may be all the more rapid in the future because the limit of what
may be called mechanical progress cannot be so very far off. The
conquest of distance is the great material fact that makes for
world-organization; and distance cannot, after all, be more than
annihilated--it cannot be reduced to a minus quantity. Now that we can
whisper round the globe as we whisper round the dome of St. Paul's, we
cannot get much further on that line of advance, until immaterial
thought-transference shall enable us "to flash through one another in
a moment as we will." We may before long have reduced the crossing of
the Atlantic from five days to one, or even less; but in that
direction, too, there is a limit to progress; no invention will enable
us to arrive before we start. The conquest of physical disease seems
to be well within view; the possibilities of intensive cultivation and
selective breeding in plants and animals are likely to be rapidly
developed. When such material problems cease to exercise the first
fascination upon the enquiring mind, the mental sciences, psychology
and sociology, with the great neglected art of education, may come
into their kingdom. Then the atheism which avers that the world stands
still, or moves only in a circle, will no longer be possible. Then all
reasonable men will feel themselves soldiers in "a mighty army which
has won splendid victories (though here and there chequered with
defeats) on its march out of the dim and tragic past, and is clearly
destined to far greater triumphs in the future, if only each man does,
with unflinching loyalty, the duty assigned to him." That loyalty will
then be the conscious and acknowledged rule of life, as it is now in
an instinctive and half-realized fashion. It will help us, more than
all the personifications in the world, to "turn away from self." It
will not take the sting from death, but it will enable us to feel that
we have earned our rest, and brought no disgrace upon the colors of
our regiment.
Is it necessary to protest once more that this assurance of progress
towards the good is not to be confounded with optimism? For it is
clear that "good" is a question-begging word. The only possible
definition of "good" is "that which makes for life"--for life, not
only measured by quantity, but by quality and intensity--"that ye may
have life more abundantly." Why is egoism evil? Because a world in
which it reigned supreme would very soon come to an end, or at any
rate could not support anything like the abundance of life which is
rendered possible by mutual aid and co-operation. Why are order,
justice, courage, humanity good? Because they enable more people to
lead fuller lives than would be possible in the absence of such
guiding principles. But in all this we assume the validity of the
standard--"life"--which is precisely what pessimism denies. And
pessimism may quite conceivably be in the right on't. It is quite
conceivable that, having made the best that can possibly be made of
life, a world-weary race might decide that the best was not good
enough, and deliberately turn away from it. But that is a contingency,
a speculation, which no sane man would allow to affect his action here
and now, or to impair his loyalty to his comrades in the great
terrestrial adventure.
And is not this question of the ultimate value of life precisely one
of the uncertainties which lend--if the flippancy may be excused--a
"sporting interest" to our position? I have said that we have two
elements of consolation: the things which are sure and the things
which are unsure: in other words, the axioms and the mysteries.
Reason is all very well so far as it goes, and we do right to trust to
it; but it may prove, after all, that the things that are behind and
beyond and above reason are the things that really matter. Does this
seem a concession to obscurantism? Not at all--for the things
obscurantism glories in are things beneath reason, which is quite
another affair. At the same time, we are too apt to think that reason
has drawn a complete outline-map of its "sphere of influence," in
which there are many details to be filled in, but no boundaries to be
shifted, no regions wholly unexplored. It is, for instance, very
unreasonable to hold that we can draw a hard and fast line between the
materially possible and impossible. There is certainly a curious
ragged edge to our purely scientific knowledge, and it may well be
that in following up the frayed-out threads we may come upon things
very surprising and important. For example, the question whether
consciousness can exist detached from organized matter, or attached to
some form of matter of which we have no knowledge, I regard as purely
a question of evidence; and I not only admit but assert that the
evidence pointing in that direction is worthy of careful examination.
The interpretation which sees in it a proof of personal immortality
may be wrong, but that does not prove that the right interpretation is
not worth discovering. The spiritist voyagers may not have reached the
Indies of their hopes, yet may have stumbled upon an unsuspected
America. Nor does the fact that they are eager and credulous
invalidate the whole, or anything like the whole, of their evidence.
After all, is it a greater miracle that consciousness should exist
_de_tached from matter than that it should exist _at_tached to matter?
Yet the latter miracle nobody doubts, except in the nursery games of
the metaphysicians.
To define, or rather to adumbrate, the realm of mystery, which is yet
as indisputably real as the realm of reason and sense, we naturally
turn to the poets, the seers. Here is a glimpse of it through the eyes
of Francis Thompson, that creature of transcendent vision who made a
strange pretence of wearing the blinkers of the Roman Catholic Church.
Thus he writes in his "Anthem of Earth":--
Ay, Mother! Mother!
What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed,
Thou lustingly engender'st,
To sweat, and make his brag, and rot,
Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?
From nightly towers
He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,
Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,
And yet is he successive unto nothing
But patrimony of a little mould,
And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth
Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
All beauty and all starry majesties,
And dim transtellar things;--even that it may,
Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
Confess--"It is enough." The world left empty
What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded
For pride, for potency, infinity,
All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
Arras'd with purple like the house of kings,--
To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm
Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!
Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues,
Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark
As we ourselves, thy darkest!
Surely this is the very truth. Man is a hieroglyph to which reason
supplies no key--nay, reason itself is the heart of the enigma. And
does not this lend a strange fascination to the adventure of life?
Another singer, in a very much simpler strain, puts something of the
same idea:--
Marooned on an isle of mystery,
From a stupor of sleep we woke,
And gazed at each other wistfully,
A wondering, wildered folk.
There were flowery valleys and mountains blue,
And pastures, and herds galore,
And fruits that were luscious to bite into,
Though bitter at the core.
So we plucked up heart, and we dree'd our weird
Through flickering gleam and gloom,
And still for rescue we hoped--or feared--
From our island home and tomb.
But never over the sailless sea
Came messenger bark or schooner
With news from the far-off realm whence we
Set sail for that isle of mystery,
Or a whisper of apology
From our mute, malign marooner.
The strain of pessimism in this is even more marked than in Thompson's
"Anthem"; and indeed it is hard to deny that the resolute silence of
the "Veiled Being," the "Invisible King," and all the Gods and
godlings ever propounded to mortal piety, is one of their most
suspicious characteristics. Yet it may be that this reproach, however
natural, does the Veiled Being--or the Younger Power of our
alternative myth--a measure of injustice. It may be that the great
Dramaturge keeps his plot to himself precisely in order that the
interest may be maintained up to the fall of the curtain. It may be
that its disclosure would upset the conditions of some vast experiment
which he is working out. Where would be the interest of a race if its
result were a foregone conclusion? Where the passion of a battle if
its issue were foreknown? What if we should prove to be somnambulists
treading some dizzy edge between two abysses, and able to reach the
goal only on condition that we are unconscious of the process? Perhaps
the sanest view of the problem is that presented in Bliss Carman's
haunting poem
THE JUGGLER
Look how he throws them up and up,
The beautiful golden balls!
They hang aloft in the purple air,
And there never is one that falls.
He sends them hot from his steady hand,
He teaches them all their curves;
And whether the reach be little or long,
There never is one that swerves.
Some, like the tiny red one there,
He never lets go far;
And some he has sent to the roof of the tent
To swim without a jar.
So white and still they seem to hang,
You wonder if he forgot
To reckon the time of their return
And measure their golden lot.
Can it be that, hurried or tired out,
The hand of the juggler shook?
O never you fear, his eye is clear,
He knows them all like a book.
And they will home to his hand at last,
For he pulls them by a cord
Finer than silk and strong as fate,
That is just the bid of his word.
Was ever there such a sight in the world?
Like a wonderful winding skein,--
The way he tangles them up together
And ravels them out again!
* * * * *
If I could have him at the inn
All by myself some night,--
Inquire his country, and where in the world
He came by that cunning sleight!
Where do you guess he learned the trick
To hold us gaping here,
Till our minds in the spell of his maze almost
Have forgotten the time of year?
One never could have the least idea.
Yet why he disposed to twit
A fellow who does such wonderful things
With the merest lack of wit?
Likely enough, when the show is done
And the balls all back in his hand,
He'll tell us why he is smiling so,
And we shall understand.
I am not, perhaps, very firmly assured of this consummation. Yet I am
much more hopeful of one day understanding the Juggler and the Balls
than of ever getting into confidential relations with Mr. Wells's
Invisible King.
* * * * *
One is conscious of a sort of churlishness in thus rejecting the
advances of so amiable a character as the Invisible King. But is Mr.
Wells, on his side, quite courteous, or even quite fair, to the Veiled
Being? "Riddle me no riddles!" he seems to say; "I am tired of your
guessing games. Let us have done with 'distressful enquiry into
ultimate origins,' and 'bring our minds to the conception of a
spontaneous and developing God'--one of whose existence and
benevolence we are sure, since we made him ourselves. I want something
to worship, to take me out of myself, to inspire me with brave phrases
about death. How can one worship an insoluble problem? Will an enigma
die with me in a reeling aeroplane? While you lurk obstinately behind
that veil, how can I even know that your political views are sound?
Whereas the Invisible King gives forth oracles of the highest
political wisdom, in a voice which I can scarcely distinguish from my
own. You are a remote, tantalizing entity with nothing comforting or
stimulating about you. But as for my Invisible King, 'Closer is he
than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.'"
A little way back, I compared Mr. Wells to Moses; but, looked at from
another point of view, he and his co-religionists may rather be
likened to the Children of Israel. Tired of waiting for news from the
God on the cloudy mountain-top, did they not make themselves a
synthetic deity, finite, friendly, and very like the Invisible King,
inasmuch as he seems to have worked no miracles, and done, in fact,
nothing whatever? But the God on the mountain-top was wroth, and
accused them of idolatry, surely not without reason. For what is
idolatry if it be not manufacturing a God, whether out of golden
earrings or out of humanitarian sentiments, and then bowing down and
worshipping it?
The wrath of the tribal God against his bovine rival was certainly
excessive--yet we cannot regard idolatry as one of the loftier
manifestations of the religious spirit. The man who can bow down and
worship the work of his hands shows a morbid craving for
self-abasement. It is possible, no doubt, to plead that the graven
image is a mere symbol of incorporeal, supersensible deity; and the
plea is a good one, if, and in so far as, we can believe that the
distinction between the sign and the thing signified is clear to the
mind of the devotee. The difficulty lies in believing that the type of
mind which is capable of focussing its devotion upon a statuette is
also capable of distinguishing between the idea of a symbol and the
idea of a portrait. But when we pass from the work of a man's hands to
the work of his brain--from an actual piece of sculpture to a mental
construction--the plea of symbolism can no longer be advanced. This
graven image of the mind, so to speak, is the veritable God, or it is
nothing; and Mr. Wells, as we have seen, is profuse in his assurances
that it is the veritable God. That is what makes his whole attitude
and argument so baffling. One can understand an idolater who says "I
believe that my God inhabits yonder image," or "Yonder image is only a
convenient point of concentration for the reverence, gratitude, and
love which pass through it to the august and transcendent Spirit whom
it symbolizes." But how are we to understand the idolater who adores,
and claims actual divinity for, an emanation from his own brain and
the brains of a certain number of like-minded persons? Is it not as
though a ventriloquist were to prostrate himself before his own
puppet?
This craving for something to worship points to an almost uncanny
recrudescence of the spirit of Asia in a fine European intelligence.
For my own part, as above stated, I cannot believe Mr. Wells's case to
be typical; but in that I may be mistaken. It is possible that an
epidemic of Asiatic religiosity may be one of the sequels of the War.
If that be so--if there are many people who shrink from the condition
of the spiritual "ronin," and are in search of a respectable "daimio"
to whom to pay their devotion--I beg leave strongly to urge the claims
of the Veiled Being as against the Invisible King.
He has at the outset the not inconsiderable advantage of being an
entity instead of a non-entity. Whoever or whatever he may be, we are
compelled by the very constitution of our minds to assume his (or its)
existence; whereas there is manifestly no compulsion to assume the
existence of the Invisible King.
Then, again, the Veiled Being is entirely unpretentious. There is no
bluster and no cant about him. He does not claim our gratitude for the
doubtful boon of life. He does not pretend to be just, while he is
committing, or winking at, the most intolerable injustices. He does
not set up to be long-suffering, while in fact he is childishly
touchy. He does not profess to be merciful, while the incurable ward,
the battlefield--nay, even the maternity home and the dentist's
parlor--are there to give him the lie. (Here, of course, I am not
contrasting him with the Invisible King, but with more ancient and
still more Asian divinities.) It is the moral pretensions tagged on by
the theologians to metaphysical Godhead that revolt and estrange
reasonable men--Mr. Wells among the rest. If you tell us that behind
the Veil we shall find a good-natured, indulgent old man, who chastens
us only for our good, is pleased by our flatteries (with or without
music), and is not more than suitably vexed at our naughtinesses in
the Garden of Eden and elsewhere--we reply that this is a nursery tale
which has been riddled, time out of mind, not by wicked sceptics, but
by the spontaneous, irrepressible criticism of babes and sucklings.
But if you divest the Veiled Being of all ethical--or in other words
of all human--attributes, then there is no difficulty whatever in
admiring, and even adoring, the marvels he has wrought. Tennyson went
deeper than he realized into the nature of things when he wrote--
"For merit lives from man to man,
But not from man, O Lord, to thee."
Once put aside all question of merit and demerit, of praise and blame,
and more especially (but this will shock Mr. Wells) of salvation and
damnation--and nothing can be easier than to pay to the works of the
Veiled Being the meed of an illimitable wonder. When we think of the
roaring vortices of flame that spangle the heavens night by night, at
distances that beggar conception: when we think of our tiny earth,
wrapped in its little film of atmosphere, spinning safely for ages
untold amid all these appalling immensities: and when we think, on the
other hand, of the battles of claw and maw going on, beneath the
starry vault, in that most miraculous of jewels, a drop of water: we
cannot but own that the Power which set all this whirl of atoms agoing
is worthy of all admiration. And approbation? Ah, that is another
matter; for there the moral element comes in. It is possible (and here
lies the interest of the enigma) that the Veiled Being may one day
justify himself even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing so
behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely useless to speculate.
Light may one day come to us, but it will come through patient
investigation, not through idle pondering and guessing. In the
meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the microcosm, ourselves
including both extremes, and being, perhaps, the most stupendous
miracle of all, we cannot deny to this amazing frame of things the
tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be religion, I profess myself
as religious as Mr. Wells. I am even willing to join him in some
outward, ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if he can suggest
one that shall not be ridiculously inadequate. What about kneeling
through the C Minor Symphony? That seems to me about as near as we can
get. Or I will go with him to Primrose Hill some fine morning (like
the Persian Ambassador fabled by Charles Lamb) and worship the Sun,
chanting to him William Watson's magnificent hymn:--
"To thee as our Father we bow,
Forbidden thy Father to see,
Who is older and greater than thou, as thou
Art greater and older than we."
The sun, at any rate, is not a figure of speech, and is a symbol which
runs no risk of being mistaken for a portrait. If Mr. Wells would be
content with some such "bright sciential idolatry," I would willingly
declare myself a co-idolater. But alas! he is the hierophant of the
Invisible King, and prayer to that impotent potentate is to me a moral
impossibility. I would rather face damnation, especially in the mild
form threatened by Mr. Wells, which consists (pp. 148-149) in not
knowing that you are damned.
And if Mr. Wells maintains that in the worship of the non-moral Veiled
Being there is no practical, pragmatic comfort, I reply that I am not
so sure of that. When all is said and done, is there not more hope,
more solace, in an enigma than in a _facon de parler_? I should be
quite willing to accept the test of the reeling aeroplane. The aviator
can say to his soul: "Here am I, one of the most amazing births of
time, the culmination of an endless series of miracles. Perhaps I am
on the verge of extinction--if so, what does it all matter? But
perhaps, on the contrary, I am about to plunge into some new
adventure, as marvellous as this. More marvellous it cannot be, but
it may perhaps be more agreeable. At all events, there is something
fascinating in this leap in the dark. Good bye, my soul! Good-bye,
my memory!
'If we should meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then this parting was well made.'"
I cannot but think that there is as much religion and as much solace
in such a shaking-off of "the bur o' the world" as in the thought that
the last new patent God is going to die with you, and that you,
unconsciously and indistinguishably merged in him, are going to live
for ever.
THE NEWEST BORZOI BOOKS
LUSTRA
_By Ezra Pound_
DANDELIONS
_By Coulson T. Cade_
A CHASTE MAN
_By Louis Wilkinson_
GOD AND MR. WELLS
_By William Archer_
MARTIN RIVAS
_By Alberto Blest-Gana_
BEATING 'EM TO IT
_By Chester Cornish_
A BOOK OF PREFACES
_By H. L. Mencken_
THE THREE BLACK PENNYS
_By Joseph Hergesheimer_
INTERPRETERS AND INTERPRETATIONS
_By Carl Van Vechten_
MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS
_By George Jean Nathan_
OTHERS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE NEW VERSE
_Edited by Alfred Kreymborg_
1917 Issue
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_.
2. The words amoeba, mythopoeic and prosopopoeia use "oe" ligature in
the original text.
3. The following misprints have been corrected:
"blackslides" corrected to "backslides" (page 40)
"annhilated" corrected to "annihilated" (page 119)
4. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies
in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been
retained.