I. Walled In
II. An Open Door
III. Reading Fiction with an Eye on Life
IV. History and Your Vote
V. Clio's Vintage
VI. The Poet and the Reader
VII. The Children of Pan
VIII. Men Behind Books
IX. Keeping up with Life
*OPEN THAT DOOR!*
*CHAPTER I*
*WALLED IN*
The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his
own works.--CERVANTES
An author is of necessity a rather egotistical sort of a fellow, or else
he would not trumpet abroad his name upon the title-page of a book. If
we should measure this egotism by the size of the audience to which he
hopes to appeal, we fear that the sponsor of this little book should
make humble apologies in behalf of his phrenological egocentric bump.
He who writes upon how to grow fat, modestly limits his audience to
those who, from pride of appearance, or upon doctor's orders, desire to
add to their avoirdupois. There is a similar modesty upon the part of
those who limit their audiences by writing cook-books for the cooks,
temperance appeals for the drunkards, novels for the seminary ladies,
war books for the valiant, peace books for the pacificists. We
(notwithstanding the fact that he fears to call himself "I" in the first
chapter) acknowledge no such modesty. Every one wants to get the best
of life. This general statement is as true as the more specific ones
that every one wants to enjoy his dinner, his work, his family, and his
friends. The desire to obtain satisfaction through the passing of the
years is the prime motive in the actions of the male and the female, the
fat and the thin, the long and the short, the stupid and the wise, the
railroad president and the ditch digger. It is for this cosmopolitan,
democratic crowd of you and myself and every one else that there is, or
is not, a message in the following pages.
One of the most stimulating thoughts to which mankind is heir is the
realization of the handicaps under which we are all laboring. This is a
great thought in that it is so universal, so levelling, so powerful in
making us truly appreciate that we are all brothers one unto another.
The millionaire is a slave to his money; another man is embittered by
poverty, a third carries the burden of an unsound body, a fourth of a
selfish nature, a fifth of an unhappy family life, a sixth is
overwhelmed by his own stupidity, a seventh by his sense of duty towards
others, an eighth by a sense of duty towards himself, and so it goes
through the rank and file, the humble and the mighty. How many of us
take the bit in our teeth, and have a glorious revel in enjoying every
furlong of life's race-course? To run such a race is a hard task, as
there is always some handicap hanging on our shoulders. We are afraid
to knock it off. Oftentimes the burden is terrifically hard for the man
who carries it to define, and yet, when you look into your inmost self
you realize that the precious hours of life are slipping by without your
cramming into them all the good things that you feel should be offered
by a world in which there is the romance of other people's lives, the
blue of the sky, the play of the sunlight, the success of your rivals.
There seems too often a wall between ourselves and that romance, that
sky, that sunlight and that success. There is indeed this wall between
us and our ideal. If we break through it, there is another one that
dares our courage to the assault and capture of our greater, enlarged
ideal. This is stimulating and comforting, as each man and woman has to
make his own assault; there is no one so lucky as to get the prizes of
life without a fight, and no one so unlucky as to be without the desire,
no matter how deeply it may be buried in his nature, to make that fight.
In what direction are you going, and what are you going to do when you
get there? Are you plugging against an impassable barrier, or is there
a way through for the man who does his best? Some lie down in the
traces and quit. They have three satisfactory meals a day, work that is
not too arduous, a warm bed at night, and, taking it all in all, that is
sufficient; at any rate, they think it better than the attempt to break
down any more walls. Perhaps they bruised their knuckles at the first:
"George Washington, Thomas Edison, and the other heroes were not afraid
of the blows at the first or at the score that followed, but we all
cannot be great, and I am willing to subside with what is already my
portion." Yes, that is the attitude of the slackers. They are in every
walk of life--the stupidly content.
There are many others who say that if they could only lift the mortgage
off their house, or buy an automobile, or get into society, or get
promoted, they could pass untouched through the barrier that crushes
them, and be ready to tackle the second with unheard-of power. They are
sadly suffering under an illusion. When you take the spur from a
laggard steed, you do not make him a thoroughbred.
Two thousand years ago Christ told us that unless we become as little
children we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That was a tremendous
statement, and one of infinite truth. To find the reasons for our
struggles and the means of carrying our burdens we must go to the boy of
ten.
He is having a splendid time! Are you? From the moment he leaves his
bed with a whoop and a hurrah, until the evening when he sinks to sleep
exhausted but happy, he has lived in a turmoil of adventure, wild
dreams, and imaginings. The world has been a magic pleasure dome from
which there were countless doors to be opened and beckoning passages to
be explored. We have our troubles and sulk under their weight, he longs
for them and so invents the game of Cowboys and Indians and glories in
the battle; we become bored with a routine existence, he scorns such an
attitude and fears that he will miss a great excitement if he but close
an eye. If rainy weather or a particular mother prevents him from
organizing a military campaign, fraught with danger and hardship,
against the enemies in the next block, he stays at home and reads of
battling with dragons. The world is forever a thing of wonder, a
tremendous feast from which he is forever called before he has had
sufficient courses. Hungry for life, he cannot find within the
twenty-four half enough hours to fulfil his demands. A fishing-rod in
his eyes is a magic thing with an incarnate life and power of its own;
the dark pool contains a possible catfish, and what, by all the stars,
could be more wonderful, more inexplicable, more mysterious and awe
inspiring than a bearded catfish! Every new friend, old or young, is a
peculiar individual of which he must ask a thousand questions to find
out whether he be an engineer, a policeman, or a fireman, or whether he
can spin a top or owns a collection of postage stamps.
What a lesson in the way of life is a lad of ten! He sees in life an
opportunity, a vast opportunity for everything. No specialist is
he--within the month he decides that his career shall lie in any one of
a dozen, from that of the man upon the back of the ice wagon, to that of
the President of the United States.
Why are the young so superior to their elders? Why, indeed, do we have
to cast off our years to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Ponce de Leon, in
search of the Fountain of Youth, journeyed from Spain to the New World,
and, weary of the quest, left his body to rot in the American
wilderness. He need not have gone so far upon his travels, as in the
point of view of the last boy whom he met before embarking from the
shores of Spain there was this very Fountain which he sought. To break
down all the barriers which hedge us in, to open a thousand doors
entering upon undiscovered countries of ambition and delight, to forget
time, to forget everything but the joy of living, to experience the
thrill of carrying heavy burdens and the overcoming of obstacles, all we
have to do is to see the world through the eyes of the boy of ten. It
is the youth's relation to the world as he finds it that makes him
superior to, and a more worthy inheritor of the Kingdom than is his
father. The former's outlook is that of perpetual wonderment, of
endless romance, of intensive interest, and wide horizons; the latter's
too often is that of a blind man in a picture gallery. A lad lives
acutely, never lets an hour "slip by," is ever willing for an assault
against any battlement, and in that lies the secret of life.
Most things, to be sure, are "easier said than done," but after having
found that the proper door to open is that which leads to the world of
fervid expectancies, experienced by the boy, we may at least _attempt_
to find the key that fits the lock. Perhaps you have already found it!
This is a good personal test--do you feel that your mind is a-tingle
with the music that is played by the world in which you live?
It has been said that you can tell a man by the company he keeps--but
there are far better methods! Find out his experiences when he walks
along a city street, rubbing elbows with the crowd, dodging motors at
the crossings, with every step he takes passing faces, human faces,
passing windows behind which are woven the webs of human happiness and
grief. What are his innermost sensations? Does he feel the throbbing
pulse of men and women, or is his heart and soul dead and forbidding?
Or else go with him upon a walk into the country--Spring or Fall--Winter
or Summer--his talk and expression will show the stuff that is in him.
Is he alive to the multifarious beauties of color, life, and movement
that are about him, or is he the same gnarled, twisted parody of man
who, when in the office, always thinks himself imposed upon, or in his
home appears a misfit, uncomfortable piece of furniture?
Yes, there is a sublime religion in the joy of jostling your fellows in
the workaday streets, there is a sublime possibility of growth in the
soul of him who, when upon a journey in the country, breathes a deep and
lasting draught of the joyousness of life. And yet, why does this
religion slip from us, why at times do we refuse to grow? Why do we
lose the tingle of living which is the very essence of the boy's sense
of life?
One man will tell you that he is in a rut. He has worked until his
youth is passed, and there is no further chance of promotion. A second
has lost his money, and he is bitter against the world that took it from
him. A third misses the companions whom he used to know, and with them
went the color and the value of the world. A fourth has gambled with
life's good things: has wasted his body and mind in his lust for women,
wine, or food, or in his greed for gold. Perhaps, although not
admitted, with the satisfaction of his desires women have lost their
beauty, wine and food their taste, and gold has proved tarnished metal.
What is, at bottom, the matter with them all? And what is the matter
with the men and women who have had worldly success, who have had all
the exterior things that life could give them, and yet feel that this
Earth is an unsatisfactory sort of pasture in which to graze? Why
should there be sighs of discontent when above us the sky is blue, and
in the world about us children are born of women, heroic deeds are
accomplished, and tragedies met and defeated by the courage and love of
our human kind?
The answer is in the fact that many of us lose the blessed heritage that
was part of our youth: our sense of wonderment, our breadth of sympathy.
To the youth, every moment of every day meant an awakening to new
things, an introduction to strange, exciting mysteries, whereas there
are no such awakenings for the man who finds not the wonder in the
windows bordering and the faces passing on the crowded city streets, or
feels not, in the country, the subtle magic of Nature's workings.
You say the world grows stale; it is not the world grown stale that
takes the lustre from life, it is your own sleepiness, the profound
drunkenness of the lazy and the cold heart. It is the loss of a
personal sympathy with God and man.
A loss of sympathy is a horrible thing. The loss of that sympathy which
holds your heart engripped, and makes you feel part and parcel of this
great, moving, turbulent, sorrowing thing we call the World, is as
grievous a loss as can befall any man. It is worse than a separation
from money, friends or family--it is the loss of an individual's
personal stake in the world. And yet, we see men who have lost and are
losing it. In them we see die that spark of life which has made them an
integral part of all that lives. We see smothered the divine fire of
humanity and godliness. If we consider Nature, including man, as one
great spirit, we feel that those who have lost an embracing sympathy are
apart from that great spirit, are drifting off into the barren deserts
of bewilderment and decay. If we consider men as individual souls
plotting their own destinies, we must see in those who have lost their
intimate touch with the surge of their fellows' labors, and their
sympathy to the power of beauty, pariahs, true outcasts, apart and
alone.
How great is your appetite for life? How great is your willingness to
break the shell of your prison and liquidate your heart? What prevents
you from throwing open your arms to the universe, accepting and
welcoming the embrace? The embrace of humanity is a glorious thing! It
is the nectar of the gods. Be one with the world, be not a pariah; be
part of the great wave, be not a stagnant pool.
But one hears answers, "I can't," "I don't want to," "I'm apart and will
not mingle." Why can't you? Why won't you? Why are you apart? Is it
because you are old and mummified? Have you lost your vision, have you
lost your heart, has the world beaten you back, and does life roll too
fast a pace? Has your understanding become blunted? Are you a snob
upon a pedestal of derision? Are your eyes blind to the colors, your
ears deaf to the music, your voice bitter in your companions' hearing?
Ah, let there be a way out of the prison--there is a door that will lead
you to your youth. Within a man there is always the spark that can be
made to brighten and to break into living flame. There is no
understanding so dense, no spirit so sordid that it cannot be stirred to
awaken to that sympathy for man and nature that is the pass word to the
Kingdom of Life.
"The Kingdom of Life." Those are perhaps hackneyed words, and yet how
many of us seem to be the inheritors of the Kingdom of Death. Live
bodies find no value in dead souls, so let us make our souls aflame and
attain to a realization of life. Where is the match to strike the
light, the key to open the door?
Through all the ages there has been a medium through which the hearts of
men have been revealed. There has been one cauldron into which the
riches of our richest and most godlike minds have been poured. It is
the melting pot that has purified the sorrows and joys of men, since man
had wit enough to know his pangs and jubilations. There is a vehicle
which will bring us to a universal sympathy, if not an understanding, of
our human kindred. There is a powerful tool, welded by man, with which
we can awaken ourselves to an appreciation of our universe, from which
we can obtain consolation in our difficulties, stimulus for our
ambitions, tonic for our depressions. The medium, the cauldron, the
vehicle, the tool is Literature.
Some men are afraid of books, and some are afraid of life; some do not
understand books, and some do not sympathize with, nor care to
understand life. Literature is the key to the door of life for those
who wish to open! There is no wall cramping the ambitions, blinding the
eyes, deafening the ears of those who seek their nutriment in the
spiritual messages and solemn understandings of the greatest minds of
the ages. The symbol of a man walking down the street with no heart to
feel, nor mind to understand the happenings about him, is the
relationship between two stones. To our knowledge there is no known
communication between one and the other. Literature is the great
communicator, the powerful disseminator of sympathies, the magnificent
doorway through which we can pass to other men's hearts, and obtain
warmth for our own in case ours are cold and comfortless.
God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. Perhaps there is
not enough, for we all walk in partial darkness, but the tremendous
sunburst that is here to lighten and revive is the lasting, printed
word, handed on from generation to generation.
*CHAPTER II*
*AN OPEN DOOR*
This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
FRA LIPPO LIPPI
There is the Rub! Of how many of us can it be said that the World
"means intensely and means good"? Do we unsatisfactorily stutter, and
stumble, and barely exist through the three score years and ten that is
our portion, or do we find in life a splendid activity that gladdens our
heart and fills us full of the thorough-going ecstasy of living?
I have a friend who is a great athlete,--an oarsman, mountain climber,
big game hunter. He exults in a life of action, of doing big things,
and yet withal, he is a tremendous reader and one of exquisite taste and
wide knowledge in books and authors. I asked him of the value of
reading.
"Every time I read a great book," he answered, "I feel as if I had
punched a hole through the wall," and so saying he crashed his large
fist against a buttress of reinforced concrete. "I feel that my world
has been made larger; where before I had only seen a blank space, now I
see a new world, the world in which the author lived. I am that much
more alive to my own."
He applied his reading to his daily life, and the world became for him a
richer, more exciting place in which to live. No one wants to plod
through the world in a blind, sleepy fashion. We all want to live as
keenly, as vitally as possible. The roots of the present are buried
deep in the past--to appreciate and have understanding of the present
you must appreciate and have understanding of the past--to realize how
small and one-sided is your own point of view, you must appreciate the
thousand and one viewpoints that have appeared through the ages to the
eyes of other men and women.
In beginning to form the habit of reading, the first thing to be
realized is that books are intimately connected with the world in which
we live. Their true value does not come from the pleasure you
experience during the actual hours in which you are turning the pages,
but (and this point cannot too vividly be borne in mind) in the reaction
of you upon the world and the world upon you after having read them. If
a book does not influence your point of view towards God, your fellow
men, and your daily tasks and ambitions, you may feel assured either
that the book is one of little worth, or that you have not absorbed its
true meaning. When you hear someone say that reading is an excellent
way to pass the time, you may feel sure that he knows little about
books. The poem, the novel, the history, the philosophy are not to pass
the time, they are to make more vital the hours of life. A book that is
a book becomes part and parcel of your being, and you must of necessity
make it part of your life.
Authors are not for the library, they are for the street, the railroad
train, the office, the open fields. Read them in the library, or even
in bed, but live them in the city thoroughfares, or country roads or
workaday places in which you make your life. No man can read the
Journals of that mystic, nature lover, Henry David Thoreau, without
having his next trip to the country one of greater pleasure. The colors
and the sounds of the fields, the woodlands and the brooks will bring a
new joy to his spirit. No man can read the novels of some great gobbler
of life, such as eighteenth century Tobias Smollett, without finding the
city life of our twentieth century more human, more satisfying, more
exciting. No man can seriously read a religious poet such as Whitman or
Wordsworth without becoming more deeply religious, more keenly conscious
of the wonders of God and Man. And the Bible--surely no one can read the
magic beauty and truth in the Prophecies of the Old Testament without
feeling that he has met and talked with giants. These books bear
directly on life--they make us think, love and experience in a way that
we have never done before. The world becomes more thoroughly a magic
place in which there are a thousand things to make life one glorious
escapade, through which we may be thankful for the opportunity of
living.
As some people believe reading to be a pleasant method of passing the
time (without realizing that time is in truth passing them), so others
believe that being "well read" is some sort of a social advantage. It
is difficult to determine which is the more stupid and superficial point
of view, that of regarding books as time-killers or as useful topics of
conversation. The latter is probably the worst, as, in addition to its
superficial aspect, there is its insincerity. The man or woman who
reads a great book because it is "the thing to do" is not only a weak
follower of fashion but a waster of valuable time. It is far better
never to have read a book than to have read it stupidly and begrudgingly
with the thought in mind that it will be a feather in your cap to be
able to boast of having read it. Needless as it may seem to make a
point of this, it is, nevertheless, the idea in the mind of many a man
in college, and many a woman who joins a reading circle.
Some misguided supporters of the study of the ancient classics use as a
plea that "every gentleman should read Greek." The insincerity of this
defence can only be compared to the sighs of the woman who attempts to
convince her neighbors that the beauty of a sunset appeals to her as it
does to no one else, or the ecstatic murmurings of the young man at the
art exhibition, who is arousing within himself a false enthusiasm, for
some artistic cult that in truth means nothing to him.
We see this type of man or woman all too often. They are usually
gushing about their latest emotional experience, when in fact they are
incapable of having any. It is an insincere attempt to be the highest
of the high-brows. Let us have none of this! Let us realize that
education and culture are splendid things to be highly prized, but only
in that they make the individual who possesses them a richer, deeper,
more sympathetic person.
A hobby, which has to-day become a fashion, is bird study. Far be it
from me to disparage the movement seemingly alive in all our suburban
districts, but let us make short shift with those who ogle knowingly
through field glasses, when the motive behind the action is that in
select company it is considered "the thing."
It is a safe warning never to read a book because it is fashionable.
Never read a book because you think it will form an engaging topic of
conversation; always read because you want to derive a sincere
inspiration, an enlarged point of view. Within a library is encased the
soul of the past, the meaning of the present, the promise of the future.
From it we derive the entire tradition of which we are inheritors, the
deeper movements of which we are a part, the prophecies of the future in
which we and ours will live. This treasure is more worthy of respect
than to be treated as the devourer of an idle hour, or the means whereby
to keep "in the swim."
The cultured man is a man of broad understanding, of deep sympathies. A
fisherman who knows his boat, his line and the bay in which he makes his
livelihood may be a cultured man. He may have derived from his way of
life and the tools of his trade the solemn truths that give him an
understanding of the ways of men and the needs of the human heart; but
another man who has gone through the University, "machinely made,
machinely crammed," may be totally without culture in that he has never
drunk at those well-springs of living which teach the mind the great
underlying sentiments that rule the world. One may well be educated and
yet uncultured, "well-read" and yet without the vision that may be
derived from books. It is not the word but the spirit of the word that
must be taken to heart and lived.
Matthew Arnold defined culture as a knowledge of the best that has been
done and said by man--but the one who _opens that door_ must have more
than that knowledge. It is not enough to cram away facts in the corners
of your brain. These facts must have a direct bearing upon your life.
To have knowledge of the best that has been written, you must not only
read a great poem but you must allow the thought or fancy to sink into
and become part of your personality; of the best that has been done you
must not only have knowledge of the courage and wisdom of the early
Americans who broke the yoke of Great Britain, but you must apply their
courage and wisdom to your daily life; of the best that has been said
you must not only read one of Abraham Lincoln's great speeches, but
absorb the quiet spirituality of the man who uttered them, and allow his
personality to become part of yours.
Farcical moving-picture shows and talking-machine rag-time surely have
their place, but can they enter the soul of man as can "the best that
has been written, done and said"? The plays of Euripides and the words
of Marcus Aurelius have for many centuries given deeper understandings
and wider horizons to a multitude of readers, and it is probable that
the intensity with which they have acted upon the individual is
commensurate with the length of time that they have acted upon the mass.
We do not believe that this can be said of the time-killing "movie" or
the rag-time song of yesterday.
Let us enter the world of living through the world of books. It is from
the printed page that we can best equip ourselves for a rich life of
value to ourselves, our family and our neighbors. If you do not believe
it, read some book that the world has acknowledged great. Having read
it, live it in your eternal self, and you will have passed through the
Open Door.
It is a rainy day at the seashore; I am writing in the reading room of a
summer hotel. Without, the rain is sweeping across the bathing beach,
the tennis courts are flooded, the golf course, without a doubt, is a
swampy morass. It is a dreary sight for one who looks through the
window pane. Our little world is upon a vacation, and all but the few
who wish to tramp the beach in raincoats and gum boots must stay
in-doors. And yet there is happiness, and I believe greater promise of
the morrow. In one corner of the room there is a stripling of about
thirteen, curled in a chair, absorbed in his book, which from the cover
I know to be "Treasure Island." He is with Old Pew, John Silver, and
the cut-throat buccaneers. On the morrow the sand-dunes for that boy
will be places of mystery where weird and exciting fairy deeds might
have been accomplished. The commonplace bathing beach will have new
mysteries, as the waters that splash at his feet are the same that
surround some sunbaked, South Sea Treasure Isle.
At the desk opposite me, a student with furrowed brow reads a calf-skin
volume. I have noted the title: "The Speeches of Henry Clay." Perhaps
this fellow is a young lawyer or an aspiring politician. He wishes to
absorb the ideas of the silver-tongued "Harry of the West," the popular
idol of seventy years ago, and to consider their bearing upon the tariff
questions of to-day. He must agree with Napoleon Bonaparte: "Read and
reflect on history; it is the only true philosophy." And there is a
girl reading the poetry of Alfred Noyes, and a bespectacled, bearded old
man with a volume of Pope. They have both turned to poetry to find the
beauty and truth those poets have seen. How much will their spirits be
affected, the one by the lyric note of our contemporary singer, the
other by the didactic moralizing of the philosopher wit?
So it goes! The boy sees visions of pirates and adventure, the old man
dreams dreams and seeks new truth; the young man desires armor for his
life's battle, the girl finds beauty, a refreshing and invigorating
draught. It rains to-day but they will all be more richly endowed to
welcome the sun and sea breezes of the morrow.
*CHAPTER III*
*READING FICTION WITH AN EYE ON LIFE*
The world and life's too big to pass for a dream,
* * * * *
you've seen the world--
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,--and God made it all!
FRA LIPPO LIPPI
Our good Brother, Lippo Lippi, has started off two of my chapters, and
it is well that he should, as no artist had a keener appetite for life
than had he. He grasped all there was of the best in life--color, love,
work--and he enjoyed it.
Librarians, booksellers, and blatant advertisements assure us that we
are a novel-reading public. The number of copies sold of this and that
best seller are at first sight staggering, and even more so after having
read the book! A certain novel becomes the fashion in the same
inconsequential manner as does an especially uncomfortable type of
collar--another season both are forgotten and something new is taken up.
The writing, publishing and advertising of such books have become a
purely commercialized art upon the part of the authors and booksellers.
"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" sighed Francois Villon, "Where are
the masterpieces of last summer?" sighs the meditative consumer of
fiction. Almost every novel which has those qualities which publishers
believe will appeal to an idle, amusement-loving populace is proclaimed
in display advertising as "the greatest novel of the decade," "the great
American novel," or in some other equally false manner. The author, the
publisher, and even the readers know that such statements are utter
falsities and yet the sale goes up into the hundreds of thousands. I
often wonder what has become of the stupendous number of copies of a
certain book the World was reading some ten years ago. It is never
mentioned; it is never read; it is seldom seen on anyone's bookshelves,
yet the material volumes must be lying about somewhere. Perhaps such
books are indeed as "the snows of yesteryear" and melt away when their
day is done. One who wishes seriously to acquire the riches there are in
books might well make it a rule never to read a novel until it has stood
the test of time. What, bye the bye, is the use of reading, unless you
mean to get the best out of it? Walking is better exercise,
conversation more sociable, gambling more risky and therefore more full
of zest! Any story worth reading this summer must surely be worth
reading five years from now. Life is too short, there are too many great
books that are eminently worth reading, to spend our time wading through
the ruck of tastefully bound, hurriedly illustrated, widely advertised
novels that greet us every season. I repeat--Do not read a book that you
may be in the swing of up-to-date conversation. If you do, you prove
yourselves the gull of everyone concerned. Let time do your winnowing,
and if after five years the people of taste are still talking of the
book, you may turn to it and probably find something of true merit. You
may say that with such a plan you will read but few modern novels.
Quite true, there will be but few that stand the test of even five
years, but how much better it is to conserve your energies and time for
reading the great works of fiction that have stood the test of
generations.
As in all other reading, novels should awaken you to a new life. You
should choose those that have the truest effect upon your goings and
comings after you have put them aside. You must agree that those
treating of an impossible, untrue social condition, as some
money-grabbing manufacturer of stories pretends to see it, will not have
this effect. Neither will those of untrue chivalry and sentiment in
which untrue ladies weep unnatural tears, and untrue heroes do
impossible deeds. Such trivial falsities merely chew up the all too few
hours allotted mortals upon this good ship, the Earth. Which then are
those novels that are to be read not for the purpose of passing the
time, but of holding up the time, and of making every minute more real,
more full of meaning,--for that is the function of all great books?
There is a poem of John Keats beginning,
Lo--I must tell a tale of chivalry;
For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye.
Perhaps these lines to every one do not carry the same magic beauty and
promise of long-dreamed-of things that they do to me. The poem was
never finished, and I, for one, deeply regret it, as surely we would
have had a tale to set our hearts afire with the clangor of the
mediaeval tournament, or the lone quest of a golden armored knight.
Sir Walter Scott told such tales in prose and his novels are of the
greatest in literature. Honore de Balzac told stories of French life in
which there is nothing specially chivalric, nothing in that sense
bewitching, and yet his tales, too, are of the greatest in literature.
The terms Realism and Romanticism are used to describe two different
aspects of art, music and literature. We will use them in considering
the relation of novels to life.
Balzac is considered the father of modern realism. This is partly due
to the fact that he presented in a forceful manner the principles upon
which he worked. He desired to put the life of France, city,
provincial, military and official, within the covers of his books. It
is interesting to remember that he wrote at a period in which men were
perhaps more interested in the reason and purpose of human life than
they had ever been before. Those scientific discoveries, which were
finally to lead the way to our present theories of evolution, were
bringing men to a realization that the religious dogmas upon which they
had founded their faith were weakening. It was difficult for a thinking
man to believe that the world had been made out of whole cloth, but a
few thousand years before. Science was in the air; faiths were
shattered. Balzac turned to man to determine anew his nature. His was
the huge task of presenting man in all his loves and hates, purposes and
motives, works and joys. He attempted it, and there has been a great
army of writers following in his footsteps. Their aim has been to give
a realistic cross section of certain aspects of life, allowing the
reader to draw inferences as to its meaning and his personal relation to
it.
This is realism. It is most unfortunate that in our country the word
has become synonymous with books of a sordid and erotic nature. Realism
in literature should show us life as it is, and as life is neither all
sordid nor all erotic, neither should literature present only those
aspects. The function of this type of literature is a great and
important one.
The supreme realist has a God-given power of seeing and feeling the
forces and emotions that make up human living. He sees and examines
life as if under a microscope, and with this peculiar power he must have
the faculty of expression. You may ask how we can apply the words
contained in such a novel to our own life? We all feel that there is a
great advantage in "understanding life." We try to analyze our own and
our friends' ways of living. Let us go to great novels and see what we
find there.
Was it a child who said, when going through the British Museum, that he
liked the sculpture better than the paintings because he could walk
around the sculpture? He spoke more wisely than he knew. The same
simile may be applied to the realistic novel. In reading it we may walk
about and examine life. From day to day, as we live things happen so
rapidly, the world is passing before us so fast that, unless you have a
supreme intellect, it is impossible to examine the pageant but from one
point of view. You can but look at the front of the picture. It is
flat, there is but little perspective.
The genius with the gift for fiction such as had Tolstoy, Balzac or
Smollett can encase civilization within the covers of a book. You may
read and understand. There is something static. You live a thousand
lives by proxy, you enter a hundred homes and have converse with the
hearts of men and women. Instead of seeing but the front of things, we
walk behind and take in life from every angle. The characters in the
drama of life are under a microscope through which we are privileged to
look. Tolstoy presents life as it was in Russia forty years ago, but
human hearts that are cosmopolitan and eternal, Balzac, the France of
the forties, Smollett, England of the eighteenth century. We learn the
ideals, the struggles, the way of life of different civilizations, of
different ages.
We find that our point of view is a narrow one, that our place in the
Sun is perhaps a very small corner, and our hearts and minds are
enlarged to a deeper sympathy with all men, a finer understanding of all
ideals and practices.
Instead of living in the little village of our own outlook, instead of
weighing all experience and action by our own, we arrive at a higher,
more cosmopolitan point of view. Whereas we might think that ours is
the only century in which people flock to the cities and live material
lives of rush and money-grabbing, we find the same thing true of
Smollett's England of one hundred and fifty years ago; instead of
condemning the woman who cannot get along with her husband we have a
broader sympathy for having followed the career of the splendid Anna
Karenina in Tolstoy's novel of that name. We break the shell of our
petty selves which has made for so many misunderstandings and
prejudices. We must not pride ourselves upon our own motives and
civilization, until we have at least made an attempt to understand those
of others.
Since the days when Nathaniel Hawthorne condensed the spiritual aspects
of New England in his immortal "Scarlet Letter," there has been a
scarcity of American novels of any high realistic calibre. Ernest Poole
has recently done brilliant work in "The Harbor," in which he presents
the ideals that have guided a young man of our day and generation. Yet,
here we are, in a strange world indeed--the greatest spirits hurling
themselves into the strife of ninety-mile-an-hour living, only to be
tossed aside to make way for younger and harder workers, more efficient
thinkers. The strange growling beast of a great American city, the wide
acres of efficient irrigated farming, with the workers in each, have yet
even partially to be interpreted by the genius of fiction. When it has
been done by the great seers, we will find answered many questions which
puzzle us to-day. Not the mirror but the cosmic microscope must be used
as the tool. It will not be done by one man; it will take a literary
army--let the advance guard come with our generation!
And of Romance--what will we say of the tales which take us away from
the dusty world of every-day duties and responsibilities, into a magic
turmoil of brave deeds and devoted lovers? We must not forever be
muddling about in the mundane sphere in which we make our bread and
butter--we must at times for wealth and happiness gaze through
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
We of the Anglo-Saxon race have a glorious heritage in the Waverley
Novels. Sometimes, we are told that Sir Walter Scott is becoming a
memory, and that of the past generation; but many feel, and I am of that
number, that the author of "Ivanhoe," "Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward"
and the score of other yarns which have charmed youth and age for now
well-nigh a century has a permanent place in our literature, perhaps
only surpassed by William Shakespeare. Lucky is the boy or girl who has
grown up, and the older persons who still sojourn with the Knights and
Ladies, the Kings and Queens, the Highland Fairies, the human serfs who
march in an endless, enduring procession through the pages of the Prince
of story tellers. For such readers the Past is hallowed with a magic
circle that defies tawdriness. How pleasant it is for one who lives in a
roaring city to be able by reaching to the book-shelf to forget the
affairs of the day and to live in the pomp and pageantry, the heroics
and devotions of the Past. The lover of Romance may well say to the
reader of modern realism, "Why read of slums, of offices, and city
suburbs when you may ride out with Prosper l'Gai in Hewlett's 'Forest
Lovers' or be partner in countless intrigues of love and swordsmanship
through a dozen of Alexander Dumas' yarns'?" Why indeed?--we sometimes
wonder.
It is a marvellous gift, that of the man who can look back into the past
and make it alive and breathing for the readers of the present. It is
dangerous to take Dumas and Scott for our guides to true history, as
they have too often twisted the facts in order to spin a good tale, but
as revealers of the atmosphere of history, they are unsurpassed even by
the greatest historians, and if we have the atmosphere we have a rich
and splendid background in which to place the facts. We may sojourn in
ancient Carthage by reading Flaubert's "Salammbo," in Rome by
Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis," in Pompeii by Bulwer Lytton's "The Last Days
of Pompeii," in early England by Scott's "Ivanhoe." Even those scornful
individuals who pride themselves upon being "men of the world" have
something to learn if they have only studied their own time as it goes
fleeting past. For facts let us turn to the scientific historians, but
for life to the historic romances.
Let us find justification of each tale, not in its historical accuracy,
but in the fact that "it helps the ear to listen when the horns of
Elf-land blow." It is for this that we will read them,--that we may
awake refreshed as from a plunge in the springs of Mount Olympus. If
they do not revivify our jaded senses, and awake our tired vision to the
beauties of character and nature of the world in which we live, we may
lay them aside and be sure that the author does not measure up to the
proper standard. The love of a story is deeply ingrained in the human
heart. The baby, before he can read, listens, fascinated, to the
paraphrase of some classic fairy tale related by his mother; the
minnesinger of old in the mediaeval castle charmed the tired fighters
with tales of greater love and chivalry; the medicine man recounted to
the savage tribe the sagas of their ancestral struggles and triumphs; we
all love to hear the man talk who has been to strange lands and seen
strange peoples. It is the cry of human nature for accounts of the
doings of men in worlds in which we live not that makes the tremendous
demand for the novels of the day. Let us remember, however, that the
old story tellers, the medicine men and the mothers with their infants
at their knees told tales that really fed souls in warming the hearts
and awakening the intellects of their eager listeners. The plumed
knight buckled on his armor with more vigor, and attempted, the next
day, to outdo the deeds of the minnesinger's hero; the child lived in
fairyland and found a background for his playing and dreaming; the
savage warrior felt more keen to go upon the warpath to uphold the
tradition of his ancestors who were watching him from their places in
the Happy Hunting Ground.
These stories were of the staff of life to their hearers. How many of
the novels you read bring nothing but the means of wasting an hour?
Grown people to-day must find their stories in books: there do not
frequently come in our way travellers who have been overcome with the
mystery of far-off places; we have no longer medicine men who sing of
the glories of our ancestors; we perforce must turn for our minnesinger
to the printed page.
Let that page be worth while! Insist upon reading a story that means
something; either that gives you a more sympathetic understanding of
your fellow men, or an inspiration and refreshment by allowing a glimpse
through that "magic casement" which opens to the world of Kings and
Princes, Castles and Feudal Keeps, or to the mountain where dwelt the
Giant or to the seas upon which sailed the Pirates of your boyhood.
When novels reveal unknown vistas of beauty and delight, or present
ideas that jog our thoughtless complacency, they are of the stuff that
intensifies and glorifies existence. They keep a man's mind from being
commonplace and mongrel. Let us all be Kentucky thoroughbreds in the
way we look upon the world. Chafe at your bit, stamp the ground and be
eager to get away at the front when the barrier goes up. Anyone can be
an "also ran." A good story is often tonic enough to turn an "also ran"
into a winner!
*CHAPTER IV*
*HISTORY AND YOUR VOTE*
We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do,
and not what they ought to do.--BACON
One of the greatest evils into which a democracy may inadvertently slide
is an indifference upon the part of the populace to the political issues
of the day. We have upon several occasions in our history passed
through periods of almost unlimited commercial prosperity during which
everyone has been too much absorbed in the pursuit of power and riches
to give a thought to the affairs of government, with the result that our
state and national affairs have lapsed into disgraceful conditions of
inefficiency and moral laxity. Such periods have paved the way to
corrupt boss rule and throttling machine politics.
Ignorance, which always comes with indifference, and yet is most
pernicious when most active, is another extreme and vital danger. It
must be evident to every thinking man or woman, that a nation whose
political destinies are in the hands of the people with their almost
universal franchise should be made up of voters who are alive and
thinking. "Read and reflect on history; it is the only true
philosophy," wrote Napoleon Bonaparte in his instructions pertaining to
the education of his only son, the King of Rome. The great Emperor must
have realized that his phenomenal success in ruling men and establishing
law had as an important part of its foundation his knowledge of the
affairs of men in the past. Without suggesting that we should all be
Napoleons, it seems true that our political fabric would be infinitely
more stable, if the rank and file of American citizens should feel it a
duty "to read and reflect on history."
With our ever-increasing number of ignorant Southern European
immigrants, who have come from countries where republican forms of
government are practically unknown, it seems that our inherited
tradition of a republican democracy will be undermined through
ignorance, unless, indeed, these new citizens be given an understanding
of our history and the meaning of our systems.
To-day many specious types of radicalism, that are for the most part
pleasant Utopian dreams of the future, standing upon no foundation and
drawing no nutriment from the past, are thundered about most seriously.
In life and in statecraft there is one great teacher,--Experience. A
man weighs the advisability of a certain step by his past experience,
and this must be the basis of thought when determining matters of
political science. A reader of American History may find food for
thought in comparing the manner in which the half-baked political
theorists of to-day come to their conclusions with that of the great
American statesmen of the past. To-day we are opportunists. Instead of
weighing experience and testing the future, we jump helter-skelter at
what seems of temporary value. In dreaming of the future you must
remember the past or your dreams are futile. Emerson somewhere tells
us, that when you are drawn into an argument upon moral values, you
should always ask your opponent whether he has carefully digested his
Plato. If he has not, you may placidly refuse to continue the
altercation, as he to whom Plato is unknown is unfit to talk with a
thinking man upon problems of higher morality. I believe that in like
manner we could close the mouths of many trumpeters of social uplift
through sumptuary legislation. Ask them if they have carefully read
their histories. If they have not, and probably the accent will be on
the "not," you may safely snub them, by insisting that they turn to the
past, before they have the right to ask people to listen to their talk
of the present and the future.
At the time of the founding of our Republic, in Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, and Alexander Hamilton we had three supreme _students_ of
government. Perhaps more than to any other one cause the success of our
"American Experiment" is due to the profound knowledge and scholarly
attainment of those three men. Upon them rested the responsibility of
founding a government "of the people, for the people, and by the people"
that would neither be subverted by the wiles of a demagogue or the power
of an oligarchy, nor become chaotic through the unrestrained influences
of the proletarian populace. To Jefferson we owe the Declaration of
Independence, to Madison a great part of the thought and the wording of
the Constitution, to Hamilton the body of the Federalist Papers. Their
thought was not the thought of the minute, but of all time. In all
their writings we can see their thorough grasp of the faults and virtues
of the governments of almost every nation in past ages. They knew, as
too few of our public men know, that the future cannot be made out of
whole cloth, but must evolve from the past. They had studied men and the
political needs and powers of men. The result has been the
establishment of a government that has stood the shock of almost a
century and a half, a period during which almost all other civilized
governments have been the prey not to peaceful but to violent evolution.
Upon the passing of the great Revolutionary triumvirate we were
fortunate in having men of the intellectual calibre of John C. Calhoun,
Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. They were thinkers as well as great
orators, students of the past as well as guardians of the present.
It is a profitable study to read of the youth of great statesmen.
Almost invariably you will find them as young men such as would to-day
be sneered at as "book-worms." Napoleon, Pitt, Gladstone, Cavour,
Mirabeau, the great Americans and many, many others before they entered
public life were profound followers of the goddess of learning. It is
not surprising to find that many of them obtained wisdom and enthusiasm
from the pages of Plutarch's "Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans."
It was in Greece and Rome that we find the origins of most of our laws
and institutions, and in the lives of the men who helped to establish
them we may read of the tests and needs in their development.
Considering the studies of great men it is always amusing to read the
calendar which, upon the request of Mr. Madison, Senior, it is said,
Jefferson arranged for the working hours of James Madison, Junior.
Please note that Madison's health broke down from overstudy while at
Princeton, and it is not to be wondered at, for here is the schedule:
until eight in the morning he should confine himself to natural
philosophy, morals and religion; from eight until twelve, read law and
condense cases, "never using two words where one will do"; from twelve
to one, read politics in Montesquieu, Locke, Priestley, Malthus, and the
Parliamentary Debates; in the afternoon relieve his mind with history,
and when the evening closes in, regale himself with literature,
criticism, rhetoric, and oratory.
In those days they indeed believed in thoroughly equipping themselves
for public life!
A few years ago there was an agitation afoot in favor of establishing
the systems of the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall. In the North,
the South, the East, and the West it was hailed by the spellbinders as
the cure-all for corrupt legislation and undesirable laws. It was
argued that citizens, who did not have enough political acumen to elect
honest and efficient representatives, would have enough to become their
own law-makers. In the height of the political campaign Nicholas Murray
Butler, the President of Columbia University, published a small book
entitled "Why Should We Change Our Form of Government?" The author
presented the hazardous risk that our profoundly important
representative system would run of being subverted into a chaotic
absolute democracy by instituting laws that would deprive the executive,
legislative, and judicial departments of their independence and
prestige. The republican forms would lapse back two thousand years to
those democratic systems of the Grecian states that too invariably paved
the way to the despotism of tyrants or the chaos of mob rule.
The title of the essay was rather startling to those who had been
advocating the new measures without having thoroughly analyzed their
true meaning and import. The distinguished scholar brought clear
thinking to bear upon the situation, whereas before it had been befogged
in the spread-eagle oratory of demagogues, and the catch-as-catch-can
subtleties of ignorant theorists. Clear thinking, President Butler's
and that of others, won the day and the measures are now well-nigh
forgotten. I mention this as but an instance of the value to our nation
of men who have political and historical knowledge with the ability to
think clearly upon the important points of our social progress.
I heard President Wilson, some months before he entered upon his
distinguished political career, address in an informal manner a group of
University students. He said in part (my quotation is rather a
paraphrase, as I would not dare to transcribe from memory the words of
the most perfect stylist of our time): "Gentlemen, in many European
countries in times of national crises and disturbances the nation looks
to the Universities and the question is asked, 'What do the young men of
the Universities think?' In America unfortunately this question is
rarely asked, as all realize that the men at the Universities _do not
think_."
This is a bitter arraignment of the intellectual life at our
universities, and if the speaker's conclusion was correct the same must
to a great degree be said of the intellectual life of our nation. The
public's antipathy to broad political matters is the most dangerous vice
that can undermine a republic, and it is the one that is most seriously
affecting ours. It would be extraordinary, if it were not so pathetic,
the way in which, without taking toll of the experience of the past,
without drawing analogies nor seeking wisdom, we go muddling, blundering
on into the future.
That there is nothing new under the sun is perhaps more true in matters
pertaining to political problems than in any other branch of affairs.
History repeats itself, repeats itself, repeats itself, as if it never
grew tired of begging the world to learn true lessons. In proportion as
the number of our citizens appreciate that truism and sincerely pursue
its corollaries, we will have a sound political condition.
When Aristotle, a wise man in his generation, said that it was in the
nature of human institutions to decay, he knew whereof he spoke. It is
painfully apparent to the student of history and governments. What were
the seeds of decay that smouldered and finally undermined the Grecian
democracies, the power of Carthage and of Tyre, the world-embracing
Roman Empire, the Venetian Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, proud Spain
of Charles V, and France of the seventeenth century? Has the English
Empire run its course to make way for the more vital power of the
Germanic People? In each and every one of these decadences, if we wish
our national life to retain its pristine spirit, there are lessons to be
learned by the United States of America. Our experiment has not
necessarily met the test of time. Our nation is not liable to be the
exception from those that have slid down the path to ruin. There is a
Germany, despotic yet powerful, that perhaps must some day be met in
mortal combat; if the danger lies not there, perhaps it will be another.
In any case our loins must be girt with power and strength, our
citizenship must be hardy, our political fabric solid.
To retain our virtues, to preserve our national life from decay, is the
responsibility upon the shoulders of our generation. It is for this
that we must "read and reflect on history" and apply it directly to
life. What an analogy may be drawn between the Roman Usurpers in the
time of the Empire's decadence throwing money at the street crowds to
obtain their support, and our modern politicians bidding for the old
soldier vote by passing absurdly extravagant pension bills! This mulct
of the treasury is now on the wane, but is the new power in politics,
the labor unions, going to obtain legislation and favors because it can
poll a large vote upon election day? Such things are signs of
decadence. Must we not learn from the French Revolution that its
failure as a constructive force was due to an attempt to legislate
morality into existence--and yet we continue to pass as laws measures
that have truly been dubbed "amendments to the Ten Commandments." How
many of the great nations and institutions have had their backs broken
through too excessive centralization, yet, to-day there are but few
individuals and no political party that stand in opposition to our
ever-increasing tendency towards federalism, in contradistinction to
community government. Until the outbreak of the World War, England,
Germany and Russia each had a terrible internal problem: England
attempting to Anglicize Ireland, Russia to Russianize Poland, Germany to
Germanize Alsace and Lorraine. There was this thorn in the side of each
nation: by brute force they were trying to denationalize another
country. England was failing after three hundred years of wasted men
and resources, Russia was covering a volcano that had smouldered for
generations, after over forty years Germany had as ugly a wound to nurse
as in the beginning. Yet with these examples, good Americans, with
confident smiles, for three years have been laughing at the Democratic
administration on account of their Mexican policy. "Conquer Mexico,"
the wiseacres say. Yes, conquer Mexico the way England has tried and
failed to conquer Ireland!
The political value of history lies in its disclosures of the defects
that have brought on decay, and the stumbling blocks that make trouble.
In reading history we must keep our eyes on the present. It is
unreasonable to believe that our government is an infallible one, or
that our national existence, maintained with the most stable
governmental authority, combined with the widest possible latitude for
the liberty of men, is any more infallible than the many other systems
that have met with disaster in the past. The reading of history is
valuable, in that it enables us to have those visions of the future that
will be fruitful in that they are moulded by our experiences in the
past. Such visions, inculcating power of judgment, are never more
requisite than in these days in which the blind pacifist, the quack
reformer, the misguided theorist, and the wide-promising demagogue are
abroad in the land. We must study our lessons of the past that we may
spurn those governmental cure-alls evolved, according to Alexander
Hamilton, "in the reveries of those political doctors, whose sagacity
disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction."
American history properly forms the most fruitful subject of study for
Americans, and yet one must have a wide background to obtain the proper
crop. One must soon be led to the investigation of our legislative,
executive and judicial functions as they developed through the evolution
of constitutional government in England. The democratic models traced to
the Grecian states, the seeds of "sans-culotte" philosophy that
Jefferson and Tom Paine brought from France, the thought of political
scientists such as Plato, Machiavel, Locke, and Montesquieu open fields
in which every reader may learn lessons that will guide his judgment in
the ever-important problems of the day.
A citizenship educated to a knowledge of the past is a bulwark that will
defend the integrity of our nation. Such a citizenship is in truth an
ideal in that it is unobtainable, but it is a splendid ideal and one
that should be our guiding star. In a government such as ours it is
intolerable that an educated man should cast his vote by habit, and yet
how often do we hear the opinion expressed that such and such a man
would vote the straight Democratic or Republican ticket no matter what
the platform, no matter who the candidate? This study of political
parties is itself fruitful. One hundred years ago the Democratic party
was the party of decentralization and "laissez-faire," but to-day, since
the Bryan influence has had such sway, it eclipses the Republican party
as the exponent of centralization and paternalism. There are, however,
thousands of voters who continue to vote the straight Democratic ticket,
believing that the party stands for the same principles as it did when
their fathers first voted. This is but an incident of man becoming an
indifferent, incapable political animal. Too much of such indifference
is a fatal disease to a country of universal franchise.
History has no business in the closet! "History and your Vote,"
gentlemen,--and now, in several states, you of the fairer sex,--is a
phrase worth remembering upon election day.
*CHAPTER V*
*CLIO'S VINTAGE*