ippne uoil.


Loss.


99


gave us preliminary instruction, and I
learned that after I had written 'jump'
on the blackboard, and printed it, and
spelled it, I was to stand up on the platform and jump, as an illustration, I felt
that the last straw had been placed on
the camers back. Maybe I had been
breaking, gradually. Anyway, I have
saved a little money, and I decided to
come back to Enterprise to rest. It may
be by the time I am rested they will have
returned to the old methods, as they
have in writing, and I can begin over
again."
She said this resolutely, but the county superintendent was nevertheless emboldened to put the question that had for
years been trembling on his lips, and
Miss Petrie accepted him with a smile of
satisfaction.


(" I have loved you all this time," he
said, " and I am sure I can make you
happy. I, too, have my troubles. The
examinations are becoming so severe
that it is very difficult to answer the questions. You have got to use your reason
these days, and work out psychological
problems even in arithmetic and grammar, while the geography and history
examinations are all taken out of the
newspapers. 'When was Tolstoi banished?' 'Write a brief biography of Aguinaldo ' ' How old is Queen Wilhelmina?' 'Give the population of Luzon.'
I certainly need a helpmate, and with
your advantages you can be of great assistance to me in grading the papers."
Miss Petrie smiled a wintry smile.
Even in Cupid's toils she was not altogether to escape from the new education.
Kate Milner Rabb.


LOSS.
WHO that hath lost some dear-beloved friend
But knoweth how - when the wild grief is spent
That tore his soul with agony, and did lend
E'en to the splendor-beaming firmament
The blighting darkness of his shadowed heartThere surely follows peace and quiet sorrow
That lead his spirit, by divinest art,
Past the drear present to that glorious morrow
Where parting is not, neither grief nor fear!
But how shall he find comfort, who sees die,
Not the one presence that he held most dear;
But from his heart a hope as Heaven high,
And from his life a wish as Truth sublime,
And from his soul a love that mocked at Time?
Hildegarde Hawthorne.


I




100


Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


RACE PREJUDICE IN THE PHILIPPINES.


WE Americans like to call ourselves
the most democratic people on earth, but
the boast requires extensive qualification
before it can be made applicable to our
social habits. Every one recognizes the
all-exclusiveness with us of the term
" white man."  Nor should "white " be
emphasized rather than "man;" the
phrase might properly be written as a
hyphenated noun.   Whether fetich or
philosophy, it predicates to us the highest common multiple of intelligence and
virtue. We make it our synonym for
" civilization."
Nor is this merely an indication of our
share in that theory of racial superiority
which talks responsibility and thinks in
terms of commercial supremacy. Americans are not proof against the flattering
unction of a doctrine which sings Christianity while it means inequality. But
until recently we have been comparatively untouched by this contagion, have, in
fact, rather been inclined to adopt a cynical attitude with reference to it. Our
social prejudices have been provincial.
Excuses are readily to be found for a people so sorely tried as we have been by the
negro problem. Mere intolerance of color, however, is much less noticeable than
unreasoning and unrestrained impatience
with any and all who do not at once acknowledge the superiority of our institutions and customs, and hasten to adopt
them. We are proud of our reputation
as an asylum of the oppressed, and yet it
may be doubted if we should have been
so tolerant of immigration from Europe
had the immigrants been less ready of assimilation. Here, to be sure, prejudice
may create a natural and proper national
safeguard; yet, in spite of the fact that
as a people we are only a blend, the native American, be his nativity but two
generations strong, has for his neighbor
of another country a sort of pity that es

capes being ignorant prejudice only by
its real kindliness.
Our provincial assumption of superiority has been ridiculed by Mr. Kipling,
but it is different in degree only, and not
in kind, from that which, as the white
man's poet, he exploits. There is no
difference in quality between the pharisaism of a rustic and the pharisaism of a
world power.
Many people find in our occupation of
the Philippine Islands the threat of a
radical change in American character
and ideals. Even if we look only on the
evil side of things, it is hard to see how
American character and social ideas can
thus be radically altered. That it is a
step of transcendent importance, involving new and various political difficulties,
is true. But it draws us into a field
in which ultimately our prejudices may
broaden out, and in which our provincialisms must disappear.
Meanwhile, however, it must be admitted, the prospect of such beneficent
results seems spoiled by two untoward
phases of our new venture: we have carried into the Philippines a petty race prejudice, the offspring of past provincialism and the inheritance of slavery with
its residue of unsettled problems; and
we are betraying a tendency to swagger
under the " white man's burden," sometimes in the garb of commercialism,
sometimes in the raiment of science.
As might be expected, the petty prejudices are first to exhibit themselves,
and are also, just at present, the more
serious obstacles to a general good understanding in the Philippines. Relying
upon the common sense of the reader not
to draw any hysterical conclusions of general "oppression" in the Philippines,
it may be worth while to cite instances
and facts to shdw how race prejudice has
been doing us harm in the islands. Only




Race Prejudice in the Philippines.
Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


101


instances for which I can personally
vouch will be employed.
That the color line would be drawn by
some Americans who had to do with affairs in the islands could readily have
been predicted. The extent to which
it has been held in veneration is, however, far from complimentary either to
the intelligence and general information
or to the breadth and charity of Americans. This tendency to shy at a darker
skin, no matter who or what the wearer,
is doubtless a minor reason for English
cynicism at our talk of Philippine selfgovernment. But we need not go to India, nor learn that there are dark-skinned
branches of the Caucasian family, to appreciate how small is the significance of
color alone in connection with mankind.
Without in the least justifying the prejudice against the negroes in the United
States, what possible excuse does that
afford for proceeding on the "nigger "
theory among a people largely Malayan?
The typical Filipino is every whit as distinct from the Negro as he is from the
European. Yet it is the usual thing
among Americans who have been in the
Philippines, and imbibed a contempt or
dislike for the people, to betray in their
conversation the fact that their theories
of the situation are based upon popular
notions at home as to negro shortcomings
and incapacity. They prejudge the people before they have even seen them, and
they come away without ever having
made a single honest effort to find out
what they really are like.
Before the arrival of the second Philippine Commission at Manila and the
inauguration by Judge Taft and its other
members of social gatherings in which
the natives were in the majority, practically nothing had been done in the way
of providing an informal meeting ground
for representative Filipinos and Americans. The first Philippine Commission
had given a ball in 1899, which was a
landmark for Filipino matrons and
belles in their discussions and misappre

hensions as to what Americans were like
socially. With two or three very notable exceptions, officers whose wives had
joined them did not think of meeting any
residents but some of the wealthy Spanish " left-overs " on anything like terms
of social equality. Eight months after
Judge Taft and his colleagues had begun
a new policy in this respect, General
MacArthur gave a distinctly successful
reception in the governor's palace in
Malacafian. Of course, it is not intended
to imply that it was incumbent upon
army officers to incur the expense and
trouble incident to such affairs, nor that
those charged with the burden of military administration in the islands could
or should have spared time in the midst
of active fighting to inaugurate a social
campaign in Manila. What it is desired
to point out is that some cultivation of
the social amenities, some willingness
to meet the natives halfway, was quite
worth the while. When it is considered
that there are in Manila many wealthy
and well-educated mestizos, some of
whom have polished their minds and
manners in Madrid and Paris, who hold
themselves quite as good as any man,
and who, in fact, were imbued with some
of the Latin-European contempt for
Americans as uncultured meney-makers,
the folly of such aloofness is doubly evident. That most of this class had formerly sought to identify themselves socially with the Spaniards, and had been
virtually of the Spanish contingent, did
not alter the fact that nearly all had their
following among the people; nor did our
knowledge of their contributions to the
insurgent cause, whether made voluntarily or through prudence, render it either
politic or patriotic to assume an air of
superiority.
Force of circumstances has from the
first, through the necessarily closer contact and the lack of other society, brought
about more social mingling in the provincial towns. In general, however,
the attitude of the army women in the




102


Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


islands is typified by that one in Manila
who, in discussing affairs in her first
call on the wife of a member of the Commission, exclaimed in horror: "Why,
surely you don't propose to visit these
people and invite them to your own home
just the same as you would white people! " Time has perhaps brought a little more catholicity, at any rate the custom of entertaining natives has come to
be received without a shock; but few
army women in Manila have Filipinas
on their calling list, and in the provinces
they often take it on themselves to caution American women sent out asteachers
against mingling with the people of their
towns. This attitude is also that of the
great majority of officers in the army,
though the men, like men everywhere,
are less formal about a social rule and
less rigid in their likes and dislikes of
persons.
An instance of this attitude was the
attempt to exclude from the Woman's
Hospital at Manila (founded by a donation of Mrs. Whitelaw Reid) all Filipinos as patients, as well as to keep off the
list of patronesses the names of Filipino
women. At about the same time the
board of ladies to whose energy the American Library of Manila was due asked
to have it made a public library, to be
helped out by funds from the Philippine
treasury, and made very strenuous protests against having it also thrown open
to Filipinos for a share in its management and use. They contended that it
had been established as a monument to
American soldiers who lost their lives in
the Philippines, and that it was unfitting
that Filipinos should have anything to
do with it, though Philippine taxes might
support it.
At a ball given to various American
authorities by the native residents of a
provincial capital, an American officer
stopped the band after it began a dance
at the direction of the Filipino who was
master of ceremonies, and ordered it to
start a two-step. When interrogated, he


announced that the military were in command of that town, thus insulting the
Filipino who had charge of affairs, and
incidentally also a number of American
ladies whose partners had brought them
on the floor for the Philippine quadrille.
The American officer was a graduate of
one of our leading universities, and formerly occupied a responsible position in
one of the largest American cities. The
Filipino, as perhaps the officer knew,
had finished his education in Madrid and
Paris, had resided for some years in the
latter city, had published a number of
scientific treatises, and was a member of
various learned societies of Europe.
This and the other instances do not,
of course, reveal a prejudice grounded
entirely on color, yet this is the chief
factor. It may be worth while remarking that, judging by one man's personal
observation, this attitude of contempt is
less noticeable among officers from the
South than among those from the North.
Doubtless this is due to their having had
closer contact with people of another
color, and to a greater tolerance through
the staling of custom, although the conviction of the other's inferiority may yet
be deeper bred.
On the other hand, an experience to
be remembered was hearing some Southern as well as Northern officers rate the
Filipino higher than the American negro,
greatly to the indignation of a colored
chaplain of the army who overheard them.
And these officers were rather more tolerant of the presence among the firstclass passengers of an army transport of
a Filipino mestizo from the Visayan islands than of the same chaplain, who
was finally given a seat by himself because some very important young lieutenants would not sit next him.
Something more than mere color prejudice must be invoked to explain the
actions of a major who put sentries out
under unprecedentedly strict orders in
the capital of a province where civil government had lately been established, and




Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


103


then backed them against the civil authorities in overriding the rights of natives and in shooting down a peaceable
citizen in the streets. Again, an ex-insurgent general, whom many of our officers denounced as having been responsible for assassinations by the men under him, was set at liberty by General
Chaffee, but a young lieutenant who happened at the time to be in command of
the military prison where he was confined
ignored the order of release till compelled
by appeal to recognize it. Meanwhile he
set the ex-insurgent officer, a man of
standing and education, to cleaning out
stables. One has to appeal to a strain
of meanness and to a brutal pleasure in
the exercise of the power over one's fellows that circumstances have temporarily
conferred, to explain these and similar instances. The details of the China campaign, not really well known, show how
such instances might be multiplied, and
our national pride suffers when we find
that, after all, they were not all confined
to Russians, Germans, and Frenchmen.
The writer was one of a group of
American civilians halted in the street
of a Philippine town by an ugly sentinel
and ordered, in gruff terms at the bayonet's point, to salute a minute American flag on the top of a fifty-foot pole.
Not one, of course, had seen it. The
pole had purposely been set some hundreds of feet from the barracks, almost
in the street itself, and the order was
enforced against every one who passed.
A protest to the officer in command, a
gray-haired captain, brought the reply
that he was " teaching the niggers a lesson." This province was a leader in the
revolt against Spain, first because of the
friars, and second because of the abuses
suffered at the hands of the Spanish civil
guard. One need not add that the hatred felt toward our troops is intense.
One of our young officers there had acquired the genial habit of imbibing to
the point of mischief, then ordering out
a corporal's guard and raiding Filipino


houses at all hours of the night. He
finally raided the house where the Filipino judge of that circuit was staying,
which put an end to this particular form
of amusement for him. When this same
judge, a Filipino educated in Paris, of
unusually solid character and attainments, opened court in this town, the
provincial capital, he was obliged to begin by requesting that an American officer - not a youngster either - remove
his hat from his head and his feet from
the table. The province is under civil government, and the officer took this means
of expressing his contempt of the civil
government idea in general and of this
Filipino's court in particular. No fighting has occurred in the province for
some months, yet so sure were high military authorities of trouble brewing that
they saw rifles in their sleep, and the
Chinese rival in business of an ex-insurgent officer was able to get him into jail
by dropping in the street a letter purporting to contain the latter's plans for
an uprising. This method of denunciation of one's enemies became very common after Spain began her deportations
on suspicion.
The ex-insurgent-appointed governor
of a neighboring province did not see fit
to salute the officers of the garrison in a
town under his jurisdiction, and the latter
started a newspaper campaign against
him in Manila, charging him with all
sorts of treachery and plotting. Similarly, the garrisoning force at Cebi was
put in such a state of mind by the restoration of civil control there that even
the privates felt called upon to stop the
officers of the native police in the streets
and make them salute. Abuses of a rather more serious nature led a Spanish
newspaper in Manila to recall to the
Americans that the people of Cebb never
really turned against Spain until the latter power had let some Moro troops loose
in their streets to run things to their liking.
These instances do not afford ground




104


Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


for a general indictment of the army in
the Philippines. Like other organizations, the army has its share of all sorts
of men; and, were it in point here, the
testimony of various Filipinos themselves
to utterly unexpected generosity at the
hands of officers and privates, and examples of unselfish efforts to get into
touch with the people and to better their
condition, could readily be adduced. Recent revelations have focused attention
on the conduct of the army in the Philippines, and some have tried to make out
that downright brutality was the rule of
campaign there. Cases of actual inhumanity have been, I am convinced, the exceptional ones. It must be admitted, however, by any one who really knows things
as they now are in the islands, that at least
three fourths of the army, rank and file,
entertain a more or less violent dislike
for the Filipinos and a contempt for their
capacity, moral and intellectual. This
feeling in the army has grown during
the past two years. Perhaps it may be
dated back to the early days of 1900,
when guerrilla warfare had begun, and
our troops had to contend with ambushes
and a foe who was an excellent masquerader, and who practiced the art of assassination on his own fellow countrymen in
forms of the most refined cruelty. The
American soldier has something of the
mediaeval warrior's love of an out and
out, decisive test of strength, and wants
his opponent to come out into the open
and slay or be slain. He is disposed to
underrate the bravery and the capacity
of a foe whose very circumstances drove
him to employ methods which nature and
his talents gave him, while secret assassination can find excuse with none of us.
Then, too, the loss of power through
the merging of military into civil government has increased the hostility of narrow-minded army officers to the native.
The atmosphere of army life is undemocratic. It was sometimes amazing to find
how large some ordinary American citizens could become in their own eyes,


when, thousands of miles from home,
they gained absolute control over five to
twenty thousand or more people, with no
white man at hand who could venture to
question their dictates. Such men -
and some were in high place and some
in low - let go of a newly tasted power
with ill grace, and promptly became convinced that civil government was a mistake. One present in the Philippines during this transfer of governing power
could see a bitterness against the natives
crop out that had not been expressed, and
often not felt before.
This contempt and ill feeling grew
apace, as one following the American
press of Manila could note, until many
would not concede to the native the possession of a single good quality. Officers stationed in pacified provinces might
often have been judged by their actions
as being really desirous of provoking another outbreak, while in the main their
conduct was due to mere thoughtless prejudice, spurred into activity by the constant iteration in the mouths of all around
them of charges against the native inhabitants. An illustrative case is that
of a young lieutenant, whom I once overheard telling an American lady how he
and a fellow officer used to go up and
down the streets of a Cavite town shooting water buckets out of the hands of
startled natives and otherwise keeping
up revolver practice. It was done to
"keep the gugus in a proper frame of
mind," he commented. This was in a
province for some time pacified, and in a
garrison where time doubtless hung rather heavy. Yet subsequent conversation
with this officer revealed that he had no
deep-seated prejudice, despite an ugly
bolo wound he carried, but was thoughtlessly classing all Filipinos together as
bad, incapable, and in general not much
entitled to consideration.
This is not the attitude solely of the
army, though it is the attitude of a majority in the army. American civilians, both
those in the employ of the civil govern



Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


105


ment and the smaller element not so employed, often feel the same. Naturally,
as the success of the civil government
must rest upon conciliation, while in the
last resort military success always depends upon force, the employees of the
civil government are obliged to consult
native feelings and native interests, no
matter what may be their personal prejudices. But among the subordinates
one finds petty prejudice cropping out in
many different ways, such as striding majestically along the middle of a crowded
sidewalk and shoving natives right and
left, while violent and ill-considered opinions are often expressed.
Allusion has been made to the attitude
of the American press in Manila. Two
of the three American dailies there are
characterized by intemperance and indecency of expression and a general cheapness. They are the mouthpieces of an
element which loudly proclaims that it
represents American commercial interests in the Orient. It is hardly necessary
to say that, while there are a few very
praiseworthy pioneers of our industry in
the Philippines, really substantial business interests have very generally held
aloof, because of active insurrection, and
because Senator Hoar's amendments to
the "Spooner Bill" postponed investments of capital until Congress had
taken further action.  But adventurers, army camp-followers, schemers, and
shyster lawyers have of course not been
held back by any such considerations.
With to desire to belittle the few who
are honestly seeking a foothold there,
and who do us credit, it is nevertheless
true - could not, in fact, be otherwise
under the circumstances - that the great
bulk of Philippine business remains in
the hands of the Spanish, British, and
other European firms. Some American
firms there, which rejoice in high-sounding names as commercial companies,
have headquarters greatly resembling
" sample rooms," and their stock, other
than liquid goods, is largely carried in


catalogues.  Beer-agents often  "roll
high " in Manila, and assume a dignity
and importance as "captains of industry " that would merely be amusing were
it not that newspapers backed by them
and others of like faith pose before the
natives as representative of Americans
and American sentiment. They furnish
the Spanish journalists of Manila, who,
almost without exception, are eager to do
us mischief, with many a text for insinuating columns about "exploitation," the
fear of which is very present with the
Filipino.
Loud talk of patriotism and the flag
characterizes this element, and the motto
" America for Americans" also signifies
to them "the Philippines for Americans."
Quite naturally, a policy which consults
principally the interests of the Filipinos
is not to their liking. This is the real
reason for the attacks on Sefors Tavera
and Legarda, two of the three Filipinos
who were added to the Philippine Commission in September last, these calumniations being based on the charges of
a Spanish journalist since convicted of
libel. Commissioner Luzuriaga has so
far escaped the mud-slinging, as he was
drafted into service from Negros, and
had not been entangled in affairs at the
capital.
Attacks on the natives constantly
grew in bitterness last fall. The massacre in Simar afforded excuse for all
sorts of rumors and even circumstantial
accusations of revolts in Manila itself,
in its environs, and in some of the pacified provinces. Sometimes these were
merely the product of reportorial invention and lack of copy; in other cases,
they could be traced to an attack of
hysteria on the part of some army or
constabulary subordinate.  A  fearful
"Katipunan rising" in Tarlac, which
occupied Manila papers for several days,
and which reached the United States as
dignified cable news, resolved itself upon
investigation into a lovers' quarrel. A
Filipino maiden whose favors had been




106


Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


transferred to an American sergeant was
called to account by her former lover, a
native, and she denounced him to the sergeant as connected with a big revolt. Arrests were prompt, and the story grew in
size and details every mile of the way to
Manila.
The meetings of the Federal party in
Manila for the purpose of drawing up
a petition to Congress were at times
amusingly turbulent, but they were
grossly misreported with a view to comment on the ridiculousness of conferring
any degree of self-government upon the
Filipinos. A press but lately freed from
the censorship of an army officer began
to cry for the restoration of military
government and a "thorough" policy,
by which, apparently, they meant a policy of extermination. Typical of these
almost daily outbreaks are these quotations from a Manila Freedom editorial
of last October: -
" Every Filipino is an insurgent at
heart, and every Filipino hates the
Americans if the truth was known.
They take our money, and they smile
to our faces, but in their hearts they
have no use for us or our government.
Incapable of gratitude, they view our
generosity in the light of a weakness,
and at the first favorable moment betray the trust reposed in them. We
deny that there are Filipinos who favor
us, or who appreciate what we have done
or wish to do for them."
The Spanish editors always see to it
that the reading Filipinos do not miss
such things for want of a translation.
Trhey have inspired frequent indignant
protests from the Filipino press and the
demand that loyalty be met with loyalty. These instances may help to shed
light on the passage of the libel and sedition laws in Manila. It must be remembered that there is no such organized public opinion to deal with newspaper extravagances in the Philippines as
with us at home, while these American
papers are taken much more seriously


by the Filipinos than by Americans. As
bearing on the reason for enacting a sedition law, it is to be noted that the Philippine government has invoked this law
so far only against American editors in
Manila. In the month of March last,
vituperation of the natives on the part
of two American publications exceeded
even anything said last fall.
Race prejudice, like any other prejudice, cannot, simply as such, be logically
explained. Even its defenders admit
this when they appeal to "an innate
sense of superiority," or preach of "the
limits assigned by God to the different
tribes of men." Gentlemen who would
scorn to admit being bound to the ancient and outgrown Jewish system of
political philosophy are often very glib
with such phrases. But when race prejudice descends from its pedestal of supernaturalism and seeks to rjustify itself
by human argument, it subjects itself to
ordinary rules of logic.
Attacks on the character of the native
are usually made the basis of the white
man's plea in the Philippines. For this
purpose the natives are all treated as
identical in kind and character, grouped
into one, as it were. Upon such a hypothesis one can argue that, because
one native known to him was deficient
morally and seemed incapable mentally,
therefore the Filipinos are a dishonest
and inefficient race. But thus baldly
stated, the proposition seems too ridiculous to emanate from any educated person; yet it is remarkable how commonly it is set forth by persons who consider
themselves very well educated. We all
know how indignant we become when a
European writer of short experience
among us proceeds to cut one suit of
clothes to fit us all; yet the Filipinos
are hardly a more homogeneous people
than we, and there are just as strongly
marked individual types in the East as
in the West.
I do not seek to gloss over Filipino
defects. No one who knows them as




Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


107


they really are to-day will undertake the
task of deification. It is a great pity
that there is no real translation into
English of Rizal's novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. The idea
is prevalent that Rizal was a political
revolutionist. On the other hand, the
primary object of his books was to exhibit to his own countrymen their shortcomings. No such exposition of the
character and conditions of the Filipinos, truthful yet sympathetic, can be obtained elsewhere.
Though awake to their failings, yet
Rizal, from the heights of his German
university training and his contact with
European civilization, did not look down
on his people as " savages with a thin
veneer of civilization," as one of our
Congressmen very considerately -pronounced them to be to their faces. A product of wider opportunities himself, Rizal believed in wider opportunities for
all his countrymen. The "savages"
contention has had of late some very
ardent advocates among the Spanish
friars, though the early missionaries of
the very orders that now turn and rend
the Filipino people have left much detailed testimony to show that their
charges were by no means savages when
the Spaniards first came that way. To get
at the truth as to the state of civilization
of the Filipinos at the time of the Spanish conquest one must carefully weigh
the evidences of an accumulation of
mainly useless and unreliable documents,
and the history of the Philippines has
yet to be written in the modern spirit;
but it is sufficient for this discussion to
say that there is no place for the notion
that the Filipinos are savages held in
check by religious awe and superstition.
Here, as throughout the discussion, no
reference is had to the Moros, the Indonesian hill tribes of Mindanao, or the
mountain wild people of Luz6n and a
few other islands. The Negritos remaining are a negligible quantity.
There are cruelty and indifference to


suffering, often to a shocking degree.
These are due to an ever present fatalism,
which the little real religious teaching
the people have received has built upon
rather than sought to eliminate, and to
the absolute lack of an appeal to, or of
an attempt to educate, higher feelings.
If it is to be assumed at the outset that
these people are forever incapable of
such higher feelings, then it ought also
to have been assumed that they were incapable of Christianity. Water torture,
which has in some cases been resorted to
on our side, is one of the forms of torture
to which these people are accustomed.
The list of victims buried alive by order
of guerrilla chiefs, the maiming, mutilations, and secret assassinations certainly
make up an appalling and shocking chapter. War stirs up the darkest passions
among the most advanced peoples, however, and it was in a degree to be expected that a people untrained in modern
international usages, and never in the
past treated as though they belonged to
the brotherhood of man, or were responsible to humanity for humaneness, would
not exhibit an entirely refined code of
slaying. The "ethics of warfare," - after all, is that not a rather paradoxical
phrase?
That instances of real brutality on the
part of our troops have been the exception has been stated to be the opinion of
the writer. On the confession of the officer who conducted it, the campaign in
the island of SAmar from October to
March last must be excepted from this
general statement. He has met the
charge of violating the rules of civilized
warfare with the counter-charge that the
people of SAmar are savages, and that it
was necessary to suspend many of these
rules in order to restore peace and quiet
to that part of the archipelago. By inference, it then became a war of extermination till one side or the other should
cry quits. It is hard to deal with this
matter as yet in a strictly impartial
spirit, and full knowledge is one of the




108


Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


first requisites. One thing can at least
be asserted, namely, that the classification
of all the people of SAmar in one lump
as savages will bear close scrutiny. How
differentiate the bulk of them, living in
Christianized towns on the coasts or up
some of the more important rivers, from
their close neighbors and kinsmen in the
island of Leyte? The rough and mountainous character of much of the interior
of SAmar, with its primitive wild people
and a proportion of " Remontados " (as
the friars denominated those who refused
Christianity, who became fugitives from
the law, or who, for other reasons, " remounted " the hills), must, of course, be
taken into account. But the people of
the towns were, at least in the main,
those who were engaged against us. The
statement that the Spanish friars and officials never got any foothold in Samar is
utterly without foundation, while yet
their failure to penetrate the interior has
been noted.
This much may be said with certitude
of the Samar campaign of General Jacob
Smith: The expeditions which went
down there from Manila, on the heels of
the Balangiga massacre, went in a spirit
of revenge.  No one who appreciated
how that massacre caused those in all
the islands who wished us ill to exult and
to lift their heads again will underestimate the importance of having just retribution dealt promptly to the offenders;
but to make no distinction between
friend and foe, and to voice the cry of
blood for blood's sake, - "an eye for an
eye," not discriminating whose, - was
to lower ourselves to the plane of those
wretches who treacherously slew our men
at Balangiga. The writer has not the
first-hand knowledge to enable him to assert that indiscriminate slaughtering took
place in SAmar; but he was assured by
the representative of one of our leading
newspapers, who was there during October and November, that there was "no
regard for friend or foe," and he remembers the unofficial statements in Manila


papers of those months that the orders
were out to "take no prisoners " and
to "spare only women and children,"
while the recrudescence at that time of
native hatred in Manila and throughout
the islands has been noted above. The
people of Leyte, neighboring island to
Samar, and the officers of Leyte's civil
provincial government, both Americans
and Filipinos, were sorely tried at the
time by the arbitrary actions of General
Smith and the men under him. All natives came in for condemnation just then,
and officers of the American army behaved in peaceful Leyte in most lawless
disregard of law established by authority
of the President, their commander in
chief.
For General Smith, it can at least be
said that he was logical. The SAmar
campaign represents the military view
of the natives and the military theory as
to rule over them carried to their legitimate extreme. Yet, again it must be
said that this campaign is to be treated
by itself, and the belief reiterated that, on
the whole, inhumane conduct has been
the exception. No one who knows the
two men, or the circumstances of the
campaigns, will think of putting General
James F. Bell's reconcentration and
similar measures in Batangas and Laguna side by side with the conduct of affairs in SAmar.
This digression as to matters of recent
controversy will have been worth while
if it shall serve to induce to a saner consideration of army conduct in the islands,
and if it shall also emphasize the fact
that the generally contemptuous attitude
of army men and other Americans toward the natives - that feeling which
gives itself vent in the term " niggers "
- is what does us greatest harm. The
Filipinos have grown, by hard experience, somewhat callous to measures that
seem to us extreme, if not actually
brutal. We do not make enemies for
ourselves half so much by the occasional
administration of the water cure or other




Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


109


forms of torture and barbarity as by a
studied attitude of contempt, an assumption of racial and individual superiority,
and the constant disregard of their petty
personal rights and of the little amenities
which count for so much with them.
Nor is it true that the water cure has
been very commonly applied, nor that
our officers and men are, as a body, given
to that sort of thing. The recent riot of
exaggeration was regrettable, in this:
that it has tended to produce a reaction,
to lead people to feel that it was all, not
partly, partisan hue and cry, and thus to
make easier a "'whitewash" of those
particular men who need punishment,
wherever, in the circles of their fellow
subordinate officers, there may be a disposition to whitewash.
Lack of capacity to develop mentally
is a frequent charge against the Filipinos. It is forever put forward by friar
writers; one comes to believe finally that
this is to excuse the failure to advance
the natives further. Just how deficient
the past education of the Filipinos has
been, just how narrow and mediaeval has
been the atmosphere of thought,, one cannot realize until he has come into direct
contact with its evidences. Often the
best educated Filipinos cannotthemselves
realize it. The fact is, no one has the
right gratuitously to assume that the
Filipino is purely imitative, that he lacks
the logical, mathematical qualities of
mind, and that, while bright when young,
he soon reaches his limit and can go no
farther. He is entitled to an honest
trial, and the entire deficiency of past instruction is summed up when it is said
that he has never yet had it. Pending
a thorough trial of the new system of
education, beginning, as it does, at the
bottom and working up gradually, no
one has the right to be positive as to the
capacity or incapacity of the Filipino. I
have in mind one Filipino who, though
in other lines exhibiting perfectly his
Manila college training in circumlocution and scholastic chop-logic, will, on


economic matters within his scope, reason as closely and with as great a devotion to practical examples as any devotee
of the research method. He certainly
never got this quality from his training.
In fact, real acquaintance with Filipinos
and frank exchange of sentiments will
correct various preconceived notions. It
is frequently asserted, for instance, that
the Tagalog has no sense of humor;
quite the reverse is true.
We should also be honest with the
Filipino in the matter of laziness. American " get-up-and-get " is not the product
of life in the tropics, and to a considerable extent is not compatible with it.
But, before American contractors are allowed to flood the islands with contract
coolie labor, the Filipino has a right to
a fair trial, and such a fair trial will involve a considerable number of years.
Development of the country may not be
quite so rapid, but it will proceed on a
sounder basis if the rights of its people
to the first share in it are consulted. In
fact, the success of our political venture
in the Philippines depends in large measure on the extent to which we can arouse
in the people a desire for better homes,
better towns, and better surroundings.
There are evidences that, as he awakened
to European civilization, the Filipino did
not settle back idle wholly through the
lack of a desire for greater comforts and
conveniences, but in part at least because
of the all but hopelessness of an effort to
rise above a certain place in the hard
and fast industrial society the Spaniards
found and continued. So far higher
wages in Manila have generally meant
patent leathers and diamonds, but even
that is encouraging. Perhaps, too, we
shall learn some things to our advantage
from the Filipino. Ordinarily our superior in courtesy, something for which
many Americans have not the time, why
may he not inspire in us a greater respect for repose, dignity, and lack of
nervousness while we are arousing him
to a rather more strenuous existence?




110


Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


Filth and unsanitary ways of living,
again, are urged against the Filipinos.
They are certainly not unclean by nature, as the daily bath and the scrupulously white clothes testify. Ignorance
of the most primary hygienic principles
is, however, nearly universal. It will be
recalled that the Spaniards, so far behind in this respect, could give them little modern teaching or example. The
general character of the education at the
friar-conducted college in Manila, which
turned out practically all the physicians
in the Philippines, may be inferred from
such facts as that its text- books and
library in important subjects date back
over sixty years, that bacteriology has
been introduced only within the past
three years, and there are no microscopes.
Female cadavers are never dissected,
while the course in anatomy, like most
of the others, is very much of a farce.
Honest differences of opinion may exist as to the points already discussed,
but there can be no honest objection to
giving the Filipinos the benefit of the
doubt until they prove themselves undeserving. Perhaps no public utterance
of the late President has received less
general attention than his instructions
of April 7, 1900, to the present Philippine Commission. Yet, as time goes by,
it will not be strange if the fame of William McKinley shall rest mainly on that
document, whether penned by him or
penned by Secretary Root and authorized by him. In it he said:" In all forms of government and administrative provisions which they are
authorized to prescribe, the Commission
should bear in mind that the government
which they are establishing is designed
not for our satisfaction or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for
the happiness, peace, and prosperity of
the people of the Philippine Islands, and
the measures adopted should be made to
conform to their customs, their habits,
and even their prejudices, to the fullest
extent consistent with the accomplish

ment of the indispensable requisites of
just and effective government."
And again: "Upon all officers and
employees of the United States, both
civil and military, should be impressed
a sense of duty to observe not merely the
material but the personal and social
rights of the people of the islands, and
to treat them with the same courtesy
and respect for their personal dignity
which the people of the United States
are accustomed to require from each
other."
These instructions are based on the belief that it is not the white man alone who
possesses ' certain inalienable rights."
Science has progressed far since the human rights movement of the eighteenth
century. But it has not reached its
final postulates, and it is still somewhat
safer to follow the promptings of humanity than some of the over-positive
dicta of the science of man. Like political economy and other non-absolute sciences, ethnology suffers from a present
tendency to employ the evolutionary
method of reasoning in a one-sided fashion. Heredity is invoked wherever possible, and environment considered only
where it cannot be overlooked. If the
equality of man was often preached in
fantastic or utopian form in the latter
part of the eighteenth century, so has
the inequality of man met with a most
superficial extension in the latter part of
the nineteenth century. Ethnology and
anthropology are sciences yet too young
and undeveloped to justify very positive
assertions being based on them. Moreover, if any one great truth has been
made evident by them, it is this, that
man has in all ages been wonderfully
responsive to his surroundings, that he
is to a remarkable degree the product
of his environment. Physically, men,
of all colors, the world over, are of one
species; in psychic equipment, in all
that goes to make up social life, the various divisions of men often present differences as great as the physical differ



Race Prejudice in the Philippines.


Ill


ences on which genera or even families are outlined among other animals.
Evolutionary science developed its processes in connection with facts and features essentially physical; entrancing
as the results may be, is it necessarily
certain that these processes should be
applied literally and in detail to phenomena of other sorts?
It is wearisome to note how uniformly
writers on the peoples of the Orient assume that they are inherently different
from us in every respect, - that the ordinary Western ways of reasoning have no
place in the East, must in fact be reversed. The familiar saying that the
Chinese do everything backward is in
point. Now, John seems to me one of
the most unsparingly logical human beings in the world. Kipling's jingles are
responsible for much of that feeling that
the Oriental is a wholly mysterious being, not given to be understood by other
men, a curious psychological phenomenon. "Half-devil and half-child" comes
trippingly to the tongue of many Americans in the Philippines, and their philosophy of the Filipino is thus summed
up for them before their study of him
has ever begun. What is less creditable,
the same stock theory and a few facts,
more or less, constitute the equipment of
various university economists and world
problem specialists.
The writer can lay no claim to world
specialism or globe trotting, but he has
been more than anything else impressed
with the feeling that, after all, the differences in the races of men are much fewer
and less important than their points of resemblance. Great and sometimes amazing as are the former at times, they strike
our notice first, while the impression that
lingers with us is the unity of man.
More important than the theories, scientific or unscientific, are the practical
political problems facing us, a nation to
whose one tong-standing and yet unsettled race problem have now been added
others. The Atlantic's editor has al

ready noted that one of the first results
of our new venture in the oceans has
been the complication of the negro question at home; so likewise our failures
with the black people in the United
States are often urged against us among
the Filipinos, and " lynch law " is held
before them by those who like us not.
For the moment, it is no reproach to
preach inequality, and more or less openly pity is expressed for the narrowness
of the promulgators of the Declaration
of Independence. Jefferson had no inkling of the evolutionary theory, it is
true; neither had the laws of selection
and survival been stated in Christ's time.
But the divinely human love he inculcated and exemplified met with a real
revival in the crusade for equality among
men, and the true tenets of evolution
have to-day no higher trend than this.
The fact is, the Declaration of Independence is acquiring with time a range
of truth uncomprehended by its authors,
and in ways incomprehensible to their
times. While, on the one side, wellmeaning Americans are sure that we are
engaged in swashbuckler imperialism,
our British critics, whom we have always
with us, are equally confident of our failure through undue idealism.  One of
these has just finished cautioning us that
we must not attempt any " Jeffersonianideals" foolishness in the Philippines,
and advises us to pattern after the British in the Straits Settlements. The people of the latter are strictly comparable
to the Moros, but not at all to the civilized Filipinos. In a book just published,
another British writer, one of the few
who have been on the ground and know
what is really going on in the Philippines, has recognized that we are attempting there something new in the history of the world, and, despite a cocksureness as to the superiority of British
methods that will crop out, has thought
best to reserve judgment. But he is an
exception; his fellow countrymen in the
Orient are laughing in their sleeves at




112


Walter Pater.


the simple Americans who believe that
self-government can exist in that atmosphere. Even to call into question the
validity of the theory that some men are
made to rule and some to obey is to jar
most inconsiderately the complacency of
those men who have landed on the ruling
side.
The answer to the fearsome at home
is that, when they doubt our doing justice in the Philippines, they themselves
call into question government by the people. The answer to our outside critics
can only be given by time. It surely is
no sin to hope and believe that the Ori

ent is not impermeable to progress; and
it surely is better to strive to that end
until it is proved to be an impossible one,
if it shall be so proved. As for our prejudices, may we not learn to shed them
as we mingle more with the men of the
world and think less of our cherished
isolation? For the way to a broader social vision and a truer and nobler Christianity - real humanity - lies through
experience of our own limitations, hearing our shortcomings from the tongues
of other peoples, acquiring charity in the
stress of temptation, knowing our fellows
on the earth.
James A. LeRoy.


WALTER PATER.


LET us imagine to ourselves a boy born
some ten years before the middle of the
last century, of a family originally Dutch,
a familywith the home-loving, reserved
temper of the Dutch, and that slow-moving mind of Holland which attaches itself so closely, so intimately to things
real and concrete, not tempted away from
its beloved interiors and limited prospects
by any glories of mountain heights or
wide-spreading and radiant horizons; a
family settled for long in the low-lying,
slow-moving Olney of Buckinghamshire,
- Cowper's Olney, which we see in the
delicate vignettes of The Task, and in
the delightful letters, skilled in making
so much out of so little, of the half-playful, half-pathetic correspondent of John
Newton and Lady Hesketh. Dutch, but
of mingled strains in matters of religion, the sons, we are told, always, until
the tradition was broken inr the case of
Walter Pater, brought up as Roman
Catholics, the daughters as members of
the Anglican communion. Walter Pater's father had moved to the neighborhood of London, and it was at Enfield,
where Lamb, about whom the critic has


written with penetrating sympathy,
Lamb and his sister Mary, had lately
dwelt, that Pater spent his boyhood.
"Not precocious," writes his friend of
later years, Mr. Gosse, " he was always
meditative and serious." Yes, we cannot think of him at any time as other
than serious; withdrawn from the boisterous sports of boyhood; fed through
little things by the sentiment of home, -
that sentiment which was nourished in
Marius at White Nights by the duteous
observances of the religion of Numa; in
Gaston at the Chateau of Deux-Manoirs
with its immemorial associations and its
traditional Catholic pieties; in Emerald
Uthwart at Chase Lodge, with its perfumes of sweet peas, the neighboring
fields so green and velvety, and the church
where the ancient buried Uthwarts slept,
that home to which Emerald came back
to die, a broken man; in Florian Deleal
by "the old house," its old staircase,
its old furniture, its shadowy angles, its
swallow's nest below the sill, its brown
and golden wall-flowers, its pear tree in
springtime, and the scent of lime-flowers
floating in at the open window.




Walter Pater.


113


And with this nesting sense of home
there comes to the boy from neighboring London, from rumors of the outer
world, from the face of some sad wayfarer on the road, an apprehension of
the sorrow of the world, and the tears
in mortal things, which disturbs him
and must mingle henceforth with all his
thoughts and dreams. He is recognized
as " the clever one of the family," but it
is not a vivacious cleverness, not a contentious power of intellect, rather a shy,
brooding faculty, slow to break its sheath,
and expand into a blossom, a faculty of
gradual and exact receptiveness, and one
of which the eye is the special organ.
This, indeed, is a central fact to remember. If Pater is a seeker for truth, he
must seek for it with the eye, and with
the imagination penetrating its way
through things visible; or if truth comes
to him in any other way, he must project
the truth into color and form, since otherwise it remains for him cold, loveless,
and a tyranny of the intellect, like that
which oppressed and almost crushed out
of existence his Sebastian van Storck.
We may turn elsewhere to read of " the
conduct of the understanding." We
learn much from Pater concerning the
conduct of the eye. Whatever his religion may hereafter be, it cannot be that
of Puritanism, which makes a breach between the visible and the invisible. It
cannot be reached by purely intellectual
processes; it cannot be embodied in a
creed of dogmatic abstractions.  The
blessing which he may perhaps obtain
can hardly be that of those who see not
and yet have believed. The evidential
value of a face.made bright by some inner Joy will count with him for more than
any syllogism however correct in its
premises and conclusions. A life made
visibly gracious and comely will testify
to him of some hidden truth more decisively than any supernatural witnessing
known only by report. If he is impressed by any creed it will be by virtue
of its living epistles, known and read of
VOL. XC. -NO. 537.            8


all men. He will be occupied during
his whole life with a study not of ideas
apart from their concrete embodiment,
not of things concrete apart from their
inward significance, but with a study of
expression, - expression as seen in the
countenance of external nature, expression in Greek statue, mediaeval cathedral,
Renaissance altar-piece, expression in the
ritual of various religions, and in the
visible bearing of various types of manhood, in various exponents of tradition,
of thought, and of faith.
His creed may partake somewhat of
that natural or human catholicism of
Wordsworth's poetry, which reveals the
soul in things of sense, which is indeed,
as Pater regards it, a kind of finer, spiritual sensuousness. But why stop where
Wordsworth stopped in his earlier days?
Why content ourselves with expression
as seen in the face of hillside and cloud
and stream, and the acts and words of
simple men, through whom certaik primitive elementary passions play? Why
not also seek to discover the spirit in
sense in its more complex and subtler
incarnations, - in the arts and crafts, in
the shaping of a vase, the lines and
colors of a tapestry, the carving of a
capital, the movements of a celebrant in
the rites of religion, in a relief of Della
Robbia, in a Venus of Botticelli, in the
mysterious Gioconda of Lionardo? Setting aside the mere dross of circumstances in human life, why not vivify all
amidst which we live and move by translating sense into spirit, and spirit into
sense, thus rendering opaque things luminous, so that if no pure white light of
truth can reach us, at least each step we
tread may be impregnated with the stains
and dyes of those colored morsels of
glass, so deftly arranged, through Wtich
such light as we are able to endure has
its access to our eyes?
If such thoughts as these lay in Pater's
mind during early youth they lay unfolded and dormant. But we cat hardly doubt that in the account of EXerald




114


Walter Pater.


Uthwart's schooldays he is interpreting
with full-grown and self-conscious imagination his experiences as a schoolboy at
Canterbury, where the cathedral was the
presiding element of the genius loci:
"If at home there had been nothing
great, here, to boyish sense, one seems
diminished to nothing at all, amid the
grand waves, wave upon wave, of patiently wrought stone; the daring height,
the daring severity, of the innumerable
long, upward ruled lines, rigidly bent just
at last in one place into the reserved
grace of the perfect Gothic arch."
Happy Emerald Uthwart in those early
days, and happy Walter Pater with such
noble, though as yet half-conscious, discipline in the conduct of the eye! If
Pater thought of a profession, the military profession of his imagined Emerald
would have been the last to commend itself to his feelings. His father was a
physician, but science had no call for
the son's intellect, and we can hardly
imagine him as an enthusiastic student in
the school of anatomy. He felt the attractions of the life and work of an English
clergyman, and when a little boy, Mr.
Gosse tells us, he had seen the benign,
face of Keble during a visit to Hursley, and had welcomed Keble's paternal
counsel and encouragement. Had Pater
lived some years longer it is quite possible that his early dream might have been
realized, but Oxford, as things were, dissolved the dream of Canterbury.
Two influences stood over against each
other in the Oxford of Pater's undergraduate days. There was the High
Church movement, with which the name
of the University has been associated.
The spell of Newman's personal charm
and the echoes of his voice in the pulpit
of St. Mary's were not yet forgotten.
The High Church movement had made
the face of religion more outwardly attractive to such a spirit as Pater's; there
had been a revival, half serious, half
dilettante, of ecclesiastical art. But the
High Church movement was essentially


dogmatic; the body of dogma had t6
some extent hardened into system, and
Pater's mind was always prone to regard
systems of thought- philosophical or
theological - as works of art, to be examined and interpreted by the historical
imagination; from which, when interpreted aright, something might be retained, perhaps, in a transposed form,
but which could -not be accepted and
made one's own en bloc. On the other
hand there was a stirring critical movement, opening new avenues for thought
and imagination, promising a great enfranchisement of the intellect, and claiming possession of the future. Jowett was
a nearer presence now at Oxford than
Newman, and Pater had already come
'under the influence of German thinkers
and had discovered in Goethe - greatest
of critics - a master of the mind. Art,
to which he had found access through
the Modern Painters of an illustrious
Oxford graduate, had passed beyond the
bounds of the ecclesiastical revival, and,
following a course like that of the mediaeval drama, was rapidly secularizing itself. We see the process at work in the
firm  of which William Morris was the
directing manager, at first so much occupied with church decoration, and by
and by extending its operations to the
domestic interiors of the wealthier layfolk of England. Pater's dream of occupying an Anglo-Catholic pulpit reshaped itself into the dream of becoming
an Unitarian minister, and by degrees
it became evident that the only pulpit
which he could occupy was that of the
Essayist, who explores for truth, and
ends his research not without a sense
of insecurity in his own conclusions, or
rather who concludes without a conclusion, and is content to be fruitful through
manifold suggestions.
We can imagine that with a somewhat
different composition of the forces within
him Pater's career might have borne
some resemblance to that of Henri Amiel,
" in wandering mazes lost." But the




Walter Pater.


115


disputants in Amiel's nature were more
numerous and could not be brought to a
conciliation. One of them was forever
reaching out toward the indefinite, which
Amiel called the infinite, and the Maia
of the Genevan Buddhist threw him back
in the end upon a world of ennui. Pater was saved by a certain " intellectual
astringency," by a passion for the concrete, and by the fact that he lived
much in and through the eye. He had
perhaps learnt from Goethe that true expansion lies in limitation, and he never
appreciated as highly as did Amiel the
poetry of fog. His boyish faith, such as
it was, had lapsed away. How was he,
to face life and make the best of it?
Something at least could be gained by
truth to himself, by utter integrity, by
living, and that intensely, in his best self
and in the highest moments of his best
self, by detaching from his intellectual
force, as he says of Winckelmann, all
flaccid interests. If there was in him
any tendency to mystic passion and religious reverie this was checked, as with
his own Marius, by a certain virility of
intellect, by a feeling of the poetic beauty of mere clearness of mind. Is nothing permanent? Are all things melting under our feet? Well, if it be so,
we cannot alter the fact. But we need
not therefore spend our few moments of
life in listlessness. If all is passing away,
let the knowledge of this be a stimulus
toward intenser activity, let it excite
within us the thirst for a full and perfect experience.
And remember that Pater's special
gift, his unique power, lay in the eye and
in the imagination using the eye as its
organ. He could not disdain the things
of sense, for there is a spirit in sense,
and mind communes with mind through
color and through form. He notes in
Marcus Aurelius, the pattern of Stoical
morality, who would stand above and
apart from the world of the senses, not,
after all, an attainment of the highest
humanity, but a mediocrity, though a


mediocrity for once really golden. He
writes of Pascal with adequate knowledge and with deep sympathy, but he
qualifies his admiration for the great
friend of Jansenism by observing that
Pascal had little sense of the beauty even
of holiness. In Pascal's " sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy," and his
perverse asceticism, Pater finds evidence
of a diseased spirit, a morbid tension like
that of insomnia. Sebastian van Storck,
with the warm life of a rich Dutch interior around him, and all the play of
light and color in Dutch art to enrich his
eye, turns away to seek some glacial
Northwest passage to the lifeless, colorless Absolute. Spinoza appears to Pater not as a God-intoxicated man, but as
climbing to the barren pinnacle of egoistic intellect. Such, at all events, could
not possibly be his own way. There is
something of the true wisdom of humility
in modestly remembering that we are
not pure intelligence, pure soul, and in
accepting the aid of the senses. How
reassuring Marius finds it to be, after
assisting at a long debate about rival
criteria of truth, " to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one's aspiration
after knowledge to that." To live intensely in the moment, "to burn with a
gemlike flame," to maintain an ecstasy,
is to live well, with the gain, at least
for a moment, of wisdom and of joy.
"America is here and now -here or
nowhere," as Wilhelm Meister, and, after
him, Marius the Epicurean discovered.
There is no hint in Pater's first volume of the fortifying thought which afterwards came to him, that some vast
logic of change, some law or rhythm of
evolution, may underlie all that is transitory, all the pulsations of passing moments, and may bind them together in
some hidden harmony. Looking back
on the period of what he calls a new
Cyrenaicism, he saw a most depressing
theory coming in contact, in his own case
as in that of Marius, with a happy temperament, - happy though subject to




116


Walter Pater.


moods of deep depression, and he saw
that by virtue of this happy temperament
he had converted his loss into a certain
gain. Assuredly he never regarded that
view of life which is expressed in the
Conclusion to Studies in the History of
the Renaissance as mere hedonism, as
a mere abandonment to the lust of the
eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride
of life. No: looking back, he perceived
that his aim was not pleasure, but fullness and vividness of life, a perfection
of being, an intense and, as far as may
be, a complete experience; that this was
not to be attained without a discipline,
involving some severity; that it demanded a strenuous effort; that here, too, the
loins must be girt and the lamp lit; that
for success in his endeavor he needed
before all else true insight, and that insight will not come by any easy way, or,
as we say, by a royal road; that on the
contrary it must be sought by a culture,
which may be, and ought to be, joyous,
but which certainly must be strict. The
precept " Be perfect in regard to what
is here and now " is one which may be
interpreted, as he conceived it, into lofty
meanings. A conduct of the intellect
in accordance with this precept, in its
rejection of many things which bring
with them facile pleasures, may in a certain sense be called a form of asceticism.
The eye itself must be purified from all
grossness and dullness. " Such a manner of life," writes Pater of the new
Cyrenaicism of his Marius, "might itself even come to seem a kind of religion.... The true ' esthetic culture'
would be realizable as a new form of the
'contemplative life,' founding its claim
on the essential ' blessedness' of 'vision,'
- the vision of perfect men and things."
At the lowest it is an impassioned ideal
life.
Such is Pater's own apologia pro vita
sua - that is, for life during his earlier
years of authorship - as given in Marius the Epicurean. But the best apologia is, indeed, the outcome of that life,


the volume of Studies in the History of
the Renaissance, and later essays, which
are essentially one with these in kind.
The richness of color and delicacy of
carving in some of Pater's work have
concealed from many readers its intellectual severity, its strictness of design,
its essential veracity. A statue that is
chryselephantine may be supposed to be
less intellectual than the same statue if
it were worked in marble; yet more of
sheer brainwork perhaps is required for
the design which has to calculate effects
of color. There are passages in Pater's
writing which may be called, if you like,
decorative, but the decoration is never
incoherent ornament of papier mach6
laid on from without; it is, on the contrary, a genuine outgrowth of structure,
always bringing into relief the central
idea.
This central idea he arrives at only
through the process of a steadfast and
strenuous receptiveness, which has in it
something of the nature of fortitude.
Occasionally he gives it an express definition, naming it, not perhaps quite happily, the formula of the artist or author
who is the subject of his study. Thus,
the formula of Raphael's genius, if we
must have one, is this: "The transformation of meek scholarship into genius
-triumphant power of genius." The
essay on Raphael is accordingly the record of a series of educations, from which
at last emerge works showing a synoptic
intellectual power, and large theoretic
conceptions, but these are seen to act in
perfect unison with the pictorial imagination and a magic power of the hand.
The formula, to turn from pictorial art
to literature, of Prosper MWrim&e, who
met the disillusion of the post-Revolution
period by irony, is this: "The enthusiastic amateur of rude, crude, naked force
in men and women wherever it could be
found; himself carrying ever, as a mask,
the conventional attire of the modern
world - carrying it with an infinite contemptuous grace, as if that too were an




Walter Pater.
all-sufficient end in itself."  Nothing  tempor
could be more triumphantly exact and   Apolly,
complete than Pater's brief formula of  and we
Merim6e. But perhaps his method is     a true
nowhere more convincingly shown than   and, ir
in the companion studies of two French  even d
churches, Notre Dame of Amiens, pre-   acinthu
eminently the church of a city, of a com-  and flo
mune, and the Madeleine of Vezelay,    of Au
which is typically the church of a mon-  and ec
astery. Here the critic does not for a  these t
moment lose himself in details; in each  Euphor
case he holds, as it were, the key of the  Faust a
situation; he has grasped the central    Even
idea of each structure; and then with  an intel
the aid of something like creative im-  nizes in
agination, he assists the idea - the vital  ature a
germ —to expand itself and grow be- -strar
fore us into leaf and tendril and blossom. to refas
In such studies as these we perceive  even of
that the eye is itself an intellectual, a  an expE
spiritual power, or at least the organ and  than m
instrument of such a power. And this   admiral
imaginative criticism  is in truth con-  Greek
structive. But the creative work of im-  tual or
agination rises from a basis of adequate  Here al
knowledge and exact perception. To     strange
see precisely what a thing is, - what, be-  and fea:
fore all else, it is to me; to feel with en-  we are
tire accuracy its unique quality; to find  shadow
the absolutely right word in which to ex-  ums. ]
press the perception and the feeling, -  say, of
this indeed taxes the athletics of the  ideas we
mind. Sometimes, while still essential-  ed in ar
ly a critic, Pater's power of construc-  thought
tion and reconstruction takes the form  special
of a highly intellectual fantasy. Thus  also in
A Study of Dionysus reads like a fan-  Hence t
tasia suggested by the life of the vine  from the
and the "spirit of sense " in the grape;  Middle
yet the fantasia is in truth the tracing  Montaig
out, by a learned sympathy, of strange  mediaev
or beautiful sequences of feeling or im-  the poet
agination in the Greek mind. In Denys  an alter
l'Auxerrois and Apollo in Picardy, which  and the
should be placed side by side as com-  summed
panion pieces, the fancy takes a freer  modern
range. They may be described as trans-  tion for
positions of the classical into the roman-  as far a
tfc. Apollo - now for mediaeval con-   what is


117
aries bearing the ill-omened name
on - appears in a monkish frock
3ars the tonsure; yet he remains
Apollo, but of the Middle Age,
1 a passage of singular romance,
oes to death the mediaeval Hy1s. Denys, that strange flaxen
)wery creature, the organ-builder
xerre, has all the mystic power
static rage of Dionysus. Are;wo elder brothers of Goethe's
rion, earlier-born  children  of
nd Helena?
i these fantasies are not without
[lectual basis. For Pater recogi classical art and classical literconsiderable element of romance
igeness allied with beauty; and
hion the myths of Dionysus and
Apollo in the romantic spirit is
eriment in which there is more
lere fantasy. Very justly and
bly he protests in writing of
sculpture against a too intellecabstract view of classical art.
Iso were color and warmth and
ventures of imaginative faith,
rs and hopes and ecstasies, which
apt to forget in the motionless
or pallid light of our cold museLiving himself at a time, as we
" transition," when new and old
ere in conflict, and little interestly form of action except that of
and feeling, he came to take a
interest in the contention and
the conciliation of rival ideals.;he period of the Renaissance -
e auroral Renaissance within the
Age to the days of Ronsard and,ne, with its new refinements of
alism, - seen, for example, in;ry of the Pleiad, - its revival in
ed form of the classical temper,
e invasions of what may be
I up under the name of "the
spirit " -had a peculiar attrachim. His Gaston de Latour,
as he is known to us through
unhappily a fragment, seems




118


Walter Pater.


almost created for no other purpose than
to be a subject for the play of contending influences. The old pieties of the
Middle Age survive within him, leaving
a deep and abiding deposit in his spirit;
but he is caught by the new grace and
delicate magic of Ronsard's verse, of
Ronsard's personality; he is exposed to
all the enriching, and yet perhaps disintegrating forces of Montaigne's undulant
philosophy, - the philosophy of the relative; and he is prepared to be lifted
- lifted, shall we say, or lowered? -
from his state of suspended judgment
by the ardent genius of that new knight
of the Holy Ghost, Giordano Bruno,
with his glowing exposition of the Lower Pantheism.
His Marius, again, cannot rest in the
religion of Numa, which was the presiding influence of his boyhood. His
Cyrenaicism is confronted by the doctrine of the Stoics, - sad, gray, depressing, though presented with all possible
amiability in the person of Marcus Aurelius. And in the Christian house of
Cecilia, and among the shadowy catacombs of Rome, his eyes are touched by
the radiance of a pewer light, which
thrills him with the sense of an unapprehended joy, a heroic - perhaps a
divine - hope. In the eighteenth century Pater's Watteau, creating a new
and delicate charm for the society of his
own day, is yet ill at ease, half detached
from that society, and even - saddening
experience! - half detached from his
own art, for he dreams, unlike his age,
of a better world than the actual one;
and by an anachronism which is hardly
pardonable (for it confuses the chronology of eighteenth - century moods of
mind) the faithful and tender diarist of
Valenciennes, whose more than sisterly
interest in young Antoine has left us
this Watteau myth, becomes acquainted
- and through Antoine himself - with
the Manon Lescaut of many years later,
in which 1he ardent passion of the period of Rousseau is anticipated. And,


again, in that other myth of the eighteenth century, Duke Carl of Rosenmold,
- myth of a half-rococo Apollo, -the
old stiff medievalism of German courts
and the elegant fadeurs of French
pseudo-classicism are exhibited in revelation to a throng of fresher influences,
- the classical revival of which Winckelmann was the apostle, the revival of
the Middle Age as a new and living
force, the artistic patriotism which Lessing preached, the " return to nature"
of which a little later the young Goethe
- he, a true Apollo - was the herald,
and that enfranchisement of passion
and desire, which, now when Rousseau
is somewhere in the world, brooding,
kindling, about to burst into flame,
seems no anachronism.
I cannot entirely go along with that
enthusiastic admirer who declaredsurely not without a smile of ironic intelligence - that the trumpet of doom
ought to have sounded when the last
page of Studies in the History of the
Renaissance was completed.  Several
copies of the golden book in its first edition, containing the famous Conclusion,
would probably have perished in the
general conflagration; and Pater was
averse to noise. But a memorable volume it is, and one which testifies to the
virtue of a happy temperament even
when in the presence of a depressing
philosophy.  Too much attention has
been centred on that Conclusion; it
has been taken by many persons as if it
were Pater's ultimate confession of faith,
whereas,'in truth, the Conclusion was a
prologue. Pater's early years had made
a home for his spirit among Christian
pieties and the old moralities. When
Florian Deleal, quitting for the first
time the house of his childhood, runs
back4o fetch the forgotten pet bird, and
sees the warm familiar rooms'" lying so
pale, with a look of meekness in their
denudation," a clinging to the cherished
home comes over him. And had Pater
in his haughty philosophy of manhood




Walter Pater.


119


in like manner dismantled and desecrated the little white room of his early
faith? The very question seemed to
carry with it something of remorse; but
Pater's integrity of mind, his intellectual virility, could not permit itself to
melt in sentiment. In the essay on Aucassin and Nicolette, he had spoken of
the rebellious antinomian spirit connected with the outbreak of the reason and
imagination, with the assertion of the
liberty of heart, in the Middle Age.
"The perfection of culture," he knew,
"is not rebellion, but peace; " yet on the
way to that end, he thought, there is
room for a noble antinomianism. Now,
like his own Marius, he began to think
that in such antinomianism there might
be a taint, he began to question whether
it might not be possible somehow to adjust his new intellectual scheme of things
to the old morality. His culture had
brought with it a certain sense of isolation, like that of a spectator detached
from the movement of life and the great
community of men. His Cyrenaic theory was one in keeping with the proud
individualism of youth. From the Stoic
Fronto his Marius hears of an august
community, to which each of us may
perchance belong, "humanity, an universal order, the great polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their
example over their successors." But
where are these elect spirits? Where
is this comely order? The Cyrenaic
lover of beauty begins to feel that his
conception of beauty has been too narrow, too exclusive; not positively unsound perhaps, for it enjoined the practice of an ideal temperance, and involved
a seriousness of spirit almost religious,
so that, as Marius reflects, "the saint
and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty would
at least understand each other better
than either would understand the mere
man of the world." His pursuit of perfection was surely not in itself illegitimate, but by its exclusiveness of a more
complete ideal of perfection it might al

most partake of the nature of a heresy.
Without rejecting his own scheme of
life, might it not be possible to adjust it
to the old morality as a part to a whole?
Viewed even from a purely egoistic
standpoint had not such attainments as
were his - and the attainments were
unquestionably precious - been secured
at a great sacrifice? Was it a true
economy to forfeit perhaps a greater
gain for the less? The Stoical ideal,
which casts scorn upon the body, and
that visible beauty in things which for
Marius was indeed a portion of truth, as
well as beauty, he must needs reject.
But might there not be a divination of
something real, an imperfect vision of a
veritable possibility in the Stoical conception of an ordered society of men, a
Celestial City, Uranopolis, Callipolis?
And what if the belief of Marcus Aurelius in the presence of a divine companion, a secret Providence behind the
veil, contained some elevating truth?
What if the isolated seeker for a narrow perfection could attach himself to
some venerable system of sentiment and
ideas, and so " let in a great tide of experience, and make, as it were, with a
single step, a great experience of his
own; with a great consequent increase
to his own mind, of color, variety, and
relief, in the spectacle of men and
things "?
There are two passages of rare spiritual beauty in Marius the Epicurean:
one is that which tells of Marius wandering forth with such thoughts as thesekeeping all these things in his heart -
to one of his favorite spots in the Alban
or the Sabine hills; the other is the description of the sacred, memorial celebration in the Christian house of Cecilia.
After a night of perfect sleep Marius
awakes in the morning sunlight, with
almost the joyful waking of childhood.
As he rides toward the hills his mood is,
like the season's, one of flawless serenity; a sense of gratitude - gratitude to
what? - fills his heart, and must over



120


Walter Pater.


flow; he leans, as it were, toward that
eternal, invisible Companion of whom
the Stoic philosopher and emperor spoke.
Might he not, he reflects, throw in the
election of his will, though never faltering from the truth, on the side of his
best thought, his best feeling, and perhaps receive in due course the justification, the confirmation of this venture of
faith? What if the eternal companion
were really by his side? What if his
own spirit were but a moment, a pulse,
in some great stream of spiritual energy?
What if this fair material universe were
but a creation, a projection into sense of
the perpetual mind? What if the new
city, let down from heaven, were also a
reality included in the process of that
divine intelligence? Less through any
sequence of argument than by a discovery of the spirit in sense, or-rather of the
imaginative reason, Marius seems to live
and move in the presence of' the Great
Ideal, the Eternal Reason, nay, the Father of men. A larger conception assuredly of the reasonable Ideal than that
of his Cyrenaic days has dawned for
him, every trace or note of which it
shall henceforth be his business to gather up. Paratum cor meum, Deus! paratum cor meum!
It is a criticism of little insight which
represents Marius as subordinating truth
to any form of ease or comfort or spiritual self-indulgence; an erroneous criticism which represents him as only extending a refined hedonism so as to include
within it new pleasures of the moral
sense or the religious temper. For Marius had never made pleasure his aim
and end; his aim and end had been always perfection, but now he perceives
that his ideal of perfection had been incomplete and inadequate. He discovers
the larger truth, and the lesser falls into
its due place. His experiences among
the Sabine hills, which remind one of
certain passages in Wordsworth's Excursion, may have little evidential value
for any other mind than his own; even


for himself they could hardly recur in
like manner ever again. But that such
phenomena - however we may interpret
their significance - are real cannot be
doubted by any disinterested student of
human nature. What came to Marius
was not a train of argument, but what we
may call a revelation; it came as the
last and culminating development, under
favoring external conditions, of many
obscure processes of thought and feeling.
The seed had thrust up its stalk, which
then had struggled through the soil; and
at last sunlight touches the folded blossom, which opens to become a flower of
light.
Marius had already seen in Cornelius
the exemplar of a new knighthood, which
he can but imperfectly understand. Entirely virile, Cornelius is yet governed by
some strange hidden rule which obliges
him to turn away from many things that
are commonly regarded as the rights of
manhood; he has a blitheness, which
seems precisely the reverse of the temper of the Emperor, and yet some veiled
severity underlies, perhaps supports, this
blitheness. And in the gathering at
Cecilia's house, where the company -
and among them, children - are singing, Marius recognizes the same glad
expansion of a joyful soul, "in people
upon whom some all-subduing experience
had wrought heroically." A grave discretion; an intelligent seriousness about
life; an exquisite courtesy; all chaste
affections of the family, and these under
the most natural conditions; a temperate
beauty, all are here; the human body,
which had been degraded by Pagan voluptuousness and dishonored by Stoic asceticism, is here reverenced as something
sacred, or as something sanctified; and
death itself is made beautiful through a
new hope. Charity here is not painfully calculated, but joyous and chivalrous
in its devotion; peaceful labor is rehabilitated and illumined with some new
light. A higher ideal than Marius had
ever known before - higher and glad



Walter Pater.


121


der - is operative here, ideal of woman,
of the family, of industry, including all
of life and death. And its effects are
visible, addressing themselves even to
the organ of sight, which with Marius is
the special avenue for truth; so that he
has only to read backward from effects
to causes in order to be assured that some
truth of higher import and finer efficacy
than any previously known to him must
be working among the forces which have
created this new beauty. What if this
be the company of elect souls dreamed of
by the rhetorician Fronto? And with
the tenderest charity in this company of
men and women a heroic fortitude- the
fortitude of the martyrs, like those of
Lyons —is united. What if here be
Uranopolis, Callipolis, the City let down
from heaven? For Marius in the house
of Cecilia the argument is irrefragable
- rather the experience is convincing.
Possibly in the light of a more extended
survey of history new doubts and questions may arise; but these were days of
purity and of love, the days of the minor
peace of the church.
Yet even in the end Marius is brought
only to his Pisgah, - the mount of vision. He does not actually set foot within
the promised land. Even that act of
surrender, by which Cornelius is delivered and Marius goes to his death, is
less an act of divine self-sacrifice than
the result of an impulse, half careless,
half generous, of comradeship. His spirit- anima naturaliter Christiana -
departs less in assured hope than with
the humble consolation of memory —
tristem neminem fecit; he had at least
not added any pang to the total sum of
the world's pain.
And although the creator of Marius
had arrived, by ways very different from
those of Pascal, at some of Pascal's conclusions, and had expressed these with
decisiveness in a review of Amiel's Journal, we cannot but remember that essentially his mind belonged to the same order as the mind of Montaigne rather


than to the order of the mind of Pascal.
We can imagine Pater, had he lived
longer, asking himself, as part of that
endless dialogue with self which constituted his life, whether the deepest community with his fellows could not be
attained by a profound individuality
without attaching himself to institutions.
Whether, for example, the fact of holding a fellowship at Brasenose, or the
fact of knowing Greek well, bound him
the more intimately to the society of
Greek scholars. We can imagine him
questioning whether other truths might
not be added to those truths which made
radiant the faces in Cecilia's house.
Whether even those same truths might
not, in a later age, be capable of, might
not even require, a different conception,
and a largely altered expression.
While in the ways indicated in Marius the Epicurean Pater was departing
from that doctrine of the perpetual flux,
- with ideals of conduct corresponding
to that doctrine, - or was at least subordinating this to a larger, really a more
liberal view of things, his mind was also
tending, and now partly under the influence of Plato, away from the brilliantly colored, versatile, centrifugal Ionian
temper of his earlier days toward the
simpler, graver, more strictly ordered,
more athletic Dorian spirit.
Plato and Platonism, in noticing which
I shall sometimes use Pater's own words,
is distinguished less by color than by
a pervasive light. The demand on a
reader's attention is great, but the demand is not so much from sentence to
sentence as from chapter to chapter. If
we may speak of the evolution or development of a theme by literary art, such
evolution in this book is perhaps its
highest merit. No attempt is made to
fix a dogmatic creed, or to piece together
an artificial unity of tessellated opinions.
Philosophies are viewed very much as
works of art, and the historical method
is adopted, which endeavors to determine the conditions that render each




122


Walter Pater.


'philosophy, each work of art, and especially this particular work of art, the
Platonic philosophy, possible. And there
is something of autobiography, for those
who can discern it, below the surface of
the successive discussions of ideas, which
yet are often seemingly remote from
modern thought.
The doctrine of the Many, of the perpetual flux of things, which was so consonant to the mobile Ionian temper, is
set over against the doctrine of the One,
for which all that is phenomenal becomes null, and the sole reality is pure
Being, colorless, formless, impalpable.
It was Plato's work to break up the formless unity of the philosophy of the One
into something multiple, and yet not
transitory, -the starry Platonic ideas,
Justice, Temperance, Beauty, and their
kindred luminaries of. the intellectual
heaven. Platonism in one sense is a
witness for the unseen,- the transcendental. Yet, austere as he sometimes appears, who can doubt that Plato's austerity, his temperance is attained only
by the control of a richly sensuous nature? Before all else he was a lover;
and now that he had come to love invisible things more than visible, the invisible
things must be made, as it were, visible
persons, capable of engaging his affections. The paradox is true that he had
a sort of sensuous love of the unseen.
And in setting forth his thoughts, he is
not a dogmatist but essentially an essayist, - a questioning explorer for truth,
who refines and idealizes the manner of
his master Socrates, and who, without
the oscillating philosophy of Montaigne,
anticipates something of Montaigne's
method as a seeker for the knowledge of
things.
At this point in Pater's long essay, a
delightful turn is given to his treatment
of the subject by that remarkable and
characteristic chapter in which he attempts to revive for the eye, as well as
for the mind, the life of old Lacedamon - Lacedaemon, the highest con

crete embodiment of that Dorian temper of Greece, that Dorian temper of
which his own ideal Republic would
have been a yet more complete development. Those conservative Lacedaemonians, "the people of memory preeminently," are made to live and move
before us by creative imagination working among the records, too scanty, of
historical research.  There in hollow
Laconia, a land of organized slavery
under central military authority, the
genius of conservatism was enthroned.
The old bore sway; the young were
under strict, but not unjoyous discipline.
Every one, at every moment, must strive
to be at his best, with all superfluities
pruned away. " It was a type of the
Dorian purpose in life - a sternness, like
sea-water infused into wine, overtaking
a matter naturally rich, at the moment
when fullness may lose its savor and
expression." There in clear air, on the
bank of a mountain torrent, stands Lacedaemon; by no means a "growing"
place, rather a solemn, ancient mountain village, with its sheltering plane
trees, and its playing-fields for youthful
athletes, all under discipline, who when
robed might almost have seemed a
company of young monks. A city not
without many venerable and beautiful
buildings, civic and religious, in a grave
hieratic order of architecture, while its
private abodes were simple and even
rude. The whole of life is evidently
conceived as matter of attention, pa-  v
tience, fidelity to detail, like that of
good soldiers or musicians. The Helots,
who pursue their trades and crafts from
generation to generation in a kind of
guild, may be indulged in some illiberal
pleasures of abundant food and sleep;
but it is the mark of aristocracy to endure hardness. And from these halfmilitary, half-monastic modes of life are
born the most beautiful of all people in
Greece, in the world. Everywhere one
is conscious of reserved power, and the
beauty of strength restrained, -a male




Walter Pater.


123


beauty, far remote from feminine tenderness. Silent these men can be, or,
if need arise, can speak to the point, and
with brevity. With them to read.is almost a superfluity, for whatever is essential has become a part of memory, and is
made actual in habit; but such culture
in fact has the power to develop a vigorous imagination. Their music has in it
a high moral stimulus; their dance is not
mere form, but full of subject; they
dance a theme, and that with absolute
correctness, a dance full of delight, yet
with something of the character of a liturgical service, something of a military
inspection. And these half-monastic people are also- as monks may be - a very
cheerful people, devoted to a religion of
sanity, worshipers of Apollo, sanest of
the national gods; strong in manly comradeship, of which those youthful demigods, the Dioscuri, are the patrons. Why
all this strenuous task-work day after
day?   An intelligent young Spartan
might reply, "To the end that I myself
may be a perfect work of art."
It is this Dorian spirit which inspires
the Republic of Plato. He would, if
possible, arrest the disintegration of
Athenian society, or at least protest
against the principle of flamboyancy in
things and thoughts, - protest against
the fluxional, centrifugal, Ionian element in the Hellenic character. He
conceives the State as one of those disciplined Spartan dancers, or as a wellknit athlete; he desires not that it shall
be gay, or rich, or populous, but that it
shall be strong, an organic unity, entirely
self-harmonious, each individual occupying his exact place in the system; and
the State being thus harmoniously strong,
it will also be of extreme aesthetic
beauty, - the beauty of a unity or harmony enforced on highly disparate ele

ments, unity as of an army or an order
of monks, unity as of liturgical music.
It could hardly happen that Pater's
last word in this long study should be
on any other subject than art. It is no
false fragment of traditional Platonism
which insists on the close connection between the aesthetic qualities of things
and the formation of moral character;
on the building of character through
the eye and ear. And this ethical influence of art resides even more in the
form -its concision, simplicity, rhythm
-than in the matter. In the ideal Republic the simplification of human nature is the chief affair; therefore art
must be simple and even austere. The
community will be fervently esthetic,
but withal fervent renunciants as well,
and, in the true sense of the word
ascetic, will be fervently ascetic. " The
proper art of the Perfect City is in
fact the art of discipline." In art, in
its narrower meaning, in literature,
what the writer of the Republic would
most desire is that quality which solicits
an effort from the reader or spectator,
" who is promised a great expressiveness
on the part of the writer, the artist, if
he for his part will bring with him a
great attentiveness." Temperance superinduced on a nature originally rich
and impassioned, - this is the supreme
beauty of the Dorian art. Plato's own
prose is, indeed, a practical illustration
of the value of intellectual astringency.
He is before all else a lover, and infinite
patience, quite as much as fire, is the
mood of all true lovers. It is, indeed,
this infinite patience of a lover which
in large measure gives to Pater's own
studies of art and literature their peculiar value. The bee, that has gone down
the long neck of a blossom, is not more
patient in collecting his drop of honey.
Edward Dowden.




124


Balm. - On Reading Books through their Backs. -


BALM.
AFTER the heat the dew,
and the tender touch of twilight;
The unfolding of the few
Calm stars.
After the heat the dew.
After the Sun the shade,
and beatitude of shadow;
Dim aisles for memory made,
And thought.
After the Sun the shade.
After all there is balm;
from the wings of dark there is wafture
Of sleep, - night's infinite psalm, -
And dreams.
After all there is balm.
Virginia Woodward Cloud.
ON READING BOOKS THROUGH THEIR BACKS.


I.
I HAVE a way every two or three days
or so, of an afternoon, of going down to
our library, sliding into the little gate by
the shelves, and taking a long empty
walk there. I have found that nothing
quite takes the place of it for me, - wandering up and down the aisles of my ignorance, letting myself be loomed at,
staring doggedly back. I always feel
when I go out the great door as.if I had
won a victory. I have at least faced the
facts. I swing off to my tramp on the
hills where is the sense of space, as if I
had faced the Bully of the World, the
whole assembled world, in his own den,
and he had given me a license to live.
Of course it only lasts a little while.
One soon feels a library nowadays pulling on him. One has to go back and do
it all over again, but for the time being


it affords infinite relief. It sets one in
right relations to the universe, to the Original Plan of Things. One suspects that
if God had originally intended that men
on this planet should be crowded off by
books on it, it would not have been put
off to the twentieth century.
I was saying something of this sort
to the Presiding Genius of the State of
Massachusetts the other day, and when
I was through he said promptly, " The
way a man feels in a library (if any one
can get him to tell it) lets out more about
a man than anything else in the world."
It did not seem best to make a reply
to this. I did n't think it would do either
of us any good.
Finally, in spite of myself, I spoke up
and allowed that I felt as intelligent in a
library as anybody.
He did not say anything.
When I asked him what he thought




On Reading Books through their Backs.


125


'being intelligent in a library was, he took
the general ground that it consisted in
always knowing what one was about
there, in knowing exactly what one
wanted.
I replied' that I did not think that that
was a very intelligent state of mind to be
in, in a library.
Then I waited while he told me (fifteen minutes) what an intelligent mind
was anywhere (nearly everywhere, it
seemed to me). But I did not wait in
vain, and at last when he had come
around to it, and had asked me what I
thought the feeling of intelligence consisted in, in libraries, I said it consisted
in being pulled on by the books.
I said quite a little after this, and of
course the general run of my argument
was that I was rather intelligent myself.
The P. G. S. of M. had little to say to
this, and after he had said how intelligent
he was awhile, the conversation was
dropped.
The question that concerns me is, what
shall a man do, how shall he act, when
he finds himself in the hush of a great
library, - opens the door upon it, stands
and waits in the midst of it, with his poor
outstretched soul all by himself before
IT,- and feels the books pulling on
him? I always feel as if it were a sort
of infinite Cross Roads. The last thing
I want to know in a library is exactly
what I want there. I am tired of
knowing what I want. I am always
knowing what I want. I can know what
I want almost anywhere. If there is a
place left on God's earth where a modern man can go and go regularly and not
know what he wants awhile, in Heaven's
name why not let him hold on to it? I
am as fond as the next man, I think, of
knowing what I am about, but when I
find myself ushered into a great library
I do not know what I am about any
sooner than I can help. I shall know
sopn enough - God forgive me! When
i'is given to a man to stand in the As

sembly Room of Nations, to feel the
ages, all the ages, gathering around him,
flowing past his life, to listen to the immortal stir of Thought, to the doings of
The Dead, why should a man interrupt
- interrupt a whole world — o know
what he is about? I stand at the junction of all Time and Space. I am the
three tenses. I read the newspaper of
the universe.
It fades away after a little, I know. I
go to the card catalogue like a lamb to
the slaughter, poke my head into Knowledge - somewhere - and am lost, but
the light of it on the spirit does not fade
away. It leaves a glow there. It plays
on the pages afterward.
There is a certain fine excitement about
taking a library in this fashion, a sense
of spaciousness of joy in it, which one is
almost always sure to miss in libraries
- most libraries - by staying in them.
The only way one can get any real good
out of a modern library seems to be by
going away in the nick of time. If one
stays there is no help for it. One is soon
standing before the card catalogue sorting one's wits out in it, filing them away,
and the sense of boundlessness both in
one's self and everybody else - the thing
a library is for - is fenced off forever.
At least it seems fenced off forever.
One sees the universe barred and patterned off with a kind of grating before
it. It is a card catalogue universe.
I can only speak for one, but I must
say, for myself, that as compared with
this feeling one has in the door, this feeling of standing over a library - mere
reading in it, sitting down and letting
one's self be tucked into a single book in
it - is a humiliating experience.
II.
I am not unaware that this will seem
to some - this empty doting on infinity,
this standing and staring at All-knowledge - a mere dizzying exercise, whirling one's head round and round in Nothing, for Nothing. And I am not una



126


Books New and Old.


ware that it would be unbecoming in me
or in any other man to feel superior to
a card catalogue.
A card catalogue, of course, as a device for making a kind of tunnel for one's
mind in a library -for working one's
way through it - is useful and necessary
to all of us. Certainly, if a man insists
on having infinity in a convenient form
- infinity in a box - it would be hard
to find anything better to have it in than
a card catalogue.
But there are times when one does
not want infinity in a box. He loses the
best part of it that way. He prefers it
in its natural state. All that I am contending for is, that when these times
come, the times when a man likes to feel
infinite knowledge crowding round him,
- feel it through the backs of unopened
books, and likes to stand still and think
about it, worship with the thought of it,
- he ought to be allowed to do so. It


is true that there is no sign up against
it (against thinking in libraries). But
there might as well be. It amounts to
the same thing. No one is expected to.
People are expected to keep up an appearance, at least, of doing something
else there. I do not dare to hope that
the next time I am caught standing and
staring in a library, with a kind of blank,
happy look, I shall not be considered by
all my kind intellectually disreputable
for it. I admit that it does not look intelligent - this standing by a door and
taking in a sweep of books - this reading a whole library at once. I can imagine how it looks. It looks like listening to a kind of cloth and paper chorus
- foolish enough, but if I go out of the
door to the hills again, refreshed for
them and lifted up to them, with the
strength of the ages in my limbs, great
voices all around me, flocking on my
solitary walk - who shall gainsay me?
Gerald Stanley Lee.


BOOKS NEW AND OLD.
LANDOR'S POETRY.


IT is not easy to admit a great liking
for Landor without ranging one's self
with the Landorians, however desirous
one may be to avoid the special pleading of a sectarian for the god of his
fancy. And indeed our natural sympathy for the under-god may readily put
us in the way of conversion to the right
Landorian sect, or to any other. We
begin by sticking up for somebody, and
end by falling fairly under his spell, or
under the spell which our assiduity has
woven about him. We are aware that
no greatness needs sticking up for, that
in the end it must get what it deserves.
But in the meantime we may say what
we can in the interest of our friends;
for Landor, certainly, the end is not yet.


The existence of his poetry is suspected by many persons who have a nodding
acquaintance with the gilt backs of his
Imaginary Conversations: in some such
way the case still stands against the
reading public, even perhaps against the
minor part of it which may not more
properly be called the buying and borrowing public. In prose he has at least
won the success of esteem, - the sort of
success which is often in itself enough
to keep one from being really read much.
An invisible but real barrier rises like
an exhalation between the common human being and the possessor of that mysterious quality, "style."  If we could
only forget that Burke and Landor and
De Quincey had style, we might find