I suppose the discussion is one which must go on always in any land
where the people of our race and tradition dwell. A more objective,
natural and naïve people would not be so interested in sin, and
when the late Mayor Gaynor of New York spoke of the difficulty of
administering the affairs of a modern city according to “the standard
of exquisite morals” held aloft by some persons for others, he
designated in his clear and clever way a class of citizens familiar to
every mayor by the curiously doctrinaire order of indurated mind with
which they are endowed. They begin with the naïve assumption that their
standard is the one and only correct standard, and that since men have
repeatedly refused to adopt it on mere inspection they must be forced
to do so by the use of violence, a process which they call maintaining
“law and order.” They believe that any wrong, any abuse, may be stopped
instantly by the passage of a law, and if one venture to question the
efficacy of any plan they propose, he is said at once to be opposed to
morality and to religion, and is set down as a profane and sacrilegious
person.
It is, of course, inconvenient to argue with a person who has the
supreme refuge of the irrelevant conclusion; as inconvenient as it
would be were one to be offered carbolic acid as a toilet article,
and, upon refusal, be accused of not believing in cleanliness. This
order of mind imagines that every phase of human conduct can be ordered
and regulated by the enactment of statutes; that the industries,
occupations, clothing, amusements, appetites, passions, prejudices,
opinions, ambitions, aspirations and devotions of man can be changed,
moulded and regulated by city councils and state legislatures. Every
inconvenience, every difficulty, every disagreeable feature of modern
life, is to be done away by the passage of a law.
That our race is saturated with this curious and amazing superstition
of the power of written enactments is shown by the common terminology.
The mental reactions of a large portion of mankind against the
irritation of opposing opinion and conduct habitually express
themselves in the phrase, “There ought to be a law.” It is heard as
often every day as the stereotyped references to the weather. Not a
disagreeable incident in life is complained of without that expression;
no one has a pet aversion or a darling prejudice that he does not
cherish the desire of having a law passed to bring the rest of the
world around to his way of feeling. And when a trust is formed, or a
strike interrupts business, or the sheets on the hotel bed are too
short, or the hatpin of a woman in a crowded street car is too long,
or a new dance is introduced, or a boor preëmpts a seat in a train,
or a cat howls on the back-yard fence in the night time, or a waiter
is impertinent, or the cook leaves, the indignant citizen lifts his
eyes hopefully toward that annual calamity known as the session of the
state legislature, and repeats the formula: “There ought to be a law.”
And when the legislature assembles, a whole body of foolish bills is
introduced regulating everything in the earth, and some things that
are outside of the earth. If a deed is disapproved of by a group of
people, an agitation is begun to make it a criminal offense; by means
of pains and penalties the whole of life is to be regulated, and
government is to become a vast bureaucracy of policemen, catch-polls,
inspectors, beadles, censors, mentors, monitors and spies. As the
session draws toward its close, the haste to enact all these measures
becomes frantic. I shall never forget those scenes of riot, the howling
and drunkenness and confusion and worse I have witnessed in the
legislatures of Illinois and of Ohio the last night of the session.
And all this delirium goes on in every state of the Union, every
winter--and all these enactments must be revered. It is the phase of
the apotheosis of the policeman, who is to replace nurse and parent and
teacher and pastor, and, relieving all these of their responsibilities,
undertake to remould man into a being of absolute perfection, in whom
character may be dispensed with, since he is to dwell forever under
the crystal dome of a moral vacuum from which temptation has been
scientifically exhausted.
The reason is simple, and obvious; it inheres in the belief in the
absolute. Your true reformer is not only without humor, without pity,
without mercy, but he is without knowledge of life or of human nature,
and without very much of any sort of sweetness and light. The more
moral he is, the harder he is, and the more amazingly ready with cruel
judgments; and he seldom smiles except with the unction that comes
with the thought of his own moral superiority. He thinks there is an
absolute good and an absolute bad, and hence absolutely good people and
absolutely bad people.
The peculiar and distinguishing feature of his mind is that life is
presented to it in stark and rigid outline. He is blandly unconscious
of distinctions; he has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of
values, in a word, no sense of humor. His world is made up of wholly
unrelated antitheses. There are no shades or shadows, no gradations,
no delicate and subtle relativities. A thing is either black or white,
good or bad. A deed is either moral or immoral, a virtue or a crime.
It is all very simple. All acts of which he does not himself approve
are evil; all who do not think and act as he thinks and acts, are bad.
If you do not know when a deed, or an opinion is wrong, he will tell
you; and if you doubt him or differ with him, you are bad, and it is
time to call in the police. “Whenever the Commons has nothing else
to do,” said the wise old member of Parliament, “it can always make
a new crime.” Statutes are thus enacted, as the saying is, against
all evils, great and small, and the greater the evil, of course, the
greater the moral triumph expressed by the mere enactment. But because
of certain contrarieties in nature and a certain obstreperous quality
in human nature and a general complexity in life as a whole these legal
fulminations are frequently triumphs only in theory, and in practice
often intensify the very ills they seek to cure. As the witty Remy de
Gourmont says: _Quand la morale triomphe il se passes des choses très
vilaines._
The more intensively developed specimen of the type will not overtly
sin himself, but he loves to inspect those who do, and to peer at
them, and to wonder how they could ever have the courage to do it; he
likes to imagine their sensations, and to note each one of them as it
was developed in the interesting experience. And hence the psychic
lasciviousness of those who are constantly reporting plays and pictures
as fit for the censor they are always clamoring for. Sometimes they
go slumming as students of the evils of society. They are like pious
uncles who never swear themselves under any circumstances, but relate
stories of other men who do, recite their delightful experiences and
roll out the awful oaths with which the profane gave vent to their
feelings with a relish that is no doubt a relief to their own.
It is, I suppose, our inheritance from the Puritans, or the worst of
our inheritance from the Puritans, and it is possible that it is worth
while to have paid the penalty as a price for the best we derived from
them, since one has to take the bad with the good, though in those
days I often wished that the bequest had gone to some other of the
heirs. Perhaps in thus speaking of the good we had from them, I am
merely yielding to the fear of saying openly what I have often thought,
namely, that the good we had from the Puritans has been immensely
overestimated and exaggerated, and is not one whit better or greater
in quantity or influence than that we had from the Cavaliers, or for
that matter from the latest emigrant on Ellis Island. They themselves
appreciated their own goodness, and we have always taken their words
for granted. I have often thought that some day, when I had the elegant
leisure necessary to such a task, I should like to write “A History of
Puritanism,” or, since I should have to place the beginnings of the
monumental work in Rome as far back at least as the reign of the first
Emperor, perhaps I should be less ambitious and content myself with
writing “A History of Puritanism in the United States of America.” I
should have to begin the larger work at that interesting period of
the history of Rome when the weary Augustus was being elected and
reëlected president against his will and trying to gratify the spirit
of Puritanism that was even in such people as those Romans, by enacting
all sorts of sumptuary laws and foolish prohibitions, and trying out to
miserable failures every single one of the proposals that have since
that time been made over and over again in the hope of regenerating
mankind. The story of how the Emperor’s own daughter was almost the
first to disobey his regulations is dramatic enough to conclude rather
than to begin any history, and yet I could write it with much more
pity than I could the story of those Puritans who abounded in my own
locality in my own time. To write fairly and philosophically of them
I should have to wait not only for a leisure so large and so elegant
that I am certain never to have it, but I should have to cultivate a
philosophic calm which I own with shame is far from me when I think
of some of the things they, or some of them, did in their efforts to
force their theories on others. I should not recall such things now,
and if I were to put them in that monumental and scholarly work of
my imagination, it should be, of course, only in the cold scientific
spirit, and as specimens, say in nonpariel type, at the foot of the
page with the learned annotations.