the apotheosis of superficiality. The obvious is its support, the inane
is its ornament. Consider the mental attitude of a writer who does not
hesitate to say in a perfectly good periodical, which does not hesitate
to publish his words: “Nothing makes a man happier than to know that he
is of use to his own time.” Only in a sunburst of cheerfulness could
such a naked truism be shamelessly exposed. I can remember that, when
I was a child, statements of this order were engraved in neat script
on the top line of our copy-books. But it was understood that their
value lay in their chirography, in the unapproachable perfection of
every letter, not in the message they conveyed. Our infant minds were
never outraged by seeing them in printed text. Those were serious and
self-respecting days when no one sent our mothers a calendar with three
hundred and sixty-five words of cheer, designed to jack up the lowered
morale of the family. The missionary spirit was at work then as now;
but it mostly dropped tracts on our doorstep, reminding us that we
might be in hell before to-morrow morning.
The gaiety of life is a saving grace, and high spirits are more than
the appanage of youth. They represent the rebound of the resilient soul
from moods of dejection, and it is their transient character which
makes them so infectious. Landor’s line,
“That word, that sad word, Joy,”
is manifestly unfair. Joy is a delightful, flashing little word, as
brief as is the emotion it conveys. We all know what it means, but
nobody dares to preach it, as they preach three-syllabled cheerfulness,
and gladness which once had a heroic sound, the “gladness that hath
favour with God,” but which is now perilously close to slang. The early
Christians, who had on a large scale the courage of their convictions,
found in their faith sufficient warrant for content. They seem to
have lived and died with a serenity, a perfect good humour, which is
the highest result of the best education. But when Mr. Shaw attempted
to elucidate in “Androcles and the Lion” this difficult and delicate
conception, he peopled his stage with Pollyannas, who voiced their
cheerfulness so clamorously that they made persecution pardonable. No
public could be expected to endure such talk when it had an easy method
of getting rid of the talkers.
The leniency of the law now leaves us without escape. We cannot
throw our smiling neighbours to the lions, and they override us in
what seems to me a spirit of cowardly exultation. Female optimists
write insufferable papers on “Happy Hours for Old Ladies,” and male
optimists write delusive papers on “Happiness as a Business Asset.”
Reforming optimists who, ten years ago, bade us rejoice over the
elimination of war,--“save on the outskirts of civilization,” now bid
us rejoice over the elimination of alcohol,--save on the tables of the
rich. Old-fashioned optimists, like Mr. Horace Fletcher, put faith in
the “benevolent intentions” of nature,--nature busy with the scorpion’s
tail. New-fashioned optimists, like Professor Ralph Barton Perry (who
may not know how optimistic he is), put faith in the mistrust of nature
which has armed the hands of men. Sentimental optimists, the most
pervasive of the tribe, blur the fine outlines of life, to see which
clearly and bravely is the imperative business of man’s soul.
For the world of thought is not one whit more tranquil than the world
of action. The man whose “mind to him a kingdom is” wears his crown
with as much uneasiness as does a reigning monarch. Giordano Bruno,
who had troubles of his own, and who knew by what road they came,
commended ignorance as a safeguard from melancholy. If, disregarding
this avenue of escape, we look with understanding, and sometimes even
with exhilaration, upon the portentous spectacle of life, if we have
tempers so flawless that we can hold bad hands and still enjoy the
game, then, with the sportsman’s relish, will come the sportsman’s
reward; a reward, be it remembered, which is in the effort only, and
has little to do with results.
“Il faut chanter! chanter, même en sachant
Qu’il existe des chants qu’on préfère à son chant.”
The generous illusions which noble souls like Emerson’s have cherished
undismayed are ill-fitted for loose handling. Good may be the final
goal of evil, but if we regard evil with a too sanguine eye, it is
liable to be thrown out of perspective. In the spring of 1916, when
the dark days of the war were upon us, and the toll of merchant
ships grew heavier week by week with Germany’s mounting contempt for
admonitions, I heard a beaming gentleman point out to a large audience,
which tried to beam responsively, that the “wonderful” thing about the
contest was the unselfish energy it had awakened in the breasts of
American women. He dwelt unctuously upon their relief committees, upon
the excellence of their hospital supplies, upon their noble response to
the needs of humanity. He repeated a great many times how good it was
for _us_ to do these things. He implied, though he did not say it in
rude words, that the agony of Europe was nicely balanced by the social
regeneration of America. He was a sentimental Rochefoucauld, rejoicing,
without a particle of guile, that the misfortunes of our friends had
given us occasion to manifest our friendship.
It has been often asserted that unscrupulous optimism is an endearing
trait, that the world loves it even when forced to discountenance it,
and that “radiant” people are personally and perennially attractive.
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson said something of this sort, and his
authority is invoked by sentimentalists who compile calendars,
and birthday books, and texts to encumber our walls. They fail to
distinguish the finely tempered spirit which carried Mr. Stevenson
over the stony places of life, and which was beautiful beyond measure
(the stones being many and hard), from the inconsequent cheerfulness
which says that stones are soft. We cannot separate an author
from his work, and nowhere in Stevenson’s books does he guarantee
anything more optimistic than courage. The triumph of evil in “Thrawn
Janet,” the hopelessness of escape from heredity in “Olalla,” the
shut door in “Markheim,” the stern contempt in “A Lodging for the
Night,” the inextinguishable and unpardonable hatreds in “The Master
of Ballantrae,” even the glorious contentiousness of “Virginibus
Puerisque,”--where in these masterful pages are we invited to smile
at life? We go spinning through it, he admits, “like a party for the
Derby.” Yet “the whole way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of
it, for those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin.”
This is a call for courage, for the courage that lay as deep as pain in
the souls of Stevenson, and Johnson, and Lamb. The combination of a sad
heart and a gay temper, which is the most charming and the most lovable
thing the world has got to show, gave to these men their hold upon the
friends who knew them in life, and still wins for them the personal
regard of readers. Lamb, the saddest and the gayest of the three,
cultivated sedulously the little arts of happiness. He opened all the
avenues of approach. He valued at their worth a good play, a good
book, a good talk, and a good dinner. He lived in days when occasional
drunkenness failed to stagger humanity, and when roast pig was within
the income of an East India clerk. He had a gift, subtle rather than
robust, for enjoyment, and a sincere accessibility to pain. His words
were unsparing, his actions kind. He binds us to him by his petulance
as well as by his patience, by his entirely human revolt from dull
people and tiresome happenings. He was not one of those who
“lightly lose
Their all, yet feel no aching void.
Should aught annoy them, they refuse
To be annoyed.”
On the contrary, the whimsical expression of his repeated annoyance is
balm to our fretted souls.
For the friend whom we love is the friend who gets wet when he is
rained on, who is candid enough to admit failure, and courageous
enough to mock at it. When Jane Austen wrote to her sister that she did
not have a very good time at a party, because men were disposed not to
ask her to dance until they could not help it, she did more than make
Cassandra smile; she won her way into the hearts of readers for whom
that letter was not meant. We know the “radiant” people to whom all
occasions are enjoyable, who intimate--with some skill, I confess--that
they carry mirth and gaiety in their wake. They are capable of
describing a Thanksgiving family dinner as mirthful because they were
participants. Not content with a general profession of pleasure in
living, “which is all,” says Mr. Henry Adams, “that the highest rules
of good breeding should ask,” they insist upon the delightfulness of a
downcast world, and they offer their personal sentiments as proof.
Dr. Johnson’s sputtering rage at the happy old lady is the most human
thing recorded of his large and many-sided humanity. A great thinker
who confronted life with courage and understanding was set at naught,
and, to speak truth, routed, by an unthinking, but extremely solid,
asseveration. And after all the old lady was not calling for recruits;
she was simply stating a case. Miss Helen Keller, in a book called
“Optimism,” says very plainly that if she, a blind deaf mute, can be
happy, every one can achieve happiness, and that it is every one’s duty
to achieve it. Now there is not a decent man or woman in the country
who will not be glad to know that Miss Keller is, as she says she is,
happy; but this circumstance does not affect the conditions of life
as measured by all who meet them. The whole strength of the preaching
world has gone into optimism, with the result that it has reached a
high place in man’s estimation, is always spoken of with respect, and
not infrequently mistaken for a virtue.
Are we then so sunk in dejection, so remote from the splendid and
unconscious joy which the struggle for life gave to the centuries that
are over? Time was when men needed the curb, and not the spur, in that
valorous contention. “How high the sea of human delight rose in the
Middle Ages,” says Mr. Chesterton, “we know only by the colossal walls
they built to keep it within bounds.” Optimism was as superfluous as
meliorism when the world was in love with living, when Christianity
preached penance and atonement for sin, striving by golden promises
and direful threats to wean man from that unblessed passion, to turn
the strong tide of his nature back from the earth that nourished it.
There was never but one thorough-going optimist among the Fathers of
the Church, and that was Origen, who looked forward confidently to the
final conversion of Satan. His attitude was full of nobleness because
he had suffered grievously at the heathen’s hands; but not even by the
alchemy of compassion is evil transmutable to good.
The Stoics, who proposed that men should practise virtue without
compensation, were logically unassailable, but not persuasive to the
average mind. It does not take much perspicuity to distinguish between
an agreeable and a disagreeable happening, and once the difference is
perceived, no argument can make them equally acceptable. “Playing at
mummers is one thing,” says the sapient tanner in Kenneth Grahame’s
“Headswoman,” “and being executed is another. Folks ought to keep them
separate.” On the other hand, the assurance of the Epicureans that
goodness and temperance were of value because they conduced to content
was liable to be set aside by the man who found himself contented
without them. “The poor world, to do it justice,” says Gilbert Murray,
“has never lent itself to any such bare-faced deception as the optimism
of the Stoics”; but neither are we disposed to recognize enlightened
self-interest as a spiritual agency. It may perhaps be trusted to make
a good husband or a good vestryman, but not a good human being.
A highly rational optimist, determined to be logical at any cost,
observed recently in a British review that sympathy was an invasion
of liberty. “If I must sorrow because another is sorrowing, I am a
slave to my feelings, and it is best that I shall be slave to nothing.
Perfect freedom means that I am able to follow my own will, and my will
is to be happy rather than to be sad. I love pleasure rather than pain.
Therefore if I am moved to sorrow against my will, I am enslaved by my
sympathy.”
This is an impregnable position. It is the old, old philosophy of the
cold heart and the warm stomach. I do not say that it is unwise. I say
only that it is unlikable.
For our quarrel with Christian Science is, not that it prefers Mrs.
Eddy to Æsculapius, or her practitioners to his practitioners; not
that it sometimes shames us by rising superbly above our froward
nerves, and on less happy occasions denies the existence of a cold
which is intruding itself grossly upon the senses; but that it exempts
its followers from legitimate pity and grief. Only by refusing such
exemption can we play our whole parts in the world. While there is a
wrong done, we must admit some measure of defeat; while there is a pang
suffered, we have no right to unflawed serenity. To cheat ourselves
intellectually that we may save ourselves spiritually is unworthy of
the creature that man is meant to be.
And to what end! Things are as they are, and no amount of
self-deception makes them otherwise. The friend who is incapable of
depression depresses us as surely as the friend who is incapable of
boredom bores us. Somewhere in our hearts is a strong, though dimly
understood, desire to face realities, and to measure consequences, to
have done with the fatigue of pretending. It is not optimism to enjoy
the view when one is treed by a bull; it is philosophy. The optimist
would say that being treed was a valuable experience. The disciple
of gladness would say it was a pleasurable sensation. The Christian
Scientist would say there was no bull, though remaining--if he were
wise--on the tree-top. The philosopher would make the best of a bad
job, and seek what compensation he could find. He is of a class apart.
If, as scientists assert, fear is the note which runs through the
universe, courage is the unconquerable beat of man’s heart. A “wise
sad valour” won the war at a cost we do well to remember; and from
unnumbered graves comes a stern reminder that the world can hold wrongs
which call for such a righting. We for whom life has been made, not
safe, but worth the living, can now afford “le bel sérieux” which
befits the time and occasion. When preachers cease pointing out to us
inaccessible routes to happiness, we may stop the chase long enough to
let her softly overtake us. When the Gospellers of Gladness free us of
their importunities, our exhausted spirits may yet revive to secret
hours of mirth. When we frankly abandon an attitude of cheerfulness,
our Malvolio smile may break into sudden peals of laughter. What have
we gained from the past seven years if not zest for the difficulties
and dangers ahead of us? What lesson have we learned but intrepidity?
The noble Greek lines upon a drowned seaman sound in our ears, and
steady us to action:
“A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when he was lost,
Weathered the gale.”
The Beloved Sinner
All the world does not love a lover. It is a cultivated taste, alien
to the natural man, and unknown to childhood. But all the world
does love a sinner, either because he is convertible to a saint, or
because a taste for law-breaking is an inheritance from our first
parents, who broke the one and only law imposed upon them. The little
children whom Fra Lippo Lippi sees standing in a “row of admiration”
around the murderer on the altar step express their innocent interest
in crime. Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche,” has never stirred
the heart of youth as has Robin Hood, that bold outlaw who “beat
and bound” unpopular sheriffs, and “readjusted the distribution of
property,”--delightful phrase, as old as the world, and as fresh as
to-morrow morning. The terrible and undeserved epithet, “blameless,”
has robbed great Arthur of his just meed of homage. The “Master Thief”
enjoyed, and still enjoys, unmerited popularity.
I sometimes wonder what a man conscious of talent, like the Master
Thief, would have thought if the simple criminologists of his day--who
knew no subtler remedy than hanging--had confronted him with clinics,
and laboratories, and pamphlets on the “disease of crime.” I sometimes
wonder how his able descendants, like the humorous rogues who stole the
gold cup at Ascot; or the wag who slipped the stolen purses (emptied
of their contents) into the pocket of the Bishop of Lincoln; or the
redoubtable Raymond--alias Wirth--who stole a shipping of Kimberley
diamonds and a Gainsborough portrait, feel about their pathological
needs. “The criminal is a sick man, the prison is his hospital, and the
judge who sentenced him is his physician,” said Dr. Vaughan, dean of
the Medical School in the University of Michigan. “Does a hunting man
give up riding to hounds because he has had a fall?” asked a stalwart
“invalid,” serving a sentence for burglary, of the chaplain who had
urged upon him the security of an honest life.
It is always animating to hear the convict’s point of view. In fact,
everything appertaining to criminology interests us as deeply as
everything appertaining to pauperism bores and repels us. Some years
ago the “Nineteenth Century” offered its pages as a debating-ground for
this absorbing theme. Arguments were presented by Sir Alfred Wills, a
judge of twenty-one years’ standing, Sir Robert Anderson, author of
“Criminals and Crime,” and Mr. H. J. B. Montgomery, an ex-convict and a
fluent writer, albeit somewhat supercilious as befitted his estate. He
took the bold and popular stand that society has created the criminal
class, that its members detest the crimes they commit with such
apparent zest, and that they should be “tended and cheered” instead
of subjected to the “extreme stupidity” of prison life. Indeterminate
sentences which carry with them an element of hope, and which should be
an incentive to reform because they imply its possibility, he condemned
without reserve as putting a premium on hypocrisy. But the point which
of all others aroused his just resentment was the demand made by the
two jurists for restitution.
This is the crux of a situation which in the moral law is simplicity
itself; but which the evasiveness of the civil law has unduly
complicated, and which the random humanitarianism of our day has
buried out of sight. Every crime is an offence against the State. It
is also in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred an offence against
a fellow-creature, which fellow-creature is called a victim, and
interests nobody. Sir Alfred Wills and Sir Robert Anderson both held
that thieves, big thieves especially, should be compelled to say what
disposition had been made of stolen property, and that they should
be imprisoned for life if they refused. Anderson was firm in his
insistence that the act of thieving alienates such property actually,
but not legally or morally, from its owner, and that serving a sentence
for robbery does not clear the robber’s title to the goods. He also
pointed out that the most heartless thefts are committed daily at the
expense of people in decent but narrow circumstances, because such
people are compelled to leave their homes unprotected. He instanced the
case of one woman robbed of her scanty savings, and of another who lost
her dead soldier husband’s medals, and the few poor cherished trinkets
he had given her.
In the matter of restitution, Mr. Montgomery stood fairly and squarely
for the felon’s rights. “The law,” he said, “has nothing to do, and
ought to have nothing to do, with the disposal of the booty”; and
he was happy in the conviction that it would never go so far as to
deprive the thief of the reward of his labour, of the money stolen by
the sweat of his brow. As for staying in jail until such restitution
was made, that was as ridiculous as the suggestion sometimes offered
that the convict’s wages should be paid over to the man he has robbed.
Nobody cares about a man who has been robbed. The interest felt in the
criminal extends itself occasionally to the criminal’s family, but
never to the family he has wronged. In the United States where robbery
is the order of the day, there isn’t sympathy enough to go ’round among
the many who play a losing game. Chicago alone boasts a record of one
hundred and seventy-five hold-ups in two nights, an amazing tribute
to industry and zeal. Many of the victims were stripped of their coats
as well as of their valuables, there being plenty of time, and no
need on the thieves’ part for hurry or disorder. The Chicago Crimes
Commission put the case with commendable brevity when it said, “Crime
is a business here.”
An interesting circumstance recorded in Anderson’s volume is the
reluctance of professional burglars to ply their craft on very cold and
stormy nights. It would seem as though bad weather might be trusted
to stand their friend; but the burglar, a luxury-loving person,
dislikes being drenched or frozen as much as does his honest neighbour.
Happily for his comfort and for his health, a high-speed motor now
enables him to work on sunny days at noon. It is pleasant to reflect
that the experts who robbed three Philadelphia jewellers at an hour
when the shops were full of customers, and the streets were full of
pedestrians, ran no risk from exposure. They may have been sick men
from the psychologist’s point of view, but they were as safe from
bronchitis as they were from the Philadelphia police.
It is an age of specialism, and the criminal, like the scientist, has
specialized. Stealing Liberty Bonds is a field full of promise for
youth. Apparently nothing can shake the confidence of brokers in the
messengers who disappear with one lot of bonds, only to be released
on a suspended sentence, and speedily entrusted with a second. The
term “juvenile delinquency” has been stretched to cover every offence
from murder to missing school. A fourteen-year-old girl who poisoned
a fourteen-month-old baby in Brooklyn, in the summer of 1919, and
who was tried in the Children’s Court, was found guilty of juvenile
delinquency, and committed to a home for delinquent girls. It is hard
to say what else could have been done with a murderess of such tender
years; but the New York authorities should see to it that Solomon
Kramer is the last baby whom Frances Sulinski kills. She poisoned this
one with the single purpose of implicating in the crime a woman of
seventy with whom she had quarrelled. The poor infant lingered in pain
twenty-four hours before released by death. It is not easy to throw a
kindly light upon the deed; and while a baby’s life is of small value
to the State (“as well be drowned as grow up a tinker,” said Sir Walter
Scott), civilization means that it has a right to protection. The
law exists, not for the punishment of the offender, and not for his
reformation, but that the public may be safe from his hands.
A robust sense of humour might help to straighten out the tangles which
have deranged the simple processes of jurisdiction. When the court
rendered a decision freeing the prison authorities of Tacoma from all
responsibility in the event of a hunger strike, a light dawned on that
stricken town. The I.W.W., who had refused to eat because they objected
to being detained in the county, instead of in the city jail, were
accorded liberty to follow their desires. A threat which for years had
sufficed to throw British and American prisons into consternation was
suddenly found to be harmless to all but the threateners. What really
agitated the citizens of Tacoma just then was, not so much whether
demagogues would consent to eat the food provided for them, as whether
honest men could afford food to eat.