When I first spelled my way through my history primer’s account of
the Pilgrim Fathers, the threadbare, too familiar story was all new
to me and came fresh-coined from the mint of glory. Swinging my feet
and chewing my tongue as I read, I glowed with sympathy for their
intrepid resistance to a tyranny which tried hideously to lay hands on
the sacred freedom of thought. I was hurrahing inwardly for them as
they fought their way across the hostile Atlantic, as they endured the
heartbreaking difficulties of their first winter, and I nearly shed
tears of admiration when they gloriously refused to go back on the ship
that would have set them back where men had the monstrous pretension to
dictate to other men what they should or should not believe. Swimming
in a golden haze of hero worship I rolled under my tongue the quotation
from Mrs. Hemans which ended the chapter:
Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod!
They left unstained what there they found--
Freedom to worship God.
And all unsuspecting, I turned over the page for the next lesson.
Roger Williams and the Quakers were in the next lesson.
I strained my poor nine year old eyes hotly over the unbelievable
story. Two hundred and sixty years divided me from the actors of
those times, but that afternoon I went off into the woods and shouted
excitedly at the top of my voice back across the centuries, to my
forefathers, “But looky-here, looky-here! You’re doing just what you
left England so people wouldn’t do it to you. Stop it! Stop it! Stop
it! Oh, _please_ don’t!”
My forefathers returning no answer to my heartbroken appeal, I tried
the generation immediately before mine, and shyly put a brief question
to my father on the subject. My father’s carelessly cynical answer
brought a club down on what was left of my cracked and tottering ideal.
“Oh, shucks, the Pilgrim Fathers wanted the same sort of ‘freedom of
thought’ that everybody wants ... freedom to bully everybody else into
thinking as they do.”
Of course the elasticity of childhood and youth being invincible, I did
not keep this disillusion in the centre of my consciousness. I poked it
down into the darkest corner of my mind and thought I had forgotten
it. I grew up to be nineteen and twenty, and as automatically as I put
up my hair and learned how to dance, I plunged into the other natural
accompaniment of being nineteen and twenty, and became a radical. “Down
with the tyranny of the past” resounds recurrently with healthy vigor
as each generation advances toward its later teens, and I sallied
forth with others of my age, a red flag in one hand and a bomb in the
other. I cannot now remember just what we attacked but I suppose,
from the dates, that we waged war on such moth-eaten old formulæ as,
“Woman’s sphere is the home”: “My father’s God is good enough for me”:
“Impressionism is all poppycock, paint pots thrown in the face of the
public”: “Organized Labor is flying in the face of the immutable law of
supply and demand”, etc., etc. I do remember that any adverse criticism
of Ibsen made us froth at the mouth, and that we were prepared to shed
our heart’s blood for the right of women to wear rainy day skirts as
high as their shoe tops. “Liberty, sacred liberty!” we shouted as we
charged.
When did I begin to notice a certain deadly likeness to our Puritan
forebears? When did the recollection of Roger Williams and the Quakers
begin to seep coldly into my mind? I don’t know when. With advancing
years, I suppose, and with that recognition of the vast, incalculable
diversity of human nature which can only come after a considerable
first-hand contact with all kinds of people.
Perhaps it was the too great vogue of our campaign for emancipating
women from domestic slavery that made me first wonder whether it was
such an uphill battle for liberty we were fighting, and whether it was
really liberty we were getting. We had repudiated at the tops of our
voices the ridiculously sweeping generalization that every woman is
happier bringing up children than in any other occupation. Things began
to go our way; the writers on our side began to be in fashion, to be
considered the knowing and sophisticated ones. The other side hung its
sentimental head in defeated silence.
And then--oh, bother, take it! It seemed to me I began to see Roger
Williams and the Quakers approaching. The sound, much needed axiom
“Every woman is not a natural mother” seemed insensibly to have become
“No woman is a natural mother”. After all there are women, just as
there are men, who prefer children and home life to anything else. In
the generation of our grandmothers no girl “in our set” had ventured
to say she wanted anything in life but to marry and bring up children.
After we had said our say, no girl “in our set” ventured to say that
she _did_ want to marry and bring up children.
All that we had done, apparently, was to vary the kind of intimidation,
from the kind that had not suited our tastes to the kind that did.
We had summoned people to free themselves from the tyrannical dicta
of preachers in the pulpits, and had clapped upon them the other
tyranny of the radical magazines. Were they getting any more chance
to be themselves? Weren’t they being bullied into believing what
radical thinkers told them to believe, rather than what they really
did believe? Were people with a mystical, poetic, religious turn of
mind getting any fairer show now than people with a logical, clean cut
turn of mind had when we were twenty? When we said “self-expression”
did we mean the expression of Bernard Shaw’s self? Did we not yell
“sentimental hypocrite” at people who ventured to express other
personalities than the brisk, clear eyed, level headed, disillusioned
type which happened to suit our fancy?
My early fierce outraged scorn for the Puritan Fathers began to be
tempered with humility. It wasn’t such an easy trick to turn ... to
leave people free to believe what you _knew_ was all nonsense.
And yet, with every year that revolved before my eyes the kaleidoscope
of the infinitely various differences between human beings, there was
forced upon me the intolerable conviction that perhaps what we knew was
all nonsense might not be all nonsense for everybody.
One’s first conception of that idea is a terrible moment in life. I
suppose it is the beginning of old age--certainly of middle age. It is
as devastating as an earthquake to the exhilarating cocksureness which
has hitherto been the solid ground under one’s feet. Forever afterward
one advances with craven caution, one tries to modify sweeping
generalizations by those qualifying clauses which normal human beings
instinctively detest. It is unpopular enough business to temper any
sweeping generalization whatever--people are uneasy when historians try
to qualify to greater truthfulness even such dead issues as opinions
on the causes of the Civil War, or what sort of man George Washington
really was. But when anyone tries to limit with qualifying phrases the
generalizations actually in fashion, then indeed do people cast him
out of the righteous ranks of orthodox Plymouth and drive him off to
live with the Indians.
Somewhat aloofly then--my natural inheritance of human intolerance
inhibited by the certainty that there is much to be said on both
sides--and considerably ashamed of my aloofness, I look on at the old
struggle being fought as fiercely today as it was twenty years ago.
One of the sweeping generalizations in fashion now is that the late war
was caused solely by capitalists and fought either by men naturally
brutes, or by finer specimens forced against their will into the ranks
by brutalized public opinion. Everybody knows in his heart that this is
not a complete statement of the truth, but no one in the ranks of the
sophisticated may be permitted to qualify the statement. The tyranny
of what is “the thing” to think is as absolute in one direction now as
it was during the war when no one was permitted to qualify the equally
outrageous statement that the war was caused solely by sympathy for
ravaged Belgium and was fought by snowy souled Crusaders.
Another sweeping generalization just now settling itself in the saddle
is that middle western American life starves and cramps all souls
submitting to it--starves and cramps, that is, more than any other
organized human society puts the screws on originality and personality
anywhere else. Nobody must qualify that statement under pain of
a sentence of exile, passed by the new Pilgrim Fathers, battling
gloriously for universal freedom to think as they do.
Another more intimate and personal conviction is that self-control
is synonymous with self-mutilation, that self-abnegation is always
perverse morbidity.
Another one states that ethics based on enlightened self-interest
should and will take the place of religion in human life and that any
form of “religion” which involves a mystical sense of communion with a
power greater than ourselves, is as out of date in the human mind as
the appendix in the human body.
These, since they happen to arouse no personal passion of mine, I
can consider calmly. But the Old Adam is not dead in me. Let anyone
maintain that the principle of authority _qua_ authority is needed in
human life, and every atom of me rises up aflame in denial. I cannot
conceive it calmly, cannot put my mind on it impartially as I do on
other matters. Any mention of it in my presence is like dropping a
lighted match into a keg of gunpowder. I go off with a shattering
bang. It is my flaming conviction that _nobody_ should pretend to tell
_any_body how to run his life. This conviction seems so axiomatic to me
that it was like turning all my brain cells inside out, to get a faint,
distant glimpse of the possibility that perhaps, occasionally in some
cases, once in a while, the principle of authority might be necessary
for the stiffening into shape of certain especially jelly-like
temperaments. I don’t believe it! Heavens, no! I can never _believe_
it! But as from time to time I encounter, among the maddeningly diverse
specimens of human nature which surround me, a specimen especially
inchoate, born without the necessary structure of moral bones, I
_almost_ perceive the possibility that even my own pet sweeping
generalization may need occasional qualification.
This perception, faint and passing as it is, makes me so dizzy and
sick that I am sure I could never act on it. I am not even sure that I
could refrain from attacking someone else trying to act on it. I try
to be flexible minded and tolerant but I stiffen and flame when that
conviction is touched. This makes me understand how other people feel
about their special generalizations, how the woman who has fought
her way out of a hideous, hide bound, joy killing creed, stiffens and
flames at any suggestion that some people need a mystical religion:
how a man who has lived with an exasperatingly “devoted mother” flares
up ragingly at the idea that self-sacrifice may be commendable. I
understand that there is no help for us, that we are none of us
battling for freedom of thought. We are battling to set up our dogmatic
convictions just as our fathers did, and as we despised them for doing.
Our convictions are different from theirs. That is all. We are ready
to fight to force on others what Samuel Butler has told us to believe,
instead of what Tennyson told our fathers to believe. We don’t intend
to allow any variation from our standards if we can help it, any more
than they did.
For a time I was greatly cast down over the discovery of this
invincible intolerance in all our hearts. Apparently we were no better
than anyone else. Had any good come at all of our fine ideas of
liberalism and freedom? Had we helped the younger generation in the
least?
I began to look around me at the younger generation, the really younger
ones, those under adolescence, the ones who have been brought up in the
best modern manner, unrepressed by stale old restrictions, unhampered
by stale old beliefs. And I began to think that I saw two things:
first, that the beliefs from which we revolted are not stale and old
to them at all, but gleaming bright with novelty; and second, as to
these beliefs of ours which we have tried to force on them, they are
preparing a revolt from us, as they advance toward their later teens.
One of my modern acquaintances told me the other day, “What do you
think? My Jeannette is just crazy about babies. She’ll leave a bunch
of her twelve year old playmates _any_ day to fool around the whole
afternoon with our neighbor’s eight months old little girl. And she
says when she grows up and marries, she wants to have seven children,
and _not belong to a single club_! Where does she get such ideas? It’s
nothing _I’ve_ taught her; nothing she’s picked up at home!”
It occurs to me that the great saints and heroes of mysticism never
come from religious families, but out of a free thinking, materialistic
milieu. There comes to me with a clap, what every old woman knows,
that rigidly neat housekeepers always have careless, slack daughters
and that the daughters of careless, slack housekeepers always react
violently into violent tidiness.
I begin to wonder, just wonder speculatively, how Christian ideals
will seem to young people who have the intimate excitement and triumph
of discovering them under protest, rather than having them crammed down
their throats. It occurs to me that perhaps all we have been doing, as
we impetuously emptied the baby out of the bath, was to enhance the
value of babies. Will not the youngest generation have a perfectly
fresh, spontaneous joy in rushing to rescue what we have thrown away?
Isn’t it possible that in a generation brought up to ruthless logic _à
la_ Shaw, there may be individuals with spiritual and mystical minds,
who will revolt against ruthless logic as hotly as we against dogmas,
and who, reveling in all the inimitable joys of martyrdom, will fight,
bleed, and die for the right to believe in what they believe--even if
it is in a religion of faith? Among children brought up to believe
that self-development is the highest duty of man, may there not even
now be growing up here and there some whose brain cells are different
from those of the majority, who will stumble some day by accident into
a self-abnegating deed, recognize in the sweetness of the pleasure it
gives them their own rightful inheritance, and fleeing the intolerance
of the latter day Nietzschean Pilgrim Fathers, betake themselves off to
live the life they were meant for? We will persecute them I dare say,
and call them reactionary, and hold them up as horrible examples of
sentimental self-deception. And all that we will really accomplish, as
far as they are concerned, will be to tear from the pure gold of their
ideals the disfiguring rags of outgrown dogma, which we mistook for the
thing itself.
On the whole, as I think it over, it seems to me that if we do that, we
will have done about all that can be expected of any generation. Human
progress is slow and spiral. Perhaps, although it is certainly not in
the least what we meant to do, that will be counted as our sufficient
contribution.
_Oliver Herford_
A slight, white-haired, indefinite, hilariously entertaining gentleman
is Oliver Herford. His caricatures, his drawings, his verses, his
fables, his essays have long delighted American audiences. He is almost
as well known an illustrator as he is a humorist. In a triple capacity,
therefore, he is associated with “Life”, for he is also on its staff
of editors. He was born in England; but his father who was a preacher
brought him in his youth to Boston. He was educated, curiously enough,
at Antioch College, Ohio. From this curious background he emerged
radiating a sense of humor. He is known as a _farceur_, as a player
of practical jokes, as a _bon vivant_. Popular wherever he goes, one
hears that since his last trip to England he has become thoroughly
American--he no longer wears a monocle.