circumstance? A single dead man and a million of dead men stand in
the same relation to the living. If ever there was a time when it was
needful to hold on to our sanity with all our might, that time is now.
Our thoughts turn, and will long turn, to the men who laid down their
lives for our safety. How could it be otherwise? There is, and there
has always been, a sense of comradeship with the departed. It is a
noble and a still comradeship, untarnished by illusions, unvulgarized
by extravagant details. Newman has portrayed it in “A Voice from Afar”;
and Mr. Rowland Thirlmere has made it the theme of some very simple
and touching verses called “Jimmy Doane.” The elderly Englishman who
has lost his friend, a young American aviator, “generous, clever, and
confident,” and who sits alone, with his heart cold and sore, feels
suddenly the welcome nearness of the dead. No table heaves its heavy
legs to announce that silent presence. No alphabet is needed for his
message. But the living man says simply to his friend, “My house is
always open to you,” and hopes that they may sit quietly together when
the dreams of both are realized, and the hour of deliverance comes.
The attitude of spirit authors to the war varies from the serene
detachment of Raymond, who had been a soldier, to the passionate
partisanship of the “Living Dead Man,” who had been a civilian; but
who, like the anonymous “Son,” cannot refrain from playing a lively
part in the struggle. “Many a time have I clutched with my too-tenuous
hands a German soldier who was about to disgrace himself.” Harry and
Helen express some calm regret that the lack of unselfish love should
make war possible, and report that “Hughey”--their brother-in-law’s
brother--“has gone to throw all he possesses of light into the dark
struggle.” Apparently his beams failed signally to illuminate the
gloom, which is not surprising when we learn that “a selfish or
ill-natured thought” (say from a Bulgarian or a Turk) “lowers the
rate of vibration throughout the entire universe.” They also join
the “White Cross” nurses, and are gratified that their knowledge of
French enables them to receive and encourage the rapidly arriving
French soldiers. Helen, being the better scholar of the two, is able
to give first aid, while Harry brushes up his verbs. In the absence of
French caretakers, who seem to have all gone elsewhere, the two young
Americans are in much demand.
Remote from such crass absurdities (which have their confiding readers)
is the quiet, if somewhat perfunctory, counsel given by “The Invisible
Guide” to Mr. C. Lewis Hind, and by him transmitted to the public.
There is nothing offensive or distasteful in this little volume which
has some charming chapters, and which purports to be an answer to
the often asked question, “How may I enter into communion with the
departed?” If the admonitions of the dead soldier, who is the “Guide,”
lack pith and marrow, they do not lack it more perceptibly than do the
admonitions of living counsellors, and he is always commendably brief.
What depresses us is the quality of his pacifism expressed at a time
which warranted the natural and noble anger awakened by injustice.
It is the peculiarity of all pacifists that wrongdoing disturbs them
less than does the hostility it provokes. The “Guide” has not a sigh to
waste over Belgium and Serbia. Air-raids and submarines fail to disturb
his serenity. But he cannot endure a picture called _Mitrailleuse_,
which represents four French soldiers firing a machine gun. When his
friend, the author, so far forgets himself as to be angry at the
insolence of some Germans, the “Guide,” pained by such intolerance,
refuses any communication; and when, in more cheerful mood, the author
ventures to be a bit enthusiastic over the gallant feats of a young
aviator, the “Guide” murmurs faintly and reproachfully, “It is the
mothers that suffer.”
One is forced to doubt if guidance such as this would ever have led to
victory.
Raymond, though he has been thrust before the public without pity
and without reserve, has shown no disposition to enter the arena of
authorship. He has been content to prattle to his own family about the
conditions that surround him, about the brick house he lives in, the
laboratories he visits, where “all sorts of things” are manufactured
out of “essences and ether and gases,”--rather like German war
products, and the lectures that he attends. The subjects of these
lectures are spirituality, concentration, and--alas!--“the projection
of uplifting and helpful thoughts to those on the earth plane.” Such
scraps of wisdom as are vouchsafed him he passes dutifully on to his
parents. He tells his mother that, on the spiritual plane, “Rank
doesn’t count as a virtue. High rank comes by being virtuous.”
“Kind hearts are more than coronets.”
Also that “It isn’t always the parsons that go highest first,” and that
“It isn’t what you’ve professed; it’s what you’ve done.” Something of
this kind we have long suspected. Something of this kind has long been
hinted from the plain pulpits of the world.
I fear it is the impatience of the human mind, the hardness of the
human heart, which make us restless under too much preaching. Volume
after volume of “messages” have been sent to us by spirits during the
last few years. There is no fault to be found with any of them, and
that sad word, “uplifting,” may well apply to all. Is it possible that,
when we die, we shall preach to one another; or is it the elusiveness
of ghostly audiences which drives determined preachers to the ouija
board? The somewhat presumptuous title, “To Walk With God,” which Mrs.
Lane and Mrs. Beale have given to their volume of revelations, was,
we are told, commanded by the spirit who dictated it. “Stephen,” the
dead soldier who stands responsible for the diffuse philosophy of “Our
Unseen Guest,” dedicates the book to the “wistful” questioners who
seek enlightenment at his hands. “Anne Simon,” a transcendental spirit
with a strong bias for hyphenated words, sends her modest “Message,”
dictated through her husband, to “world-mortals for their regeneration.”
How lightly that tremendous word, “regeneration,” is bandied about by
our ghostly preceptors. Mr. Basil King, in “The Abolishing of Death,”
reports the spirit of Henry Talbot, the distinguished Boston chemist,
as saying, “My especial mission is to regenerate the world.” It is a
large order. The ungrateful but always curious mortal who would like
a few practical hints about chemistry, is told instead that “grief is
unrhythmical,” which proves that Mr. Talbot never read “In Memoriam”;
or finds himself beset by figurative phrases. “Literature is the
sun, music is the water, sculpture is the earth, dancing is life, and
painting is the soul. These in their purity can never be evil. I have
spread a table in your sight. Whatever is on it is for your use. Take
freely, and give it to others. They hunger for the food.”
For what do we hunger? For any word which will help us on our hard but
interesting way, any word which is wise, or practically useful, or
beautiful. It has been revealed to Mr. King that poets as splendid as
Homer and Shakespeare bloom in the spirit world. Why, in the general
assault by dead authors, are _they_ the silent ones? Could they not
give us one good play, one good lyric, one good sonnet, just to show a
glint of their splendour? What is wrong with psychic currents that they
bear nothing of value? “Stephen,” the “Unseen Guest,” assures us that
many a man we call a genius “simply puts into words the thoughts of
some greater mentality in the other life.” But this is not adding to
our store. It is trying to take away from us the merit of what we have.
“Anne Simon” reads the riddle thus: “In earth-proximity the spirit
leaves behind him his efficacy, for the time, of Heaven-emanation;
so it is better to open the heart, and wish the larger beneficence
than to visualize the spirit-form. For the spirit-form without its
spirit-treasure does not bring the mortal to the higher places.”
Which, though not wholly intelligible, is doubtless true.
If we do not get what we hunger for, what is it we receive? Professor
Hyslop once assured me that the authorship of “Jap Herron” was “proved
beyond question.” This contented him, but dismayed me. The eclipse of
the “merry star” which danced above Mark Twain’s cradle, and which
shone on him fitfully through life, suggests direful possibilities
in the future. It is whispered that O. Henry is busily dictating
allegories and tracts; that Dickens may yet reveal “The Mystery of
Edwin Drood”; that Washington Irving has loomed on the horizon of an
aspiring medium. The publication of “Shakespeare’s Revelations, by
Shakespeare’s Spirit: A Soul’s Record of Defeat,” adds a touch of
fantastic horror to the situation. The taste of the world, like the
sanity of the world, has seemingly crashed into impotence.
Patience Worth is fortunate in so far that she has no earlier
reputation at stake. In fact, we are informed that three of her stories
are told in “a dialect which, taken as a whole, was probably never
spoken, and certainly never written. Each seems to be a composite
of dialect words and idioms of different periods and different
localities.” It is Mr. Yost’s opinion, however, that her long
historical novel, “The Sorry Tale,” is composed “in a literary tongue
somewhat resembling the language of the King James version of the
Bible in form and style, but with the unmistakable verbal peculiarities
of Patience Worth.” “What bringeth thee asearch?” and “Who hath the
trod of the antelope?” are doubtless verbal peculiarities; but for any
resemblance to the noble and vigorous lucidity of the English Bible we
may search in vain through the six hundred and forty closely printed
pages of this confused, wandering, sensuous, and wholly unreadable
narrative, which purports to tell the life-history of the penitent
thief. I quote a single paragraph, snatched at random from the text,
which may serve as a sample of the whole:
“And within, upon the skins’-pack, sat Samuel, who listed him, and
lo, the jaws of him hung ope. And Jacob wailed, and the Jew’s tongue
of him sounded as the chatter of fowls, and he spake of the fool that
plucked of his ass that he save of down. Yea, and walked him at the
sea’s edge, and yet sought o’ pools. And he held aloft unto the men who
hung them o’er the bin’s place handsful of brass and shammed precious
stuffs, and cried him out.”
Six hundred and forty pages of this kind of writing defy a patient
world. And we are threatened with “the larger literature to come”!
“Hope Trueblood,” Patience Worth’s last novel, is written in
intelligible English, as is also the greater part of her verse. The
story deals with the doubtful legitimacy of a little girl in an English
village which has lived its life along such straight lines that the
mere existence of a bastard child, or a child thought to be a bastard,
rocks it to its foundations, and furnishes sufficient matter for
violent and heart-wounding scenes from the first chapter to the last.
It is difficult to follow the fortunes of this child (who might have
been the great original devil baby of Hull House for the pother she
creates) because of the confusion of the narrative, and because of the
cruelly high pitch at which all emotions are sustained; but we gather
that the marriage lines are at last triumphantly produced, and that the
village is suffered to relapse into the virtuous somnolence of earlier
days.
Mr. Yost, who has edited all of Patience Worth’s books, and who
is perhaps a partial critic, praises her poems for their rare
individuality. We may search in vain, he says, through literature for
anything resembling them. “They are alike in the essential features of
all poetry, and yet they are unalike. There is something in them that
is not in other poetry. In the profusion of their metaphor there is an
etherealness that more closely resembles Shelley, perhaps, than any
other poet; but the beauty of Shelley’s poems is almost wholly in their
diction; there is in him no profundity of thought. In these poems
there is both beauty and depth,--and something else.”
Whatever this “something else” may be, it is certainly not rhyme or
rhythm. The verses brook no bondage, but run loosely on with the
perilous ease of enfranchisement. For the most part they are of the
kind which used to be classified by compilers as “Poems of Nature,” and
“Poems of Sentiment and Reflection.” Spring, summer, autumn, and winter
are as inspirational for the dead as for the living.
“’Tis season’s parting.
Yea, and earth doth weep. The Winter cometh,
And he bears her jewels for the decking
Of his bride. A glittered crown
Shall fall ’pon earth, and sparkled drop
Shall stand like gem that flasheth
’Pon a nobled brow. Yea, the tears
Of earth shall freeze and drop
As pearls, the necklace o’ the earth
’Tis season’s parting. Yea,
The earth doth weep.
’Tis Fall.”
These simple statements might justifiably be printed without the
capital letters which distinguish prose from verse; but we can
understand them, and we are familiar with the phenomena they describe.
Byron has recorded in a letter to Hoppner the profound impression made
upon him by two concise epitaphs in the cemetery of Bologna.
MARTINI LUIGI
Implora pace.
LUCREZIA PICINI
Implora eterna quiete.
It seemed to the poet--himself in need of peace--that all the weariness
of life, and all the gentle humility of the tired but trusting soul,
were compressed into those lines. There is nothing calamitous in death.
“The patrimony of a little mould,
And entail of four planks,”
is the common heritage of mankind, and we accept it reverently. A
belief in the immortality of the soul has been fairly familiar to
Christendom before the spiritualists adopted it as their exclusive
slogan. But to escape from time, only to enter upon an eternity shorn
of everything which could make eternity endurable, to pass through the
narrow door which opens on the highways of God, only to find ourselves
dictating dull books, and delivering platitudinous lectures,--which of
us has courage to face such possibilities!
We are told that once, when Patience Worth was spelling out the endless
pages of “The Sorry Tale,” she came to a sudden stop, then wrote, “This
be nuff,” and knocked off for the night. A blessed phrase, and, of a
certainty, her finest inspiration. Would that all dead authors would
adopt it as their motto; and with ouija boards, and table-legs, and
automatic pencils, write as their farewell message to the world those
three short, comely words, “This be nuff.”
Consolations of the Conservative
There is a story of Hawthorne’s which is little known, because it is
too expansively dull to be read. It tells how the nations of the earth,
convulsed by a mighty spasm of reform, rid themselves of the tools
and symbols of all they held in abhorrence. Because they would have
no more war, they destroyed the weapons of the world. Because they
would have no more drunkenness, they destroyed its wines and spirits.
Because they banned self-indulgence, they destroyed tobacco, tea, and
coffee. Because they would have all men to be equal, they destroyed the
insignia of rank, from the crown jewels of England to the medal of the
Cincinnati. Wealth itself was not permitted to survive, lest the new
order be as corrupt as was the old. Nothing was left but the human
heart with its imperishable and inalienable qualities; and while it
beats within the human breast, the world must still be moulded by its
passions. “When Cain wished to slay his brother,” murmured a cynic,
watching the great guns trundled to the blaze, “he was at no loss for a
weapon.”
If belief in the perfectibility of man--and not of man only, but of
governments--is the inspiration of liberalism, of radicalism, of the
spirit that calls clamorously for change, and that has requisitioned
the words reform and progression, sympathy with man and with his
work, with the beautiful and imperfect things he has made of the
chequered centuries, is the keynote of conservatism. The temperamental
conservative is a type vulnerable to ridicule, yet not more innately
ridiculous than his neighbours. He has been carelessly defined as a
man who is cautious because he has a good income, and content because
he is well placed; who is thick-headed because he lacks vision, and
close-hearted because he is deaf to the moaning wind which is the cry
of unhappy humanity asking justice from a world which has never known
how to be just. Lecky, who had a neat hand at analysis, characterized
the great conflicting parties in an axiom which pleased neither:
“Stupidity in all its forms is Tory; folly in all its forms is Whig.”
These things have been too often said to be quite worth the saying.
Stupidity is not the prerogative of any one class or creed. It
is Heaven’s free gift to men of all kinds, and conditions, and
civilizations. A practical man, said Disraeli, is one who perpetuates
the blunders of his predecessor instead of striking out into blunders
of his own. Temperamental conservatism is the dower (not to be
coveted) of men in whom delight and doubt--I had almost said delight
and despair--contend for mastery; whose enjoyment of colour, light,
atmosphere, tradition, language and literature is balanced by chilling
apprehensiveness; whose easily won pardon for the shameless revelations
of an historic past brings with it no healing belief in the triumphant
virtues of the future.
The conservative is not an idealist, any more than he is an optimist.
Idealism has worn thin in these days of colossal violence and colossal
cupidity. Perhaps it has always been a cloak for more crimes than even
liberty sheltered under her holy name. The French Jacobins were pure
idealists; but they translated the splendour of their aspirations,
the nobility and amplitude of their great conception, into terms of
commonplace official murder, which are all the more displeasing to
look back upon because of the riot of sentimentalism and impiety which
disfigured them. It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad
taste is unpardonable. If we had resolutely severed the word “idealism”
from the bloody chaos which is Russia, we should have understood more
clearly, and have judged no less leniently, the seething ambitions
of men who passionately desired, and desire, control. The elemental
instinct of self-preservation is the first step to the equally
elemental instinct of self-interest. Natural rights, about which we
chatter freely, are not more equably preserved by denying them to
one class of men than by denying them to another. They have been
ill-protected under militarism and capitalism; and their subversion has
been a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance. They are not protected
at all under any Soviet government so far known to report.
Nothing is easier than to make the world safe for democracy. Democracy
is playing her own hand in the game. She has every intention and
every opportunity to make the world safe for herself. But democracy
may be divorced from freedom, and freedom is the breath of man’s
nostrils, the strength of his sinews, the sanction of his soul. It is
as painful to be tyrannized over by a proletariat as by a tsar or by a
corporation, and it is in a measure more disconcerting, because of the
greater incohesion of the process. It is as revolting to be robbed by
a reformer as by a trust. Oppressive taxation, which forced the great
Revolution upon France; dishonest “deals,” which have made a mockery of
justice in the United States; ironic laws, framed for the convenient
looting of the bourgeoisie in Russia;--there is as much idealism in
one device as in the others. Sonorous phrases like “reconstruction of
the world’s psychology,” and “creation of a new world-atmosphere,” are
mental sedatives, drug words, calculated to put to sleep any uneasy
apprehensions. They may mean anything, and they do mean nothing, so
that it is safe to go on repeating them. But a Bolshevist official was
arrested in Petrograd in March, 1919, charged with embezzling fifteen
million rubles. Not content with the excesses of the new régime, he
must needs revert to the excesses of the old,--a discouraging study in
evolution.
When Lord Hugh Cecil published his analysis of conservatism nine
years ago, the British reviewers devoted a great deal of time to its
consideration,--not so much because they cared for what the author
had to say (though he said it thoughtfully and well), as because
they had opinions of their own on the subject, and desired to give
them utterance. Cecil’s conception of temperamental, as apart from
modern British political conservatism (which he dates from Pitt and
Burke), affords the most interesting part of the volume; but the line
of demarcation is a wavering one. That famous sentence of Burke’s
concerning innovations that are not necessarily reforms, “They shake
the public security, they menace private enjoyment,” shows the alliance
between temperament and valuation. It was Burke’s passionate delight in
life’s expression, rather than in life’s adventure, that made him alive
to its values. He was not averse to change: change is the law of the
universe; but he changed in order to preserve. The constructive forces
of the world persistently won his deference and support.
The intensely British desire to have a moral, and, if possible, a
religious foundation for a political creed would command our deepest
respect, were the human mind capable of accommodating its convictions
to morality and religion, instead of accommodating morality and
religion to its convictions. Cecil, a stern individualist, weighted
with a heavy sense of personal responsibility, and disposed to
distrust the kindly intervention of the State, finds, naturally enough,
that Christianity is essentially individualistic. “There is not a line
of the New Testament that can be quoted in favour of the enlargement
of the function of the State beyond the elementary duty of maintaining
order and suppressing crime.”
The obvious retort to this would be that there is not a line in the
New Testament which can be quoted in favour of the confinement of the
function of the State to the elementary duty of maintaining order and
suppressing crime. The counsel of Christ is a counsel of perfection,
and a counsel of perfection is necessarily personal and intimate. What
the world asks now are state reforms and social reforms,--in other
words, the reformation of our neighbours. What the Gospel asks, and
has always asked, is the reformation of ourselves,--a harassing and
importunate demand. Mr. Chesterton spoke but the truth when he said
that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been
found difficult, and not tried.
Cecil’s conclusions anent the unconcern of the Gospels with forms of
government were, strangely enough, the points very ardently disputed by
Bible-reading England. A critic in the “Contemporary Review” made the
interesting statement that the political economy of the New Testament
is radical and sound. He illustrated his argument with the parable
of the labourers in the vine-yard, pointing out that the master paid
the men for the hours in which they had had no work. “In the higher
economics,” he said, “the State, as representing the community,
is responsible for those who, through the State’s malfeasance,
misfeasance, or nonfeasance, are unable to obtain the work for which
they wait.”
But apart from the fact that the parable is meant to have a spiritual
and not a material significance, there is nothing in the Gospel to
indicate that the master considered that he owed the late-comers their
day’s wage. His comment upon his own action disclaims this assumption:
“Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” And it is
worthy of note that the protest against his liberality comes, not from
other vine-growers objecting to a precedent, but from the labourers who
cannot be brought to see that an hour’s work done by their neighbours
may be worth as much as twelve hours’ work done by themselves. Human
nature has not altered perceptibly in the course of two thousand years.