1
_The Romantic_
There is a variety of man whose eye inevitably exaggerates, whose
ear inevitably hears more than the band plays, whose imagination
inevitably doubles and triples the news brought in by his five senses.
He is the enthusiast, the believer, the romantic. He is the sort of
fellow who, if he were a bacteriologist, would report the streptococcus
pyogenes to be as large as a St. Bernard dog, as intelligent as
Socrates, as beautiful as Beauvais Cathedral and as respectable as a
Yale professor.
2
_The Skeptic_
No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an
idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there
is always a flavor of doubt—a feeling, half instinctive and half
logical, that, after all, the scoundrel _may_ have something up his
sleeve. This doubt, it must be obvious, is always more than justified,
for no man is worthy of unlimited reliance—his treason, at best, only
waits for sufficient temptation. The trouble with the world is not that
men are too suspicious in this direction, but that they tend to be
too confiding—that they still trust themselves too far to other men,
even after bitter experience. Women, I believe, are measurably less
sentimental, in this as in other things. No married woman ever trusts
her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she _did_ trust
him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pick-pocket’s
confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.
3
_The Believer_
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence
of the improbable. Or, psychoanalytically, as a wish neurose. There
is thus a flavor of the pathological in it; it goes beyond the normal
intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental
metaphysics. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never
had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere
ass: he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment,
being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect
his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic
infection. What he usually says, in substance, is this: “Let us trust
in God, _who has always fooled us in the past_.”
4
_The Worker_
All democratic theories, whether Socialistic or bourgeois, necessarily
take in some concept of the dignity of labor. If the have-not were
deprived of this delusion that his sufferings in the sweat-shop are
somehow laudable and agreeable to God, there would be little left in
his ego save a belly-ache. Nevertheless, a delusion is a delusion,
and this is one of the worst. It arises out of confusing the pride of
workmanship of the artist with the dogged, painful docility of the
machine. The difference is important and enormous. If he got no reward
whatever, the artist would go on working just the same; his actual
reward, in fact, is often so little that he almost starves. But suppose
a garment-worker got nothing for his labor: would he go on working
just the same? Can one imagine him submitting voluntarily to hardship
and sore want that he might express his soul in 200 more pairs of
pantaloons?
5
_The Physician_
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to
find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a
theory of the virtuous. The whole hygienic art, indeed, resolves itself
into an ethical exhortation, and, in the sub-department of sex, into a
puerile and belated advocacy of asceticism. This brings it, at the end,
into diametrical conflict with medicine proper. The aim of medicine is
surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them
from the consequences of their vices. The true physician does not
preach repentance; he offers absolution.
6
_The Scientist_
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and
inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable
curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the
former, and yet it is the former that moves some of the greatest
men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigators.
What animates a great pathologist? Is it the desire to cure disease,
to save life? Surely not, save perhaps as an afterthought. He is too
intelligent, deep down in his soul, to see anything praiseworthy in
such a desire. He knows by life-long observation that his discoveries
will do quite as much harm as good, that a thousand scoundrels will
profit to every honest man, that the folks who most deserve to be saved
will probably be the last to be saved. No man of self-respect could
devote himself to pathology on such terms. What actually moves him is
his unquenchable curiosity—his boundless, almost pathological thirst
to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has
not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing
slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but the dog sniffing
tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes. And yet he is one of
the greatest and noblest of men. And yet he stands in the very front
rank of the race.
7
_The Business Man_
It is, after all, a sound instinct which puts business below the
professions, and burdens the business man with a social inferiority
that he can never quite shake off, even in America. The business man,
in fact, acquiesces in this assumption of his inferiority, even when he
protests against it. He is the only man who is forever apologizing for
his occupation. He is the only one who always seeks to make it appear,
when he attains the object of his labors, _i. e._, the making of a
great deal of money, that it was not the object of his labors.
8
_The King_
Perhaps the most valuable asset that any man can have in this world
is a naturally superior air, a talent for sniffishness and reserve.
The generality of men are always greatly impressed by it, and accept
it freely as a proof of genuine merit. One need but disdain them to
gain their respect. Their congenital stupidity and timorousness make
them turn to any leader who offers, and the sign of leadership that
they recognize most readily is that which shows itself in external
manner. This is the true explanation of the survival of monarchism,
which invariably lives through its perennial deaths. It is the popular
theory, at least in America, that monarchism is a curse fastened upon
the common people from above—that the monarch saddles it upon them
without their consent and against their will. The theory is without
support in the facts. Kings are created, not by kings, but by the
people. They visualize one of the ineradicable needs of all third-rate
men, which means of nine men out of ten, and that is the need of
something to venerate, to bow down to, to follow and obey.
The king business begins to grow precarious, not when kings reach out
for greater powers, but when they begin to resign and renounce their
powers. The czars of Russia were quite secure upon the throne so long
as they ran Russia like a reformatory, but the moment they began to
yield to liberal ideas, _i. e._, by emancipating the serfs and setting
up constitutionalism, their doom was sounded. The people saw this
yielding as a sign of weakness; they began to suspect that the czars,
after all, were not actually superior to other men. And so they turned
to other and antagonistic leaders, all as cocksure as the czars had
once been, and in the course of time they were stimulated to rebellion.
These leaders, or, at all events, the two or three most resolute and
daring of them, then undertook to run the country in the precise way
that it had been run in the palmy days of the monarchy. That is to say,
they seized and exerted irresistible power and laid claim to infallible
wisdom. History will date their downfall from the day they began to
ease their pretensions. Once they confessed, even by implication, that
they were merely human, the common people began to turn against them.
9
_The Average Man_
It is often urged against the so-called scientific Socialists, with
their materialistic conception of history, that they overlook certain
spiritual qualities that are independent of wage scales and metabolism.
These qualities, it is argued, color the aspirations and activities
of civilized man quite as much as they are colored by his material
condition, and so make it impossible to consider him simply as an
economic machine. As examples, the anti-Marxians cite patriotism,
pity, the æsthetic sense and the yearning to know God. Unluckily,
the examples are ill-chosen. Millions of men are quite devoid of
patriotism, pity and the æsthetic sense, and have no very active desire
to know God. Why don’t the anti-Marxians cite a spiritual quality
that is genuinely universal? There is one readily to hand. I allude
to cowardice. It is, in one form or other, visible in every human
being; it almost serves to mark off the human race from all the other
higher animals. Cowardice, I believe, is at the bottom of the whole
caste system, the foundation of every organized society, including
the most democratic. In order to escape going to war himself, the
peasant was willing to give the warrior certain privileges—and out
of those privileges has grown the whole structure of civilization.
Go back still further. Property arose out of the fact that a few
relatively courageous men were able to accumulate more possessions than
whole hordes of cowardly men, and, what is more, to retain them after
accumulating them.
10
_The Truth-Seeker_
The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man
with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely,
like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded, and
disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth
represents some man’s bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk
of it there is a brave truth-seeker’s grave upon some lonely ash-dump
and a soul roasting in hell.
11
_The Pacifist_
Nietzsche, in altering Schopenhauer’s will-to-live to will-to-power,
probably fell into a capital error. The truth is that the thing the
average man seeks in life is not primarily power, but peace; all
his struggle is toward a state of tranquillity and equilibrium; what
he always dreams of is a state in which he will have to do battle no
longer. This dream plainly enters into his conception of Heaven; he
thinks of himself, _post mortem_, browsing about the celestial meadows
like a cow in a safe pasture. A few extraordinary men enjoy combat at
all times, and all men are inclined toward it at orgiastic moments,
but the race as a race craves peace, and man belongs among the more
timorous, docile and unimaginative animals, along with the deer, the
horse and the sheep. This craving for peace is vividly displayed in
the ages-long conflict of the sexes. Every normal woman wants to be
married, for the plain reason that marriage offers her security. And
every normal man avoids marriage as long as possible, for the equally
plain reason that marriage invades and threatens _his_ security.
12
_The Relative_
The normal man’s antipathy to his relatives, particularly of the
second degree, is explained by psychologists in various tortured
and improbable ways. The true explanation, I venture, is a good
deal simpler. It lies in the plain fact that every man sees in his
relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque
caricatures of himself. They exhibit his qualities in disconcerting
augmentation or diminution; they fill him with a disquieting feeling
that this, perhaps, is the way he appears to the world and so they
wound his _amour propre_ and give him intense discomfort. To admire his
relatives whole-heartedly a man must be lacking in the finer sort of
self-respect.
13
_The Friend_
One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that
friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that
any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable. The fact is
that a man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just
as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his
epistemology. They become threadbare, shabby, pumped-up, irritating,
depressing. They convert themselves from living realities into
moribund artificialities, and stand in sinister opposition to freedom,
self-respect and truth. It is as corrupting to preserve them after
they have grown fly-blown and hollow as it is to keep up the forms
of passion after passion itself is a corpse. Every act and attitude
that they involve thus becomes an act of hypocrisy, an attitude
of dishonesty.... A prudent man, remembering that life is short,
gives an hour or two, now and then, to a critical examination of his
friendships. He weighs them, edits them, tests the metal of them. A
few he retains, perhaps with radical changes in their terms. But the
majority he expunges from his minutes and tries to forget, as he tries
to forget the cold and clammy loves of year before last.