to which I would add that every man is also. The naval officers look
magnificent in their bright blue frock coats, their yellow buttons,
and their shining epaulets. These gorgeous hawks of war are decorated
by the government as lavishly as Nature, the greatest of all tailors,
fits out her birds of prey. A naval officer excels in brilliance the
appearance of a civilian, even as the gay feathers of a sparrowhawk
excel those of a sparrow.
Furthermore, every military and naval officer has a capable man to
look after his wardrobe. Not only are his various uniforms beautiful
in design and ornamentation, they are without spot or blemish. His
trousers are mathematically creased, his coat unwrinkled, his linen
like virgin snow. My suggestion is, that if you really want to get rid
of war, the first thing to do is to compel all professional warriors to
wear ill-fitting hand-me-downs, shabby and unpressed, and without gold
trimmings. The glamour and the glory would vanish with the gold.
Then I would abolish the dance of death. Instead of having perfect
drill, hundreds of men deploying with exactitude, I would make them
look like Coxey’s Army, every man for himself, and the devil take the
hindmost.
But above all, I would silence the drum and fife, and the big brass
band. Although I myself hate war, and should like to see it abolished,
whenever I hear the thrilling roll of the drums and the shrill scream
of the fifes, followed by the sight and sound of marching men, their
bayonets gleaming in the sunshine, I want to cry. A lump comes up in my
throat and I am ready to fight anybody or anything. If you really want
to get rid of war, you must not surround it with pomp and majesty, you
must not give it such a chance at our hearts.
Although wars are never started by warriors, but only by politicians
and tradesmen, for the very last place where a foreign war could begin
would be at Annapolis or West Point; still, there is no doubt that high
officers have a ripping time during a great war, and that the surviving
soldiers love to talk about it (among themselves) at their regular
reunions in later years. Shakespeare, himself no soldier, understood
perfectly how the professional feels. This is the farewell he put in
the mouth of Othello:
Farewell the tranquil mind: farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
Even so: Othello was a sentimentalist. He had more passion than brains.
That is why Iago and not Desdemona made him jealous; that is why,
with the loss of war and women, he lost everything. He was without any
intellectual resources.
The leaders of thought and the leaders of morals have usually been
against war. Although the historical books of the Old Testament and
the emotional Psalms celebrated the glory of war, the contemporary
sober-minded prophets were against it. They prophesied the coming of
universal peace, when the money spent on armaments would be devoted to
agriculture and to education. The appearance of Jesus was the signal
for peace on earth and good will to men.
Jonathan Swift, more than two hundred years ago, said that men were
less intelligent than beasts. A single wild beast would fight for his
food or his mate; but you could never, said Swift, induce a lot of wild
beasts to line up in dress parade, and then fight another set of wild
beasts, whom they did not know.
Benjamin Franklin, the wisest of Americans, immediately after the
Revolutionary War, which he had helped to win, said there had never
been a good war or a bad peace.
But although the wisdom and morality of mankind have been against war,
war goes on; the moment it breaks out in any country, all the forces
of sentimentalism are employed to glorify, yes, even to sanctify its
course. The first great casualty is Reason.
What shall we say of a scholar like the late Sir Walter Raleigh,
Professor of English Literature at Oxford? He continually ridiculed
religion for its sentimentality; but the moment the great war broke
out, no school-girl was more sentimental than he.
Thus the hope for peace lies not in the poets, the literary men, the
preachers and the philanthropists; the hope lies in hardheaded Scotsmen
like Ramsay MacDonald, whose idealism is built on a foundation of
shrewd sense.
XVIII
MAN AND BOY
F. P. A., in his excellent Conning Tower in the _New York World_ for
the Ides of March, pays a fine tribute to E. W. Howe and his paragraphs
long ago in the Atchison _Globe_. He says: “There were two paragraphs
that appeared just about the time we began reading the _Globe_, which
we are willing to bet were written by Ed himself. He was less oracular
in those days. They were something like the following:
‘We have been editing a newspaper for twenty-five years, and have
learned that the only thing a newspaper can safely attack is the
man-eating shark.
‘A boy thinks, “What a fine time a man has!” And a man thinks,
“What a fine time a boy has!” And what a rotten time they both
have!’”
There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that
they enjoy life. Having the honour of a personal acquaintance with both
F. P. A. and Ed Howe, it is my belief they both had a happy childhood
and that they are now having a good time in this strangest of all
possible worlds. No one can judge another’s inner state of mind, but as
these distinguished humorists are men of unusually high intelligence
I think they find life immensely interesting; and to be constantly
interested is to be happy.
I remember a magnificent reply made by F. P. A. to a remark of that
hirsute Englishman, D. H. Lawrence; the latter, commenting in that
tactless fashion so characteristic of foreign visitors to these shores,
said, “It must be terrible to be funny every day.” “No,” said F. P. A.,
“not so terrible as never to be funny at all.”
I spent an agreeable afternoon in Florida talking with Ed Howe, or
rather in hearing him talk. He told a succession of anecdotes and
stories, and it was clear that he not only enjoyed telling them, which
he did with consummate art, but that he enjoyed having them in his mind.
Why is it so many people are afraid to admit they are happy? I have a
large and intimate acquaintance with farmers; many of them are splendid
men. But how cautious they are in their replies to casual questions! If
everything is going as well as could possibly be expected and you ask
them how they are, they say, “Can’t complain.”
If a man says, “I have had and am having a happy life,” he is regarded
by many as being a shallow and superficial thinker; but if he says,
“My most earnest wish is that I had never been born,” many believe that
he has a profound mind.
With regard to the saying quoted from the Atchison _Globe_ that a boy
thinks a man has a fine time and a man thinks a boy has a fine time and
in reality both have a rotten time--well, the statement, whoever said
it, is shallow and untrue. When I was a boy I had lots of fun, and I
deeply pitied old men of thirty-two because I supposed they had no fun
at all. Then, when I became a man, I realised how enormously richer in
happiness is manhood than boyhood.
The average American boy has a pretty good time. What fun, on emerging
from school on Friday afternoon, to know that tomorrow is Saturday!
What fun to play games, to go on exploring adventures in neighbouring
woods, to have picnics and jollifications, to live a life of active
uselessness! The mere physical health of boyhood makes one feel like a
young dog released from a chain. “Mere living” is good.
I remember seeing a picture of an old man addressing a small boy. “How
old are you?” “Well, if you go by what Mama says, I’m five. But if you
go by the fun I’ve had, I’m most a hundred.”
Joseph Conrad, who was a grave and serious man, said he was neither
an optimist nor a pessimist. He did not think life was perfect, but
pessimism, he said, was intellectual arrogance. He made the point that
no matter what was one’s religion or philosophy, this at all events is
a spectacular universe.
To deny life, to show no appreciation of it, seems to me both
ungrateful and stupid. If you showed a man the Himalaya Mountains,
the ocean in a storm, sunrise in the desert, the Court of Honour in
1893, the Cathedral of Chartres, and he looked at them all with a
lack-lustre eye, we should think him stupid. Well, the universe itself
is tremendously spectacular, and the best shows in it are free. To go
through life in rebellion, disgust or even in petulance, is the sign,
not of a great, but of a dull mind.
How ridiculous it is for a boy to wish he were a man and how much more
ridiculous for a man to wish he were a boy! It is as silly as crying
for the moon. Instead of always longing for something beyond our reach,
why not simply make the best of what we have? This would be a platitude
if it were not that so very few people follow it.
There is certainly enough sorrow in the world, but I sometimes think
we should enjoy life more if we had more of the divine gift of
appreciation, if we were not so unappreciative. When Addison thanked
God for the various pleasures of life, he thanked Him most of all for a
cheerful heart.
More than two hundred years ago he wrote in the _Spectator_:
Ten thousand thousand precious gifts
My daily thanks employ;
Nor is the least a cheerful heart
That tastes these gifts with joy.
XIX
AMBITION
What do we really mean when we say of a man, “He is too good for this
world?” Do we mean exactly that, do we mean he is so far loftier in
character than the average person that he seems almost out of place in
a world like this? Don’t we rather mean that he lacks human sympathy
and understanding, and therefore can be of no real use to anybody?
If you remember the character of Hilda in Hawthorne’s novel, _The
Marble Faun_, you may remember that she used to be held up as an ideal
of the religious life. “Her soul was like a star and dwelt apart.” But
from the selfish sanctity of its seclusion, no real good resulted; no
one was aided or cheered in the struggle of life. No one could confide
in her, for she could not even confide in herself. Her nature may have
had the purity of an angel, but it lacked the purity of a noble woman.
She was no help to sinners; she was their despair. Her purity was like
that of one who hesitates to rescue a drowning man, for fear of soiling
his clothes.
Hilda gave up the world and worldly pleasure; easily enough, for she
abhorred it, and felt ill at ease in society. But though she gave up
many things precious to the average person, she had no conception of
the meaning of the word _self_-denial.
For the true sacrifice, if one wishes to be of real use in this world,
consists not in the giving of things, but in giving oneself. If a man’s
life consists not in the abundance of things which he possesses, so the
sacrificial life consists not in the number of luxuries one surrenders,
but in the devotion of oneself, in the denial of the will. There is a
certain kind of purity which is fundamentally selfish.
This manner of asceticism is not particularly common nowadays, and we
need not fear that it will be too generally practiced. I am calling
attention to it in order to show that selfishness may take on the mask
of purity or of respectability, a selfishness that springs from pure
moral motives and a longing for the elevation of character.
But there is another type of respectable selfishness that is far more
common, possibly more common in America than in any other country. It
is not usually recognised as selfishness, but regarded as one of the
greatest--perhaps the greatest--of the virtues. It is seen chiefly
among earnest and ambitious young men, who assume that life is not a
holiday, but a serious affair, a struggle, a strictly competitive race,
where if you stop a moment, even for reflexion, you are left behind.
We are bound to respect these men. They have at all events found out
half the secret of life. They have set before themselves some goal, in
politics, in business, in literature, and they are determined to reach
it. They are equally determined to gain the prize by no dishonourable
means. Their minds are full of the lessons learned from their
predecessors, men who by the sacrifice of temporary pleasures, by the
refusal to indulge in recreation or relaxation, have surpassed their
competitors and reached the top.
We are constantly told that it is only by intense concentration, by
terrific efforts day and night, and by keeping the end constantly in
view that one can attain success. Surely these young men are to be
admired, surely they are models, examples worthy of emulation?
Well, they are better than criminals, they are better than parasites,
they are better than drones. But their driving motive is selfishness.
Tennyson wrote _The Palace of Art_, Browning wrote _Paracelsus_,
because each of these poets knew that his individual danger was not
what is usually known as “temptation.” They knew that they would never
go to hell by the crowded highway of dissipation, for they were above
the mere call of the blood. Their danger lay in a high and noble
ambition, which has wrecked many first-rate minds.
Modern life tends to encourage this respectable selfishness. The
central law of the so-called science of Economics is selfishness. A
whole science is built on one foundation--that every man in the world
will get all he can for himself. The subject is naturally studied not
from an ethical, but from a scientific standpoint. Life is a race.
Now I believe that Efficiency--mere practical success in the world--is
as false an ideal as asceticism. If the morality of withdrawal is not
good enough, neither is the morality of success. Those deserve the
highest admiration and the most profound respect who have actually
aided their human brethren, who have left the world better than they
found it.
This is by no means a hopeless ideal of character. It is not necessary
to crush a tyrant or to organise a revolution or to reconstruct
society or to be a professional reformer. There are plenty of
professional reformers who have tremendous enthusiasm for humanity and
who have never helped an individual. Those who by unselfish lives and
consideration for others elevate the tone of the community in which
they live and who by their presence make others happier, these are the
salt of the earth. Their daily existence is more eloquent than a sermon.
American young men and women in our High Schools and universities
are not often face to face with the mystery of life. They have no
conception of the amount of suffering in the world. Their own lives are
comparatively free from it, in many cases free even from anxiety. These
boys and girls are for the most part sensible, alert, quick-witted,
and practical; what I should like to see would be a change in their
ideals from mere Success to something nobler. I should like to see them
devoting their intelligence and energy to the alleviation of suffering
and to the elevation of human thought and life.
If one still believes that the highest happiness and satisfaction come
from the attainment of any selfish ambition, no matter how worthy
in itself, it is well to remember the significance of the fact that
Goethe, acknowledged to be one of the wisest of men, made Faust happy
only when he was unselfishly interested in the welfare of others;
and to remember that Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the shrewdest of all
shrewd Americans, found the greatest pleasure of his long life in two
things--public service and individual acts of kindness.
XX
BIRDS AND STATESMEN
When, in the Spring of 1910, Theodore Roosevelt was on his way to
England from his African explorations, he wrote a strange letter to
the British Foreign Office in London. I call it a strange letter,
because it is the kind of epistle one would not expect to be sent by an
ex-executive of one country to the Foreign Office of another. He wrote
that during his stay in England he would like to make an excursion
into the woods, hear the English songbirds and learn their names; in
order that he might do this satisfactorily and intelligently, would the
Foreign Office please select some naturalist who knew the note of every
bird in England and request him to accompany Mr. Roosevelt on this
expedition?
Well, the head of the British Foreign Office was Sir Edward Grey and he
himself knew the note of every singing bird in England--a remarkable
accomplishment for one of the busiest statesmen in the world. He
therefore appointed himself as bird-guide for the ex-President of the
United States.
The two distinguished men stood on a railway platform one day in May
and were surrounded by reporters, who supposed that a new world-problem
of the first magnitude was on the carpet. But the two men told the
reporters that they were going away into the country for two days,
did not wish to be disturbed, and asked the journalists to leave them
alone. Accordingly, it was generally believed that Roosevelt and Grey
were absorbed in the discussion of international affairs, and as the
great war broke out a few years later, some went so far as to believe
then that it had its origin in this sinister interview.
Now, as a matter of fact, the two men did not mention either war or
politics; they went a-walking in the New Forest and every time they
heard the voice of a bird, Grey told Roosevelt the singer’s name.
They both agreed (and so do I) that the English blackbird is the best
soloist in Great Britain.
It is a curious fact that the four most famous birds in English
literature are none of them native in America. The Big Four are the
Nightingale, the Skylark, the Blackbird and the Cuckoo. From Chaucer to
Kipling the British poets have chanted the praise of the Nightingale.
And of all the verses in his honour, it is perhaps the tribute by Keats
that is most worthy of the theme.
Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oftimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
We never had nightingales in the United States until Edward W. Bok
imported them into his Bird Paradise in Florida. Previous attempts
to bring them over had failed; the birds invariably died. Some
investigators declared that this tragedy was owing to the change of
diet; but of course the real reason for their death was American
poetry. After the nightingales had listened for centuries to Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, etc., the change to the level
of American verse was too much for them, and they died of shock.
The English skylark leaves the grass and soars aloft, singing his heart
out, so that after he has disappeared in the sky, we hear his voice
coming down out of the blue, like a revelation. One of the poets calls
it a “sightless song.”
Shakespeare sends the skylark to the gate of heaven.
And Shelley’s poem on the skylark expresses the ethereal nature of the
soaring voice of this bird:
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and
Soaring ever singest.
American blackbirds do not sing well; the so-called crow-blackbird, so
common in flocks in autumn, makes a noise like tonsillitis, or as if he
had a boy’s voice in process of changing, or as if he were a hinge that
needed oiling. Our redwing blackbird, with his scarlet epaulets, has a
good-natured and perky wheeze, which can hardly be called singing. But
the English and Continental blackbird pours out of his throat the most
heavenly melody. One Winter day in Munich, in the midst of a snowstorm,
I saw a blackbird perched on a tree directly in front of the University
building. He was “hove to,” that is, he had his beak turned directly
into the wind, and as the snowflakes beat against his little face, he
sent straight into the gale the loveliest music. Tennyson has observed
how the voice of the blackbird loses its beauty in the hot Summer days.
A golden bill! the silver tongue,
Cold February loved, is dry:
Plenty corrupts the melody
That made thee famous once, when young;
And in the sultry garden-squares,
Now thy flute-notes are changed to coarse,
I hear thee not at all, or hoarse
As when a hawker hawks his wares.
The nearest we Americans can get to the English cuckoo is the
abominable cuckoo clock. The voice of the English cuckoo sounds exactly
like the clock, only of course you can’t train him to strike right. In
addition to his regular accomplishment, he is a ventriloquist and can
throw his voice a tremendous distance. One day, crossing a field in
Sussex, I heard the loud double note of the cuckoo, apparently directly
behind me. He was in reality a furlong away.
Wordsworth says:
O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear,
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off and near.
Concerning the all too common crimes of shooting, snaring, and eating
little singing birds, the English poet, Ralph Hodgson, has expressed
himself in words that ought to be everywhere read:
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in a vision
The worm in the wheat
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat:
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.
XXI
RUSSIA BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
The best way to invade Russia is by sea; and I advise those who
plan to visit the Soviet Republic to go via Stockholm. Copenhagen,
Christiania, Stockholm are three interesting cities and should be seen
in that order. Stockholm, the “Venice of the North,” is one of the most
beautiful, most picturesque, and most attractive places in the world.
It is surprising that the short sea voyage from Stockholm to Saint
Petersburg (now Leningrad) is not better known; it is enchantingly
beautiful. We left Stockholm at six o’clock in the evening of a fine
September day, and as our tiny steamer drew away, the sunset light
over the fair city hung a new picture on the walls of my mind. It took
some five hours to reach the Baltic, five hours of constantly changing
scenery, one view melting into another like a succession of dissolving
panoramas. Hundreds of miniature islands dotted with châteaux and
country houses; winking lighthouse towers; “the grey sea and the long
black land.”
An impossible half-moon lent the last touch of glory to the scene. We
stood on the top deck and beheld the spacious firmament on high, thick
inlaid with patines of bright gold; while the long level light of the
crazy moon fell across the darkening water and the myriad islands.
In the middle of the night we crossed the Baltic, and in the whitening
dawn entered the gulf of Finland. The air was nipping and eager, but
the sun rose in a cloudless sky. All day long the steamer nosed her way
through the blue sea, twisting and turning among the countless points
of the earth’s surface that were just able to keep their heads above
water. A few of these were covered with green grass, and supported
white farm buildings where laughing children accompanied by dignified
dogs ran out to see our transit; but for the most part these elevations
were bald, with a tall lighthouse as sole decoration.
At five in the afternoon we reached Helsingfors (still my farthest
north) and stepped ashore to spend six hours in seeing the town, the
boat not proceeding toward Russia until late in the night. The clouded
sky was low and harsh the next morning, and the sea was surly. Toward
noon it cleared, and early in the afternoon we saw the gilded domes and
spires of Holy Russia. After a long delay with passports, we drove
across one of the bridges over the Neva to our hotel at a corner of the
Nevski Prospekt. Although it was only September, the temperature was
under fifty, and seemed colder.