to in my paper--one of those cattle that here in democratic America
become leaders of men. They do not know that the progress of the world
has been built upon discarded customs and broken laws--but let us go
down the street. I must have a drink of something before I can solve the
problem to your satisfaction--or even convince myself that I am right."
VII
"The Goodness of a Bad Man"
Perhaps it was to the disgrace of the Alliance that Keidansky's
disquisition, his merciless tirade against the good man, was received
with some show of hand-clapping favor; and it may be to the credit of
the membership that there were those in the audience who were surprised,
shocked and startled, who dissented from and resented his utterances. At
any rate, the dissenters and commentators stirred up a discussion, and
for several days after that it was a topic of conversation and
disagreement at the club, at the cafés and such places where our circles
would congregate. Those who dissented and disagreed with the man who
questioned the very bases of our morality said many, varying things and
not all things were said in Keidansky's presence. And he? Sometimes he
would say a word in explanation, or his defence, and for the rest he
listened, looked wise, smiled and relished every attack made against
him. His opponents finally agreed that his was a one-sided, partial
view, and they told him that, after all, it was better to have a good
man than a bad one.
"But it yet remains to be proved," he argued, "that the average good man
is not a whole lot worse than the so-called bad man."
They all dared him to prove it, to present the other side of the case,
the goodness of the bad man. "I don't care to prove anything," said
Keidansky. "'Even the truth can be proved,'" he quoted a favorite
decadent; "but if you want me to, I'll try to show you the other side of
the story, as it seems to me. I'll write it to-night or to-morrow, and
read it to you all, say, on the evening of the day after to-morrow, at
the Alliance." We all agreed to be there, and accordingly assembled at
the appointed time, and waited until Keidansky appeared with a folded
manuscript sticking out of his coat pocket. He was all out of breath. He
had been walking very fast so as to get here "just in time to be late."
He had just finished his composition. "My lamp went out last night," he
explained, "and so I had to do it all this afternoon, and just got
through." And so here is his paper as he read it to us on "The Goodness
of a Bad Man."
"He is a bad man, a worthless, useless member of society. Most of his
neighbors say so, and he does not stand well in the community. His
friends are few, with long distances between. He would not go far out of
his way to do a fellow a good turn; does not believe in favours, he
says, and nobody cares much for him. He lives, acts, thinks, speaks like
a bad man, and to say nothing of popularity--very few of us have
any--but who will have any respect for a man that scorns, jeers, sneers
and pokes all manner of fun at respectability? Respectability, he says,
is a mark of public formality behind which to hide private rascality,
and the prettier the mask the more ugly the face.
"He disagrees with nearly everybody on almost every conceivable
subject. No matter what other people think of his opinions, he actually
believes them to be right. He is a bad man. He is not at all tolerant.
When he disagrees with any one--and he does that most of the time--he
bluntly and boldly tells him so up and down, and he is ever ready to
state his reasons and argue the case. He will not conceal his
convictions, even when he is your guest. Of course, this is a free
country, and every man is entitled to his opinion--but one should have
some tact, politeness, diplomacy, courtesy. If every one had these there
would not be so much difference of opinion and discord in our land, and
there would be more peace on earth. Polite people do not try to force
their opinions upon others.
"Polite people have no opinions that differ from those of others. I
doubt whether it is polite to have any opinions at all. The aristocracy
is setting a good example. It never thinks. Persons who think too much
are ever behind the times. But even if one has a right to his opinion,
he certainly has no right to be cranky, eccentric, and disturb the
mental peace of the community with his queer, revolutionary notions.
Stubborn, stiff-necked, hard-headed, determined, impulsive, he is ever
present with that ubiquitous mind of his, ever ready to give everybody a
piece of it. Considering the frequency with which he gives everybody a
piece of his mind, I wonder that it is not all gone by this time.
"He is a bad man. He is aggressive and arrogant. His faith in himself
is offensive, his self-reliance, self-satisfaction unbearable. He has
too much respect for himself to follow the dictates of others. His life
is a life, he says, and not an apology for living; he will have to pay
for it with death and wants to make the most of the bargain--live fully
and freely in his own way, however reprehensible. He does not want his
neighbors to love and interfere with him--unless he cared for their
affection. He says it would be a sin to love his neighbors if they did
not deserve his love. The welfare of the community, I heard him say,
depends upon the absolute freedom, the self-salvation of each
individual. No one can ever do anything for another unless he has made
the most of his own life--good or bad. Self-preservation in the end
prompts us to do most for others. Selfishness is a pronounced form of
sanity. Altruism has enslaved the world. Egoism will save it. And I
could quote you such monstrous heresies as will make your hair stand on
end. He is a bad man.
"The world belongs to those who take things for granted. He will not
take anything for granted and that's why he has to take more hard knocks
than anybody else. He impiously questions, doubts, examines,
investigates everything on the face of the earth and--God save us--even
the things that be in heaven. He is a living interrogation point, ever
questioning the wisdom of this world and the promises of the one to
come. Nothing is so sacred as to be above his scrutiny; he has little
reverence for any of our glorious institutions. He says they are the
handiwork of men and often as crude and as useless as men could make
them. Whatever has been erected can be corrected, he says. He thinks
lightly of our laws; thinks they are at best but a necessary evil and
that in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish all
evil.
"He is a bad man. He does not even recognize the sacred authority of
tradition, and has no decent regard for precedent. Precedent, he argues,
only proves that some people lived before us and did things in a certain
way. He does not even--well, think of a man who doubts the holy right of
the majority! He does not believe that the majority is always right; in
fact, he contends that it is always wrong. By the time the majority
discovers a truth it becomes a falsehood, he avers. The majority only
thinks it is always right. The majority is but another word for
mediocrity. He does not heed what the people say. The monster called
majority, in spite of his many heads, does very little thinking. What
the people say seldom amounts to a meaning. Morality, he argues, is that
which is conducive to one's happiness, without interfering with or
injuring his fellow-men. To be moral is to live fully, freely,
completely. Morality has nothing to do with the abnormal stifling,
starving, thwarting of instincts and feelings.
"A truth, he told me, is a truth, and a principle is a principle,
whether it is held by many or by one. Numbers no more make right than
might does.
"'The strongest man on earth,' he says, 'is he who stands alone,' and he
always quotes a man named Ibsen. He is a bad case. 'Customs and
conventionalities be hanged,' he says, 'I have my own life to live and
mean to manage it in my own way. I have laws of my own and must obey
them.' I heard him say it myself, and I wonder what he means by these
things. There are always those who know better than you what is good for
you, but you don't want to mind them, he told me. The most advisable
thing in the world is never to take any advice. There may be those, he
once remarked, who have lived longer than you have, but they have not
lived your life.
"He has a mania for principles. I think that is a chronic disease with
him. He imagines it is all one needs in life. There is not a material
advantage in the world but he would forfeit it for a moral principle, as
he calls it. 'Ideals are very well,' I once said, 'but one must live.'
'Not necessarily,' he answered. 'One must die, if one cannot live
honestly.'
"Always he talks about the so-called social problem of the age. I do not
know just what that is; but if there is such a thing as a social problem
it is how to abolish social reformers. This man is a social reformer,
and he has some scheme of his own how to reconstruct society on a basis
of what he terms justice and truth. In the promulgation of this scheme
of his he foolishly spends much of his spare time and not a little of
his money--and Heaven knows he has not any too much. But he says he
does it all for his pleasure; that it is out of sheer selfishness that
he would uplift the fallen and elevate the lowly. He is a bad man. It is
no disgrace to be poor, of course; but it is criminal of the poor not to
know their place. I half told him so, but he answered in his usual
contradictory way that the poor have no place at all.
"He travels through life very much by his own crooked road, with his own
conception of morality, justice and truth. Out of justice to the dead,
he argues, we ought to abolish most of the institutions they have left
behind. Otherwise they are being disgraced every day by the clumsy
workings of the things they have established. If our honored ancestors
desired to perpetuate their taboos, fetishes and inquisitions they had
no business to die; they should have stayed here. By going to either of
the places beyond they have forfeited their right to manage things here
below. The dead should give the living absolute home rule.
"He is a bad man. He hardly ever gives any charity. He does not believe
in charity; says it creates more misery than it relieves, and
perpetuates poverty--the crime of mankind. Charity, he claims, curses
both the giver and the receiver. It makes the former haughty and proud
and the latter dependent and servile. What he wants is justice and the
rights of all to earn the means of subsistence. And there is no use in
quoting the Bible, when he talks of poverty. The Bible, he says, is a
great book which could be immensely improved by a good editor with a
long blue pencil. All the immoral problem-plays pale into pitiful
insignificance beside some of the stories told in the Bible--and they
are not anywhere half so well told. Did you ever hear such blasphemy? He
is an infidel. He does not even believe the newspapers; has little faith
in the great power of the press. Most of the newspapers, he told me, are
published by the advertisers and edited by the readers. Journalists ever
follow public opinion, and they are never sure of what they believe in
because it is hard to find out what the people approve. Weather Bureau
predictions are often Gospel truths beside editorial convictions. The
best papers are yet to be printed. He has such rank disregard of the
past and the present that he seems to think that all things really great
are yet to come.
"He puzzles and vexes me. I don't know just what he is in politics. I
doubt whether he is either a Republican or a Democrat. I suspect he
votes for the Anarchist party. What an absurdity! They will never elect
a President, and this foolish man has not the ghost of a chance to get
an office. He is not at all consistent. He changes his mind very often.
No matter how zealous or ardent he is about his ideas he is ever ready
to reject them to-morrow and accept other views. He does not believe in
the newspapers, in things visible and present, yet he has the utmost
faith in far-away fictions, intangible Utopias and the realization of
iridescent dreams.
"I dare not repeat all his outrageous blasphemies, and I positively
cannot mention his awful heresies as to his religion. He cannot accept
the religion of his fathers because they were infidels; infidels who
built little creeds out of fear, who were afraid of their shadows, who
had monstrous, libellous conceptions of God. He says that he has too
much faith to belong to any denomination. Religion is so large that no
church can hold it. No one should meddle between man and his Maker.
Christ, I have heard him say, may never forgive the Christians for what
they have made out of him, for robbing him of his humanity. No church
for him. He would rather worship beneath the arched dome of the starry
skies and offer up a prayer to the God that dwells in every human heart
and thinking brain. He is a bad man.
"He is always on the ungrateful side of the few, the poor, the weak and
the fallen; and he even sympathizes with beggars, criminals, fallen
women and low persons; is not afraid to mingle with them. And what
advantage can he ever derive out of that? Absent-minded, forgetful,
engrossed in his queer ideas and impossible ideals, he gets lost in his
theories and books, and loses life. He does not realize that millions
have found this world as it is and millions more will leave it so. Poor
man, he is a dreamer of dreams; and to see the invisible, to hear
inaudible voices, is the most expensive thing in life. He sacrifices
affluence, influence, power, political office, honor, _éclat_, applause,
the respect of the community, the regard of his neighbors, the praise
of the press, the advantages of politics and of the people's
approval--sacrifices all these for his pitiful brain-begotten fancies.
He is a dreamer of dreams. Yet he seems to like this journey along the
lines of most resistance, says it is least resistance to him, and he
tells me that he enjoys his poverty and all, immensely. He freely
indulges in most of the vain and worldly pleasures of life as he sees
them, regardless of all others, considers one day as holy as another and
no day so mean as to wear a long and sanctimonious face on, and he says
that the only thing which he prohibits is prohibition in any form. His
wife does not fear him, does not have to obey him, does as she pleases,
and his children are as free and wild as little savages. He is a bad
man.
"But what can be done? Ministers and other good men have repeatedly
tried to save him, but he evades all their efforts, avoids all their
sermons. He would save them the trouble of saving him, he says, because
he thinks he can do it so much better himself. What can be done? All
things are here to serve him, none to subserve him. He is a law unto
himself, and has little or nothing to do with the Government, so he
says. He is a bad man. He is not going to heaven--and yet, and yet--if
there were more like him this world would be so different, and perhaps
no one would ever want to go to heaven."
There was a pause and a silence at the close of the reading, but our
essayist was soon spared "the agony of suspense," as he mockingly
remarked. Then came comments of varied shades of opinion, approving and
disapproving, constructive and destructive, too many to mention, and
Keidansky enjoyed them all. At length I ventured to ask him what sort of
administrator his friend, the bad man, would make if he was ever elected
to office.
"He would never run for office," said Keidansky, "and if he ran he would
never be elected; and if he ever was elected he would certainly be a
dire failure because he does not believe in managing other people's
business. The best of men will not want to, cannot do it, and politics
is no test. The man who goes in with or for the crowd ceases to be
himself; and therefore we ought to invent our public officials and not
make them out of men. However, don't press me, I am not at all sure
about these things. I only know that the bad man is coming; that he is
here; that he is a dire terror--and will save the world. What I gave you
here is a mere suggestion, a hint of a possibility, a premonition. Every
conception is spoiled by the description of it. He will come, and time
will not tame him. He will come, and the divine institution of
police-court morality is doomed. The virtues of the future will be
useful. They will be conducive to growth--real happiness.
"But, as I say, I don't want to appear dogmatic; nor to be too sure of
things. The most useful thing about our theories is that we know them to
be useless. The best thing about our ideas is that the world has not
accepted them yet. If the world had accepted them these ideas would
probably now look like last winter's snow. Better to wait until it is
ready for them--then they will not go to waste. Better a bad world than
a good world come too early--before the people are ready for it. But
what's the use! I've done it, my friends, and my apology for life
is--that I never apologize. Come, it's getting close, up here. Come, let
us forth into the darkness and pray for eternal night--for night hides
all the ugly splendors of the world."
VIII
"The Feminine Traits of Men"
"You are as inquisitive as a man," said Keidansky.
"You mean--" I tried to correct him.
"I mean as inquisitive as a man," he repeated.
This was at a social gathering, a Purim festival given by the B'nai Zion
Educational Society at Zion Hall. We sat in the little back room
adjoining the main hall, which formed the library of the society. There
was a good fire in the stove; we were just far enough away from the
music and the dance to enjoy it, and also to relish our chat.
I suppose I had gone beyond the point of discretion in my quest of
information; that I asked some questions of a rather personal nature
which my friend thought best to leave unanswered, and hence the rebuke I
received.
"Some one," said Keidansky, "ought to write an essay on 'The Feminine
Traits of Men,' and point out in what a pronounced form men possess the
traits, objectionable and acceptable, they constantly attribute to
women. For centuries women have borne the blame and ridicule and
criticism for qualities they either have in the mildest, most
insignificant forms, or do not possess at all--when you compare them to
men. And it's about time they should be vindicated, and the truth should
make them free from this popular misconception. It seems to me that in
a certain way men have actually monopolized most of the objectionable
traits of women; and to have shifted all the blame on them for all these
years was a crying shame--an outrageous wrong.
"Yes, some one ought to write about it; some one who is young, handsome
and gallant--so that he may receive the gratitude of the fair sex. For
instance, woman is said to be inquisitive. But who, really, is so
anxious to know, so peevish, petulant and prurient as man is? Who like
him will go to so much trouble to find out the minutest detail about
men, women and things that surround him? Who is so eager and diligent in
his search of information, knowledge and light? Who like unto him--I
mean, his majesty, man--takes such loving interest in his neighbors and
pries so pitilessly into their private affairs? Who makes such an
excellent reporter, detective, biographer? Who are the successful
editors of our newspapers? Men, of course. They are the ones who
constantly load you with questions, who are ever endeavoring to peer
into your inmost self and who always want to know about your past,
present, future, former and later incarnations. I am told, on good
authority, that genealogy--which I understand to be the science of
proving that your great-grandfather was somebody and that somebody was
your great-grandmother--that this science has been nurtured and garnered
and brought up to its present state of perfection, or imperfection, by
men.
"It's appalling, this curiosity of man," he continued fervently. "He
can go sixteen miles out of his way to pick up the smallest scrap of a
fact, or fancy. He can collect endless stores of useless information. He
fancies nothing so much as facts. His thirst for knowledge cannot be
satiated even by flattery. Men not only make encyclopædias, but they
actually use them. They not only build and endow libraries, but they
actually utilize them--spoil their eyes over musty, misty, mazy volumes.
And then, how anxious we all are to be posted on the most unimportant
things concerning our friends and the people we meet and know; we are
ever attempting to read their minds and their hearts, and if there are
none, we put meanings into them. Have not the greatest novelists been
men?
"Motke Chabad, the Jewish jester, once came to a strange town near his
native city of Wilna, and as he entered the community a patriarchal old
Israelite accosted him with the usual _Shalom aleichem. Ma simecho?_
'Peace be with thee, stranger. What is thy name?'
"'It's none of your business,' answered Motke.
"When asked why he thus rudely acted toward the old man, Motke Chabad
explained that had he told the stranger his name the other would have
asked where he came from, what his business was, how many children he
had, if he was married, how old his father was, if he was still living,
if he had any relatives in America, if he ever was blessed by the great
rabbi of Wilna, etc., etc., and, said Chabad, 'to say nothing of my
morning prayers, I had not as yet had my breakfast, when I met him.'
"Chabad, you see, knew his brother, man. Men curious to know? Rose
Dartle is nothing beside Andrew Lang, and he has this advantage over
her--that he exists and can find things out. Another instance. You go
into your store or factory in the morning. You have a slight toothache.
You feel and look rather seedy, and the man who works next to you comes
over and sympathetically asks you why it was that she rejected you, why
the other fellow won her heart, by what magic charms your rival eclipsed
you, etc., and he keeps on with his queries until you tell him--
"Go stand up on the first corner. Take off your hat and cry out:
'Gentlemen, this is a hat, this is a hat! Look into it!' And in a few
seconds you will have a big throng of curious men standing about and
staring at you. Women who will happen along will pass right on, but men
will stand there and stare--like men.
"There was a time when certain things were considered beyond the
scrutiny of curious men, when they were held too sacred for
investigations and explanations, when the things that were not
understood were deemed holy and when men stood in reverence before these
things and bowed and took off their thinking caps. But now they want to
know everything--even the things that are of prime importance. And there
is no use in telling them that nothing really exists--not even the
logic of Christian Scientists. They want to know. They must find the
facts or make them. What's the use of living if one doesn't know just on
what date King Pharaoh died? No news may be good news, but you can't run
a newspaper on that principle now-a-days. Whether the things happen or
not man wants to know the facts and the details of the cases. They must
know. Knowledge is power. To know is to be able to boast of it. And men
ever boast of what they know or think they know.
"But why say more? The collected knowledge, the accumulated data and
science of the world sufficiently prove the inquisitiveness of men. It
is one faculty which works many ways, you know, and these ways are
shaped by circumstances and conditions. Now a man peeps through a
keyhole to get some material for a bit of gossip, and then he looks up
to the stars to make an astronomical observation. But the Darwins and
the Newtons and the Herschels prove how curious to know men really are.
"And it is their extreme vanity, too, that makes men so presumptuous,
ostentatious and obstreperous. They have so much faith in themselves
that no self-respecting person can trust them. They are so confident in
their right to know, so convinced of the value of their knowledge, so
sure of the absolute necessity of their volubility. They are so
unbearably overbearing, self-conscious and self-centred that they forget
there are others besides them in this world. It is their vanity that
makes men speak in volumes.