modification of a striking landscape is violation and despoliation; and
unwarranted opposition, in some cases amounting almost to prudery,
follows any needful work of utilization. Undoubtedly the farmer and
builder and promoter have been too unmindful of the effect of their
interference on scenery, and particularly in taking little care in the
disposition of wastes and in the healing of wounds; but a work either of
farming or of construction may add interest and even lines of beauty to
a landscape and endow it with the suggestion of human interest. If care
were taken in the construction of public and semi-public work to reshape
the banks into pleasing lines, to clean up, to care for, to plant, to
erect structures of good proportions whether they cost much or little,
and to give proper regard to the sensibilities of the communities, most
of the present agitation against interference with natural scenery would
disappear. One has only to visit the factory districts, the vacation
resorts, the tenement areas, the banks of streams and gorges, to look at
the faces of cliffs and at many engineering enterprises and at
numberless farmyards, to find examples of the disregard of men for the
materials that they handle. It is as much our obligation to hold the
scenery reverently as to handle the products reverently. Man found the
earth looking well. Humanity began in a garden.
The keeping of the good earth depends on preservation rather than on
destruction. The office of the farmer and the planter is to produce
rather than to destroy; whatever they destroy is to the end that they
may produce more abundantly; these persons are therefore natural
care-takers. If to this office we add the habit of good housekeeping, we
shall have more than one-third of our population at once directly
partaking in keeping the earth. It is one of the bitter ironies that
farmers should ever have been taken out of their place to wreak
vengeance on the earth by means of military devastation. In the past,
this ravage has been small in amount because the engines of destruction
were weak, but with the perfecting of the modern enginery the havoc is
awful and brutal. While we have to our credit the improvement of
agriculture and other agencies of conservation, it is yet a fact that
man has never been so destructive as now. He is able to turn the skill
of his discovery to destructive ends (a subject that we have already
approached from another point of view). The keeping of the earth is
therefore involved in the organization of society. Military power heads
toward destructiveness. Civil power heads toward conservation. The
military power may be constructive in times of peace, but its end, if it
uses the tools it invents, is devastation and the inflicting of injury.
When the civil power is subjugated to the military power, society is
headed toward calamity.
To keep and to waste are opposite processes. Not only are we able to
despoil the earth by sheer lust of ravage and by blighting the fields
with caverns of human slaughter, but we shoot away incredible supplies
of copper and petroleum and other unrenewable materials that by every
right and equity belong to our successors; and, moreover, we are to make
these successors pay for the destruction of their heritage. Day by day
we are mortgaging the future, depriving it of supplies that it may need,
burdening the shoulders of generations yet unborn.
Merely to make the earth productive and to keep it clean and to bear a
reverent regard for its products, is the special prerogative of a good
agriculture and a good citizenry founded thereon; this may seem at the
moment to be small and ineffective as against mad impersonal and
limitless havoc, but it carries the final healing; and while the land
worker will bear much of the burden on his back he will also redeem the
earth.
_The tones of industry_
One of the clearest notes of our time is the recognition of the holiness
of industry and the attempt to formulate the morals of it. We accept
this fact indirectly by the modern endeavor to give the laboring man his
due.
The handworker is more or less elemental, dealing directly with the
materials. We begin to recognize these industries in literature, in
sculpture, and in painting; but we do not yet very consciously or
effectively translate them into music.
It is to be recognized, of course, that melody is emotional and dynamic
not imitative, that its power lies in suggestion rather than in direct
representation, and that its language is general; with all this I have
nothing to do. Meunier has done much with his chisel to interpret the
spirit of constructive labor and to develop its higher significance. His
art is indeed concrete and static, and sculpture and music are not to be
compared; yet it raises the question whether there may be other bold
extensions of art.
The primitive industries must have been mostly silent, when there were
no iron tools, when fire felled the forest tree and hollowed the canoe,
when the parts in construction were secured by thongs, and when the game
was caught in silent traps or by the swift noiseless arrow and spear.
Even at the Stone Age the rude implements and the materials must have
been mostly devoid of resonance. But now industry has become universal
and complex, and it has also become noisy,--so noisy that we organize to
protect ourselves from becoming distraught.
And yet a workshop, particularly if it works in metal, is replete with
tones that are essentially musical. Workmen respond readily to unison.
There are melodies that arise from certain kinds of labor. Much of our
labor is rhythmic. In any factory driven by power, there is a
fundamental rhythm and motion, tying all things together. I have often
thought, standing at the threshold of a mill, that it might be possible
somewhere by careful forethought to eliminate the clatter and so to
organize the work as to develop a better expression in labor. Very much
do we need to make industry vocal.
It is worth considering, also, whether it is possible to take over into
music any of these sounds of industry in a new way, that they may be
given meanings they do not now possess.
At all events, the poetic element in industry is capable of great
development and of progressive interpretation; and poetry is scarcely to
be dissociated from sound. All good work well done is essentially poetic
to the sensitive mind; and when the work is the rhythm of many men
acting in unison, the poetry has voice.
The striking of the rivet
The purr of a drill
The crash of a steam-shovel
The plunge of a dredge
The buzz of a saw
The roll of belts and chains
The whirl of spindles
The hiss of steam
The tip-tap of valves
The undertone rumble of a mill
The silence intent of men at work
The talk of men going to their homes,--
These are all the notes of great symphonies.
Nor should I stop with the industries of commerce and manufacture. There
are many possibilities in the sounds and voices that are known of
fisherfolk and campers and foresters and farmers. Somehow we should be
able to individualize these voices and to give them an artistic
expression in some kind of human composition. There are rich suggestions
in the voices of the farmyard, the calls of wild creatures, the tones of
farm implements and machinery, the sounds of the elements, and
particularly in the relations of all these to the pauses, the silences,
and the distances beyond.
Whether it is possible to utilize any of these tones and voices
artistically is not for a layman to say; but the layman may express the
need that he feels.
_The threatened literature_
A fear seems to be abroad that the inquisitiveness and exactness of
science will deprive literature of imagination and sympathy and will
destroy artistic expression; and it is said that we are in danger of
losing the devotional element in literature. If these apprehensions are
well founded, then do we have cause for alarm, seeing that literature is
an immeasurable resource.
Great literature may be relatively independent of time and place, and
this is beyond discussion here; but if the standards of interpretative
literature are lowering it must be because the standards of life are
lowering, for the attainment and the outlook of a people are bound to be
displayed in its letters.
Perhaps our difficulty lies in a change in methods and standards rather
than in essential qualities. We constantly acquire new material for
literary use. The riches of life are vaster and deeper than ever before.
It would be strange indeed if the new experience of the planet did not
express itself in new literary form.
We are led astray by the fatal habit of making comparisons, contrasting
one epoch with another. There may be inflexible souls among the
investigators who see little or nothing beyond the set of facts in a
little field, but surely the greater number of scientific men are
persons of keen imagination and of broad interest in all conquests.
Indeed, a lively imagination is indispensable in persons of the best
attainments in science; it is necessary only that the imagination be
regulated and trained. Never has it been so true that fact is stranger
than fiction. Never have the flights of the poets been so evenly matched
by the flights of science. All great engineers, chemists, physiologists,
physicists work in the realm of imagination, of imagination that
projects the unknown from the known. Almost do we think that the
Roentgen ray, the wireless telegraphy, the analysis of the light of the
stars, the serum control of disease are the product of what we might
call pure fancy. The very utilities and conquests of modern society are
the results of better imagination than the world has yet known. If it is
true that the desire to measure and to analyze is now an established
trait, equally is it true that it directs the mind into far and untried
reaches; and if we have not yet found this range of inspiration in what
is called artistic literature, it must be because literary criticism has
not accepted the imagery of the modern world and is still looking for
its art to the models of the past.
The models of the past are properly the standards for the performances
of their time, but this does not constitute them the standards of all
time or of the present time. Perhaps the writing of language for the
sake of writing it is losing its hold; but a new, clear, and forceful
literature appears. This new literature has its own criteria. It would
be violence to judge it only by standards of criticism founded on
Elizabethan writings. We do not descend into crude materialism because
we describe the materials of the cosmos; we do not eliminate imagination
because we desire that it shall have meaning; we do not strip literature
of artistic quality because it is true to the facts and the outlook of
our own time.
It may be admitted that present literature is inadequate, and that we
are still obliged to go to the former compositions for our highest
artistic expressions. Very good. Let us hope that we shall never cease
to want these older literatures. Let us hope that we shall never be
severed from our past. But perhaps the good judge in a coming
generation, when the slow process of elimination has perfected its
criticism, will discover something very noble and even very artistic in
the abundant writing of our day. Certainly he will note the recovery
from the first excess of reaction against the older orders, and he will
be aware that at this epoch man began anew to express his social sense
in a large way, as a result of all his painstaking studies in science.
Even if he should not discover the highest forms of literary expression,
he might find that here was the large promise of a new order. Possibly
he would discover major compositions of the excellence of which we
ourselves are not aware.
It is less than forty years since Darwin and less than fifty years since
Agassiz. It is only twenty years since Pasteur. It is only a century and
a quarter since Franklin, fifty years since Faraday, less than
twenty-five since Tyndall. It is sixty years since Humboldt glorified
the earth with the range of his imagination. It is not so very far even
if we go back to Newton and to Kepler. Within the span of a century we
count name after name of prophets who have set us on a new course. So
complete has been the revolution that we lost our old bearings before we
had found the new. We have not yet worked out the new relationships, nor
put into practice their moral obligations, nor have we grasped the
fulness of our privileges. We have not yet made the new knowledge
consciously into a philosophy of life or incorporated it completely into
working attitudes of social equity. Therefore, not even now are we ripe
for the new literature.
We have gone far enough, however, to know that science is not
unsympathetic and that it is not contemptuous of the unknown. By lens
and prism and balance and line we measure minutely whatever we can
sense; then with bared heads we look out to the great unknown and we
cast our lines beyond the stars. There are no realms beyond which the
prophecy of science would not go. It resolves the atom and it weighs the
planets.
Among the science men I have found as many poetic souls as among the
literary men, although they may not know so much poetry, and they are
not equally trained in literary expression; being free of the restraint
of conventional criticism, they are likely to have a peculiarly keen and
sympathetic projection. Close dissection long continued may not lead to
free artistic literary expression; this is as true of literary anatomy
as of biological anatomy: but this does not destroy the freedom of other
souls, and it may afford good material for the artist.
Two kinds of popular writing are confused in the public mind, for there
are two classes that express the findings of scientific inquiry. The
prevailing product is that which issues from establishments and
institutions. This is supervised, edited, and made to conform; it is the
product of our perfected organizations and has all the hardness of its
origin. The other literature is of a different breed. It is the
expression of personality. The one is a useful and necessary public
literature of record and advice; the other is a literature of outlook
and inspiration. The latter is not to be expected from the institutions,
for it is naturally the literature of freedom.
My reader now knows my line of approach to the charge that literature is
in danger of losing its element of devotion, and hereby lies the main
reason for introducing this discussion into my little book. We may be
losing the old literary piety and the technical theology, because we are
losing the old theocratic outlook on creation. We also know that the
final control of human welfare will not be governmental or military, and
we shall some day learn that it will not be economic as we now
prevailingly use the word. We have long since forgotten that once it was
patriarchal. We shall know the creator in the creation. We shall derive
more of our solaces from the creation and in the consciousness of our
right relations to it. We shall be more fully aware that righteousness
inheres in honest occupation. We shall find some bold and free way in
which the human spirit may express itself.
_The separate soul_
Many times in this journey have we come against the importance of the
individual. We are to develop the man's social feeling at the same time
that we allow him to remain separate. We are to accomplish certain
social results otherwise than by the process of thronging, which is so
much a part of the philosophy of this anxious epoch; and therefore we
may pursue the subject still a little further.
Any close and worth-while contact with the earth tends to make one
original or at least detached in one's judgments and independent of
group control. In proportion as society becomes organized and involved,
do we need the separate spirit and persons who are responsible beings on
their own account. The independent judgment should be much furthered by
studies in the sciences that are founded on observation of native forms
and conditions. And yet the gains of scientific study become so rigidly
organized into great enterprises that the individual is likely to be
lost in them.
As an example of what I mean, I mention John Muir, who has recently
passed away, and who stood for a definite contribution to his
generation. He could hardly have made this contribution if he had been
attached to any of the great institutions or organizations or to big
business. He has left a personal impression and a remarkable literature
that has been very little influenced by group psychology. He is the
interpreter of mountains, forests, and glaciers.
There is one method of aggregation and social intercourse. There is
another method of isolation and separateness. Never in the open country
do I see a young man or woman at nightfall going down the highways and
the long fields but I think of the character that develops out of the
loneliness, in the silence of vast surroundings, projected against the
backgrounds, and of the suggestions that must come from these situations
as contrasted with those that arise from the babble of the crowds. There
is hardiness in such training; there is independence, the taking of
one's own risk and no need of the protection of compensation-acts. There
is no over-imposed director to fall back on. Physical recuperation is in
the situation. As against these fields, much of the habitual golf and
tennis and other adventitious means of killing time and of making up
deficiencies is almost ludicrous.
Many of our reformers fail because they express only a group psychology
and do not have a living personal interpretation. Undoubtedly many
persons who might have had a message of their own have lost it and have
also lost the opportunity to express it by belonging to too many clubs
and by too continuous association with so-called kindred spirits, or by
taking too much post-graduate study. It is a great temptation to join
many clubs, but if one feels any stir of originality in himself, he
should be cautious how he joins.
I may also recall the great example of Agassiz at Penikese. In his last
year, broken in health, feeling the message he still had for the people,
he opened the school on the little island off the coast of
Massachusetts. It was a short school in one summer only, yet it has made
an indelible impression on American education. It stimulates one to know
that the person who met the incoming students on the wharf was Agassiz
himself, not an assistant or an instructor. Out of the great number of
applicants, he chose fifty whom he would teach. He wanted to send forth
these chosen persons with his message, apostles to carry the methods and
the way of approach. (When are we to have the Penikese for the rural
backgrounds?)
Sometime there will be many great unattached teachers, who will choose
their own pupils because they want them and not merely because the
applicants have satisfied certain arbitrary tests. The students may be
graduates of colleges or they may be others. They will pursue their
work not for credit or for any other reward. We shall yet come back to
the masters, and there will be teaching in the market-places.
We are now in the epoch of great organization not only in industrial
developments but also in educational and social enterprises, in
religious work, and in governmental activities. So completely is the
organization proceeding in every direction, and so good is it, that one
habitually and properly desires to identify oneself with some form of
associated work. Almost in spite of oneself, one is caught up into the
plan of things, and becomes part of a social, economic, or educational
mechanism. No longer do we seek our educational institutions so much for
the purpose of attaching ourselves to a master as to pursue a course of
study. No more do we sit at the feet of Gamaliel.
In government, the organization has recently taken the form of mechanism
for efficiency. We want government and all kinds of organization to be
efficient and effective, but administrative efficiency may easily
proceed at the expense of personality. Much of our public organization
for efficiency is essentially monarchic in its tendency. It is likely to
eliminate the most precious resource in human society, which is the
freedom of expression of the competent individual. We are piling
organization on organization, one supervising and watching and
"investigating" the other. The greater the number of the commissions,
investigating committees, and the interlocking groups, the more complex
does the whole process become and the more difficult is it for the
person to find himself. We can never successfully substitute bookkeeping
for men and women. We are more in need of personality than of
administrative regularity.
This is not a doctrine of laisser-faire or let-alone. The very
conditions of modern society demand strong control and regulation and
vigorous organization; but the danger is that we apply the controls
uniformly and everywhere and eliminate the free action of the
individual, as if control were in itself a merit.
In some way we must protect the person from being submerged in the
system. We need always to get back of the group to the individual. The
person is the reason for the group, although he is responsible to the
group.
It is probably a great advantage to our democracy that our educational
institutions are so completely organized, for by that means we are able
to educate many more persons and to prepare them for the world with a
clear and direct purpose in life. But this is not the whole of the
public educational process. Some of the most useful persons cannot
express themselves in institutions. This is not the fault of the
institutions. In the nature of their character, these persons are
separate. For the most part, they do not now have adequate means of
self-expression or of contributing themselves to the public welfare.
When we shall have completed the present necessity of consolidation,
centralization, and organization, society will begin to be conscious of
the separate souls, who in the nature of the case must stand by
themselves, and it will make use of them for the public good. Society
will endow persons, not on a basis of salary, and enable them thereby to
teach in their own way and their own time. This will represent one of
the highest types of endowment by government and society.
We begin to approach this time by the support, through semi-public
agencies, of persons to accomplish certain results or to undertake
special pieces of work, particularly of research; but we have not yet
attained the higher aim of endowing individuals to express themselves
personally. There are liberated personalities, rare and prophetic, who
are consumed only in making a living but who should be given
unreservedly to the people: the people are much in need.
Never have we needed the separate soul so much as now.
_The element of separateness in society_
If it is so important that we have these separate souls, then must we
inquire where they may be found and particularly how we may insure the
requisite supply. Isolated separates appear here and there, in all the
ranges of human experiences; these cannot be provided or foretold; but
we shall need, in days to come, a group or a large class of persons, who
in the nature of their occupation, situation, and training are
relatively independent and free. We need more than a limited number of
strong outstanding figures who rise to personal leadership. We must have
a body of unattached laborers and producers who are in sufficient
numbers to influence unexpressed public opinion and who will form a
natural corrective as against organization-men, habitual reformers, and
extremists.
It is apparent that such a class must own productive property, be able
to secure support by working for themselves, and produce supplies that
are indispensable to society. Their individual interests must be greater
and more insistent than their associative interests. They should be in
direct contact with native resources. This characterization describes
the farmer, and no other large or important group.