worth moving in, lie on the other side of the great reaction, the
spiritual revival which we see now faintly beginning; and it is
because these things can be got at only by stimulating American
character that these reform movements are of value. Here at least the
circulation throbs. Political reform--that is to say, a political life
in which men who are personally honest predominate, a politics run
by ideas--will come in as fast as the public develops ideas, and not
before. But an idea is something very different from what you who read
this think it is. An idea is a thing that governs your conduct all
the time. For instance, you assent to the notion of independence in
politics; you understand the lost-cause theory, but you won’t vote the
ticket. Why? You don’t want to get out of your class. The relations
between thought and action in you are not normal. Half of your brain
has never functioned, and the paralysis shows in your politics. You
have no idea. It is not this sort of idea that expels rascals or makes
books or music. What passes for political thought in your vocabulary
is like the phantasma in the brain of the Indian priest who is buried
with the corn growing above him. The average educated man in America
has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of
the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or
music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate
somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It
must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried
figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea
is against the rules of his mind.
Imagine a tea-party of pre-Raphaelites discussing Dante; they dote on
his style, his passion, his force, his quality. In walks Dante, grim,
remorseless, harsh, powerful. The man represents everything they hate.
He is a horror and an outrage. The whole region of literature that
these men live in is not more fictitious than the region of political
thought in which the effete American--I mean your banker, your college
president, your writer of editorial leaders--lives. Exclude for the
moment those who are financially corrupt and consider only the men of
intellect, and in all that concerns politics they are as removed from
real ideas as Rossetti was removed from the real Dante.
Imagine a company of people on a voyage. They play whist with one
another for dimes, and they spend all their money on the steward and
continue to play with counters, and the ship goes to wreck, and they
sit on the beach and continue to play with pebbles. That is American
politics. The whole thing is one gigantic sham, one transcendent fraud.
It makes no difference which man is made president; it makes no
difference which is governor. There is no choice between McKinley and
Bryan, between Republicanism and Democracy. There is no difference
between them. They are one thing. They both and all of them are part
of the machinery by which the government of a most dishonest nation
is carried on, for the financial benefit of certain parties,--certain
thousands of men who have bank accounts and eat and drink and bring up
their families on the proceeds of this complicated swindle.
There is no reality in a single phrase uttered in politics, no meaning
in one single word of any of it. There is no man in public life who
stands for anything. They are shadows; they are phantasmagoria. At
best they cater to the better elements; at worst they frankly subserve
the worst. There is no one who stands for his own ideas himself, by
himself, a man. If American politics does not look to you like a joke,
a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea,
on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic party or the Republican
party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate
who does not stand for a new era,--then you yourself pass into the
slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a
curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem, and you
must be educated and drawn forward towards real life. This process is
going on. As the community returns to life, it sees the natural world
for a moment and then forgets it. The blood flushes the brain and then
recedes. You yourself voted once against both parties, when you thought
you could win, and when you were excited. You quoted Isaiah and I know
not what poetry, and were out and out committed to principle; but
to-day you are cold and hopeless. At present, hope is a mystery to you.
Nevertheless the utility of those early reform movements survives. They
heated the imagination of the people till the people had a momentary
vision of truths which not all of them forgot; and so each year the
temperature has been higher, the mind of the community clearer.
We must not regard those broken reeds, the renegade leaders of reform
movements, as villains; though the mere record of their words and
conduct might prove them such. They have been men emerging from a mist.
They see clearly for a moment, and then clouds sweep before them.
Vanity, selfishness, ambition, tradition, habit, intervene like a fog.
They have been betrayed, too, by the fickle public, that would not
stand by them when in trouble. In the recapture of any institution by
the forces of honesty there are trenches that get filled by slaughtered
honor.
This whole revolution means the invasion of politics by new men. At
first they are tyros, unstable, untried, well-meaning fellows. Half of
them crack in the baking. But there are more coming, and the fibre is
growing tougher and the eyes clearer; soon we shall have men. A great
passion is soon to replace the feeble conscientious motive that has
hitherto brought the new men forward: ambition,--the ambition to stand
for ideas, for ideas only, and to get heard. We have almost forgotten
that public life is the natural ambition of every young man. Conditions
have made it contemptible. But these struggles signify that a change in
those conditions has already begun. Your work and mine may be summed up
in one word. Make it possible for a young man to go into public life
untarnished, and as an enemy to every extant evil. You must have men
who will not go except on these terms. The times herald such men. They
will appear. We must prepare for them.
* * * * *
The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a
single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath
the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish
forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call
to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy.
He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial
philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the
half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him
is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart. The instant
he declares war, every inducement is offered to make him stop. “Toil,
envy, want, the patron, and the jail” intervene. The instant he stops
fighting he is allied with the enemy: he is bought up by prejudice or
by fatigue. He begins to realize the importance of particular visible
institutions, as if their sole value did not come from the fraction
of unselfishness they represent. He rushes headlong into trade, and
thenceforth can see his country only as a series of trade interests.
He gets into some church and begins to value its organization, or
into some party and begins to value its past, or into some club and
begins to value his friends’ feelings. The consequence is that you
may search Christendom and hardly find a man who is free. The advance
of the world, like the improvement of our local politics, has always
been the work of young men. It is done by men before their minds
have been worn into ruts by particular businesses, or their sight
shortened by the study of near things. What we love in the young is
not their youth, but their force. The energy that runs through them
makes them sensitive. They feel the importance of remote things, and
infer the relations of the present to the future more truly than their
elders. They are touched by hints. The direct language of humanity is
plain and native to them. The invisible waves of force which do as a
matter of fact rule the world, using its fictions and its phrases as
mere transmitting-plates, strike keenly upon the heart of the youth,
and the vibrations of instinctive passion that shake his frame are
the response of a strong creature to the laws of its universe. This
unlearned knowledge of good and evil is like the response of the
eyes to light or of the tongue to the taste of a fruit. It was not
indoctrinated; it is a reaction to a stimulus.
So long as the world shall last, men will be writing books in order to
explain and justify the instincts; inventing theologies and ethical
codes, and projecting political programs to advance and confirm them.
If you take up some particular matter and begin to trace out its
consequences upon mankind, you find yourself forced boldly to embrace
the sum of all human destiny. We cannot follow out this course in
detail. We see only tendency; we see only influence. Enlarge our
horizon as we will, we cannot live out the lives of all future
generations, and thus furnish an answer to the first caviller who
interrupts our argument with a “cui bono.” The generous impulses of
youth represent a vision of consequences. They take in more of the
future at one glance than a philosopher can state in a year.
Certainly, so far as we can follow out the threads of influence, the
lines seem to converge. They make a figure and point to a conclusion
exactly upon that spot in the firmament where instinct would place
it. If philosophy gives us a diagram, the rest of life fills it up,
and embellishes it with infinite illustration. The proofs multiply,
and are hurled in upon us from all quarters of life and all provinces
of endeavor. The anecdotes and fables of the world, its drama, its
poetry and fiction, its religion and piety, its domestic teaching and
its monuments support this instinct, and describe the same figure.
Further still, there is not a man who does not reveal it in his soul’s
anatomy: so much so that upon every occasion except where his interests
are touched, he is for virtue, and even where they are touched, it is
only a question of a few degrees more heat to dissolve the habits and
prejudices of a lifetime, and make him take off his coat and go into a
war or a political campaign.
A single man, as we see him in one of the great modern civilizations,
looks like a bit of machinery, a cog or a crank or an air-brake. The
business man is especially mechanical, his functions are so accurate,
so delimited and specialized. And yet any theory that dwells upon
these limitations is put to shame in five minutes, for the creature
eats and sheds tears before your eyes. All of the reasons for not
doing some particular act that you think wise to be done, turn out to
be founded on the idea that this man is a driving-wheel, and nothing
but a driving-wheel. You cannot change him, they say, you must take
him as he is. I have never heard any argument given against the wisdom
of righteousness, except the existence of evil. “It exists, therefore
subserve it.” Is it not clear that evil exists only because people
subserve it? It has no fixity. Withdraw your support and it begins
to perish. One man says, “Oh, let the world go. All the wickedness
and unhappiness in it are inevitable.” Another says, “Some little
concession to present conditions must be made.” Nothing can be said to
justify the second man that is not moral support to the first. Your
concession is always the acknowledgment of somebody’s weakness. Now
you may make allowances for a man who has not come up to the mark; but
if you make allowances for him beforehand, and assume that he is not
going to do right, you corrupt him. If these things are true, then we
are absolved from all complicity with vice. We need never take a course
that requires to be explained. We thus get rid of a great oppression
and can breathe freely. In the language of the old piety, Christian’s
pack falls from his back. That pack has, in all ages, been a perversion
of the conscience, a mistake as to the size of the universe.
We have seen all these ranks and armies of humanity pass in review
before us, each man with his eyes fixed in mesmeric intensity upon
some set of opinions, until he grew to be the thing he looked on.
These opinions of his are all we know of him. They are not our own
opinions. They often appear to us misguided and illusory; yet there
is always to be found in them the light of some benevolence. They are
like broken mirrors and give back fractions of a larger idea. The hope
and courage in each of these men bless and advance the world; but not
in the way that the men themselves expect. They seem all to be bent
over a game of chess, where every move has its real significance upon
another board which they do not see. Each man seems to be following
some will-o’-the-wisp across a landscape at night. No cannon can waken
these insensate sleepers. And yet they are tracing out patterns and
geometrical diagrams upon the sward; they are weaving a magical dance
that, for all its intricacy, has a planetary rhythm, and the sober
motion of a pendulum. Each individual in this unthinkable host gives
an instance of the same fatality; first, that he becomes the thing he
looks on, and second, that he accomplishes something that he does not
understand.
And both parts of this fatality must hold true of ourselves. Certainly,
our subjection to the thing we look on is almost pitiable. We cannot
even remember a righteous hatred without beginning to take color from
the thing we hate. Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness;
our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of
our own contemplation.
As for the last half of that fatality, that keeps us forever ignorant
of the true meaning of our lives, it is not an absolute ignorance, like
our ignorance of how we came to exist. It is a qualified ignorance,
like our ignorance that we have hurt some one’s feelings. The elements
of understanding are within us: to-morrow the whole matter may become
clear. The borders of our understanding extend, as we push outward
our frontier of inquiry. This is both a frontier of scepticism, and
of faith. It is a bulwark of doubt as to the value of our last new
formula, and of faith as to the reality behind that formula. As we go
forward, bringing our lives down to date, holding our experience at
arm’s length and examining it with a merciless endeavor to wring the
truth out of it, we do, from day to day, get a clearer notion of the
actual world, a truer idea of our own place in it. This qualified and
modest understanding of life, that comes from putting things together
that seem to go together, is within the power of any one.
And we find this: the more unselfish men become, the more sensitive do
they become in understanding human relations. The gambler cannot see
that he is giving pain to his family; his self-indulgence has blunted
his sensibilities. The faith healer knows that he is curing a man in a
neighboring State; his love for mankind has refined his sensibilities.
Most of us stand somewhere between these two extremes in the scale of
understanding, and are moving towards one or the other. Education,
then, is the process by which we gradually discover both the real
nature of the human life about us, and our own relation to the whole of
it. The process is never complete. Even poets and great men are in the
dark about their own function; but they are less in the dark than the
rest of us. They speak from a knowledge that is greater than ours. They
have a wonderful power over us; for they help us in our struggle to see
the world as it is.
OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
_EMERSON_ AND OTHER ESSAYS
12mo. $1.25.
Emerson. Walt Whitman. A Study of Romeo.
Michael Angelo’s Sonnets. Robert Browning.
R. L. Stevenson. The Fourth Canto of the Inferno.
Mr. Chapman brings to bear on his task a rare store of critical
perception and literary knowledge, while in his own style there is
nothing to be found of the obscure or the inflated. The interesting
part of Mr. Chapman’s work is that he has something new to say about
everything he touches.--_The Spectator._
❦ ❦ ❦
This Essay (Emerson) is the most effective critical attempt made in the
United States, or I should suppose anywhere, to get near the sage of
Concord.--HENRY JAMES.
❦ ❦ ❦
We shall hope to come across Mr. Chapman again. Few living critics go
so straight to the heart of their problem, or waste so little time in
writing “about it and about.”--_The Academy._
_CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES_
12mo. $1.25.
Politics. Society. Education.
Democracy. Government.
No one can read Mr. Chapman’s book without finding in it something
instructive and suggestive. The author is an enthusiast for humanity
converted by stress of circumstances into a preacher against
corruption. His book is a manly appeal to the rising generation,
for whom it has a message of courage and hope sadly wanting
nowadays.--_The Nation._
❦ ❦ ❦
This is a brilliant little book. Mr. Chapman wields a razor edge of
forcible statement, and he is inspired by a moral passion that makes
his utterance a breathing, vital thing.--_The Academy._
❦ ❦ ❦
The author is essentially a critic, clear and incisive, at times rather
sweeping in his generalities, yet always fresh and stimulating. His
attack on the corruption of American politics is as vigorous a piece of
writing as one could desire.--_The Outlook._
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, Publishers
153-157 Fifth Ave., New York
Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in hyphenation have been retained as published in the
original book. Punctuation has been standardised.
The following change has been made:
Page 17
surge up and are scatttered _changed to_
surge up and are scattered