friendship; Plato, friendship; Jesus, love; Paul, charity; Adam Smith
and Darwin, sympathy; Comte, altruism; Renan, the enthusiasm of humanity;
Kropotkin, mutual aid; Matthew Arnold, humanism; Giddings, consciousness
of mankind; Trotter, the herd instinct. It is a power to feel for others
and must be sufficiently strong to influence action at times.
5. Love of nature. This is the root. There are many flowers—poetry,
music, literature, art of whatever form, religion. The mind first feels
love and awe, then worship, then a desire for cold, outward study—the
order is always the same. But in spite of the mind’s insistence on going
to extremes, the feeling must be kept alive and must be adequately fed.
6. Sublimation. Teeth, lips and tongue were created or developed to eat
with; we have made them serve us to speak with, also. The senses first
served to warn us of danger and to find and test food; we now use them in
a thousand ways. Anger began as blind rage, but we have gone some way to
control and direct it. We cannot be too angry if we are angry aright. As
for love, which began on the physical plane, “every real interest sets a
back-fire to lust.”
7. Activity as against passivity. Although a given person or nation may
be predominantly active or passive, doers or knowers, leaders or led,
the two forces must be controlled and balanced for success. Do not make
the mistake of thinking that activity is all to the good; energy without
intelligence is worthless.
8. Loyalty or fidelity. In the first instance, this is loyalty to
oneself, creating self-respect. The various loyalties to parents, husband
or wife, children, friends, country, etc., follow.
These tests cannot be applied to large groups. They are tests of the
individual. They cannot be made within set time limits. They cannot be
made by asking a man or woman questions and writing down the answers.
They require observation in favorable circumstances and these cannot
always be secured by prearrangement. But they are the only tests worth
making. They require in the tester something which psychology requires
very much, in Dr. Hall’s estimation, in many psychologists—common sense.
v
Dr. Hall’s attitude toward educational theory and practice was derived
from his special interest in child study. “In the nature of childhood
itself and its different stages of development,” he says, “must be found
the norm for all the method and matter of teaching.” One very general
defect of our schools is that the teacher does not teach enough, but
gives, or is required to give, too much attention to setting, hearing,
and marking lessons. He thought the weakest spot in the American system
to be from about the fourth to the ninth grades. Drill and authority can
really do most with the child just at this stage. Whatever may be the
possibilities eugenics offers in the future, it is a far-off future; for
a long time to come we must depend on education to make the best of our
child-material. Although it was necessary to exclude religious teaching
from the schools, it should be restored as soon as a gradually widening
tolerance makes that possible. Education without it lacks heart and soul.
“Protestant though I am, I would far rather a child of mine should be
trained to be a good Catholic, Jew, or even Buddhist, Confucianist, or
Mohammedan than allowed to grow up with no religion at all and made an
early skeptic toward all faiths. Not absolute truth but efficiency for
the conduct of life is the supreme criterion of all values here. The
highest interpretation of the most vital human experiences must always
take the religious form.”
Motion pictures have more cultural possibilities, wrote Dr. Hall, than
anything since the invention of printing; but we have not learned to
develop them. Broadcasting may have similar possibilities; but the
educational value of our newspapers has deteriorated.
The general problem of education as stated by Dr. Hall is somewhat as
follows:
Over-population and a use of the earth’s resources so wasteful that we
can now date the exhaustion of many of them are the first term of the
problem. There is not now in the world one one-hundredth of the wealth
necessary to satisfy the demand for it. “As civilization advances, it
costs not only more money but more time and effort to keep people happy.”
And “the average individual wants all that is coming to him now and here,
and uses every means in his power (fair and sometimes foul) to get it.
Thus he plunges on toward the bankruptcy of his hopes in their present
form.” Wise minds realize that either men must restrict their desires,
which is not likely, or must transform and redirect them—in technical
language, must sublimate them, or find more internal surrogates for their
gratification. Our industrial system is less than 200 years old. Our
political institutions are only a few thousand years old. The mind of man
is far, far older. Such men as James Harvey Robinson would adapt the mind
of man to these juvenile institutions or phases of knowledge. Dr. Hall
said the adjustment will have to be the other way about. It does seem
likely. If it is to be made, psychology must make it.
“I know,” he wrote, “no class of men quite so hard-boiled and
uninteresting and, indeed, unintelligent outside the hard and fast and
often narrow limits of their own interests as the American millionaires.
Each man has a normal amount of wealth as he has a normal weight of body
on which he can best thrive. If I were sentenced to be rich now I should
grow neurotic over insurance risks, problems of competition, fluctuation
of prices and markets, labor problems, anxieties about special
legislation, tariff rates, new fields of fruitful investment, and perhaps
efforts to reform our present industrial system.”
In his own case, Dr. Hall found happiness through his work, which has
never included that “curse of the industrial world today,” having to do,
for pay, work that he hated. For it must be remembered that the false
situation at Clark University was more than offset by the delight he had
as a teacher of graduate students. But, work aside, perhaps the next
greatest source of happiness and satisfaction to him has been the trait
which Walt Whitman perfectly phrased when he exclaimed:
“In me the caresser of life, wherever moving.”
For this psychologist and teacher, who was also for some time president
of the New England Watch and Ward Society, a voluntary censorship which
asserts itself chiefly over books and plays and in opposition to the
social evil, always had “a love for glimpsing at first hand the raw side
of life. I have never missed an opportunity to attend a prize fight if
I could do so unknown and away from home. Thrice I have taken dancing
lessons from experts sworn to secrecy, and tried to learn the steps of
ancient and some of the tabooed modern dances—just enough to know the
feel of them—up to some six years ago, although I have always been known
as a non-dancer.” In Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, New York and San
Francisco he found guides to take him through the underworld by night. In
an institution for the blind, he blindfolded himself for an entire day;
he learned the deaf mute alphabet; he had seen three executions, visited
morgues, revival meetings, anarchist meetings. Paupers, criminals,
wayward children, circus freaks were among his hobbies. “I believe that
such zests and their indulgence are a necessary part of the preparation
of a psychologist or moralist who seeks to understand human nature as it
is.” And as, probably, it will continue to be for a while to come.
BOOKS BY G. STANLEY HALL
1874 _Hegel as the National Philosopher of Germany._ Translated
from the German of Dr. Karl Rosenkrans
1881 _Aspects of German Culture_
1883 _Methods of Teaching History_
1886 _Hints Towards a Select and Descriptive Bibliography of
Education_ (with John M. Mansfield)
1904 _Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to
Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime,
Religion and Education._ Two volumes
1906 _Youth, Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene._ An abridgement
of _Adolescence_
1907 _Aspects of Child Life and Education_
1911 _Educational Problems._ Two volumes
1912 _Founders of Modern Psychology_
1917 _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology._ Two volumes
1920 _Morale: The Supreme Standard of Life and Conduct_
1920 _Recreations of a Psychologist._ Stories, reminiscences and
sketches
1922 _Senescence: The Last Half of Life_
1923 _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_
1923 _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology._ One volume
edition
NOTE: An extended list of articles, some of them popularly-written, will
be found in the bibliography appended to _Life and Confessions of a
Psychologist_.
SOURCES ON G. STANLEY HALL
His autobiographical _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ is of the
first importance.
_How You Can DO More and BE More_, by Bruce Barton. An interview with G.
Stanley Hall. In the American Magazine for November, 1923.
“Stanley Hall: A Memory,” by A. E. Hamilton in the American Mercury for
July, 1924.
Article by Dr. Joseph Jastrow on Dr. Hall in the Literary Review of The
Evening Post, New York, 28 June 1924.
10. The Mode in New Fiction
i
If only books were like hats and gowns it would simplify matters a good
deal. I could say: “Ostrich feathers are being much used,” or “Egotism is
usually the center of the design.” But although there is an observable
tendency to buy books like clothes, because some novel or other is all
the rage, the tendency grows weaker from year to year, I think; and if in
the title of this chapter I use the word “mode” it is phrasemaking.
Phrasemaking has its excuse in convenience, but it must be abandoned in
the discussion of some of the fiction I am going to talk about. Among
these books just one is a first novel. Because it has this distinction,
because of its human quality, and because it borders a theme of great
significance, I want to speak at once of Marjorie Barkley McClure’s _High
Fires_. Mrs. McClure, the daughter of a Detroit clergyman, has laid
her story principally in that city, in the period from 1905 to about
the present. Angus Stevenson is a minister of the gospel who sticks by
the letter of a somewhat rigid, old-fashioned creed. His sons and his
daughter are young people of today. They cannot see why they should
not do what other boys and girls of their age are doing. But their
father will not for one moment countenance such things as dancing and
card-playing and Sunday baseball.
The struggle is tempered and made human by Angus Stevenson’s goodness.
He loves his children; especially is his daughter the apple of his
eye. But he cannot sacrifice one inch of his principles. They are just
as effectual in one direction as another. He voluntarily reduces his
own salary when it seems to him that the act is called for. If he is
intolerant, he is Christ-like.
Of several crises, the one that cuts into him most deeply is his
daughter’s falling in love with a young man whom Angus Stevenson is
constrained to regard as an atheist and an infidel. I have said that he
loves his children; I should add that even when they are most rebellious
against their father, they love him no less. The intensity and depth of
Mrs. McClure’s portrait of Angus Stevenson fully realizes the feeling
on all sides. You are made to see and to acknowledge the claim to
justice of conflicting creeds, the rare courage and noble faith and
life-long devotion of the father, the right to happiness and a certain
self-fulfillment of the children. I know scarcely a novel of this year in
which the human element is so strong; none in which it is stronger; none
in which the lessons of a right feeling are more clearly conveyed or are
more capable of a direct application in the lives of ordinary Americans.
Here lies the flesh that tried
To follow the spirit’s leading;
Fallen at last, it died,
Broken, bruised and bleeding,
Burned by the high fires
Of the spirit’s desires.
Mrs. McClure’s novel is of interest, too, for its evidence that religion
is quickening in the American mind. I am using “religion” in the sense
of personal faith, which is at the present hour having a difficult time
with established creeds, on the one hand, and life’s machinery of motion
on the other. There were evidences before _High Fires_ was published, in
the huge sale of a new life of Christ and in the fundamentalist-liberal
controversy in the churches, that something deeply disquieting was
coming to the surface. Almost simultaneously with the publication of
_High Fires_, a first novel by Lyon Montross, _Half Gods_, by means of
the highly realistic presentation of American small town life, tried to
disclose the trouble. Mr. Montross’s story implied what is probably true:
the wine of a strong belief in anything is no longer fermented in most of
us; we half-worship, or, at best, only worship half-heartedly.
Now the business of a novelist, or his art, is, as Joseph Conrad said,
“a form of imagined life clearer than reality.” It is to show you
something more plainly than life shows it you; a good novel is a beacon,
not a bonfire. Thus in the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning (the
most ambitious work she has so far done), the heroine, after a life of
vicissitudes, comes to realize that she is, in the Scriptural phrase of
the title, but a “handmaid of the Lord.” Veronica is a sensitive girl
brought up in depressing though scarcely unusual circumstances. She
marries a man whose business career takes her to a social height, both
in America and, for a time, in England. Her church, which should mean
so much to her constantly, affects her life only at intervals. When the
crash comes she finds herself separated from her husband by his struggle
to keep afloat. She goes back to her home town. It seems as though she
were back where she had started, with little difference except in the
perplexity of an uncomprehended experience. So it is that finally she
comes to a measure of understanding, to an unquiet peace. She sees that
things will go on, though not in her way nor in any way of her choosing.
_A Handmaid of the Lord_, like _High Fires_ and _Half Gods_, does
something to get at the trouble that is in us.
To show what is, including what is wrong, is the novelist’s object; to
show what came right is also sometimes possible. Dealing with the subject
of religion, it has taken that very able novelist, Compton Mackenzie,
three books in sequence to show the history of Mark Lidderdale. _The
Altar Steps_ gave the young man’s background and the story of his life up
to his ordination in the Church of England. In _The Parson’s Progress_ we
see him as a priest of the English Church constantly beset by doubts and
difficulties. These are by no means solved when the third novel of the
trilogy, _The Heavenly Ladder_, opens; but they find their solution as it
ends. Mark, as a convert in Rome, finds a happiness that Mr. Mackenzie
has expressed with the utmost simplicity and with a restrained but lofty
fervor.
With a simplicity different but equally honest, Ralph Connor writes his
novels of men in a newer country. “Imagine,” he said, when asked to
tell briefly about his new book, “a man of vitality and power who has
given and taken heavy blows in the struggle of human life, who finds
himself cornered by forces he cannot subdue. Suddenly he realizes that
his back is against the wall, that no further retreat is possible.
Spiritually, mentally, physically there is a last stand to be made—a hold
on the essentials of life to be groped for and seized. It is this last
stand, this fighting chance that I have made the theme of _Treading the
Winepress_.” The scenes of the story are laid in Nova Scotia.
ii
If there is no single preoccupation common to the new fiction of other
authors, readers will be highly content to find thoroughly characteristic
new work by such favorites as Joseph C. Lincoln, Hugh Walpole, Mary
Roberts Rinehart, Arnold Bennett, Bertrand W. Sinclair, Susan Ertz,
Robert Hichens, and Ruth Comfort Mitchell.
Both Joseph C. Lincoln and Hugh Walpole—and different as they are—seem
to me to have surpassed themselves. Mr. Lincoln’s _Rugged Water_ is not
basically different from his other Cape Cod novels. Perhaps in the loose
chronology of his stories it is more nearly contemporaneous with _Cap’n
Eri_ than with his more recent books. It is a story of a Coast Guard
Station in the days when the Coast Guard was the Life Saving Service.
The chief character is Calvin Homer, Number One man of the crew, brave,
honest, and shy of women. In temporary command of the Station, he does
gallant rescue work which should place him in line for promotion to
Keeper of the Station. But in the same storm, Benoni Bartlett, of a
nearby Station, stands out more conspicuously as the sole survivor of a
brave crew. Benoni is made Keeper over Homer.
These two men, Benoni Bartlett and Homer; Myra Fuller, to whom Homer
became engaged before he quite knew what was happening; Norma Bartlett,
daughter of the former Keeper and the young woman with whom Homer
eventually discovers himself to be in love, are the main persons of the
novel. It is difficult to regard them as Mr. Lincoln’s real subject,
for the life of the Station and the drama of shipwreck asserts itself
constantly in pages that teem with humor and with other qualities of
human nature less easy of superficial exhibition.
In other words, the largeness of what he is essentially dealing with has
seized upon Mr. Lincoln, and without the sacrifice of his lesser drama,
or any of the picturesqueness that has made him so beloved, he has caught
something of the loneliness of the Station, the whisper and thunder of
the surf, the struggle of men in an “overmatched littleness” under a
black sky in the tempest of waters. To me, these captures make _Rugged
Water_ the best novel he has written.
As for Mr. Walpole in _The Old Ladies_, my verdict, arrived at on
different grounds, is equally affirmative and emphatic. Here is a short
novel to stand beside Edith Wharton’s _Ethan Frome_. There is bleakness
as well as sunniness about the story; no haze; no sentimentality, though
sentiment a-plenty and a deep, clear feeling. Three women, Lucy Amorest,
May Beringer, and Agatha Payne, all seventy, live together in the top
of a “rain-bitten” old house in Polchester. All are very poor. Lucy has
a cousin who _may_ leave her money, and a son in America from whom she
has not heard for a couple of years. May Beringer, close to penury, is
a weak, stupid, kind creature always terrified of life. Agatha Payne is
sensual and strong. There has never, in my knowledge, been a picture
more honest or more terribly pathetic of what old age sometimes means.
Mr. Walpole has not evaded an inch of the truth or the tragedy; and the
measured happiness accorded at last to Lucy Amorest comes not in the
least as a concession toward a “happy ending” but solely as a reprieve of
pity for her—and for the reader also.
The stories in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s _Temperamental People_ represent
her most recent work and have a unity as interesting as their wide
range. Each shows the force of temperament—that quality in people which
makes the drama of life. But who are the temperamental people? A queen,
a cowboy, a famous singer, a wife, a great sculptor and a business man’s
secretary are some of them. People as diverse as life; but all of them
have temperament, and each story is a revelation of human emotion in
action. As one of the characters says (it is the opening of the story of
the sculptor, “Cynara”): “I suppose once in every creative life there
comes the sublime moment, the consecrated hour when, not from within but
from without there comes the onrush of true greatness.” These records of
that moment and that hour are among the best things Mrs. Rinehart has
done.
The title of Arnold Bennett’s new collection, _Elsie and the Child and
Other Stories_, should be notice enough to the thousands who revelled in
_Riceyman Steps_ that the new book is one they may not miss. Yes, it is
Elsie, the humble but lovable heroine of Clerkenwell, who figures again
in this volume. It will be remembered that at the close of _Riceyman
Steps_, Elsie, about to marry Joe, weakly consented to go to work as a
servant for Mrs. Raste, while Joe (it was arranged) should resume his
rôle as Dr. Raste’s handy man. This was due to the pleading of young
Miss Raste; Elsie was never one to resist children. And so “Elsie and
the Child” begins approximately where _Riceyman Steps_ left off. It is
a novelette in length, a most satisfactory morsel left over from the
novel’s feast. With the very first page the feeling of _Riceyman Steps_
in its more blissful moments is restored to the reader. The dozen shorter
tales in the book are all from Mr. Bennett’s most recent work.
Bertrand W. Sinclair’s _The Inverted Pyramid_ is work of such
proportions and of a sufficient dignity to take him quite out of the
group of “Western” writers. This is not to rate down the cowboy story,
but it is to recognize that such work as Mr. Sinclair’s is something
far more consequential. The inverted pyramid of the title is the
social structure of a family set up by entailed wealth. Hawk’s Nest,
on Big Dent, just off the coast of Vancouver Island, is the home of
the Norquay family, founded in 1809 by a roving pioneer fur trader who
obtained the immense tract of land from the Indians for a pittance. He
held it intact and it has come down unspoiled to the fifth generation
of Norquays—Dorothy, Roderick, Phil and Grove. Luck and ability has
aggregated a huge fortune from the natural resources of the estate, which
Roderick’s grandfather converted into a corporation, seventy per cent. of
income going to the oldest son, the rest being divided among the others.
In the fifth generation various destinies open before the three brothers.
Money, in the sense of finance (money plus power); love; the call of
adventure; the quest of romance exert themselves on the three. The
very structure of the family, however, makes it quite impossible that
the destinies of one should not react in an exceptional degree upon
the others. The responsibility for the maintenance of family standing,
financial, social, moral, is interlocking. The old question: “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” was never asked under a colder compulsion to return an
affirmative answer: yes, because he is a fellow director on the board.
I have said nothing about the daughter, Dorothy, and will only say that
her rôle in the novel is important. It is enough, I think, to indicate
the largeness and the serious character of _The Inverted Pyramid_, and to
hail it as a sign that Mr. Sinclair will give us other books as good or
even better, to stand with this, his finest so far.
Susan Ertz’s _Nina_ is at once more brilliant and more profound than
her _Madame Claire_ (a novel which sells better today than when it was
first published). _Nina_ is the study of a girl whose love, once given,
cannot be revoked by any act or will of her own. Brought up by her aunt,
Nina Wadsworth falls in love with Morton Caldwell, adopted as a boy by
that same aunt. Morton is extraordinarily handsome, good-hearted, and
hopelessly susceptible to women. Tony Fielding has the qualities of
fidelity and devotion which Morton lacks. Henri Bouvier, the son of a
French family in England, is a playmate in childhood. Miss Ertz deals
directly only with Nina and Morton after their marriage; what has gone
before is cleverly reflected in the scenes put before the reader. As in
_Madame Claire_, a delightful feature is the points of view from which
the story is told. Much of it is seen through the eyes of Henri, grown
to manhood, French in his ideas, sophisticated, and almost equally
sympathetic and discreet. His comments, both spoken and unspoken, are
delicious. They do much to enliven a situation at bottom profoundly
tragic by reason of Morton’s limitations as a husband and Nina’s
tenacious love.