[Greek: Ta môra gar pant' estin Aphroditê brotois.]
Eur. Troad. 989.
The wise Hecuba accused the frail Helen of throwing upon Aphrodite
blame which really belonged to no one but Helen herself. Can it be
that, now the whole world has turned sociologist, many of us are
guilty of throwing upon poor society blame that ought solely to attach
to us as would-be students of society? When emancipated spirits give
utterance to their views with regard to the iniquities of the
man-ruled world of the past, and describe the ideal eugenic world of
the future, in which woman is to be man's superior, and the family a
new thing under heaven, one wonders how far the nature of the views
and the character of the vision are determined by the deficiencies,
and how far by the exceptional endowments, mental and moral, of the
critic and prophet. When economists cross their scientific hearts, and
assure us on their honor as impartial students that, however much they
may regret to announce its speedy demise, the monogamous family is a
doomed institution, one is tempted to ask whether a few shrivelling
leaves of a brief season would be reliable authorities with regard to
the condition of a large tree at its roots. To anyone who inquires
whether a metaphor or an analogy is an argument, we will say that we
have known political economists who spoke of themselves and their work
in terms indistinguishable from those employed by students of the
so-called physical sciences.
We are free to confess that these perhaps inconsequential remarks
proceed from a middle aged person who is not a sociologist, or an
economist, or even an adept in the New History. That we make any
remarks at all is due to the fact that, as our title perhaps
indicates, a little too much sociological diet has induced in us a
condition analogous to nightmare. When a small boy of our
acquaintance, in a family not yet extinct, is afflicted with this
disorder, he invariably screams out lustily and runs to his mother.
Following his example as nearly as manners and circumstances permit,
we vent our feelings in THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW.
"But who forces you, in this free country, to feed upon sociological
diet?" This hypothetical question from a hypothetical reader admits of
an easy reply. It is impossible to earn one's living pent up in a
barricaded study, reading Greek; and outside of such a fastness, how
can one escape the amateur sociologist? He intrudes himself into your
most select circle at your club. He, or she, sends you through the
mail notices of "thon's" books and lectures. He preaches at you if you
go to church, and you make him an excuse for staying away. He assails
your ears at college commencements. He makes the _Congressional
Record_ duller. He solicits your vote for this and that candidate, on
the ground that they are advocates of a new freedom, or exponents of a
progressive social and political movement, or, at the very least,
stanch friends of the people. He writes editorials and letters in your
morning and evening newspapers, and articles in your favorite
magazine. He punishes you for your weakness in attending a public
dinner. He--or rather she--airs his--or rather her--most advanced
ideas when you are just beginning to sip your afternoon cup of tea,
and you are fortunate if, in your disgust, you do not play havoc with
the china of your hostess. Avoid sociological diet in the year of our
Lord one thousand, nine hundred and fourteen? It was far easier to
avoid the Plague in the year sixteen hundred and sixty-five.
We admit frankly that the amateur sociologist is not the only person
our weak nerves dread. We avoid a Pragmatist and a New Realist almost
as assiduously, and with but slightly more success. Latter-day
novelists, poets, statesmen, and educators, "uplift-men" in general,
and advocates of scientific efficiency in particular, preachers of
social service who blandly assume both that society wants their
services and that they have services to render, when what is chiefly
apparent is their own need of education--these and other sons of
thunder too numerous to mention have given us many a bad quarter of an
hour. But it is the amateur sociologist alone who is able to give us a
nightmare.
We confess that such was not always the case. We entered one of the
first classes ever taught in this country in what was then called the
Science of Society. We listened with amused interest, possibly with
profit, to the remarks, interspersed with puns, which the erudite
professor allowed himself to make on the subject of marriage as an
institution. Later we read ponderous books on this topic and kindred
ones, and we even plumed ourselves upon our advocacy of woman suffrage
and our practical interest in organized philanthropy. Political
economy and history were not neglected by us, and so we rounded out
the last century cherishing the delusion that we were somewhat
progressive. Alas, we were primitive enough to spell it with a small
"p." And now, but a few short years later, we are wailing in or about
a Sociological Nightmare! Is it that, in the natural course of things,
we have merely become conservative, have been caught up with, and
passed, by a more radical generation, and are taking out on them,
regardless of justice and of shifting metaphors, a spite caused by our
own weakness of mental digestion?
Perhaps so, perhaps not. Thus far we have not flung even the tiniest
of stones at the important study known as Sociology, nor have we meant
to hit any of its serious students. The banner under which we enlisted
as the humblest of privates, we still salute, and as the army of
workers marches on, we, droppers-out yet loyal, raise our feeble
cheer. But behold! we are caught in a frantic mob of camp-followers,
and we struggle in vain to extricate ourselves. And what a mob it is!
Men and women who call themselves "Progressives" without being able to
read a pedometer; anarchists who, with less sense than bulls, mistake
a red flag for a new Gospel; propagandists of peace who have no
respect for rest; advocates of nostrums who actually resent being
called quacks; women who rejoice in being "hikers;" philanthropists
who are doing their foolish best to make the under dog a mad one;
lecturers who convert their lungs into cash; fashionable women who
open their drawing-rooms to cranks, and their heads to whims;--but why
attempt an impossible description? It seems better to fall back upon
Matthew Arnold's more decorous expression of his feelings, in
_Bacchanalia; or, the New Age_:--
Thundering and bursting
In torrents, and waves,
Carolling and shouting,
Over tombs, amid graves,
See! on the cumbered plain
Clearing a stage,
Scattering the past about,
Comes the new age.
Bards make new poems,
Thinkers new schools,
Statesmen new systems,
Critics new rules.
All things begin again;
Life is their prize;
Earth with their deeds they fill,
Fill with their cries.
Have we, then, got at the root of the matter? Tired out with
"strenuosity," fatigued with American "progress," dinned with
lectures, conferences, civic forums, and all the other modes of
vociferous self-expression dear to this Age of Talk, are we, like the
poet, the poet who, be it remembered, wrote of Sophocles that he "saw
life steadily, and saw it whole," are we really longing for an
impossible golden reign of universal silence, and, in despair of
obtaining it, railing at what happens for the moment to be the most
noisy object within our dyspeptic range of hearing--the amateur
sociologist?
We are not sure that this is not the case, but why should we undertake
to analyze our own feelings? The main point is that we feel them; the
next point, almost as important to ourselves, is that we want to
express them. And who that is past fifty is not warranted in indulging
in mild objurgations when it is possible to overhear at a dinner
party, as the dominant note of an eager conversation between a lady
and a gentleman, that latest intruder into the limited vocabulary of
fashionable life, the ugly word "prostitute"! No one placed in so
astounding a situation would stop to reflect that, if he had overheard
such a conversation--save the mark!--two centuries ago, the dominant
word would have been, most assuredly, both shorter and uglier. Not for
us at least such cold philological comfort in the presence of our
arch-enemy, the amateur sociologist. Here we have caught him in the
innermost recess of civilization, caught him at our very dinner
table--a more loathsome and dangerous foe than the Satan-Toad squat at
the ear of sleeping Eve!
For where in all Creation's round
Can now a _sleeping_ Eve be found?
They are all awake--God bless them and save them!--awake and listening
to the amateur sociologist, or else to the sociological dramatist,
which is every whit as bad, or worse. They are awake and forming
drama-leagues, attending lectures for political education, giving
suffrage teas and balls, flocking to conventions, marching under
banners and "hiking" in squads, grabbing at slippery presidents,
writing their pretty fingers off, converting the tenets of the New
Morality into lullabies, in short, following a modern Pied Piper--into
what?
We are brought up with a shock before the blank wall of our own
question, and we are out of our nightmare. This world, even if in this
particular year of grace it does seem to be overstocked with
sociologists, is a pleasanter place to inhabit than a Hades tenanted
by gibbering ghosts. It is possible to advocate equal franchise and to
help along other causes in which one may believe without mistaking
one's heels for one's head, difficult though this may be in these
dancing days. We suspect that a suffrage ball in New York is in many
ways a less objectionable affair than a London masquerade of the early
eighteenth century given under the direction of the long forgotten
John James Heidegger. It is fairly certain that in the same city at
the same period "Orator Henley" was as convinced of his own
omniscience as any sociologist or political economist who discusses
the future of the family or white slavery before a woman's club. Every
age must cherish its pet variation of the standing illusion of the
race--that for our day and generation we are wiser than our ancestors
were for theirs. Who would not run after a good thing, and what better
things are there to run after than schemes for human regeneration,
even if we frequently find that our rainbow has not led us to a pot of
gold? Have we not been assured on good authority that out of the clash
of opinions truth emerges? Is it not the prime article of our
democratic creed that the _vox populi_ is the _vox dei_, and, even if
the _vox populi_ speaks with an unmistakably sociological twang, is it
not our duty, at the risk of being labelled "undesirable citizens," to
imagine, nay, to believe and aver, that we are listening to the dulcet
harmonies of heaven? What if that gruff old person, Dr. Samuel
Johnson, would, were he alive, assert in his most stentorian tones
that our strenuous democratic optimism is the vulgarest and the
shallowest philosophy ever permitted by a too indulgent Providence to
flourish under the sun! Is not the grumpy Doctor safely buried, and
common sense along with him?
But this is no way to shake off the effects of a nightmare. Let us
conclude in an humbler, more supplicatory strain. Will not our gifted
reformers, for a while at least, forbear to announce that they have
converted ethics into a science, and education into a highway to
Paradise? Will not our politicians admit between their speeches, that
people who question or censure their latest panaceas are, on the
whole, exemplary and fairly intelligent citizens, who in no other
respect than their momentary recalcitrancy seem to be fit candidates
for a jail or an asylum? Will not exponents of New History, New
Philosophy, and New Literature give a slightly larger portion of their
time to reading what a not altogether benighted past managed to
accomplish in those departments of human knowledge, speculation, and
imaginative creation? Will not suffragists and anti-suffragists call a
short truce for the purpose of admitting that, if a sense of humor and
a spirit of tolerance are totally banished from our devoted country,
the lot of future generations--if there are to be any--will be
somewhat parlous? Finally, will not the ladies and gentlemen who are
tearfully or gleefully forecasting the doom of the monogamous family,
occasionally condescend to glance at Homer's description of the
parting of Hector from Andromache and Astyanax, or at one of Raphael's
Madonnas with the Christ-Child, with the intent of asking themselves
whether in human evolution there are not other forces at work than
those dubbed economic? Let but these good men and women consider
without impatience their petitioner's modest requests, and he will
wish them Godspeed in their commendable if arduous and often thankless
task of regenerating the human race.