Not long ago, in the Metropolitan Magazine, Clarence Day shied a
cocoanut at old Henri Fabre. Personally I had nothing against Henri. I
rather liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clarence said
publicly, "that old bird-artist, you don't have to admire him any
longer." Without waiting for further encouragement I bounced Henri off
the steps of my Pantheon.
Have you a little Pantheon? It is necessary, I admit, but nothing is so
important as to keep it from getting crowded with half-gods. For many
months my own Pantheon has been seriously congested. Most of the ancient
deities are still around--George Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom Hardy
and Sam Butler--and there is a long waiting list suggested by my
friends. Joseph Conrad has been sitting in the lobby for several years,
hungering for a vacant pedestal, and I have had repeated applications
from such varied persons as Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau,
Anatole France, Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P. Shelley, John
Muir, George Washington and Mary Wollstonecraft. But with so many
occupants already installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed in, it
has been impossible to open the doors to newcomers. My gods are like the
office-holders--few die and none resign. And when a happy accident
occurs, like the demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel as one feels when
some third person is good enough to smash the jardiniere.
I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while. Two or three years ago he
swept into the Pantheon on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse
for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest gods I had ever
encountered. His smile, his long jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a
Tussaud figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and William Blakes.
I stood him in the corner when he first arrived, debating where to put
him, but at no time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young Teddy
Junior helped me to like Woodrow. So did Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did
Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all, had kept
Mr. Wilson from being a Republican? How did he differ intrinsically from
a Henry Stimson, a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton? The
pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had not the heart to enthrone
him; and never shall I enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the
flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and commonplace
humanity. He is President, as was Taft. So is he impressive. But the
expectation I had blown up for him is punctured. He would have been a
god, despite all my prejudice against his styles, if at any time he had
proved himself to be the resolute democrat. But the resolute democrat he
was not. He was just an ordinary college president inflating his chest
as well as he could, and he has to get out of my Pantheon.
This eviction of the President relieves my feelings like a good spring
cleaning. To be con-structive gives me pleasure, but not half so much
pleasure as to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former mental
and spiritual habitations. A great many people are catholic. They have
hearts in which Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East Lynne. I
envy these people and their receptive natures, but my own chief joy is
to asphyxiate my young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bondage
of loyalty.
There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I was unjust to Upton Sinclair
that I almost subscribed to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel,
Jimmie Higgins, I actually read it.
"My best book," Mr. Sinclair assures the world. If that is really the
case, as I hope, I am happily emancipated from him forever. He is
something of an artist. He converts into his own kind of music the
muck-rake element in contemporary journalism. He is always a
propagandist, and out of religious finance or the war or high society or
the stockyards or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that
nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on such stimulants, one
ought to choose them carefully, and I'd much rather go straight to Billy
Sunday than take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on reading his
well-known health books, I nearly fasted nine days under his influence.
That is to say, I fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which I
dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced me that I was perhaps
a coarser organism than Mr. Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an
ordinary diet. But until I had a good reason for expelling this
uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was always in danger of taking
him seriously. Now, I am glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am
safe.
Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom Upton Sinclair is
nothing but a gargoyle; yet the expulsion of Nietzsche was also
required. When we used to read the _New Age_ ten years ago, with Oscar
Levy's steady derision of everything and anything not Nietzschean, I had
a horrible sense of inadequacy, and I started out to read the Master's
works. It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and worm as I was,
I found Nietzsche upsetting all the other fellows in the Pantheon. He
and William Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christianity.
Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny stories. He was sulky with
George Meredith and frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss
Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but I voted him away.
This Olympian problem does not seem to bother men like William Marion
Reedy. Mr. Reedy is the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee
Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism, Woodrow Wilson
and Theodore Roosevelt. He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile
salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops and publishers, and
he is genuinely himself with all of them. He finds the common
denominator in machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and without
turning a hair he moves from tropical to arctic conversation. He is at
home with Celtic fairies and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance
and St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe he has, it must be
a good deal like a Union depot, with gods coming in and departing on
every train and he himself holding a glorious reception at the
information booth. I am sure he can still see the silver lining to W. J.
Bryan and the presidential timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun
of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a good word for Freud. He has
nothing against Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This receptivity
puzzles me. A person with such open sympathies is called upon to slave
in their service, to rush here and there like a general practitioner, to
sleep with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at his head. How
does he find the energy to do it! I admire it. I marvel at men who
understand all and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore
Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt Whitman. Think of those
who have a good word to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am
sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a lot of much-needed
vitality. Give me a temple on a high hill, with a long drop down from
the exit.