we did not speak as strangers; the memories that rose in each of us, so
separate, so different, flowed together in some way, united beneath our
spoken words, and made them sacred. But I may record that she got out
her old books to show me, her registry-books of the Bon-Laboureur,
little, old, modest volumes, where in many handwritings through many
years the names of her guests had been inscribed. They had come from
almost everywhere in the world. No longer strong enough, she had parted
with the business and the good-will; but from these tokens of her past
she could not part. She clung to the inanimate survivals of her good
days and her renown. And on a blank page of the last volume which she
placed before me, putting a pen in my hand, I wrote briefly for her of
my three pilgrimages to her _petit pays_. Of the international
distinction of her son she was touchingly and justly proud: famous
peonies have spread his name wide as their cultivator and producer. For
this, too, was the Bon-Laboureur in its way responsible.
Perhaps I may not see it again, or its grand neighbor, the château, that
secular shrine of a vivacious and select Past. But I shall need no
Michelin, or Baedeker, or Joanne, to guide my memories thither. They are
with me, every moment and breath of them, for my perpetual delight, a
safe possession, unweakened and undimmed; and to conjure them before me
it needs no more than the haunting syllables of Chenonceaux and the
quaint, cherished volumes of the patronne.
IN CHENONCEAUX
My noiseless thoughts, if changed to their just sound
Amid these courts of silence once so gay
With love and wit, that here full pleasure found
Where Kings put off their crownèd cares to play,
Would shake in laughter at some jest unheard;
Would sing like viols in a saraband;
Would whisper kisses--but express no word
That would not be too dim to understand.
Like to a child, who far from ocean's flood
Against his ear a shell doth fondly hold
To hear the murmur that is his own blood,
And half believes the fairy-tale he's told,
So I within this shell mistake my sea
Of musing for the tide of History.
The Other Side
By Margaret Sherwood
Like every other attentive reader of our periodical literature, I am
increasingly aware of our persistent exposure of sin and wrong-doing in
high places and in low; like many another attentive reader, I am growing
a bit rebellious against this constant demand and supply in the matter
of information regarding recent evil. Have we not grown over-alert in
the search for this special kind of news? We take vice with our
breakfast porridge; perjury with our after-dinner coffee; our essayists
vie with one another in seeing who can write up the most startling story
of crimes; and it is a bankrupt family nowadays that cannot produce one
member to expose civic or political corruption. Undoubtedly much genuine
ethical impulse lies back of all this; undoubtedly, too, much of the
picturesque and spectacular treatment springs from a desire to startle,
and ministers, in many a reader who would scorn paper-covered fiction,
to a love of the sensational. Surely it must seem to the people of other
countries that we take pride in the immensity of our sins, as we take
pride in Niagara, in the length of the Mississippi, in the extent of our
western plains.
Many may be, and must be, the good effects of throwing the searchlight
upon dark places, but the constant glare of the searchlight bids fair to
rob us of our normal vision of life. My poor mind has become a
storehouse of misdeeds not my own. I am sick with iniquity; I walk
abroad under the shadow of infamy, and I sup with horrors. I shrink from
meeting my friends,--not that they are not the best people in the world,
but I dread lest they pour into my ears some newly acquired knowledge of
wrong-doing. For me, as for others, the sun of noonday is clouded by
graft, bribery, treachery, and corruption; and I fear to close my eyes
in the dark because of the pictured crimes that crowd before them.
Suppose poor Christian had had to drag after him not only his own bag of
transgressions, but those of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Facing-both-ways,
and all the denizens of Vanity Fair, what chance would he ever have had
of getting out of the Slough of Despond?
It is not that I wish to shirk; I am not afraid of facing anything that
I ought to know, and I have not the slightest doubt that we are all, in
great measure, responsible for our neighbors' sins. But I am not sure
that we are taking the wisest way to mend them. It seems to me
incontestable that, with the large issues of individual and of national
well-being in mind, we are over-doing the exposure, and slighting the
incentives to right action; emphasizing the negative at the expense of
the positive; and that, with our weakening convictions regarding the
things that are right, it is dangerous to go on loudly proclaiming the
things that are wrong. We are much in the position of a village
improvement society which has pulled down a bridge because it is
rotting, and is impotent to build another and a better. We have invested
our national all in wrecking machinery, and have nothing left for
constructive tools. It is said that in our explosive setting forth of
civic and national wrong-doing, we are all too prone to stop with the
explosion, as if mere knowledge of these things would set them right.
Mere knowledge never yet set anything right; only the ceaselessly
active, creative will can fashion a world of law out of chaos.
Of the criticism often made that exposure of wrong should be followed,
more closely than is done here, by constructive action, if anything is
to be really effected, it is not my task to speak. The aspect of the
matter which interests me especially concerns the youth of the land; it
is the educational aspect. Not through loud wailing over evil can a
nation be built, but through resolute dwelling with high ideals. In
certain ugly tendencies of recent years among the young, as, for
instance, the unabashed sensuality of much of the modern dancing, may we
not detect, perhaps, a cynical assumption that life is at basis
corrupt,--a natural result of continued harping on evil things, and of
failure to keep before them images of moral beauty? Our magazine writers
would be far better employed, if, instead of making our ears constantly
resound with reports of civic iniquities, they were, part of the time at
least, studying Plato's _Republic_, and filling mind and soul with the
hope of the perfect state. Wrong things we dare hope are of small and
fleeting consequence as compared with the right; it is not the sin of
Judas Iscariot, but the righteousness of his Master, that has brought
the human race a gleam of hope and possible redemption. When I was told,
not long ago, of a student in one of our great universities who had
elected 'Criminology 16,' I could not help reflecting that he might far
better have taken Idealistic Philosophy I.
Whether or not our study of evil should be lessened, our study of the
good needs to be vastly strengthened. We are losing the vision! 'Your
old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' said the
prophet, in promising wonders in the heavens and in the earth, after his
account of fasting, weeping, mourning, and beating the breast. There is
a time for beating the breast and for tearing the hair, and of this we
have had our day, but perpetual sitting upon the ash-heap and howling
will not raise the walls of state. Sitting there may, in time, even
become a luxury; can it be that we are doing so much of it partly
because it is easier, and because the heaven-sent task of building up
and shaping is too hard for us?
Take away from youth the power of seeing visions, of dreaming dreams,
and you take away the future. It would behoove us to remember, perhaps,
that the eras of great deeds have not been eras of analysis, but eras
when the creative imagination was at work. Yet our modern mental habit
is overwhelmingly a habit of analysis, for which science, in teaching us
to pick the world to bits, is partly, though not wholly, responsible. It
has brought us an immense amount of interesting information; it has
brought also a danger whose gravity we can hardly estimate, in the
constant lessening of the synthetic power. The power to image, to
fashion high ideals, and to create along the line of the imagining, is
weakening, instead of growing more strong. In the glorious days of Queen
Elizabeth, in the unparalleled days of Periclean Athens, great ideals
formed themselves before men's eyes and great achievements followed;
emotion, hope, vision, shaped human nature to great issues. I wonder
what influence those perfect marble representations of perfect form had
upon the very bodies of the youths and the maidens of Athens, what
creative force they exercised,--the imaginative grasp of the perfect
reaching forward toward perfectness in the human being. I wonder what
influence the character of Sir Philip Sidney alone, with 'high-erected
thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,' has had upon succeeding
generations of English youth. 'A man to be greatly good,' said Shelley,
'must imagine intensely and comprehensively.'
Here my quarrel with our present intellectual trend and our present
system of education becomes more acute. We are not only losing the habit
of mind that fosters idealism, but we are more and more breaking with
the past. The door of that storehouse of noble thought and noble example
is being slowly but firmly closed, and there is little in modern
teaching that can meet the inroads made by the devastating knowledge of
evil of which we have been speaking; little that can build up where this
tears down. Study of Greek life, with its incomparable power of shaping
existence toward the beautiful, is all but cast aside; most
unfortunately now, when, with the rush of ignorant peoples to our
shores, it might have a far-reaching potency never attained before. The
ignorance of contemporary youth regarding that other and finer
loveliness of 'Gospel books' is amazing. More and more we are stripped
of the humanities; the incredulity of science in contemplating
philosophy, art, literature, as part of the educational curriculum, is
full of menace. There has never been, I think, in the history of the
civilized world, a time when people were so anxious to cast off the
past. In our eager Marathon race of material and physical progress we
want to go as lightly equipped as possible. The æroplane carries small
luggage; our light modern mind is ever ready to throw overboard even its
precious heritage, in its eagerness for swift flight. As earlier days
have reverenced the old, we reverence the new, and are all too
insistently contemporaneous.
We need, as we never needed before, a broader and deeper study of
history, of philosophy, of literature; for most of our young, a
knowledge of the mental and spiritual past of the race is of far greater
importance than a knowledge of the physical past, at the amoeba stage,
or any other. Science, much as it can do for us, can never meet our
deepest need; the world of imaginative beauty and the world of ethical
endeavor are apart from its domain. It has no spring to touch the will,
yet that which has, the magnificent inheritance of our literature, is
more and more neglected for the latest machinery that applied science
has devised, or the most recent treatise on insect, bird, or worm. It is
well to study insect, bird, and worm, for they are endlessly
interesting, but I maintain that neither the full sum of knowledge
concerning them, nor even the ultimate fact about the ultimate star, can
be a substitute for knowledge of the idealism of Thomas Carlyle, of the
categorical imperative of Kant,--for that study of the humanities which
means preserving, for the upbuilding of youth, that which was best and
finest in the past, as we go on toward the future.
If the swift retort should come, from those who think the present the
only era of attainment and the physical world the only source of wisdom,
that the past is full of villainies, of lapses from high standards, one
can but say that for ethical purposes our study should be frankly a
selective study, emphasizing the fine and high, subordinating the evil.
There is no hypocrisy in such selection; there is deliberate choice of
the higher upon which to dwell, as a formative power, quickening feeling
and imagination. I have heard it said that a woman, by resolute dwelling
on things noble and pure, may shape the inner nature of her unborn
child, and I have faith to believe it. Even so should the nation yet to
be be shaped by resolute dwelling on the good. It was not all cowardice,
as many a present writer thinks, that led the mothers of earlier days to
say little to their sons and daughters regarding evil things, and much
regarding right things. Doubtless greater frankness would have been
better, yet I doubt if our protracted dwelling on the evil will produce
better results.
Should any one object that this emphasis on the good means suppression
of the truth, we can but reply that, for the rational soul, the truth is
not necessarily the mechanically worked-out sum of all the facts. That
we have forgotten the distinction between fact--that which has indeed
come to pass, but which may be momentary--and truth, which endures, is
one of the many signs of what William Sharp calls the 'spiritual
degradation' of our time. Much of our modern thinking and teaching, much
of our realistic fiction, rests upon a failure to make the distinction;
much that is indisputable in individual instances of wrong-doing may be,
thank God! false in the long run.
'That is not true, scientifically true,' we hear often in regard to some
fine hope or aspiration of the race; but in the real import of the term
there is no such thing as scientific truth. It is a pity that a word of
such profound and distinctive meaning should come to be more and more
exclusively identified with the observation of physical phenomena, and
the formulation of physical laws, whereas the very root-meaning of the
word true, from Anglo-Saxon _treowe_, signifying faithful, gives
justification for the idealist's belief that vital truth is partly a
matter of the will, not of mere perception and of intellectual
deductions drawn therefrom. We have need of deeper truth than that of
mere fact; and the truth that shall set us free is a truth of choice, of
selection; it embraces that part of human thought and human experience
which is worth keeping.
Faithfulness to the best and finest in the past and in the present,
rather than horrified gaping at the present's worst, is the attitude
that means continued and bettered life, for we become what we will. What
are we offering, in the way of concrete examples, or of finely expressed
thought about virtue, to the young, to the ignorant nations who are
pouring in upon us, that will help them form their vision of the
perfect? With our narrowing knowledge of the greater past, our choice of
heroes becomes more and more local and national, yet our hierarchy of
sacred dead is too small to afford that variety of heroic action and
heroic choice that should always be kept before the minds of youth. We
teach them that George Washington never told a lie; we teach them
something--and there could be nothing better--of Lincoln; but those two
figures are lonely upon Olympus, and the great tragic story of the way
in which Lincoln faced the greatest crisis in our history will not alone
suffice to help the everyday citizen shape his thought and action toward
constructive idealism. The lesser heroes of our young republic have
acquitted themselves nobly in this struggle and in that, but the
struggles have been too closely akin in nature to give the embryo hero
that breadth and depth of nurture that he requires. We need an enlarged
vision of history, and the sight of great men of all ages faithful to
small tasks as to great; we need the companionship of heroes of other
times and of other nations, and not of military heroes alone. Saint
Francis with his unceasing tenderness to man and beast, Father Damien at
work among the lepers, might far better occupy the pages of our
magazines, than the pictured deeds of criminals and the achievements of
contemporary multimillionaires.
If we need a wider range of concrete examples of the good, we need
still more a wider range of nobly expressed ideals. Our thought grows
narrow; we smother for lack of breathing space. Benjamin Franklin's
philosophy was far from grasping the best of life, yet we remember him
better than we do our Emerson, whose plea for spiritual values as the
only real ones is lost in the louder and louder groaning of the wheels
of our machinery. The idealism that is taught the young in Sunday
schools is too often inextricably bound up with unnecessary theology;
and many and many a pupil, in discarding the latter, discards the other
also. The ideal of success upheld in much journalistic admonition is
often rather mean and low; the young of this country need no printed
incentives to urge them into commercialism and the victories of trade.
The best influences that are being brought to bear upon them are those
which concern social responsibilities and the needs of the poor. Yet all
this thought and endeavor should supplement and not supersede, as it is
doing, a deep concern with the things of the spirit; and no admonition
regarding hygiene for one's self or others is a substitute for--
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things.
The great things of the past in all nations, history can teach us; the
possible, both literature and philosophy can teach us. We must forego no
noble expression of idealistic faith, lest we impoverish our own souls,
and beggar those who come after us. The pure intellectual passion of
Bacon's _Advancement of Learning_, the noble stoicism of Marcus
Aurelius, the spiritual vision of Plato, of Spenser, the heroic strain
of Wordsworth's 'Liberty Sonnets' and his 'Happy Warrior,' Shelley's
ardent and generous sympathy, Browning's dynamic spiritual force, should
make up part of our life and thought, checking our insistent impulse
toward mechanical things, and correcting the evil within and without.
More than anything else, we need a revival of interest in great poetry.
'Now therein of all sciences,' said Sir Philip Sidney, 'is our poet the
monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a
prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter it.... He cometh
to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with,
or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale,
forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from
play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth
intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.'
The poet's 'perfect picture' of the good, the great image, causes noble
passion, wakes us out of our 'habitual calm,' and stirs us almost
beyond our possibilities. The imagination is the miracle-working power
in human nature; through it alone can the human soul come to its own.
Only that which is fine and high can feed it aright, while baseness can
make of it a destructive tool of terrible power. As I think back to
childhood, I can remember the devastating effect that one tale of
cruelty had upon my mind, haunting me by day in vivid pictures, turning
my dreams to horror, and making me, while the obsession lasted, believe
that the world of grown folk must be all alike cruel. So, too, the
compelling vision of the good came through concrete instances; and the
people, both the living and the dead, in whom I passionately believed,
shaped all my faith.
The imagination of youth,--there is no power like it, no machine that
can equal it in dynamic force, nothing so full of power, so full of
danger. We become that which we look upon, contemplate, remember; it is
for this that I dread the ultimate effect of the long, imaginative
picturing of our neighbor's sins now presented in our periodicals.
Images of evil can hardly help dimming and tarnishing the bright ideals
of youth; is there no way--with all our modern wisdom can we find no
way--of limiting our exposure of crime to the people who can be of
service in helping check it, and keeping it from those who cannot help,
but can only be silently hurt? A moment, an hour of some fresh vision,
and a child's destiny is perhaps decided for good or for ill. One
afternoon's reading of Spenser made the boy Keats a poet; who, knowing
the potency of brief experience in the flush of youth, can doubt the
lasting wrong wrought again and again by the sudden shock of contact
with things evil?
Many images of wrong must of necessity come to the young; let them not
be multiplied in our feverish and morbid fashion of to-day. Above all,
let them be crowded out by constant suggestion of noble images and noble
thought, which will work both consciously and subconsciously, shaping
the dream when the dreamer is least aware. To hold up before the ardent
and impressionable young that which they may become in strength, in
purity, would surely be better than placing before them this perpetual
moving-picture show of our civic and national transgressions. I can but
believe, as I read article after article of exposure, that this
continued presentation to youth of the unholy side of life, with our
increasing tendency to make education a mere matter of the intellect and
of the eye, is bound to lessen the moral energy of the race. Would it
not be better if we were more diligent in searching history, philosophy,
literature, for 'whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,' and in bidding the young
think on these things?
On Authors
By Margaret Preston Montague
I write myself; therefore I feel free to say what I please about
authors; but if you, sir, or madam, who read, but do not write, were to
give voice to the reflections that are even now beginning to distill
from my pencil, I should doubtless resent them. And here, indeed, I am
faced by the sudden reflection that much of what I say myself I might
resent in the mouths of others. This leads to a whole new train of
thought, which, however, I refuse to take, and board instead the one I
set out for,--The Authors' Unlimited. There are many things to be
remarked about authors, but in so short a paper it is possible to touch
upon only a very few. One of the first facts that strikes the
investigator in this field is that members of my profession do not
always appear to endear themselves to those with whom they have
dealings.
'What do you think of authors?' I once asked an editor.
'I hate 'em!' he answered without a moment's hesitation.
Another editor assured me, with a weary sigh, that authors were 'kittle
cattle.' This affords a writer a little leap of amusement. So editors
suffer from authors, even as authors from editors! Well, yes, we _are_
kittle cattle! But some of this is due, no doubt, to what people expect
of us. I was presented once to a lady who immediately fixed me with an
eager eye.
'I am making a study of the habits of authors,' she announced. (Here a
dreadful sinking of the heart assailed me.) 'Kindly tell me at what hour
you retire.'
'Usually at half-past ten,' I answered wretchedly.
At that, as I had expected, her eyebrows went up. 'The author of _When
All Was Dark_,' she informed me, 'sits up all night. She says she cannot
sleep until she has savored the dawn.' However, she was kind enough to
give me another chance. 'What do you eat?' she asked.
'Three hearty meals a day,' I answered.
'Not _breakfast_!' she pleaded. 'Why, St. George Dreamer _never_ takes
more than three drops of brandy on a lump of sugar in the morning. Just
the sight of a coffee cup will upset his work for a week.'
And then she left me, sure, I have no doubt, that no real author could
confess to such distressingly normal habits as mine.