POINTS OF FRICTION
BY
AGNES REPPLIER, LITT.D.
AUTHOR OF “BOOKS AND MEN,” “ESSAYS IN
IDLENESS,” “COUNTER-CURRENTS,” ETC., ETC.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Note
Six of the ten essays in this volume--“Living in History,” “Dead
Authors,” “Consolations of the Conservative,” “The Cheerful Clan,”
“Woman Enthroned,” and “Money”--are reprinted through the courtesy
of _The Atlantic Monthly_; “The Beloved Sinner” and “The Strayed
Prohibitionist” through the courtesy of _The Century Magazine_;
“Cruelty and Humour” through the courtesy of _The Yale Review_; “The
Virtuous Victorian” through the courtesy of _The Nation_.
Contents
Living in History 1
Dead Authors 31
Consolations of the Conservative 70
The Cheerful Clan 105
The Beloved Sinner 126
The Virtuous Victorian 149
Woman Enthroned 167
The Strayed Prohibitionist 204
Money 227
Cruelty and Humour 254
POINTS OF FRICTION
⁂
Living in History
When Mr. Bagehot spoke his luminous words about “a fatigued way of
looking at great subjects,” he gave us the key to a mental attitude
which perhaps is not the modern thing it seems. There were, no doubt,
Greeks and Romans in plenty to whom the “glory” and the “grandeur”
of Greece and Rome were less exhilarating than they were to Edgar
Poe,--Greeks and Romans who were spiritually palsied by the great
emotions which presumably accompany great events. They may have been
philosophers, or humanitarians, or academists. They may have been
conscientious objectors, or conscienceless shirkers, or perhaps plain
men and women with a natural gift of indecision, a natural taste for
compromise and awaiting developments. In the absence of newspapers and
pamphlets, these peaceful pagans were compelled to express their sense
of fatigue to their neighbours at the games or in the market-place; and
their neighbours--if well chosen--sighed with them over the intensity
of life, the formidable happenings of history.
Since August, 1914, the turmoil and anguish incidental to the world’s
greatest war have accentuated every human type,--heroic, base, keen,
and evasive. The strain of five years’ fighting was borne with
astounding fortitude, and Allied statesmen and publicists saw to it
that the clear outline of events should not be blurred by ignorance
or misrepresentation. If history in the making be a fluid thing, it
swiftly crystallizes. Men, “living between two eternities, and warring
against oblivion,” make their indelible record on its pages; and other
men receive these pages as their best inheritance, their avenue to
understanding, their key to life.
Therefore it is unwise to gibe at history because we do not chance to
know it. It pleases us to gibe at anything we do not know, but the
process is not enlightening. In the second year of the war, the English
“Nation” commented approvingly on the words of an English novelist who
strove to make clear that the only things which count for any of us,
individually or collectively, are the unrecorded minutiæ of our lives.
“History,” said this purveyor of fiction, “is concerned with the rather
absurd and theatrical doings of a few people, which, after all, have
never altered the fact that we do all of us live on from day to day,
and only want to be let alone.”
“These words,” observed the “Nation” heavily, “have a singular truth
and force at the present time. The people of Europe want to go on
living, not to be destroyed. To live is to pursue the activities proper
to one’s nature, to be unhindered and unthwarted in their exercise. It
is not too much to say that the life of Europe is something which has
persisted in spite of the history of Europe. There is nothing happy or
fruitful anywhere but witnesses to the triumph of life over history.”
Presuming that we are able to disentangle life from history, to sever
the inseverable, is this a true statement, or merely the expression
of mental and spiritual fatigue? Were the great historic episodes
invariably fruitless, and had they no bearing upon the lives of
ordinary men and women? The battles of Marathon and Thermopylæ, the
signing of the Magna Charta, the Triple Alliance, the Declaration of
Independence, the birth of the National Assembly, the first Reform
Bill, the recognition in Turin of the United Kingdom of Italy,--these
things may have been theatrical, inasmuch as they were certainly
dramatic, but absurd is not a wise word to apply to them. Neither is it
possible to believe that the life of Europe went on in spite of these
historic incidents, triumphing over them as over so many obstacles to
activity.
When the “Nation” contrasts the beneficent companies of strolling
players who “represented and interpreted the world of life, the one
thing which matters and remains,” with the companies of soldiers who
merely destroyed life at its roots, we cannot but feel that this
editorial point of view has its limitations. The strolling players
of Elizabeth’s day afforded many a merry hour; but Elizabeth’s
soldiers and sailors did their part in making possible this mirth. The
strolling players who came to the old Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia
interpreted “the world of life,” as they understood it; but the
soldiers who froze at Valley Forge offered a different interpretation,
and one which had considerably more stamina. The magnifying of small
things, the belittling of great ones, indicate a mental exhaustion
which would be more pardonable if it were less complacent. There are
always men and women who prefer the triumph of evil, which is a thing
they can forget, to prolonged resistance, which shatters their nerves.
But the desire to escape an obligation, while very human, is not
generally thought to be humanity’s noblest lesson.
Many smart things have been written to discredit history. Mr. Arnold
called it “the vast Mississippi of falsehood,” which was easily said,
and has been said in a number of ways since the days of Herodotus, who
amply illustrated the splendours of unreality. Mr. Edward Fitzgerald
was wont to sigh that only lying histories are readable, and this
point of view has many secret adherents. Mr. Henry Adams, who taught
history for seven years at Harvard, and who built his intellectual
dwelling-place upon its firm foundations, pronounced it to be “in
essence incoherent and immoral.” Nevertheless, all that we know of
man’s unending efforts to adjust and readjust himself to the world
about him we learn from history, and the tale is an enlightening one.
“Events are wonderful things,” said Lord Beaconsfield. Nothing, for
example, can blot out, or obscure, the event of the French Revolution.
We are free to discuss it until the end of time; but we can never alter
it, and never get away from its consequences.
The lively contempt for history expressed by readers who would escape
its weight, and the neglect of history practised by educators who would
escape its authority, stand responsible for much mental confusion.
American boys and girls go to school six, eight, or ten years, as the
case may be, and emerge with a misunderstanding of their own country,
and a comprehensive ignorance of all others. They say, “I don’t know
any history,” as casually and as unconcernedly as they might say, “I
don’t know any chemistry,” or “I don’t know metaphysics.” A smiling
young freshman in the most scholarly of women’s colleges told me that
she had been conditioned because she knew nothing about the Reformation.
“You mean,--” I began questioningly.
“I mean just what I say,” she interrupted. “I didn’t know what it was,
or where it was, or who had anything to do with it.”
I said I didn’t wonder she had come to grief. The Reformation was
something of an episode. And I asked myself wistfully how it happened
she had ever managed to escape it. When I was a little schoolgirl, a
pious Roman Catholic child with a distaste for polemics, it seemed
to me I was never done studying about the Reformation. If I escaped
briefly from Wycliffe and Cranmer and Knox, it was only to be met by
Luther and Calvin and Huss. Everywhere the great struggle confronted
me, everywhere I was brought face to face with the inexorable logic of
events. That more advanced and more intelligent students find pleasure
in every phase of ecclesiastical strife is proved by Lord Broughton’s
pleasant story about a member of Parliament named Joliffe, who was
sitting in his club, reading Hume’s “History of England,” a book
which well deserves to be called dry. Charles Fox, glancing over his
shoulder, observed, “I see you have come to the imprisonment of the
seven bishops”; whereupon Joliffe, like a man engrossed in a thrilling
detective story, cried desperately, “For God’s sake, Fox, don’t tell me
what is coming!”
This was reading for human delight, for the interest and agitation
which are inseparable from every human document. Mr. Henry James once
told me that the only reading of which he never tired was history.
“The least significant footnote of history,” he said, “stirs me more
than the most thrilling and passionate fiction. Nothing that has ever
happened to the world finds me indifferent.” I used to think that
ignorance of history meant only a lack of cultivation and a loss of
pleasure. Now I am sure that such ignorance impairs our judgment by
impairing our understanding, by depriving us of standards, of the
power to contrast, and the right to estimate. We can know nothing of
any nation unless we know its history; and we can know nothing of the
history of any nation unless we know something of the history of all
nations. The book of the world is full of knowledge we need to acquire,
of lessons we need to learn, of wisdom we need to assimilate. Consider
only this brief sentence of Polybius, quoted by Plutarch: “In Carthage
no one is blamed, however he may have gained his wealth.” A pleasant
place, no doubt, for business enterprise; a place where young men were
taught how to get on, and extravagance kept pace with shrewd finance.
A self-satisfied, self-confident, money-getting, money-loving people,
honouring success, and hugging their fancied security, while in far-off
Rome Cato pronounced their doom.
There are readers who can tolerate and even enjoy history, provided
it is shorn of its high lights and heavy shadows, its heroic elements
and strong impelling motives. They turn with relief to such calm
commentators as Sir John Seeley, for years professor of modern history
at Cambridge, who shrank as sensitively as an eighteenth-century
divine from that fell word “enthusiasm,” and from all the agitation
it gathers in its wake. He was a firm upholder of the British Empire,
hating compromise and guiltless of pacifism; but, having a natural
gift for aridity, he saw no reason why the world should not be content
to know things without feeling them, should not keep its eyes turned
to legal institutions, its mind fixed upon political economy and
international law. The force that lay back of Parliament annoyed him by
the simple primitive way in which it beat drums, fired guns, and died
to uphold the institutions which he prized; also because by doing these
things it evoked in others certain simple and primitive sensations
which he strove always to keep at bay. “We are rather disposed to
laugh,” he said, “when poets and orators try to conjure us with the
name of England.” Had he lived a few years longer, he would have
known that England’s salvation lies in the fact that her name is, to
her sons, a thing to conjure by. We may not wisely ignore the value
of emotions, nor underestimate the power of the human impulses which
charge the souls of men.
The long years of neutrality engendered in the minds of Americans a
natural but ignoble weariness. The war was not our war, yet there was
no escaping from it. By day and night it haunted us, a ghost that
would not be laid. Over and over again we were told that it was not
possible to place the burden of blame on any nation’s shoulders. Once
at least we were told that the causes and objects of the contest, the
obscure fountains from which had burst this stupendous and desolating
flood, were no concern of ours. But this proffered release from serious
thinking brought us scant peace of mind. Every honest man and woman
knew that we had no intellectual right to be ignorant when information
lay at our hand, and no spiritual right to be unconcerned when great
moral issues were at stake. We could not in either case evade the duty
we owed to reason. The Vatican Library would not hold the books that
have been written about the war; but the famous five-foot shelf would
be too roomy for the evidence in the case, the documents which are the
foundation of knowledge. They, at least, are neither too profuse for
our patience, nor too complex for our understanding. “The inquiry into
the truth or falsehood of a matter of history,” said Huxley, “is just
as much an affair of pure science as is the inquiry into the truth or
falsehood of a matter of geology; and the value of the evidence in the
two cases must be tested in the same way.”
The resentment of American pacifists, who, being more human than they
thought themselves, were no better able than the rest of us to forget
the state of Europe, found expression in petulant complaints. They kept
reminding us at inopportune moments that war is not the important
and heroic thing it is assumed to be. They asked that, if it is to
figure in history at all (which seems, on the whole, inevitable), the
truth should be told, and its brutalities, as well as its heroisms,
exposed. They professed a languid amusement at the “rainbow of
official documents” which proved every nation in the right. They
inveighed bitterly against the “false patriotism” taught by American
schoolbooks, with their absurd emphasis on the “embattled farmers” of
the Revolution, and the volunteers of the Civil War. They assured us,
in and out of season, that a doctor who came to his death looking after
poor patients in an epidemic was as much of a hero as any soldier whose
grave is yearly decorated with flowers.
All this was the clearest possible exposition of the lassitude induced
in faint-hearted men by the pressure of great events. It was the wail
of people who wanted, as the “Nation” feelingly expressed it, to be
let alone, and who could not shut themselves away from the world’s
great tragedy. None of us are prepared to say that a doctor and a nurse
who perform their perilous duties in an epidemic are not as heroic as
a doctor and a nurse who perform their perilous duties in war. There
is glory enough to go around. Only he that loveth his life shall lose
it. But to put a flower on a soldier’s grave is a not too exuberant
recognition of his service, for he, too, in his humble way made the
great sacrifice.
As for the brutalities of war, who can charge that history smooths them
over? Certain horrors may be withheld from children, whose privilege
it is to be spared the knowledge of uttermost depravity; but to the
adult no such mercy is shown. Motley, for example, describes cruelties
committed three hundred and fifty years ago in the Netherlands, which
equal, if they do not surpass, the cruelties committed six years ago
in Belgium. Men heard such tales more calmly then than now, and seldom
sought the coward’s refuge--incredulity. The Dutch, like other nations,
did better things than fight. They painted glorious pictures, they
bred great statesmen and good doctors. They traded with extraordinary
success. They raised the most beautiful tulips in the world. But to do
these things peacefully and efficiently, they had been compelled to
struggle for their national existence. The East India trade and the
freedom of the seas did not drop into their laps. And because their
security, and the comeliness of life which they so highly prized, had
been bought by stubborn resistance to tyranny, they added to material
well-being the “luxury of self-respect.”
To overestimate the part played by war in a nation’s development is
as crude as to ignore its alternate menace and support. It is with
the help of history that we balance our mental accounts. Voltaire
was disposed to think that battles and treaties were matters of small
moment; and Mr. John Richard Green pleaded, not unreasonably, that more
space should be given in our chronicles to the missionary, the poet,
the painter, the merchant, and the philosopher. They are not, and they
never have been, excluded from any narrative comprehensive enough to
admit them; but the scope of their authority is not always sufficiently
defined. Man, as the representative of his age, and the events in which
he plays his vigorous part,--these are the warp and woof of history. We
can no more leave John Wesley or Ignatius Loyola out of the canvas than
we can leave out Marlborough or Pitt. We know now that the philosophy
of Nietzsche is one with Bernhardi’s militarism.
As for the merchant,--Froissart was as well aware of his prestige
as was Mr. Green. “Trade, my lord,” said Dinde Desponde, the great
Lombard banker, to the Duke of Burgundy, “finds its way everywhere,
and rules the world.” As for commercial honour,--a thing as fine
as the honour of the aristocrat or of the soldier,--what can be
better for England than to know that after the great fire of 1666
not a single London shopkeeper evaded his liabilities; and that this
fact was long the boast of a city proud of its shopkeeping? As for
jurisprudence,--Sully was infinitely more concerned with it than he
was with combat or controversy. It is with stern satisfaction that
he recounts the statutes passed in his day for the punishment of
fraudulent bankrupts, whom we treat so leniently; for the annulment of
their gifts and assignments, which we guard so zealously; and for the
conviction of those to whom such property had been assigned. It was
almost as dangerous to steal on a large scale as on a small one under
the levelling laws of Henry of Navarre.
In this vast and varied chronicle, war plays its appointed part. “We
cannot,” says Walter Savage Landor, “push valiant men out of history.”
We cannot escape from the truths interpreted, and the conditions
established by their valour. What has been slightingly called the
“drum-and-trumpet narrative” holds its own with the records of art and
science. “It cost Europe a thousand years of barbarism,” said Macaulay,
“to escape the fate of China.”
The endless endeavour of states to control their own destinies, the
ebb and flow of the sea of combat, the “recurrent liturgy of war,”
enabled the old historians to perceive with amazing distinctness the
traits of nations, etched as sharply then as now on the imperishable
pages of history. We read Froissart for human delight rather than for
solid information; yet Froissart’s observations--the observations of a
keen-eyed student of the world--are worth recording five hundred years
after he set them down.
“In England,” he says, “strangers are well received”; yet are the
English “affable to no other nation than their own.” Ireland, he holds
to have had “too many kings”; and the Scotch, like the English, “are
excellent men-at-arms, nor is there any check to their courage as long
as their weapons endure.” France is the pride of his heart, as it is
the pride of the world’s heart to-day. “In France also is found good
chivalry, strong of spirit, and in great abundance; for the kingdom
of France has never been brought so low as to lack men ready for the
combat.” Even Germany does not escape his regard. “The Germans are
a people without pity and without honour.” And again: “The Germans
are a rude, unmannered race, but active and expert where their own
personal advantage is concerned.” If history be “philosophy teaching by
example,” we are wise to admit the old historians into our counsels.
To withhold from a child some knowledge--apportioned to his
understanding--of the world’s sorrows and wrongs is to cheat him of
his kinship with humanity. We would not, if we could, bruise his
soul as our souls are bruised; but we would save him from a callous
content which is alien to his immaturity. The little American, like the
little Austrian and the little Serb, is a son of the sorrowing earth.
His security--of which no man can forecast the future--is a legacy
bequeathed him by predecessors who bought it with sweat and with blood;
and with sweat and with blood his descendants may be called on to
guard it. Alone among educators, Mr. G. Stanley Hall finds neutrality,
a “high and ideal neutrality,” to be an attribute of youth. He was
so gratified by this discovery during the years of the war, so sure
that American boys and girls followed “impartially” the great struggle
in Europe, and that this judicial attitude would, in the years to
come, enable them to pronounce “the true verdict of history,” that he
“thrilled and tingled” with patriotic--if premature--pride.
“The true verdict of history” will be pronounced according to the
documentary evidence in the case. There is no need to vex our souls
over the possible extinction of this evidence, for closer observers
than our impartial young Americans are placing it permanently on
record. But I doubt if the equanimity which escapes the ordeal of
partisanship is to be found in the mind of youth, or in the heart of
a child. Can we not remember a time when the Wars of the Roses were
not--to us--a matter for neutrality? Our little school histories,
those vivacious, anecdotal histories, banished long ago by rigorous
educators, were in some measure responsible for our Lancastrian
fervour. They fed it with stories of high courage and the sorrows of
princes. We wasted our sympathies on “a mere struggle for power”; but
Hume’s laconic verdict is not, and never can be, the measure of a
child’s solicitude. The lost cause fills him with pity, the cause which
is saved by man’s heroic sacrifice fires him to generous applause.
The round world and the tale of those who have lived upon it are his
legitimate inheritance.
Mr. Bagehot said, and said wisely after his wont, that if you catch an
intelligent, uneducated man of thirty, and tell him about the battle of
Marathon, he will calculate the chances, and estimate the results; but
he will not really care. You cannot make the word “Marathon” sound in
his ears as it sounded in the ears of Byron, to whom it had been sacred
in boyhood. You cannot make the word “freedom” sound in untutored ears
as it sounds in the ears of men who have counted the cost by which it
has been preserved through the centuries. Unless children are permitted
to know the utmost peril which has threatened, and which threatens, the
freedom of nations, how can they conceive of its value? And what is the
worth of teaching which does not rate the gift of freedom above all
earthly benefactions? How can justice live save by the will of freemen?
Of what avail are civic virtues that are not the virtues of the free?
Pericles bade the Athenians to bear reverently in mind the Greeks who
had died for Greece. “Make these men your examples, and be well assured
that happiness comes by freedom, and freedom by stoutness of heart.”
Perhaps if American boys bear reverently in mind the men who died
for America, it will help them too to be stout of heart, and “worthy
patriots, dear to God.”
In the remote years of my childhood, the study of current events, that
most interesting and valuable form of tuition, which, nevertheless,
is unintelligible without some knowledge of the past, was left out
of our limited curriculum. We seldom read the newspapers (which I
remember as of an appalling dulness), and we knew little of what was
happening in our day. But we did study history, and we knew something
of what had happened in other days than ours; we knew and deeply
cared. Therefore we reacted with fair intelligence and no lack of
fervour when circumstances were forced upon our vision. It was not
possible for a child who had lived in spirit with Saint Genevieve to
be indifferent to the siege of Paris in 1870. It is not possible for
a child who has lived in spirit with Jeanne d’Arc to be indifferent
to the destruction of Rheims Cathedral in 1914. If we were often
left in ignorance, we were never despoiled of childhood’s generous
ardour. Nobody told us that “courage is a sublime form of hypocrisy.”
Nobody fed our young minds on stale paradoxes, or taught us to
discount the foolish impulsiveness of adults. Our parents, as Mr.
Henry James rejoicingly observes, “had no desire to see us inoculated
with importunate virtues.” The Honourable Bertrand Russell had not
then proposed that all teaching of history shall be submitted to an
“international commission,” “which shall produce neutral text-books,
free from patriotic bias.” There was something profoundly fearless in
our approach to life, in the exposure of our unarmoured souls to the
assaults of enthusiasms and regrets.
The cynic who is impatient of primitive emotions, the sentimentalist
whose sympathy is confined exclusively to his country’s enemies, grow
more shrill-voiced as the exhaustion of Europe becomes increasingly
apparent. They were always to be heard by those who paused amid the
thunderings of war to listen to them; but their words were lost in
the whirlwind. It was possible for a writer in the “Survey” to allude
brutally in the spring of 1916 to the “cockpit of Verdun.” It was
possible for Mr. Russell to turn from the contemplation of Ypres, and
say: “The war is trivial for all its vastness. No great human purpose
is involved on either side, no great principle is at stake.” If the
spiritual fatigue of the looker-on had found an echo in the souls of
those who were bearing the burden and heat of the day, the world would
have sunk to destruction. “The moral triumph of Belgium,” said Cardinal
Mercier, when his country had been conquered and despoiled, “is an
ever memorable fact for history and civilization.” Who shall be the
spokesman of the future?
In the last melancholy pages of that able and melancholy book, “The
Economic Consequences of the Peace,” Mr. Keynes describes the apathy
of victorious England, too spent to savour victory. “Our power of
feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material
well-being is temporarily eclipsed. We have been moved already beyond
endurance, and need rest. Never, in the lifetime of men now living, has
the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.”
Never perhaps in the centuries, for when in the centuries has that
element been so ruthlessly consumed? England is like a swimmer who has
carried the lifeline to shore, battling amid the breakers, tossed high
on their crests, hurled into their green depths, pounded, battered,
blinded, until he lies, a broken thing, on the shore. The crew is safe,
but until the breath comes back to his labouring lungs, he is past all
acute consideration for its welfare. Were Mr. Keynes generous enough to
extend his sympathy alike to foes and friends, he might even now see
light shining on the horizon. It would do him--it would do us all--good
to meditate closely on the probable state of Europe had Germany
triumphed. The “hidden currents” of which we are warned may be sweeping
us on a reef; but the most imminent and most appalling calamity has
been averted. “Events are wonderful things,” and we may yet come to
believe with Froissart, lover of brave deeds and honourable men, that
“the most profitable thing in the world for the institution of human
life is history.”
Dead Authors
“Les morts n’écrivent point,” said Madame de Maintenon, who lived in
a day of tranquil finalities. If men’s passions and vanities were
admittedly strong until the hour of dissolution, the finger of death
obliterated all traces of them; and the supreme dignity of this
obliteration sustained noble minds and solaced the souls that believed.
An age which produced the _Oraisons Funèbres_ had an unquenchable
reverence for the grave.
Echoes of Madame de Maintenon’s soothing conviction ring pleasantly
through the intervening centuries. Book-making, which she knew only
in its smiling infancy, had grown to ominous proportions when the
Hon. Augustine Birrell, brooding over the fatality which had dipped
the world in ink, comforted himself--and us--with the vision of an
authorless future. “There were no books in Eden,” he said meditatively,
“and there will be none in Heaven; but between times it is otherwise.”
For an Englishman more or less conversant with ghosts, Mr. Birrell
showed little foreknowledge of their dawning ambitions. If we may judge
by the recent and determined intrusion of spirits into authorship,
Heaven bids fair to be stacked with printing-presses. One of their
number, indeed, the “Living Dead Man,” whose amanuensis is Elsa Barker,
and whose publishers have unhesitatingly revealed (or, I might perhaps
say, announced) his identity, gives high praise to a ghostly library,
well catalogued, and containing millions of books and records. Miss
Lilian Whiting assures us that every piece of work done in life has
its ethereal counterpart. “The artist creates in the astral before
he creates in the material, and the creation in the astral is the
permanent embodiment.” Consequently, when an author dies, he finds
awaiting him an “imperishable record” of all he has ever written. Miss
Whiting does not tell us how she comes to know this. Neither does she
say how good a book has to be to live forever in the astral, or if a
very bad book is never suffered to die a natural and kindly death as in
our natural and kindly world. Perhaps it is the ease with which astral
immortality is achieved, or rather the impossibility of escaping it,
which prompts ambitious and exclusive spirits to force an entrance into
our congested literary life, and compete with mortal scribblers who ask
their little day.
The suddenness of the attack, and its unprecedented character, daunt
and bewilder us. It is true that the apparitions that lend vivacity
to the ordinary spiritualistic séance have from time to time written
short themes, or dropped into friendly verse. Readers of that engaging
volume, “Report of the Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern
Spiritualism,” published in 1887, will remember that “Belle,” who
claimed to be the original proprietor of Yorick’s skull (long a
“property” of the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, but at that time
in the library of Dr. Horace Howard Furness), voiced her pretensions,
and told her story, in ten carefully rhymed stanzas.
“My form was sold to doctors three,
So you have all that’s left of me;
I come to greet you in white mull,
You that prizes my lonely skull.”
But these effusions were desultory and amateurish. They were designed
as personal communications, and were betrayed into publicity by
their recipients. We cannot regard their authors--painstaking but
simple-hearted ghosts--as advance guards of the army of occupation
which is now storming the citadel of print.
It is passing strange that the dead who seek to communicate with the
living should cling so closely to the alphabet as a connecting link.
Dying is a primitive thing. Men died, and were wept and forgotten, for
many, many ages before Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth. But letters
are artificial and complicated. They belong to fettered humanity which
is perpetually devising ways and means. Shelley, whose impatient soul
fretted against barriers, cried out despairingly that inspiration
wanes when composition begins. We strive to follow Madame de Sévigné’s
counsel, “Laissez trotter la plume”; but we know well how the little
instrument halts and stumbles; and if a pen is too clumsy for the
transmission of thought, what must be the effort to pick out letters
on a ouija board, or with a tilting table? The spirit that invented
table-rapping (which combines every possible disadvantage as a means
of communication with every absurdity that can offend a fastidious
taste) deserves to be penalized by its fellow spirits. Even Sir Oliver
Lodge admits that the substitution of tables for pen and ink “has
difficulties of its own.”
Yet nothing can overcome the infatuation of ghostly visitors for
this particular piece of furniture. They cannot keep their spectral
fingers off one, and they will come any distance, and take any pains,
for the pleasure of such handling. Maeterlinck relates with enviable
gravity the details of an evening call paid by a monk who had lain in
the cloisters of the Abbaye de Saint Wandrille since 1693, and who
broke a sleep of two centuries that he might spin a table on one leg
for the diversion of the poet’s guests. Their host, while profoundly
indifferent to the entertainment, accepted it with a tolerant shrug.
If it amused both mortals and the monk, why cavil at its infantile
simplicity?
The frolicsome moods of the Lodge table must have been disconcerting
even to such a receptive and sympathetic circle. It performed little
tricks like lying down, or holding two feet in the air, apparently
for its own innocent delight. It emulated Æsop’s affectionate ass,
and “seemed to wish to get into Lady Lodge’s lap, and made caressing
movements to and fro, as if it could not get close enough to her.” It
jocularly thumped piano-players on the back; and when a cushion was
held up to protect them, it banged a hole in the cover. What wonder
that several tables were broken “during the more exuberant period of
these domestic sittings, before the power was under control”; and
that the family was compelled to provide a strong and heavy article
which could stand the “skylarking” (Sir Oliver’s word) of supernatural
visitors.
The ouija board, though an improvement on the table, is mechanical and
cumbersome. It has long been the chosen medium of that most prolific
of spirit writers, Patience Worth; and a sympathetic disciple once
ventured to ask her if there were no less laborious method by which she
could compose her stories. To which Patience, who then used a language
called by her editor “archaic,” and who preferred to “dock the smaller
parts-o’-speech,” replied formidably,--
“The hand o’ her do I to put be the hand o’ her, and ’t is ascribe that
setteth the one awither by eyes-fulls she taketh in.”
The disciple’s mind being thus set at rest, he inquired how Patience
discovered this avenue of approach, and was told,--
“I did to seek at crannies for to put; ay, an’t wer the her o’ her who
tireth past the her o’ her, and slippeth to a naught o’ putting; and ’t
wer the me o’ me at seek, aye, and find. Aye, and ’t wer so.”
The casual and inexpert reader is not always sure what Patience means
to say; but to the initiated her cryptic and monosyllabic speech offers
no difficulties. When asked if she were acquainted with the spirit of
the late Dr. William James, she said darkly,--
“I telled a one o’ the brothers and the neighbours o’ thy day, and he
doth know.”
“This,” comments Mr. Yost, “was considered as an affirmative reply,”
and with it her questioners were content.
All fields of literature are open to Patience Worth, and she disports
herself by turns in prose and verse, fiction and philosophy. Other
spirits have their specialties. They write, as a rule, letters,
sermons, didactic essays, _vers libre_, and an occasional story. But
Patience writes six-act dramas which, we are assured, could, “with a
little alteration,” be produced upon the stage, short comedies “rich in
humour,” country tales, mystical tales, parables, aphorisms, volumes
of verse, and historical novels. In three years and a half she dictated
to Mrs. Curran, her patient ouija-board amanuensis, 900,000 words. It
is my belief that she represents a spirit syndicate, and lends her name
to a large coterie of literary wraiths. The most discouraging feature
of her performance is the possibility of its indefinite extension. She
is what Mr. Yost calls “a continuing phenomenon.” Being dead already,
she cannot die, and the beneficent limit which is set to mortal
endeavour does not exist for her. “The larger literature is to come,”
says Mr. Yost ominously; and we fear he speaks the truth.
Now what do we gain by this lamentable intrusion of ghostly aspirants
into the serried ranks of authorship? What is the value of their
work, and what is its ethical significance? Perhaps because literary
distinction is a rare quality, the editors and publishers of these
revelations lay stress upon the spiritual insight, the finer wisdom,
which may accrue to us from direct contact with liberated souls. They
even hint at some great moral law which may be thus revealed for our
betterment. But the law of Christ is as pure and lofty as any code our
human intelligence can grasp. We do not live by it, because it makes no
concession to the sickly qualities which cement our earthly natures;
but we hold fast to it as an incomparable ideal. It is not law or light
we need. It is the power of effort and resistance. “Toutes les bonnes
maximes sont dans le monde; on ne manque que de les appliquer.”
The didacticism of spirit authors is, so far, their most striking
characteristic. As Mr. Henry James would put it, they are “awkward
writers, but yearning moralists.” Free from any shadow of diffidence,
they proffer a deal of counsel, but it is mostly of the kind which our
next-door neighbour has at our command.
In the volume called “Letters from Harry and Helen,” the dead children
exhort their relatives continuously; and their exhortations, albeit of
a somewhat intimate character, have been passed on to the public as
“an inspiration to the life of brotherhood.” Helen, for example, bids
her mother and sister give away the clothes they do not need. “You had
better send the pink dress to B. You won’t wear it. Lace and a few good
bits of jewelry you can use, and these won’t hurt your progress.” She
also warns them not to take long motor rides with large parties. The
car holds four comfortably; but if her sister _will_ go all afternoon
with five people packed into it, she is sure to be ill. This is
sensible advice, but can it be needful that the dead should revisit
earth to give it?
Harry, a hardy and boisterous spirit, with a fine contempt for
precautions, favours a motor trip across the continent, gallantly
assures his family that the project is “perfectly feasible,” tells his
sister to “shoot some genuine food” at her sick husband, who appears
to have been kept on a low diet, and observes with pleasure that his
mother is overcoming her aversion to tobacco. “Mamma is learning,” he
comments patronizingly. “Some day she will arrive at the point where a
smoker will fail to arouse a spark of criticism, or even of interest.
_When that day comes, she will have learned what she is living for this
time._”
Here was a chance for a ghostly son to get even with the parent who
had disparaged the harmless pleasures of his youth. Harry is not the
kind of a spirit to miss such an opportunity. He finds a great deal to
correct in his family, a great deal to blame in the world, and some
things to criticize in the universe. “I suppose the Creator knows
his own business best,” he observes grudgingly; “but there have been
moments when I felt I could suggest improvements. For instance, had I
been running affairs, I should have been a little more open about this
reincarnation plan of elevating the individual. Why let a soul boggle
along blindly for numberless lives, when just a friendly tip would have
illuminated the whole situation, and enabled him to plan with far less
waste?”
“O eloquent, just and mighty death!” Have we professed to break thy
barriers, to force thy pregnant silence into speech, only to make
of thy majesty a vulgar farce, and, of thy consolations, folly and
self-righteousness?
The “Living Dead Man” has also a course of instruction, in fact
several courses of instruction, to offer. His counsels are all of the
simplest. He bids us drink plenty of water, because water feeds our
astral bodies; to take plenty of sleep, because sleep fits us for
work; and on no account to lose our tempers. He is a gentle, garrulous
ghost, and his first volume is filled with little anecdotes about his
new--and very dull--surroundings, and mild little stories of adventure.
He calls himself an “astral Scheherazade,” but no sultan would ever
have listened to him for a thousand and one nights. He chants _vers
libre_ of a singularly uninspired order, and is particular about his
quotations. “If you print these letters,” he tells his medium, “I wish
you would insert here fragments from that wonderful poem of Wordsworth,
‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’”
Then follow nineteen lines of this fairly familiar masterpiece. There
is something rather droll in having our own printed poets quoted to us
lengthily by cultivated and appreciative spirits.
The “War Letters” dictated by the “Living Dead Man” in the spring and
summer of 1915 are more animated and highly coloured. Some long-past
episodes, notably the entrance of the German soldiers into Brussels,
are well described, though not so vividly as by the living Richard
Harding Davis. We are told in the preface that on the fourth of
February, 1915, the spirit wrote: “When I come back” (he was touring
to a distant star), “and tell you the story of this war, as seen from
the other side, you will know more than all the Chancelleries of the
nations.” This promises well; but in the three hundred pages that
follow there is not one word to indicate that the “Living Dead Man”
had any acquaintance with real happenings which were not published in
our newspapers; or that he was aware of these happenings before the
newspapers published them. He is always on the safe side of prophecy.
In a letter dictated on the seventh of May, the date of the sinking
of the Lusitania, he makes no mention of the crime; but the following
morning, after the ghastly news was known to the world, he writes that
he could have told it twenty-four hours earlier had he not feared to
shock Mrs. Barker’s sensibilities.
It was a mistaken kindness. Nothing could save mankind from a knowledge
of that terrible deed; but four words spoken on the seventh of May
would have revolutionized the world of thought. They would have
compelled belief in phenomena which we are now intellectually free to
reject.
The events narrated by the “Living Dead Man” are of a kind which the
Chancelleries of the nations had no need to know. He tells us that he
and twenty other spirits stood for hours in the palace of Potsdam,
trying with lamentable lack of success to reduce by the pressure of
their will the greater pressure of the war-will surging through
the German nation. He has a dramatic meeting with the spirit of the
murdered Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, and a long interview with the
spirit of Nietzsche, whom he commands--authoritatively--to go back
to earth and teach humility. He rests and refreshes the jaded spirit
of a British officer, killed in action, by showing him a dance of
sylphs; and he meets an old acquaintance, the sylph Meriline (friend
and familiar of a French magician), doing scout duty in the German
trenches. Finally he assures us that Serbia is doomed to disaster,
because a Serbian magician, who died many years ago, left her as a
legacy a host of “astral monsters” that infest the land, awakening from
slumber at the first hint of strife, and revelling in bloodshed and
misery.
It is hard lines on Serbia, and it sounds a good deal like the fairy
tales of our happy infancy. The “Living Dead Man” is careful to let
us know that he has assisted at the war councils of Berlin, being
enabled by an especial hardening of the astral ears to hear all that is
spoken on earth. No secrets of state are hidden from him; but, on such
weighty matters, discretion compels silence. Moreover, the vastness of
his knowledge is out of accord with the puniness of our intelligence.
It cannot be communicated, because there is no avenue of approach.
“The attempt to tell the world what I know now is like trying to play
Beethoven on a penny whistle. I feel as a mathematician would feel
should he set himself down to teach addition to small children. I dare
not tell you more than I do, for you could not contain it.”
And so we are told nothing.
In the little book entitled, “Thy Son Liveth,” which is said to have
been dictated by an American soldier, killed in Flanders, to his
mother, we have a cheerful picture of active young spirits “carrying
on” the business of war, relieving the wounded, soothing the dying,
working up wireless communications (“The German operators cannot see
us when we are around”), and occasionally playing the part of the gods
before the walls of Troy.
“I told you that we were not given any power over bullets, that we can
comfort, but not save from what you call death. That is not quite the
case, I find. Jack Wells directed me to stand by a junior lieutenant
to-day, and impel him this way and that to avoid danger. I discovered
that my perceptions are much more sensitive than they were before
I came out. I can estimate the speed, and determine the course, of
shells. I stood by this fellow, nudged him here and there, and kept him
from being hurt. I asked Wells if that was an answer to prayer. Wells
said, ‘No, the young chap is an inventor, and has a job ahead of him
that’s of importance to the world.’”
It is an interesting episode; but intervention, as we learn from Homer,
is an open game. Perhaps some German lieutenant had a job ahead of
_him_, and scientifically-minded German ghosts saved him from Allied
shells. When the dead American soldier writes that he is going to “get
in touch with Edison,” and work on devices to combat German machines,
we ask ourselves whether dead German soldiers got in touch with Dr.
Haber, and helped him make the poison gas and the flame-throwers which
won the Nobel prize.
That the son should proffer much good advice to his mother seems
inevitable, because it is the passion of all communicative spirits to
advise. He is also happy to correct certain false impressions which she
has derived from the Evangelists.
“I got your wire calling my attention to the scriptural statement that
in Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, and I do
not know what to say. It seemed (until you gave me this jolt) that the
Bible bears out everything that I have been able to tell you. Perhaps
the chronicler got balled up in this particular quotation. For love and
marriage are certainly in bud and flower here. I can see this fact with
my own eyes.”
He can do more than see it with his own eyes. He can feel it with his
own heart. A few pages later comes this naïve confession:
“Jack Wells and I are very close friends. His sister’s name is Alice,
and she has grown up in the country beyond, where his folks live. It
seems all reach or return to maturity. Youth blossoms and flowers, but
does not decay. I can call up her vision at any time. But I want her
near.”
A simple and guileless little book, preposterous only in the
assumption that the human race has waited for centuries to receive its
revelations.
We have been told that the Great War stands responsible for our mental
disturbance, for the repeated assaults upon taste and credulity before
which the walls of our minds are giving way. Mr. Howells, observing
rather sympathetically the ghostly stir and thrill which pervades
literature, asked if it were due to the overwhelming numbers of the
dead, if it came to us straight from sunken ships, and from the
battle-fields of Europe.