bit of politics, any law-case, or domestic complication, until you
understand your own reasons for feeling as you do about it. Then
write the matter down carefully and conclusively, and you will find
that you have done no more than restate the problem in a new form.
The more complete your exposition, the more loudly it calls for new
solution. The masterly analysis of Tolstoi, his accurate explanations,
his diagnosis and dissection of human life, leave us with a picture of
society that for unsolved mystery competes with the original. But the
point lies here. You must lay bare your whole soul in the statement you
make. You must resolutely set down everything that touches the matter.
Until you do this, the question refuses to assume its next shape. You
cannot flinch and qualify in your first book, and speak plainly in your
second.
It is the act of utterance that draws out the powers in a man and makes
him a master of his own mind. Without the actual experience of writing
Lohengrin, Wagner could not have discovered Parsifal. The works of
men who are great enough to get their whole thought uttered at each
deliverance, form a progression like the deductions of a mathematician.
These men are never satisfied with a past accomplishment. Their eyes
are on questions that beckon to them from the horizon. Their faculties
are replenished with new energy because they seek. They are driving
their ploughs through a sea of thought, intent, unresting, resourceful,
creative. They are discoverers, and just to the extent that lesser men
are worth anything they are discoverers too.
Beauty and elevation flash from the currents set up by intense
speculation. Beauty is not the aim of the writer. His aim must be
truth. But beauty and elevation shine out of him while he is on the
quest. His mind is on the problem; and as he unravels it and displays
it, he communicates his own spirit, as it were incidentally, as it were
unwittingly, and this is the part that goes out from him and does his
work in the world.
V
PRINCIPLES
Speech is a very small part of human intercourse. Indeed speech is
often not connected with the real currents of intercourse. A comic
actor has made you happy before he has uttered a word. This is by the
responsive vibration of your apparatus to his. The external speech
and gesture help the transfer of power, and that is all they do. The
communion, upon whatever plane of being it takes place, is a contagion,
and goes forward by leaps and darts, like the action of frost on a
window-pane. An angry friend comes into my room, and before he has
uttered a word I am in a blaze of anger. A baby too young to speak does
some naughty thing. I remonstrate with him in a rational way. Perhaps
I repeat to him Kant’s maxim from the Critique of Practical Reason.
The child understands at once and is grateful for the treatment. Now,
observe this, that if I said the same thing to a grown man in the same
tone, it would be to the tone and not to the argument that he would
respond.
The exchange of energy between man and man is so rapid that language
becomes a bystander. It is like the passage of the electrical
current,--we receive an impression or a message, or twenty messages at
once. All this is the result of suggestion and inference. No strange
phenomenon is here alluded to. The situation is the normal and constant
situation whenever two human beings meet. The only mystery about it is
that our senses should be so much more acute than we knew. Ask a man
to dinner and talk to him about the Suez Canal, and the next morning
your wife will be apt to give a truer account of him than you can give.
She has been knitting in the corner and thinking about the best place
to buy children’s shoes, but she knows which coils in her brain have
been played upon by the brain of the stranger. The reason your wife
knows that your Suez friend is no saint, is that she feels that certain
strings of the benevolent harp that is sounding in herself are not
being reinforced. There are dead notes in him.
The sensitiveness of children is so common a thing that we forget its
explanation. It is just because the child cannot follow the argument,
that he is free from the illusion that the argument is the main point.
The lobes of his brain get a shock and respond to it ingenuously.
These facts have been neglected by philosophers, because the facts defy
formulation. You cannot get them into a statement. They are life. But
in the practical, workaday world, they have always been understood.
Men of action owe their success to the habit of using their minds and
bodies in a direct way. Men in every profession rely upon the accuracy
of direct impressions. The great doctor, or the great general, or the
great business man uses the whole of his sensibilities in each act of
reading a man. There is no other way to read him correctly. People
whose brains are preoccupied with formulated knowledge are not apt to
be as good judges of character as spontaneous persons. Their thoughts
are on logic. They follow what is said. A very small fraction of them
is alive. They are like chess-players who are not listening to the
opera.
The answer to any question in psychology always lies under our hand. We
have only to ask what the normal man does. It will be found that he
uses his faculties according to their nature, though it may be, he is
embryonic and inarticulate. We speak of great men as “simple,” because
they retain a sensitiveness to immediate impressions very common
in uneducated persons and in children. Their thought subserves the
direct currents of suggestion. Their instincts rule them. Their minds
serve them. They are great because of this power to read the thoughts
of others through the pores of their skin, and answer blindfold to
unuttered appeals, whether of weakness or of strength. To do this means
intellect, whether in Napoleon or Gladstone. Every pianist and public
speaker, every actor and singer knows that his whole art consists in
getting his intellectual apparatus into focus, so that the vibrations
of his formulated thought shall correspond and fall in with the direct
and spontaneous vibrations of his audience. This is truth, this is the
discovery of law, this is art.
Men are profound and complicated creatures, and when any one of them
expresses the laws of his construction and reveals his own natural
history, he is called a genius. But he is a genius solely because
he is comprehensible, and others say of him, “I am like that.” His
suggestions carry. Their extreme subtlety baffles analysis, just as
the suggestions of real life baffle analysis. The miracle of reality
in art is due to refinement of suggestion. We cannot follow its steps
or say how it is done. We see only the idea. Shakespeare gives you all
the meaning, and none of the means. This is first-class artificial
communication. It almost competes with the every-day, commonplace,
familiar transfer of the incommunicable essence of life from man to man.
Our present problem is, how to influence people for their good. It is
clear that when you and another man meet, the personal equation is the
controlling thing. If you are more high-minded than he, the way to
influence him is to stick to your own beliefs; for they alone can keep
you high-minded. They alone can make you vibrate. It is they and not
you that will do the work. There you stand, and there he stands; and
you can only qualify him by the ideas that control you. It makes no
difference whether you are an emperor and he a peasant, or you a Good
Government Club man and he a merchant, the same forces are at work.
Shift your ground, and he feels the shift; you are encouraging him to
be shifty, like yourself. What can you do for him except to follow
your conscience? But this is equally true of every meeting of all men
everywhere. You address a labor meeting and talk about the Philippines.
You meet the Turkish Ambassador and talk about Kipling’s poems.
You talk to your son about kite-flying. To each of these contacts
with another’s mind you bring the same power. If you start with the
psychical value of 6, no matter what you do, a cross-section of your
whole activity in the world will at any instant of time read 6. It may
be that a page of ciphering cannot express the formula, but it will
mean 6.
The immense amount of thought that man has given, during the last few
thousand years, to his social arrangements and his destiny, has filled
our minds with tangled formulas, and has attached our affection to
particular matters. The pomp of preambles and the stress of language
stun us. There is so much of organized society. There are so many good
ends. If there were only one man in the world, we know that it would
be impossible to do good to him by suggesting evil. We know that if we
gave him a hint that contained both good and evil, the good would do
him good, and the evil, evil. If we were bent on nothing but benefit,
we should have to confine ourselves to suggestions of unalloyed
virtue. But the world is such a tangle of personalities, that we do not
hesitate to mix a little evil in the good we do, hoping that the evil
will not be operative. We half believe that there may, somewhere in the
community, be a hitch in the multiplication table that brings out good
for evil. Liberty and democracy are thought to be such worthy ends,
that we must obtain them by any means and all means, even by hiring
mercenaries. Can we wonder that in the past, men’s minds were staggered
by the importance of a papacy or of some dynastic succession? To-day
everybody jumps to shield vice because it is called republicanism or
democracy. The irony of history could go no further.
Let us consider our local reforms by the light of these views. Civil
service laws, ballot-reform, elections, taxation,--dissolve all these
into acts and impulses, and see whether the laws of human influence do
not make a short cut through them all, like X-rays. No matter what I
talk about to the Emperor, I am really conveying to him by suggestion
a tendency to become as good or as bad a man as I myself. Chinese
Gordon turned a dynamo of personal force upon the Orientals, and
they understood him. He was talking religion, and he gave it to them
straight. Now all religion, as everybody knows, is purely a matter of
suggestion. But so is all other intercourse. We want honesty. Well,
what makes people honest? Honesty. Does anything else spread the
influence of honesty, except honesty? Are we here facing a scientific
fact? Is this a law of the transference of human energy, or is it not?
If it is, you cannot beat it. You cannot imagine any situation where
your own total force, in favor of honesty, will consist of anything
else than honesty. Of course you may put a case where honesty will
result in somebody’s death. If in that case, you want his life, why,
lie. But what you will get will be his life, not the spread of honesty.
If the event is chronicled, you will find it used as a means of
justifying dishonesty forever afterwards.
We do not want any of these reforms except as a means of stimulating
character, and it is a law of nature that character can only be
stimulated directly. Sincerity is the only need, courage the
all-sufficing virtue. We can dump them into every occasion, and
sleep sound at night. What interest can any rational man have in our
municipal issues except as a grindstone on which to whet the people’s
moral sense? How is it possible to deceive ourselves into looking at
our own political activity from any other standpoint than this? You are
to make a speech at Cooper Union on ballot reform. Somebody says, “Do
not mention the liquor question or you will lose votes.” But some phase
of that question seems to you pertinent and important. Shall you omit
and submit? That would be an odd way of stimulating character. The need
of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The maximum that any man
can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself.
All the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation; and the vices
likewise. Our people are deficient in righteous indignation. When you
see a man righteously indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this the
force. Nothing else will arouse courage but courage, faith but faith.
You see, for instance, a knot of men who are really indignant at the
injustice of the times. But their indignation seems to you a danger;
because it is likely to defeat some candidate, some pet measure of
yours. You wish to allay it. You wish yourself well rid of this
sacred indignation; it is inconvenient. Open your eyes to the light of
science. Here is a spark of that fire with which everybody ought to
be filled. All your scheming was only for the purpose of getting this
fire. Then foment it.
Virtue then, is a mode of motion, or it is an attitude of mind in a
human organism, which enables that organism to transmit virtue to
others. But vice is also a mere attitude of mind by which vice is
transmitted. We know less about the natural history of vice than we do
of dipsomania and consumption; but we know this much, that the vices
are co-related, and breed one another _in transitu_; the tendency
being towards lighter forms in the later catchers. Avoid another’s
guilty side, and you reinforce it; sympathize with it, and you catch
his disease, or some disease. I have held hands with my friend (who
is in the wrong) over his family troubles, and it has given me the
distemper for a week. The German actor, Devrient, went mad while
studying the inmates of asylums, as a preparation to playing King
Lear. It was not the living in asylums that drove him mad, but his
sympathetic attitude toward the disease. This exposed him. Why is it
we commend the man whose antagonism to crooked work is so great that
he shows a tempter the door before he has finished his proposition?
Parleying is not only a danger; it is the beginning of the trouble
itself.
It is very difficult and very odious offending people, by forcing them
to see in which direction our wheels really go round; and yet the
alternative is to have our machinery forced back to a standstill. We
are interlocked with other people and cannot break free. We are held in
place by fate, and played upon against our will. When you see cruelty
going on before you, you are put to the alternative of interposing
to stop it, or of losing your sensibility. There is a law of growth
here involved. It is inexorable. You are at the mercy of it. You wish
yourself elsewhere, but you are here; you are a mere illustration of
pitiless and undying force. The part you take, may run through a fit of
bad temper or malice. It may turn to covetousness or conceit, who can
tell? Some poison has entered your eye because you looked negligently
upon corruption. It will cost you some part of your sense of smell.
“Use or lose,” says Nature when she gives us capacities. What you
condone, you support; what you neglect, you confirm.
It is true that your confirmation and support are managed through the
mechanism of blindness. All the evil in the world receives its chief
support from the people whose only connection with it is that they do
not fight it, nor see it. Where politics is involved scarcely a man in
America knows the difference between right and wrong. Our mayoralty
contest five years ago would have left Lot searching for a man who
could tell black from white. It was a clear moral issue. But it arose
in politics: we could not see it. That we have intellectual cataract is
entirely due to the habit of condoning embezzlement. It is a secondary
form of the endemic theft, caught by the by-standers. The best people
in town had it. If they had been lifting their hands against theft
during the preceding years, they never would have caught it.
Of course we support all the good in the world, as well as all the
evil; and the ratio in which we do both changes at every moment. It
radiates forth from us, and is read correctly by every baby as he
passes in his perambulator. Close thinking, and fresh observation of
things too familiar to be noticed, bring us to this point.
Now, just as no complexity of institutions affects the transfer of
virtue, so none affects the transfer and propagation of vice. Yesterday
you were all for virtue. You were for leading a revolution against
the bosses, and were ready to work and subscribe and vote. You were
a man with the heart of a man. But to-day you are chop-fallen. “The
thing cannot be done. It is not the year.” The degradation of your
character is seen in your low spirits, and in the jaded and sophistical
commonplaces you pour forth. I know the academical reasons for this
change in you. I can express it in terms of ballot-law and civil
service. But what is it that really has happened?
The power that has struck you was focalized the day before yesterday in
the office of some law-broking politicians; and the direct rays of base
passion have struck straight through stone walls and constitutions,
and, falling upon you, have stopped your wheels. In them it was avarice
and ambition. In you it is doubt. A drowsy inertia overcomes you, a
blindness of the will. That is what has really happened. The rest is
illusion and metaphysical talk. See, now, the real curse of injustice;
it takes away the sight from the eyes, and that in a night.
Is it not perfectly natural that Tammany Hall should be everywhere, at
all tables, in all churches, in all consciences, when these electrical
currents run between man and man and connect them so easily?
I read in the newspaper that a well-known man is at Albany in the
interests of a gas deal. He cannot get his way in the city, and
is putting up a job with the legislature. I see the thing going
through,--a thing utterly cynical, utterly corrupt. No paper will
explain it because it cannot be explained without names; besides, the
names own the papers. Everybody understands it; nobody minds it. Is any
statute here at fault? Will any legislation cure this? If the moral
sensibility of our people should become tensified by twenty per cent
in twenty-four hours, twenty per cent of all our iniquities in every
department would cease in forty-eight hours. Government is carried
on by the lightning of personal suggestion which flashes through the
community from day to day and from moment to moment. Those things are
done which are demanded or are tolerated at the instant they are done.
I read in a newspaper that a syndicate has been formed to light the
city. It is backed by the men who control the city administration,
and they are now blackmailing the existing company to its ruin. Can I
escape the knowledge of this thing? Alas, too easily: I own stock in it.
At first we think the legislature makes the laws, then we see it is
done by a cabal, then by people behind the cabal, finally by the
million bonds of popular prejudice which tie each man up with the times.
Look closely, take some particular man, and consider why it is that
he does not spend his whole time in fighting for virtue. It will
turn out, that in some form or other, he is a beneficiary of these
evils, and has not the energy to fight them. One man depends upon the
_status quo_ for his living, the next is held by affection for his
friends, by the ties of old prejudice, by inertia, by hopelessness.
Which of them is the more deeply injured victim of tyranny,--the active
self-seeker or the listless man, the Tammany boy or the American
gentleman?
Every man bears a direct and discoverable share in the responsibility.
A janitor keeps his place through Tammany influence, a young lawyer
gets business by keeping his mouth shut. Follow out the lines leading
from any man, no matter how obscure he is, and they will lead you to
the ante-chamber where gigantic business has its offices, where the
highest functionaries of commerce and politics meet. The business world
is all one organization. It is a sort of secret society, a great web.
No matter where you touch it, the same spiders come out.
The boss system, then, appears as the visible part of all the private
selfishness in America. It is a great religion of self-interest, with
its hierarchy, its chapels, its propaganda, and its confessors in
every home. You yourself support it. I saw last week, at your table,
a magnate whose business conduct you deplore, and to-day I heard a
young man make the comment, that there was no use fighting the current
so long as social influence could be bought. Do not accuse Tammany
Hall; you yourself have corrupted that young man. So long as you think
you can circumvent the laws of force, you will remain a pillar in the
temple of iniquity.
But look closer still at each of those individuals, and see just what
it is he is giving as the purchase money. One man gives $25,000 to
pay a president’s private debts, and goes as minister to England;
another gives merely his name to indorse a doubtful candidate for the
assembly, and receives prospective good will from the organization.
What is this great market overt where every one can get what he wants?
The syndicate can get the franchises, and the aldermen the cash. No
one is too small to be served, or so great as to require nothing.
Upon what principle is this monstrous bazaar, this clearing-house for
self-interest, conducted? It is as large as the United States--the
transcontinental railroads use it--and so well managed that I can get
my friend a job as the secretary of a reform movement. What is it
that makes this universal shop run so smoothly? It is hooked together
simply on business principles. The price you pay is always the rubbing
of somebody the right way; the thing you get is advancement or
personal comfort of some sort. It has happened, that by the operation
of commercial forces, the whole of America’s seventy million people
have been polarized into self-seekers; and our total condition is
visibly Vanity Fair. You can actually follow the rays of power from
the individual to the boss. All the evil in the world is seen to be
in league. Embezzlement and laziness, selfish ambition and prejudice,
cruelty and timidity here openly play into each other’s hands, support
and console each other. Nay, every atom of vice, every impulse of
malice or cupidity, can be shown up as a tendon or a sinew of the great
organization of selfish forces. It is as if a magic glass had been
superposed upon the continent, and, looking down through it, upon the
motives of men, all complexity vanished, and we saw all the evil forces
pulling one way.
The same thing has always been true in every society; but the names,
powers, superstitions have been so extremely complicated that no one
could follow the laws of interlocking motive, except by inference and
prophetic insight. Take the case of a very selfish man fighting his
way up through society in the reign of Louis XVIII. He meets a Bourbon
influence, an ecclesiastical influence, a Napoleonic influence, a
republican influence. He grapples with every man he meets, using the
hooks of self-interest in that man. The forces at work under Louis
XVIII. were as simple as with us. Only the nomenclature is different,
and more complex. It is easy in America to see the working of one man’s
selfishness upon another’s. Let alone the market overt, it is easy to
trace the subtle social relations, when they are for the bad. It was
easy to follow the effect of your conduct in asking the dishonest
business magnate to dinner, because the young man spoke of it. He was
shocked and injured. But we also found out by the episode that before
you did the thing, you were really a factor for good in his life,
holding up his conscience and his ideals.
The inexpressible subtlety in the mechanism of man makes the
transmission of the force for good as easy as that of the force for
evil. They are of the same character, and very often flow through the
same channels. There is no more mystery in the one case than in the
other.