even, perhaps, to denounce the learned author, in a lofty manner, as
a mere jackass. His argument, at more than one place, is so shaky
that it tempts ribaldry with a powerful lure, almost a suction. His
premisses are often gratuitous and absurd; his conclusions are often
fantastic. Worse, he argues in circles, and it is frequently hard to
make out what he is advocating, and why. Worst of all, the urbanity
suitable to a learned gentleman resident in Sparks street, Cambridge,
Mass., sometimes yields to a libido far more suitable to an auctioneer,
a Federal district attorney or a Methodist bishop, and he rants
dreadfully. But against all this there is yet something to be said, and
that something, I think, is sufficient to stay the impulse to have at
him brutally, either with cackles or with invective. It is, in brief,
this: that what he inveighs against, given his natural and laudable
prejudices, is plentifully sufficient to excuse all his indignation,
and all his incoherence, and even his occasional departures from the
strict letter of the record--that it is a merit in any man, facing what
he deems to be incubi and succubi, to belabor them in a hearty and
vociferous manner, and without too pedantic a respect for the rules of
evidence. That merit has nothing to do, at bottom, with his rightness
or wrongness; it lies in his mere sincerity. Dr. Abbott is obviously
full of sincerity; no fair reader can doubt it for an instant. But
he has something more: he has under him a respectable body of facts,
sound ones as well as shaky ones. The deductions he draws from them are
often extravagant, and now and then he mingles them with assumptions
that seems to me to do violence to the most elemental common sense.
Nevertheless, his basic facts remain, and if I were an Anglo-Saxon as
he is I suspect that they would fever me as they fever him.
What he complains of, in a few words, is the assault that has been
made of late upon the old American tradition and the fundamental
canons of American idealism, _i. e._, upon the body of ideas that
Americans cherish as peculiarly their own, and believe in with a
romantic devotion. What he complains of, especially, is that this
assault has been made, in the main, by men who are not “Anglo-Saxons”
(the professor himself quotes the term: a touching concession to
ethnological exactness)--that it has been largely led by men whose
very Americanism, when they claim to be Americans at all, is open
to question. When I say open to question, I mean, of course, by
“Anglo-Saxon” Americans. Dr. Abbott seems to be firmly convinced
that these are the only ones entitled to the name. They are the pure
stock; their ancestors conquered the continent unaided. They alone
partake of the true national spirit, and may be trusted to guard the
national hearth. All other Americans are in the position of visitors,
interlopers, relatives-in-law. They may become in time, if they are
good, creditable assistant Americans, but they can no more enter
into the full national heritage, as free equals, than they can lift
themselves by their boot-straps. The American tradition, it appears,
must forever remain a bit strange to them; they are the children, not
of heroes, but of serfs. Thus it is no wonder that their political
notions, when they make bold to state them, are exotic and subversive.
They can imagine government only as a power above and beyond the
citizen. If they are not in favor of kaiserism, then they are in favor
of communism, which is simply kaiserism imposed from below. Their
politics is essentially a slave politics. They stand opposed eternally
to that self-reliant and somewhat pugnacious individualism which is
the mark of the true “Anglo-Saxon.” If they ever come into power the
Constitution will be destroyed and freedom will perish.
Dr. Abbott’s book, as I have said, is somewhat difficult; perhaps
I misrepresent him in a few details. But in the main, I believe, I
gather his doctrine correctly; it is, indeed, a doctrine that has
grown very familiar. The Ku Klux has carried it into every hamlet in
the land, and bolstered it with the authority of Holy Writ. I could,
if I would, amuse myself by exhibiting the holes in it. Is it a fact,
then, that the “Anglo-Saxons” conquered the continent unaided? What
of the Spaniards and French? What of the Dutch and Germans? What of
the Scotch-Irish? Is it a fact that they invented the American scheme
of government? What of Rousseau? Is it a fact that all assaults upon
that scheme have been made by assistant Americans? What of Jefferson,
Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, Bryan? Is it a fact that all the
enemies of the Constitution came from below the salt? What of the
Eighteenth Amendment: does it damage the Bill of Rights more or less
than the late Dr. La Follette’s vaporous schemes? Such questions
suggest themselves in great variety. I could roll them off until you
stood agape. But I have no desire to press a professor of history
unduly; his authority, in the last analysis, cannot be upset by facts.
And in the present case, whatever his errors in detail, it seems to me
to be quite clear that the fundamental facts are on his side. There
_is_ unquestionably a difference between the “Anglo-Saxon” American
and the non-“Anglo-Saxon”--a difference in their primary instincts,
in their reactions to common stimuli, in their ways of looking at the
world. And that difference, of late years, _has_ come to the estate of
a conflict, with the “Anglo-Saxon” striving to keep what he has--his
point of view, his cultural leadership, his political hegemony--and
the non-“Anglo-Saxon” trying to take it away from him. To deny that
conflict is to fall into an absurdity far worse than any Dr. Abbott is
guilty of. To admit it is to admit his clear right, nay, his bounden
duty, to do battle for his side, passionately, desperately, and with
any weapon at hand.
This he does in his book, and up to the limit of his forensic skill,
which, I regret to have to add, is not noticeably great. If, at times,
he grows a bit muddled, and even maudlin, then let us not hold the
fact against him, for a man performing a _pas seul_ upon a red-hot
stove cannot be expected to achieve an impeccable step. It seems to
me that this red-hot stove, at the moment, is under every conscious
“Anglo-Saxon” in our great Republic--that he must be an insensate clod,
indeed, if he does not feel the heat. The cultural leadership of the
country is passing out of his hands, and he is beginning to lose even
his political hegemony. I sat in the Democratic National Convention
in 1924 as the Hon. Al Smith rolled up his votes, and watched the Ku
Kluxers on the floor. They were transfixed with horror: if it was a
comedy, then pulling tonsils is also a comedy. Dr. Abbott mentions
Dreiser. The influence of Dreiser upon the literature of to-morrow in
this land--upon all the youngsters who are now coming to maturity in
the universities, and turning away from their ordained professors--will
be a hundred times as potent as that of any New Englander now alive.
Who is Dreiser? When the grandfathers of the Republic were hanging
witches at Salem his forbears were raising grapes on the Rhine. Dr.
Abbott professes history at Harvard. During the past ten years but one
professor at that great university has materially colored the stream
of ideas in America. He has since escaped abroad--and is a Spaniard.
Every day a new Catholic church goes up; every day another Methodist or
Presbyterian church is turned into a garage. But there is no need to
labor the point. The fact is too obvious that the old easy dominance
of the “Anglo-Saxon” is passing, that he must be up and doing if he
would fasten his notions upon the generations to come. And the fact
is equally obvious that his success in that emprise, so far, has been
extremely indifferent--that, despite the great advantages that he
enjoys, of position, of authority, of ancient right, he is making very
heavy weather of it, and not even holding his own. I am frankly against
him, and believe, as I have often made known, that he is doomed--that
his opponents will turn out, in the long run, to be better men than
he is. But I confess that I’d enjoy the combat more if he showed less
indignation and more skill.
Dr. Abbott himself reveals many characteristic “Anglo-Saxon”
weaknesses. His incoherence I have mentioned. There is also a
downright inconsistency, often glaring. On one page he denounces all
non-“Anglo-Saxons” as opponents of democracy; on another (for example,
page 242) he denounces the fundamental tenets of democracy himself.
This inconsistency is visible in nine “Anglo-Saxon” gladiators out of
ten. What ails them all is that they have to defend democracy, and yet
do not believe in it. Has any good “Anglo-Saxon” ever believed in it?
I sometimes doubt it. Did Washington? Did John Adams? Jefferson did,
but wasn’t there a Celtic strain in him--wasn’t he, after all, somewhat
dubious, a sort of assistant American? In any case, the surviving
Fathers were all apparently against him. In our own time how many
“Anglo-Saxons” of the educated class actually believe in democracy?
I know of none, and have heard of none. The late war revealed their
true faith very brilliantly and even humorously. It was a crusade for
democracy, and yet one of the shining partners was the late Czar of
Russia! The assault upon the Kaiser was led by Roosevelt! The chief
official enemy of absolutism was Wilson! No wonder the whole thing
collapsed into absurdity. Dr. Abbott falls into a similar absurdity
more than once. His book would be vastly more effective if he took all
the idle prattle about democracy out of it, and grounded it upon the
forthright doctrine that the “Anglo-Saxons,” having got here first, own
the country, and have a clear right to impose political disabilities
upon later comers--in other words, if he advocated the setting up of
an “Anglo-Saxon” aristocracy, with high privileges and prerogatives,
eternally beyond the reach of the mongrel commonalty. This, in point
of fact, is what he advocates, however much he may cloud his advocacy
in democratic terms. I call upon him with all solemnity to throw off
his false-face and come out with the bald, harsh doctrine. There is
more logic in it than in his present nonsense; he could preach it more
powerfully and beautifully. More, he would get help from unexpected
quarters. I can speak, of course, only for one spear. I might quibble
and protest, but I’d certainly be sorely tempted.
7
_Yazoo’s Favorite_
AN OLD-FASHIONED SENATOR, by Harris Dickson. New York: _The Frederick
A. Stokes Company_. [The Nation, October 14, 1925.]
Some time ago, essaying a literary survey of the Republic, I
animadverted sadly upon the dreadful barrenness of the great State
of Mississippi. Speaking as a magazine editor, I said that I had
never heard of a printable manuscript coming out of it. Speaking as
a frequenter of the Athenian grove, I said that I had never heard
of it hatching an idea. Instantly there was an uproar from Iuka to
Pascagoula. The vernacular press had at me with appalling yells;
there were demands from the Ku Klux that I come down to Jackson and
say it again; Kiwanis joined the Baptist Young People’s Society in
denouncing me as one debauched by Russian gold. Worse, the Mississippi
intelligentsia also had at me. Emerging heroically from the crypts
and spring-houses where they were fugitive from Rotary, they bawled
me out as ignorant and infamous. Had I never heard, they demanded, of
Harris Dickson, the Mississippi Balzac? Had I never heard of John Sharp
Williams, the Mississippi Gladstone?
I had, but remained unmoved. I now continue unmoved after reading
Balzac’s tome on Gladstone. It is, in its small way, a tragic book.
Here, obviously, is the best that Mississippi can do, in theme and
treatment--and it is such puerile, blowsy stuff that reviewing it
realistically would be too cruel. Here the premier literary artist of
Mississippi devotes himself _con amore_ to the life and times of the
premier Mississippi statesman--and the result is a volume so maudlin
and nonsensical that it would disgrace a schoolboy. The book is simply
mush--and out of the mush there emerges only a third-rate politician,
professionally bucolic and as hollow as a jug.
Yet this Williams, during his long years in Congress, passed in
Washington as an intellectual. Cloak-room and barroom gossip credited
him with a profound education and very subtle parts. Such ideas, when
they prevail in Washington, perhaps need and deserve no investigation;
the same astute correspondents who propagated this one later coupled
the preposterous Coolidge with Pericles. But maybe there was some
logic in it, after all; Williams, at some time in the past, had
been to Heidelberg and knew more or less German and French. That
accomplishment, in a Southern politician, was sufficient to set the
capital by the ears. So the Williams legend grew, and toward the end
it rose to the dignity of a myth, like that of Dr. Taft’s eminence as
a constitutional lawyer. Even the learned hero’s daily speeches on
Teutonic mythology during the war did not drag him out of Valhalla
himself. The press-gallery gaped and huzzahed.
But the Heidelberg chapter in Mr. Dickson’s book leaves the myth rather
sick. It starts off, indeed, with a disconcerting couplet:
In Germany ’twas very clear
He’d leave the rapiers for beer.
And what follows is distressingly silent about cultural accretions.
Young Williams’ main business at Heidelberg, it appears, was putting
the abominable Prussian _Junker_ in their place. They naturally
assumed that their American fellow-student could be thrown about with
impunity. Encountering him on the sidewalk, they tried, in the manner
made historic by the Creel Press Bureau, to shove him off. Presently
one of these fiends in human form came melodramatically to grief.
Williams challenged him, and “according to Prussian ethics,” named the
weapons--pistols. A shock, indeed! The monster expected sabers, at
which he was diabolically expert, but Williams didn’t intend “to go
home with his face all slashed, and have folks jeer at him for getting
his jaw cut on a beer glass.” Facing cold lead, the Prussian was so
scared that he fired prematurely. Worse, he so lost his wits that he
addressed his antagonist as Freiherr Williams. That antagonist fired
into a snowbank. Some time later, having thus got all that was of
worth out of Heidelberg, he came sailing home, “full even then of his
ultimate intention: he’d go in for politics, he’d become a professional
politician.”
A professional politician he remained for thirty years, always in
office, first in the House and then in the Senate. His start was
slow--he practiced law for a time--, but once he was on the payroll
he stayed there until old age was upon him. For a number of years he
was Democratic leader in the House; twice he got the party vote for
the Speakership. In the Senate he was technically in the ranks, but on
great occasions he stepped forward. His specialties, toward the end,
were the divine inspiration of Woodrow Wilson, the incomparable valor
of the American soldier, the crimes of the Kaiser, the superiority of
the “Anglo-Saxon,” the godlike bellicosity of the Confederate gentry,
and the nature and functions of a gentleman. On these themes he
discoursed almost every afternoon. The boys in the press-gallery liked
him, and he got plenty of space. Always his rodomontades brought forth
dark hints about his esoteric learning, and the news that, next after
Henry Cabot Lodge, he was the most cultivated man in the Senate.
Mr. Dickson prints extracts from some of his speeches. Criticism,
obviously, is an art not yet in practice in Mississippi, even among
the literati. I used to read him in the _Congressional Record_; he
was really not so bad as Dickson makes him out. His career, seen in
retrospect, seems to have been mainly a vacuum. Once or twice he showed
a certain fine dignity, strange in a Southern politician. He opposed
the Prohibition frenzy. He voted against the bonus. But usually,
despite his constant talk of independence, he ran with the party pack.
For years a professional Jeffersonian, he brought his career to a
climax by giving lyrical support to the Emperor Woodrow, who heaved the
Jeffersonian heritage into the ash-can. During the La Follette uproar
he was one of the most vociferous of the witch-burners. He passed out
in silence, regretted for his rustic charm, but not much missed.
I commend “An Old-Fashioned Senator” to all persons who are interested
in the struggle of the South to throw off its cobwebs. Both as document
and as work of art the book makes it very plain why Mississippi’s place
in that struggle is in the last rank.
8
_The Father of Service_
THE LIFE STORY OF ORISON SWETT MARDEN, by Margaret Connolly. New
York: _The Thomas Y. Crowell Company_. [The American Mercury,
February, 1926.]
If Dr. Martin had not written his first book, said Frank A. Munsey
one day, he would have been a millionaire. By Munseyan standards,
praise could go no higher--and Munsey knew his man, for they were
fellow-waiters in a Summer hotel back in the ’70’s and kept up friendly
exchange until Marden’s death in 1924. Both sprang from the hard,
inhospitable soil of Northern New England, both knew dire poverty in
youth, both got somewhere a yearning for literary exercises, and both
cherished an immense respect for the dollar. But though fate brought
them together when they were young, they chose different paths later
on. Munsey, with “Afloat in a Great City,” “The Boy Broker,” and other
inspirational master-works behind him, abandoned beautiful letters
for the stock market, and eventually gathered in so much money that
he could afford to butcher great newspapers in sheer excess of animal
spirits, as lesser men butcher clay pigeons. Marden, going the other
way, abandoned the hotel business, for which he seemed to have had
genius, for the pen, and devoted the last thirty years of his life to
composition.
His bibliography runs to a hundred or more volumes--a colossal,
relentless, overwhelming deluge of bilge. All his books have the
same subject: getting on in the world. That was, to him, the only
conceivable goal of human aspiration. Day in and day out, for three
decades, he preached his simple gospel to all mankind, not only in his
books, but also in countless pamphlets, in lectures, and in the pages
of his magazine, _Success_. Its success was instantaneous and durable.
His first book, “Pushing to the Front,” rapidly went through a dozen
editions, and was presently translated into a dozen foreign languages.
It remained, to the end, his best-seller, but it had many formidable
rivals. Altogether, his writings in book-form must have reached a total
of 20,000,000 copies, including 3,000,000 in twenty-five tongues other
than English. In Germany alone he sold more than 500,000 copies of
thirty volumes. He remains to-day the most popular of American authors
in Europe, and by immense odds. I have encountered translations of
his books on the news-stands of remote towns in Spain, Poland and
Czecho-Slovakia. In places where even Mark Twain is unknown--nay, even
Jack London, Upton Sinclair and James Oliver Curwood--he holds aloft
the banner of American literature.
I lack the stomach for the job myself, but I think a lot could be
learned about the psychology of _Homo boobiens_ through an intensive
study of Marden’s vast shelf of books. The few I have read seem to be
exactly alike; no doubt all the rest resemble them very closely. What
they preach, in brief, is the high value of hopefulness, hard work,
high purpose and unflagging resolution. The appeal is to the natural
discontent and vague aspiration of the common man. The remedy offered
is partly practical and partly mystical--practical in its insistence
upon the sound utility of the lowly virtues, mystical in its constant
implication that matter will always yield to mind, that high thinking
has a cash value. An evil philosophy? Surely not. A valid one? There
it is not so easy to answer. Marden is full of proofs that what he
preaches works--but only too often those proofs show the incredible
appositeness and impeccability of patent-medicine testimonials. How
many false hopes he must have raised in his day! One imagines humble
hearts leaping to the gaudy tales of Judge Elbert Gary, Beethoven and
Edison in the darkest reaches of Montenegro, Norway and Tennessee.
Down went the dose, but was the patient actually cured? Well, perhaps,
he at least _felt_ better--and that was something. Marden was not to
be pinned down to clinical records; he was, in his way, a poet, and
even more a prophet. A religious exaltation was in him; he knew how to
roll his eyes. The first article of his creed was that it was a sin
to despair--that realism was a black crime against the Holy Ghost. He
reduced the Beatitudes to one: Blessed are they that believe in their
stars, and are up and doing.
His influence was immense, and perhaps mainly for the good. He soothed
his customers with his optimistic taffy, and made them happier. It
is, indeed, small wonder that eminent figures in finance and industry
admired him greatly, and gave his books to their slaves. He turned the
discontents of those slaves inward; instead of going on strike and
breaking windows they sat up nights trying to generate inspiration
and practicing hope and patience. He was thus a useful citizen in a
democratic state, and comparable to the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday. He
preached a Direct Action of a benign and laudable sort, with Service
running through it. His mark shines brilliantly from the forehead of
every Y. M. C. A. secretary in the land, and from the foreheads, too,
of most of the editorial writers. Many lesser platitudinarians followed
him--for example, Dr. Frank Crane and the Rev. Dr. Henry van Dyke--,
but he kept ahead of all of them. None other could put the obvious
into such mellow and caressing terms. None other could so completely
cast off all doubts and misgivings. When he spit on his hands and let
himself out, the whole world began to sparkle like a Christmas tree. He
was Kiwanis incarnate, with whispers of the Salvation Army. In early
manhood he had cast off the demoniacal theology of his native hills,
but one treasure of his Puritan heritage he retained to the end: he
knew precisely and certainly what God wanted His children to be and do.
God wanted them to be happy, and He wanted them to attain to happiness
by working hard, saving money, obeying the boss, and keeping on the
lookout for better jobs. Thus, after a hiatus of 137 years, Marden
took up the torch of Poor Richard. He was, in his way, the American
St. Paul. He was the pa of Kiwanis. He carried the gospel of American
optimism to all the four quarters of the world.
9
_A Modern Masterpiece_
THE POET ASSASSINATED, by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated from
the French by Matthew Josephson. New York: _The Broom Publishing
Company_. [The American Mercury, March, 1924.]
Whatever may be said against the young literary lions of the Foetal
School, whether by such hoary iconoclasts as Ernest Boyd or by such
virginal presbyters as John S. Sumner, the saving fact remains that
the boys and girls have, beneath their false-faces, a sense of humor,
and are not shy about playing it upon one another. Such passionate
pioneers of the movement as _Broom_ and the _Little Review_ printed, in
their day, capital parodies in every issue, many of them, I believe,
deliberate and malicious--parodies of Ezra Pound by the Baroness Elsa
von Freytag-Loringhoven, and of the Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven
by E. E. Cummings, and of E. E. Cummings by young Roosevelt J.
Yahwitz, Harvard ’27. And the thing goes on to this day. Ah, that the
rev. seniors of the Hypoendocrinal School were as gay and goatish!
Ah, specifically, that Dr. Paul Elmer More would occasionally do a
salacious burlesque of Dr. Brander Matthews, and that Dr. Matthews
would exercise his forecastle wit upon the Pennsylvania Silurian, Prof.
Fred Lewis Pattee!