fascinating study, _The Mind in the Making_, James Harvey Robinson,
says: “Personally I have reached the conclusion, after many years
of teaching, that one should choose for instruction, whether one be
dealing with young or old, _some phase of human interest rather than
some field of scientific investigation_”--and he goes on with force
and plainness to point out the defect of an educational scheme in
which knowledge is imparted by going in and out of great numbers of
pigeonholes. He is really pleading for methods of instruction that
shall take account of the ordinary man’s interest in his world, and
shall proceed by the natural process of mental associations instead
of by artificial and arbitrary tetherings to the post of this and
that “subject.” Seldom has the difficulty been put with more brevity,
simplicity and general sweetness of temper, or in a way to give such
decent courage to individual self-respect. “We are not many of us
interested in isolated scientific facts of any kind. That species of
interest, as we have seen, is reserved for the few. But all of us are
open to the effects of such new knowledge as gets under our skins.
And the great art is not to exhibit our own insight and learning but
really to influence those whom we are aiming to influence.” There could
be no better text or opening for a chapter devoted to books of many
varieties, inasmuch as books have always taken, except where restricted
by school formulas, the lines of human interests and the path of some
natural association of ideas. In this sense, though teaching may need
to be humanised, knowledge has never been without its humanisation. A
James Harvey Robinson cannot write about science without being led into
the absorbing history of the mind that is slowly achieving science. A
Camille Flammarion, discussing astronomy, finds it above all things
natural to relate his knowledge with man’s religious ideas. An L. P.
Jacks, analysing religious doubts, moves directly over the border of
so-called psychology into the sphere of conduct and behaviour, because
the answer lies over there. A George Santayana employs poetry to state
those portions of his philosophy which prose can scarcely embody with
sufficient expressiveness; bases criticism on his philosophy and
distils or re-distils philosophical ideas from all the varieties of his
learning.
To take M. Flammarion, for example. His new work, _Dreams of an
Astronomer_, could without any essential inaccuracy be styled “A
Humanisation of Astronomy.” Here is a book produced in this French
scientist’s eighty-first year, at an age where “isolated scientific
facts” had lost all fanciful meanings and were seen only in their warm
and present human significance. The point with M. Flammarion was not
that we live on a poor little world in a vast universe composed of
worlds within worlds and flaming suns and revolving planets, nor that
this universe so immense is but an item of larger immensities. The
point was in the significance of these facts to the heart and mind of
a man or a woman. What does it mean as regards our attempt to know
God? In what perspective does it place our aspirations and our efforts
toward what we sometimes call “righteousness”? Flammarion gives the
richness of his physical knowledge in untechnical language; in words
that summon the imagination he constructs pen pictures of other worlds
than ours. That we may have the value of comparison, he describes Venus
and Mars--the latter possibly inhabited by creatures millions of years
ahead of us in their development. This moving and inspiring book ends
with a sentence that might serve as the quiet challenge of science to
much of philosophy and religion. Says M. Flammarion: “Let us not be
personal, like infants or the aged, who see only their own room, let us
know how to live in the infinite and in the eternal.”
But this lofty idea needs translation into the terms of our finite
existence and our character of religious beliefs. It finds it in such a
book as L. P. Jacks’s _Religious Perplexities_. Like _The Humanizing of
Knowledge_, this is a slender book that can be read through in about an
hour and it is equally a book that is likely to influence a lifetime.
It is beside my point that Professor Jacks is one of the greatest
living philosophers and religionists; but it is a fact of the highest
relevance that he writes as no one writing on these subjects has
written since William James. The same power to pierce to fundamental
questions--and answer them; the same lucidity of thought and expression
are characteristic of the two men. Jacks exhibits the same tolerance
of the forms of religious belief; and it is only after a discussion of
“Religious Perplexities in General” that he closes with a talk about
“Perplexity in the Christian Religion.” He says: “Far be it from me
to set up an exclusive claim for Christianity. Anyone who does that
goes a long way towards forfeiting his title to be called a Christian.
Let each of us look for truth where it is most accessible and where
it speaks the language he best understands.” He begins with the two
ultimate questions that man asks himself: “Why are we here?” followed
by, “Why am I--I, and not John Jones or James Smith--here and now?”
The answer to the first is the need of the One to differentiate itself
into the Many, proving its universality and its power to integrate and
raise up the good. But, he shows, the answer to the second question is
in the conduct of the individual. Insofar as I by my courage in the
face of life justify my particular existence, I supply the reason why
myself, rather than Jones or Smith, exists in my place, here and now.
Faith is not a new faculty added to us, it is simply our reason grown
courageous. As Carlyle repeated, we all must answer the alternative:
“Wilt thou be a hero or a coward?” Professor Jacks adds: “No philosophy
can relieve us from the responsibility of having to make that
choice”--and religion, telling us our choice must be the heroic one,
strengthens us in making it.
It is religion, I think, that George Santayana represents--Santayana
who contrasts for me with that rooted countryman of his, Miguel de
Unamuno. I have a love for both, the one tenacious of his soil and
its traditions, the other early detached, flung into the New England
of Harvard and William James, now lodged in Paris, and always with
his roots feeding orchid-like on the air. It is inevitable that one
like Santayana should bear his blossom in poetry and criticism and his
fruit in philosophy-religion, or religious philosophy. Thus he calls
his _Scepticism and Animal Faith_, “an introduction to a system of
philosophy,” but it is so only in the literal sense probably necessary
to secure the proper recognition from a too unimaginative world. The
book, which has a charm unbecoming a philosophical overture, can be
read independently of the volumes that are to follow it; but who reads
it may be trusted to put independence on one side and “follow, follow.”
Santayana as poet is possibly matter to consider in a later chapter
of our book, but since, as he says in the preface to his _Poems_,
their subject “is simply my philosophy in the making,” we should be
privileged to a passing consideration here. “I see no reason why a
philosopher should be puzzled. What he sees he sees; of the rest he is
ignorant; and his sense of this vast ignorance (which is his natural
and inevitable condition) is a chief part of his knowledge and of
his emotion. Philosophy is not an optional theme that may occupy him
on occasion. It is his only possible life, his daily response to
everything”--call it religion, if you please, and regard its expression:
O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul’s invisible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
And to all who care for fine intellectualism neither arid of
inspiration nor robbed of beauty and emotion I commend Santayana in all
his books, those named and, of course, _The Life of Reason_, _Winds of
Doctrine_, _The Sense of Beauty_, and _Character and Opinion in the
United States_ and the _Soliloquies_ as well. For those unacquainted
with the man, _Little Essays Drawn from the Works of George Santayana_,
by Logan Pearsall Smith, may offer the readiest approach.
ii
The task to which James Harvey Robinson calls us has already been
undertaken with the highest success by himself and some others. Among
these has from the first been Edwin E. Slosson who now, with Otis W.
Caldwell, the botanist and educator of Columbia University, has edited
an admirable volume, _Science Remaking the World_. This book is so good
and represents so intelligent a collaboration, that I hope it is only
the forerunner of a number of similar volumes. In the dual editorship,
Dr. Caldwell’s contribution was his working familiarity with every
field of modern science while Dr. Slosson lent his magic touch of the
born populariser. The fifteen chapters, eleven of which are contributed
by specialists in various fields, deal directly along the average
person’s lines of interest with such subjects as gasoline power, coal
tar products, the modern idea of the atom, what we know of “infantile
paralysis,” our present knowledge of tuberculosis, the lengthening of
human life, the world’s health, botanical science, evolution, warfare
against insects, forestation, the chemistry and economy of food, and
those two basic foods, bread and the potato. Dr. Caldwell writes the
general opening chapter and the chapter on lengthening human life with
its special reference to Louis Pasteur’s work; as was desirable in view
of the great popular success of his _Creative Chemistry_, Dr. Slosson
contributes the discussions of gasoline power and of the miracles
wrought from coal tar.
Our quest shuttles back and forth between the discoveries of man and
man the discoverer. At every stage we have to consider not only what
man has gained in the way of knowledge but his potentialities in
respect of all knowledge. That is why we have such a succession of
books as Madison Grant’s _The Passing of the Great Race_, those books
by Lothrop Stoddard which are brought to attention in Chapter 22 of
this volume, and, now, Roland B. Dixon’s _The Racial History of Man_.
The professor of anthropology at Harvard treats impressively and from
a broad point of view the whole question of race. His account of race
distribution and historical development is divided geographically.
Beginning with Europe and a general outline of its racial history,
he then takes up the separate countries or areas. In the same way
he deals with Africa, Asia, Oceania, North and South America. His
interesting conclusions, in some respects original and without the
dogmatism that vitiates much writing on the subject, are given in a
final chapter. But the best part is that this book is simply the first
in a group of probably ten volumes, each to be written by a leading
American authority, which is to describe, in the light of the latest
investigation and discovery, the formation of worlds, the evolution of
species, and the emergence and development of man.
Such books are desperately needed, to resume James Harvey Robinson’s
argument, if science is to save itself. Such is the present situation
that “if no precautions are taken to bridge the gap between scientific
knowledge and popular prejudice it may grow so wide that the researcher
himself may be engulfed.” It would not be the first time in human
history when light was swallowed up in darkness. How dense that
darkness can be, how persistent, how ironical and, perhaps, pathetic
may be learned from the slightest perusal of Dr. James J. Walsh’s
astonishing and engrossing new book, called _Cures_. This is a history
of new remedies of every sort in all ages which have cured for a
while and then have failed. It will scarcely surprise us, although it
may make us rather uncomfortable, to know that not Europe with its
ancient and superstitious peoples but modern America has supplied the
greatest number of cure delusions. Dr. Walsh puts the explanation on
a charitable ground: “Americans are more enterprising and as a result
we have had ever so many more successful discoveries of new”--but
less permanently successful--“remedies.” The subject is not without
its humorous aspects. Insofar as Dr. Walsh has occasion to treat of
some forms of curing which are still much adhered to, with or without
correlated religious beliefs, his book treads on live and resentful
toes. As a Catholic avoiding the discussion of Lourdes and other
shrines, he invites reprisals; as a physician of very distinguished
service and high standing, he is well-qualified to counter them. But
aside from any possible controversy, what an amazing history of human
credulity and ignorance he exposes--Dowie, rattlesnake oil, magnetic
iron, metallic tractors, sympathetic powders, hypnotism, mesmerism,
electric belts, plasters, pads, chest protectors, psychoanalysis and
spiritualistic healing along with the various forms of “New Thought”
come under review. It will be observed that as a rule Dr. Walsh gives
credit for cures to even the most impossible notion or contraption--at
first. A cure is a cure, perhaps only the more so if the actual
curative agent is suggestion.
Suggestion! Is it possible that, on a subject so bedevilled, a book
could now appear of genuine usefulness, sanity and popular value?
Personally I should have inclined to answer emphatically, “No!” But
I cannot, for the book is before me. Dr. Louis E. Bisch, a physician
practising in New York, lecturing on psychology at Columbia and
directing the treatments given in mental and nervous cases at the
large sanitarium in the North Carolina mountains, has been known to me
hitherto by his _Your Inner Self_--without exception the best popular
account of psychoanalysis and modern psychology I have ever seen. Now
he has written _The Conquest of Self_, in which he expresses with
the same directness and accuracy all that body of actual truth which
the “How to Succeed” books build into such amazing forms of lies and
nonsense. There is, of course, a certain power of accomplishment in
each of us; there is a general direction for each of us to take; there
are personal obstacles to overcome, and there is a power of progression
to be developed. A better comprehension of one’s self, as of others,
can definitely be arrived at. All these facts Dr. Bisch translates into
practical detail and illustrates with concrete instances, avoiding the
claptrap with which the whole subject is now so heavily overloaded.
In that general enterprise of the humanisation of knowledge to which
(I hope) we are all fully committed, such a book as _The Conquest of
Self_ has a special merit; for where ignorance is thickest, it lights a
clear and modest path, and where pseudo-science has done and is doing
the greatest havoc, it puts truth in armour for the hardest part of a
difficult journey.
iii
If, as some contend, the purpose of fiction is entertainment--an
assertion we need not either attempt to refute nor deny--then the
mark of good fiction is that, while perhaps entertaining us, it does
something else. And about the “something else” I should think we need
not be narrow in definitions. Maybe the entertaining novel we are
reading adds its unobtrusive item to our understanding of this or that;
maybe it tunes up our emotional natures. Or it may accomplish its
bye-purpose in other directions. We may or may not be conscious of the
additional result, or, if conscious of it, we may continue (perhaps
wisely) to read for the sole purpose of being entertained. I do not
believe one should read fiction with the something else in mind, nor,
in a brief account of some new novels, would I attempt to suggest
what the something else--differing, it is likely, with the individual
reader--may turn out to be. If one asks me for bread, I will not offer
him a loaf of vitamins, but palatable bread from which his body may
take the elements it pleases.
For examples, you may derive from John Buchan’s _Midwinter_ your
clearest idea of Dr. Samuel Johnson, or your greatest knowledge
about the affections of a young lady; your own mind will satisfy
its proper need. From Compton Mackenzie’s _The Altar Steps_ and its
sequel, _Parson’s Progress_, certain temperaments gain religious and
ecclesiastical satisfactions. The modern, intimate taste for sensory
impulses can be gratified in reading John Dos Passos’s unusual novel,
_Streets of Night_; just as the correlative instinct for a fresh and
daring idealism is fed by such a fine first novel as Cyril Hume’s _The
Wife of the Centaur_. Arnold Bennett’s _Riceyman Steps_, with its story
of a young charwoman who works for a miserly bookseller and his wife,
renews the heart in its assurance of our common humanity, and offers
the rich nourishment which rejoiced us in _The Old Wives’ Tale_. And so
it goes with fiction.
We think of Brand Whitlock now as the author of _Belgium_, but a
further thought recalls him, and with pleasure, as a writer of fiction.
His new novel, _J. Hardin & Son_, was planned ten years and more ago
and discussed with the late William Dean Howells, whose interest in
it was keen. The actual writing had begun in the summer of 1914 at a
small country place near Brussels when the catastrophe of war began
its pre-emption upon all of the American Minister’s time and energy.
Except for intervals of thinking about it and occasional notes, Mr.
Whitlock could do nothing but protect the manuscript on journeyings to
and fro--until the end of 1918, when, after the armistice, he resumed
writing as opportunity offered. The book was progressing in earnest at
Biarritz and Spa in 1922, and was completed in New York in the spring
of 1923. Mr. Howells’s interest will be understood when it is explained
that _J. Hardin & Son_ takes place in a little Ohio town. The story
begins when Paul Hardin, the son, is ten and accompanies him to middle
age--perhaps one should say to that point in or at the beginning of
middle age where, as with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a man’s character
takes its final determining shape in some act or decision which
controls the rest of his life. For Paul Hardin this moment comes when
he recognises one of the buggies made forty years before by his father,
takes hold of one of the spokes and finds it as solid, as resistant
as on the day it was made. Paul had hardly liked his father, whose
sternly-held and sternly-expressed views and whose passion for moral
reform in the shape of prohibition seemed like a life-long and perverse
obstinacy, embittering all the preludes to affection, sympathy or even
understanding. Yet now! Something comes out of that spoke, something
out of his father’s life that settles his behaviour toward the two
women who are for him to deal with in regard to himself. Mr. Whitlock
has aimed, however, at the reconstruction of a period in American life.
His momentous personal problem in the life of Paul Hardin is simply the
foreground for a study of American ideas in a certain kind of community
in the years within his own recollection, say from 1880 on pretty well
into our century. Over a hundred characters, many of them of more than
passing importance, are involved in the extremely varied but entirely
naturalistic incidents of the novel.
_J. Hardin & Son_, the work of an American at fifty, makes a contrast
with the work of a Norwegian of fifty, the age at which Jonas Lie wrote
his _The Family at Gilje_. The Norwegian novelist, whose story is just
offered in a careful translation, uses a much simpler scheme. His tale
opens with a picture of a home in the mountains of Norway where a
father and mother are anxious to get their children married off. It
ends when each child has solved his or her problem. If environment
conquers in one child, individuality is sure to come out on top in
another. Jonas Lie’s book, I am told, makes Norwegians feel that they
are living again the scenes of early life; and at the same time the
novel is full of the most modern ideas about marriage, the home and the
management of children, introduced not by main strength and the hazard
of fictional illusion but subtly, by an artist who shared Ibsen’s
supply of “social dynamite” but whose artistry was paramount. Lie is
called a realist, as, I suppose, Bojer and most of the Scandinavians
would be (except Jens Jacobsen in _Marie Grubbe_); but what is the
white magic in these writers of the white snow-countries that makes
their realism so unfailingly poetic? Is it indigenous? Cannot we
acquire it here in America? Shall we exile our artists to Canada,
whence now comes little but the worn-out stories of strong men and
their uniform primitiveness with women?
I do not know the answers to these questions, nor do you; but I do
know that certain writers are _simpatico_ in certain provinces of
society--Frank Swinnerton, for example, in the stratum whence he
drew his _Nocturne_ and his _Coquette_ and in the somewhat different
middle-class level on which we meet the characters of his new story,
_Young Felix_. Here is a satisfactory representative English novel
in the mode called realism to contrast with our American and our
Norwegian. I say “contrast”--for I don’t think comparisons will get us
very far. What we are better employed in doing, in my opinion, is a
species of addition rather than subtraction; we shall find a difference
in the attitude as well as the art of Brand Whitlock, Jonas Lie, and
Frank Swinnerton. Is not each worth our while? I think so. I think such
a novel as Jay William Hudson’s _Nowhere Else in the World_ is worth
the while of most readers, who may, however, be a bit puzzled at first
to discover how different it is from his _Abbé Pierre_. Mr. Hudson
may possibly have written the Great Chicago Novel as Carl Sandburg is
sometimes thought to have written the great Chicago hymn or chant. At
least, his _Nowhere Else in the World_ is in its essence apocalyptic.
Stephen Kent, who had been enchanted by Paris after a youthful
rebellion against Chicago and its blatant commercialism, lives to look
upon the city of his birth as “like Rodin’s ‘Thinker,’ primitive,
powerful, with mighty sinews,” as “the spiritual capital of America,”
as a place where he and others will join in “moulding, not paintings
and statues, but a civilisation destined to be the summit of all art,
of all dreams.” There is incidentally in this tense story a competent
picture of American academic life which will cause squirmings. Mr.
Hudson’s knowledge of American colleges is derived at first hand.
Much first hand knowledge, I happen to know, has gone into the writing
of George Looms’s second novel, _John-No-Brawn._ The action of this
rather terrible but certainly impressive piece of fiction takes place
in Louisville, Kentucky, the author’s home town, and in and near
Denver, Colorado. The book is one of an intensity that has already
occasioned extremely divergent opinions. The story is that of a sick
man, an indeterminate character trapped by the horrible and inescapable
fact of disease. He comes to the conclusion that he is a hopeless
drag on his young wife. Against the warnings, protests and threats
of doctor and nurse, he walks out of the hospital. “They watched him
near the stairway, saw him reel slightly and then reach out his hand
and take hold of the banister--saw him steady himself. He paused for
a moment ... and then he passed around the partition corner, out of
sight.” Such an ending is exalting or deadly in its depressiveness, as
you please; just as the story itself is a thing of magnificence or of
utter drabness. Like the powerful war novel by Thomas Boyd, _Through
the Wheat_, a violent reaction in one direction or another is to be
expected of the reader. It is probably an advantage in Mr. Boyd’s novel
over Dos Passos’s _Three Soldiers_ that _Through the Wheat_ is almost
entirely a story of fighting in the front line. All agree that this was
war, at least, and something is gained at the outset by the setting
aside of various prejudices and preconceptions. _Through the Wheat_,
far more than _Three Soldiers_, contrasts with high effectiveness
with Henri Barbusse’s _Under Fire_. Again may I plead that if the two
novels, the French and the American, are to be entered in a fight by
rounds, there can and should be no decision. _Through the Wheat_ is a
wonderful thing to have been plucked in Belleau Wood, at Soissons and
Saint Mihiel by a boy not yet twenty.
While Mr. Whitlock is going back of our day for his Middle Western
picture, Meredith Nicholson, slightly his senior, has been busy with
the immediacy not only of the present day but the very hour. Mr.
Nicholson’s new novel, _The Hope of Happiness_, like its predecessor,
_Broken Barriers_, reckons with a social life in which, if they have
not been entirely swept aside, American standards of conduct have been
very much altered. The young woman who drinks too hopelessly much is
put before us, but the essential story is one of a situation between
father and unacknowledged son with the probable complications of men’s
business and women’s love. There is an ability of characterisation and
a temper and evenness in the writing which make the reader feel that
Mr. Nicholson writes for a much ampler purpose than would be served by
a novel of changing manners and enlarged social license. These are mere
appurtenances of the story he has to tell.