able to establish and maintain such schools, is a question to be solved
upon trial through their organizations.
The question is, Will you breed men for the service of the Cannon, to be
aimed at you in the hour of Strikes and Revolts, men to uphold the
machine which is crushing you, or will you train them in the knowledge
of the true worth of Labor and a determination to reorganize it as it
should be?
Sex Slavery
Night in a prison cell! A chair, a bed, a small washstand, four blank
walls, ghastly in the dim light from the corridor without, a narrow
window, barred and sunken in the stone, a grated door! Beyond its
hideous iron latticework, within the ghastly walls,--a man! An old man,
gray-haired and wrinkled, lame and suffering. There he sits, in his
great loneliness, shut in from all the earth. There he walks, to and
fro, within his measured space, apart from all he loves! There, for
every night in five long years to come, he will walk alone, while the
white age-flakes drop upon his head, while the last years of the winter
of life gather and pass, and his body draws near the ashes. Every night,
for five long years to come, he will sit alone, this chattel slave,
whose hard toil is taken by the State,--and without recompense save that
the Southern planter gave his negroes,--every night he will sit there so
within those four white walls. Every night, for five long years to come,
a suffering woman will lie upon her bed, longing, longing for the end of
those three thousand days; longing for the kind face, the patient hand,
that in so many years had never failed her. Every night, for five long
years to come, the proud spirit must rebel, the loving heart must bleed,
the broken home must lie desecrated. As I am speaking now, as you are
listening, there within the cell of that accursed penitentiary whose
stones have soaked up the sufferings of so many victims, murdered, as
truly as any outside their walls, by that slow rot which eats away
existence inch-meal,--as I am speaking now, as you are listening, _there
sits Moses Harman_!
Why? Why, when murder now is stalking in your streets, when dens of
infamy are so thick within your city that competition has forced down
the price of prostitution to the level of the wages of your starving
shirt-makers; when robbers sit in State and national Senate and House,
when the boasted "bulwark of our liberties," the elective franchise, has
become a U. S. dice-box, wherewith great gamblers play away your
liberties; when debauchees of the worst type hold all your public
offices and dine off the food of fools who support them, why, then, sits
Moses Harman there within his prison cell? If he is so _great_ a
criminal, why is he not with the rest of the spawn of crime, dining at
Delmonico's or enjoying a trip to Europe? If he is so bad a man, why in
the name of wonder did he ever get in the penitentiary?
Ah, no; it is not because he has done any evil thing; but because he, a
pure enthusiast, searching, searching always for the cause of misery of
the kind which he loved with that broad love of which only the pure soul
is capable, searched for the data of evil. And searching so he found the
vestibule of life to be a prison cell; the holiest and purest part of
the temple of the body, if indeed one part can be holier or purer than
another, the altar where the most devotional love in truth should be
laid, he found this altar ravished, despoiled, trampled upon. He found
little babies, helpless, voiceless little things, generated in lust,
cursed with impure moral natures, cursed, prenatally, with the germs of
disease, forced into the world to struggle and to suffer, to hate
themselves, to hate their mothers for bearing them, to hate society and
to be hated by it in return,--a bane upon self and race, draining the
lees of crime. And he said, this felon with the stripes upon his body,
"Let the mothers of the race go free! Let the little children be pure
love children, born of the mutual desire for parentage. Let the manacles
be broken from the shackled slave, that no more slaves be born, no more
tyrants conceived."
He looked, this obscenist, looked with clear eyes into this ill-got
thing you call morality, sealed with the seal of marriage, and saw in it
the consummation of _im_morality, impurity, and injustice. He beheld
every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's
name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's
passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of
travail at _his_ dictation,--not at her desire; who can control no
property, not even her own body, without his consent, and from whose
straining arms the children she bears may be torn at his pleasure, or
willed away while they are yet unborn. It is said the English language
has a sweeter word than any other,--_home_. But Moses Harman looked
beneath the word and saw the fact,--a prison more horrible than that
where he is sitting now, whose corridors radiate over all the earth, and
with so many cells, that none may count them.
Yes, our Masters! The earth is a prison, the marriage-bed is a cell,
women are the prisoners, and you are the keepers!
He saw, this corruptionist, how in those cells are perpetrated such
outrages as are enough to make the cold sweat stand upon the forehead,
and the nails clench, and the teeth set, and the lips grow white in
agony and hatred. And he saw too how from those cells might none come
forth to break her fetters, how no slave dare cry out, how all these
murders are done quietly, beneath the shelter-shadow of home, and
sanctified by the angelic benediction of a piece of paper, within the
silence-shade of a marriage certificate, Adultery and Rape stalk freely
and at ease.
Yes, for that is adultery where woman submits herself sexually to man,
without desire on her part, for the sake of "keeping him virtuous,"
"keeping him at home," the women say. (Well, if a man did not love me
and respect himself enough to be "virtuous" without prostituting me, he
might go, and welcome. He has no virtue to keep.) And that is rape,
where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman whether he is licensed
by the marriage law to do it or not. And that is the vilest of all
tyranny where a man compels the woman he says he loves, to endure the
agony of bearing children that she does not want, and for whom, as is
the rule rather than the exception, they cannot properly provide. It is
worse than any other human oppression; it is fairly _God_-like! To the
sexual tyrant there is no parallel upon earth; one must go to the skies
to find a fiend who thrusts life upon his children only to starve and
curse and outcast and damn them! And only through the marriage law is
such tyranny possible. The man who deceives a woman outside of marriage
(and mind you, such a man will deceive _in_ marriage too) may deny his
own child, if he is mean enough. He cannot tear it from her arms--he
cannot touch it! The girl he wronged, thanks to your very pure and
tender morality-standard, may die in the street for want of food. _He_
cannot force his hated presence upon her again. But his wife, gentlemen,
his wife, the woman he respects so much that he consents to let her
merge her individuality into his, lose her identity and become his
chattel, his wife he may not only force unwelcome children upon, outrage
at his own good pleasure, and keep as a general cheap and convenient
piece of furniture, but if she does not get a divorce (and she cannot
for such cause) he can follow her wherever she goes, come into her
house, eat her food, force her into the cell, _kill_ her by virtue of
his sexual authority! And she has no redress unless he is indiscreet
enough to abuse her in some less brutal but unlicensed manner. I know a
case in your city where a woman was followed so for ten years by her
husband. I believe he finally developed grace enough to die; please
applaud him for the only decent thing he ever did.
Oh, is it not rare, all this talk about the preservation of morality by
marriage law! O splendid carefulness to preserve that which you have not
got! O height and depth of purity, which fears so much that the children
will not know who their fathers are, because, forsooth, they must rely
upon their mother's word instead of the hired certification of some
priest of the Church, or the Law! I wonder if the children would be
improved to know what their fathers have done. I would rather, much
rather, not know who my father was than know he had been a tyrant to my
mother. I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the
statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of
Nature. For what is it to be legitimate, born "according to law"? It is
to be, nine cases out of ten, the child of a man who acknowledges his
fatherhood simply because he is forced to do so, and whose conception of
virtue is realized by the statement that "a woman's duty is to keep her
husband at home"; to be the child of a woman who cares more for the
benediction of Mrs. Grundy than the simple honor of her lover's word,
and conceives prostitution to be purity and duty when exacted of her by
her husband. It is to have Tyranny as your progenitor, and slavery as
your prenatal cradle. It is to run the risk of unwelcome birth, "legal"
constitutional weakness, morals corrupted before birth, possibly a
murder instinct, the inheritance of excessive sexuality or no sexuality,
either of which is disease. It is to have the value of a piece of paper,
a rag from the tattered garments of the "Social Contract," set above
health, beauty, talent or goodness; for I never yet had difficulty in
obtaining the admission that illegitimate children are nearly always
prettier and brighter than others, even from conservative women. And how
supremely disgusting it is to see them look from their own puny, sickly,
lust-born children, upon whom lie the chain-traces of their own terrible
servitude, look from these to some healthy, beautiful "natural" child,
and say, "What a pity its _mother_ wasn't virtuous!" Never a word about
_their_ children's fathers' virtue, they know too much! Virtue! Disease,
stupidity, criminality! What an _obscene_ thing "virtue" is!
What is it to be illegitimate? To be despised, or pitied, by those whose
spite or whose pity isn't worth the breath it takes to return it. To be,
possibly, the child of some man contemptible enough to deceive a woman;
the child of some woman whose chief crime was belief in the man she
loved. To be free from the prenatal curse of a slave mother, to come
into the world without the permission of any law-making set of tyrants
who assume to corner the earth, and say what terms the unborn must make
for the privilege of coming into existence. This is legitimacy and
illegitimacy! Choose.
The man who walks to and fro in his cell in Lansing penitentiary
to-night, this vicious man, said: "The mothers of the race are lifting
their dumb eyes to me, their sealed lips to me, their agonizing hearts
to me. They are seeking, seeking for a voice! The unborn in their
helplessness, are pleading from their prisons, pleading for a voice! The
criminals, with the unseen ban upon their souls, that has pushed them,
pushed them to the vortex, out of their whirling hells, are looking,
waiting for a voice! _I will be their voice._ I will unmask the outrages
of the marriage-bed. I will make known how criminals are born. I will
make one outcry that shall be heard, and let what will be, _be_!" He
cried out through the letter of Dr. Markland, that a young mother
lacerated by unskilful surgery in the birth of her babe, but recovering
from a subsequent successful operation, had been stabbed, remorselessly,
cruelly, brutally stabbed, not with a knife, but with the procreative
organ of her husband, stabbed to the doors of death, and yet there was
no redress!
And because he called a spade a spade, because he named that organ by
its own name, so given in Webster's dictionary and in every medical
journal in the country, because of this Moses Harman walks to and fro
in his cell to-night. He gave a concrete example of the effect of sex
slavery, and for it he is imprisoned. It remains for us now to carry
on the battle, and lift the standard where they struck him down, to
scatter broadcast the knowledge of this crime of society against a man
and the reason for it; to inquire into this vast system of licensed
crime, its cause and its effect, broadly upon the race. The Cause! Let
woman ask herself, "Why am I the slave of Man? Why is my brain said not
to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his?
Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor
in the household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he
take my children from me? Will them away while yet unborn?" Let every
woman ask.
There are two reasons why, and these ultimately reducible to a single
principle--the authoritarian, supreme-power, _God_-idea, and its two
instruments, the Church--that is, the priests--and the State--that is,
the legislators.
From the birth of the Church, out of the womb of Fear and the fatherhood
of Ignorance, it has taught the inferiority of woman. In one form or
another through the various mythical legends of the various mythical
creeds, runs the undercurrent of the belief in the fall of man through
the persuasion of woman, her subjective condition as punishment, her
natural vileness, total depravity, etc.; and from the days of Adam until
now the Christian Church, with which we have specially to deal, has made
_woman_ the excuse, the scapegoat for the evil deeds of _man_. So
thoroughly has this idea permeated Society that numbers of those who
have utterly repudiated the Church, are nevertheless soaked in this
stupefying narcotic to true morality. So pickled is the male creation
with the vinegar of Authoritarianism, that even those who have gone
further and repudiated the State still cling to the god, Society as it
is, still hug the old theological idea that they are to be "heads of the
family"--to that wonderful formula "of simple proportion" that "Man is
the head of the Woman even as Christ is the head of the Church." No
longer than a week since an Anarchist (?) said to me, "I will be boss in
my own house"--a "Communist-Anarchist," if you please, who doesn't
believe in "_my_ house." About a year ago a noted libertarian speaker
said, in my presence, that his sister, who possessed a fine voice and
had joined a concert troupe, should "stay at home with her children;
that is _her place_." The old Church idea! This man was a Socialist, and
since an Anarchist; yet his highest idea for woman was serfhood to
husband and children, in the present mockery called "home." Stay at
home, ye malcontents! Be patient, obedient, submissive! Darn our socks,
mend our shirts, wash our dishes, get our meals, wait on us and _mind
the children_! Your fine voices are not to delight the public nor
yourselves; your inventive genius is not to work, your fine art taste is
not to be cultivated, your business faculties are not to be developed;
you made the great mistake of being born with them, suffer for your
folly! You are _women_! therefore housekeepers, servants, waiters, and
child's nurses!
At Macon, in the sixth century, says August Bebel, the fathers of the
Church met and proposed the decision of the question, "Has woman a
soul?" Having ascertained that the permission to own a nonentity wasn't
going to injure any of their parsnips, a small majority vote decided the
momentous question in our favor. Now, holy fathers, it was a tolerably
good scheme on your part to offer the reward of your pitiable "salvation
or damnation" (odds in favor of the latter) as a bait for the hook of
earthly submission; it wasn't a bad sop in those days of Faith and
Ignorance. But fortunately fourteen hundred years have made it stale.
You, tyrant radicals (?), have no heaven to offer,--you have no
delightful chimeras in the form of "merit cards"; you have (save the
mark) the respect, the good offices, the smiles--of a slave-holder! This
in return for our chains! Thanks!
The question of souls is old--we demand our bodies, now. We are tired of
promises, God is deaf, and his church is our worst enemy. Against it we
bring the charge of being the moral (or immoral) force which lies behind
the tyranny of the State. And the State has divided the loaves and
fishes with the Church, the magistrates, like the priests take marriage
fees; the two fetters of Authority have gone into partnership in the
business of granting patent-rights to parents for the privilege of
reproducing themselves, and the State cries as the Church cried of old,
and cries now: "See how we protect women!" The State has done more. It
has often been said to me, by women with decent masters, who had no idea
of the outrages practiced on their less fortunate sisters, "Why don't
the wives leave?"
Why don't you run, when your feet are chained together? Why don't you
cry out when a gag is on your lips? Why don't you raise your hands above
your head when they are pinned fast to your sides? Why don't you spend
thousands of dollars when you haven't a cent in your pocket? Why don't
you go to the seashore or the mountains, you fools scorching with city
heat? If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed
tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the asinine
stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable dullness says, "Why
don't the women leave!" Will you tell me where they will go and what
they shall do? When the State, the legislators, has given to itself, the
politicians, the utter and absolute control of the opportunity to live;
when, through this precious monopoly, already the market of labor is so
overstocked that workmen and workwomen are cutting each others' throats
for the dear privilege of serving their lords; when girls are shipped
from Boston to the south and north, shipped in carloads, like cattle, to
fill the dives of New Orleans or the lumber-camp hells of my own state
(Michigan), when seeing and hearing these things reported every day,
the proper prudes exclaim, "Why don't the women leave," they simply
beggar the language of contempt.
When America passed the fugitive slave law compelling men to catch their
fellows more brutally than runaway dogs, Canada, aristocratic,
unrepublican Canada, still stretched her arms to those who might reach
her. But there is no refuge upon earth for the enslaved sex. Right where
we are, there we must dig our trenches, and win or die.
This, then, is the tyranny of the State; it denies, to both woman and
man, the right to earn a living, and grants it as a privilege to a
favored few who for that favor must pay ninety per cent. toll to the
granters of it. These two things, the mind domination of the Church, and
the body domination of the State are the causes of Sex Slavery.
First of all, it has introduced into the world the constructed crime of
obscenity: it has set up such a peculiar standard of morals that to
speak the names of the sexual organs is to commit the most brutal
outrage. It reminds me that in your city you have a street called
"Callowhill." Once it was called Gallows' Hill, for the elevation to
which it leads, now known as "Cherry Hill," has been the last touching
place on earth for the feet of many a victim murdered by the Law. But
the sound of the word became too harsh; so they softened it, though the
murders are still done, and the black shadow of the Gallows still hangs
on the City of Brotherly Love. Obscenity has done the same; it has
placed virtue in the shell of an idea, and labelled all "good" which
dwells within the sanction of Law and respectable (?) custom; and all
bad which contravenes the usage of the shell. It has lowered the dignity
of the human body, below the level of all other animals. Who thinks a
dog is impure or obscene because its body is not covered with
suffocating and annoying clothes? What would you think of the meanness
of a man who would put a skirt upon his horse and compel it to walk or
run with such a thing impeding its limbs? Why, the "Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" would arrest him, take the beast from
him, and he would be sent to a lunatic asylum for treatment on the score
of an _impure_ mind. And yet, gentlemen, you expect your wives, the
creatures you say you respect and love, to wear the longest skirts and
the highest necked clothing, in order to conceal the _obscene human
body_. There is no society for the prevention of cruelty to women. And
you, yourselves, though a little better, look at the heat you wear in
this roasting weather! How you curse your poor body with the wool you
steal from the sheep! How you punish yourselves to sit in a crowded
house with coats and vests on, because dead Mme. Grundy is shocked at
the "vulgarity" of shirt sleeves, or the naked arm!
Look how the ideal of beauty has been marred by this obscenity notion.
Divest yourselves of prejudice for once. Look at some fashion-slaved
woman, her waist surrounded by a high-board fence called a corset, her
shoulders and hips angular from the pressure above and below, her feet
narrowest where they should be widest, the body fettered by her
everlasting prison skirt, her hair fastened tight enough to make her
head ache and surmounted by a thing of neither sense nor beauty, called
a hat, ten to one a hump upon her back like a dromedary,--look at her,
and then imagine such a thing as that carved in marble! Fancy a statue
in Fairmount Park with a corset and bustle on. Picture to yourselves the
image of the equestrienne. We are permitted to ride, providing we sit in
a position ruinous to the horse; providing we wear a riding-habit long
enough to hide the obscene human foot, weighed down by ten pounds of
gravel to cheat the Wind in its free blowing, so running the risk of
disabling ourselves completely should accident throw us from the saddle.
Think how we swim! We must even wear clothing in the water, and run the
gauntlet of derision, if we dare battle in the surf minus stockings!
Imagine a fish trying to make headway with a water-soaked flannel
garment upon it. Nor are you yet content. The vile standard of obscenity
even kills the little babies with clothes. The human race is murdered,
horribly, "in the name of" Dress.
And in the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has
engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth
about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a
human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood. When they
come to you with a simple, straightforward question, which they have a
right to ask, you say, "Don't ask such questions," or tell some silly
hollow-log story; or you explain the incomprehensibility by
another--God! You say "God made you." You know you are lying when you
say it. You know, or you ought to know, that the source of inquiry will
not be dammed up so. You know that what you could explain purely,
reverently, rightly (if you have any purity in you), will be learned
through many blind gropings, and that around it will be cast the
shadow-thought of wrong, embryo'd by your denial and nurtured by this
social opinion everywhere prevalent. If you do not know this, then you
are blind to facts and deaf to Experience.
Think of the double social standard the enslavement of our sex has
evolved. Women considering themselves very pure and very moral, will
sneer at the street-walker, yet admit to their homes the very men who
victimized the street-walker. Men, at their best, will pity the
prostitute, while they themselves are the worst kind of prostitutes.
Pity yourselves, gentlemen--you need it!
How many times do you see where a man or woman has shot another through
jealousy! The standard of purity has decided that it is right, "it shows
spirit," "it is justifiable" to--murder a human being for doing exactly
what you did yourself,--love the same woman or same man! Morality!
Honor! Virtue!! Passing from the moral to the physical phase; take the
statistics of any insane asylum, and you will find that, out of the
different classes, unmarried women furnish the largest one. To preserve
your cruel, vicious, indecent standard of purity (?) you drive your
daughters insane, while your wives are killed with excess. Such is
marriage. Don't take my word for it; go through the report of any asylum
or the annals of any graveyard.
Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to
curb their love natures--restrained at every turn! Your blasting lies
would even blacken a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish,
must not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to swim, must
not do anything they desire to do which Madame Grundy has decreed
"improper." Little boys are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if
they want to make patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they grow up,
"Oh! Men don't care for home or children as women do!" Why should they,
when the deliberate effort of your life has been to crush that nature
out of them. "Women can't rough it like men." Train any animal, or any
plant, as you train your girls, and it won't be able to rough it either.
Now _will_ somebody tell me why either sex should hold a corner on
athletic sports? Why any child should not have free use of its limbs?
These are the effects of your purity standard, your marriage law. This
is your work--look at it! Half your children dying under five years of
age, your girls insane, your married women walking corpses, your men
so bad that they themselves often admit _Prostitution holds against_
=Purity= _a bond of indebtedness_. This is the beautiful effect of your
god, Marriage, before which Natural Desire must abase and belie itself.
Be proud of it!
Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought
equity anywhere--=Liberty=! Centuries upon centuries of liberty is the
only thing that will cause the disintegration and decay of these
pestiferous ideas. Liberty was all that calmed the blood-waves of
religious persecution! You cannot cure serfhood by any other
substitution. Not for you to say "in this way shall the race love." Let
the race _alone_.
Will there not be atrocious crimes? Certainly. He is a fool who says
there will not be. But you can't stop them by committing the arch-crime
and setting a block between the spokes of Progress-wheels. You will
never get right until you start right.
As for the final outcome, it matters not one iota. I have my ideal, and
it is very pure, and very sacred to me. But yours, equally sacred, may
be different and we may both be wrong. But certain am I that with free
contract, that form of sexual association will survive which is best
adapted to time and place, thus producing the highest evolution of the
type. Whether that shall be monogamy, variety, or promiscuity matters
naught to us; it is the business of the future, to which we dare not
dictate.
For freedom spoke Moses Harman, and for this he received the felon's
brand. For this he sits in his cell to-night. Whether it is possible
that his sentence be shortened, we do not know. We can only try. Those
who would help us try, let me ask to put your signatures to this simple
request for pardon addressed to Benjamin Harrison. To those who desire
more fully to inform themselves before signing; I say: Your
conscientiousness is praiseworthy--come to me at the close of the
meeting and I will quote the exact language of the Markland letter. To
those extreme Anarchists who cannot bend their dignity to ask pardon for
an offense not committed, and of an authority they cannot recognize, let
me say: Moses Harman's back is bent, low bent, by the brute force of the
Law, and though I would never ask anyone to bow for himself, I can ask
it, and easily ask it, for him who fights the slave's battle. Your
dignity is criminal; every hour behind the bars is a seal to your
partnership with Comstock. No one can hate petitions worse than I; no
one has less faith in them than I. But for _my_ champion I am willing to
try any means that invades no other's right, even though I have little
hope in it.
If, beyond these, there are those here to-night who have ever forced
sexual servitude from a wife, those who have prostituted themselves in
the name of Virtue, those who have brought diseased, immoral or
unwelcome children to the light, without the means of provision for
them, and yet will go from this hall and say, "Moses Harman is an
unclean man--a man rewarded by just punishment," then to _you_ I say,
and may the words ring deep within your ears UNTIL YOU DIE: Go on! Drive
your sheep to the shambles! Crush that old, sick, crippled man beneath
your Juggernaut! In the name of Virtue, Purity and Morality, do it! In
the name of God, Home, and Heaven, do it! In the name of the Nazarene
who preached the golden rule, do it! In the name of Justice, Principle,
and Honor, do it! In the name of Bravery and Magnanimity put yourself on
the side of the robber in the government halls, the murderer in the
political convention, the libertine in public places, the whole brute
force of the police, the constabulary, the court, and the penitentiary,
to persecute one poor old man who stood alone against your licensed
crime! Do it. And if Moses Harman dies within your "Kansas Hell," be
satisfied _when you have murdered him_! Kill him! And you hasten the day
when the Future shall bury you ten thousand fathoms deep beneath its
curses. Kill him! And the stripes upon his prison clothes shall lash you
like the knout! Kill him! And the insane shall glitter hate at you with
their wild eyes, the unborn babes shall cry their blood upon you, and
the graves that you have filled in the name of Marriage, shall yield
food for a race that will pillory you, until the memory of your atrocity
has become a nameless ghost, flitting with the shades of Torquemada,
Calvin and Jehovah over the horizon of the World!
Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say, "We are rid of this
obscenist"? Fools! The corpse would laugh at you from its cold eyelids!
The motionless lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless,
folded hands, in their quietness would write the last indictment, which
neither Time nor you can efface. Kill him! And you write his glory and
your shame! Moses Harman in his felon stripes stands far above you now,
and Moses Harman _dead_ will live on, immortal in the race he died to
free! Kill him!
Literature the Mirror of Man
Perhaps I had better say the Mirror-reflection,--the reflection of all
that he has been and is, the hinting fore-flashing of something of what
he may become. In so considering it, let it be understood that I speak
of no particular form of literature, but the entire body of a people's
expressed thought, preserved either traditionally, in writing, or in
print.
The majority of lightly thinking, fairly read people, who make use of
the word "literature" rather easily, do so with a very indistinct idea
of its content. To them it usually means a certain limited form of human
expression, chiefly works of the imagination--poetry, drama, the various
forms of the novel. History, philosophy, science are rather frowning
names,--stern second cousins, as it were, to the beguiling companions of
their pleasant leisure hours,--not legitimately "literature."
Biography,--well, it depends on who writes it! If it can be made so much
like a work of fiction that the subject sketched serves the purposes of
a fictive hero, why then--maybe.
To such talkers about literature, evidence of familiarity with it, and
title to have one's opinions thereon asked and respected, are witnessed
by the ability to run glibly off the names of the personages in the
dramas of Ibsen, Björnson, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann or Shaw; or in the
novels of Gorki, Andreyev, Tolstoy, Zola, Maupassant, Hardy, and the
dozen or so of lesser lights who revolve with these through the cycle of
the magazine issues.
Not only do these same people thus limit the field of literature, (at
least in their ordinary conversation,--if you press them they will
dubiously admit that the field may be extended) but they are also
possessed of the notion that only one particular mode even of fiction,
is in fact the genuine thing. That this mode has not always been in
vogue they are aware; and they allow other modes to have been literature
in the past, as a sort of kindly concession to the past--a
blanket-indulgence to its unevolved state. At present, however, no
indulgences are allowed; whatever is not the mode, is anathema; it is
not literature at all. When confronted by the _very_ great names of the
Past, which they can neither consign to oblivion, nor patronize by
toleration for their undeveloped condition, names which are names for
all ages, which they need to use as conjuration words in their
comparisons and criticisms, names such as Shakespeare or Hugo, they
complacently close their eyes to contradictions and swear that
fundamentally these men's works _are in the modern mode, the accepted
mode, the one and only enduring mode_, the mode that they approve.
"Which is?"--I hear you ask. _Which is_ what they are pleased to call
"Realism."
If you wish to know how far they are obsessed by this notion, go pick
yourself a quiet corner in some café where light literature readers meet
to make comparisons, and listen to the comments. Before very long,
voices will be getting loud about some character at present stalking
across the pages of the magazines, or bestirring itself among the latest
ton of novel; and the dispute will be, "Does such a type exist?"--"Of
course he exists,"--"He does not exist,"--"He must exist,"--"He cannot
exist,"--"Under such conditions,"--"There are no such conditions,"--"But
be reasonable: you have not been in all places, and you cannot say there
may not be such conditions; supposing--" "All right: I will give you the
conditions; all the same, no man would act so under any conditions." "I
swear L have seen such men--" "Impossible--" "What is there impossible
about it?--"
And the voices get louder and louder, as the disputants proceed
to pick the character to pieces, speech by speech, and action by
action, till, nothing being left, each finally subsides somehow,
each confirmed in his own opinion, each convinced that the main
purpose of literature--Realism--has either been served, or not
served, by the author under discussion. To such disputants
"Literature the Mirror of Man," means that only such literature
as gives so-called absolutely faithful representations of life
as it is demonstrably lived, is a genuine Mirror. No author is
to be considered worthy of a place, unless his works can be at
least twisted to fit this conception. With some slight refinement
of idea, in so far as it recognizes the obscurer recesses of the
mind as entitled to representation as well as the externals, it
corresponds to the one-time development of portrait painting,
which esteemed it necessary to paint the exact number of hairs
in the wart on Oliver Cromwell's nose, in order to have a true
likeness of him.
As before suggested, I do not, when I speak of Literature as the Mirror
of Man, have any such 12x18 mirror in view; nor the limitation of
literature to any one form of it, to any one age of it, to any set of
standard names; nor the limitation of Man to any preconceived notion of
just what he may logically be allowed to be. The composite image we are
seeking to find is an image wrought as much of his dreams of what he
would like to be, as of his actual being; that is no true picture of
Man, which does not include his cravings for the impossible, as well as
his daily performance of the possible. Indeed, the logical, calculable
man, the man who under certain circumstances may be figured out to turn
murderer and under others saint, is hardly so interesting as the
illogical being who upsets the calculation by becoming neither, but
something not at all predictable.
The objects of my lecture then are these:
1. To insist on a wider view of literature itself than that generally
accepted.
2. To suggest to readers a more satisfactory way of considering what
they read than that usually received.
3. To point to certain phases of the human appearance reflected in the
mirror which are not generally noticed, but which I find interesting and
suggestive.
You would think it very unreasonable, would you not, for any one to
insist that because your highly polished glass backed by quicksilver,
gives back so clear and excellent an image, _therefore_ the watery
vision you catch of yourself in the shifting, glancing ripples of a
clear stream is not an image at all! With all the curious elongating and
drifting and shortening back and breaking up into wavering circles, done
by that unresting image, you know very certainly that is you; and if you
look into the still waters of some summer pool, or mountain rain-cup,
the image there is almost as sharp-lined as that in your polished glass,
except for the vague tremor that seems to move under the water rather
than on its surface, and suggest an ethereal something missing in your
drawing-room shadow. Yet that vision conjured in the water-depth is
you--surely you. Nay, even more,--that _first_ image of you, you
perceived when as a child you danced in the firelight and saw a
misshapen darkness rising and falling along the wall in teasing
mockery,--that too was surely an image of you--an image of interception,
not of reflection; a blur, a vacancy, a horror, from which you fled
shrieking to your mother's arms;--and yet it was the distorted outline
of you.
You grew familiar with it later, amused yourself with it, twisted your
hands into strange positions to see what curious shapes they would form
upon the wall, and made whole stories with the shadows. Long afterward
you went back to them with deliberate and careful curiosity, to see how
the figures stumbled on by accident could be definitely produced, at
will, according to the laws of interception.
Even so the first _Man-Images_, cast back from the blank wall of
Language, are uncouth, ungraspable, vague, vacant, menacing--to the men
who saw them, frightful. Mankind produced this paradox: the early
_lights_ of literature were _darkness_!
Later these darknesses grew less fearsome; the child-man began to jest
with them; to multiply figures and send them chasing past each other up
and down the wall, with fresh glee at each newly created shadow-sport.
The wall at last became luminous, the shadows shining. And out of the
old monosyllabic horror of the primitive legend, out of Man's fright at
the projection of his own soul, out of his wide stare at those terrific
giants on the wall who suddenly with shadow-like shifting became
grotesque dwarfs, and mocking little beasts that danced and floated,
ever most fearful because of their elusive emptiness; out of this, bit
by bit, grew the steady contemplation, the gradual effacement of fright,
the feeling of power and amusement, and the sense of Creative Mastery,
which, understanding the shadows, began to command them, till there
arose all the beauty of fairy tales and shining myths and singing
legends.
Now any one who desires to see in Literature the most that there is in
it; who desires to read not merely for the absorption of the moment but
for the sake of permanent impression; who wishes to have an idea of Man
not only as he is now, but through the whole articulate record of his
existence; who would know the thoughts of his infancy and the connected
course of his development,--and no one has any adequate conception of
the glory of literature, unless he includes this much in it--any such a
reader, I say, must find among its most attractive pages, the stories of
early superstitions, the fictions of Fear, the struggles of the
Race-Child's intelligence with overlooming problems. Think of the Ages
and Ages that men saw the Demon Electricity riding the air; think that
even now they do not know what he is; and yet he played mightily with
their daily lives for all those ages. Think how this staring savage was
put face to face with world-games which were spun and tossed around him,
and compelled by the nature of his own activity to try to find an
explanation to them; think that most of us, if we were not the heritors
of the ages that have passed since then, should be staggered and
out-breathed even now by all these lights and forms through which we
move; and then turn to the record of those pathetic strivings of the
frightened child with some little tenderness and sympathy, some solemn
curiosity to know _what_ men were able to think and feel when they led
their lives as in a threatening Wonder-house, where everything was an
Unknown, invested with crouching hostility. And never be too sure you
know just how men will act, or try to act, under any conditions, if you
have not read the record of what they have thought and fancied and done;
and after you have read it, Oh, then you will never be sure you know!
For then you will realize that every man is a burial-house, full of dead
men's ghosts,--and the ghosts of very, very ancient days are there,
forever whispering in an ancient, ancient tongue of ancient passions and
desires, and prompting many actions which the doer thereof can give
himself no accounting for.
There are two ways of reading these old stories; and as one who has
gotten pleasure and profit, too, from both, I would recommend them both
to be used. The first way is to read yourself backward into it as much
as possible. Do not be a critic, on first reading; put the critic
asleep. Let yourself _seem to believe it_, as did he who wrote it. Read
it aloud, if you are where you will not annoy anybody; let the words
sing themselves over your lips, as they sung themselves over the lips of
the people who were dead so long ago,--in their strange far-away homes
with their vanished surroundings; sung themselves, just as the wind sung
through the echoing forests, and murmured back from the rocks; just as
the songs slipped out of the birds' throats. You will find that half the
beauty and the farce of old-time legend lies in the bare sound of it.
Far, far more is it dependent on the voice, than any modern writings
are. And surely, the reason is simple enough: for _it_ was not _writing_
in its creation; ancient literature addressed itself to the ear, always,
while modern literature speaks to the eye.
If once you can get your ears washing with the sounds of the old
language, as with the washing of the seas when you sit on the beach, or
the lapping of the rivers when the bank-grass caresses you some idle
summer afternoon, it will be much easier for you to forget that you are
the child of another age and thought. You will begin to luxuriate in
fancies and prefigure impossibilities; then you will know how it feels
to be fancy free, loosed from the chain of the possible; and once having
felt, you will also understand better, when you re-read with other
intent.
When you are ready for such re-reading, then be as critical as you
please,--which does not necessarily mean be condemnatory. It means
rather take notice of all generals and particulars, and question them.
You will naturally pose yourself the question, Why is it
that the bare sounds of these old stories are so much more
vibrating, drum-like, shrilling, at times, than any modern
song or poem? You will find that the mitigating influence of
civilization,--knowledge, moderation,--creeping into expression,
produces flat, neutral, diluted sounds,--watery words, so to
speak, long-drawn out and glidingly inoffensive. In any modern
writing remarkable for strength, will be found a preponderance of
"barbaric yawp"--as Whitman called it.
Fear creates sharp cries; the rebound of Fear, which is Bravado,
produces drum-tones, roars, and growls; unrestrained Passions howl in
wind-notes, irregular, breaking short off. God carries a hammer, and
Love a spear. The hymn clangs, and the love-song clashes. Through those
fierce sounds one feels again hot hearts.
Those who perceive colors accompanying sounds, sense clean cut lights
streaking the night-ground of these early word-pictures; sharp, hard,
reds and yellows. It is our later world which has produced green
tintings not to be told from gray, nor gray from blue, nor anything from
anything. In our fondness for smoothness and gradation we have attained
practical colorlessness.
If it appears to you that I am talking nonsense, permit me to tell you
it is because you have dulled your own powers of perception; in seeking
to become too intellectually appreciative, you have lost the power to
feel primitive things. Try to recover it.
Another source of interesting observation, especially in English
literature of early writing: this time the eye.
It is admitted by everybody that as a serviceable instrument for
expressing definite sounds in an expeditious and comprehensible manner,
English written language is a woeful failure. If any inventor of a
theory of symbols should, would, or could have devised such a ridiculous
conception of spelling, such a hodge-podge of contradictory jumbles, he
would properly have been adjudged to an insane asylum; and that, every
man who ever contrived an English spelling-book, and every teacher who
is obliged to worry this incongruous mess through the steadily revolting
reason-and-memory process of children, is ably convinced. But Man,
English-speaking Man, has actually--_executed_ such conception; (he
probably executed it first and conceived it afterward, as most of our
poor victims do when they start on that terrible blind road through the
spelling-book). Whether or no, the thing is here, and we've all to
accept it, and deal with it as best we may, sadly hoping that possibly
the tenth generation from now may at least be rid of a few unnecessary
"e's."
And since the thing is here, and is a mighty creation, and very
indicative of how the human brain in large sections works; since we've
got to put up with it anyway, we may as well, in revenge for its many
inconveniences, get what little satisfaction we can out of it. And I
find it one of the most delightful little side amusements of wandering
through the field of old literature, while in the critical vein, to
stray around among the old stumps and crooked cowpaths of English
spelling. Much pleasure is to be derived from seeing what old words grew
together and made new ones; what syllables or letters got lopped off or
twisted, how silent letters became silent and why; from what older
language planted, and what its relatives are. It is much the same
pleasure that one gets from trailing around through the narrow crooked
streets and senseless meanderings of London City. Everybody knows it's a
foolish way to build a city; that all streets should be straight and
wide and well-distributed. But since they are not, and London is too big
for one's individual exertion to reform, one consents to take interest
in explaining the crookedness--in mentally dissolving the great city
into the hundred little villages which coalesced to make it; in marking
this point as the place where St. Somebody-or-Other knelt and prayed
once and therefore there had to be a cross-street here; and this other
point as the place where the road swept round because martyrs were wont
to be burnt there, etc., etc. The trouble is that after a while one gets
to love all that quaint illogical tangle, seeing always the thousand
years of history in it; and so one's senses actually become vitiated
enough to permit him to love the outrages of English spelling, because
of the features of men's souls that are imaged therein. When I look at
the word "laugh," I fancy I hear the joyous deep guttural "gha-gha-gha"
of the old Saxon who died long before the foreign graft on the English
stock softened the "gh" to an "f"!
Really one must become more patient with the "un-system," knowing how it
grew, and feeling that this is the way of Man,--the way he always
grows,--not as he ought, but as he can.
I have spoken of forms: word-sounds, word-symbols; as to the spirit of
those early writings, full of inarticulate religious sentiment, emotions
so strong they burst from the utterer's throat one might almost say in
barks; gloomy and foreboding; these gradually changing to more
lightsome fancies,--beauty, delicacy, airiness taking their place, as in
the fairy tales and folk-songs of the people, wherein the deeds of
supernaturals are sported with, and it becomes evident that love and
winsomeness are usurping the kingdom of Power and Fear,--through all we
are compelled to observe one constant tendency of the human mind,--the
desire to free itself from its own conditions, to be what it is not, to
represent itself as something beyond its powers of accomplishment. In
their minds, men had wings, and breathed in water, and swam on land, and
ate air, and thrived in deserts, and walked through seas, and gathered
roses off ice-bergs, and collected frozen dew off the tails of sunbeams,
dispersed mountains with mustard seeds of faith, and climbed into solid
caves under the rainbow; did everything which it was impossible for them
to do.
It is in fact this imaginative faculty which has fore-run the
accomplishments of science and while, under the influence of practical
experiment and the extension of knowledge such dreams have passed away,
this much remains and will long, long remain in humankind, covered over
and shamefacedly concealed as much as may be--that men perpetually
conceive themselves as chrysalid heroes and wonder workers; and, under
strain of occasion, this element crops out in their actions, making them
do all manner of curious things which the standard-setters of realism
will declare utterly illogical and impossible. Often it is the commonest
men who do them.
I have a fondness for realism myself; at least I have a very wicked
feeling towards what is called "symbolism," and various other things
which I don't understand; but as the "Unrealists," the "Exaggeratists,"
the whatever-you-call-them express what I believe to be a very permanent
characteristic of humankind, as evidenced in all the traces of its
work, I think they probably give quite as true reflections of Man's Soul
as the present favorites.
These early literatures, most of which have of course been lost, were
the embryos of our more imposing creations; and it is a pleasant and an
instructive thing to follow the unfolding of Monster Tales into Great
Religious Literatures; to compare them and see how the same few simple
figures, either transplanted or spontaneously produced at different
points, evolved into all manner of Creators, Redeemers and miracles in
their various altered habitats. No one can so thoroughly appreciate what
is in the face of a man turned upward in prayer, as he who has followed
the evolution of the black Monster up to that impersonal conception of
God prettily called by Quakers "the Inner Light."
Fairy Tales on the other hand have evolved into allegories and
Dramas,--first the dramas of the sky, now the dramas of earth.
Tales of Sexual exploits have become novels, novelettes, short stories,
sketches,--a many-expressioned countenance of Man. But the old Heroic
Legend,--and the Hero is always the next born after the Monster in the
far-back dawn-days, is the lineal progenitor of History,--History which
was first the glorification of a warrior and his aids; then the story of
Kings, courts, and intrigues; now mostly the report of the deeds of
nations in their ugly moods; and _to become_ the record of what people
have done in their more amiable moments,--the record of the conquests of
peace; how men have lived and labored; dug and built, hewn and cleared,
gardened and reforested, organized and coöperated, manufactured and
used, educated and amused themselves. Those of us who aspire to be more
or less suggesters of social change, are greatly at a loss, if we do not
know the face of Man as reflected in history; and I mean as much the
reflection of the minds of historians as seen in their histories as the
reflection of the minds of others they sought to give; not so much in
the direct expression of their opinion either, as in the choice of what
they thought it worth while to try to stamp perpetuity upon.
When we read in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle these items which are
characteristic of the whole:
"A. D. 611. This year Cynegils succeeded to the government in Wessex,
and held it 31 winters. Cynegils was the son of Ceol, Ceol of Cutha,
Cutha of Cymric."
And then,
"614. This year Cynegils and Cuiehelm fought at Bampton and slew 2046 of
the Welsh."
And then
"678. This year appeared the comet star in August, and shone every
morning during three months like a sunbeam. Bishop Wilfred being driven
from his bishopric by King Everth, two bishops were consecrated in his
stead."
--when we read these we have not any very adequate conception of what
the Anglo-Saxon people were doing; but we have a very striking and
lasting impression of what the only men who tried to write history at
all in that period of English existence, thought it was worth while to
record.
"Cynegils was the son of Ceol, and he of Cutha, and Cutha of Cymric." It
reads considerably like a stock-raiser's pedigree book. The trouble is,
we have no particular notion of Cymric. Probably if we went back we
should find he was the son of Somebody. But at any rate, he had a
grandson, and the grandson was a king, and the chronicler therefore
recorded him. Nothing happened for three years; and then the chronicle
records that two kings fought and slew 2046 men. Then comes the
momentous year 678 when a comet appeared and a bishop lost his job. No
doubt the comet foretold the loss. There are no records of when
shoemakers lost their jobs that I know of, nor how many shoemakers were
put in their places; and I imagine it would have been at least as
interesting for us to know as the little matter of Bishop Wilfred. But
the chronicler did not think so; he preserved the Bishop's troubles--no
doubt he did just what the shoemakers of the time would also have done,
providing they had been also chroniclers. It is a fair sample of what
was in men's minds as important.--If any one fancies that this
disposition has quite vanished, let him pick up any ordinary history,
and see how many pages, relatively, are devoted to the doings of persons
intent on slaying, and those intent on peaceful occupation; and how many
times we are told that certain politicians lost their jobs, and how we
are not told anything about the ordinary people losing their jobs; and
then reflect whether the old face of Man-the-Historian is quite another
face yet.
Biography, as a sort of second offspring of the Hero legend, is another
revelation, when we read it, not only to know its subject, but to know
its writer,--the standpoint from which he values another man's life.
Ordinarily there is a great deal of "Cynegils the son of Cutha the son
of Cymric" in it; and a great deal of emphasis upon the man as an
individual phenomenon; when really he would be more interesting and more
comprehensible left in connection with the series of phenomena of which
he was part. As an example of what to me is a perfect biography, I
instance Conway's Life of Thomas Paine, itself a valuable history. But
it is not so correct a mirror of the general attitude of biographers and
readers of biography as Bosworth's Life of Johnson, except in so far as
it indicates that the great face in the glass is changing.
It is rather the type of what biography is _becoming_, than what it has
been, or is.
There are two divisions of literature which are generally named in one
breath, and are certainly closely connected; and yet the one came to
highly perfected forms long, long ago, while the other is properly
speaking very young; and for all that, the older is the handmaid of the
younger. I mean the literatures of philosophy and science.
Philosophy is simply the coördination of the sciences; the formulation
of the general, and related principles deduced from the collection and
orderly arrangement of the facts of existence. Yet Man had rich
literatures of philosophy, while his knowledge of facts was yet so
extremely limited as hardly to be worth while writing books about. None
of the appearances of Man's Soul is more interesting than that reflected
in the continuous succession of philosophies he has poured out. Let him
who reads them, read them always twice; first, simply to know and grasp
what is said, to become familiar with the idea as it formed itself in
the minds of those who conceived it; second, for the sake of figuring
the restless activity of brain, the positive need of the mind under all
conditions to formulate what knowledge it has, or thinks it has, into
some sort of connected whole. This is one of the most pronounced and
permanent features seen in the mirror: the positive refusal of the mind
to accept the isolation of existences; no matter how far apart they lie,
Man proceeds to spin connecting threads somehow. The woven texture is
often comical enough, but the weaver is just as positively revealed in
the cobwebs of ancient philosophy as in the reasoning of Herbert
Spencer.
Concerning the literature of Science itself, in strict terms, I should
be very presumptuous to speak of it, because I know extremely little
about it; but of those general popularizations of it, which we have in
some of the works of Haeckel, Darwin, and their similars, I should say
that beyond the important information they contain in themselves (which
surely no one can afford to be in ignorance of) they present the most
transformed reflection of Man which any literature gives. Their words
are cold, colorless, burdened with the labor of exactness, machine
like, sustained, uncompromising, careless of effect. The spirit they
embody is like unto them. They offer the image of Man's Soul in the
time while imagination is in abeyance, reason ascendent.
This coldness and quietness sound the doom of poetry. A people which
shall be fully permeated with the spirit and word of Science will never
conceive great poems. They will never be overcome long enough at a time
by their wonder and admiration, by their primitive impulses, by their
power of simple impression, to think or to speak poetically. They will
never see trees as impaled giants any more; they will see them as
evolved descendants of phytoplasm. Dewdrops are no more the jewels of
the fairies; they are the produce of condensation under given
atmospheric conditions. Singing stones are not the prisons of punished
spirits, but problems in acoustics. The basins of fjords are not the
track of the anger of Thor, but the pathways of glaciation. The roar and
blaze and vomit of Etna, are not the rebellion of the Titan, but the
explosion of so and so many million cubic feet of gas. The comet shall
no more be the herald of the wrath of heaven, it is a nebulous body
revolving in an elliptical orbit of great elongation. Love--love will
not be the wound of Cupid, but the manifestation of universal
reproductive instincts.
No, the great poems of the world _have been_ produced; they have sung
their song and gone their way. Imagination remains to us, but weakened,
mixed, tamed, calmed. Verses we shall have,--and _many_
fragments,--fragments of beauty and power; but never again the
thunder-roll of the mighty early song. We have the benefits of science;
we must have its derogations also. The powerful fragments will be such
as deal with the still unexplored regions of Man's own internity--if I
may coin the word. Science is still balking here. But not for long. We
shall soon have madmen turned inside out, and their madness
painstakingly reduced to so-and-so many excessive or deficient
nerve-vibrations per second. Then no more of Poe's "Raven" and Ibsen's
"Brand."
I have said that I intended to indicate a wider concept of literature
than that generally allowed. So far I have not done it; at least all
that I have dealt with is usually mentioned in works on literature. But
I wish now to maintain that some very lowly forms of written expression
must be included in literature,--always remembering that I am seeking
the complete composite of Man's Soul.
Here then: I include in literature, beside what I have spoken on, not
only standard novels, stories, sketches, travels, and magazine essays of
all sorts, but the poorest, paltriest dime novel, detective story, daily
newspaper report, baseball game account, and splash advertisement.
Oh, what a charming picture of ourselves we see therein! And a faithful
one, mind you! Think what a speaking likeness of ourselves was the
report of national, international, racial importance--the
Jeffries-Johnson fight! Nay, I am not laughing. The people of the future
are going to look back at the record a thousand years from now; and say,
"This is what interested men in the year 1910." I wonder which will
appear most ludicrous then, Bishop Wilfred in juxtaposition with the
comet star, or the destiny of the white race put in jeopardy by a
pugilistic contest between one white and one black man! O the bated
breath, the expectant eyes, the inbitten lip, the taut muscles, the
riveted attention, of hundreds of thousands of people watching the great
"scientific" combat. I wonder whether the year 3000 will admire it more
or less than the Song of Beowulf and the Battle of Brunanburh.
Consider the soul reflected on the sporting page. Oh, how mercilessly
correct it is! Consider the soul reflected on the advertising page. Oh,
the consummate liar that strides across it! Oh, the gull, the simpleton,
the would-be getter of something for nothing whose existence it argues!
Yea, commercial man has set his image therein; let him regard himself
when he gets time.
And the body of our reform literature, which really reflects the very
best social aspirations of men, how prodigal in words it is,--how
indefinite in ideas! How generous of brotherhood--and sisterhood--in the
large; how chary in the practice! Do we not appear therein as curious
little dwarfs who have somehow gotten "big heads"? Mites gesticulating
at the stars and imagining they are afraid because they twinkle. I would
not discourage any comrade of mine in the social struggle, but sometimes
it is a wholesome thing to reconsider our size.
A word in defense of the silly story. Let us not forget that lowly minds
have lowly needs; and the mass of minds are lowly, and have a right to
such gratification as is not beyond their comprehension. So long as I do
not _have to read_ those stories, I feel quite glad for the sake of
those who are not able to want better that such gratification is not
denied them. I would not wish to frown the silly story out of existence
so long as it is a veritable expression of many people's need. There are
those who have only learned the art of reading at all because of the
foolish story. And quite in a side way I learned the other day through
the grave assertion of a physician that the ability to read even these,
whereby some little refinement of conception is introduced into the idea
of love, is one of the restraining influences upon sexual degradation
common among poor and ignorant young women. The face of man revealed in
them is therefore not altogether without charm, though it may look
foolish to us. I said there were some appearances in the Mirror not
generally remarked, but which to me are suggestive. One of these is the
evident delight of the human soul in _smut_. In the older literature
these things are either badly set down, as law and cursing, as
occasionally in the Bible; or they are clothed and mixed with sprightly
imaginations as in the tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer; or they are
thinly veiled with a possible modest meaning as in the puns of the
Shakespearian period; but in our day, they compose a subterranean
literature of themselves, like segregated harlots among books. Should I
say that I blush for this face of Man? I ought to, perhaps, but I do
not: all I say is, the thing is there, a very real, a very persistent
image in the glass; no one who looks straight into it can avoid seeing
it. Mixed with the humorous, as it often--rather usually--is, it seems
to be one of the normal expressions of normal men. We deceive ourselves
greatly if we fancy that Man has become purified of such imaginations
because they are not used openly in modern dramas and stories, as they
were in the older ones.
It may be dangerous to say it, but I believe from the evidence of
literature as a whole, that a moderate amount of amusement in smut is a
saving balance in the psychology of nearly every man and woman,--a sign
of anchorage in a robust sanity, which takes things as they are--and
laughs at them. I believe it is a much more wholesome appearance, than
that betrayed in our fever-bred stories and sketches which deal with the
abnormalities of men, and which are growing more and more in vogue, in
spite of our cry about realism.
Personally, I am more interested in the abnormalities, which I find very
fascinating. And I am very eager to know whether they will prove to be
the result of the abnormal conditions of life which Modern Man has
created for himself in his tampering with the forces of nature,--his
strenuous industrial existence, his turning of night into day, his
whirling himself over the world at a pace not at all in conformity with
his native powers of locomotion, and other matters in accordance. Or
will they prove to be the revenge of the dammed up, cribbed, cabined,
and confined imagination, which can no longer exert itself upon
externals,--since the Investigating Man has explained and mastered these
or is doing so--and now turns in to wreak frightful wreck upon the mind
itself?
At any rate, the fact is that we have some very curious appearances in
the Mirror just now; madmen explaining their own madness, diseased men
picking apart their own diseases, perverted men analyzing their own
perversions, anything, everything but sane and normal men. Does it mean
that in our day there is nothing interesting in good health, in
well-ordered lives? Or does it mean that the rarest thing in all the
world is the so-called normal man, whom tacit consent assumes to be the
commonest? That everybody, while outwardly wearing a mask of reputable
common sense, is within a raging conglomeration of psychic elements that
hurl themselves on one another like hissing flames? Or does it mean
simply that the most powerful writers are themselves diseased, and can
only paint disease?
I put these questions and do not presume to answer them. I point to the
mirror,--the Ibsen Drama, the Andreyev Story, the Maeterlinck Poem, the
Artzibashev novel,--and I say the image is there. Explain it as you can.
For the rest, let me recall to you what I told you was my intent:
First: To insist on a more inclusive view of Literature; you see I would
have it extended both up and down,--_down_ even to the advertisement,
the sporting page, and the surreptitious anecdote,--_up_ to the fullest
and most comprehensive statements of the works of reason.
Second: To suggest that readers acquire the habit of reading twice, or
at least with a double intent. When serious literature is to be
considered, I would insist on actually reading twice; but of course it
would be both impractical and undesirable to apply such a method to most
of the print we look at.
Those who are confirmed in the habits of would-be critics will have the
greatest trouble in learning to read a book from the simple man's
standpoint,--and yet no one can ever form a genuine appreciation of a
work who has not first forgotten that he is a critic, and allowed
himself to be carried away into the events and personalities depicted
therein. In that first reading, also, one should train himself to feel
and hear the music of language,--this great instrument which Men have
jointly built, and out of which come great organ tones, and trumpet
calls, and thin flute notes, sweeping and wailing, an articulate
storm--a conjuring key whereby all the passions of the dead, the
millions of the dead, have given to the living the power to call their
ghosts out of the grave and make them walk. Yea, every word is the
mystic embodiment of a thousand years of vanished passion, hope, desire,
thought--all that battled through the living figures turned to dust and
ashes long ago. Train your ears to hear the song of it; it helps to feel
what the writer felt.
And after that read critically, with one eye on the page, so to speak,
and the other on the reflection in the mirror, looking for the mind
behind the work, the things which interested the author and those he
wrote for.
Third: To suggest inquiry into the curious paradox of the people of the
most highly evolved scientific and mechanical age taking especial
delight in psychic abnormalities and morbidities,--whereby the most
utterly unreasonable fictive creation becomes the greatest center of
curiosity and attraction to the children of Reason.
A Mirror Maze is literature, wherein Man sees all faces of himself,
lengthened here, widened there, distorted in another place, restored
again to due proportion, with every possible expression on his face,
from abjectness to heroic daring, from starting terror to icy courage,
from love to hate and back again to worship, from the almost sublime
down to the altogether grotesque,--now giant, now dwarf,--but always
with one persistent character,--his _superb curiosity to see himself_.
The Drama of the Nineteenth Century
The passions of men are actors, events are their motions, all history is
their speech. In the long play of the ages a human being sometimes
becomes an event; a nation's passion takes a _personnel_. Such beings
are the expression of the gathered mind-force of millions.
He only who keeps himself aloof from all feeling can remain the
spectator of the hour. All that humanity which is held within the
beating, coiling, surging tides of passion, has no individuality; it
sinks its personality to become a vein in the limb of this giant, a
pulse in the heart of that Titan. Only when out of the spirit of the
times the event is born, only when the act is complete, the curtain rung
down, only then does the intellectuality of the vein, the pulse, rise to
the level of the dispassionate. Only then can it survey a tragedy and
say, "This was necessary"--a reaction, and say, "This was inevitable."
Yet as a drop of blood is a quivering, living, flashing ruby beside the
dead, pale pearl of a stagnant pool, so is one drop of feeling a shining
thing, a living thing, beside the deadness of the intellect which judges
while the heart is stone; beside those quiet bayous of brain which
reflect back the images before them very purely, very stilly, giving no
heed to the great rushing river of heart that rolls on, hurries on so
close beside them. Bye and bye, bye and bye, the river reaches the
grand, great sea, and the waters spread out calm and deep, so deep that
the stars of the upper sea, the lights of the higher life, shine far up
from them as a babe smiles up into its mother's eyes, and up still to
the distant source of the light within the eyes.
It is to men and women of feeling that I speak, men and women of the
millions, men and women in the hurrying current! Not to the shallow
egotist who holds himself apart and with the phariseeism of
intellectuality exclaims, "I am more just than thou"; but to those whose
every fiber of being is vibrating with emotion as aspen leaves quiver in
the breath of Storm! To those whose hearts swell with a great pity at
the pitiful toil of women, the weariness of young children, the
handcuffed helplessness of strong men! To those whose blood runs quick
along the veins like wild-fire on the dry grass of prairies when the
wind whirls aside the smokings of the holocaust, and, courting the teeth
of the flame, the black priestess, Injustice, beckons it on while her
feet stamp on the cinders of the sacrifice! To those whose heart-strings
thrill at the touch of Love like the sweet, low, musical laugh of
childhood, or thrum with hate like the singing vibration of the
bowstring speeding the arrow of Death! I speak to those whose eyes
behold all things through a haze of gray, or rose, or gold, born of
their surroundings, and which mist slips away only when the gaze is
leveled on that dead Past whose passions and whose deeds are ended: to
whom the present is always a morning with the dimness of morning around
it--the past clear and still--no veil on its face, for the veil has been
shredded asunder.
For he only who intensely perceives the nature of his surroundings, he,
and he only, who has felt, and keenly felt, all the throbs and throes of
life, can judge with any degree of truth of the action of that which is
past. You, you who have loved, you who have joyed, you who have
suffered, it belongs to you to people the silent streets of the silent
cities with forms now vanished, to comprehend something of the passions
which animated their action; it belongs to you to understand how the
fury of a great energy, striking terrible aimless blows in the dark, may
yet, across the chasm of awful mistake, touch the hand of a greater
Justice.
If from a panoramic survey of the past some wisdom may be gathered, then
let the dramas of old ages tell us what have been the mainsprings of
their motions; so we shall understand what action ushered in the drama
of the nineteenth century.
"Westward the Star of Empire holds its way." Following the course of
those majestic spheres of fire which whirl each in its vast ellipse,
trending away in a long, southwesterly path athwart the heavens,
obedient to that superior attraction which through all the universe
holds good, the attraction of greater for lesser things, the tide of
life upon our world has risen and swelled and rolled away to the south
and west. Away in the orient source of the sunlight, away where the
glitter of ice shines up to meet the morning, nations have risen and
plunged down impetuously over the sleeping regions of darkness and of
heat, bearing with them the breeze-stirring life of the north and the
on-trending light of the east. And out of this conquered earth have
arisen the mixed passions of another life and another race. Still the
governing stars wheel on, and the tide of life which paused only to
gather strength rolls up again; and once more a nation is born, and new
passions dictate the action of the peoples. Down, down it sweeps over
the Altaian hills, over the Himalayan ranges, over the land of the
Euphrates and Tigris, over the deserts of Arabia the barren, the fields
of Arabia the stony, and the grasses and waters of Arabia the happy, to
those low shores, the home of dark mausoleums and darker pyramids, on to
the now classic land of Greece, and golden Italy, and the home of the
dark-eyed Moors. Sweeps till it touches the frothing sea, and brightly
borne upon its upper crest shines the glory, the splendor, the
magnificence of the warring powers which dictated the action of Greece
and Rome. For centuries their hoisted spears send back the burnished
glitter of the sun, and then--the light dies out; down rushing from the
North-land again the tide of vigor pours, and the health and strength of
barbarism conquers the weakness of a tottering civilization! Far
away--away over the miles of sparkling sea, in the darkness and the
silence a continent lies waiting; waiting for the coming of the light,
waiting for the swelling of the tide. Slowly at last a ripple creeps up
over the strange beach, and the flood rolls on, and again a continent
becomes a cradle, and the Empire Star sends on its rays to kiss the
forehead of the rising world. Over the breadth of all our continent that
mighty wave is flowing still.
Standing to-day almost upon the threshold of another world, and looking
back down this long-vista'd past, gradually there dawns upon
Reflection's vision, gradually there grows out of the confusion of forms
and the Babel of sounds, a clearer perception of the motor powers which
have dictated the action of this past, a better idea of the grand plot
which, driven by these motor powers, the passions are working out. For,
above the long procession of scenes and events, above the monster
massings of happiness and woe, above the War and Peace of centuries,
above the nations that have risen and fallen, above the life and above
the grave, the winged and shadowy embodiments of two great ideas float
and rest. And those two principles are called Authority and Liberty; or,
if it please you better, _God_ and Liberty. The one is all clad in the
purple and scarlet of pomp and of power, while the other stands a
glorious shining center in the white radiance of Freedom.
Yet not always; far back in time Authority stood on thrones and altars,
with the plumed sables of despotism waving on his brow, while in his
hands he held two iron gyves, the one to fetter thought, the other to
fetter action; and these two gyves were called _the Church and State_.
Liberty! Ah, Liberty was then a name scarcely to pass the lips; dreamed
of only in solitude, spoken of only in dungeons! Yet out of the blackest
mire the whitest lily blooms! Out of the dungeon, out of the sorrow, out
of the sacrifice, out of the pain, grew this child of the heart; and
pure and strong she grew until the sabled plumes have tottered on the
despot's brow, and a great palsy shakes the hands that once so firmly
held the gyves of Church and State. For, ever seeking to overthrow each
other, the one for the aggrandizement of self, the other for the love of
all mankind, these two powers have contended; and every energy, every
passion, every desire, good or evil, has been ranged on this side or on
that, blunderingly or wisely, and nations have swung to and fro in their
breath as upon a hinge. And one by one the powers of Authority have been
crippled, and step by step Liberty has advanced, until to-day mankind is
beginning to measure the forces that, struggling blindly together, are
yet evolving light, to drink in the sublime ideal of freedom. Yet, oh,
how long the struggle with vested ignorance, with greed in power!
When upon the Drama of the Nineteenth Century the curtain rose, Liberty,
triumphant on the younger shores, lay prone and hurled in Europe.
Against fifteen centuries of crowned and throned and tithed curse and
woe unutterable, she had risen with such a fearful convulsive strength
that when she had mown down king, priest and throne, and gorged the
guillotine with blood, she sank back, exhausted from the struggle, and
the hated tyrant rose again. The wild desire to conquer, to possess, to
control, to hold in subjection, seemed to dominate with an unconquerable
strength, and the gathered mind-force of millions of people wrought
itself into the single brain of Napoleon Bonaparte. This human being
became an event--this nation's passion took a _personnel_! The spirit of
the times produced this man, and Authority smiled as one after another
the despots of Europe plotted and planned, only to be overthrown by this
incarnation of Ambition, while the scenes were shifted from the
Vine-land to the Rhine-land, from the sun-land to the snow-land, and
through them all the great event glowed out, lit high by the rust-red
light.
How well the plot was working! The Empire triumphant, nations subjected,
the fetter of action closing its terrible teeth! Liberty manacled on the
left! The armies of God massing their forces--advancing--preparing to
close down the iron jaw of the iron gyve upon the right; to imprison
thought, to re-establish the union of fetters, to link up the broken
chains, to burden human hope and human will and human life once more
with the awful oppression of Church and State!
But Liberty will not, cannot die! Wounded and bruised and pinioned
sore, condemned to the use of instruments that were none of hers, she
wrought with England's jealousy, with Wellington's emulation, with fear,
with love, with hate! Impelled by one motive or another the nations of
the coalition moved in concert. Napoleon had been Marengo--he had been
Austerlitz! He became _Waterloo!_ And when across that awful field
rolled the last long cannon boom, when the silence settled, when the
Quick and the Dead lay sleeping and the Wounded died, Justice and
Suffering touched hands across the gulf of blood, and Liberty heard them
whisper, _"Sic semper tyrannis."_ In the tableau that followed, she, the
ideal of our dreams, still stood pale and fettered; but a smile lit up
her face and a light gleamed in her eyes as she saw Authority reel and
stagger from the blow which, though it did not sever, yet shattered half
the strength of both its fetters.
For the strength of God lies in a vast unity, an ownership of ideas
backed up by the brute force under the command of the individual in whom
that ownership of ideas is vested; while the strength of Liberty lies in
the very essence of things themselves, the fact that no law or force
ever _can_ destroy the individualities of existence; and of necessity
the natural tendency to break all bonds which seek to control thought,
and all force which locks up those bonds entailing liberty of action as
the outcome of liberty of thought. And just in proportion as Churches
have been dismembered and States have been broken up, no matter that
each new Church and each new State were but another form of despotism,
just in that proportion has the principle of liberty been served; for
each new religious establishment has been an assertion of the right to
think differently from the fashionable creed, each change has been a
movement away from the centralization of power.
So with Waterloo in the background, with Authority lashed to impotent
rage before it, and Liberty pinioned, yet with the lit smile still upon
her countenance, the tableau light flames up and dies, and the curtain
falls upon the first great act. Those who think, those who feel, those
who hope, know why that smile was there. For looking away over the long
blue roll of water that swelled like an interlude between, she beheld
the sublime opening scene of the act that followed.
Far up the wonderful stage the distant mountains lift their circling
crests, at their feet the waters sweep like a march of music, vast acres
of untrodden grass-land shower their emerald wealth, nearer the front
the lower hills rise up, and then the short Atlantic slope, all rife
with busy life, bends down to meet the sea. On the right the hoar-frost
sheens and shines on the majestic northern forests, while the glittering
earth, dipped in its bath of frozen crystal, spreads like a field of
diamonds; on the left the white flakes of the orange bloom fall like a
shimmering bridal veil, the wind floats up like a perfume, and the hazy,
lazy languor of warmth creeps all about. Behind it all, behind the hills
and the prairies and the lifted summits, the mystical golden light of
the west drops down, filling the dim-lit distance with the glory of
promise. The silver light of the Empire Star glides over the Atlantic
slope, and its rays, like guiding fingers, point onward to the gathering
shadows.
Now the Passions of men begin to move upon this vast platform with an
energy never before witnessed. Diverted from their old-time channels of
struggle against the oppression of Gods and kings and the bitterness
of birth-hatred, with a freedom of opportunity denied in the old
world, and with such unstinted natural resources waiting for the magic
transformer, the genius of humanity, Ambition of power, Avarice,
Pride, Jealousy, all those motors born out of the old _régime_ of a
State-propped God, bred and multiplied through generations till they
have come to be looked upon as natural laws of human existence, begin
to work together to plant this untrodden earth, to sow in its furrows
the seed of a newer race--and, paradoxical as it may sound, to work for
their own destruction, their final elimination from the human brain.
Or perhaps it were more correct to say, that, with the barriers of old
institutions taken away, they naturally begin their retransformation
into those beautiful sentiments from which they were originally warped,
distorted, misshapen by that warped, distorted, misshapen idea called
God. So do they inaugurate the grand era of development; so do they
answer the oft-repeated question, "What incentive would there be for
labor or genius if the institutions that compel them to struggle were
broken down?" Look at the stage of the past and see! Never before had
thought been so free, never before had ability been less cramped, less
starved or less compelled! And never before did genius dare so much for
purposes so great; never before did the engines which drive the tide
of life along a continent send forth a stream of so much vigor. A new
light breaks along the pathway of the stars, and swells and rolls and
floods the great scene with a dawn-burst so magnificent that the very
hills blush in its rising splendor. It is the dawn which the night of
God so long held shrouded; it is that which is born when Superstition
dies; it is that Phoenix which rises from the ashes of religion; it
is that clear blent flame of all the great forces of nature, brought
to the knowledge of mankind by delving Reason, and shot like northern
streamers from the heart of her the Church of God so long held
throttled--Science!
It is that which shone reflected in the eyes of Liberty when pale and
manacled she stood before the field of Waterloo! The ray of the under
earth came up to join the ray of the clouds shot down, the energies of
sky and mine and sea were clasped to bring down the wealth of the
mountains to the shore, and to transport the life of the now populous
strip of slope to the unclaimed regions of the west.
In the broad blaze of light the scene is shifted, the golden effulgence
melts and flows round that sea-girdled kingdom, where quietly but surely
the two great engines of Authority are being shriven apart. The
dynasties of kings are growing dusty--much of their power is but a
legend; the Church is shrinking in her garments. The desires of this
people are slow to move, but deeply rooted and strong; and so far as
they have moved forward, they have never moved back. There have been no
gigantic strides, no reactions. Little by little the idea of
divinely-delegated power has been crippled till the English bishop and
the English lord have become mere titled mockeries in comparison with
their ancient feudal meaning. But stop! Close lying there, almost
beneath her stretching shadows, another island flashes like a green star
in its sea-blue setting. And from that island there rises up the cry of
a great devotion, clinging blindly to its greatest curse, its
priest-hedged God, while persecuted even unto death by the fanaticism of
another faith; and the pleading of Hunger while day long and night long
the shuttle flies in the flax loom, and the earth yields her golden
fruition, only to lade the ships that bear it away from the famine-white
lips and the toil-hardened hands that produced it. Blindly Devotion
prays to its God, that God whom it calls all-wise, all-powerful and
all-just, and the English Lord, who cannot thus subdue his own
countrymen, reaches out the long arm of the law across the channel for
his rent--and, with God looking on, it is given; and still while the
hollow-eyed women kneel at the altar for help, the scene widens out, and
away in the distance the seven-hilled city lifts up from the sea, and
from the dome of the Vatican, from that great mortared hill of God, the
Vicar of Christ calls out, "My tribute, my Peter pence!" And with God
looking on, it is given! And then from the foot of that tear-stained
altar, where so many lips of Woe have pressed, where so many helpless
hands have clasped, where so many hearts have broken, comes the ironical
promise of Jehovah, "Ask and thou shalt receive."
Oh, God is a very promising personage indeed--very promising, but, like
some of his disciples, very poor pay.
Liberty! Shadowed, invisible! Yet a muffled voice is repeating the words
which not so long ago rang from the lips of one who stood almost beneath
the shadow of the scaffold, who walks to-day in prison gloom:
"Ye see me only in your cells, ye see me only in the grave,
Ye see me only wand'ring lone beside the exile's sullen wave!
Ye fools! Do I not also live where you have sought to pierce
in vain?
Rests not a nook for me to dwell in every heart, in every brain?
Not every brow that boldly thinks erect with manhood's honest
pride?
Does not each bosom shelter me that beats with honor's generous
tide?
Not every workshop brooding woe, not every hut that harbors
grief?
Ha! Am I not the breath of life that pants and struggles for
relief?"
Ah, poor, panting, struggling, misery-laden Ireland! How God laughs with
glee to see his shackles weight your misery!
The scene is shifting, the stage is dark'ning--a strange eclipse
obscures the shafted light! Darker, darker! Now a low, red fire gleams
like a winking eye along the foreground; it runs, it hisses like a
snake; there another leaps up, there another; France, Germany,
Italy--the continent blazes with the fires of the Commune! That spirit
which, drunken with blood, reeled from the guillotine at '93, to be
crushed beneath the upbuilding of the Empire, has once more arisen. And
out of the hot hells of Fury, and Jealousy, and Hate, out of the
pitiless struggle between "vested rights" and wrongs with high ancestral
lineage, and the great outcrying of a piteous ignorance against an
oppression whose injustice it feels but cannot analyze, grows the
sublime idea which priests have anathematized and States have
outlawed--"the sacred dogma of =Equality.="
In so far as that ideal was made possible of conception, in so far as
the masses began to understand something of the causes of their ills, in
so far the purpose of Liberty was served: no matter that the arms of
Oppression were triumphant, the dawn of the thought of equal liberty
upon the mass of the unthinking was a far greater victory than any
triumph of arms.
So when the fires died down, and the low reflection gleamed for an
instant over those quiescent Indian valleys and Altaian ranges, where
the main plot of old centuries had been laid, and then paled out before
the white flare lighting the tableau of the second act, Liberty stood
with chained hands lifted toward her enemy, while a proud look, playing
like an iridescent flame in her eyes, said, plain as lips could speak
it, "I have unbound their thoughts; they will one day unbind my hands."
Slowly the curtain falls on the fair prisoner and the glowering God.
The solemn ocean interlude rolls in again; again the rising curtain
shows the curving slope, the rock-romance of hills, the wide, green
valley with its threading silver, the sweeping mountains with the mirage
of the blue Pacific lifted high in the sky behind them, the frosted
pines, the orange groves. Moving upon the nearer stage two great masses
of humanity are seen facing each other; the fires of ambition, of
stubborn pride, of determination for the mastery flash like flint-sparks
in the eyes of both. Rage is gathering as the stage-light darkens!
Yet these two opposing forces are not all. From under the groves of
bridal bloom comes a mournful, chant-like requiem; under the bloom four
million voices cry in pain; upon the darkened faces, upturned to that
darkening day, fall the white petals helplessly, as Hope falls on the
faces of the dead--to die beside them. In the beautiful land of the sun
four million human beings clank the chains of the chattel slave! Ah!
what music!
Liberty! Liberty was a wraith, fleeting ghost-like through the lonely
rice-swamps, terrible _ignis fatuus_ of the quagmire, strange,
mystical, vanishing moon-shimmer on the darkly ominous waters lying
so silent, so level, beneath the droop of Spanish moss and cypress!
There it was they drove thee, _there_--=there=--where the quaking earth
shivered with its branded burden, where the fever and the miasm were
thy breathing, and thy sacred eyes were dimmed with winding-sheets
of mist that floated, O so dankly, O so coldly, a steam of tears
that rose as fast as their dews might fall: there wast thou exiled,
Thou, the God-hunted, Thou, the Law-driven, =Thou, the immortal=!
Yet, Oh, so dear men love thee, Liberty, that even here in thy last
terrible citadel of woe, Humanity linked arms with Death, and wooed
thee still! Wooed thee, with the ringing bay of bloodhounds in its
ears; wooed thee, with the wolf of hunger gnawing at its throat; wooed
thee with the clinging miasm winding its anacondine folds around its
fever-thin body; wooed thee with the dark pathos of a dying eye, while
the diseased and hungered limbs lay stiffening in their agony. And
thou wast true, O Liberty! Out of thy bitter exile thou didst call to
them, and point them on to hope; and thou didst call, too, to those
strange-eyed dreamers, whose faces shone amidst the rank and file of
those dominated by local Hate alone, as shines a clear star among
driving clouds. Against them Authority has hurled his curses. Spit upon
by the godly, despised by the law abiding, they yet have dared to say
to Church and Law, "Think what you please of me, but free the slave."
Aye, the Church persecuted, and the Law hunted down, and for the love
of God, men set traps to catch their fellow-men: even the "wise men,"
the wise men at Washington, against whose mandates it is treason to
speak, aye, a matter for the scaffold in these days, even the wise men
built a trap to uphold the divine institution and sent it forth to the
people labelled, "The Fugitive Slave Law", and as in other days, human
beings died for their opinions--_but the opinions did not die_. Has not
one of our latter-day martyrs said, "Men die, but principles live"?
See! The light which has been slowly fading from the right and left
shines with a frightful brilliancy upon one point: North and South lie
darkened, but Harper's Ferry glows! There is a wild, mad charge, a
shifting of the light, a scaffold, a doomed old man bending his grand,
white head, to mount the fatal steps with a child-slave's kiss yet warm
upon his lips, and then--only a dull, lifeless pendulum in human form,
swinging to and fro. And the Church and the Law were satisfied, when
those dumb lips were cold, and the dead limbs were stiff, and God and
Harper's Ferry had no more to fear from old John Brown.
But the Church and the Law have not always been wise; they have not
always understood that the martyrs _to_ Creed and Code have done as much
by their death for the propagation of their principles as the martyrs
_of_ creed and code; and God and the State sowed a wind whose reaping
was a terrible whirlwind, when they hung John Brown.
Across the dim platform the Passions of hate and pride move toward each
other; it is the old combat of the forces of Authority, each contending
not for the vindication of right, but for the maintenance of power over
the other. It is a terrific struggle of brute strength and strategy and
cunning and ferocity, and well might those who conceived the ideal
beautiful of freedom, shrink horror-struck from the blood-soaked path
their feet must tread to reach it. Not strange if some should pause and
shudder and cry out, "Is it worth the sacrifice?" But up from the dust
where Hope lay trodden, and out of the trenches where the sacrificed lay
hid, and over the plains all scarred with bullets and plowed with
shells, breathed the whisper, "It is not vain." It was not in vain; for
as at Waterloo the struggle of ambition against ambition defeated the
first purpose of Authority, the centralization of power, and gave a
partial victory to her whom both hated, so Antietam, Fredericksburg,
Vicksburg, Gettysburg, while in themselves representing only the brutish
struggle of opposition, based on the desire to domineer, really wrought
out the victory of that ideal which dwelt in the minds of those
anathematized by God and outlawed by the State. For when the hot lips
of the iron mouths grew cold, Liberty forsook her lonely fastness, came
forth upon the desolated plain, and mounting still to the summits of the
blue-hazed hills looked away over the ruined homes, the depopulated
cities, the gloom-clouded faces, and though her tears fell fast, an
ineffable tenderness shone upon her features as the torrent of pale
light flowed round her form, defining its snow-whiteness in relief
against the sable of four million freedmen smiling o'er their stricken
chains.
Swiftly following the tableau fire comes the eastern scene, where, in
the very center of its power the Church is shaken by an invader, and
Garibaldi becomes the _personnel_ of the event. Then follows the
Conclave of the Vatican, where by that singular logic known to the Roman
Church, the vote of fallible beings renders the pope infallible; upon
the heels of this, the breaking of that strong tooth of the Church in
the expulsion of the Order of the Society of Jesus by the German
Reichstag, and the overthrow of kingcraft in France.
The curtain falls. Behind, the scene is being prepared for the last
great act!
And now, in the interval of waiting, let us think. So far we have been
surveying the completed. While we can understand something of the
passions which animated this past, can feel something of the pulsations
which throbbed in its arteries, flowed in its veins, we yet can speak of
it without over-riding emotion either upon one side or the other. The
river of heart has reached the sea--the troubled waters have spread out
deep, and up from their depths shine the still reflections of those
great lights which gilt the stages of the past. Calmly now we can look
at the reaction from the French Revolution to the Empire, and say, "This
was inevitable,"--of Napoleon's fall, "this was necessary"; of the
awakening of Science, "this was a natural result"; of the uprising of
'48, "this was the premature birth of an idea forced upon the people by
the oppression of Authority"; we can forget the choking agony of John
Brown, and declare his death a victory. We can look upon the awful waste
of blood in the Civil War and say, "It was pitiful, but the goblet of
woe must needs have been spilled full of red life wine, ere the hoarse
and hollow throat of tyranny were satisfied." We can see where each of
the contending principles has lost and gained, and measuring the sum
totals against each other, _must_ decide that the old despotism is
losing ground; that instead of the supreme authority of God, the supreme
sovereignty of the Individual is the growing idea.
But now we have come to a stage where we can no longer be cool
spectators. In what happens now we too must be part and parcel of the
action; we too must hope, and toil, and struggle and suffer. We are no
longer looking through the clear still atmosphere of the dead: around
our forms the wheeling mists are circled, and before our eyes the haze
lies thick--the haze of gold or the haze of gray. The dimness of the
"yet to be" befogs our sight, and the rush of hope and fear blinds all
our faculties. You who stand well upon the heights of love, of comfort,
of happiness, heeding not the darkness and the sorrow beneath you,
behold, with up-cast eyes, the great figures of God and Freedom wound
about, showered with light. To you there is no menace in their darting
eyes, there is no purpose in their full-drawn statures, there is no
jarring in their clarion voices. No! for your senses are stupid in your
luxury, your brains are dulled, too dulled to think, your ears are
glutted with the ring of gold. In your vain and foolish hearts you dream
that what you see there is a shadowy bridal; that there, at last,
Religion and Science, Statecraft and Freedom, are meeting to embrace
each other.
Ah, go on, book-makers, press-writers, doctors and lawyers and preachers
and teachers! Go on talking your incompatibilities; go on teaching your
absurdities! Dream out your short-lived dream! At your feet, beneath the
shadow of your capitols and domes, under the tuition of your few-facted,
much-fictioned literature, from out your chaos of truth-flavored lies,
from before your pulpits, your rostrums and your seats of learning,
something is growing. Something that is looking _you_ in the eyes, that
is analyzing your statements, that is revolving your institutions in its
brain, that is crushing your sophistries in its merciless machinery as
fine as grain is ground between the whitened mill-rollers. Freethought
is looking at you, gentlemen!--more than that, it questions you, it puts
you on the witness-stand, it cross-examines you. It says, "Do you
believe in God?" and you answer, "Yes." "Do you believe him to be
omnipotent, omniscient, and all-just?" "Certainly; less than this would
not be God." "Then you believe he has the power to order all things as
he wills, and being all-just he wills all things according to justice?"
"Yes." "Then you believe him to be the impartially-loving father of all
his created children?" "Yes." "And each one of those children has an
equal right to life and liberty?" "Yes." Then look upon this earth
beneath you, this earth of beings whose lives are of so poor account to
you, and tell us, where _is_ God and _what_ is he doing?
Everyone has a right to life! What mockery! When the control of the
necessaries of life is given to the few by the State, and above the seal
of the law the priest has set the seal of the Church! Verily,
"You do take my life
When you take that whereby I live."
Is this your Divine Justice?
What irony to tell me I am free if at that same time you have it in your
power to withhold the means of my existence! Free! Will you look down
here at these whose sight is shadowed with the ebon shadow of despair,
these, the homeless, the disinherited, the product of whose toil you
take and leave them barely enough to live upon--live to toil on and keep
you in your luxury! You, the monied idlers, you, the book-makers and the
journalists, who do more to cry down truth, to laud our social lies, our
economic despots and our pious frauds, than any other propaganda can!
You, the doctors, whose drugs have cursed the world with poison-eaten
bodies, corroded the health of unborn generations with your medicated
slime, and when the sources of life have yielded to the hungry body so
poor a stream that for lack of air, and earth, and sun, and food, and
clothing, and recreation, it drooped and sickened, have bottled up some
nauseating stuff, and with oracular wisdom have taught them to imagine
it could undo what years of misery had done! You, the law-makers, who
have twisted Nature's code till to be natural is to be a criminal; you,
who have lawed away the earth that was not yours to give; you, who even
seek to charter the sea and make the commandment "across the middle of
this river thou shalt not go unless thou render tribute unto Cæsar!"
you, who never inquire "what is _justice,_" but "what is law!" And you,
the teachers, you who prate of the glory of knowledge as the remedy for
the evils of the world, and boast your compulsory law of education,
while a stronger law than all the wordy sentences ever graven upon
statute books, is driving the children out of the schoolground into the
factory, into the saw-mill, into the shaft, into the furrow, into the
myriad camps of toil, to the dust of the wheel, to the heat of the
furnace, till their pallid cheeks and bloodless lips are bleached like
bones beneath the desert sun, and their clogged lungs rattle in their
breathing pain! Will you look at these, the under-stratum of your social
earth, and tell them they are free? Will you tell them ignorance is
their greatest curse and education their only remedy? Will you say to
these children, "We have provided free schools for you, and now we
compel you to attend them whether you have anything to eat and wear or
not"? Will you tell these people there is a good, kind, merciful God who
loves them, meting out justice to them from the skies?
No, you _will_ not, you _cannot_. The words will die upon your lips ere
you utter them.
Do you know what it is they see up there above you, they whose eyes look
through the mist of gray and the shroud of darkness? They see your God
of justice a pitiless slave-driver, his Church more brutal than the
lash, his State more merciless than the bloodhound; they see themselves
a thousand million serfs more hopelessly enthralled, more helplessly
chained down than e'en the lashed and tortured body of the chattel
slave. For them there is no refuge, no escape; in every land the Master
rules; no fugitive slave law need now be passed--there is no place to
flee--the whole horizon is iron-bound. White and black alike are yoked
together, and the master yields no distinction, shows no mercy. The bare
pittance of existence is the meed for him who toils, and for him who
_cannot_--starvation! with a preacher to help him die! That is the
justice that they see there, in the shadow lines above your golden haze.
And they see, too, a conflict preparing between those two antagonistic
forces such as never before the world has witnessed. They see your God
concentrating his strength to fight so bitter a battle with Liberty as
shall crush the spirit of individuality forever from the race. They see
him ranging his forces, those forces blood-imbrued through all the
anguished past, the blacklist, the club, the sword, the rifle, the
prison, aye, the scaffold; they see them all, and know that ere your God
will yield his vested rights, the noblest of the race will have been
stricken, the most unselfish will have been tortured in his dungeons,
the white robes of innocence will have been reddened in her own martyr's
blood, and Death will have shadowed many and many a home, unless you
shall hearken to the voice of Liberty and save yourselves while there is
yet time. They see the wide stage spreading out, they see the passions
moving over it; they see there, in the center, beneath the rolling
brilliance of the Empire State, the tragic inauguration of the act! They
see a grim and blackened thing, a silent thing, the demoniac effigy of
Torquemada's spirit, the frozen laugh of the Dark Ages at our boasted
civilization; they see twelve stolid fools before this Nineteenth
Century gallows; they see the hiding place of that thing masquerading
under the sacred name of Justice, which shrinks even from the gaze of
the lauding press and the imbecile jurymen, and does unknown its deed of
murder; they see four shrouded forms, they hear four muffled voices, a
broken sentence, and--an awful hush! And then, O crowning irony of all,
they see advancing to speak to them over the bodies of the murdered (and
mouthed back from a hundred pulpits comes the echo), Jehovah masked as
Jesus. Ah, the divine cowardice of it! Mild is the light in the Nazarene
eyes, tender the tone of the Nazarene voice!
"Ah, people whom I love! For whom my life was given long ago on Calvary!
What rashness is it that you meditate? Is it that you are weary of the
yoke of love I lay on you? Is this your faith? Have I not promised you a
sweet release when your dark pilgrimage on earth is o'er? Exiles ye are
upon this world of pain and if oppression comes to weigh you down, if
hunger shows his long fangs at your hearth, if your chilled limbs are
cramped with bitter cold the while your neighbor hoards his fuel up, if
you are driven out upon the street with crying children clinging
piteously and begging you for shelter from the storm, if your hard toil
is taken by the law to satisfy a corporation's greed, if fever and
distress gnaw at your heart and still you tread the weary wine-press
out, knowing no rest until the death-hour comes; if all these things
discourage and perplex, know 'tis for love of you I order it. For thus
would I point you to paradise, win you from all the pleasure of the
world, and fix your hopes on Heaven's eternity. 'Whom the Lord loveth,
him he chasteneth'; so then it is for love that these things are. For
love of you I press your life-blood out; for love of you I load you down
with pain; for love of you I take your rights away; for love of you I
institute the law that slaves you to the grasping millionaire; for love
of you I pile the glutted hoards of Vanderbilt and Gould and Rothschild
and the rest; for love of you I rent the right to breathe in a poor
tenement of dingy dirt; for love of you I make machines a curse; for
love of you I make you toil long hours, and those who cannot toil, I
turn adrift to wander as they may--sons into dens where thievery is
learned as a fine art, daughters to barter their virginity till
competition forces down the price of lust and death is left them as a
last resort. Ah, what a golden crown, and sweet-toned harp, what a
resplendent whit robe, await the soul whom so God loves while on the
earth it dwells. Aye, for the love of you these men were murdered, and
for my glory; and through my holy love they roast in hell: for they
would take away the instruments whereby I lure you to my blest abode.
They would have taught you what your freedom meant; they would have told
you to regain your rights; they would have contradicted my commands and
lost you heaven, perchance--and if not heaven, _hell_. Keep to your
faith, my people, trust in God! Break not the altars where your fathers
knelt; trust to your teachers, keep within the law; bow to the Church
and kiss the State's great toe! So shall good order be observed, obeyed,
and as 'Peace reigned in Warsaw,' so anon shall 'Peace, good-will to men
reign on the earth.'"
These are the words that fall from the lips of him you call "the
merciful," "the just." These are the sounds that sink into the ears of
those upon whose toil _you_ are dependent for your existence; judge you
how they will be received. And now, you, the dwellers on the lifted
heights, listen to the voice that follows him, for these are words that
concern _you_, and if you listen to their warning you may yet save
yourselves the desolation and the ruin that otherwise must come. This
deep, bell-pealing voice that echoes through the corridors of thought
till almost Death's chill sleepers might arise again, is the voice which
called for centuries to the Empire, "Cease your oppressions or the
people rise"; and to the Kingdom, "Curse not the new world with your
tyrannies, it will rebel"; and to the Master, "Put not the lash upon
your bonded slave, for the time will come when every stroke will rise
like a warrior armed, to burn and waste and kill." The Empire laughed,
the Kingdom ignored, the Planter sneered; but the time came when laugh
and sneer died to white ashes. The time came when "France got drunk with
blood, to vomit crime," when England "lost the brightest jewel in her
coronal," when the South waded in blood and tears and knelt her pride
before a conqueror. And now, she, the liberator, the destined conqueror
of God, calls out to you, "Yield up your scepters ere they be torn from
you; give back the stolen earth, the mine, the sea! Give back the source
of life, give back the light! For a black, bitter hour is waiting you,
an awful gulf unfathomed in its depth, if now you do not pause and
render _justice_."
Ah, thou, whatever be thy awful name, which like a serpent's trail hath
marked the earth, whether Jehovah, Buddha, Joss, or Christ! Thou who
hast done for _love_ what others do for most envenomed _hate_, how hast
thou hated these the happy ones! Is this impartial justice then to
these, to pour the golden treasures of the earth into their laps, that
these may feast and toast and so forget thee and thy promised heaven?
Truly thou hast been most unkind to them, since kindness means with thee
a tearing out of e'en the heart and entrails of existence. Bah! how thou
liest! To what most pitiable trick of speech hast thou been forced!
Think'st thou the dwellers in the darkness longer take thy creed of
crystalline deception! No! They laugh at thee, they spew thee out, they
spit at thee.
Love! Say! Look--this long procession coming here! Here are the
murderers, with their red-hued eyes; here the adulterers, with their
lecherous glance; here are the prostitutes, with their mark of shame;
here are the gamblers, with their itching hands; here are the thieves,
with furtive lips and eyes; here are the liars with their dastard
tongues; here all the train that Crime can muster up reviews before
thee! And after them, a ghastly, fearful sight, follow the victims of
their blackened hearts, slain, ruined, desolated by thy love! And now,
behold, another train comes on--a train whose name is legion! Here the
dark, bruted faces from the mines, here the hard, sun-browned cheeks
from out the furrow, here the dull visage from the lumber-camp, here
the wan eyes from whirling factory, here the gaunt giants from the
furnace fire, here the tarred hands from off the stream and sea, here
all the aching limbs that stand behind the fashionable counter, here, O
pitiful sight of all, those whose home is in the street, whose table is
the garbage pile, the vast, helpless body of the unemployed. And, ever
as they march, they drop, and drop, into the earth that swallows them,
and over their graves the march goes on. These are thy victims, God!
These are the creatures of thy Church and Law! Speak no more of the
breaking of altars, thou who hast broken every altar that the human
heart holds dear! Take thy position at the head of the murderers'
column! And when thou hast marched away into the past, thou and thy
preachers and thy praters of justice, then will the world _return_ to
justice and the great law of Nature reign upon the earth. Then will her
broad, green acres yield their wealth to him who toils, and him alone;
then will the store-houses of Nature yield her fuel and her light, not
to the corporation whose high-priced lobbying can buy it, for in that
time no wealth nor intrigue can purchase the heritage of all, but to all
the sons and daughters of Labor. And then upon _this_ earth there shall
be no hungry mouths, no freezing limbs; no children spending the hours
of youth in gaining a miserable livelihood, no women crying,
"It's Oh, to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save
If this is _Christian_ work!"
no men wandering aimlessly in search of a master for their slavery.
But O, careless dwellers upon the heights, awaken now!--do not wait till
reason, persuasion, judgment, coolness are swept down before the rising
whirlwind. Bend your energies _now_ to the eradication of the Authority
idea, to righting the wrongs of your fellow-men. Do it for your own
interest, for if you slumber on--ah me! ye will awaken one day when an
ominous rumble prefaces the waking of a terrific underground thunder,
when the earth shakes in a frightful ague fit, when from out the parched
throats of the people a burning cry will come like lava from a crater,
"'Bread, bread, bread!' No more preachers, no more politicians, no more
lawyers, no more gods, no more heavens, no more promises! Bread!" And
then, when you hear a terrible leaden groan, know that at last, here in
your free America, beneath the floating banner of the stars and stripes,
more than fifty million human hearts have burst! A dynamite bomb that
will shock the continent to its foundations and knock the sea back from
its shores!
"It is no boast, it is no threat,
Thus History's iron law decrees;
The day grows hot! O Babylon,
'Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!"
SKETCHES
AND
STORIES
A Rocket of Iron
It was one of those misty October nightfalls of the north, when the
white fog creeps up from the river, and winds itself like a corpse-sheet
around the black, ant-like mass of human insignificance, a cold menace
from Nature to Man, till the foreboding of that irresistible fatality
which will one day lay us all beneath the ice-death sits upon your
breast, and stifles you, till you start up desperately crying, "Let me
out, let me out!"
For an hour I had been staring through the window at that chill steam,
thickening and blurring out the lines that zig-zagged through it
indefinitely, pale drunken images of facts, staggering against the
invulnerable vapor that walled me in--a sublimated grave marble. Were
they all ghosts, those figures wandering across the white night, hardly
distinguishable from the posts and pickets that wove in and out, like
half-dismembered bodies writhing in pain? My own fingers were curiously
numb and inert; had I, too, become a shadow?
It grew unbearable at last, the pressure of the foreboding at my heart,
the sense of that on-creeping of Universal Death. I ran out of doors,
impelled by the vague impulse to assert my own being, to seek relief in
struggle, even though foredoomed futile--to seek warmth, fellowship,
somewhere, though but with those ineffective pallors in the mist, that
dissolved even while I looked at them. Once in the street, I ran on
indifferently, glad to be jostled, glad of the snarling of dogs and the
curses of laborers calling to one another. The penumbra of the mist,
that menacing dim foreshadow, had not chilled these, then! On, on,
through the alleys where human flesh was close, and when one listened
one could hear breathings and many feet, drifting at last into the
current that swept through the main channel of the city, and presently,
whirled round in an eddy, I found myself staring through the open door
of the great Iron Works. Perhaps it was the sensation of warmth that
held me there first, some feeling of exhilaration and wakening defiance
in the flash and swirl of the yellow flames--this, mixed with an
indistinct desire to clutch at something, anything, that seemed
stationary in the midst of all this that slipped and wavered and fell
away.... No, I remember now: there was something before that; there was
a sound--a sound that had stopped my feet in their going, and smote me
with a long shudder--a sound of hammers, beating, beating, beating a
terrific hail, momentarily faster and louder, and in between a panting
as of some great monster catching breath beneath the driving of that
iron rain. Faster, faster--CLANG! A long reverberant shriek! The giant
had rolled and shivered in his pain. Involuntarily I was drawn down into
the Valley of the Sound, words muttering themselves through my lips as I
passed: "Forging, forging--what are they forging there? Frankenstein
makes his Monster. How the iron screams!" But I heard it no more now; I
only saw!--saw the curling yellow flames, and the red, red iron that
panted, and the Masters of the Hammers. How they moved there, like
demons in the abyss, their bodies swinging, their eyes tense and
a-glitter, their faces covered with the gloom of the torture-chamber!
Only _one_ face I saw, young and fair--young and very fair--whereon the
gloom seemed not to settle. The skin of it was white and shining there
in the midst of that black haze; over the wide forehead fell tumbling
waves of thick brown hair, and two great dark eyes looked steadily into
the red iron, as if they saw therein something I did not see; only now
and then they were lifted, and looked away upward, as if beyond the
smoke-pall they beheld a vision. Once he turned so that the rose-light
cast forth his profile as a silhouette; and I shivered, it was so fine
and hard! Hard with the hardness of beaten iron, and fine with the
fineness of a keen chisel. Had the hammers been beating on that fair
young face?
A comrade called, a sudden terrified cry. There was a wild rush, a mad
stampede of feet, a horrible screech of hissing metal, and a rocket of
iron shot upward toward the black roof, bursting and falling in a
burning shower. Three figures lay writhing along the floor, among the
leaping, demoniac sparks.
The first to lift them was the Man with the white face. He had stood
still in the storm, and ran forward when the others shrank back. Now he
passed by me, bearing his dying burden, and I saw no quiver upon brow or
chin; only, when he laid it in the ambulance, I fancied I saw upon the
delicate curved lips a line of purpose deepen, and the reflection of the
iron-fire glow in the strange eyes, as if for an instant the door of a
hidden furnace had been opened and smouldering coals had breathed the
air. And even then he looked up!
It was all over in half an hour. There would be weeping in three little
homes; and one was dead, and one would die, and one would crawl, a
seared human stump, to the end of his weary days. The crowd that had
gathered was gone; they would not know the Stump when it begged from
them with its maimed hands, six months after, on some street corner.
"Fakir" they would say, and laugh. There would be an entry on the
company's books, and a brief line in the newspapers next day. But the
welding of the iron would go on, and the man who gave his easy money for
it would fancy he had paid for it, not seeing the stiff figures in their
graves, nor the crippled beggar, nor the broken homes.
The rocket of iron is already cold; dull, inert, fireless, the black
fragments lie upon the floor whereon they lately rained their red
revenge. Do with them what you will, you cannot undo their work. The men
are clearing way. Only he with the white face does not go back to his
place. Still set and silent he takes his coat, "presses his soft hat
down upon his thick, damp locks," and goes out into the fog and night.
So close he passed me, I might have touched him; but he never saw me.
Perhaps he was still carrying the burden of the dying man upon his
heart; perhaps some mightier burden. For one instant the shapely, boyish
figure was in full light, then it vanished away in the engulfing
mist--the mist which the vision of him had made me forget. For I knew I
had seen a Man of Iron, into whose soul the iron had driven, whose
nerves were tempered as cold steel, but behind whose still, impassive
features slumbered a white-hot heart. And others should see a rocket and
a ruin, and feel the Vengeance of Beaten Iron, before the mist comes
and swallows all.
* * * * *