The literary life of New York continues to rattle on. And it is a
rather grand life: though a number of writers appear to scratch
an existence from the soil of Greenwich Village and the purlieus
of mean streets, most of the men who write our books live quite
comfortably. One meets them every day--a prosperous crew--who lunch
cosily at the ---- or at the ---- and not infrequently the ----, then
are whisked homeward in shining limousines to put in another hour or
so on the manuscript of a new novel.
A few days later, filled with pensive, affectionate, and somewhat
irreverent thoughts about the newspaper business, I went uptown to the
offices of a very great New York paper--a paper which, as a gatherer
of news, though it does not claim the “Greatest” phrase, comes a lot
nearer to it than that one in Chicago. A beautiful bronze elevator
lifted me gently to the tenth floor, a beautiful bronze attendant
took my name politely and asked me to wait until my host emerged from
conference. I gazed amazedly into the editorial penetralia, churchly
in aspect, with groined ceiling, panelled alcoves, like pews, and
lead-veined glass. Very handsome young women came strolling from those
shadowy cloisters of opinion. A scholarly-looking young man, with
tortoise spectacles, sat under a reredos of books. If not a curate,
at least a curator. It all came down upon me with crushing force. How
could one chaff this magnificent thing? How could one speak jocularly
of The Press? This was all so terribly real, so unmistakably there.
I remembered my amazement when I first entered the Curtis Building
in Philadelphia. Beside the humble little state house where a nation
was founded rises that gigantic cube of Americanization; in more
senses than one it is the exact spiritual centre of America. Does it
not contain a mosaic glass picture with “over a million pieces”? It
has been told, with the jolliest humour, how several of the world’s
greatest artists were commissioned, one after another, to create a
painting of Plato’s Grove of Academe for that lobby; but they kept on
“passing away” before it was done. There is something most quaintly
American, I believe, in adoring Plato with a vast painting rather than
by listening to what he had to say. At a window on the seventh floor
(I think it was the seventh) might have been seen the strong masculine
face of the fashion editor of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ gazing out
with a sudden unaccountable nostalgia. The trademarked patroness of the
“L. H. J.,” I remembered, was Pallas Athene. Pallas is right, I said to
myself, studying that building. This _must_ be a home of literature,
the walnut panelling is so fine. This huge bulk, edified from the ribs
of a simple, shrewd, courageous, and strangely wistful little man from
Maine--surely if the Muse were looking for a comfortable lodging, this
is where she would habit?
Sometimes it is with an effort that one must remind oneself, a thing is
not necessarily wrong because it is so large.
Well, all that came back to me as I sat waiting in the New York
newspaper office. Painful doubts, too, as to whether what I am anxious
to say is worth attempt. For it is sure to be misconceived. I am not
satirizing anything. These matters are far too serious for mere satire,
which is so agreeably easy. No, I am merely attempting to think.
I remembered also how, not long before, it strangely befell me to speak
in a large church on a Sunday afternoon. I had not rightly apprehended
the situation beforehand: I found that I should have to mount into
what the cheerful minister called “the high pulpit.” Sitting behind a
thin frondage of palms, and scanning the scene in some frightfulness,
I waited my exposure. It was a beautiful church, and there was a large
and friendly congregation. In one of the front pews there was even a
gentleman with a silk hat. There was music, the thrilling tumult of
the organ, a choir, a soprano soloist with a clear and lovely voice.
There were prayers, and great words were said. And in the same way that
the editorial magnificence of that newspaper office came down upon me
from above, so I felt the whole weight and beauty and tradition of Holy
Church moulding me and subduing my poor little premeditated ardours.
I felt the awful hopelessness of attempting to convey, in those
circumstances, my feeble and futile sense of the love and liberty
of life. I knew then why Christ preached in the open air. And I knew
that the people in those pews, dear friendly people the latchets of
whose minds I was not worthy to unloose, desired me to say what was
in my heart just as keenly as I desired to say it. Yet it could not,
fully, be done. Holy Church was too strong for them as it was for me.
I knew then, even in the small, imperfect way I know things, something
of the whole history of religions. I knew how the majesty and glamour
and noble gravity of institutions and authorities must have lain heavy
on the hearts of schismatics and reformers. It is not that those poor
brave souls did not love the rote they questioned. But the rote must be
kept in its place. I knew then, for the first time, the real dangers of
the pulpit. And yet even that polished wood was once alive, growing
from earth toward sky.
§2
The world of newspapers and the life of newspaper men are for the
most part vulgar, and therefore delightful. I mean vulgar in its
exact sense: it is a word neither of praise nor blame, both of which
are foreign to philosophy. O thrilling, delicious, childish world!
The other day, from a green glade in the country, I telephoned to a
newspaper office. “City room, please,” I said. The connection was
made, and as the receiver was taken down, I could hear that old
adorable hum, the quick patter of typewriters, voices on the copy desk
tersely discussing the ingenious minutiæ of the job. No man who has
dabbled, ever so amateurishly, in that spirited child’s-play outgrows
its irrational and cursèd charm. Over miles of telephone wire that
drugging hum came back to my ear, that furious and bewildering pulse
of excitement which seems so frantically important and really means
so little. O world so happy, so amusing, so generously emotional, so
exempt from the penalty of thought! World that deals with quaintly
codified and abstracted notions of life! How idle to ask whether
newspapers tell the truth! With truth they have little concern. Their
trade is in facts; like all prosperous tradesmen they are reasonably
conscientious. To belittle newspapers for not telling the truth is as
silly as to regard them as training-ground for literature. Literature
and journalism rarely overlap.
For the newspaper world, that vast, brightly coloured, contentious,
and phantasmagoric picture of life that it evolves for its readers, is
mostly a spurious world evolved for hurried and ignorant people. It
is a world so happily out of touch with the world of philosophy that
when, on rare occasions, the newspapers get wind of the things that
philosophers habitually and calmly discuss, it causes a terrible to-do
in the headlines. The world of newspaper thinking is almost the last
resort of the truly childish in heart. With princely accuracy is it
called “the newspaper game.” Children are not friendly to philosophy,
nor hostile. They are simply not aware it exists.
And the game of newspapers, which I greatly love, being at heart no
philosopher, is enormously important. The prevailing temperament of its
players is worth careful study. The mere existence of newspapers is a
proof of the religious instinct among men, that passionate interest in
one another which implies that we are all gossips together. Gossips
are people who have only one relative in common, but that relative the
highest possible; namely, God. There is truly some strange analogy
between church and press. Whether it is the successful newspaper’s
taste for making itself clerical in architecture, or the successful
church’s appetite for front-page controversy; whether it is that they
both make the cruellest and deadliest of enemies if annoyed; whether
it is that the newspaper carries on the medieval church’s lust of
persecution; or that they both mobilize for war sooner than any one
else; or that both are vehicles of great realities, but vehicles so
gorgeously mechanized and ritualed that the passenger has almost been
forgotten--whatever the basis of the analogy may be, I am not sure; but
I feel it to be there.
Journalism, like every skilled _métier_, tends to become a sort of
priesthood. All such professional groups admit with cynical or humorous
readiness, inside the circle, truths that it is unmannerly to gossip
abroad. But now and then some happy member feels he has absorbed
enough hokum to last him for a reasonable lifetime. He has enjoyed,
perhaps even profited by, the sharp childishness of that way of life.
He escapes for a time, with aspiration to think it over. He wearies of
the tragic ingenuity of men at concealing their real thoughts. There
are no longer any codes of manners to be considered, any possibly
tender readers to be sheltered, any powerful patrons to be placated. Of
course genuinely detached thinking, even if it were possible, is likely
to be discouraged; for detachment is always assumed to be malignant.
But, anyhow, let’s be at least like so many houses in the suburbs,
semi-detached.
Yes, there is a sort of spring fever of the soul, a seizure when, in
moments of golden tranquil intuition, we see Lucretius’s “coasts of
light.” We would hope to savour, as he bids us, not merely the honey
that is greased round the rim of the cup--the honey of our daily
amusement and distraction--but even the chill purging wormwood of
the draft. Suddenly the quotidian employ, the haggling scruples of
detail, seem strangely insignificant. Languor and lassitude and uneasy
hankering pervade the spirit--an intimation of unearthliness. There is
passion to go seeking “those things that are requisite and necessary.”
In Walt’s noble phrase, “to sign for soul and body.” Then, unashamed of
the hunger and trouble of human spirits, it seems irrelevant either
to chaff or to praise the dear farce of life. One dreams of uttering
only some small granule of broken truth, something more than the jocund
trickery of the press.
Every philosopher is a humorist who has been squeezed. And the
newspaper man, odd as this may sound, is not the least appropriate
student to pursue the wingy mysteries in divinity. For he is kinspirit
of the parson in this, that church and press are perhaps the two
professions that have most frankly regarded themselves as separate
estates, above and apart from the common man. The priest esteems
himself the vicar of God. The pressman appoints himself vicar of News.
The priest transmits to the congregation as much of God’s doings as he
thinks will be not too embarrassing for them to hear. And the newspaper
man lays bare that portion of the event which he considers the public
will be most anxious to pay for. Both are anthologists.
For some time I had been saving clippings of newspaper stories about
recent religious controversy. I meant to sit down some evening and read
them through, patiently, to see how much humane sense I could winnow.
But I found I could not force my eyes through them. For the sake of
record, to notify the quaintness of mankind, I copied down a few of the
headlines. “CHRIST HELD DIVINE OR ILLEGITIMATE: Dr. Pettingill Makes
Baptists Gasp by Strong Defense of Virgin Birth.” (New York _World_.)
DR. GUTHRIE FINDS YULE ALL PAGAN: St. Mark’s Rector Says Gift Custom
Was Roman, Mistletoe Celtic and Tree Teutonic. (New York _Times_.)
MODERNISM FOUND HERE MID RITUALS, DOGMA MID GLARE. (New York _Evening
Post_.) DR. GUTHRIE SCENTS CLASHES TO COME. (New York _Times_.) And so
on. I threw the mass of clippings into the fire.
And yet throughout those naïve burblings the reader felt a strange
mixture of exhilaration and disgust. For the newspapers, with their
unerring instinct, realize that men are keenly and desperately
interested in these matters. Hidden inside that mysterious carcass,
your neighbour, is the universal cry, “I want to be happy!” And with
all their agile and cautious skill at hiding what they really think,
men wildly crave those liberating sorceries (liquor and love and
laughter, perhaps even literature, too) that roll away the stone from
the door of the heart.
Yet perhaps no man in his senses talks about religion except for the
pleasure of the talk, which is a sufficient human excuse. For the
less we talk about religion, probably, the nearer we come to the heart
of it. By religion we mean, I suppose, our ligatures with an unseen
world--a world not realized, as Wordsworth says in those “Intimations”
that are a whole prayer-book in themselves. There are “high instincts,”
he tells us, before which we tremble “like a guilty thing surprised.”
Our guilt, surely, is that we know ourselves to have been so wearily
and perversely disloyal to that unseen world of beauty and ecstasy;
and our surprise, that when we escape into the honest solitudes of the
mind we find it waiting for us. There is a great saying to the effect
that wherever two or three are gathered together, I shall be among you.
But, alas! it is even more true perhaps (one must not forget a plenty
of perhapses) that wherever two or three are gathered together, there
I am _not_. Human meeting introduces awkwardly human difficulties and
embarrassments. It introduces, for instance, vanity and humility,
both awkward encumbrances to truth. Is there a man who does not know,
sorrowfully, that he is much “better company” when he is alone? As
old Doctor Donne found in the absence of his mistress, there is a
“close corner of the brain” where the purest and loveliest embraces
are possible. Of all mistresses, the fairest and the farthest away is
Truth. God is known, if at all, in solitude.
§3
The theological bickerings of our time and their “tincture of choler,”
as Hobbes would say, are due perhaps to the uneven progress of a great
shift in the human notion of God. The primitive imagination of Deity
is often of a gigantic omnipotent and omnipresent personality. Then,
later, men come to think of God as a kind of force or law, or a harmony
among infinite laws and forces. This process of magnifying God from
a person to a “far-off Divine Event” proceeds unevenly, as do all
ideas. And there is no squabbling so violent as that between people
who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea
to-morrow. More important than the novelty of ideas is the differential
in the rate at which people accept them. Or it might even be put the
other way round--the rate at which ideas accept people as vehicles. An
idea often hops into a person and uses him, more or less as we hop into
taxicabs. Bernard Shaw remarked, not unwisely, that his “Irrational
Knot” was a first try (on the part of “the Life Force”) to get the
theme of “A Doll’s House” written in English.
Robinson Crusoe’s religion was merely a calculus of personal benefit.
When he found that the seeds he threw away had sprouted and come up,
he suddenly remembered the goodness of God. But gradually men tend to
rise sufficiently above their own pangs and pleasures to relish the
conception of a vaster God--a God who does not even know that we exist.
There are still, astounding as it seems, actual and living parsons who
tell us that the Museum of Natural History is an affront to the Deity.
Their simplicity is as delightful as that of Edmund Gosse’s father (if
you remember that great book, “Father and Son”). The rock that his
reason split upon was the problem whether Adam and Eve, created _de
novo_, had navels. There are others who find in the spider webs and
redwood rings of the museum a powerful impulse to wonder and praise. At
any rate, this process of magnifying God from an invisible bishop of
friable temper to a universal phantom of legality is what Thomas Hardy
had in mind when he urged “the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in
allusions to the Fundamental Energy.” Nor, on consideration, do we find
the masculine pronoun a symbol of such benevolent majesty that it need
much longer be retained as spokesman for Deity. It is necessary for man
to know, as astronomers do, the inconceivable minuteness of himself and
his affairs.
Yet, knowing his unimportance, it is equally urgent for man to act
as though his business were momentous. For the whole intellectual
life is based upon paradox and dainty artifice. And here we encounter
some fundamental characteristics of human behaviour which are highly
interesting.
First of all, man is orderly. Finding himself in a grotesquely
complicated universe, he hastily tries to reduce what he sees to some
general principles. He concocts helpful formulæ, rules of thumb,
mnemonic rhymes, all sorts of proverbs, to simplify matters. There
has been a rather absurd eagerness on the part of the newspapers to
reproach the church for its adherence to formalism. But man is a
formula-bearing animal. And I doubt if the most rigid bishop who ever
lived was more at the mercy of ritual and formulated ways of expression
than the average city editor. An incident may be as interesting as you
please, but unless it fits into his carefully ratiocinated scheme
of what constitutes a “story” and how it should be “played,” it gets
little attention. I have mentioned the Museum of Natural History;
let’s take it again as an illustration. I took there a small girl
four years old. At first she was appalled and horrified by the things
she saw. Live animals, at the zoo, she was familiar with. But these
so genuine-looking and yet motionless creatures, plausible enough
in their synthetic facsimile surroundings, yet with a gruesome air
of not-quite-rightness--she was badly puzzled. They fitted into no
preconceived frame in her small mind.
“Are they real, Daddy?” she inquired.
“They were once real, and now are stuffed,” I said.
Her eager mind leaped at this. Here was a happy little formula. And at
every succeeding specimen, whether a wolf or a puma or a walrus or a
whale, with monotonous insistence she asked, “Is it real and stuffed?”
To which I replied, each time, with patient repetition, “Yes, real and
stuffed.” It satisfied her perfectly until we came to the figures of
Indians and Eskimos. Here a new formula had to be devised, that they
were “Not real, but made to look like it.” These trifling statements
made the museum, for her, a rational and not too terrifying place.
Once in a while, if you are fond of self-scrutiny, you will catch
yourself in the very act of creating or parroting some useful formula.
Formulæ swarm in the mind just as birds do in an orchard. And though
they destroy some fruit, they also help to exterminate lesser vermin
which might do much harm. For the most part we are all mercifully
unaware of our dependence on them.
Secondly, then, once formulæ are made, another subtle trick of the mind
enters into function. Man’s sovereign faculty of pretense works upon
them. He persuades himself that these little rites and short-cuts are
not really made by himself, but that they are sacred. Man’s capacity
for pretense, I dare say, has been the only thing that has kept him
going in a rough, bruising world. He has found, throughout history,
that the percolation of certain fictions into affairs made order and
government more easy. Indeed the number of generally accepted fictions
in currency is not such a bad test of civilization: the more such
harmless pretenses, the pleasanter life is. The divine right of kings
was one great fiction that had a long serial career and gradually
tapered off. Oliver Cromwell “Garred kings ken they had a lith in
their necks”; the Prince of Wales’s horses seem to have suggested the
same thing. That adorable old shrew, Thomas Hobbes, whose wise and
racy survey of human foibles might almost have made any subsequent
palaver unnecessary, had people patience to read “Leviathan” nowadays,
is copious in instance of men’s love of standing “in awe of their own
imaginations.” We are all quick to believe anything, he remarks, from
teachers who can “with gentleness and dexterity take hold of our fear
and ignorance.” Whereas any truth, no matter how rationally arrived at,
that counters our passion and interest, we naturally reject. “I doubt
not but,” says the darling old cynic, “if it had been a thing contrary
to any man’s right of dominion that the three angles of a triangle
should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have
been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry,
suppressed.”
Master Hobbes is very jolly, too, on a matter that has interested
every thoughtful observer since civilization began--that religion is
always heartily favoured by prosperous people. Obviously; for it is
a stabilizing force. I was greatly struck, approaching Pittsburgh on
the train, passing through a black, cindered region where life must
lack many of its most harmless pleasures, to notice the astounding
number of churches. These, surely, are not there without some sound
social reason. There are three prime consolations known to man in the
difficulty of his life, God, love, and money. Of any two of these you
may deprive him without hearing much grumble, provided he has plenty
of the third. But if he lacks all three, there is sure to be trouble.
I have often noticed, in burning a pile of dead leaves, that the
mass that seems burned through will, if turned over with the rake,
burst into fresh flame. Down under the mound, smothered by weight and
closeness, were many fragments that needed only air and freedom to
burst into golden blaze. Perhaps it is so with any industrial society.
To turn it top to bottom now and then would liberate brilliant human
combustions that now lie choked. It is a dangerous doctrine, but so are
all doctrines that are any fun. It is a thoroughly Christian doctrine,
too.
Before we leave the topic of human relish in pretense, let’s mention
one very innocent and amusing example. One of the gay hilarities of
existence is the way the current social pretenses shift and vary
and move in recurring orbits. The négligé of one period becomes the
_haut ton_ of the next. A few years ago, during a very severe winter,
it became the mode for young women to go trapesing about in galoshes
which were left floppingly unbuckled. What, then, do we see? A year or
so later galoshes are put on the market, very cunningly devised with
drooping webbed tops to _look_ as though they were carelessly left
undone. These at once became, particularly in rustic high schools,
excellently _de rigueur_. It was a daintily accurate exposition of our
human taste for illusion.
And the third fundamental characteristic that I am thinking of is our
universal liability to habit. This is too familiar for comment. Take
merely one instance which has pleasing analogies. Suppose you go to a
small haberdasher to buy a pair of socks. In payment, you give him a
five-dollar gold piece. As he makes change, he is obscurely troubled.
He will ask if you haven’t a bill instead. He doesn’t relish that coin,
because he isn’t used to it. Yet, if I understand correctly, gold is
the only genuine money there is; all the other stuff is merely money
by convention. And how beautifully valid in regard to truth as well.
Half-truths to which men are accustomed are so much easier to pass than
the golden mintage they rarely encounter! What was it Mr. Don Marquis
has remarked: “If you make people think they think, they’ll love you.
If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
§4
Certainly these three coercive factors, and many others, too, bear
strangely upon all our attempts to think. The beauty and the happiness
of religion, perhaps, lie in the fact that it has little to do
with thinking. As far as any man knows, up to now, the universe is
insoluble; and the mind, ardent particle, rather resents insolubility.
It resents the solemn circling of the Dipper, seen from the front
porch every clear night. Filling itself with slow darkness, gently
tilting and draining again, it too cruelly reminds us of the orderly
immensities of space. And religion may very well be considered a form
of art and of anesthetic to soften the onset of that insolvency. It
is reason’s petition in bankruptcy, “to drown the memory of that
insolence.” If it makes us happy, we need inquire no further; for
happiness is what all pursue. Perhaps, indeed, we are but memoranda
in the note-book of the cosmic Author, jottings of some story that
flashed into His mind one day, but which He did not trouble to write.
So we are hunting, hunting endlessly for the rest of the plot. Or we
are surf-bathers in an ocean where one step carries us beyond our
depth. Accept any figure of speech that appeals to you. No work of art
or literature yet, so far as I know, has given an adequate presentment
of the glory and agony and mirth and excitement of being alive. Suppose
some visitor from another planet dropped in for an evening and could
communicate his inquisition. We wanted to give him just one book that
would offer a picture, trustworthy, frank, recognizable, of the life
we have known--man’s long campaign with nature, with other men, with
woman, with himself. Some suggest “Candide,” but I find that great
book too pitiless. Some, Browne’s “Religio Medici,” but is it not too
witty? We might, in a hasty ransack of the shelves, linger momently
upon Boswell or Walt Whitman or Shakespere’s Sonnets or “Moby Dick”; or
upon the Book of Common Prayer or a photograph of Gozzoli’s “Viaggio
dei Re Magi.” But not even these would duly serve. It would have to be
an anthology, I fear; perhaps Robert Bridges’s “Spirit of Man,” though
it should really have a stouter infusion of the seventeenth century,
when God-intoxicated and Eros-maddened poets like John Donne and Andrew
Marvell uttered their ecstatic and magnanimous despair.
And that brings us to another cusp in this only too risible indent upon
the infinite. Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in
human terms more-than-human realities. The seat of Peter has always
lain beyond the Alps. The church, like the poet, is an ambassador from
abroad; from the strangest of countries, that lying within our own
bosoms. And what is the virtue of an ambassador? Surely, tact. The
one thing that makes ambassadors useless or dangerous is too great a
zest to blurt out truths that many of us know, but have agreed not
to emphasize. He thinks in the language of his homeland; he must
speak--though always, we trust, with winningly foreign accent--the
tongue to which he is accredited. The ambassador knows, better than
any other, that truth is condiment, not diet. It is rough manners to
shove truth at people when they are not expecting it. There is always
charming significance in popular phrases. “The dreadful truth” is such
a one. Truth is always dreaded, not so much because it is gruesome or
tragic, but because it is so often absurd.
The church, then, comes before us as envoy from the world of spirit to
the world of flesh; and here is the anomaly, that only too probably
these worlds have small interest in common. So is our envoy but
demi-potentiary. In medieval time the problem was simple; flesh and
spirit were assumed to be deadly enemies one of the other. But nowadays
we lean toward a casuistry far more perplexed; that body is soul’s
noblest ally, that whatever makes flesh satiate and merry is so much
gain for soul. Blithe, ruddy doctrine! Yet, sadly enough, it is even
possible that truth is neither Trojan nor avoirdupois. Flesh and spirit
sometimes look terribly incommensurable. Saint Paul did not fully plumb
the real tragedy of the situation. The most bitter wisdom of the human
voice is the very opposite of Paul’s cry. Transpose it so: _Video
deteriora proboque, meliora sequor._
Body and soul, tied together back to back, see different realms of
sky. And the innermost capsule of mind, that very I of very I, though
wretchedly at the mercy of pains and lusts, is yet also oddly detached.
Sitting in the dentist’s chair, the innermost self says: “Here we are.
This is terrible. Now he is going to hurt me. Is it the essential me
he is going to hurt, or is it just the make-believe me?” But when the
pang comes, then truly for an instant all me’s whatsoever coalesce into
one indignant craven whole. Yet even in that horrid shudder I think
we are obscurely aware that it is not our essence that surrenders.
That volatile quiddity has retreated in disgust, loath to attend the
deplorable scene. He is as cheerfully regardless of body as is the
tenant of a house he has merely rented, and for rather less than value.
He is, perhaps, not unlike the fire on the hearth, the brightness and
warm centre of the home, yet caring nought for your cherished odds and
ends. What’s Hecuba to him? Given a chance, that same domestic ember
would devour the whole building; and is no different, in essence, from
the roaring streamers that once ran wild in Baltimore and San Francisco.
I knew a lovely and thoughtful woman who, with a few other adepts,
used to do graceful figure-skating on the far side of a college
skating-pond. There, in a quiet little cove of clear ice, apart from
the crowd and the rhythmic, hollow undersong of the whole vibrating
lake, this little group swung and twirled. I can see her small slender
figure, her bright cheek, the lovely float and spread of her skirt as
she curved and poised in that steely waltzing. College students and
wild hockey berserks and miscellaneous small fry scuttled and careered
about; now and then a rubber puck would skim across the ice, and like a
pack of hounds the barbarian rout would sweep upon that tranquil shore
of the pond. For a moment the pensive skaters would be blotted out by
swirling movement--clattering sticks, ringing skates, noisy shouts.
Then the rabble would whirl away. The fancy skaters would be seen
again; and that lonely figure, swinging, leaning in airy curves, aware
of it all with thoughtful eyes a little sparked with annoyance, aloof
from the turmoil, yet not unkindly so.
Not otherwise, perhaps, our hidden capsule of identity is a solitary
skater. The wild rush of emotions, desires, passions, timidities,
comes tearing across the pond; lonely Diana is hidden, even shouldered
off her lagoon of clear crystal. But then they go racketing away. The
pirouette begins again, and the soul is happy with her own concerns.
What language, then, is our ambassador to utter, dealing with two
worlds appallingly incongruous? Is it strange if, like the rest of us,
he falls back upon prudential and cheery approximations? That witty
writer Stella Benson mentions in one of her novels (“The Poor Man”)
a character who “knew too well the difficulties and dangers of being
alive to despise those who sought for safety in tremulous platitudes.”
§5
Speaking of ambassadors there was one in the sixteenth century who told
the following story:
At Constantinople I saw an Old Man, who, after he had taken a Cup
of Wine in his Hand to Drink, us’d first to make a hideous Noise; I
asked his Friends, Why he did so? They answered me, that, by this
Outcry, he did, as it were, warn his Soul to retire to some secret
Corner of his Body, or else, wholly to Emigrate, and pass out of it,
that it might not be guilty of that Sin which he was about to Commit,
nor be defiled with the Wine that he was about to guzzle down.
This humorous ancient was not unlike the modern newspaper man. The
hideous noise of the press, its conscience-annulling haste, its sense
of power and almost uncontradictable certainty,[A] are what he employs
to warn his soul, his reason, not to look over his shoulder while he is
at work. The fact is that the whole ingenious mechanism of a newspaper
is so automatically conjointed and revolves so rapidly that by sheer
fury and speed of movement it takes on a kind of synthetic life of its
own. It could well be imagined thundering round and round of its own
accord in a great jovial, shouting stupor. A leading editorial, tearing
passions to tatters, could arise by spontaneous combustion, exhaling
itself somehow from the general uproar and joy. Virgin birth would be
no miracle in a newspaper office: I have seen, and myself committed,
editorial matter whose parent had never been approached by any siring
intelligence.
Or, in the case of the reporter, painfully trained in a generous human
skepticism, enforced student of the way people behave and the way
things happen, alert to discern the overtones of irony and pathos in
the event, you might expect him to be the least credulous of beings.
If so, the general flavour of the press little represents him. He
acquiesces, consciously or unconsciously, in the fact that in all but
a few really intelligent journals the news columns are edited down
to the level of the proprietor’s intelligence, or what the active
managers imagine to be the proprietor’s taste. Not in facts, but in
the tone adopted in setting out those facts. An Index Expurgatorius
is issued for office guidance, lists made of words and phrases not
to be mentioned in news stories. The more essentially vulgar a paper
is, the more cautious it will be not to use words the managing editor
believes dirty. “Obscene,” for example, is deleted, and the truly
disgusting word “spicy” is substituted. And the reporter himself
having acquiesced, it is not unnatural that the readers of the paper
do also. The great majority of them, tippling their customary sheet
day after day with the regularity of dram-fiends, are so indurated
to the grotesque psychology of the more popular news columns that to
find a paper habitually speaking recognizable moderate sense would
afflict them with a warmth of indecency and dismay. The daily journals
give them the same pleasure that the serial parts of Dickens’s novels
gave the early Victorians eighty and ninety years ago. So we have the
agreeable paradox that these papers we see all round us, roaring their
naïvetés and scandals, are written and compiled by those who are, as
individuals, studious, serene, and gently acetic skeptics.
It is an entertaining thought. If it is true, I believe it is due
to what I think of as the carburetor-adjustment of the human mind, a
delicate, unconscious, and continuous process. It pleases me to imagine
that in the intellect there is a valve that regulates the mixture of
truth and convention that we utter, just as gasolene and heated air are
mixed and vaporized in the carburetor of an engine. Whenever we meet
any one, or at any rate any stranger, we are likely to be on our guard.
We have our own little private reservoir of sincerity, but we don’t
intend to draw on it too largely until we know we are safe. There are
some people, as you must have noticed, to whom it is almost impossible
to say a word of what you really believe. Accordingly, automatically
and almost unconsciously, we make a mental adjustment of our “mixture.”
We admit into it just as much truth as we believe the other is likely
to relish, or willing to receive. But we may have made a bad guess.
The conversation begins to back-fire. That means the mixture is too
“lean.” Very well; pull out the choke, enrich it with more candour,
all goes delightfully. Too “rich” a mixture, however, is, every
mechanician knows, as bad as too “lean.” The mind gets crusted with
carbon--unassimilated truth. The analogy seems to me highly applicable,
even down to the infusion of what used to be called, in a bygone slang,
“hot air.” Through this needle-valve, for the most part unconsciously,
we regulate our mental ignition.
All this, as you shall see presently, has its just bearing on our
topic of religion. We need, but are little likely to get, a new
“Areopagitica” to liberate our press from its cheery bondage of
vulgarity and slip-slop thinking. The newspaper man who has pride in
his honourable tradition may well feel grim to see the things he has
sweat for trafficked across counters like bundles of merchandise; yes,
and to see the transaction applauded by eminent statesmen and divines
who feel the need of a front-page quote. A little pride is desirable
now and then; yes, in God’s name, a little pride, gentlemen. We who
have lived, as best we could, for the decency of letters; who have
vigiled with Chaucer and taken wine with Descartes and changed opinion
with Doctor Johnson, are we to be hired to and fro by the genial
hucksters who know the art of print chiefly as a rapid factory for
gaily tinted palaver?
In his tight place, beset by doubts just as acute as those of the young
theologian, our newspaper man ratiocinates upon the quaint processes
of mind. He broods on the haphazard, interest-tainted, and fallible
nature of most mortal opinion. He studies the relativity of truth
and the proliferation of rumour. He notes how every event is like a
stone cast into a pond; it ejaculates concentric vibrations, widening
loops of hearsay. Varying layers or rings of truth are available for
different classes of bystanders, or bythinkers. How well he knows the
queer fact that you can say, unrebuked, in a weekly what would never
pass in a daily! You can say still more in a monthly; in a quarterly
review almost all the beans can be decanted. And in a book, quite often
you can print your surmises in full. Of course, to tell exactly what
happens, as Pepys did, it is best to be dead. (How odd is the saying,
“Dead men tell no tales.” Why, they tell the best tales of all.) It
does sometimes seem as though the more immediate readers there are for
any bit of print, the less candour can be rationed out for each.[B]
So every human being stands at the centre of a little eddy or whirl
of testimony. If one could make a map or editor’s projection of him
considered as a news item--it would be as complicated as an ocean chart
with festoons of barographs and isotherms, curves and twists and arrows
indicating set of currents, prevailing winds, soundings. On such a
chart, we would denote here a cyclone of scandal, there a hot monsoon
of misappreciation, yonder a steady trade-wind of generous sympathy.
In an ocean so various we should find our victim leading a thousand
different phantom lives in the opinion of others. If you begin to think
about this sort of thing, the asylum waits; for truly, confronted by
the alternating delights and possibilities of life, the mind is not
unlike that chameleon that went mad when tethered on a Paisley shawl.
The newspaper man, then, begins to feel perhaps that it is necessary
for him to undertake the burden of fidelity to human realities--that
burden that is often so lightly shrugged off by bishops. Looking at
things in the large, or trying to, he strongly suspects that formal
religion, as we have known it, is dying; lovelier and greater poetries
are pushing in. (There are thousands of years still to come, you
know.) The highest honour that he can pay to sacred matters is to
regard them as so thrillingly actual that they can be accepted into
the great general body of human life. To regard them, indeed, as news,
as the word Gospel itself suggests. It would seem fairly obvious that
the miracles and parables of the New Testament, like the various
creeds themselves, were intended as vivid and stunning apologues.
To batter them down to the level of facts seems to degrade them, as
it would be degrading to reject Keats’s sonnet because there are no
peaks in the isthmus of Darien, and because it wasn’t Cortes. The
newspaper man prefers to take his stand with Tolstoy, who said, in
that thrilling book “A Confession”: “I wish to understand in such
a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to
me as _necessarily_ inexplicable.” He prefers that when there is
an available and mortally recognizable way of understanding things,
they should so be understood. Take, for example, the story of the
miracle at Cana. To a man trained to observe the delightful ways
in which testimony arises and is transmitted, how does that story
explain itself? Here is a wedding party, at which appears the amazing
stranger. He seems a man more fascinating, more charming, more utterly
delightful, than any that those country folk have ever encountered.
They are all very merry, the toasts go round, the wine runs short. But
the ruler of the feast, turning to the stranger, says, prettily enough,
I think, “With _you_ here, water is as good as wine.” Some one else
takes it up, echoing the sentiment, seeking to add to it. “Right!” he
cries. “Our friend here makes the water into wine. Here’s to you!” And
with friendly applause the gathering ratifies the compliment. One of
the servants overhears, and carries the incident into the kitchen. How
quickly it grows and passes down the village street! “They’ve got some
one in there who’s turning water into wine!” Can it be denied that this
is the way that human events are reported?
Let us take an example of a miracle-germ in our own time. When Horace
Traubel, faithful and simple-minded disciple of Walt Whitman, died in
September, 1919, his body was taken to the Community Church, at Park
Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, New York, for the funeral service.
But when the body reached the church, the little company of mourners
could not enter; the building had suddenly caught fire. Imagine this
episode handed down through generations of simple people by word of
mouth. The intimate disciple of a great poet, both of them impatient
of the genteel religions, is borne dead to a sacred edifice. It bursts
into flame. Would that not be taken as some authentic Pentecost, and
at the very least as a proof of Walt’s divinity? Yet we know well
enough that the event was no miracle, but rather what Hobbes called “an
extraordinary felicity.”
There is one more Biblical passage I should like to refer to, one that
has often been considered a knotty saying. It is the parable of the
talents and the unprofitable servant. I like to conceive Deity in the
guise of that hard master who wanted his own with usury. “Well,” I can
imagine God saying to the newly dead, “what did you think of that world
I gave you?” “Not so bad, on the whole,” replies the embarrassed soul.
“What!” cries God. “Simpleton, do you mean to say you took it as you
found it, accepted it, swallowed it down without question? Depart from
me, unprofitable servant! You were supposed to remould it nearer to
your heart’s desire, to create out of my materials a new world of your
own.”
Old Doctor Jewett said to Margot Asquith, “You must believe in God
in spite of what the clergy say.” And truly I don’t think that any
man who has worked in downtown New York can be much of an atheist. In
that great jungle of violent life, under the glittering spires of such
steep cathedrals, he must inevitably be a trifle mad. Even Manhattan,
supposed to be most material of cities, is best known for the fantastic
figure she cuts against the sky. The loveliest picture I ever saw of
her profile was a photograph given me by an amateur lensman who caught
it by accident. It shows that uneven scarp of buildings in soft masses
of dark and shadow, looming on a queerly pebbled and fuscous twilight,
like an eclipse. And this, as my astonished friend learned from his
film-dealer, was an accident, due to mildew on the gelatin. So some
of the most lovely visions of reality are printed on minds that are
mildewed. The madman and the nincompoop often see more beauty than
the sane and solid cit. The only possible suggestion that one might
humbly venture to offer to the authoritative officers of Holy Church
is that they are too sane and too businesslike. They ask us to believe
not things that are too hard, but too easy. They are too eager to lock
the stable door after the Messiah has been stolen. They have learned
the tricks of our world of flesh so glibly that they seem sometimes to
forget the manners of that world of spirit they are commissioned to
represent.
For the world is fascinating and painful beyond human power of
testimony. The best of every life is unprintable. If one were given
five minutes’ warning before sudden death, five minutes to say what
it had all meant to us, every telephone-booth would be occupied by
people trying to call up other people to stammer that they loved them.
You would want to tell a whole lot of people that you love them, but
had been too clumsy and too shy to admit it. And the newspaper man
himself, who both loves and hates his queer trade, would be the first
to remember that one always is severest with what one adores. Every
movement is set in some strange turning of wonder. As a man will
suddenly discover in himself some miserable petty trick of behaviour
which, he painfully realizes, is a true microcosm and characteristic
of his life as a whole, so now and then with the world at large. We
are aware of lights and shadows and moments of millennium that seem
a part of some vast consistency. You know the thrill of a letter or
parcel that comes from some one you are fond of, far away. As you
undo the string, you say, foolishly, but with a genuine quaver of
sentiment, “When that was tied up, So-and-so handled it!” Well, there
are instants of preposterous happiness, clear insight, that are just
like that--little packages of reality, tied up in the twine of our time
sense, that come to us direct, intact, from the eternity and infinity
we call God. It matters little how you explain that great word to
yourself. Perhaps you mean by it the sum total of all human awarenesses
of beauty. In that sense of prevailing loveliness we are all obscurely
united. In those moments, moments of heavenly farce and unredeemable
tragedy, we can forgive ourselves for being only human.
But in these matters silence is the final eloquence. One does not
argue with moonlight. Men talk of “finding God,” but no wonder it is
difficult; He is hidden in that darkest of hiding-places, your own
heart. You yourself are a part of Him. The chief danger is to be too
prosaic. Any one who has ever done proof-reading knows the delicious
fidelity and strict zeal and maddening literalness with which the
professional corrector marks a galley-proof. How he construes the text
according to his own rote and rigid scheme; how he resents any unusual
use of words; how he is so busy querying things that look odd to him
that he misses many of the downright errors. That is precisely the
attitude of man toward the universe, which he is so daringly anxious to
interpret in some comforting sense. The journalist, whatever his sins
and stupidities, would hope to enjoy the text of life in the spirit of
a collaborating author rather than presume to correct it. And he will
not do any great poet, such as Christ, the dishonour of taking him too
literally.
We cannot hope until we have learned to despair. Let me remind you of
some great lines by Andrew Marvell:
My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
As lines, so loves oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.