Sutton’s daily programme was characteristic of young men of his sort.
He rose early enough in the morning to bolt a cup of coffee by nine
o’clock, and be at his office by half-past nine.
In New York, workmen rise early; business men late--a custom that had
better change before it is changed.
* * * * *
Sutton’s business, in common with the business of most reputable
people, had suffered under the eight years’ blight of a mindless
administration.
Even from the beginning, the grotesqueries of a comic-opera cabinet had
alarmed the business world. Now, through eight incredible years, amid
the ape-like leaps and capers of a contemptible Congress and the din
of the demagogues in authority, a faint glimmer appeared in the grey
obscurity.
Monstrous policies, infamous measures were nearing a climax; social
unrest was approaching a boiling point; all the national and local scum
from those eight miserable years was coming to the surface.
There it floated in its filth, stupidity, arrogance,
incompetency--there seethed the dregs, too--national humiliation,
sectional ruthlessness, class hatred, bitter consciousness of the
world’s amused contempt.
There were the poisonous precipitations, too, in this hellbroth wherein
the nation was stewing--enmities sown recklessly abroad; at home, the
most infamous tax laws ever imposed since the day of the German King of
England, George III.
And then the grotesqueries--the fanatic, rampant and victorious,
imposing _his_ will as ruthlessly as the Holy Office had dealt with
any who opposed its dogmas--an entire people indicted as drunkards,
and laws made to discipline everybody--laws contemplated, advocated,
to regulate a people’s religious beliefs, devotional observances,
spiritual requirements, minds--every inherent liberty which was theirs!
Everywhere the bigot, the despot, the mental pervert, were lifting
hydra heads out of the accumulations of the last eight years. And, on
this rotting culture, the crack-brain fed and battened--the parlour
socialist; the ragged--and far more to be respected--anarchist;
the miserable scribbler of seditious articles; the half-crazed
intellectual, writing in praise of human equality--to which he must
aspire in vain; the terrorist screaming in red print; the half-educated
millionaire, with his mischievous efforts to start a religious pogrom;
Congressmen of the “poor white” variety, appealing to sectionalism;
and then the vast genus of Grafter--the contractor with his “code of
practice”; the politician getting “his”; the walking delegate; the
“leaders” who make the very name of “labour” a nauseating stink.
* * * * *
Now, in this grey, unhealthy obscurity befogging a nation, and
gradually thickening during the last eight years, men’s minds and
thoughts became dull and greyish, too.
Dull minds ruled and dictated the “trend of modern thought,” the cult
of the commonplace made the average person duller, the stupid stupider,
the intellectual morose.
It was an era of joyless dulness in literature and in art; creative
work by the dull for the dull offered only what was negative and
dreary. Solemnity reigned. The misty moroseness of Scandinavia and of
Russia settled like a cloud over the country, clogging inspiration,
tarnishing all brightness, reproving exuberance, so that in modern
fiction there remained no buoyancy, no charm, no beauty, no tender
frailty, nor any hint of sun and blue sky--nothing of human
aspiration--no heart, no blood--only a monotony of all that is sordid,
colourless, and passionless in human life.
In art, too, the plodding pedant spread the accentless cult of the
commonplace, or of ugliness, physical and spiritual. That tour de force
of degraded taste, _The Faun_, symbolised horribly the mental decadence
of a sickened world.
The human-cow-school flourished: in every studio and art gallery
cow-like human females suckled babies or dangled large bronze hands or
marble feet over meaningless pedestals.
Architects beautified such squares as The Plaza with chunks of Indiana
limestone and a series of superimposed cheeses for a fountain to
face a gilded General, whose steed was led recklessly down town by a
barefooted servant-girl wearing wings.
The ugliness that was New York’s!--the ugliness that was the
nation’s!--physical, mental, spiritual, affronting a Creator who
created nothing unlovely since the first nebulæ floated incandescent on
the ocean of the night.