I was accompanied by my friend, A. K. Merritt, now Registrar of Yale
College, who will vouch for the truth of the story. Dusk was falling;
there was no wind. We had wandered into a scene of stagnant desolation.
Dead trees had fallen in rotten ruin across the trail, and the swampy
pools were covered with a green mantle of decay. Merritt was walking in
front and I close behind him. The gloom and depression of the scene in
the deepening dusk had affected our spirits, so that we had not spoken
for some time. Suddenly I thought of the scenery of Browning’s poem,
_Childe Roland_. The lines of that masterpiece of horror would well
describe this place, I thought; and I began to repeat them in my mind
without saying a word aloud. Then methought there was only one thing
needed to make the picture complete. That was the horrible horse, which
in the poem stood alone and sinister in the gathering night. If that
horse were here, I said to myself, this would indeed be the veritable
country of Childe Roland. Something impelled me to look behind my back,
and, to my unutterable surprise and horror, I found myself looking
directly into the eyes of a forlorn old horse. I let out a yell of
sheer uncontrollable terror.
Merritt was as startled by the yell as I had been by its cause. I asked
him if the horse was really there. It was bad to have him there, but
worse if he were not. Merritt reassured me on that point.
I suppose the poor old horse had been pensioned off by some farmer, and
had silently followed us on the spongy ground, either because he was
lonesome or because he wanted salt. But he gave me the shock of my life.
I have thought much about it since, and I am unable to determine
whether the appearance of the horse at the precise moment when I was
thinking of him was a coincidence--or was I all the time subconsciously
aware of his presence? That is to say, did the nearness of the
horse, even though I had no conscious knowledge of it, suggest to my
subconscious mind the lines from the poem? I wish I knew.
XLII
TRIAL BY JURY
When I was an undergraduate at Yale, we were fortunate in having as one
of our professors Edward John Phelps, who was unexpectedly appointed
minister to England by Grover Cleveland, and who, after making a fine
impression at the Court of _St. James_--do you know why it is called
that?--returned to his professorship. He was fond of making general
statements, not only concerned with his specialty, the law, but on
anything that rose to the surface of his mind; so that to take his
course was in itself a liberal education.
I well remember his beginning one lecture by saying emphatically,
“Trial by jury is a good thing which has outlived its usefulness.”
I believe that when he made that statement, he spoke the truth. If
it was true then, it is certainly true now; nothing has happened
since to improve the situation, or to make jury trials fairer or
less expensive to the state. In America, we have two pieces of
obsolete machinery--the electoral college and trial by jury. When I
began university teaching, one of my freshman pupils made the only
interesting contribution to the workings of the electoral college
that I have ever seen. I gave out as a theme subject, “The Electoral
College,” and the first theme handed in opened with this sentence--“I
do not believe in the Electoral College.” Well, neither did I, so
thus far I agreed with my pupil; I read the next sentence to get
his reasons; it was the next sentence that contained the original
contribution to the subject, “The trouble is,” wrote the freshman,
“that in the Electoral College everybody chooses snap courses.”
Now the original idea on which the scheme of trial by jury was founded
was as good as human ingenuity could devise. Any person accused of
anything involving legal punishment was to be tried by a jury of his
peers--twelve average, common-sensible, fair-minded men, who, after
hearing all the evidence and the pleas of the lawyers, would bring in
a verdict, which presumably would be in accordance with the facts, and
therefore just. But in the course of time, although human nature has
not changed, circumstances have, and it is difficult to avoid today the
conclusion that the chief qualification for a member of a jury is that
he should not be fit to serve. Unfitness is the only fitness. Anyone
who has an opinion is barred; in order therefore for one to be eligible
he must be one who knows little of the world in which he lives and
who is curiously insensitive to what everybody is talking about. In a
recent editorial in the _New Haven Journal-Courier_, the point is well
made.
An intelligent man even with prejudice would appear to be a better
person to entrust the decision of life or death with, after the
presentation of the evidence and the interpretation of it by
counsel and the judge’s charge, than an ignorant person who knows
too little of current life to form any opinions whatever upon any
subject.
Furthermore, it frequently happens that after a trial lasting for
months the jury disagree, making another trial necessary, and involving
an enormous waste of public money. There ought to be some better way of
reaching a decision.
Then the very fact that the members of a jury are apt to be below
rather than above the average person in intelligence, makes them
particularly susceptible to emotional response when skilfully handled
by a clever criminal lawyer. Only a short time ago a jealous woman
deliberately murdered her husband and the woman she suspected,
although neither then nor at any time were they caught in a
compromising situation; at the trial the evidence certainly looked
black because it was all against the murderess. She was, however, an
attractive physical specimen. Her lawyer stood her up in front of the
jury, put his arm around her, and defiantly asked the jury if they
were going to put to death this beautiful woman whose only offence was
that she was a defender of the ideals of the home, American ideals.
Should she, who stood so nobly and resolutely for family purity, be
slaughtered? The jury acquitted her.
Furthermore, jury verdicts, instead of being in accordance with the
evidence and with the law, are often determined by local sentiment.
I remember two events in America at the same time, only in widely
separated parts of our country. In the first instance, a husband who
had for some time suspected his wife, happened to stumble upon the
unmistakable proof of guilt; in a transport of rage, he killed his man.
He was convicted of murder in the first degree, but the death sentence
was commuted to imprisonment for life. He is in prison now. In the
second instance, a husband hearing that his wife had gone to a hotel
with another man, deliberately armed himself, went thither and killed
both. The local jury instantly acquitted him, and he was a popular hero.
I do not believe in capital punishment, and should like to see it
abolished. But its sole merit, acting as a deterrent to crime, can be
realised only in a country like England, where trials are conducted
with absolute formality, where a decision is speedily reached, and
where the verdict of guilty is speedily followed by execution. In the
United States the murderer is too often a romantic hero, and has a long
career as a great actor, whether or not he is convicted.
It seems to me that the best judges of any case are those who by
education and training are best qualified to judge. It is significant
that in Connecticut the prisoner may now choose to be tried by three
professional judges rather than by twelve incompetent men. In a recent
famous instance the prisoner did make that choice.
Too often a public trial by jury becomes a public scandal; of greater
harm to the community and to the state than the crime of which the
prisoner is accused.
Mark Twain said: “We have a criminal jury system which is superior to
any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty
of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t
read.”
XLIII
ATHLETICS
The whole world, with the exception of India, China, Siberia and
a few other countries, has gone wild over athletics. Although new
stadiums and amphitheatres are in process of construction everywhere,
it is impossible to accommodate the crowds. Millions of people have
apparently the money and the time to devote to these spectacular
contests, and many more millions “listen in” on the radio. In England
last June Wimbledon was not half large enough to hold the frantic crowd
that wished to see the tennis matches; the same is true of France.
At a recent wrestling contest in Austria, after all the seats were
taken, the gates were broken down by the mob of spectators who wished
to enter; about 150,000 people saw a prize fight in Chicago and it is
significant of the times that the only vacant seats were the cheapest.
Every newspaper devotes an immense amount of space to sporting news;
and all the leading daily journals employ a highly paid staff of
experts on sports, who keep the public agog with excitement before
every contest and who endeavour to satisfy its curiosity after the
battle is over.
Now there are some pessimistic philosophers who look upon all this
athletic fever as a sign of degeneration, as evidence of the coming
eclipse of civilisation. They point out that during the decay of the
Roman Empire there was a universal excitement over sports, and they
draw the inference that European and American civilisation is headed
toward disaster.
No one can read the future, although innumerable fakers are paid for
doing so. But it is at least possible that the ever-growing interest
in athletics, instead of being a sign of degeneration, is in reality
one more proof of the gradual domination of the world by Anglo-Saxon
language, customs and ideas.
Extreme interest in athletics, though it cannot be defended on strictly
rational grounds, is not necessarily accompanied by a lack or loss of
interest in intellectual matters. If one had to name the place and the
time when civilisation reached its climax, one might well name Athens
in the fifth century before Christ. If one compares Athenian public
interest in the tragedies of Sophocles with New York public interest
in musical comedy, the contrast is not flattering to American pride.
Yet that intellectual fervour in Athens was accompanied by a tremendous
interest in track athletics. Every Greek city was a separate state;
their only bond of union was the track meet held every four years and
called the Olympic Games, to which the flower of youth from every Greek
town contributed; and the winner of each event--a simon-pure amateur,
receiving as prize only a laurel wreath--was a hero for at least four
years.
From the strictly rational point of view it is impossible to defend or
even to explain the universal ardour over athletics, but it is best to
regard it as a fact, and then see what its causes are.
The majority of Anglo-Saxons have always had sporting blood, and the
Latin races are now being infused with it. I well remember a train
journey near Chicago during the darkest days of the World War. We
were all awaiting the newspapers. Suddenly a newsboy entered and we
bought eagerly. The man sitting next to me was a clergyman in Episcopal
uniform. He looked not at the front part of the paper, but turned
feverishly to the sporting page, which he read carefully. When I called
on the Very Reverend Dean of Rochester Cathedral, in England, Dean
Hole, I was shown into a room containing several thousand books. I
glanced over these and all I saw dealt exclusively with sport.
Many excellent men without sporting blood have protested against the
domination of athletics. The famous English novelist, Wilkie Collins,
published a novel, _Man and Wife_, which was a protest against the
British love of sports, in which both athletes and the public were
ridiculed. Why should thousands pay money to see two men run a race?
What difference did it make to civilisation which man won?
Yet, although it is easy to overdo excitement about athletics, the
growing interest in sport which has been so characteristic of France,
Germany and Italy during the last ten years is a good thing for the
youth of these countries and for their national and international
temper.
Years ago, the space occupied in England and in America by fields
devoted to various outdoor sports was in Germany and France used for
public gardens, where people sat and drank liquor while listening to
a band or watching some vaudeville. When I first travelled on the
Continent, I found only one tennis court and that was at Baden-Baden.
Today one finds everywhere in France and Germany tennis courts, golf
links and football fields.
It is surely not a change for the worse that a German student who used
to test his physical endurance by the number of quarts of beer he could
drink at a sitting tests it today in tennis, rowing and football, and
that the French students with silky beards, who used to strain their
eyes looking at women, now, clean-shaven and alert, are looking at the
tennis ball.
It is, of course, irrational to take an eager interest in a prize
fight, but if you have sporting blood you cannot help it. My father was
an orthodox Baptist minister. As I had never heard him mention prize
fighting, I supposed he took no interest in it.
But the day after a famous battle, as I was reading aloud the newspaper
to him, I simply read the headline, “Corbett Defeats Sullivan,” and was
about to pass on to something important when my father leaned forward
and said earnestly, “Read it by rounds.”
XLIV
A PRIVATE LIBRARY ALL YOUR OWN
A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with
punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see
that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof.
You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn
down the pages, you cannot use it familiarly. And then, some day,
although this is seldom done, you really ought to return it.
But your own books belong to you; you treat them with that affectionate
intimacy that annihilates formality. Books are for use, not for show;
you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up, or afraid to
place on the table, wide open and face down. A good reason for marking
favourite passages in books is that this practice enables you to
remember more easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly,
and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once
blazed a trail. You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and
recalling both the intellectual scenery and your own earlier self.
Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; the
instinct of private property, which is fundamental in human beings, can
here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils. One should have
one’s own bookshelves, which should not have doors, glass windows, or
keys; they should be free and accessible to the hand as well as to the
eye. The best of mural decorations is books; they are more varied in
colour and appearance than any wall-paper, they are more attractive
in design, and they have the prime advantage of being separate
personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight,
you are surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are
there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. You do not have
to read them all. Most of my indoor life is spent in a room containing
six thousand books; and I have a stock answer to the invariable
question that comes from strangers. “Have you read all of these books?”
“Some of them twice.” This reply is both true and unexpected.
There are of course no friends like living, breathing, corporeal men
and women; my devotion to reading has never made me a recluse. How
could it? Books are of the people, by the people, for the people.
Literature is the immortal part of history; it is the best and most
enduring part of personality. But book-friends have this advantage over
living friends; you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in
the world whenever you want it. The great dead are beyond our physical
reach, and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible; as for
our personal friends and acquaintances, you cannot always see them.
Perchance they are asleep, or away on a journey. But in a private
library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or
Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there
is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They
wrote for YOU. They “laid themselves out,” they did their ultimate best
to entertain you, to make a favourable impression. You are necessary to
them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked,
you look into their inmost heart of heart. The “real Charles Dickens”
is in his novels, not in his dressing-room.
Everyone should have a few reference books, carefully selected, and
within reach. I have a few that I can lay my hands on without leaving
my chair; this is not because I am lazy, but because I am busy.
One should own an Authorised Version of the Bible in big type, a good
one-volume dictionary, the one-volume _Index and Epitome_ to the
_Dictionary of National Biography_, a one-volume History of England
and another of the United States, Ryland’s _Chronological Outlines of
English Literature_, Whitcomb’s _Chronological Outlines of American
Literature_, and other works of reference according to one’s special
tastes and pursuits. These reference books should be, so far as
possible, up to date.
The works of poets, dramatists, novelists, essayists, historians,
should be selected with care, and should grow in number in one’s
private library from the dawn of youth to the day of death.
First editions are an expensive luxury, but are more interesting to
the average mind than luxurious bindings. When you hold in your hand
a first edition of the seventeenth century, you are reading that
book in its proper time-setting; you are reading it as the author’s
contemporaries read it; maybe your copy was handled by the author
himself. Furthermore, unless you have paid too much for it, it is
usually a good investment; it increases in value more rapidly than
stocks and shares, and you have the advantage of using it. It is great
fun to search book-catalogues with an eye to bargains; it is exciting
to attend an auction sale.
But of course most of us must be content to buy standard authors,
living and dead, in modern editions. Three qualities are well to bear
in mind. In getting any book, get the complete edition of that book;
not a clipped, or condensed, or improved or paraphrased version.
Second, always get books in black, clear, readable type. When you are
young, you don’t mind; youth has the eyes of eagles. But later, you
refuse to submit to the effort--often amounting to pain--involved
in reading small type, and lines set too close together. Third, get
volumes that are light in weight. It is almost always possible to
secure this inestimable blessing in standard authors. Some books are so
heavy that to read them is primarily a gymnastic, rather than mental
exercise; and if you travel, and wish to carry them in your bag or
trunk, they are an intolerable burden. Refuse to submit to this. There
was a time when I could tell, merely by “hefting” it, whether a book
had been printed in England or in America; but American publishers have
grown in grace, and today many American books are easy to hold.
Some books must be bought in double column; but avoid this wherever
possible, and buy such books only when economy makes it necessary
to have the complete works of the author in one volume. A one-volume
Shakespeare is almost a necessity; but it should be used for reference,
as we use a dictionary, never for reading. Get Shakespeare in separate
volumes, one play at a time. It is better to have some of an author’s
works in attractive form, than to have them complete in a cumbrous or
ugly shape.
Remember that for the price of one ticket to an ephemeral
entertainment, you can secure a book that will give strength and
pleasure to your mind all your life. Thus I close by saying two words
to boys and girls, men and women: BUY BOOKS.
XLV
THE GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR
Some distinguished novelists are like lofty peaks. Few ascend them
and those who do breathe rarefied air. There are writers whose fame
is apparently secure who have never had many readers, and there are
writers who have an enormous public and no fame. George Meredith and
Henry James were men of genius, and there will always be enough people
of taste to save some of their books from oblivion; but neither of
these authors made much money. Both Meredith and James would have liked
to have a million readers; perhaps it is to their credit that they made
no compromises to increase the sales of their works, perhaps they could
not have succeeded in such an undertaking had they tried.
While in the long run it is popularity that determines a writer’s
fame--not only Shakespeare, but every first rate English poet has today
many thousands of readers--there are also “trashy” books which sell
like gasolene, and there are trashy books which do not sell at all.
It is a comforting thought that the majority of trashy books have a
smaller sale than masterpieces, and that the best book ever written has
had, has, and will have the largest sale of all.
It won’t do to prefer posterity to popularity; posterity is more cruel
to the average writer than are his contemporaries. Shakespeare was the
most popular Elizabethan dramatist; Ben Jonson, the foremost press
agent of his time, said that his friend Shakespeare had surpassed all
the writers of Greece and Rome, which was exactly what John Dryden,
the foremost press agent of his time, said of his contemporary,
Milton. Gray’s _Elegy_, Byron’s _Childe Harold_, Tennyson’s _In
Memoriam_, Kipling’s _Recessional_, were popular two weeks after their
publication, and they are popular now. In the long run the best books
have the largest sales.
In every age, however, there are certain novelists of prodigious vogue,
whose works nevertheless are to readers of good taste negligible.
The common people read them gladly and the Scribes and Pharisees
regard them with scorn. When our high school teachers and junior
college professors wish to relieve their systems of accumulated bile,
they pour out before their sceptical pupils bitter denunciations of
Harold Bell Wright, the late Gene Stratton Porter and Zane Grey.
They try to persuade their flocks that the books by these writers are
not interesting; but the flocks know that they are, and instead of
despising these novelists, they lose confidence in their instructors.
Far be it from me to pretend that Mr. Wright and Mr. Grey are literary
artists, or to enter the lists as a champion of their works. What I
have read of them has not left me with an insatiable appetite for
more. But here is a fact of interest to students of books and of human
nature--of the “works” of Porter and of Wright over nine million copies
have been sold, and as we rate five readers to every copy, each of
these two worthies has an audience of forty-five million readers. What
does this mean? Many will say it means that the public loves trash. I
don’t believe it; the majority of books are trash, and the majority of
books do not sell. Some critics and some unsuccessful writers say that
they could write just the same sort of thing if they would stoop to it;
I don’t believe it. The financial rewards of popularity are so great
that many writers would produce tales of adventure if they were sure of
a million readers.
It is possible that boys and girls read these books because of their
good qualities rather than because of their defects. Why is it that
these authors are Greatest Common Divisors? Why do they make the
largest appeal to the largest number of people?