- 
 pudence of teaching other races a set of legends and a' 
 bankrupt system of conduct; other millions are spent 
 on vice crusades, on the persecution of prostitutes and 
 on the enforcement of unpopular, repressive laws. The 
 children of New York city have not school houses 
 enough for the most elementary instruction and the 
 courts are asking the inhabitants of the city to raise 
 twenty-seven millions of dollars to defray the cost of 
 prosecuting infringements of the eighteenth amend- 
 ment. It may be doubted whether deliberate human 
 folly has gone beyond that in any age or among any 
 people apparently civilized. Let us suppose the funds 
 of the missionaries and the vice crusaders spent for the 
 •medical research of venereal diseases. In one genera- 
 tion the physiology and psychology of human love 
 would be revolutionized and saved. This, together 
 with the elimination of the savage notion /of illegiti- 
 macy, the endowment of voluntary motherhood, the 
 universal introduction of efficient contraceptives, 
 would transform millions of lives that are now stag- 
 nant and foul morasses into free rivers flowing in the 
 sun. "Why do we waste the wealth produced by human 
 labor on crippling our own instincts and hounding our 
 own souls ? Why do we, pitiful slaves, toil to make the 
 knout that flays our living flesh! Because we let stupid 
 zealots persuade us that their sadism is a moral abso- 
 lute compulsive on our minds and actions. And be- 
 cause men are starved in all their vital impulses and 
 robbed of all delight and liberty they sigh for im- 
 mortality as the forlornest of mortal hopes, for a 
 Mohamedan heaven of sensuous compensation, which 
 is the more honest one, or a Christian heaven in which 
 
 [244] 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAOS 
 
 all that is human will be extinguished and trouble them 
 no more. The philosopher, driven by a noble urge, 
 seeks to make rational his universe by assigning to 
 creative values a permanent validity. I share that 
 speculative hope. But I deplore its exploitation by 
 moralistic professors who play into the hands of them 
 that stunt and defile the life of man. ... I see old men 
 with vague, wandering eyes and thin, drawn lips and 
 claw-like fumbling hands. They mutter in the 
 churches; they confer with priests; they make gifts 
 to buy their way to heaven past old thefts and stealthy 
 lecheries. Morality has disinherited and poisoned 
 them. They want another chance; they want to be 
 cleansed. ... I have a vision of an old man of a new 
 moral order. Neither you nor I will be that man. But 
 the hope of his coming may sustain us He, too, has 
 been touched by fleshly decay. But his wrinkles do not 
 humiliate him; his white hair does not tell him that 
 it is too late. His eyes are serene and full of memories. 
 He has worked at his chosen task without fear of 
 penury; he has loved freely and magnificently. . . . 
 The voice of one — what a trick of laughing at the dawn 
 she had — floats to him . . . the sombre brows and hair 
 of another — what splendor was hers of mind and pas- 
 sion — arise before him. . . . Yes, beauty is immortal 
 and of immortal goodness. . . . He thinks of evenings 
 in gardens by a river where over wine, amber or the 
 color of dark rose-leaves, he and his friends debated 
 of art and the state and the procession of history and 
 the nature of the unfathomable world. He thinks of 
 his strong children living in the sun. He sits in an 
 armchair by the window, a volume of Plato or Goethe 
 on his knees. The sun is setting for him now. But 
 
 [245] 
 
UP STREAM 
 
 he is beyond wanting, needing, striving. He has had 
 his dawn, his noon, his afternoon. The sun sinks and 
 darkness falls npon the open page. If there is life 
 beyond earth he is unafraid. If there is none, he is at 
 peace. Work, loveliness and wisdom have been his. 
 The end is as fit as the beginning; the darkness is as 
 beautiful as the dawn. 
 
 [246] 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 All that I have written is true. It is true of 
 America. It is true, in other degrees, of mankind. But 
 I have written of America for the simple reason that 
 I am an American and I have spoken strongly for the 
 equally simple reason that the measure of one's love 
 and need is also the measure of one's disappointment 
 and indignation. 
 
 The facts stand as I have recorded them. And the 
 implications stand. Among the masses of our country- 
 men I see no stirring, no desire to penetrate beyond 
 fixed names to living things, no awakening from the 
 spectral delusions amid which they pursue their aim- 
 less business and their sapless pleasures. But the 
 critical spirit which is also the creative spirit has 
 arisen among us and it has arisen, naturally and in- 
 evitably, in the form of a protest and a rebellion 
 against the life and the ethos which is also described 
 here. I need but name a few representative names: 
 Masters, Sherwood Anderson,. Sinclair Lewis. The 
 substance of our new literature, of poems and novels 
 and books of criticism, is clearly this : Life among us 
 Is ugly and mean and, above all things, false in its as- 
 sumptions and measures. Somehow we must break 
 these shackles and flee and emerge into some beyond 
 of sanity, of a closer contact with reality, of nature and 
 of truth. 
 
 A few of the books of our new writers are read by 
 
 \247] 
 
many for the story, as a matter of fashion, often quite 
 unreflectively. But most of them are read by a 
 handful of people only. This handful means little 
 among our overwhelming numbers and we who love 
 this new literature and are sustained by it are often 
 deceived in regard to its significance as either a symp- 
 tom or a sanative. Shall I now say, in order to end 
 agreeably: It is always darkest before dawn? No; 
 for that kind of professional optimism is precisely 
 one of our national vices. The hour is dark. But that 
 shall not prevent us from working and striving for a 
 better one that may come hereafter. 
 
 THEESTD 
 
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