PART IV

AMERICA

I

THE "DIVINE AVERAGE"

The great countries of the East have each a civilisation that is

original, if not independent. India, China, Japan, each has a peculiar

outlook on the world. Not so America, at any rate in the north. America,

we might say, does not exist; there exists instead an offshoot of

Europe. Nor does an "American spirit" exist; there exists instead the

spirit of the average Western man. Americans are immigrants and

descendants of immigrants. Putting aside the negroes and a handful of

orientals, there is nothing to be found here that is not to be found in

Western Europe; only here what thrives is not what is distinctive of the

different European countries, but what is common to them all. What

America does, not, of course, in a moment, but with incredible rapidity,

is to obliterate distinctions. The Scotchman, the Irishman, the German,

the Scandinavian, the Italian, even, I suppose, the Czech, drops his

costume, his manner, his language, his traditions, his beliefs, and

retains only his common Western humanity. Transported to this continent

all the varieties developed in Europe revert to the original type, and

flourish in unexampled vigour and force. It is not a new type that is

evolved; it is the fundamental type, growing in a new soil, in luxuriant

profusion. Describe the average Western man and you describe the

American; from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and always

the same--masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at once

good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if you

do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity,

intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, contemptuous of

ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognising

nothing but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spiritual

life, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the

conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child

with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for

what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naïf, precociously accomplished

brute.

One does not then find in America anything one does not find in Europe;

but one finds in Europe what one does not find in America. One finds, as

well as the average, what is below and what is above it. America has,

broadly speaking, no waste products. The wreckage, everywhere evident in

Europe, is not evident there. Men do not lose their self-respect, they

win it; they do not drop out, they work in. This is the great result not

of American institutions or ideas, but of American opportunities. It is

the poor immigrant who ought to sing the praises of this continent. He

alone has the proper point of view; and he, unfortunately, is dumb. But

often, when I have contemplated with dreary disgust, in the outskirts of

New York, the hideous wooden shanties planted askew in wastes of

garbage, and remembered Naples or Genoa or Venice, suddenly it has been

borne in upon me that the Italians living there feel that they have

their feet on the ladder leading to paradise; that for the first time

they have before them a prospect and a hope; and that while they have

lost, or are losing, their manners, their beauty and their charm, they

have gained something which, in their eyes, and perhaps in reality, more

than compensates for losses they do not seem to feel, they have gained

self-respect, independence, and the allure of the open horizon. "The

vision of America," a friend writes, "is the vision of the lifting up of

the millions." This, I believe, is true, and it is America's great

contribution to civilisation. I do not forget it; but neither shall I

dwell upon it; for though it is, I suppose, the most important thing

about America, it is not what I come across in my own experience. What

strikes more often and more directly home to me is the other fact that

America, if she is not burdened by masses lying below the average, is

also not inspired by an élite rising above it. Her distinction is the

absence of distinction. No wonder Walt Whitman sang the "Divine

Average." There was nothing else in America for him to sing. But he

should not have called it divine; he should have called it "human, all

too human."

Or _is_ it divine? Divine somehow in its potentialities? Divine to a

deeper vision than mine? I was writing this at Brooklyn, in a room that

looks across the East River to New York. And after putting down those

words, "human, all too human," I stepped out on to the terrace. Across

the gulf before me went shooting forward and back interminable rows of

fiery shuttles; and on its surface seemed to float blazing basilicas.

Beyond rose into the darkness a dazzling tower of light, dusking and

shimmering, primrose and green, up to a diadem of gold. About it hung

galaxies and constellations, outshining the firmament of stars; and

all the air was full of strange voices, more than human, ingeminating

Babylonian oracles out of the bosom of night. This is New York. This

it is that the average man has done, he knows not why; this is the

symbol of his work, so much more than himself, so much more than what

seems to be itself in the common light of day. America does not know

what she is doing, neither do I know, nor any man. But the impulse that

drives her, so mean and poor to the critic's eye, has perhaps more

significance in the eye of God; and the optimism of this continent, so

seeming-frivolous, is justified, may be, by reason lying beyond its

ken.

II

A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS

The American, I said, in the previous letter, is the average Western

man. It should be added, he is the average man in the guise of pioneer.

Much that surprises or shocks Europeans in the American character is to

be explained, I believe, by this fact. Among pioneers the individual is

everything and the society nothing. Every man relies on himself and on

his personal relations. He is a friend, and an enemy; he is never a

citizen. Justice, order, respect for law, honesty even and honour are to

him mere abstract names; what is real is intelligence and force, the

service done or the injury inflicted, the direct emotional reaction to

persons and deeds. And still, as it seems to the foreign observer, even

in the long-settled east, still more in the west, this attitude

prevails. To the American politician or business man, that a thing is

right or wrong, legal or illegal, seems a pale and irrelevant

consideration. The real question is, will it pay? will it please

Theophilus P. Polk or vex Harriman Q. Kunz? If it is illegal, will it be

detected? If detected, will it be prosecuted? What are our resources

for evading or defeating the law? And all this with good temper and good

conscience. What stands in the way, says the pioneer, must be swept out

of it; no matter whether it be the moral or the civil law, a public

authority or a rival in business. "The strong business man" has no use

for scruples. Public or social considerations do not appeal to him. Or

if they do present themselves, he satisfies himself with the belief

that, from activities so strenuous and remarkable as his, Good must

result to the community. If he break the law, that is the fault of the

law, for being stupid and obstructive; if he break individuals, that is

their fault for being weak. _Vae victis!_ Never has that principle, or

rather instinct, ruled more paramount than it does in America.

To say this, is to say that American society is the most individualistic

in the modern world. This follows naturally from the whole situation of

the country. The pioneer has no object save to get rich; the government

of pioneers has no object save to develop the country quickly. To this

object everything is sacrificed, including the interests of future

generations. All new countries have taken the most obvious and easy

course. They have given away for nothing, or for a song, the whole of

their natural resources to anybody who will undertake to exploit them.

And those who have appropriated this wealth have judged it to be theirs

by a kind of natural right. "These farms, mines, forests,

oilsprings--of course they are ours. Did not we discover them? Did not

we squat upon them? Have we not 'mixed our labour with them'?" If

pressed as to the claims of later comers they would probably reply that

there remains "as much and as good" for others. And this of course is

true for a time; but for a very short time, even when it is a continent

that is being divided up. Practically the whole territory of the United

States is now in private ownership. Still, the owners have made such

good use of their opportunities that they have created innumerable

opportunities for non-owners. Artisans get good wages; lawyers make

fortunes; stock and share holders get high dividends. Every one feels

that he is nourishing, and flourishing by his own efforts. He has no

need to combine with his fellows; or, if he does combine, is ready to

desert them in a moment when he sees his own individual chance.

But this is only a phase; and inevitably, by the logic of events, there

supervenes upon it another on which, it would appear, America is just

now entering. With all her natural resources distributed among

individuals or corporations, and with the tide of immigration unchecked,

she begins to feel the first stress of the situation of which the

tension in Europe has already become almost intolerable. It is the

situation which cannot fail to result from the system of private

property and inheritance established throughout the Western world.

Opportunities diminish, classes segregate. There arises a caste of

wage-earners never to be anything but wage-earners; a caste of

property-owners, handing on their property to their descendants; and

substantially, after all deductions have been made for exaggeration and

simplification, a division of society into capitalists and proletarians.

American society is beginning to crystallise out into the forms of

European society. For, once more, America is nothing new; she is a

repetition of the old on a larger scale. And, curiously, she is less

"new" than the other new countries. Australia and New Zealand for years

past have been trying experiments in social policy; they are determined

to do what they can to prevent the recurrence there of the European

situation. But in America, there is no sign of such tendencies. The

political and social philosophy of the United States is still that of

the early English individualists. And, no doubt, there are adequate

causes, if not good reasons for this. The immense wealth and size of the

country, the huge agricultural population, the proportionally smaller

aggregation in cities has maintained in the mass of the people what I

have called the "pioneer" attitude. Opportunity has been, and still is,

more open than in any other country; and, in consequence, there has

hardly emerged a definite "working class" with a class consciousness.

This, however, is a condition that cannot be expected to continue.

America will develop on the lines of Europe, because she has European

institutions; and "labour" will assert itself more and more as an

independent factor in politics.

Whether it will assert itself successfully is another matter. At

present, as is notorious, American politics are controlled by wealth,

more completely, perhaps, than those of any other country, even of

England. The "corporations" make it a main part of their business to

capture Congress, the Legislatures, the Courts and the city governments;

and they are eminently successful. The smallest country town has its

"boss," in the employ of the Railway; the Public Service Corporations

control the cities; and the protected interests dominate the Senate.

Business governs America; and business does not include labour. In no

civilised country except Japan is labour-legislation so undeveloped as

in the States; in none is capital so uncontrolled; in none is justice so

openly prostituted to wealth. America is the paradise of plutocracy; for

the rich there enjoy not only a real power but a social prestige such as

can hardly have been accorded to them even in the worst days of the

Roman Empire. Great fortunes and their owners are regarded with a

respect as naïf and as intense as has ever been conceded to birth in

Europe. No American youth of ambition, I am told, leaves college with

any less or greater purpose in his heart than that of emulating Mr.

Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller. And, on the other hand, it must be

conceded, rich men feel an obligation to dispose of their wealth for

public purposes, to a degree quite unknown in Europe. By these lavish

gifts the people are dazzled. They feel that the millionaire has paid

his ransom; and are ready to forgive irregularities in the process of

acquiring wealth when they are atoned for by such splendid penance. Thus

the rich man in America comes to assume the position of a kind of

popular dictator. He is admired on account of his prowess and forgiven

on account of his beneficence. And, since every one feels that one day

he may have the chance of imitating him, no one judges him too severely.

He is regarded not as the "exploiter," the man grown fat on the labour

of others. Rather he is the type, the genius of the American people; and

they point to him with pride as "one of our strong men," "one of our

conservative men of business."

Individualism, then, is stronger and deeper rooted in America than

elsewhere. And, it must be added, socialism is weaker. It is an imported

article, and it does not thrive on the new soil. The formulæ of Marx are

even less congenial to the American than to the English mind; and

American conditions have not yet given rise to a native socialism, based

on local conditions and adapted to local habits of thought. Such a

native socialism, I believe, is bound to come before long, perhaps is

arising even now. But I would not hazard the assertion that it is likely

to prevail. America, it would seem, stands at the parting of the ways.

Either she may develop on democratic lines; and Democracy, as I think,

demonstrably implies some kind of socialism. Or she may fossilise in the

form of her present Plutocracy, and realise that new feudalism of

industry which was dreamt of by Saint-Simon, by Comte, and by Carlyle.

It would be a strange consummation, but stranger things have happened;

and it seems more probable that this should happen in America than that

it should happen in any European country. It is an error to think of

America as democratic; her Democracy is all on the surface. But in

Europe, Democracy is penetrating deeper and deeper. And, in particular,

there can be little doubt that England is now more democratic than the

United States.

III

NIAGARA

I shall not describe Niagara; instead I shall repeat a conversation.

After a day spent in visiting the falls and the rapids, I was sitting

to-night on a bench on the river bank. The racing water-ridges glimmered

faintly in the dusk and the roar of the falls droned in unwavering

monotony. I fell, I think, into a kind of stupor; anyhow, I cannot

remember when it was that some one took a seat beside me, and began to

talk. I seemed to wake and feel him speaking; and the first remark I

definitely heard was this: "All America is Niagara." "All America is

Niagara," the voice repeated--I could see no face. "Force without

direction, noise without significance, speed without accomplishment. All

day and all night the water rushes and roars. I sit and listen; and it

does nothing. It is Nature; and Nature has no significance. It is we

poets who create significance, and for that reason Nature hates us. She

is afraid of us, for she knows that we condemn her. We have standards

before which she shrinks abashed. But she has her revenge; for poets

are incarnate. She owns our bodies; and she hurls us down Niagara with

the rest, with the others that she loves, and that love her, the virile

big-jawed men, trampling and trampled, hustling and hustled, working and

asking no questions, falling as water and dispersing as spray. Nature is

force, loves force, wills force alone. She hates the intellect, she

hates the soul, she hates the spirit. Nietszche understood her aright,

Nietszche the arch-traitor, who spied on the enemy, learned her secrets,

and then went over to her side. Force rules the world."

I must have said something banal about progress, for the voice broke

out:

"There is no progress! It is always the same river! New waves succeed

for ever, but always in the old forms. History tells, from beginning to

end, the same tale--the victory of the strong over the sensitive, of the

active over the reflective, of intelligence over intellect. Rome

conquered Greece, the Germans the Italians, the English the French, and

now, the Americans the world! What matters the form of the struggle,

whether it be in arms or commerce, whether the victory go to the sword,

or to shoddy, advertisement, and fraud? History is the perennial

conquest of civilisation by barbarians. The little islands before us,

lovely with trees and flowers, green oases in the rushing river, it is

but a few years and they will be engulfed. So Greece was swallowed up,

so Italy, and so will it be with England. Not, as your moralists

maintain, because of her vices, but because of her virtues. She is

becoming just, scrupulous, humane, and therefore she is doomed. Ignoble

though she be, she is yet too noble to survive; for Germany and America

are baser than she. Hark, Hark to Niagara! Force, at all costs! Do you

hear it? Do you see it? I can see it, though it is dark. It is a river

of mouths and teeth, of greedy outstretched hands, of mirthless

laughter, of tears and of blood. I am there, you are there; we are

hurrying over the fall; we are going up in spray."

"Yes," I cried as one cries in a nightmare, "and in that spray hangs the

rainbow."

He caught at the phrase. "It is true. The rainbow hangs in the spray! It

is the type of the Ideal, hanging always above the Actual, never in it,

never controlling it. We poets make the rainbow; we do not shape the

world."

"We do not make the rainbow," I said. "The sun makes it, shining against

it. What is the sun?"

"The sun is the Platonic Good; it lights the world, but does not warm

it. By its illumination we see the river in which we are involved; see

and judge, and condemn, and are swept away. That we can condemn is our

greatness; by that we are children of the sun. But our vision is never

fruitful. The sun cannot breed out of matter; no, not even maggots by

kissing carrion. Between Force and Light, Matter and Good, there is no

interchange. Good is not a cause, it is only an idea."

"To illuminate," I said, "is to transform."

"No! it is only to reveal! Light dances on the surface; but not the

tiniest wave was ever dimpled or crisped by its rays. Matter alone moves

matter; and the world is matter. Best not cry, best not even blaspheme.

Pass over the fall in silence. Perhaps, at the bottom, there is

oblivion. It is the best we can hope, we who see."

And he was gone! Had there been anyone? Was there a real voice? I do not

know. Perhaps it was only the roar of Niagara. When I returned to the

hotel, I heard that this very afternoon, while I was sunning myself on

one of the islands, a woman had thrown herself into the rapids and been

swept over the fall. Niagara took her, as it takes a stick or a stone.

Soon it will take the civilisation of America, as it has taken that of

the Indians. Centuries will pass, millenniums will pass, mankind will

have come and gone, and still the river will flow and the sun shine, and

they will communicate to one another their stern immortal joy, in which

there is no part for ephemeral men.

IV

"THE MODERN PULPIT"

It is a bright July morning. As I sit in the garden I look out, over a

tangle of wild roses, to a calm sea and a flock of white sails.

Everything invites to happy thought and innocent reverie. Moreover, it

is the day of rest, and every one is at leisure to turn his mind towards

pleasant things. To what, in fact, are most people on this continent

turning theirs? To this, which I hold in my hand, the Sunday newspaper.

Let us analyse this production, peculiar to the New World. It comprises

eight sections and eighty-eight pages, and very likely does really, as

it boasts, contain "more reading matter than the whole Bible."

Opening Section 1, I read the following headings:

"Baron Shot as Bank-teller--Ends Life with Bullet."

"Two fatally Hurt in Strike Riots at Pittsburg."

"Steals a Look at Busy Burglars."

"Drowned in Surf at Narragansett."

"Four of a Family fear a Dogs' bite" (_sic_).

"Two are Dead, Two Dying; Fought over Cow."

Section 2 appears to be concerned with similar matter, for example:

"Struck by Blast, Woman is Dying."

"Hard Shell Crabs help in giving Burglar Alarm."

"Man who has been Married three times denies the Existence of

God."

But here I notice further the interesting and enigmatic heading:

"Will 'boost' not 'knock' New York,"

and roused for the first time to something like curiosity, read:

"To lock horns with the muckrakes and to defend New York against all who

defame and censure it the Association for New York was incorporated

yesterday."

I notice also "Conferences agree to short rates on woollen goods," and

am reminded of the shameless bargaining of which, for many weeks past,

Washington has been the centre; which leads me to reflect on the

political advantages of a Tariff and its wholesome effect on the

national life.

Section 3 deals with Aviation and seaside resorts:

"Brave Lake Placid," I read, "Planning New Hotel."

"Haines Falls entertaining a Great Throng of People."

"Resound with the Laughter and Shout of Summer Throngs."

Section 4 consists entirely of advertisements:

"Tuning-up Sale," I read. "Buff-and-crimson cards will mark the trail of

all goods ready for the sale. We are tuning up. By September it is our

intention to have assembled in these two great buildings the most

fashionable merchandise ever shown. No one piece of goods will be

permitted to linger that lacks, in any detail, the æsthetic beauty

demanded by New York women of fashion. Everything will be better and a

definite percentage lower in price than New York will find in any other

store. Do not expect a sale of ordinary proportions. To-morrow you will

find the store alive with enthusiasm. This is not a summer hurrah." And

so on, to the end of the page. Twelve pages of advertisements,

uninterrupted by any item of news.

Section 5 is devoted to automobile gossip and automobile advertisements.

Thereupon follows the _Special Sporting Section_:

"Rumsom Freebooters defeat Devon's first."

"'Young Corbett' is chipped in the 8th."

"Doggett and Cubs each win shut out."

"Brockett is easy for Detroit Nine."

Glancing at the small type I read:--

"Englewood was the first to tally. This was in the fourth inning. W.

Merritt, the first man up, was safe on Williams' error, and he got round

to third on another miscue by Williams. Charley Clough was on deck with

a timely single, which scored Merritt. Curran's out at first put Clough

on third, from whence he tallied on Cuming's single. Cuming got to

second, when Wiley grounded out along the first base line and scored on

Reinmund's single. Every other time Reinmund came to the bat he struck

out."

I pass to the _Magazine Section_.

On the first page is the mysterious heading "E. of K. and E." Several

huge portraits of a bald clean-shaven man in shirt sleeves partially

explain. E. is Mr. Erlanger, a theatrical impresario, and K. and E.

presumably is his firm. The article describes "the accomplishment of a

busy man on one of his ordinary days," and makes one hope no day is ever

extraordinary. The interviewer who tells about him is almost speechless

with emotion. He searches for a phrase to express his feelings, finds it

at last, and comes triumphantly to his close--Mr. Erlanger is a man

"with trained arms, trained legs, a trained body and a trained mind."

There follows: "The Story of a Society Girl," in which we are told

"there is a confession of love and the startling discovery that Dolly

was a professional model"; "The Doctor's Story," with a picture of a

corpse, "whose white shapely hands were clasped one over the other";

and "Would you Convict on Circumstantial Evidence?--A Scaffold

Confession. A True Story." I glance at this, and read, "While the crowd

watched in strained, breathless silence there came a sharp agonised

voice and a commotion near the steps of the scaffold. 'Stop! Stop! The

man is not guilty. I mean it. It is I who should stand there. Let me

speak.'" You can now reconstruct the story for yourself. Next comes "Get

the Man! Craft and courage of old-time and modern express robbers

matched by organised secret service and the mandate that makes capture

alone the end of an unflagging man-hunt." This is accompanied by

portraits of famous detectives and train-robbers.

There follows "_Thrilling Lines_," with a picture of a man who seems to

be looping the loop on a bicycle.

And the conclusion of the section is a poem, entitled "Cynthianna

Blythe," with coloured illustrations apparently intended for children,

and certainly successful in not appealing to adults.

Comment, I suppose, is superfluous. But it is only fair to say that the

whole of the press of America is not of this character. Among the

thousands of papers daily produced on that continent, it would be

possible, I believe, to name ten--I myself could mention five--which

contain in almost every issue some piece of information or comment which

an intelligent man might care to peruse. There are to be found, now and

again, passing references to European and even to Asiatic politics; for

it cannot be said that the press of America wholly ignored the recent

revolutions in Persia and in Turkey. I myself saw a reference to the new

Sultan as a man "fat, but not fleshy." England looms big enough on the

American horizon to be treated to an occasional gibe; and the doings of

fashionable Americans in London are reported somewhat fully. Still, on

the whole, the American daily press is typified by the specimen I have

analysed. Sensations, personalities and fiction are its stock-in-trade.

Why? The causes are well known, but are worth recapitulating, for they

are part of the system of modern civilisation.

The newspaper press is a business intended to make money. This is its

primary aim, which may, or may not, include the subordinate purpose of

advocating some line of public policy. Now, to make money, it is

essential to secure advertisements; and to secure advertisements it is

essential to have a large circulation. But a large circulation can only

be obtained by lowering the price of the paper, and adapting it to the

leisure mood of the mass of people. But this leisure mood is usually one

of sheer vacuity, incapable of intellectual effort or imaginative

response. The man is there, waiting to be filled, and to be filled with

the stuff easiest to digest. The rest follows. The newspapers supply the

demand and by supplying extend and perpetuate it. Among the possible

appeals open to them they deliberately choose the lowest. For people are

capable of Good as well as of Bad; and if they cannot get the Bad they

will sometimes take the Good. Newspapers, probably, could exist, even

under democratic conditions, by maintaining a certain standard of

intelligence and morals. But it is easier to exist on melodrama,

fatuity and sport. And one or two papers adopting that course force the

others into line; for here, as in so many departments of modern life,

"The Bad drives out the Good." This process of deterioration of the

press is proceeding rapidly in England, with the advent of the halfpenny

newspaper. It has not gone so far as in America; but there is no reason

why it should not, and every reason why it should; for the same causes

are at work.

I have called the process "deterioration," but that, of course, is

matter of opinion. A Cabinet Minister, at a recent Conference in London,

is reported to have congratulated the press on its progressive

improvement during recent years. And Lord Northcliffe is a peer. The

more the English press approximates to the American, the more, it would

seem, it may hope for public esteem and honour. And that is natural, for

the American method pays.

Well, the sun still shines and the sky is still blue. But between it and

the American people stretches a veil of printed paper. Curious! the

fathers of this nation read nothing but the Bible. That too, it may be

said, was a veil; but a veil woven of apocalyptic visions, of lightning

and storm, of Leviathan, and the wrath of Jehovah. What is the stuff of

the modern veil, we have seen. And surely the contrast is calculated to

evoke curious reflections.

V

IN THE ROCKIES

Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly upon the railway.

There was a little shanty of a station 8000 feet above the sea; and,

beyond, the great expanse of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, and

I determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told me

there was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, in

vain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by a

thin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of

recognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that

absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness

but independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, and

resumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell

faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I

wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idly

enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to

establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the

achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless

telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the

name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he

will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he has

exterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across the

mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent.

"Click--click--click--Pick--pick--pick--Pock--pock--pockets." So the

west called to the east, and the east to the west, while the winds

roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolate

iron road.

It was too late now for me to reach my hotel that evening, and I was

obliged to beg a night's rest. The yellow youth assented, with his air

of elaborate indifference, and proceeded to make me as comfortable as he

could. About sunset, the storm passed away over the plains. Behind its

flying fringes shot the last rays of the sun; and for a moment the

prairie sea was all bared to view, as wide as the sky, as calm and as

profound, a thousand miles of grass where men and cattle crept like

flies, and towns and houses were swallowed and lost in the infinite

monotony. We had supper and then my host began to talk. He was a

democrat, and we discussed the coming presidential election. From one

newspaper topic to another we passed to the talk about signalling to

Mars. Signalling interested the youth; he knew all about that; but he

knew nothing about Mars, or the stars. These were now shining bright

above us; and I told him what I knew of suns and planets, of double

stars, of the moons, of Jupiter, of nebulae and the galaxy, and the

infinity of space, and of worlds. He chewed and meditated, and presently

remarked: "Gee! I guess then it doesn't matter two cents after all who

gets elected president!" Whereupon we turned in, he to sleep and I to

lie awake, for I was disturbed by the mystery of the stars. It is long

since the notion of infinite space and infinite worlds has impressed my

imagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic

scheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands not

only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to

our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and space; but he

bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of

Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and

through,--that vision which, if it contracts space, expands the fate of

man, and relates him to the sun and the moon and the stars. I thought of

him as he crossed the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea at

sunset the tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest of

Ravenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of business, the chances

of war, the bitterness of exile, aware of the march of the sun about the

earth, of its station in the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricate

wheeling of the spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those bright

luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow of

Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter's intolerable blaze;

and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and their

order, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate

Essence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things and

all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tend

and in whom they rest.

And I recalled the passage:

"Frate, la nostra volontà quieta

Virtù di carità, che fa volerne

Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta.

Se disiassimo esser più superne,

Fôran discordi gli nostri disiri

Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne;

Che vedrai non capere in questi giri,

S'essere in caritate è qui necesse,

E se la sua natura ben rimiri;

Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse

Tenersi dentro alia divina voglia,

Perch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse.

Si che, come noi siam di soglia in soglia

Per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace,

Com'allo re, che in suo voler ne invoglia.

E la sua volontade è nostra pace:

Ella è quel mare al qual tutto si muove

Cio ch' ella crea o che natura face."[3]

And then, with a leap, I was back to what we call reality--to the

clicking needle, to the corner in wheat, to Chicago and Pittsburg and

New York. In all this continent, I thought, in all the western world,

there is not a human soul whose will seeks any peace at all, least of

all the peace of God. All move, but about no centre; they move on, to

more power, to more wealth, to more motion. There is not one of them who

conceives that he has a place, if only he could find it, a rank and

order fitted to his nature, higher than some, lower than others, but

right, and the only right for him, his true position in the cosmic

scheme, his ultimate relation to the Power whence it proceeds. Life,

like astronomy, has become Copernican. It has no centre, no

significance, or, if any, one beyond our ken. Gravitation drives us, not

love. We are attracted and repelled by a force we cannot control, a

force that resides in our muscles and our nerves, not in our will and

spirit. "Click--click--click--tick--tick--tick," so goes the economic

clock. And that clock, with its silly face, has shut us out from the

stars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now for

us no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that

ultimate point of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." "America

is a clock," I said; and then I remembered the phrase, "America is

Niagara." And like a flake of foam, dizzy and lost, I was swept away,

out into the infinite, out into unconsciousness.

The sun was shining brightly when I woke, and I had slept away my mood

of the night. I took leave of my host, and under his directions, after

half a mile along the line, plunged down into a gorge, and followed for

miles, crossing and re-crossing, a mountain brook, between cliffs of red

rocks, by fields of mauve anemones, in the shadow and fragrance of

pines; till suddenly, after hours of rough going, I was confronted by a

notice, set up, apparently, in the desert:

"Keep out. Avoid trouble. This means you."

I laughed. "Keep out!" I said. "If only there were a chance of my

getting in!" "Avoid trouble! Ah, what trouble would I not face, could I

but get in!" And I went on, but not in, and met no trouble, and

returned to the hotel, and had dinner, and watched for a solitary hour,

in the hall, the shifting interminable array of vacant eyes and blank

faces, and then retired to write this letter; "and so to bed."

Footnotes:

[Footnote 3:

"Brother, the quality of love stilleth our will, and maketh us

long only for what we have, and giveth us no other thirst,

"Did we desire to be more aloft, our longings were discordant

from his will who here assorteth us,

"And for that, thou wilt see, there is no room within these

circles, if of necessity we have our being here in love, and if

thou think again what is love's nature.

"Nay, 'tis the essence of this blessed being to hold ourselves

within the divine will, whereby our own wills are themselves

made one.

"So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold,

throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm as to the King,

who draweth our wills to what he willeth;

"And his will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves

that it createth and that nature maketh."

DANTE, _Purgatorio_, iii. 70-87 (trans. by Rev. Philip H.

Wicksteed, in the "Temple Classics" edition).]

VI

IN THE ADIRONDACKS

For the last few days I have been living in camp on a mountain lake in

the Adirondacks. All about me are mountains and unlumbered forest. The

tree lies where it falls; the undergrowth chokes the trails; and on the

hottest day it is cool in the green, sun-chequered wilderness. Deer

start in the thickets or steal down to drink in the lake. The only

sounds are the wood-pecker's scream, the song of the hermit-thrush, the

thrumming and drumming of bull-frogs in the water. My friend is a

sportsman; I am not; and while he catches trout I have been reading

Homer and Shelley. Shelley I have always understood; but now, for the

first time, I seem to understand Homer. Our guide here, I feel, might

have been Homer, if he had had imagination; but he could never have been

Shelley. Homer, I conceive, had from the first the normal bent for

action. What his fellows did he too wanted to do. He learned to hunt, to

sail a boat, to build a house, to use a spear and bow. He had his

initiation early, in conflict, in danger, and in death. He loved the

feast, the dance, and the song. But also he had dreams. He used to sit

alone and think. And, as he grew, these moods grew, till he came to live

a second life, a kind of double of the first. The one was direct,

unreflective, and purposeful. In it he hunted wild beasts that he might

kill them, fought battles that he might win them, sailed boats that he

might arrive somewhere. So far, he was like his fellows, and like our

guide, with his quick observation, his varied experience, his practical

skill. But then, on the other hand, he had imagination. This active life

he reproduced; not by recapitulating it--that the guide can do; but by

recreating it. He detached it, as it were, from himself as centre;

ceased, indeed, to be a self; and became all that he contemplated--the

victor and the vanquished, the hunter and the hunted, the house and its

builder, Thersites and Achilles. He became the sun and the moon and the

stars, the gods and the laughter of the gods. He took no sides,

pronounced no judgment, espoused no cause. He became pure vision; but

not passive vision. To see, he had to re-create; and the material his

observation had amassed he offered up as a holocaust on the altar of his

imagination. Fused in that fierce fire, like drew to like, parts ran

together and formed a whole. Did he see a warrior fall? In a moment the

image arose of "a stately poplar falling by the axe in a meadow by the

riverside." Did a host move out to meet the foe? It recalled the ocean

shore where "wave follows wave far out at sea until they break in

thunder on the beach." Was battle engaged? "The clash of the weapons

rang like the din of woodcutters in the mountain-glades." Did a wounded

hero fall? The combatants gathered about him "like flies buzzing round

the brimming milk-pails in the spring." All commonest things, redeemed

from isolation and irrelevance, revealed the significance with which

they were charged. The result was the actual made real, a reflexion

which was a disclosure, a reproduction which was a recreation. And if

experience, as we know it, is the last word of life, if there is nothing

beyond and nothing behind, if there is no meaning, no explanation, no

purpose or end, then the poetry of Homer is the highest reach of human

achievement.

For, observe, Homer is not a critic. His vision transmutes life, but

does not transcend it. Experience is ultimate; all the poet does is to

experience fully. Common men live, but do not realise life; he realises

it. But he does not question it; it is there and it is final; glorious,

lovely, august, terrible, sordid, cruel, unjust. And the partial,

smiling, unmoved, unaccountable Olympians are the symbol of its brute

actuality. Not only is there no explanation, there is not even a

question to be asked. So it is, so it has been, so it will be. Homer's

outlook is that of the modern realist. That he wrote an epic, and they

novels, is an accident of time and space. Turgeneff or Balzac writing

1000 years before Christ would have been Homer; and Homer, writing now,

would have been Turgeneff or Balzac.

But Shelley could never have been Homer; for he was born a critic and a

rebel. From the first dawn of consciousness he challenged and defied the

works and ways of men and the apparent order of the universe. Never for

a moment anywhere was he at home in the world. There was nothing

attainable he cared to pursue, nothing actual he cared to represent. He

could no more see what is called fact than he could act upon it. His

eyes were dazzled by a different vision. Life and the world not only are

intolerable to him, they are unreal. Beyond and behind lies Reality, and

it is good. Now it is a Perfectibility lying in the future; now a

Perfection existing eternally. In any case, whatever it be, however and

wherever to be found, it is the sole object of his quest and of his

song. Whatever of good or lovely or passionate gleams here and there, on

the surface or in the depths of the actual, is a ray of that Sun, an

image of that Beauty. His imagination is kindled by Appearance only to

soar away from it. The landscape he depicts is all light, all fountains

and caverns. The Beings with which it is peopled are discarnate Joys and

Hopes; Justice and Liberty, Peace and Love and Truth. Among these only

is he at home; in the world of men he is an alien captive; and Human

Life presents itself as an "unquiet dream."

"'Tis we that, lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife

Invulnerable nothings."

When we die, we awake into Reality--that Reality to which, from the

beginning, Shelley was consecrated:

"I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine--have I not kept my vow?"

He calls it "intellectual Beauty"; he impersonates it as Asia, and sings

it in verse that passes beyond sense into music:

"Life of Life! thy lips enkindle

With their love the breath between them;

And thy smiles before they dwindle

Make the cold air fire; then screen them

In those looks, where whoso gazes

Faints, entangled in their mazes.

Child of Light! thy limbs are burning

Through the vest which seems to hide them;

As the radiant lines of morning

Through the clouds ere they divide them;

And this atmosphere divinest

Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest.

Fair are others; none beholds thee,

But thy voice sounds low and tender

Like the fairest, for it folds thee

From the sight, that liquid splendour,

And all feel, yet see thee never,

As I feel now, lost for ever!

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest

Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,

And the souls of whom thou lovest

Walk upon the winds with lightness,

Till they fail, as I am failing,

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!"

This we call poetry; and we call the Iliad poetry. But the likeness is

superficial, and the difference profound. Was it Homer or Shelley that

grasped Reality? This is not a question of literary excellence; it is a

question of the sense of life. And--oddly enough--it is a question to

which the intellect has no answer. The life in each of us takes hold of

it and answers it empirically. The normal man is Homeric, though he is

not aware of the fact. Especially is the American Homeric; naïf,

spontaneous, at home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is he

right? This whole continent, the prairies, the mountains and the coast,

the trams and trolleys, the sky-scrapers, the factories, elevators,

automobiles, shout to that question one long deafening Yes. But there is

another country that speaks a different tongue. Before America was,

India is.

VII

THE RELIGION OF BUSINESS

In the house in which I am staying hangs an old coloured print,

representing two couples, one young and lusty, the other decrepit, the

woman carrying an hour-glass, the man leaning on a stick; and

underneath, the following inscription:

"My father and mother that go so stuping to your grave,

Pray tell me what good I may in this world expect to have?"

"My son, the good you can expect is all forlorn,

Men doe not gather grapes from of a thorn."

This dialogue, I sometimes think, symbolises the attitude of the new

world to the old, and the old to the new. Not seldom I feel among

Americans as the Egyptian is said to have felt among the Greeks, that I

am moving in a world of precocious and inexperienced children, bearing

on my own shoulders the weight of the centuries. Yet it is not exactly

that Americans strike one as young in spirit; rather they strike one as

undeveloped. It is as though they had never faced life and asked

themselves what it is; as though they were so occupied in running that

it has never occurred to them to inquire where they started and whither

they are going. They seem to be always doing and never experiencing. A

dimension of life, one would say, is lacking, and they live in a plane

instead of in a solid. That missing dimension I shall call religion. Not

that Americans do not, for aught I know, "believe" as much as or more

than Europeans; but they appear neither to believe nor to disbelieve

religiously. That, I admit, is true almost everywhere of the mass of the

people. But even in Europe--and far more in India--there has always

been, and still is, a minority who open windows to the stars; and

through these windows, in passing, the plain man sometimes looks. The

impression America makes on me is that the windows are blocked up. It

has become incredible that this continent was colonised by the Pilgrim

Fathers. That intense, narrow, unlovely but genuine spiritual life has

been transformed into industrial energy; and this energy, in its new

form, the churches, oddly enough, are endeavouring to recapture and use

to drive their machines. Religion is becoming a department of practical

business. The Churches--orthodox and unorthodox, old and new, Christian,

Christian-Scientific, theosophic, higher-thinking--vie with one another

in advertising goods which are all material benefits: "Follow me, and

you will get rich," "Follow me, and you will get well," "Follow me, and

you will be cheerful, prosperous, successful." Religion in America is

nothing if not practical. It does not concern itself with a life beyond;

it gives you here and now what you want. "What _do_ you want? Money?

Come along!--Success? This is the shop!--Health? Here you are! Better

than patent medicines!" The only part of the Gospels one would suppose

that interests the modern American is the miracles; for the miracles

really did _do_ something. As for the Sermon on the Mount--well, no

Westerner ever took that seriously.

This conversion of religion into business is interesting enough. But

even more striking is what looks like a conversion of business into

religion. Business is so serious that it sometimes assumes the shrill

tone of a revivalist propaganda. There has recently been brought to my

attention a circular addressed to the agents of an insurance society,

urging them to rally round the firm, with a special effort, in what I

can only call a "mission-month." I quote--with apologies to the unknown

author--part of this production:

THE CALL TO ACTION.

"How about these beautiful spring days for hustling? Everything

is on the move. New life and force is apparent everywhere. The

man who can stand still when all creation is on the move is

literally and hopelessly a dead one.

"These are ideal days for the insurance field-man. Weather like

this has a tremendously favourable effect on business. In the

city and small town alike there is a genuine revival of

business. The farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer, are

beginning to work overtime. Spring is in the footstep of the

ambitious man as well as in the onward march of nature. This is

the day of growth, expansion, creation, and re-creation.

"Consciously or unconsciously every one responds to the glad

call to new life and vigour. Men who are cold and selfish, who

are literally frozen up the winter through, yield to the warm,

invigorating, energising touch of spring.

"Gentlemen of the field force, now is the psychological moment

to force your prospects to action as indicated by the dotted

line. As in nature, some plants and trees are harder to force

than others, so in the nature of human prospects, some are more

difficult than others. Sunshine and rain will produce results in

the field of life-underwriting.

"Will it not be possible for you during these five remaining

days not only to increase the production from regular sources,

but to go out into the highways and hedges and compel others to

sign their applications, if for only a small amount?

"Everything is now in full swing, and we are going to close up

the month

"IN A BLAZE OF GLORY."

Might not this almost as well have been an address from the

headquarters of the Salvation Army? And is not the following exactly

parallel to a denunciation, from the mission-pulpit, of the unprofitable

servant?

"A few days ago we heard of a general agent who has one of the

largest and most prosperous territories in this country. He has

been in the business for years, and yet that man, for some

unknown reason, rather apologises for his vocation. He said he

was a little ashamed of his calling. Such a condition is almost

a crime, and I am sure that the men of the Eastern Department

will say, that man ought to get out of the business.

"_Instead of being ashamed of his calling, he should be mortally

ashamed of his not calling._

"Are you happy in your work? If not, give it up and go into some

business more to your liking."

WHY IS IT?

"So many times the question is asked, 'Why is it, and how is it,

that Mr. So-and-so writes so much business? There is not a week

but he procures new applications.' Gentlemen, there's but one

answer to this question. There is a great gulf between the man

who is in earnest and works persistently every day and the man

who seems to be in earnest and makes believe he is working

persistently every day.

"One of the most successful personal producers said to the

writer the other day: 'No wonder certain agents do not write

more business. I couldn't accomplish very much either if I did

not work longer hours than they do. Some insurance agents live

like millionaires and keep bankers' hours. You cannot expect

much business from efforts like that.' This man speaks from

practical knowledge of the business. He has written

$147,500 _in personal business in the last six weeks_.

"It does seem rather strange, sometimes, that half of the men in

the Eastern Department should be writing twice as much business

as the other half. They are representing the same company;

presenting the same propositions; are supposed to be talking to

practically the same number of men; have the same rates, same

guarantees, and the same twenty-four hours in each day, and yet

are doing twice the business. In other words, making more money.

What really makes this difference? I will tell you. They put

heart into their work. There is an enthusiasm and earnestness

about them that carries conviction. They are business through

and through, and everybody knows it.

"Are you getting your share of applications? If some other agent

is up early, wide-awake and alert, putting in from ten to

fifteen hours per day, he is bound to do business, isn't he?

This is a plain, every-day horse-sense business fact. No one has

a patent on time or the use of it. To work and to succeed is

common property. It is your capital, and the use of it will

determine your worth."

I think, really, this is one of the most remarkable documents that could

be produced in evidence of the character of American civilisation. There

is all the push, initiative, and enterprise on which they justly pride

themselves; there is also the reduction of all values to terms of

business, the concentration of what, at other times, have been moral and

religious forces upon the one aim of material progress. In such an

atmosphere it is easy to see how those who care for spiritual values are

led to protest that these are really material; to pack up their goods,

so to speak, as if they were biscuits or pork, and palm them off in that

guise on an unsuspecting public. In a world where every one is hustling,

the Churches feel they must hustle too; when all the firms advertise,

they must advertise too; when only one thing is valued, power, they must

pretend they can offer power; they must go into business, because

business is going into religion!

It is a curious spectacle! How long will it last? How real is it, even

now? That withered couple, I half believe, hanging on the wall, descend

at night and wander through the land, whispering to all the sleepers

their disquieting warning; and all day long there hovers at the back of

the minds of these active men a sense of discomfort which, if it became

articulate, might express itself in the ancient words:

"My son, the good you can expect is all forlorn,

Men doe not gather grapes from of a thorn."

VIII

RED-BLOODS AND "MOLLYCODDLES"

I am staying at a pleasant place in New Hampshire. The country is hilly

and wooded, like a larger and wilder Surrey; and through it flows what,

to an Englishman, seems a large river, the Connecticut. Charming villas

are dotted about, well designed and secluded in pretty gardens. I

mention this because, in my experience of America, it is unique. Almost

everywhere the houses stare blankly at one another and at the public

roads, ugly, unsheltered, and unashamed, as much as to say, "Every one

is welcome to see what goes on here. We court publicity. See how we eat,

drink, and sleep. Our private life is the property of the American

people." It was not, however, to describe the country that I began this

letter, but to elaborate a generalisation developed by my host and

myself as a kind of self-protection against the gospel of

"strenuousness."

We have divided men into Red-bloods and Mollycoddles. "A Red-blood man"

is a phrase which explains itself, "Mollycoddle" is its opposite. We

have adopted it from a famous speech of Mr. Roosevelt, and redeemed

it--perverted it, if you will--to other uses. A few examples will make

the notion clear. Shakespeare's Henry V. is a typical Red-blood; so was

Bismarck; so was Palmerston; so is almost any business man. On the other

hand, typical Mollycoddles were Socrates, Voltaire, and Shelley. The

terms, you will observe, are comprehensive, and the types very broad.

Generally speaking, men of action are Red-bloods. Not but what the

Mollycoddle may act, and act efficiently. But, if so, he acts from

principle, not from the instinct of action. The Red-blood, on the other

hand, acts as the stone falls, and does indiscriminately anything that

comes to hand. It is thus he that carries on the business of the world.

He steps without reflection into the first place offered him and goes to

work like a machine. The ideals and standards of his family, his class,

his city, his country and his age, he swallows as naturally as he

swallows food and drink. He is therefore always "in the swim"; and he is

bound to "arrive," because he has set before himself the attainable. You

will find him everywhere in all the prominent positions. In a military

age he is a soldier, in a commercial age a business man. He hates his

enemies, and he may love his friends; but he does not require friends to

love. A wife and children he does require, for the instinct to propagate

the race is as strong in him as all other instincts. His domestic life,

however, is not always happy; for he can seldom understand his wife.

This is part of his general incapacity to understand any point of view

but his own. He is incapable of an idea and contemptuous of a principle.

He is the Samson, the blind force, dearest to Nature of her children. He

neither looks back nor looks ahead. He lives in present action. And when

he can no longer act, he loses his reason for existence. The Red-blood

is happiest if he dies in the prime of life; otherwise, he may easily

end with suicide. For he has no inner life; and when the outer life

fails, he can only fail with it. The instinct that animated him being

dead, he dies too. Nature, who has blown through him, blows elsewhere.

His stops are dumb; he is dead wood on the shore.

The Mollycoddle, on the other hand, is all inner life. He may indeed

act, as I said, but he acts, so to speak, by accident; just as the

Red-blood may reflect, but reflects by accident. The Mollycoddle in

action is the Crank: it is he who accomplishes reforms; who abolished

slavery, for example, and revolutionised prisons and lunatic asylums.

Still, primarily, the Mollycoddle is a critic, not a man of action. He

challenges all standards and all facts. If an institution is

established, that is a reason why he will not accept it; if an idea is

current, that is a reason why he should repudiate it. He questions

everything, including life and the universe. And for that reason Nature

hates him. On the Red-blood she heaps her favours; she gives him a good

digestion, a clear complexion, and sound nerves. But to the Mollycoddle

she apportions dyspepsia and black bile. In the universe and in society

the Mollycoddle is "out of it" as inevitably as the Red-blood is "in

it." At school, he is a "smug" or a "swat," while the Red-blood is

captain of the Eleven. At college, he is an "intellectual," while the

Red-blood is in the "best set." In the world, he courts failure while

the Red-blood achieves success. The Red-blood sees nothing; but the

Mollycoddle sees through everything. The Red-blood joins societies; the

Mollycoddle is a non-joiner. Individualist of individualists, he can

only stand alone, while the Red-blood requires the support of a crowd.

The Mollycoddle engenders ideas, and the Red-blood exploits them. The

Mollycoddle discovers, and the Red-blood invents. The whole structure of

civilisation rests on foundations laid by Mollycoddles; but all the

building is done by Red-bloods. The Red-blood despises the Mollycoddle;

but, in the long run, he does what the Mollycoddle tells him. The

Mollycoddle also despises the Red-blood, but he cannot do without him.

Each thinks he is master of the other, and, in a sense, each is right.

In his lifetime the Mollycoddle may be the slave of the Red-blood; but

after his death, he is his master, though the Red-blood know it not.

Nations, like men, may be classified roughly as Red-blood and

Mollycoddle. To the latter class belong clearly the ancient Greeks, the

Italians, the French, and probably the Russians; to the former the

Romans, the Germans, and the English. But the Red-blood nation _par

excellence_ is the American; so that, in comparison with them, Europe as

a whole might almost be called Mollycoddle. This characteristic of

Americans is reflected in the predominant physical type,--the great jaw

and chin, the huge teeth, and predatory mouth; in their speech, where

beauty and distinction are sacrificed to force; in their need to live

and feel and act in masses. To be born a Mollycoddle in America is to be

born to a hard fate. You must either emigrate or succumb. This, at

least, hitherto has been the alternative practised. Whether a

Mollycoddle will ever be produced strong enough to breathe the American

atmosphere and live, is a crucial question for the future. It is the

question whether America will ever be civilised. For civilisation, you

will have perceived, depends on a just balance of Red-bloods and

Mollycoddles. Without the Red-blood there would be no life at all, no

stuff, so to speak, for the Mollycoddle to work upon; without the

Mollycoddle, the stuff would remain shapeless and chaotic. The Red-blood

is the matter, the Mollycoddle the form; the Red-blood the dough, the

Mollycoddle the yeast. On these two poles turns the orb of human

society. And if, at this point, you choose to say that poles are points

and have no dimensions, that strictly neither the Mollycoddle nor the

Red-blood exist, and that real men contain elements of both mixed in

different proportions, I have no quarrel with you except such as one has

with the man who states the obvious. I am satisfied to have

distinguished the ideal extremes between which the Actual vibrates. The

detailed application of the conception I must leave to more patient

researchers.

One point more before I close. This Dichotomy, so far as I can see,

applies only to man. Woman appears to be a kind of hybrid. Regarded as a

creature of instinct, she resembles the Red-blood, and it is to him that

she is first attracted. The hero of her youth is the athlete, the

soldier, the successful man of business; and this predilection of hers

accounts for much of human history, and in particular for the

maintenance of the military spirit. On the other hand, as a creature

capable of and craving sympathy, she has affinities with the

Mollycoddle. This dual nature is the tragedy of her life. The Red-blood

awakens her passion, but cannot satisfy it. He wins her by his virility,

but cannot retain her by his perception. Hence the fact, noted by a

cynic, that it is the Mollycoddle who cuckolds the Red-blood. For the

woman, married to the Red-blood, discovers too late that she is to him

only a trophy, a scalp. He hangs her up in the hall, and goes about his

business. Then comes the Mollycoddle, divining all, possessing and

offering all. And if the Red-blood is an American, and the Mollycoddle

an European, then the situation is tense indeed. For the American

Red-blood despises woman in his heart as profoundly as he respects her

in outer observance. He despises her because of the Mollycoddle he

divines in her. Therefore he never understands her; and that is why

European Mollycoddles carry off American women before the very eyes of

the exasperated Red-blood. "Am I not clean?" he cries. "Am I not

healthy? Am I not athletic and efficient?" He is, but it does not help

him, except with young girls. He may win the body; but he cannot win the

soul. Can it be true then that most women would like two husbands, one

Red-blood, the other Mollycoddle, one to be the father of their

children, the other to be the companion of their souls? Women alone can

answer; and, for the first time in history, they are beginning to be

articulate.

IX

ADVERTISEMENT

The last two days and nights I spent in a railway train. We passed

through some beautiful country; that, I believe, is the fact; but my

feeling is that I have emerged from a nightmare. In my mind is a jumbled

vision of huge wooden cows cut out in profile and offering from dry

udders a fibrous milk; of tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastly

realism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I needed

them--U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in an

interminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals of

indigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous

frieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco

than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a black

moustache, recurring, like a decimal, _ad infinitum_ on the top of a

board, to inform me that his beauty is the product of his own toilet

powder; of cod-fish without bones--"the kind you have always bought"; of

bacon packed in glass jars; of whiz suspenders, sen-sen throat-ease,

sure-fit hose, and the whole army of patent medicines. By river, wood,

and meadow, hamlet or city, mountain or plain, hovers and flits this

obscene host; never to be escaped from, never to be forgotten, fixing,

with inexorable determination, a fancy that might be tempted to roam to

that one fundamental fact of life, the operation of the bowels.

Nor, of course, are these incubi, these ghostly emanations of the One

God Trade, confined to the American continent. They haunt with equal

pertinacity the lovelier landscapes of England; they line the route to

Venice; they squat on the Alps and float on the Rhine; they are

beginning to occupy the very air, and with the advent of the air-ship,

will obliterate the moon and the stars, and scatter over every lonely

moor and solitary mountain peak memorials of the stomach, of the liver

and the lungs. Never, in effect, says modern business to the soul of

man, never and nowhere shall you forget that you are nothing but a body;

that you require to eat, to salivate, to digest, to evacuate; that you

are liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, colitis, calvity,

constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, diabetes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy,

eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache,

hæmorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice,

lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey,

rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and

so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never

and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in

the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forget

that nothing matters--nothing in the whole universe--except the

maintenance and extension of industry; that beauty, peace, harmony are

not commercial values, and cannot be allowed for a moment to stand in

the way of the advance of trade; that nothing, in short, matters except

wealth, and that there is no wealth except money in the pocket.

This--did it ever occur to you--is the real public education every

country is giving, on every hoarding and sky-sign, to its citizens of

every age, at every moment of their lives. And that being so, is it not

a little ironical that children should be taught for half an hour in

school to read a poem of Wordsworth or a play of Shakespeare, when for

the rest of the twenty-four hours there is being photographed on their

minds the ubiquitous literature of Owbridge and of Carter?

But of course advertisement cannot be interfered with! It is the

life-blood of the nation. All traders, all politicians, all journalists

say so. They sometimes add that it is really, to an unprejudiced spirit,

beautiful and elevating. Thus only this morning I came across an article

in a leading New York newspaper, which remarks that: "The individual

advertisement is commonly in good taste, both in legend and in

illustration. Many are positively beautiful; and, as a wit has truly

said, the cereal advertisements in the magazines are far more

interesting than the serial stories." This latter statement I can easily

believe; but when I read the former there flitted across my mind a

picture of a lady lightly clad reclining asleep against an open window,

a full moon rising in the distance over a lake, with the legend

attached, "Cascarella--it works while you sleep."

The article from which I have quoted is interesting not only as

illustrating the diversity of taste, but as indicating the high degree

of development which has now been attained by what is at once the art

and the science of advertisement. "The study of advertisement," it

begins, "seems to have a perennial charm for the American public. Hardly

a month passes but some magazine finds a new and inviting phase of this

modern art to lay before its readers. The solid literature of

advertisement is also growing rapidly.... The technique of the subject

is almost as extensive as that of scientific agriculture. Whole volumes

have been compiled on the art of writing advertisements. Commercial

schools and colleges devote courses of study to the subject. Indeed the

corner-stone of the curriculum of a well-known business college is an

elective upon 'Window-dressing.'" That you may be under no

misapprehension, I must add that this article appears in what is

admittedly the most serious and respectable of the New York newspapers;

and that it is not conceived in the spirit of irony or hyperbole. To the

American, advertisement is a serious, important, and elevating

department of business, and those who make it their speciality endeavour

to base their operations on a profound study of human nature. One of

these gentlemen has expounded, in a book which has a wide circulation,

the whole philosophy of his liberal profession. He calls the book

"Imagination in Business";[4] and I remark incidentally that the use of

the word "imagination," like that of "art," in this connection, shows

where the inquirer ought to look for the manifestation, on this

continent, of the æsthetic spirit. "The imaginative man," says the

writer, "sends his thought through all the instincts, passions, and

prejudices of men, he knows their desires and their regrets, he knows

every human weakness and its sure decoy." It is this latter clause that

is relevant to his theme. Poets in earlier ages wrote epics and dramas,

they celebrated the strength and nobility of men; but the poet of the

modern world "cleverly builds on the frailties of mankind." Of these the

chief is "the inability to throw away an element of value, even though

it cannot be utilised." On this great principle is constructed the whole

art and science of advertisement. And my author proceeds to give a

series of illustrations, "each of which is an actual fact, either in my

experience, or of which I have been cognisant." Space and copyright

forbid me to quote. I must refer the reader to the original source.

Nowhere else will be found so lucid an expression of the whole theory

and practice of modern trade. That theory and practice is being taught

in schools of commerce throughout the Union; and there are many, I

suppose, who would like to see it taught in English universities. But,

really, does anyone--does any man of business--think it a better

education than Greek?

Footnotes:

[Footnote 4: _Imagination in Business_ (Harper & Brothers).]

X

CULTURE

Scene, a club in a Canadian city; persons, a professor, a doctor, a

business man, and a traveller (myself). Wine, cigars, anecdotes; and

suddenly, popping up, like a Jack-in-the-box absurdly crowned with ivy,

the intolerable subject of education. I do not remember how it began;

but I know there came a point at which, before I knew where I was, I

found myself being assailed on the subject of Oxford and Cambridge. Not,

however, in the way you may anticipate. Those ancient seats of learning

were not denounced as fossilised, effete, and corrupt. On the contrary,

I was pressed, urged, implored almost with tears in the eye--to reform

them? No! to let them alone!

"For heaven's sake, keep them as they are! You don't know what you've

got, and what you might lose! We know! We've had to do without it! And

we know that without it everything else is of no avail. We bluster and

brag about education on this side of the Atlantic. But in our heart of

hearts we know that we have missed the one thing needful, and that you,

over in England, have got it."

"And that one thing?"

"Is Culture! Yes, in spite of Matthew Arnold, Culture, and Culture, and

always Culture!"

"Meaning by Culture?"

"Meaning Aristotle instead of Agriculture, Homer instead of Hygiene,

Shakespeare instead of the Stock Exchange, Bacon instead of Banking,

Plato instead of Pædagogics! Meaning intellect before intelligence,

thought before dexterity, discovery before invention! Meaning the only

thing that is really practical, ideas; and the only thing that is really

human, the Humanities!"

Rather apologetically, I began to explain. At Oxford, I said, no doubt

the Humanities still hold the first place. But at Cambridge they have

long been relegated to the second or the third. There we have schools of

Natural Science, of Economics, of Engineering, of Agriculture. We have

even a Training College in Pædagogics. Their faces fell, and they

renewed their passionate appeal.

"Stop it," they cried. "For heaven's sake, stop it! In all those things

we've got you skinned alive over here! If you want Agriculture go to

Wisconsin! If you want Medicine, go to the Rockefeller Institute! If you

want Engineering, go to Pittsburg! But preserve still for the

English-speaking world what you alone can give! Preserve liberal

culture! Preserve the Classics! Preserve Mathematics! Preserve the

seed-ground of all practical inventions and appliances! Preserve the

integrity of the human mind!"

Interesting, is it not? These gentlemen, no doubt, were not typical

Canadians. But they were not the least intelligent men I have met on

this continent. And when they had finally landed me in my sleeping-berth

in the train, and I was left to my own reflections in that most

uncomfortable of all situations, I began to consider how odd it was that

in matters educational we are always endeavouring to reform the only

part of our system that excites the admiration of foreigners.

I do not intend, however, to plunge into that controversy. The point

that interests me is the view of my Canadian friends that in America

there is no "culture." And, in the sense they gave to that term, I think

they are right. There _is_ no culture in America. There is instruction;

there is research; there is technical and professional training; there

is specialisation in science and industry; there is every possible

application of life, to purposes and ends; but there is no life for its

own sake. Let me illustrate. It is, I have read, a maxim of American

business that "a man is damned who knows two things." "He is almost a

dilettante," it was said of a student, "he reads Dante and Shakespeare"!

"The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to

work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but

they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel

long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will

not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon

you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not

converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meet

a man who, when a subject is started, is willing or able to follow it

out into its ramifications, to play with it, to embroider it with pathos

or with wit, to penetrate to its roots, to trace its connexions and

affinities. Question and answer, anecdote and jest are the staple of

American conversation; and, above all, information. They have a hunger

for positive facts. And you may hear them hour after hour rehearsing to

one another their travels, their business transactions, their

experiences in trains, in hotels, on steamers, till you begin to feel

you have no alternatives before you but murder or suicide. An American,

broadly speaking, never detaches himself from experience. His mind is

embedded in it; it moves wedged in fact. His only escape is into humour;

and even his humour is but a formula of exaggeration. It implies no

imagination, no real envisaging of its object. It does not illuminate a

subject, it extinguishes it, clamping upon every topic the same

grotesque mould. That is why it does not really much amuse the English.

For the English are accustomed to Shakespeare, and to the London cabby.

This may serve to indicate what I mean by lack of culture. I admit, of

course, that neither are the English cultured. But they have culture

among them. They do not, of course, value it; the Americans, for aught I

know, value it more; but they produce it, and the Americans do not. I

have visited many of their colleges and universities, and everywhere,

except perhaps at Harvard--unless my impressions are very much at

fault--I have found the same atmosphere. It is the atmosphere known as

the "Yale spirit," and it is very like that of an English Public School.

It is virile, athletic, gregarious, all-penetrating, all-embracing. It

turns out the whole university to sing rhythmic songs and shout rhythmic

cries at football matches. It praises action and sniffs at speculation.

It exalts morals and depresses intellect. It suspects the solitary

person, the dreamer, the loafer, the poet, the prig. This atmosphere, of

course, exists in English universities. It is imported there from the

Public Schools. But it is not all-pervading. Individuals and cliques

escape. And it is those who escape that acquire culture. In America, no

one escapes, or they are too few to count. I know Americans of culture,

know and love them; but I feel them to be lost in the sea of

philistinism. They cannot draw together, as in England, and leaven the

lump. The lump is bigger, and they are fewer. All the more honour to

them; and all the more loss to America.

Whether, from all this, any conclusion is to be drawn about the proper

policy to be pursued at our universities, is a question I will not here

discuss. Culture, I think, is one of those precious things that are

achieved by accident, and by accident may be destroyed. The things we do

to maintain it might kill it; the things we do to kill it might preserve

it. My Canadian friends may be quite wrong in their diagnosis of the

causes that engender or destroy it. But they are right in their sense of

its importance; and it will be an interesting result of imperial unity

if we find, to our astonishment, that the Dominions beyond the seas

rally round exactly those things in England which we expect them to

declare effete. The Rhodes scholars go to Oxford, not to Birmingham or

Liverpool. And it is Cambridge that peoples the universities of the

Empire with professors.

XI

ANTÆUS

I saw to-day some really remarkable landscapes by an American artist.

So, at least, they seem to me. They have, at any rate, a quality of

imagination which one does not expect to find in this country. "One does

not expect"--why not? Why, in this respect, is America, as undoubtedly

she is, so sterile? Artists must be born here as much as elsewhere.

American civilisation, it is true, repels men of reflection and

sensitiveness, just as it attracts men of action; so that, as far as

immigration is concerned, there is probably a selection working against

the artistic type. But, on the other hand, men of action often produce

sons with a genius for the arts; and it is to be supposed that they do

so as much in America as elsewhere. It must be the environment that is

unfavourable. Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named

"Mollycoddle"; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to

breathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been able to see,

is there to be found a class or a clique of men, respected by others and

respecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artistic

calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit; including

under business Politics and Law, which in this country are only

departments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem that

is held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life in

England. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets no

encouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles,

his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the only

virile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well become

chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professorial career; but that, it is

agreed, is adopted only by men of "no ambition." Americans believe in

education, but they do not believe in educators. There is no money to be

made in that profession, and the making of money is the test of

character. The born poet or artist is thus handicapped to a point which

may easily discourage him from running at all. At the best, he emigrates

to Europe, and his achievement is credited to that continent. Or,

remaining in America, he succumbs to the environment, puts aside his

creative ambition, and enters business. It is not for nothing that

Americans are the most active people in the world. They pay the penalty

in an atrophy of the faculties of reflection and representation.

Things are different in Europe, and even in England. There, not only

are artists and men of letters honoured when they are successful--they

are, of course, honoured at that stage in America; but the pursuit of

literature and art is one which a young man need not feel it

discreditable to adopt. The contemporaries of a brilliant youth at

Oxford or at Cambridge do not secretly despise him if he declines to

enter business. The first-class man does not normally aspire to start

life as a drummer. Public life and the Church offer honourable careers;

and both of them have traditional affinities with literature. So has the

Law, still in England a profession and not a trade. One may even be a

don or a schoolmaster without serious discredit. Under these conditions

a young man can escape from the stifling pressure of the business point

of view. He can find societies like-minded with himself, equally

indifferent to the ideal of success in business, equally inspired by

intellectual or æsthetic ambitions. He can choose to be poor without

feeling that he will therefore become despicable. The attitude of the

business classes in England, no doubt, is much the same as that of the

business classes in America. But in England there are other classes and

other traditions, havens of refuge from the prevalent commercialism. In

America the trade-wind blows broad, steady, universal over the length

and breadth of the continent.

This, I believe, is one reason for the sterility of America in Art. But

it is not the only one. Literature and Art in Europe rest on a long

tradition which has not only produced books and pictures, but has left

its mark on the language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, the

physical features of the country. The books and the pictures can be

transplanted, but the rest cannot. Thus, even though in every art the

technical tradition has been interrupted, there remains in Europe what I

will call the tradition of feeling; and it is this that is absent in

America. Art in Europe is rooted; and there still persists into the

present something of the spirit which fostered it in the past. Not only

is Nature beautiful, she is humanised by the works of Man. Politics are

mellowed by history, business tempered by culture. Classes are more

segregated, types more distinct, ideals and aims more varied. The ghost

of a spiritual life still hovers over the natural, shadowing it with the

beat of solemn wings. There are finer overtones for a sensitive ear to

catch; rainbow hues where the spray of life goes up. All this, it is

true, is disappearing in Europe; but in America it has never existed. A

sensitive European, travelling there, feels at once starved and flayed.

Nothing nourishes, and everything hurts. There is natural beauty, but it

has not been crowned and perfected by the hand of man. Whatever he has

touched he has touched only to defile. There is one pursuit, commerce;

one type, the business man; one ideal, that of increasing wealth.

Monotony of talk, monotony of ideas, monotony of aim, monotony of

outlook on the world. America is industrialism pure and simple; Europe

is industrialism superimposed on feudalism; and, for the arts, the

difference is vital.

But the difference is disappearing. Not that America is becoming like

Europe, but Europe is becoming like America. This is not a case of the

imitation that is a form of flattery; it is a case of similar causes

producing similar results. The disease--or shall we say, to use a

neutral term--the diathesis of commercialism found in America an open

field and swept through it like a fire. In Europe, its course was

hampered by the structures of an earlier civilisation. But it is

spreading none the less surely. And the question arises--In the future,

when the European environment is as unfavourable to Art as the American,

will there be, in the West, any Art at all? I do not know; no one knows;

but there is this to remark. What I am calling commercialism is the

infancy, not the maturity of a civilisation. The revolution in morals,

in manners, and in political and social institutions which must

accompany the revolution in industry, has hardly yet begun its course.

It has gone further in Europe than in America; so that, oddly enough,

Europe is at once behind and in front of this continent, overlaps it, so

to speak, at both ends. But it has not gone very far even in Europe; and

for generations, I conceive, political and social issues will draw away

much of the creative talent that might have been available for Art. In

the end, one may suppose, something like a stable order will arise; an

order, that is, in which people will feel that their institutions

correspond sufficiently with their inner life, and will be able to

devote themselves with a free mind to reflecting their civilisation in

Art.

But will their civilisation be of a kind to invite such reflection? It

will be, if the present movement is not altogether abortive, a

civilisation of security, equity, and peace; where there is no

indigence, no war, and comparatively little disease. Such society,

certainly, will not offer a field for much of the kind of Art that has

been or is now being produced. The primitive folk-song, the epic of war,

the novel or play inspired by social strife, will have passed

irrecoverably away. And more than that, it is sometimes urged, there

will be such a dearth of those tense moments which alone engender the

artistic mood, that Art of any kind will have become impossible. If that

were true, it would not, in my opinion, condemn the society. Art is

important, but there are things more important; and among those things

are justice and peace. I do not, however, accept the view that a

peaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that is

uninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurable

materialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalry

except for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my own

belief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in which

most men are now plunged would liberate the energies for spiritual

conflict; that the passion to know, the passion to feel, the passion to

love, would begin at last to take their proper place in human life; and

would engender the forms of Art appropriate to their expression.

To return to America, what I am driving at is this. America may have an

Art, and a great Art. But it will be after she has had her social

revolution. Her Art has first to touch ground; and before it can do

that, the ground must be fit for it to touch. It was not till the tenth

century that the seed of Mediæval Art could be sown; it was not till the

thirteenth that the flower bloomed. So now, our civilisation is not ripe

for its own Art. What America imports from Europe is useless to her. It

is torn from its roots; and it is idle to replant it; it will not grow.

There must be a native growth, not so much of America, as of the modern

era. That growth America, like Europe, must will. She has her prophet of

it, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make his

vision real.

CONCLUDING ESSAY

The preceding pages were written in the course of travel and convey the

impressions and reflections of the moment. Whatever interest they may

have depends upon this immediacy, and for that reason I have reprinted

them substantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, some

concluding reflections of a more considered nature may be of some

interest to my readers. I do not advance them in a dogmatic spirit nor

as final judgments, but as the first tentative results of my gropings

into a large and complicated subject. I will ask the reader, therefore,

be he Western or Oriental, to follow me in a spirit at once critical and

sympathetic, challenging my suggestions as much as he will, but rather

as a fellow-seeker than as an opponent bent upon refutation. For I am

trying to comprehend rather than to judge, and to comprehend as

impartially as is compatible with having an attitude of one's own at

all.

Ever since Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line it has become a

commonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is an

East and a West, and an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling

was thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinking

of England, and England is not all the West. As soon as one approaches

the question more particularly it becomes a complicated matter to decide

whether there is really an East and a West, and what either stands for.

That there is a West, in a real sense, with a unity of its own, is, I

think, true. But it must be limited in time to the last two centuries,

and in space to the countries of Western Europe and the continent of

America. So understood, the West forms, in all the most important

respects, a homogeneous system. True, it is divided into different

nations, speaking different languages, and pursuing different, and often

conflicting, policies; and these distinctions are still so important,

that they colour our fears and hopes and sympathies, and take form in

the burden of armaments and the menace of war. Nevertheless, seen in the

perspective of history, they are survivals, atrophying and disappearing.

Behind and despite of them there is a common Western mind and a common

Western organisation. Finance is cosmopolitan; industry is cosmopolitan;

trade is cosmopolitan. There is one scientific method, and the results

achieved by it are common. There is one system of industry, that known

as Capitalism; and the problems arising from it and the solutions

propounded appear alike in every nation. There is one political

tendency, or fact, that of popular government. There are cognate aims

and similar achievements in literature and art. There is, in brief, a

Western movement, a Western problem, a Western mentality; and the

particular happenings of particular nations are all parts of this one

happening. Nor is this all. There is in the West a common religion. I do

not refer to Christianity, for the religion I mean is held by hundreds

and thousands who are not Christians, and indeed does not very readily

find in Christianity an expression at once coherent and pure. It has not

been formulated in a creed; but it is to be felt and heard in all the

serious work and all the serious thought of the West. It is the religion

of Good and Evil, of Time and the process in Time. If it tried to draw

up a confession of faith perhaps it would produce, as its first attempt,

something of this kind:--

"I believe in the ultimate distinction between Good and Evil,

and in a real process in a real Time. I believe it to be my duty

to increase Good and diminish Evil; I believe that in doing this

I am serving the purpose of the world. I know this; I do not

know anything else; and I am reluctant to put questions to which

I have no answer, and to which I do not believe that anyone has

an answer. Action, as defined above, is my creed. Speculation

weakens action. I do not wish to speculate, I wish to live. And

I believe the true life to be the life I have described."

In saying that this is the real creed of the modern Western man I do not

pretend that he always knows or would admit it to be so. But if his

actions, his words, and his thoughts be sympathetically interpreted,

where all are at their best, I think they will be found to imply

something of this kind. And this attitude I call religious, not merely

ethical, because of its conviction that the impulse towards Good is of

the essence of the World, not only of men, or of Man. To believe this is

an act of faith, not of reason; though it is not contrary to reason, as

no faith should be or long can be. Many men do _not_ believe it, for

many are not religious; others, while believing it, may believe also

many other things. But it is the irreducible minimum of religion in the

modern West, the justification of our life, the faith of our works. I

call it the Religion of Time, and distinguish it thus from the Religion

of Eternity.

In this sense, then, this profound sense, of a common aim and a common

motive, there is really a West. Is there also an East? That is not so

clear. In some important respects, no doubt, the Eastern civilisations

are alike. They are still predominantly agricultural. Their industry is

manual not mechanical. Their social unit is the extended family. To

travel in the East is to realise that life on the soil and in the

village is there still the normal life, as it has been almost everywhere

and always, throughout civilisation, until the last century in the West.

But though there is thus in the East a common way of life, there is not

a common organisation nor a common spirit. Economically, the great

Eastern countries are still independent of one another. Each lives for

the most part by and on itself. And their intellectual and spiritual

intercourse is now (though it was not in the past) as negligible as

their economic commerce. The influence that is beginning to be strong

upon them all is that of Western culture; and if they become alike in

their outlook on life, it will be by assimilating that. But, at present,

they are not alike. It is easy, in this matter, to be deceived by the

outward forms of religion. Because Buddhism originated in India and

spread to China and Japan, because Japan took Confucian ideals from

China, it is natural to conclude that there is a common religious spirit

throughout the East, or the Far East. But one might as reasonably infer

that the spirit of the christianised Teutons was the same as that of the

Jews or of the Christians in the East. Nations borrow religions, but

they shape them according to their own genius. And if I am not very much

mistaken the outlook of India is, and always has been, radically

distinct from and even opposed to that of China or Japan. These latter

countries, indeed, I believe, are far closer to the West than they are

to India. Let me explain.

India is the true origin and home of what I have called the religion of

Eternity. That idea seems to have gone out from her to the rest of the

world. But nowhere else was it received with equal purity and passion.

Elsewhere than in India the claims of Time were predominant. In India

they have been subordinate. This, no doubt, is a matter of emphasis. No

society, as a whole, could believe and act upon the belief that activity

in Time is simply waste of time, and absorption in the Eternal the

direct and immediate object of life. Such a view, acted upon, would

bring the society quickly to an end. It would mean that the very

physical instinct to live was extinguished. But, as the Eternal was

first conceived by the amazing originality of India, so the passion to

realise it here and now has been the motive of her saints from the date

of the Upanishads to the twentieth century. And the method of

realisation proposed and attempted has not been the living of the

temporal life in a particular spirit, it has been the transcending of it

by a special experience. Indian saints have always believed that by

meditation and ascetic discipline, by abstaining from active life and

all its claims, and cultivating solitude and mortification, they could

reach by a direct experience union with the Infinite. This is as true of

the latest as of the earliest saints, if and so far as Western

influences have been excluded. Let me illustrate from the words of Sri

Ramakrishna, one of the most typical of Indian saints, who died late in

the nineteenth century.

First, for the claim to pass directly into union with the Eternal:

"I do see that Being as a Reality before my very eyes! Why then

should I reason? I do actually see that it is the Absolute Who

has become all these things about us; it is He who appears as

the finite soul and the phenomenal world. One must have such an

awakening of the Spirit within to see this Reality.... Spiritual

awakening must be followed by Samadhi. In this state one forgets

that one has a body; one loses all attachment to things of this

world."[5]

And let it not be supposed that this state called Samadhi is merely one

of intense meditation. It is something much more abnormal, or

super-normal, than this. The book from which I am quoting contains many

accounts of its effects upon Sri Ramakrishna. Here is one of them:

"He is now in a state of Samadhi, the superconscious or

God-conscious state. The body is again motionless. The eyes are

again fixed! The boys only a moment ago were laughing and making

merry! Now they all look grave. Their eyes are steadfastly fixed

on the master's face. They marvel at the wonderful change that

has come over him. It takes him long to come back to the sense

world. His limbs now begin to lose their stiffness. His face

beams with smiles, the organs of sense begin to come back each

to its own work. Tears of joy stand at the corners of his eyes.

He chants the sacred name of Rama."[6]

The object, then, of this saint, and one he claims to have attained, is

to come into union with the Infinite by a process which removes him

altogether from contact with this world and from all possibility of

action in it. This world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saints

and most Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the speculative

problems raised by this conception I need not speak here. But it belongs

to my purpose to bring out its bearing upon conduct. All conduct depends

upon the conception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche,

assume and require these ideas, just as much as moralists; they merely

attempt to give them a new content. If conduct is to have any meaning,

Good and Evil must be real in a real world. If they are held to be

appearances conduct becomes absurd. What now is Sri Ramakrishna's view

of this matter? The whole life that we Western men call real is to him a

mere game played by and for the sake of God, or, to use his phrase, of

the Divine Mother. For her pleasure she keeps men bound to Time, instead

of free in Eternity. For her pleasure, therefore, she creates and

maintains Evil. I quote the passage:

"My Divine Mother is always in Her sportive mood. The world,

indeed, is Her toy. She will have Her own way. It is Her

pleasure to take out of the prisonhouse and set free only one or

two among a hundred thousand of her children!

"_A Brahmo_: Sir, She can if She pleases set everybody free.

Why is it then, that She has bound us hand and foot with the

chains of the world?

"_Sri Ramakrishna_: Well, I suppose it is her pleasure. It is

her pleasure to go on with Her sport with all these beings that

She has brought into existence. The player amongst the children

that touches the person of the Grand-dame, the same need no

longer run about. He cannot take any further part in the

exciting play of Hide and Seek that goes on.

"The others who have not touched the goal must run about and

play to the great delight of the Grand-dame."[7]

Thus the Indian saint. Let us now try to bring his conception into

relation with what we in the West believe to be real experience. In a

railway accident a driver is pinned against the furnace and slowly

burned to death, praying the bystanders in vain to put him out of his

misery. What is this? It is the sport of God! In Putumayo innocent

natives are deprived of their land, enslaved, tortured, and murdered,

that shareholders in Europe may receive high dividends. What is this?

The sport of God! In the richest countries of the West a great

proportion of those who produce the wealth receive less than the wages

which would suffice to keep them in bare physical health. What is this?

Once more the sport of God! One might multiply examples, but it would be

idle. No Western man could for a moment entertain the view of Sri

Ramakrishna. To him such a God would be a mere devil. The Indian

position, no doubt, is a form of idealism; but an idealism conditioned

by defective experience of the life in Time. The saint has chosen

another experience. But clearly he has not transcended ours, he has

simply left it out.

Now I am aware that it will be urged by some of the most sincere

representatives of religion in India that Sri Ramakrishna does not

typify the Indian attitude. Perhaps not, if we take contemporary India.

But then contemporary India has been profoundly influenced by Western

thought; modern Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen,

Rabindranath Tagore, could hardly have thought and felt as they did, and

do, were it not for this influence. The following poem of Rabindranath

Tagore may aptly symbolise this breaking in of the West upon the East,

though I do not know that that was the author's intention:

"With days of hard travail I raised a temple. It had no

doors or windows, its walls were thickly built with

massive stones.

I forgot all else, I shunned all the world, I gazed in rapt

contemplation at the image I had set upon the altar.

It was always night inside, and lit by the lamps of

perfumed oil. The ceaseless smoke of incense wound

my heart in its heavy coils.

Sleepless, I carved on the walls fantastic figures in mazy

bewildering lines--winged horses, flowers with human

faces, women with limbs like serpents.

No passage was left anywhere through which could enter

the song of birds, the murmur of leaves, or the hum

of the busy village.

The only sound that echoed in its dark dome was that

of incantations which I chanted.

My mind became keen and still like a pointed flame, my

senses swooned in ecstasy.

I knew not how time passed till the thunderstone had

struck the temple, and a pain stung me through the

heart.

The lamp looked pale and ashamed; the carvings on

the walls, like chained dreams, stared meaningless

in the light, as they would fain hide themselves.

I looked at the image on the altar. I saw it smiling and

alive with the living touch of God. The night I had

imprisoned spread its wings and vanished."[8]

The closed temple, I believe, is a true image of the spiritual life of

India, if not at all times, at any rate for many centuries previous to

the advent of the English. Everything seems to point to this--the

symbolic character of Indian art; the absence of history and the

prevalence of religious legend; the cult of the fakir and the wandering

ascetic. In India one feels religion as one feels it nowhere else,

unless it were in Russia. But the religion one feels is peculiar. It is

the religion that denies the value of experience in Time. It is the

religion of the Eternal.

But, it will be urged, how can that be, when India continues to produce

her teeming millions; when these perforce live their brief lives in a

constant and often vain struggle for a bare livelihood; when, in order

to live at all, it is necessary at every point to be straining vitality

in the pursuit of temporal goods or the avoidance of temporal evils?

I make no attempt to disguise or to weaken this paradox. But I suggest

that it is but one of the many paradoxes set up by the conflict between

men's instinct for life and their conscious beliefs. Indians live not

because they believe in life, but because they cannot help it. Their

hold on life is certainly less than that of Western men. Thus I have

been told by administrators of famine relief or of precautions against

plague, that what they have to contend with is not so much the

resistance as the indifference of the population. "Why worry us?" they

say, in effect; "life is not worth the trouble. Let us die and be rid of

it." Life is an evil, that is the root feeling of India; and the escape

is either, for the mass, by death; or for the men of spiritual genius,

by a flight to the Eternal. How this attitude has arisen I do not here

seek to determine; race, climate, social and political conditions, all

no doubt have played their part. The spiritual attitude is probably an

effect, rather than a cause, of an enfeebled grip on life. But no one, I

think, who knows India, would dispute that this attitude is a fact; and

it is a fact that distinguishes India not only from the West but from

the Far East.

For China and Japan, though they have had, and to a less extent still

have, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, religious. The Chinese, in

particular, strike one as secular and practical; quite as secular and

practical as the English. They have had Buddhism, as we have had

Christianity; but no one who can perceive and understand would say that

their outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more than ours is by

Christianity. It is Confucianism that expresses the Chinese attitude to

life, whenever the Chinese soul, becoming aware of itself, looks out

from the forest of animistic beliefs in which the mass of the people

wander. And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expression of

the practical reason that has ever been formulated. Family duty, social

duty, political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. And

when the Chinese spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations,

it finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of fact,

imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. Chinese art

purifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas in

India the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowning

surface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this

same hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equally

gifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, is stupidly and

tediously didactic. But where it escapes into poetry it is a poetry like

Wordsworth's, revealing the beauty of actual things, rather than weaving

across them an embroidery of subjective emotions The outlook of China is

essentially the outlook of the West, only more sane, more reasonable,

more leisured and dignified. Positivism and Humanity, the dominant forms

of thought and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisation

for centuries. The Chinese have built differently from ourselves and on

a smaller scale, with less violence and less power; but they have built

on the same foundations.

And Japan, too, at bottom is secular. Her true religion is that of the

Emperor and his divine ancestors. Her strongest passion is patriotism. A

Japanese, like an Indian, is always ready to die. But he dies for the

splendours and glories of this world of sense. It is not because he has

so little hold on life, but because he has so much, that he so readily

throws it away. The Japanese are unlike the Chinese and unlike the

Europeans and Americans; but their outlook is similar. They believe in

the world of time and change; and because of this attitude, they and the

rest of the world stand together like a mountain in the sun,

contemplating uneasily that other mysterious peak, shrouded in mist,

which is India.

The reader by this time will have grasped the point I am trying to put.

There are in Man two religious impulses, or, if the expression be

preferred, two aspects of the religious impulse. I have called them the

religion of the Eternal and the religion of Time; and India I suggest

stands pre-eminently for the one, the West for the other, while the

other countries of the East rank rather with the West than with India.

It is not necessary to my purpose to exaggerate this antithesis. I will

say, if it be preferred, that in India the emphasis is on the Eternal,

in the West on Time. But that much at least must be said and is plainly

true. Now, as between these two attitudes, I find myself quite clearly

and definitely on the side of the West. I have said in the preceding

pages hard things about Western civilisation. I hate many of its

manifestations, I am out of sympathy with many of its purposes. I can

see no point, for instance, in the discovery of the north or the south

pole, and very little in the invention of aeroplanes; while gramophones,

machine guns, advertisements, cinematographs, submarines, dreadnoughts,

cosmopolitan hotels, seem to me merely fatuous or sheerly disastrous.

But what lies behind all this, the tenacity, the courage, the spirit of

adventure, this it is that is the great contribution of the West. It is

not the aeroplane that is valuable; probably it will never be anything

but pernicious, for its main use is likely to be for war. But the fact

that men so lightly risk their lives to perfect it, _that_ is valuable.

The West is adventurous; and, what is more, it is adventurous on a

quest. For behind and beyond all its fatuities, confusions, crimes,

lies, as the justification of it all, that deep determination to secure

a society more just and more humane which inspires all men and all

movements that are worth considering at all, and, to those who can

understand, gives greatness and significance even to some of our most

reckless enterprises. We are living very "dangerously"; all the forces

are loose, those of destruction as well as those of creation; but we are

living towards something; we are living with the religion of Time.

So far, I daresay, most Western men will agree with me in the main. But

they may say, some of them, as the Indian will certainly say, "Is that

all? Have you no place for the Eternal and the Infinite?" To this I must

reply that I think it clear and indisputable that the religion of the

Eternal, as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, is altogether incompatible

with the religion of Time. And the position of Sri Ramakrishna, I have

urged, is that of most Indian, and as I think, of most Western mystics.

Not, however, of all, and not of all modern mystics, even in India.

Rabindranath Tagore, for example, in his "Sádhana," has put forward a

mysticism which does, at least, endeavour to allow for and include what

I have called the religion of Time. To him, and to other mystics of real

experience, I must leave the attempt to reconcile Eternity and Time. For

my own part, I can only approach the question from the point of view of

Time, and endeavour to discover and realise the most that can be truly

said by one who starts with the belief that that is real. The

profoundest prophets of the religion of Time are, in my judgment, Goethe

and George Meredith; and from them, and from others, and from my own

small experience, I seem to have learned this: the importance of that

process in Time in whose reality we believe does not lie merely in the

bettering of the material and social environment, though we hold the

importance of that to be great; it lies in the development of souls. And

that development consists in a constant expansion of interest away from

and beyond one's own immediate interests out into the activities of the

world at large. Such expansion may be pursued in practical life, in art,

in science, in contemplation, so long as the contemplation is of the

real processes of the real world in time. To that expansion I see no

limit except death. And I do not know what comes after death. But I am

clear that whatever comes after, the command of Life is the same--to

expand out of oneself into the life of the world. This command--I should

rather say this impulse--seems to me absolute, the one certain thing on

which everything else must build. I think it enough for religion, in the

case at least of those who have got beyond the infant need for

certitudes and dogmas. These perhaps are few; yet they may be really

more numerous than appears. And on the increase in their numbers, and

the intensity of their conviction and their life, the fate of the world

seems to me to depend.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 5: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna_, second edition, Part

1., p. 310.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, p. 61.]

[Footnote 7: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna_, second edition, Part

1., p. 145.]

[Footnote 8: _The Gardener_, p. 125.]

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Pg. 168, added closing single quote mark for clarity. In this case it

serves to close a quote within a quote. (speak.'" You can now)

Footnote 3, in the original text, the English translation of Dante's

poem did not preserve the line breaks in each stanza. The original

appearance has been retained.

Footnote 3, the reference is given as Dante's "Purgatorio". In actual

fact the lines of verse come from Dante's "Paradiso". The author's

original text has been retained.

Pg. 184 and 191, line of verse beginning "My son, the good you....". In

the original text, the fifth word was an abbreviation comprising a "y"

and a superscript "o". This is presumed to represent "you" and has been

expanded as such for readability.

Pg. 192, "poeple" changed to "people". (property of the American

poeple.)

End of Project Gutenberg's Appearances, by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson