Now, at this present moment, and for the next two months, twenty
million American youth,--turning from syndicalism, the new morality,
forgotten virtues, capitalism, psychical research, sociology,
trust-busting, fly-swatting, preventive medicine, the evils of
alcohol and tobacco, and other of the million burning questions
of the day,--are and will be chiefly occupied with the important
historical problem as to whether Mr. Charles Brickley, captain of and
kicker-in-extraordinary to the Harvard football team, is a mightier man
than the ancient heroes of the kicking game,--Moffatt, Bull, Brooke,
Trafford, O’Dea, Poe, Sharpe, Eckershall,--and with this discussion
they will couple the practical ambition and personal hope of joining
the great galaxy.
But why bother about such matters? We cannot all, dear brother sports,
become members of the firm of Brickley and Company. There is no use in
trying. Besides, satisfaction for disappointment is ready at hand. As
is common in human affairs, when we cannot do a thing literally, we
may always turn to a metaphor. The turn has this advantage: whereas
actual kicking is the prerogative of a few favored mortals, its
practice, under the metaphor, may become the pastime of any person,
however humble. For this use of the word there is the highest possible
authority: the heavenly vision that appeared to Saul of Tarsus on the
road to Damascus, was accompanied by a voice which said, “It is hard
for thee to kick against the pricks.” It is interesting to note, by
the way, that these words were the only ones uttered in that famous
conversation which bear any suggestion of rationality, and it is not
unlikely that the great and able apostle, perceiving the hard-headed
and common-sense quality of the advice, made haste to adopt a less
futile pursuit than that of persecuting new movements.
Now this metaphor stands for an operation far more common than most of
us are usually aware. Figuratively, we are all kickers, at least nearly
all of us, in one way or another, at one time or another, for one cause
or another. Illustrations are as common as football associations or
earth worms. Thus that oracular Englishman, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, has
all Victorian literature the outcome of various reactions against the
“Victorian Compromise,” but, in less elegant phrase and from the point
of view of the aforesaid “V. C.,” all Victorian literature might be
said to have arisen from the _Stossenslust_, or desire to kick. And,
whereas that desire, literally considered, is surging in the breast
of every manly young American at this very moment,--the metaphorical
function may be administered by young and old, male and female, alike.
An extra strong cup of coffee, too many buckwheat cakes, too prolonged
indulgence in prayer-meetings, will often do the trick, without those
long years of patient practice which make certain of our football
heroes distinguished above their kind.
Personally I like the easy way, and therefore I may, at the outset, and
with all due modesty, lay a not-to-be-denied claim to some share in the
function that I am describing. I admire the motives, and occasionally
the works, of my colleagues in the noble art which we profess, the
art of setting the world, the whole world, or the particular world,
right,--perhaps of setting some parts of the world by the ears, who
knows? I greatly admire such periodicals as are instruments and
vehicles for the “registering of kicks” that will take the offender and
the offence squarely and forcibly and leave the remains to be carted
away by the scavengers of reform. I enjoy nothing more than a blithe,
personally conducted “muck-rake”; I hope sometime to offer a Nobel
kicking prize. Whatever makes against the crudeness, the carelessness,
the complacency especially, and the contentment with mediocrity that
so pervade some of the aspects of our modern civilization charms me.
Doubtless we in America are eaten up with the heir-to-all-the-ages,
we-can-do-as-we-like, America-for-the-Americans sort of feeling
and sentiment. Though Mr. Wells is probably right in saying that
“the United States of America remains the greatest country in the
world, and the living hope of mankind,” yet anything that checks our
bumptiousness is surely a good thing. But I do not halt here; far be
it from me to delight solely in the advantages of my own land. I love
to read about Ministerial and Opposition struggles, and the Austrian
parliament and the French strikes are very merry spectacles. Kicking
is really the most sacred tradition handed down to us from our puritan
ancestors, themselves most accomplished in the art. Why should not
one love it? But I dislike clumsy workers. As Matthew Arnold might
have said, we want real kicking, real criticism, real objection. The
vital question is as to the nature of good kicking and of bad kicking.
What are the “pricks” to be shunned? for, as we have said, the advice
of the heavenly voice would, in general, seem to be as sound as the
Elizabethan semi-slang is lively. Into the answer enter considerations
of motive, of object, of method, and of technic. In the interests of
sound thinking, I am going to register my own demurrer against certain
abuses of the noble pastime.
* * * * *
First as to the motive. Generally speaking this is dissatisfaction
with the _status quo_ and a desire to alter it. Altering may evidently
be about anything one pleases. Hence the motive for kicking may
be anything from crude envy to lofty altruism; it may be a simple
reaction, scarcely more noble than the electrically stimulated kick
of the frog’s leg in the classical experiment, or it may be quite
rational and untemperamental. It is obvious that the artist, the
_Stossenskunstmeister_, should avail himself of the high motive; and
no matter how much he may personally pine, should at least assume the
altruistic virtue. Skilful mammas customarily observe this principle
when they spank their children, saying, with greater reference to an
ideal than an actual world, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” or
“I do this for your own good,” or other equally convincing remarks. In
contrast with this amiable and ambi-flagellatory or bipenal practice,
may be placed the character and instance of the unjust judge who
frankly admitted boredom as his motive for action.
It would seem as if the present generation, in America, at least,
besides losing the old fashioned virtues of tact and reticence, had
also to some degree lost the artistic sense of the selection of the
proper motive, and in so far have become unskilful kickers. Perhaps
the growth of democracy has engendered obtuseness to the more delicate
arts, but what could be cruder, for example, than the motives of many
suffragettes, of many trade unions, of many socialists. It is crude raw
envy: “You have something that I haven’t got; I want it or something
just as good.” Intellectually and morally this position is about as far
advanced as that of a group of infants, whose conception of play seems
to be the snatching of those toys that are for the moment most desired
by their companions. “What is the city doing for women to make up for
the money that has been stolen from the treasury to found a man’s
college?” cries one, and another exclaims: “What is it all worth so
long as we haven’t the vote?”
“What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?”
says Shelley, and the child in proportion to his infancy will not be
happy until he gets the star, the watch, the rattle, or the cake of
soap.
One may believe in Votes for Women, rejoice over the improvement of
the position of workingmen, and hope to see many of the ideals of
socialism prevail,--and yet lament clumsiness and maladroitness in the
use of motive. For all causes need the aid of the judiciously selected
method, the appeal to high expediency, whereas they have to some degree
fallen into the hands of extremely clumsy operators, the Pankhursts,
the Carons, the Tannenbaums, who recall Newman’s words: “Others are
so intemperate and intractable that there is no greater calamity for
a good cause than that they should get hold of it.” They also recall
Shakespeare’s version of the words of Antony, which may be regarded as
the epitome of good form in kicking, so far as motive is concerned:
“This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good of all, made one of them.”
Even more various, important and interesting than the motive of kicking
is the object of the kick, _l’objet d’appui, das Stossensstoff_.
Judging from some specimens and examples still to be found among us,
we may imagine that the primitive man always objected to specific
and tangible things; if an acquaintance impinged too violently upon
the person of the primitive, the latter replied by “handing out,”
or footing out, a good “swift” blow. So too, now-a-days, the wise
and simple person is not likely to go too far afield to kick, there
being plenty of objects in the immediate neighborhood on which he
can break his toes, such as little eccentricities in his neighbor’s
or his own _ménage_. If he is wise, really wise, he takes exception
to these things from the high impersonal motives that we have been
examining, and only where he is pretty sure of success. But if he
have a disinterested mind, a philanthropic temperament, a broad
philosophical outlook on life, he will see a very large assortment of
objects that are by no means those of his special field of activity.
These are the generalized _objets d’appui_, and it may be said to the
credit of our civilization that we have accumulated them in larger
numbers than any of our predecessors. The fact is, indeed, that the
primitive had none of them, or, if in his later aeons he recognized
some of them, his attitude was religious, terrorful, abject. They
apparently grow in number quite as rapidly as other inventions of
the human mind; and as each of these latter has been devised and
recognized, so its accompanying kick has been engendered, thereafter
never quite to leave it; just as the louse of the dead Filipino
accompanies him to the nether world. Thus the general recognition of
something called Life, brings a kick at Life by those who are hard
hit by it. This is on the whole the most idle of the manifestations
of the _Stossenslust_. The most evident thing about life, for the
individual, is that it apparently begins somewhere, through no fault
whatever of the individual’s own, and ends for the individual in some
way that he cannot specifically forecast. Evidently to object to the
most hard and fast fact of the world, the time-honored premise that all
men are mortal, is a most futile proceeding; and yet it has been made
not only the subject of the most varied and legitimate inquiries, but
also of wailings and gnashings of teeth, of religious terror, fervor
and abnegation. So far as the subject of this paper is concerned, the
reasonable kick at life is the kick at conditions that lie along the
way; and it is a healthy sign of the times that our energies are being
directed rather to improvement of affairs in this world than to a too
active calculation about the compensations that the next one affords.
Another almost equally futile aim of the _Stossenskunst_ lies in
a kind of objection to alleged tendencies. With the advance of
civilization, to use Macaulay’s phrase, new tendencies and movements
are thought to appear; and these naturally develop their own special
crop of kickings. The decay of modern manners, the growing corruption
of the English tongue, the growing impudence of modern youth, the
encroachments of scepticism upon the domain of religion, the antagonism
of classes, the sentimentality of democratic life, the general increase
of foolishness,--these and a thousand other alleged tendencies, are
really futile matter for fretting about. Here, indeed, the operation
is something like this: the kicker goes forth to kick. He mistakes
a balloon for a football and with an inflator proceeds to blow the
balloon up, puffing it into enormous size with air (at 99F) from his
own lungs. Then he paints on it the sign, “Degeneracy of modern times,”
and kicks it a mile or two into the air in about any direction, except
toward a goal. Meanwhile really skilful kickers are trying to score by
accurate judicious kicks over a cross-bar.
The recognition of real tendencies, of movements, of purposes, of
motives, on the other hand, is of course indispensable if the art of
objecting is to be successfully practiced. If I were oblivious to
the tendency of my neighbor to absorb small portions of my estate,
of harum-scarum pictures and statues to oust a more sober art, of
armaments to go on increasing, I should find myself bunkoed in a
minute; I should be as inept as Piggy Moore in the story, who did not
know one goal from another. If one looks up only when his toes are
trod on, he will see little. Tendencies must be recognized; without
them we could have no such thing as the anticipatory, the preparative,
the restraining, the stimulating kick. But it is evident that little
except by way of suggestion can come through treating these matters in
general; the effective kick has a specific objective. And unless one’s
criticism of tendency be based on facts, one does as the protagonists
of the last paragraph, booting the self-blown air of vituperation or
aspiration.
It is a pastime to kick at institutions as well as at tendencies. I
once knew a man who for a whole long year never ceased to complain
of the Subway; it was noisy, ill-ventilated, ill-mannered. The kick
was very inapposite: I was not the president of the Metropolitan,
and moreover I liked the Subway, in spite of some drawbacks. But the
correct attitude is quite simple: one is under no undeniable compulsion
to ride in the Subway; but even if one cannot escape, to destroy it is
inconvenient and impossible; and therefore the only sensible course is
to attack the abuses, by writing about them to the management, or to
some benignant newspaper. In like manner many of us find a peculiar
joy in attacking modern journalism, flats, pianolas, victrolas,
automobiles, the modern drama, the study of rhetoric, the management
of asylums, city life and many institutions of many descriptions.
Whereas the judicious kicker usually aims only at the abuses that
such institutions bring with them,--unless the evils are inherent and
colossal, as possibly in Tammany Hall and war and the corner saloon.
But even here kicking must be piecemeal.
If for a moment a practical application of the foregoing principles
and kinds of kicking be made to contemporary American life, it is
evident that we do not, on the whole, frown sufficiently at the varied
assortment of specific objects at our feet. That is the charge often
brought against us by observant foreigners. Whether in our eager
individual pursuit of the main chance we neglect the details that lie
along the way, or whether we do not like to interfere with what is
not our own particular business, it is certain that we put up with
abuses and impositions that would not be tolerated in other lands.
Every country, to be sure, has its special crop of abuses, which are
more apparent to the foreigner than to the native, and there can be no
harm in the visitor’s indulging in the very common pastime of plucking
them out if the act helps him to consider the beam in his own eye. Yet
our attitude is seldom so correct as that of the old deacon who said,
“When you see a fault in me, mend it in yourselves, brethren.” It is
really much easier,--and quite as futile,--to rail at what we don’t
like in other lands--the lack of hot bread and ice-water in England,
of swift and slaughterous railways in Germany and France, of public
control of beggars in Italy and Spain--than to set our own house in
order. But kicking, like charity, should begin at home. It ought to be
the duty of everybody at home to object, persistently and effectively,
to the specific overcrowded street-car, the badly paved road, the
encroaching door-step, the neglected yard, the malodorous cesspool,
the irresponsible automobile, and the reckless railroad--especially if
he have any personal part in the maintenance of similar abuses. If the
tendency of these evils were rightly apprehended, if a part only of
the effort that is expended, presumably, in objecting to generalized,
foreign and futile subjects, were bestowed on specific and tangible
details, if we would forego the emotional pleasure of the impersonal
“muck-rake,” to assail the evil at our very feet,--especially if
each one of us were careful to avoid offence in matters of the same
kind--our country would surely be a much fairer one.
* * * * *
If we are to distinguish good kicking from bad the matter remains to
be looked at from a somewhat different point of view, that of method
and technic. The matter is important enough to run some risk of
repetition. I am far from following a school of thinkers who seem to
imply that when the method of a subject,--as of teaching, brick-laying,
railroading, etc.,--is properly apprehended, the learner may ride gaily
away on a successful career without reference to the facts of his
business. Nor is method easy to define; all that I know is that it is
very important. In addition to the inspiration and animus of a good,
or at least a plausible, motive and to a judicious choice of object,
good kicking should also be in the right direction. Let us see what is
actually in vogue.
A common kind of kick might be called conservative. Under the loose
figure of the “gridiron” we may imagine certain more spirited and
adventurous souls who wish to propel the game toward a more or less
distant and obscure goal; they have some idea of tendency. In their
efforts they are constantly hampered, checked, and tripped by an
equally numerous body of players, who desire to keep the game where
it is, alleging that there is no fairer prospect than the fields that
have already been played over, that every advance is sure to lead to
the bog and the morass. Life has nothing better to offer than what it
has already offered; their efforts are to keep the ball in the middle
of the field; no score games are best. Now this conservative kick
certainly has manifest advantages; it may be used, for example, with
great effect against the common cry that we are better than anybody
else, or against rash and hasty innovation. But in its extreme form
it is peculiarly irritating. This extreme form may be called the
reactionary kick, a favorite pastime in all the ages. Let me take
an example that I happened to come across a day or two ago. In _The
School of Abuse_, Stephen Gosson said among many other things of like
reasonable tenor and sense of fact,--
“Consider with thy selfe (gentle reader) the olde discipline of
Englande, mark what we were before, and what we are now: Leave _Rome_ a
while and cast thine eye backe to thy Predecessors, and tell mee howe
wonderfully wee have been chaunged, since wee were schooled in these
abuses. _Dion_ saith, that english men could suffer watching and labor,
hunger and thirst, and beare of al stormes with hed and shoulders,
they used slender weapons, went naked, and were good soldiours, they
fed uppon rootes and barkes of trees, they would stand up to the
chin many dayes in marishes without victualles: and they had a kind
of sustenaunce in time of neede, of which if they had taken but the
quantitie of a beane, or the weight of a pease, they did neyther gape
after meate, nor long for the cuppe, a great while after. The men in
valure not yeelding to _Scithia_, the women in courage passing the
_Amazons_. The exercise of both was shootyng and darting, running
and wrestling, and trying such maisteries, as eyther consisted in
swiftnesse of feete, agilitie of body, strength of armes, or Martiall
discipline. But the exercise that is now among us, is banqueting,
playing, pipyng, and dauncing, and all such delightes as may win us to
pleasure, or rocke us a sleepe.”
This is amusing; we are so far from Gosson’s time that we are not
afraid to laugh at it; we recognize its absurdity, as we recognize
the humor of the quack medicine vendor in _Punch_ (Dec. 24, 1913):
“Here you are, gents, sixpence a bottle. Founded on the researches
of modern science. Where should we be without science? Look at the
ancient Britons. They hadn’t no science, and where are they? Dead
and buried, every one of ’em.” But, _mutatis mutandis_, Gosson’s
words are a reactionary formula of all the ages: we find it, more
persuasively and more subtly, in the _Past and Present_ of Carlyle,
in some of the criticism of Arnold, in many of the denunciations of
Ruskin, and it is even betting that one will not find an example of
it any day in the pages of our more staid journals. It objects to
most modern enterprises, to imperialism, to the increase of foreign
trade, to modern science, to psychical research, to the Ph.D. degree,
to children’s courts, to scientific philanthropy, to eugenics, to the
Panama Canal, to a thousand other things, not because there may be a
reasonable and conservative scepticism regarding the outcome of these
matters and the facts on which they are alleged to rest, but because
they were not recognized by the pre-Baconian philosophers, and fail to
be specifically commented on by Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius or St.
Paul.
Whereas it must, of course, be evident to common sense that the
enterprises of an age may be properly criticised, for the most part,
only in terms of the age. One’s own age is usually regarded as a
particularly enterprising one, and an enterprising age is one full of
experiment. All that experience has to teach us about new enterprises
in the main is that they have never been tried before, and that we
were best not to be over sanguine of their success. But that is merely
reasonable caution,--such as doubtless mingled with the loftier spirit
of a Themistocles, a Pericles, a Michael Angelo, a Raleigh, a Bismarck,
a Wilbur Wright, a Scott, in the ages that we are accustomed to think
of as great. The enterprising age has always tried to find better
houses, better ships, better laws,--to find its north pole,--and it
is good much in proportion as it tries to find these things. Many of
the attempts are failures, and the way to success is strewn with bones
of men, but they are failures because they do not attain the goal for
which they are striving, because they do not win the satisfactions
of their own times; not because they do not conform to the achieved
success or to the reactionary formula of a past age.
The reactionary kick is not without virtue; it is usually a gentleman’s
instrument. It may even be charming, as with those dear ladies in
_Cranford_ who never used any word “not sanctioned by Johnson.” The
charm may arise from the fact that the reactionary kick really requires
no thought at all; a fair acquaintance with the literature of past
ages, of one past age in particular,--the Periclean, the Medicean, the
Spenserian, the Johnsonian,--is all that is necessary. Therefore one
can put one’s effort on manner and style, and may produce the effect of
great suavity and wisdom. The reactionary kick is really terribly easy,
possibly the easiest of all intellectual exercises,--indeed, it barely
merits the name of intellectual; for it really consists in putting some
standard on ice, and taking it off from time to time whenever a warm
modern idea is thought to be in need of cooling. Whereas, on the other
hand, the man in the thick of an active enterprise must work and think
with all his might, and etiquette and style are of minor moment.
Yes, on the whole, the reactionary kick must in turn react on the
intellectual and moral quality of its operator and cause his fibre to
degenerate through easefulness. But this we seldom notice. The poet
says:
“The crown of olive let another wear;
It is my crown to mock the runner’s feet
With gentle wonder and with laughter sweet.”
and we scorn him, calling him hedonist, epicurean, indifferentist,
“quitter;” but he is really less bad than the reactionary kicker
who, when he has energy enough to get into the game, still hugs the
side lines or keeps trotting back to the bleachers to shout needless
warnings to players who know quite as much as he. Or again, we usually
reckon it doubtful ethics to quarrel with another man’s job, and can
see the absurdity in lack of harmony between the pot and the kettle;
for we are fundamentally of the opinion that live and let live is
ordinarily a good public and private motto. And yet, the strife that
sometimes arises between the representatives of various activities is
no more absurd than the attempt to pry down from its various pedestals
the enterprise of modern times, with the levers and pulleys of past
generations. The reactionary kick is, on the whole, as useful as
plowing with wooden plowshares, battling with the pilum, crushing flies
with a steam-hammer, repudiating the typewriter and the locomotive, or
giving one’s days and nights to the volumes of Thomas Aquinas.
* * * * *
A word as to technic, which is in a comparatively crude state and
leaves much to be desired. That is perhaps inevitable, since really
skilful kicking, no matter in what direction, does not really proclaim
itself as such, and is consequently not likely to be thought of at
all as anything more than advice or persuasion, whereas the unskilful
technician is too likely to call names to be really effective. Some of
the phrases in vogue will show the crudeness of the technic: the white
man’s burden, the strenuous life, a tendency toward socialism, this
is an age of transition, simplified spelling is an entering wedge,
let us sweep anarchy into the sea, we are up against it in life, home
is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse, I fear that I am too
old-fashioned, we must uplift the masses, what are home and children
and country if we have not the vote, America for the Americans, destroy
the very foundations of our faith, threaten to overwhelm our fairest
institutions beneath a wave of ignorance and despotism, to crucify
mankind on a cross of gold,
“Why be this juice the growth of God, who dare
Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a snare?
A blessing, we should use it, should we not?
And if a curse, why then, who set it there?”
etc., etc., etc., etc.
Nor is the pantomime of kicking more advanced: the melancholy air
of grave concern at the state of scholarship in America; the tears
in the voice lamenting the decay of our dear mother tongue; the
placid large-eyed sorrow at the spectacle of corruption, of reckless
automobiles, or of unkempt pavements; the firm and elevated chin and
stretching neck of her who presses into the service of the Cause;
the slow and silent tread, albeit in public places, of him who goes
about in meditation on the misery of mankind (_eheu miser!_);--all
these methods were the object for the satire of a Swift or the sweet
rationality of a Montaigne; but they must be content with this sketchy
cataloguing from a humbler pen.
One school of kickers only, so far as I am aware, has paid much
attention to the technic of the great art. Their names will presently
appear (for should they not be named with honor?), but the essence of
their method is this, that they side-step every move in the game and,
as the play goes rushing by, plant a skilful kick where they think it
will be effective. In this game they do somewhat imitate the methods
of the reactionary kicker, who as we have seen, retreats to the rear
of the field, bidding the play come to him on the ground where it
was played by St. Thomas, Samuel and Noah. That is to say, the method
consists in assuming a point of view different from the current one.
There the resemblance ceases, for these modern masters of technic
rarely retreat to the rear, but keep alongside the game or even ahead
of it, and even mingle in it with jest and laughter. And thus Mr. Shaw,
from his coign of vantage just ahead of the player, is constantly
thrusting things between his legs to trip him up if he run awkwardly;
and Mr. Wells is making diagrams of how badly the game has been played
in the past, and showing how it is bound to improve when we divest
it of old and ragged toggery, which somehow holds together; and Mr.
Chesterton is engaged in proving that nobody but himself knows anything
about sport anyway; while Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Belloc, and a host of
others are kicking away brilliantly, imagining that they also have
discovered something quite new in the annals of the sport. Meanwhile
hosts of good quiet people are lending a helping hand or are, like
skilful guards or backs, actively but unostentatiously pushing the good
cause through the opponents’ line and towards the goal.
If, by way of summary, one were asked to draw a brief sketch of the
ideal kicker, much as Herbert Spencer drew the character of the ideal
writer, the answer would be something like this. The ideal kicker is
he who would improve his own condition or the condition of the town,
community, age, and atmosphere in which he lives, mainly according to
the light of his own generation. His attack is against the particular
and the immediate; for he knows that for the purposes of his art,
life is made up of an infinite number of small and specific acts. The
larger abuse he recognizes to be assailable chiefly in its detail,
and hence the pursuit of it, except in rare circumstances,--as when a
whole community is like minded with himself,--is likely to be a sort of
guerilla warfare and a kind of pot-hunting. But it is guerilla warfare
and pot-hunting directed to as large ends as can be compassed by the
limits of one’s imagination and practical common sense. The adroit
kicker knows that many sad objects will in the usual course of events
be left behind, by a sort of common consent, just as we discard certain
clothes, less by deliberate pursuit of the ragman than by forgetting
the old suit in the delightful possession of the new. He therefore
spends his strength in calling attention to the new and beautiful
attire of civilization. Nor is he likely to be seduced into the belief,
that the armor of old days, or the stately shoe buckles and flowered
waistcoats and well-curled wigs of the eighteenth century, are a better
costume for our light running modern world and our warm climate than
the flexible jersey and springy stockings of the contemporary athlete.
Do you ask if such an ideal kicker actually exists? I am forced to
admit that I know no such one, any more than Spencer could have pointed
to the actual embodiment of his deduction. And if it be further
objected that the foregoing pages do by no means wholly exemplify the
doctrine that they attempt to expound, in that they kick at what is
essentially unkickable, the _Stossenslust_ of humanity, I can merely
register a mild and dainty kick to the effect that it is unreasonable
to expect me, more than any other reformer or _censor morum_, to abide
quite exactly by the doctrine that I would inculcate. Does it at all
matter? Not very much one way or the other.