How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find.--Dr. Samuel Johnson.
There is something admirably rugged and encouragingly practical
in the sentiments and philosophies of the older writers that acts
on the mind as a potent tonic when wearied and weakened by the
monotonous and anaemic outpourings of the so-called
philanthropists of the present day. There is something
energizing, thew-developing. This is the age of pulling
literature, of crocodile tears, of simulated tenderness, of
counterfeit sympathy, of cry and clamor and plaint and protest.
In politics we call this practice calamity-howling, whether in
tornado-swept Kansas, blizzard-bitten Iowa or boss-ridden New
York. in literature it is mere charlatanry, mere scagliola, made
for sale. Hamlin Garland makes imaginary journeys over "Traveled
Roads" to tell us of the utter and intolerable miseries of the
Western farmers who live in sod houses. Raising dollar wheat is
not so bad, even in a sod house. George Cable and Albion Tourges
write sentimental lies about the Southern negroes. Those at all
familiar with the facts know that no people on earth are happier
than the Southern negroes. Arthur Morrison writes about "The
Child of the Jago" and draws tears from our eyes. Those who have
seen the children of the Jago fight and play, romp and riot would
probably be willing to trade health and peace of mind with any of
them. The list is too long or it might be interesting to name
others who write for the purpose of making people discontented,
to inflame jealousy or arouse envy. It will be no trouble to
recall a host of others. The politician seeks to "remove the
inequalities of life by wise and salutary laws," meaning that he
wants office. The "literary feller" seeks "to educate the public
mind and raise the public conscience to a higher plane," meaning
that he wants to do the educating, incidentally, and to sell his
books, objectively. To complain that life is "often more than sad
enough, with its inequalities confronting us, its gilded prizes
and its squalors side by side, its burdens and its trivialties
pressing in upon the soul," as does Marguerite Merington in a
late and otherwise excellent magazine article, is to strike a
popular chord, but the note is false and scabrous, the philosophy
less than commendable. Men are but children of a larger growth
and, like children of a smaller growth, they like to be petted
and pitied and told that the world is not treating them fairly.
No man, rich or poor, is contented, and he enjoys being told that
his failure to reach the goal of his ambitions and fill to the
brim his cup of pleasure is because of the great impersonal
world, or untoward and oppugning circumstances have prevented
him. He enjoys this sort of thing so much that he will pay
handsomely for it and the charlatan finds a market for his wares.
He does not like the plain truth bluntly stated. No one does. We
do not admire those who wrestle and strive with us. Nevertheless,
they alone strengthen our muscles and, hence--
. . .
Verily I say: "Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of
fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantom of hope--who expect
that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the
deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow,"
need not attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,
except for the passing pleasure of the reading, because the story
can be told in fewer words, to wit: Happiness is a personal
equation--"what is one man's meat is another man's poison."
Rasselas found the Happy Valley irksome and intolerable. There
never has been a Happy Valley since that could furnish continuous
content to any one. The nearest approach to happiness comes with
juxtaposition to one's tastes and aspirations. The simpler the
tastes and the less discursive the aspirations, the nearer
happiness comes and the longer it remains. Happiness does not
come from conditions or surroundings, nor are these conditions or
surroundings always understood. Actual conditions do not reveal
themselves to perspicacity much less to casual observation.
The multi-millionaire in his mansion or the king on his throne,
surrounded by all the comforts and conveniences, all the
marvelous treasures, all that is pleasing to the eye and to the
senses, may not be happy--may be unhappy. The rustic who follows
the plow through furrowed fields, unkempt, clownish,
toil-stained, weary and overworked, may brawl raucous roundelay
at even-tide and enjoy the fullness of earthly bliss. His
neighbor similarly situated may suffer agonies because his tastes
and ambitions are higher. Those who imagine "plow hands" have no
ambitions to gratify know little of life. Sometimes they aspire
to be presidents, and sometimes they gratify those aspirations,
but they never know happiness. They may be as wise as a dozen
Solons, but they can not provide happiness by legislation. They
may reach the summit of earthly glory and strive to seize the
fulgurant prize that lured them on, only to find a penumbra--the
shadow of a shade. And if conditions are actually known they
prove nothing, generally. Each case must be specialized. Children
and grown people, for that matter, are subjected to involuntary
fasts and oftimes go hungry, in fact are always hungry, but they
suffer less and are healthier than those who are stuffed and
pampered and sated. The joy of eating when food comes compensates
for the previous scantiness of the fare. There are deaths from
insufficient alimentation; ten to one are the deaths traceable to
over-feeding. There is suffering for lack of food. There is ten
to one more suffering by gouty and dyspeptic gourmands. The
beggar shivers in the cold for lack of clothing; there is ten to
one more suffering from over-swathing. For pain, actual,
excrutiating; for pain invincible, somber and unutterable, one
proud woman reduced to a last season's frock suffers more than
twenty arrayed in customary rags and tatters. God tempers the
wind to the shorn lamb, but not to the dowdy woman. The occupant
of the cottage or cabin as he hurries home on Saturday night with
his hard-earned store perhaps envies the occupant of the mansion
where lights burn brightly and music fills the air, but the
master of the mansion may be driven to the verge of insanity in
an unequal contest to keep up appearances and a style of living
that is grinding his heart into dust. Gladly, he thinks, he would
court the modest shelter of the cottage or cabin but, alas!
sorrow and suffering, want and wickedness might follow him there.
From natal bed to mortuary box happiness escapes us--the faster,
the more we pursue it.
We mistake appearances for realities and misbestow our sympathy.
Had some of the more tender-hearted met Audubon when he returned
from one of his trips in the forests, his clothing in shreds, his
shoes gone, travel- stained and unkempt, alms would have been
unhesitatingly bestowed. And how amused would the great man have
been! He was too great to have been irritated. If, as it is
claimed, human happiness is the aim and object of
philanthropists, they seek the unattainable and destroy that
which they would save. A sudden wrenching from the one condition
to another is misery. The eagle would rather starve in his native
forests than feast in a cage. The Indian maiden who graduates at
Carlisle and who captures all the medals, returns to her blanket
and the dirt, dogs and squalor of her tribe as soon as she
reaches the reservation. There is a strain of the Huckleberry
Finn in all natures that resents a too sudden metamorphosis and
which will return to its rags, its back alley and empty cask.
Charlatans of the law and of literature inculcate the idea that a
change in conditions means the acquisition of unqualified bliss,
and they assume that the poor are necessarily unhappy and
endeavor to convince them--not a difficult task, that it is the
fault of someone else that they are not rich! Folly! The
hod-carrier and helot who works from dawn to dusk, who goes in
rags, who fares on coarsest food, whose wife and children live in
squalor, may be considered unhappy, but they never experience
real suffering, acute, unasuageable, poignant grief, until they
become possessed of money and mansions and modern grandeur, only
to find themselves coldly isolated. Sudden wealth has made them
too grand for their former friends, it cannot secure them
entrance into the society which they would affect, or, if it
does, they find themselves ill at ease, out of place, miserable.
Those who imagine that all bliss comes from lucre or legislation
know little and are "ignorant of their own ignorance." They do
not know that "our own felicity we make is final, and that
through the cultivation of individual inherency and personal
sufficiency. They listen to the charlatans who, on the plea of
bringing balm, inflict incurable wounds; who would bring
happiness by sowing the dragon's teeth of discontent. "Coal-Oil
Johnny," who threw away hundreds of thousands of suddenly
acquired dollars, was a philosopher. The money put him out of
harmony with himself. It was to him a curse. And he wisely rid
himself of it. There is peace and pleasure in the jangling
discord and in the pains of effort, a peace which, otherwise, the
world can not give, a pleasure found nowhere else; and this peace
and pleasure are not to be sought by effort; are not to be
attained by effort; but are found in the effort itself. There is
pleasure in dressing a field or in painting a house, but not in
the dressed field or in the painted house. In other words, there
is pleasure in individual assertiveness and not in inertia. No
doubt either Calypso or Circe was more attractive than Penelope,
but Ulysses was not content. He had to continue his wanderings
even to his own home, and when he had killed of all the suitors
and was restored to his diplomatic spouse, there were doubtless
days when he wished himself back with the enchantress on the
lovely isle--days when he would have changed places with his
father, Sisyphus, and rolled the ever returning stone with will
and energy. Ease and passivity were a torture to him.
A picture of life is painted by that wonderful artist, Gabrielle
d'Annunzio, in "The Triumph of Death." Yes, I hear the hurtling
of such missles as "decadent," "obscene," "vulgar," "impious."
Nevertheless d'Annunzio is one of the great masters. His pigments
may be mud or muck. His brush is the brush of an Angelo. His
finished product is life itself, breathing, pulsing life, through
which the blood rushes loud enough to be heard. Life in all its
phases, from the loftiest to the lowliest. Demetrius, wealthy,
scholarly, meditative, one would suppose needed no legislation or
literature to make him happy. He possessed all the world had to
give. "A mild, meditative man, with a face full of virile
melancholy, and a single white curl in the center of his forehead
among the black hair, giving him an old appearance." He sought
earnestly and sedulously for the secret meaning of life. He tried
to reach and unravel its symbols and allegories; he tried to
interpret the furtive gestures which he beheld in the shadows,
and he passed into deeper shadows and more oppressive
silences through the ghastly gates of suicide, while his idiotic
sister remained to chatter and grimace. Jaconda remained
gibbering and pleased with the world and with herself. George saw
this and he saw many other things which he could not understand.
He saw "Oreste of Chapelles" firing the simple minds of the
people to fanaticism as he went up and down like a fury. He saw
the pilgrims at the sanctuary and the beggars and cripples on his
return from the sanctuary to Cassalbordino--horrible monsters,
not fashioned, or scarce fashioned in God's image, and he saw
that they had their families and their belongings with them, that
they piteously plead for alms and that they danced and sung,
cursed and caroused, made merry over the deformities of each
other, and presented a phase of life wholly incomprehensible.
Laws or literature could not increase their happiness. Their
apparent miseries were not real. He saw Colas, ignorant, stupid,
superstitious, but content. He saw Candia, proud of her
fecundity, slaving, singing. He saw Favetta, the young singer
with the falcon-like eyes, the idol of her friends, simple,
modest, happy. He saw the peasants in their mysterious rites
"consecrating the nativity of bread" in the harvest field. They
needed neither laws nor literature to improve their condition.
They were the happiest of mortals. And he saw the dark tragedies
of this remote world. Liberata carrying her dead child on her
head to the burial place. No laws or literature for her, poor
woman: her baby was dead and her reason was gone. He saw
Riccangela, the widow, on the beach, with her large rough hands,
pouring forth her heart in a wild monody over the remains of her
puny boy, who was drowned, while the homicidal sea chanted a
lugubrious accompaniment or mocked the agony of the song. George
sought the meaning and the key to life's mysteries and found them
not. Subjective study and spiritual contemplation drove him mad.
They had driven his uncle Demetrious mad. He recoiled from them
and plunged into life as he found it, endeavoring to extract from
it the honey of happiness, or at least, immunity from misery. If
carnalism could furnish content, one would think George would
have found it. Rich to opulence, young, idle, he met Hippolyte,
"a compound of pale amber and dull gold in which were mingled
perhaps a few tints of faded roses." He won her and subjected
her, "the bloodless, wounded creature who used to submit with
profound astonishment, the ignorant and frightened creature who
had given him that fierce and divine spectacle--the agony of
modesty felled by vicious passion." He idolized her and idealized
her in the struggle for perfect bliss. He took her to the
deserted abbey and placed on "the summit of the high marble
candelabra which had not heard the voice of the light for
centuries," where she burned before his eye in the
inextinguishable and silent flame of her love, and, as he
believed, illuminating the meditations of his soul. Folly! His
apotheosis was a farce. She developed, but not spiritually. What
he supposed was a pure flame of love proved to be a base erotic
fever. The bloom of pudicity was brushed off. She acquired a
strange power over him; she, the once innocent and frightened
creature. "She possessed the infallible science and knew her
lover's most secret and subtle sensibilities and knew how to move
them with a marvelous intuition of the physical conditions that
depend on them and their corresponding sensations and their
association and their alternatives." And from the thing of beauty
and light, seen with enraptured eyes as she stood "on the summit
of the marble candelabra which had not heard the voice of the
light for centuries, she became a loved and hated thing, "the
flower of concupiscence," "an instrument of low lasciviousness."
The union of these two, perfect in all outward appearances,
blessed with love and leisure, beauty and youth, and all that
wealth could buy, was a mocking and a delusion because lacking in
spirituality, because unsanctified and unholy. It was a
monstrous tragedy, this union, presented on a stage of ashes
over a volcano. (Unions in polite society, where forms are
observed, laws obeyed and customs followed, but where the moving
impulse is sordid, where the marriage is for money or for
social position, do they, too, not drift toward mutual hate and
abhorrence, to divorce or death? I only ask the question. There
may be more Georges and Hippolytes in the world than we care to
admit). When at last he discovered his true condition, when he
realized that he was in her power that he could not live with her
or without her, that she obstructed his way of life and his way
to death, he caught her in his arms and hurled both over the
precipice upon the rocks below, making a ghastly ending for a
ghastly tragedy. No law or literature could have brought
happiness to him. He sought it in the various ways, in every way
but the one, simple and only right way--the effort to confer
happiness on others. Frantic intoxications, the culminations of
carnal pleasures, which amount to unspeakable ecstasies, are mere
temporations which are followed by lassitude, exhaustion and
disgust, and these soon turn to a fiercely implacable hate. The
search for happiness, when carried to the extreme, becomes a
torture. The desire for happiness is selfish, and selfishness is
never happy. Happiness dispensed is like bread cast upon the
water, and will return after many days. Those who seek it stray
from it. All laws and all literature that arouse the spirit of
discontent, of selfishness and of desire for happiness, are
vicious because they defeat the very object which they seek to
accomplish, and make people more miserable than they were by
increasing their capacity for suffering without a coexistent
power to gratify the desires aroused. What is this George Eliot
puts into the mouth of the radical, Felix Holt? "This world is
not a very fine place for a good many of the people in it. But
I've made up my mind it shan't be the worse for me if I can help
it. They tell me I can't alter the world--that there must be a
certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, and if I don't lie
and filch somebody else will. Well, then, somebody else shall,
for I won't--I will never be one of the sleeks dogs--I would
never choose to withdraw myself from the labor and common burden
of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the rush
and scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to
call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefitted by the push
and scramble in the long run, but I care for the people who are
alive now and will not be living when the long run comes. I
prefer to go shares with the unlucky."
Irrefragible philosophy! The true and the wise proceed not to
stir up the lees of passion and greed and avarice and ambition.
They remain with the world, go with it in its devious ways and
through its torturous windings, removing the thorns and briars
from before naked feet, shielding the weak, sheltering the naked,
encouraging and dispensing light and hope and love. The true and
wise who love their fellows avoid strife and carnage, and
conflict with the ineluctable, but they meet the inevitable
calmly and courageously. They are superior to laws and
literature. They are supremely blest. Memphis. Tenn., November
10.
* * *
TOMMIE WATSON'S TOMMYROT.
Somebody whom I have never harmed sends me an A. P. A. tract
entitled "A Good Catholic," and issued by Tommy Watson, who once
tried to run for vice-president on the Middle-of-the-Muck
ticket--for the purpose of turning back the reform tide and
electing the humble peon of the gold-buggers, high-tariffites and
trusts. Tommie's Ape tract is simply an "ad." for a weekly paper
which he seems to be getting out all by his little self somewhere
in Gooberdom. On the front elevation of this bombshell with which
he expects to blow the Vatican across the yellow Tiber, the
statement is made in display type that, for the trifling sum of
one dollar in hand paid, "You can read the brilliant, patriotic
editorials of Hon. Thos. E. Watson" for an entire year--granting,
of course, that their Promethean brilliancy fail to set your
shirt-tail afire in the meantime. There is no provision for the
return of your money in case Tommie's exhuberant patriotism
should overpower you. We are then assured that "no Roman Pope or
American Cardinal can coerce" the architect of the "brilliant and
patriotic editorials" aforesaid. Now that's the kind of a man I
admire! Hang a Georgia editor, say I, who sells himself to the
Pope of Rome for six bits, or rushed around to an American
Cardinal every morning before breakfast with the proof-sheets of
his labored lucubrations, humbly asking permission to print. The
brilliant and patriotic editor of a Georgia paper having a paid
circulation of 710 copies can not be too independent. It is his
solemn duty to keep watch and ward over this country and promptly
put a kibosh on every conspiracy of the Pope. Like most brilliant
patriots, Tommie has sacrificed a very great deal for conscience
sake. When he tried to save the country by playing second tail to
the Bryan kite for the purpose of dividing the reform forces and
electing a Republican president, the Pope and all his "priest-led
citizens" straddled his collar, rode him into an open grave and
piled a cathedral on top of him to hold him down--at least I
suppose they did from the way in which this raucous little Buzfuz
is chewing the rag. Had he been "A Good Catholic" he would have
been elected with votes to burn; for did not Dick Bland have to
hide out in the Ozark hills to escape the presidential nomination
the moment it was rumored that his wife was a "Romanist"? Did not
Generals Sherman and Sheridan have to insulate themselves to
avoid the presidential lightnings which played around them
continuously because they were Catholics? Sure! Tommie is
doubtless correct in his assertion that the Pope controls
American politics and dictates every act of congress. That is
amply proven by the fact that after all these years the Catholics
have a representative in the president's cabinet. That all
Catholics are sworn enemies of this republic and peons of the
Pope is demonstrated by the fact that the "Romish"
attorney-general refused to permit his people to erect at their
own expense a chapel on government ground at West Point--the
general public being taxed meanwhile to maintain an Episcopal
clergyman at that place. Tommy protests that he is both a Baptist
and devoid of bigotry. If he can make this claim good I will
undertake to secure for him an engagement at $1,000 a day in a
dime museum as the greatest curio ever seen in this country.
Doubtless there are many good people who are Baptists but God's
sunlight never fell upon one who was not a bigot. The man who
concedes that it is possible for one to reach heaven except he be
soused bodily into some sacred slop-tub is not a Baptist. If he
thinks he is, he has made a faulty diagnosis of his disease. The
Baptist church breeds bigotry just as a dead mule does magots. It
dominates politics wherever it is strong enough to do so. It
boycotts every publisher who dares suggest that it doesn't
hold the one only key to heaven. It is the sworn foe of
Catholicism, yet not one of its members in a million has the
remotest idea what Catholicism means. It assumes that the great
body of Catholics are ignorant clowns, while itself absorbing 60
per cent. of the illiterates of this land. The more ignorant an
animal is the more bigoted Baptist it is likely to be. I cannot
at present think of a single American of distinction who was a
member of that denomination. I have passed in mental review the
great American statesmen, soldiers, authors and inventors, and
find only one among them who was web-footed. Garfield was a
Campbellite--and had he not been murdered no one would have
suspected that he was a great man. If any of the immortelles was
of the Baptist persuasion he was probably ashamed of that fact,
as he kept it concealed. It is possible that in soaking the
original sin out of a fellow any latent germs of genius he
possesses may be extracted also. Tommie solemnly assures us that
Catholics dare not read a book or paper that has not been
formally approved by the Pope. What a foolish falsehood!
I'll wager a pint of peanuts that Watson cannot name half a dozen
American books, papers or magazines that bear the Papal
imprimatur, and another pint of the same luscious circus fruit
that even his own rabid A.P.A. rot has never been placed in the
index prohibitorius. If it is not there every Catholic in this
country is privileged to read it without consulting Rome. Of the
most bigoted sect of pseudo- religious fanatics that ever cursed
this country the Hon. Tommie Watson is perhaps the most
intolerant and narrow-brained little blatherskite. And the worst
of it all is that while in religion he's a fool, in politics he's
a knave. While pretending that the cause of the common people was
the apple of his eye, he lent himself to a scheme to defeat their
tribune and elect a ligneous-headed hiccius-doctius owned soul
and body by Mark Hanna, the "industrial cannibal." Bryan would be
president to-day but for this busy little blabster whom accident
placed in a position where he could betray the people. Avaunt!
thou contumacious little coyote, thou pestiferous pole-cat.
Benedict Arnold was a gentleman when compared to you, for his
treason was open and avowed, while you stabbed the cause of the
people in a friendly embrace, struck in the back. You have had no
parallel since Judas Iscariot conspired with the plutocracy to
betray the idol of the people--and even Judas had decency enough
to hang himself as expiation for his infamy. Shut up, thou
hatchet-faced, splenetic-hearted, narrow-headed little hypocrite,
for verily the world is aweary of Tommie Watson. His "brilliant
and patriotic editorials" are used only to underlay carpets,
paper pantry shelvest and for purposes less polite. I cheerfully
risk my reputation as a prophet on the prediction that in less
than two years his windy little "reform" paper will go to the
bone-pile. Tommie, you are the pin-worm of American politics--a
more aggravating little parasite than even Miltonius Park. Take a
gentleman's advice and apply the soft pedal to your wheezy
calliope--get off the political stage in time to avoid the coming
cataclysm of sphacelated cabbage and has-been cats. The day of
your destiny's over and the star of your fate is in the
mullagatawny. You are simply a fragment of worthless political
seaweed cast with flabby jelly fish and dead sting rays upon an
inhospitable shore, there to rot and befoul the atmosphere. You
have "a very ancient and fishlike smell, a smell not of the
newest." You may howl a lung out, but will only evoke laughter or
disgust. Occasionally some lonely Middle-of-the-Roader, dragging
his No. 12's painfully through the dust may turn to look at you,
perhaps toss you a dime; but you are politically dead. You may
play the Baptist racket for all it is worth; but the brethren
while long on zeal are shy on boodle. Even Jehovah Boanerges
Cranfill, the champion leg elongator of the universe, finds it
hard work to keep fat in the Baptist field--must add professional
beggary to his schemes of predacity. You may tie your abortive
little paper to the tail of the "Ape," but that animal is too
weak in the hinder legs to pull it out of a financial hole. Go
plug yourself. Shuck your long-tailed hand-me-down Albert
Edward, trade your paper for a double-shovel plow, gird up your
yarn galluses and make a reasonable effort to earn an honest
living. Had you expended half the nervo-muscular energy in the
cotton patch that you have wasted in working your jaw-bone you
would have money to burn. Mene mene tekel upharsim--which means
that you are entirely too light at both ends.