one will be in bed, and what will become of my telegram on the Czar of
Russia? Instead of getting three thousand words from you, I have been
giving you that number on your own topic."
"For once, then, I have got the better of a reporter," said I.
"But before I give you any supper, Mr. Reporter," said Josephine, "you
must acknowledge, too, that the movement _is_ gaining ground, and that
the refined and educated _are_ changing their point of view. Think of
the hospitals, think of the museums, think of the colleges, think of
the model tenements, the schools for manual training and cooking."
"I do acknowledge it; it is grand and inspiring. I have been merely
calling attention to the fact that in the search for the ideal their
new point of view must become permanent and extend still farther. To
counterbalance your facts I could cite others. Think of the doings of
the multi-millionaires, their modern palaces, their extravagant
entertainments, their steam-yachts, their home-desecrating wives--a
lot of third-class passengers, with no more claim to be considered
first-class than the alderman and the shop-girl and the other
democrats of whom we were speaking a moment ago. Nothing of the ideal
there, and they had such a grand chance! Yes, yes, I do admit, madam,
that the efforts and progress of the refined and intelligent during
the last quarter of a century have been notable and stirring, but
democracy has been neglected for so many centuries that it may prove a
little ungrateful at first. And here am I, Mr. Philosopher, keeping
your train in three sections waiting all this time."
"The oysters are cooked," said Josephine.
"Five minutes for lunch!" cried the reporter.
[_Note._--Confound the man! Why should he call my supper a lunch?]
To _A Young Man or Woman_ in Search of the Ideal. IV.
That beatific mental condition associated by my midnight visitor, the
reporter, with people of alleged cultivation and aesthetic tastes, when
in the presence of the beauties or marvels of nature, like sunset,
mountain scenery, ocean calm and ocean storm, is doubtless a familiar
experience to you. The wonder book of nature is constantly being held
up by poet and painter as the source of human ideality, and all the
traditions of civilization urge you to attain that degree of artistic
development under the white light of which the seals of that book
become loosened, and you are able to read in the evening star and the
mountain torrent lessons of inspiration and truth. Next to nature in
their aesthetic potency are her hand-maids, music, sculpture, letters
and painting--briefly, the civilized arts, the medium by which mortals
seek to woo and hold fast to beauty. We listen to the gorgeous anthems
of the world's most famous composers, and our souls thrill and vibrate
with emotion; life seems grand and everything possible. We stand
before the greatest marbles and canvasses, and we seem to have truth
within our grasp and nature almost subjugated. How exquisitely falls
on the senses the sublimity of the lines
_Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky._
We catch a glimpse there of what we call heaven. Is there any more
satisfactory occupation for a thirsty soul than to scan the fairness
of the twilight heavens when the evening star shines alone and the
saffron or purple glories of the departing day irradiate the west?
_Noi andavam per lo vespero attenti
Oltre, quanto potean gli occhi allungarsi,
Contro i raggi serotini e lucenti._
So wrote Dante in immortal verse, to portray the aesthetic value of a
kindred experience.
I selected those lines of Wordsworth because he, of all the poets,
suggests more ostensibly in his verse deliberate pursuit of the ideal.
Shelley, indeed, reveals a bolder purpose to unmask the infinite, but
his mood is oftener that of an audacious stormer of heaven than of a
reverent seeker for perfect truth. We feel in Wordsworth a conscious
intent to distill from the study of nature and of man a spiritual
exhalation, which would enlighten him and enable him, by force of his
poetic gifts, to enlighten us as to how best to live. When we think of
him, we see him amid the exquisite scenery of his favorite lakes,
walking in close communion with God; discerning the manifestations of
the infinite in the mountain and the wild flower, in the splendor of
the storm and the faithful doings of the humblest lives.
Ever since he wrote Wordsworth has been the patron saint of
introspective souls. In his poetry they have found not merely
suggestion but a creed. The poet himself was at heart an enthusiast
and a revolutionary, and his worship of quiet beauty and subjective
refinement was the expression of a design broader and deeper in its
scope than many of his followers have been willing to adopt. He
revealed not merely the aesthetic significance of the contemplative
life which substitutes soul analysis, with God in nature as a guide,
for the grosser interests of the flesh, but also the unholiness of
class distinctions and of the indifference of man to his fellow-man as
distinguished from himself. The followers of Wordsworth were, for the
most part, prompt to accept the first without including the second and
equally fundamental tenet of his philosophy. What, a quarter of a
century ago, was the ordinary practice of the cultivated and refined,
who had been stirred either directly or indirectly by the teaching of
the great poet to adopt contemplation as the key-note of their daily
lives? Their greatest number was in beautiful, rural England; but the
spiritual atmosphere breathed by them soon found its way across the
Atlantic, and served to exalt and modify the ever moral inclinations
of New England.
Picture, if you will, the model country house of the English country
gentleman of comfortable means and refined tastes. To begin with, the
structure itself is charming; time has bestowed upon it
picturesqueness, and art has made it beautiful with the simple but
effective arrangement of vines and flowers. There is nothing of the
vileness of earth at hand to mar or offend. The proprietor himself, an
elder son, has been left with a competence; no riches, but sufficient
to enable him to pursue his literary or other refined interests
without molestation from pecuniary cares. The interior is tasteful and
aesthetically satisfying; the spacious, comfortable rooms contain all
that is desirable in the way of upholstery, ornaments, books, and
pictures. The large drawing-room windows command a fair expanse of
velvet lawn, flanked by stately trees. Beyond lies an undulating
acreage of ancestral metes and bounds, rich in verdure and precious
with associations. Here lives our gentleman the greater portion of the
year; lives aspiringly according to his Wordsworthian creed. He
eschews or uses with admirable moderation the coarser pleasures and
vanities of life. Unselfishness, gentleness, and nicety of thought and
speech are the custom of his household. He himself finds congenial
occupation in literary or scientific research, in the hope of adding
some book or monograph to the world's store of art or knowledge. His
wife, in co-operation with the church, plays a gracious part among
their tenants or among the village sick and poor, teaching her
daughters to dispense charity in the form of soup, coals, jellies, and
blankets. Parents and children alike, jealously intending to attain
holiness and culture, continuously take an account of their individual
spiritual successes and failures, and though they hold these auditings
with God in the church, they renew them often under the inspiring
influence of nature.
_The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,_
or, as Dante expressed a similar conception,
_'Twas now the hour that turneth back desire
In those who sail the sea, and melts the heart
The day they've said to their sweet friends farewell,
And the new pilgrim penetrates with love,
If he doth hear from far away a bell
That seemeth to deplore the dying day._
This is the hour when the Wordsworthian spirit, refined,
conscientious, aspiring, beauty and duty loving, sees through the
splendor of the lucent, saffron sky, heaven open, and the angels of
God ascending and descending. Not always is the vision so adorable.
Often enough the gazer knows the bitterness of divine discontent, and
finds the golden glory but a bar, shutting out God. In the favorable
hour, though, comes the rapture, and the transfiguration; the
exquisite, refined feelings seem to find communion with the infinite,
and a voice from heaven to say:
_Well done, good and faithful servant._
I have selected this experience of the cultivated English household
rather than that of the purely religious life as an example, for the
reason that in it the aesthetic side is represented in the soul-hunger,
and that the existing conditions of earth are, to a certain extent,
taken into account. In the purely religious life, the emotions of the
exalted soul have, in the past at least, been prone to exclude the
actual conditions of human life from consideration. The thought has
been that the earthly existence is travail, and at best a discipline;
that the joys of life are vanity, and the mundane problems of life
unworthy of the interested attention of the heaven-seeking soul.
Modern religious theories have modified this point of view, but
certainly in some sects still the aesthetic value of existence is
almost contemptuously discarded by religion. I have taken the
beautiful lives of the Wordsworthians as an example, also because the
religious element is so manifestly cherished and cultivated in them.
It is intended in them that art and God should work together, or, more
accurately, the precept is that the aesthetic side of humanity is one
of the noblest manifestations of the infinite within us. It is
significant in this connection that though art has often reached its
apogee in periods of moral decay, the ruin of the nation, thus robbed
of spiritual vitality, has soon followed, in spite of the glory of its
sculpture and canvasses. But that is a mere interjection. The point I
wish to suggest is this: The sane soul recognizes, when face to face
with truth, that what we see in the glory of the sunset, when we think
we walk with God, must be, in order to be of value, an inspiration
based on the conditions of mundane life. Without this, prayer and
adoration become a mere nervous exhalation, reaching out for something
which has no more substance than an _ignus fatuus_. The old saints who
lived and died in prayer, ignoring human relations, seem to us to-day
to have been wofully deluded. They yearned to be translated from a
world to which they had contributed nothing but the desire to be holy.
This desire is of the essence of the matter; and so we consent to give
their reverences the benison of our distinguished consideration. But
aspiring souls, as evidenced by the aesthetic man and woman of culture,
presently perceived the error. They recognized that aspiration, to be
vital, must start with a conception of the world as it was, and seek a
realization of the world as it might be, and that in this seeking lay
service to God and preparation for heaven. Proceeding they fixed on
unselfish human love and on beauty as the motive of their creed, and
endeavored to live lives animated by these principles. This creed has
been the real creed of aspiring humanity during the past century and a
half, and it still seems sufficient to many. There have been diverse
differences of application and administration in connection with it,
according as the pendulum swung more or less near to one or the other
of the two cardinal points of faith, unselfish love, or exquisite
beauty. There have been some who, in their desire to make the
relations of man toward those with whom he lived and whom he loved
more ideal, have been disposed to ignore the claims of color and
elegance; and there have been others so eager in their allegiance to
the cause of beauty that they have exalted sense and emotion at the
expense of unselfishness and purity. Essentially, however, the ideal
life of the modern centuries has sought to develop the individual soul
by stimulating its faculties to cherish self-sacrificing devotion to
familiar friends, aesthetic appreciation of form, color and sound, and
exquisite personal refinement. The Christian life, in its highest
form, from this amalgamation of human traits, has constructed an ideal
for the soul founded on something tangible and substantial in human
consciousness. When the Christian said, "O God, make me pure and
noble," it has been no longer necessary to rhapsodize on a heaven
concerning which he knew nothing, and to disclaim all interest in this
earth. On the contrary, he has appreciated that conceptions of the
ideal must be based on human conditions or they cease to be
intelligible, and that the soul which seeks God can reach him only
through faithfulness to a method of life, the aim of which is to make
the best use of earth and its possibilities.
Beautiful as have been the lives which have resulted from this
aesthetic spirituality, the world has been beginning to realize, during
the last twenty-five years, that this is a creed partially outworn,
or, rather, a creed hampered by its limitations. In taking its
suggestion for the ideal from the world, noble society chose to accept
economic conditions as they were, and to fashion an ideal which
necessarily shut out the larger portion of humanity from the
possibility of attaining it. The aesthetic satisfaction which we draw
from the sunset is due to the pleasure which conscience feels in its
allegiance to an ideal of its own devising, and seeing God is only
another term for the solemn identification of man's aspirations. The
Wordsworthian soul, as interpreted by his followers, assumed that the
political conditions of society were always to remain the same, or,
more accurately speaking, it accepted those conditions as permanent
and continuously inevitable. In other words, it did not foresee
democracy. In short, its ideal was essentially aristocratic and
exclusive, and it continues so stubbornly in the present day in many
circles. To be sure, it has included and continues to include in its
formula the carrying of soups, jellies, coals, and blankets to the
poor, and the proffering of educational advantages to the ignorant,
but it never has predicated, as essential to the world's true
progress, such fundamental changes in the social status of society as
would involve the annihilation of class distinctions and a greater
general happiness for the mass of humanity. To be sure, there have
always been individual philanthropists, who insisted upon these
changes as vital, but they have been ignored by the leaders of ideal
thought as visionary enthusiasts, or maligned as disturbers of
permanent society. It has been the struggle of democracy itself that
has been the chief revealer of a new vision in the sunset, until now,
at last, the soul in search of the ideal appreciates that it does not
walk with God unless it sees in the saffron glory its own sympathy
with these new conditions.
The development of this recognition has been tolerably swift in
certain directions. New hospitals, new colleges, college settlements
among the poor, are concrete evidences of the modern spirit, and
equally significant, if less heralded, are the faithful, zealous
labors of physicians, teachers, clergymen, and the host of workers in
various lines of industry, where the earnest, self-sacrificing work
done is rarely if ever paid for, in dollars and cents, commensurate
with its value. The serious energy of the best humanity, instead of
pluming itself in the seductive contemplation of aesthetic beauty,
seems rather to be celebrating the apotheosis of dirt. It feels that
the cleansing of the physical and moral filth from our slums, the
relief of appalling ignorance and superstition, the combating of
political dishonesty and the checking of private greed are more to be
desired at this time than great marbles and a great literature. Or,
rather, perhaps, it seems probable that great marbles and a great
literature will not come to us until the leaven of this new ideal
expresses itself in the truths of art. The sane, aspiring soul can no
longer be satisfied unless it recognizes the inevitableness and the
pathos of democracy and adjusts its human perspective accordingly.
The world of vested rights and wealth is still reluctant to accept
this new aestheticism, and the soul in search of the ideal will find
the allurements of aristocratic culture still insisted on as the
secret of noble living. Social arrogance and the exclusive tendencies
of class are slow in yielding to the hostility even of republican
forms of government. In this country parents who profess to be
Americans still choose to send their children to private instead of to
the public schools, in order to separate them from the mass of the
people. The doctrine of social caste, thus early impressed upon the
youth of both sexes, serves to produce a class of citizens who are not
really in sympathy with popular government. If one questions sometimes
the depth of purpose of highly evolved man, and doubts the existence
of God, it is because of the lavish wantonness of living of some of
the very rich in the presence of the thousands of miserable and
wretched creatures who still degrade our large cities. But there is
this to be said in this connection: This new aesthetic ideal is at
least partially the fruit of the awakening of humanity to a keener
appreciation of the conditions of human life; but its progress is made
certain by the coming evolution of democracy, which slowly but surely
will overwhelm the aristocratic spirit forever, even though
aestheticism, as realized by the arrogant and exclusive, perish in the
process. The ideal life to-day is that which maintains the noblest
aims of the aspiring past, cherishing unselfishness, purity, courage,
truth, joy, existence, fineness of sentiment and aesthetic beauty; but
cherishes these in the spirit and for the purposes of a broader
humanity than the melting soul has hitherto discerned in the sunset,
the ocean, or the starry heavens. There are among us men and women
living in this spirit of idealism, and they, O, my correspondents! are
the first-class passengers.
To _A Modern Woman_ with Social Ambitions. I.
In the first place let me assure you that I am in sympathy with you. I
am not one of those unreasonable philosophers who would have every
wife merge her identity in that of her husband, and every spinster who
has decided not to marry relegated to obscure lodgings with a parrot
and a dog. My sentiments recognize the justice and the value of the
emancipation movement by means of which woman has obtained freedom to
arrange her life conformably to her own ideas as to what is salutary
and entertaining for her as an individual, whether she be married or
single, beautiful or plain. In homely phrase the world has become
woman's oyster, and, save for the little matter of the ballot, a
restriction concerning which the subject-matter of this letter does
not require me to agitate you, every woman is at liberty to open her
oyster according to her own sweet will. Filial limitations and the
other circumstances of her environment must prohibit this and make
desirable that manner of living, just as in the case of man; but to
all intents and purposes, if she be clear-headed and ambitious, she is
free to do what she chooses in the way she chooses, whether it be to
preside over a drawing-room exquisitely, to guide a woman's club to
grace and glory, to renounce the world for the sake of art and a
studio, or, it may be, to combine all these occupations in one
seething round of tense existence which, according to the constitution
of the subject, is liable to terminate abruptly in nervous prostration
or, baffling the predictions of the doctors, to continue indefinitely
unto hale and bright-eyed longevity. In brief, I make my best bow to
the modern woman; I admire her and am stimulated by her. Indeed, I
take her so seriously in her endeavor to be independent that I am
almost ready to let her stand up in an electric-car or other
overcrowded conveyance. I have on occasions even made so free as to
bend forward in the theatre and, lacking an introduction, ask her to
take off the high hat which obscured my view of the stage. Verily,
these are piping times of progress for woman, as every one knows, and
I am glad to put on record as a philosopher that I approve of and am
edified by them.
So much, my dear correspondents, to assure you of my sympathy and my
distinguished consideration. There are five of you, but three out of
the five--a maid almost hoping always to remain one, a wife almost
sorry that she is one, and a widow almost certain that she never will
be anything else--have written to me as the result of what is known
colloquially as the dumps. That is to say, you have become socially
ambitious from stress of circumstances, because your dolls are stuffed
with sawdust. But for the letters of Numbers 4 and 5 I should be
tempted to adopt the manner of a French philosopher and dismiss you
with this piece of counsel: Love some one else. Numbers 4 and 5,
respectively, a wife thoroughly happy in the wedded state, and a
radiant, able-bodied spinster haughtily unconcerned about love and
lovers, are not to be answered by such a simple gallicism. The frame
of mind of these two last-mentioned ladies was evidently not induced
by disappointment; they are not seeking social activity as an antidote
to care or as a mere occupation to consume time. Their letters clearly
indicate to me a consciousness of stored-up capabilities and an
ambition to display them. Devoted as Number 4 obviously is to her
husband, it is no less clear that she is not content to be regarded
merely as his wife. Similarly, Number 5, though serene at the prospect
of living without a mate, still cherishes the intention of preserving
her identity. In other words, each is imbued with the desire to make
her individuality felt in the world. It is in the interest of this
justifiable and laudable ambition that I take my pen in hand to
compose an answer. The constituency to which Numbers 4 and 5 belong is
large and constantly increasing. There are thousands of women without
a grievance against Cupid whose bosoms are aching with the desire for
identity, and it is to them, as represented by you, that I address
myself.