UNDER DISPUTE
BY
AGNES REPPLIER, LITT.D.
AUTHOR OF “POINTS OF FRICTION,” “COMPROMISES,”
“COUNTER-CURRENTS,” ETC.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1924
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
Note
Five of the twelve essays in this volume, “To Counsel the Doubtful,”
“The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography,” “The Divineness of
Discontent,” “Strayed Sympathies,” and “The Battlefield of Education,”
are reprinted through the courtesy of _The Atlantic Monthly_; four
of them, “The Masterful Puritan,” “Are Americans a Timid People?”
“Allies,” and “The American Laughs,” through the courtesy of _The Yale
Review_; “The Preacher at Large,” through the courtesy of _The Century
Magazine_; “They Had Their Day,” through the courtesy of _Harper’s
Magazine_; “The Idolatrous Dog,” through the courtesy of _The Forum_.
Contents
The Masterful Puritan 1
To Counsel the Doubtful 31
Are Americans a Timid People? 58
The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography 88
Strayed Sympathies 119
The Divineness of Discontent 148
Allies 178
They Had Their Day 203
The Preacher at Large 233
The Battlefield of Education 258
The American Laughs 286
The Idolatrous Dog 312
UNDER DISPUTE
The Masterful Puritan
When William Chillingworth, preaching at Oxford in the first year of
England’s Civil War, defined the Cavaliers as publicans and sinners,
and the Puritans as Scribes and Pharisees, he expressed the reasonable
irritation of a scholar who had no taste or aptitude for polemics, yet
who had been blown about all his life by every wind of doctrine. Those
were uneasy years for men who loved moderation in everything, and who
found it in nothing. It is not from such that we can hope for insight
into emotions from which they were exempt, and purposes to which they
held no clue.
In our day it is generously conceded that the Puritans made admirable
ancestors. We pay them this handsome compliment in after-dinner
speeches at all commemorative meetings. Just what they would have
thought of their descendants is an unprofitable speculation. Three
hundred years divide us from those stern enthusiasts who, coveting
lofty things, found no price too high to pay for them. “It is not
with us as with men whom small matters can discourage, or small
discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again,” wrote William
Brewster, when one half of the Mayflower Pilgrims had died in the
first terrible year, and no gleam of hope shone on the survivors. To
perish of hunger and cold is not what we should now call a “small
discontentment.” To most of us it would seem a good and sufficient
reason for abandoning any enterprise whatsoever. Perhaps if we would
fix our attention upon a single detail--the fact that for four years
the Plymouth colonists did not own a cow--we should better understand
what life was like in that harsh wilderness, where children who could
not get along without milk had but one other alternative--to die.
Men as strong as were the Puritan pioneers ask for no apologies at our
hands. Their conduct was shaped by principles and convictions which
would be insupportable to us, but which are none the less worthy of
regard. Matthew Arnold summed up our modern disparagement of their
standards when he pictured Virgil and Shakespeare crossing on the
Mayflower, and finding the Pilgrim fathers “intolerable company.” I
am not sure that this would have been the case. Neither Virgil nor
Shakespeare could have survived Plymouth. That much is plain. But three
months on the Mayflower might not have been so “intolerable” as Mr.
Arnold fancied. The Roman and the Elizabethan were strong-stomached
observers of humanity. They knew a man when they saw one, and they
measured his qualities largely.
Even if we make haste to admit that two great humanizers of society,
art and letters, played but a sorry part in the Puritan colonies, we
know they were less missed than if these colonies had been worldly
ventures, established solely in the interest of agriculture or of
trade. Sir Andrew Macphail tersely reminds us that the colonists
possessed ideals of their own, “which so far transcended the things of
this world that art and literature were not worth bothering about in
comparison with them.” Men who believe that, through some exceptional
grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of
culture. If they believe that they share God with all races, all
nations, and all ages, culture comes in the wake of religion. But the
Puritan’s God was a somewhat exclusive possession. “Christ died for a
select company that was known to Him, by name, from eternity,” wrote
the Reverend Samuel Willard, pastor of the South Church, Boston, and
author of that famous theological folio, “A Compleat Body of Divinity.”
“The bulk of mankind is reserved for burning,” said Jonathan Edwards
genially; and his Northampton congregation took his word for it. That
these gentlemen knew no more about Hell and its inmates than did Dante
is a circumstance which does not seem to have occurred to any one. A
preacher has some advantages over a poet.
If the Puritans never succeeded in welding together Church and State,
which was the desire of their hearts, they had human nature to thank
for their failure. There is nothing so abhorrent--or so perilous--to
the soul of man as to be ruled in temporal things by clerical
authority. Yet inasmuch as the colony of Massachusetts Bay had for its
purpose the establishment of a state in which all citizens should be of
the same faith, and church membership should be essential to freemen,
it was inevitable that the preacher and the elder should for a time
dominate public counsels. “Are you, sir, the person who serves here?”
asked a stranger of a minister whom he met in the streets of Rowley. “I
am, sir, the person who rules here,” was the swift and apt response.
Men whose position was thus firmly established resented the
unauthorized intrusion of malcontents. Being reformers themselves,
they naturally did not want to be reformed. Alone among New England
colonists, the Pilgrims of Plymouth, who were Separatists or
Independents, mistrusted the blending of civil and religious functions,
and this mistrust had deepened during the sojourn of their leaders in
Holland. Moreover, unlike their Boston neighbours, the Pilgrims were
plain, simple people; “not acquainted,” wrote Governor Bradford, “with
trades nor traffique, but used to a countrie life, and the innocente
trade of husbandry.” They even tried the experiment of farming their
land on a communal system, and, as a result, came perilously close to
starvation. Only when each man cultivated his own lot, that is, when
individualism supplanted socialism, did they wring from the reluctant
soil food enough to keep them alive.
To the courage and intelligence of the Pilgrim and Puritan leaders,
Governor Bradford and Governor Winthrop, the settlers owed their safety
and survival. The instinct of self-government was strong in these men,
their measures were practical measures, their wisdom the wisdom of
the world. If Bradford had not made friends with the great sachem,
Massasoit, and clinched the friendship by sending Edward Winslow to
doctor him with “a confection of many comfortable conserves” when he
was ill, the Plymouth colonists would have lost the trade with the
Indians which tided them over the first crucial years. If Winthrop had
not by force of argument and persuasion obtained the lifting of duties
from goods sent to England, and induced the British creditors to grant
favourable terms, the Boston colony would have been bankrupt. The keen
desire of both Plymouth and Boston to pay their debts is pleasant to
record, and contrasts curiously with the reluctance of wealthy States
to accept the Constitution in 1789, lest it should involve a similar
course of integrity.
It is hardly worth while to censure communities which were
establishing, or seeking to establish, “a strong religious state”
because they were intolerant. Tolerance is not, and never has
been, compatible with strong religious states. The Puritans of New
England did not endeavour to force their convictions upon unwilling
Christendom. They asked only to be left in peaceful possession of a
singularly unprolific corner of the earth, which they were civilizing
after a formula of their own. Settlers to whom this formula was
antipathetic were asked to go elsewhere. If they did not go, they were
sent, and sometimes whipped into the bargain--which was harsh, but not
unreasonable.
Moreover, the “persecution” of Quakers and Antinomians was not
primarily religious. Few persecutions recorded in history have been.
For most of them theology has merely afforded a pious excuse. Whatever
motives may have underlain the persistent persecution of the Jews,
hostility to their ancient creed has had little or nothing to do with
it. To us it seems well-nigh incredible that Puritan Boston should have
vexed its soul because Anne Hutchinson maintained that those who were
in the covenant of grace were freed from the covenant of works--which
sounds like a cinch. But when we remember that she preached against the
preachers, affirming on her own authority that they had not the “seal
of the Spirit”; and that she “gave vent to revelations,” prophesying
evil for the harassed and anxious colonists, we can understand their
eagerness to be rid of her. She was an able and intelligent woman,
and her opponents were not always able and intelligent men. When
the turmoil which followed in her wake destroyed the peace of the
community, Governor Winthrop banished her from Boston. “It was,” says
John Fiske, “an odious act of persecution.”
A vast deal of sympathy has been lavished upon the Puritan settlers
because of the rigours of their religion, the austerity of their
lives, their lack of intellectual stimulus, the comprehensive absence
of anything like amusement. It has been even said that their sexual
infirmities were due to the dearth of pastimes; a point of view which
is in entire accord with modern sentiment, even if it falls short
of the facts. Impartial historians might be disposed to think that
the vices of the Puritans are apparent to us because they were so
industriously dragged to light. When all moral offences are civil
offences, and when every man is under the close scrutiny of his
neighbours, the “find” in sin is bound to be heavy. Captain Kemble, a
Boston citizen of some weight and fortune, sat two hours in the stocks
on a wintry afternoon, 1656, doing penance for “lewd and unseemly
behaviour”; which behaviour consisted in kissing his wife “publiquely”
at his own front door on the Lord’s day. The fact that he had just
returned from a long voyage, and was moved to the deed by some excess
of emotion, failed to win him pardon. Neighbours were not lightly
flouted in a virtuous community.
That there were souls unfit to bear the weight of Puritanism, and
unable to escape from it, is a tragic truth. People have been born out
of time and out of place since the Garden of Eden ceased to be a human
habitation. When Judge Sewall read to his household a sermon on the
text, “Ye shall seek me and shall not find me,” the household doubtless
protected itself by inattention, that refuge from admonition which is
Nature’s kindliest gift. But there was one listener, a terrified child
of ten, who had no such bulwark, and who brooded over her unforgiven
sins until her heart was bursting. Then suddenly, when the rest of the
family had forgotten all about the sermon, she broke into “an amazing
cry,” sobbing out her agonized dread of Hell. And the pitiful part of
the tale is that neither father nor mother could comfort her, having
themselves no assurance of her safety. “I answered her Fears as well as
I could,” wrote Judge Sewall in his diary, “and prayed with many Tears
on either part. Hope God heard us.”
The incident was not altogether uncommon. A woman of Boston, driven
to desperation by the uncertainty of salvation, settled the point for
herself by drowning her baby in a well, thus ensuring damnation, and
freeing her mind of doubts. Methodism, though gentler than Calvinism,
accomplished similar results. In Wesley’s journal there is an account
of William Taverner, a boy of fourteen, who was a fellow passenger on
the voyage to Georgia; and who, between heavy weather and continuous
exhortation, went mad with fear, and saw an indescribable horror at the
foot of his bed, “which looked at him all the time unless he was saying
his prayers.”
Our sympathy for a suffering minority need not, however, blind
us to the fact that the vast majority of men hold on to a creed
because it suits them, and because their souls are strengthened by
its ministrations. “It is sweet to believe even in Hell,” says that
archmocker, Anatole France; and to no article of faith have believers
clung more tenaciously. Frederick Locker tells us the engaging story
of a dignitary of the Greek Church who ventured, in the early years of
faith, to question this popular tenet; whereupon “his congregation,
justly incensed, tore their bishop to pieces.”
No Puritan divine stood in danger of suffering this particular form
of martyrdom. The religion preached in New England was a cruel
religion, from which the figure of Christ, living mercifully with men,
was eliminated. John Evelyn noted down in his diary that he heard the
Puritan magistrates of London “speak spiteful things of our Lord’s
Nativity.” William Brewster was proud to record that in Plymouth “no
man rested” on the first Christmas day. As with Bethlehem, so with
Calvary. Governor Endicott slashed with his sword the red cross of
Saint George from the banner of England. The emblem of Christianity
was anathema to these Christians, as was the Mother who bore Christ,
and who saw Him die. The children whom He blessed became to Jonathan
Edwards “young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers.” The
sweetness of religion, which had solaced a suffering world, was wiped
out. “The Puritans,” wrote Henry Adams pithily, “abandoned the New
Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to the beginning, and
renew the quarrel with Eve.”
It took strong men to live and thrive under such a ministration,
wrestling with a sullen earth for subsistence, and with an angry Heaven
for salvation. Braced to endurance by the long frozen winters, plainly
fed and plainly clad, in peril, like Saint Paul, of sea and wilderness,
narrow of vision but steadfast to principles, they fronted life
resolutely, honouring and illustrating the supreme worth of freedom.
That they had compensations, other than religious, is apparent to all
but the most superficial observer. The languid indifference to our
neighbour’s moral and spiritual welfare, which we dignify by the name
of tolerance, has curtailed our interest in life. There must have
been something invigorating in the iron determination that neighbours
should walk a straight path, that they should be watched at every step,
and punished for every fall. The Puritan who said, “I will not. Thou
shalt not!” enjoyed his authority to the uttermost. The prohibitionist
who repeats his words to-day is probably the only man who is having a
thoroughly good time in our fretful land and century. It is hard, I
know, to reconcile “I will not. Thou shalt not!” with freedom. But the
early settlers of New England were controlled by the weight of popular
opinion. A strong majority forced a wavering minority along the road of
rectitude. Standards were then as clearly defined as were boundaries,
and the uncompromising individualism of the day permitted no juggling
with responsibility.
It is not possible to read the second chapter of “The Scarlet Letter,”
and fail to perceive one animating principle of the Puritan’s life.
The townspeople who watch Hester Prynne stand in the pillory are moved
by no common emotions. They savour the spectacle, as church-goers of
an earlier age savoured the spectacle of a penitent in sackcloth at
the portal; but they have also a sense of personal participation in
the dragging of frailty to light. Hawthorne endeavours to make this
clear, when, in answer to Roger Chillingworth’s questions, a bystander
congratulates him upon the timeliness of his arrival on the scene.
“It must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the
wilderness, to find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is
searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people.” An
unfortunate speech to make to the husband of the culprit (Hawthorne is
seldom so ironic), but a cordial admission of content.
There was a picturesque quality about the laws of New England, and a
nicety of administration, which made them a source of genuine pleasure
to all who were not being judged. A lie, like an oath, was an offense
to be punished; but all lies were not equally punishable. Alice Morse
Earle quotes three penalties, imposed for three falsehoods, which show
how much pains a magistrate took to discriminate. George Crispe’s
wife who “told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly,” was
simply admonished. Will Randall who told a “plain lie” was fined ten
shillings. Ralph Smith who “lied about seeing a whale,” was fined
twenty shillings and excommunicated--which must have rejoiced his
suffering neighbours’ souls.
The rank of a gentleman, being a recognized attribute in those days,
was liable to be forfeited for a disgraceful deed. In 1631, Josias
Plastowe of Boston was fined five pounds for stealing corn from the
Indians; and it was likewise ordered by the Court that he should be
called in the future plain Josias, and not Mr. Plastowe as formerly.
Here was a chance for the community to take a hand in punishing a
somewhat contemptible malefactor. It would have been more or less than
human if it had not enjoyed the privilege.
By far the neatest instance of making the punishment fit the crime is
recorded in Governor Bradford’s “Diary of Occurrences.” The carpenter
employed to construct the stocks for the Plymouth colonists thought
fit to charge an excessive rate for the job; whereupon he was speedily
clapped into his own instrument, “being the first to suffer this
penalty.” And _we_ profess to pity the Puritans for the hardness and
dulness of their lives! Why, if we could but see a single profiteer
sitting in the stocks, one man out of the thousands who impudently
oppress the public punished in this admirable and satisfactory manner,
we should be willing to listen to sermons two hours long for the rest
of our earthly days.
And the Puritans relished their sermons, which were masterful like
themselves. Dogma and denunciation were dear to their souls, and they
could bear an intolerable deal of both. An hour-glass stood on the
preacher’s desk, and youthful eyes strayed wistfully to the slender
thread of sand. But if the discourse continued after the last grain had
run out, a tithingman who sat by the desk turned the glass, and the
congregation settled down for a fresh hearing. A three-hour sermon was
a possibility in those iron days, while an eloquent parson, like Samuel
Torrey of Weymouth, could and did pray for two hours at a stretch. The
Reverend John Cotton, grandfather of the redoubtable Cotton Mather, and
the only minister in Boston who was acknowledged by Anne Hutchinson
to possess the mysterious “seal of the Spirit,” had a reprehensible
habit of preaching for two hours on Sunday in the meeting-house (his
family and servants of course attending), and at night, after supper,
repeating this sermon to the sleepy household who had heard it in the
morning.
For a hundred and fifty years the New England churches were unheated,
and every effort to erect stoves was vigorously opposed. This at
least could not have been a reaction against Popery, inasmuch as the
churches of Catholic Christendom were at that time equally cold. That
the descendants of men who tore the noble old organs out of English
cathedrals, and sold them for scrap metal, should have been chary
of accepting even a “pitch-pipe” to start their unmelodious singing
was natural enough; but stoves played no part in the service. The
congregations must have been either impervious to discomfort, or very
much afraid of fires. The South Church of Boston was first heated in
the winter of 1783. There was much criticism of such indulgence, and
the “Evening Post,” January 25th, burst into denunciatory verse:
“Extinct the sacred fires of love,
Our zeal grown cold and dead;
In the house of God we fix a stove
To warm us in their stead.”
Three blots on the Puritans’ escutcheon (they were men, not seraphs)
have been dealt with waveringly by historians. Witchcraft, slavery
and Indian warfare gloom darkly against a shining background of
righteousness. Much has been made of the fleeting phase, and little
of the more permanent conditions--which proves the historic value
of the picturesque. That Salem should to-day sell witch spoons and
trinkets, trafficking upon memories she might be reasonably supposed to
regret, is a triumph of commercialism. The brief and dire obsession of
witchcraft was in strict accord with times and circumstances. It bred
fear, horror, and a tense excitement which lifted from Massachusetts
all reproach of dulness. The walls between the known and the unknown
world were battered savagely, and the men and women who thronged from
house to house to see the “Afflicted Children” writhe in convulsions
had a fearful appreciation of the spectacle. That terrible child,
Ann Putnam, who at twelve years of age was instrumental in bringing
to the scaffold some of the most respected citizens of Salem, is a
unique figure in history. The apprehensive interest she inspired in her
townspeople may be readily conceived. It brought her to ignominy in the
end.
The Plymouth colonists kept on good terms with their Indian neighbours
for half a century. The Bay colonists had more aggressive neighbours,
and dealt with them accordingly. It was an unequal combat. The
malignancy of the red men lacked concentration and thoroughness. They
were only savages, and accustomed to episodic warfare. The white
men knew the value of finality. When Massachusetts planned with
Connecticut to exterminate the Pequots, less than a dozen men escaped
extermination. It was a very complete killing, and no settler slept
less soundly for having had a hand in it. Mr. Fiske says that the
measures employed in King Philip’s War “did not lack harshness,” which
is a euphemism. The flinging of the child Astyanax over the walls of
Troy was less barbarous than the selling of King Philip’s little son
into slavery. Hundreds of adult captives were sent at the same time to
Barbados. It would have been more merciful, though less profitable, to
have butchered them at home.
The New England settlers were not indifferent to the Indians’ souls.
They forbade them, when they could, to hunt or fish on the Lord’s day.
John Eliot, Jonathan Edwards, and other famous divines preached to
them earnestly, and gave them a fair chance of salvation. But, like
all savages, they had a trick of melting into the forest just when
their conversion seemed at hand. Cotton Mather, in his “Magnalia,”
speculates ruthlessly upon their condition and prospects. “We know
not,” he writes, “when or how these Indians first became inhabitants of
this mighty continent; yet we may guess that probably the Devil decoyed
these miserable savages hither, in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord
would never come to destroy or disturb his absolute Empire over them.”
Naturally, no one felt well disposed towards a race which was under
the dominion of Satan. Just as the Celt and the Latin have small
compunction in ill-treating animals, because they have no souls, so
the Puritan had small compunction in ill-treating heathens, because
their souls were lost.
Slavery struck no deep roots in New England soil, perhaps because the
nobler half of the New England conscience never condoned it, perhaps
because circumstances were unfavourable to its development. The negroes
died of the climate, the Indians of bondage. But traders, in whom
conscience was not uppermost, trafficked in slaves as in any other
class of merchandise, and stoutly refused to abandon a profitable line
of business. Moreover, the deep discordance between slavery as an
institution and Puritanism as an institution made such slave-holding
more than ordinarily odious. Agnes Edwards, in an engaging little
volume on Cape Cod, quotes a clause from the will of John Bacon of
Barnstable, who bequeathed to his wife for her lifetime the “use and
improvement” of a slave-woman, Dinah. “If, at the death of my wife,
Dinah be still living, I desire my executors to sell her, and to use
and improve the money for which she is sold in the purchase of Bibles,
and distribute them equally among my said wife’s and my grandchildren.”
There are fashions in goodness and badness as in all things else; but
the selling of a worn-out woman for Bibles goes a step beyond Mrs.
Stowe’s most vivid imaginings.
These are heavy indictments to bring against the stern forbears
whom we are wont to praise and patronize. But Pilgrim and Puritan
can bear the weight of their misdeeds as well as the glory of their
achievements. Of their good old English birthright, “truth, pitie,
freedom and hardiness,” they cherished all but pitie. No price was
too high for them to pay for the dignity of their manhood, or for
the supreme privilege of dwelling on their own soil. They scorned
the line of least resistance. Their religion was never a cloak for
avarice, and labour was not with them another name for idleness and
greed. Eight hours a day they held to be long enough for an artisan
to work; but the principle of giving little and getting much, which
rules our industrial world to-day, they deemed unworthy of freemen. No
swollen fortunes corrupted their communities; no base envy of wealth
turned them into prowling wolves. If they slew hostile Indians without
compunction, they permitted none to rob those who were friendly and
weak. If they endeavoured to exclude immigrants of alien creeds,
they would have thought shame to bar them out because they were
harder workers or better farmers than themselves. On the whole, a
comparison between their methods and our own leaves us little room for
self-congratulation.
From that great mother country which sends her roving sons over land
and sea, the settlers of New England brought undimmed the sacred fire
of liberty. If they were not akin to Shakespeare, they shared the
inspiration of Milton. “No nobler heroism than theirs,” says Carlyle,
“ever transacted itself on this earth.” Their laws were made for the
strong, and commanded respect and obedience. In Plymouth, few public
employments carried any salary; but no man might refuse office when it
was tendered to him. The Pilgrim, like the Roman, was expected to serve
the state, not batten on it. What wonder that a few drops of his blood
carries with it even now some measure of devotion and restraint. These
were men who understood that life is neither a pleasure nor a calamity.
“It is a grave affair with which we are charged, and which we must
conduct and terminate with honour.”
“To Counsel the Doubtful”
In the “Colony Records” of Plymouth it is set down that a certain
John Williams lived unhappily with his wife--a circumstance which was
as conceivable in that austere community as in less godly towns. But
the Puritan magistrate who, in the year 1666, undertook to settle
this connubial quarrel, had no respect for that compelling word,
“incompatibility.” The afflicted couple were admonished “to apply
themselves to such waies as might make for the recovery of peace and
love betwixt them. And for that end, the Court requested Isacke Bucke
to bee officious therein.”
It is the delight and despair of readers, especially of readers
inclined to the intimacies of history, that they are so often told the
beginnings of things, and left to conjecture the end. How did Isacke
Bucke set about his difficult and delicate commission, and how did the
contentious pair relish his officiousness? The Puritans were tolerably
accustomed to proffering advice. It was part of their social code, as
well as a civil and religious duty. They had a happy belief in the
efficacy of expostulation. In 1635 it was proposed that the magistrates
of Boston should “in tenderness and love admonish one another.” And
many lively words must have come of it.
Roman Catholics, who studied their catechism when they were children,
will always remember that the first of the “Spiritual Works of Mercy”
is “To counsel the doubtful.” Taken in conjunction with the thirteen
other works, it presents a compendium of holiness. Taken by itself,
apart from less popular rulings, such as “To forgive offences,” and
“To bear wrongs patiently,” it is apt to be a trifle overbearing.
Catholic theology has defined the difference between a precept and a
counsel--when the Church speaks. A precept is binding, and obedience to
it is an obligation. A counsel is suggestive, and obedience to it is a
matter of volition. The same distinction holds good in civil and social
life. A law must be obeyed; but it is in no despite of our counsellors,
moral or political, that we reserve the right of choice.
Three hundred years ago, Robert Burton, who was reflective rather
than mandatory, commented upon the reluctance of heretics to be
converted from their errors. It seemed to him--a learned and detached
onlooker--that one man’s word, however well spoken, had no effect upon
another man’s views; and he marvelled unconcernedly that this should be
the case. The tolerance or the indifference of our day has disinclined
most of us to meddle with our neighbour’s beliefs. We are concerned
about his tastes, his work, his politics, because at these points
his life touches ours; but we have a decent regard for his spiritual
freedom, and for the secret responsibility it entails.
There are, indeed, devout Christian communities which expend their
time, money and energy in extinguishing in the breasts of other
Christians the faith which has sufficed and supported them. The
methods of these propagandists are more genial than were those of
the Inquisition; but their temerity is no less, and their animating
principle is the same. They proffer their competing set of dogmas with
absolute assurance, forgetting that man does not live by fractions
of theology, but by the correspondence of his nature to spiritual
influences moulded through the centuries to meet his needs. To counsel
the doubtful is a Christian duty; but to create the doubts we counsel
is nowhere recommended. It savours too closely of omniscience.
The counsels offered by age to youth are less expansive, and less
untrammelled than are the counsels offered by youth to age. Experience
dulls the courageous and imaginative didacticism that is so heartening,
because so sanguine, in the young. We have been told, both in England
and in the United States, that youth is now somewhat displeased
with age, as having made a mess of the world it was trying to run;
and that the shrill defiance which meets criticism indicates this
justifiable resentment. It is not an easy matter to run a world at
the best of times, and Germany’s unfortunate ambition to control the
running has put the job beyond man’s power of immediate adjustment.
The social lapses that have been so loudly lamented by British and
American censors are the least serious symptoms of the general
disintegration--the crumbling away of a cornice when the foundations
are insecure.
It is interesting, however, to note the opposing methods employed by
carping age to correct the excesses of youth. When a Western State
disapproves of the behaviour of its young people, it turns to the
courts for relief. It asks and obtains laws regulating the length of a
skirt, or the momentum of a dance. When a New England State disapproves
of the behaviour of its young people, it writes articles, or circulates
and signs a remonstrance. Sometimes it confides its grievance to
a Federation of Women’s Clubs, hoping that the augustness of this
assembly will overawe the spirit of revolt. I may add that when Canada
(Province of Quebec) disapproves of the behaviour of its young people,
it appeals to the Church, which acts with commendable promptness and
semi-occasional success.
All these torrents of disapproval have steeped society in an ebb-tide
of rejected counsels. It would seem that none of us are conducting
ourselves as properly as we should, and that few of us are satisfactory
to our neighbours. In the rapid shifting of responsibility, we find
ourselves accused when we thought we were accusers. We say that a
girl’s dress fails to cover a proper percentage of her body, and are
told that it is the consequence of our inability to preserve peace. We
pay a predatory grocer the price he asks for his goods, and are told
that it is our fault he asks it. If we plead that hunger-striking--the
only alternative--is incompatible with common sense and hard work,
we are offered a varied assortment of substitutes for food. There is
nothing in which personal tastes are more pronounced or less persuasive
than in the devices of economy. Sooner or later they resolve themselves
into the query of the famous and frugal Frenchman: “Why should I pay
twelve francs for an umbrella when I can buy a bock for six sous?”
The most hopeful symptom of our times (so fraught with sullenness
and peril) is the violent hostility developed some years ago between
rival schools of verse. There have always been individual critics as
sensitive to contrary points of view as are the men who organize raids
on Carnegie Hall whenever they disagree with a speaker. Swinburne was a
notable example of this tyranny of opinion. It was not enough for him
to love Dickens and to hate Byron, thus neatly balancing his loss and
gain. He was impelled by the terms of his nature ardently to proclaim
his love and his hate, and intemperately to denounce those who loved
and hated otherwise.
That so keen and caustic a commentator as Mr. Chesterton should have
been annoyed because he could not turn back the tide of popular
enthusiasm which surged and broke at Rudyard Kipling’s feet was natural
enough. He assured the British public that “Recessional” was the work
of a “solemn cad”; and the British public--quite as if he had not
spoken--took the poem to its heart, wept over it, prayed over it,
and dilated generally with emotions which it is good for a public to
feel. The looker-on was reminded a little of Horace Walpole fretfully
explaining to Paris that a Salisbury Court printer could not possibly
know anything about the habits of the English aristocracy; and of Paris
replying to this ultimatum by reading “Clarissa Harlowe” with all its
might and main, and shedding torrents of tears over the printer’s
matchless heroine.
The asperity of a solitary critic is, however, far less impelling than
the asperity of a whole school of writers and of their opponents.
Just when the ways of the world seemed darkest, and its nations most
distraught, the _literati_ effected a welcome diversion by quarreling
over rules of prosody. The lovers of rhyme were not content to read
rhyme and to write it; the lovers of polyphonic prose were not content
to read polyphonic prose and to write it; but both factions found their
true joy in vivaciously criticizing and counselling their antagonists.
Miss Amy Lowell was right when she said, with her customary insight and
decision, that the beliefs and protests and hates of poets all go to
prove the deathless vigour of the art. Unenlightened outsiders took up
the quarrel with pleasure, finding relief in a dispute that threatened
death and disaster to no one.
Few contentions are so innocent of ill-doing. The neighbours whom
we counsel most assiduously are the nations of the world and their
governments, which might well be doubtful, seeing that they stumble
at every step; but which perhaps stand more in need of smooth roads
than of direction. It is true that M. Stéphane Lauzanne, editor of
“Le Matin,” assured us in the autumn of 1920 that France did not
seek American gold, or ships, or guns, or soldiers--“only counsels.”
This sounded quite in our line, until the Frenchman, with that fatal
tendency to the concrete which is typical of the Gallic mind, proceeded
to explain his meaning: “We ask of the country of Edison and of the
Wrights that it will present us with a system for a league of nations
that will work. If there were nothing needed but eloquence, the
statesmen of old Europe would have been sufficient.”
Why did not M. Lauzanne ask for the moon while he was about it? What
does he suppose we Americans have been striving for since 1789 but
systems that will work? Henry Adams, commenting upon the disastrous
failure of Grant’s administration, says just this thing. “The world”
(the American world) “cared little for decency. What it wanted, it did
not know. Probably a system that would work, and men who could work it.
But it found neither.”
And still the search goes on. A system of taxation that will work.
A system of wage-adjustment that will work. A system of prohibition
that will work. A system of public education that will work. These are
the bright phantoms we pursue; and now a Paris editor casually adds a
system for a working league of nations. “If France is in the right,
let America give us her moral support. If France is in the wrong, let
America show us the road to follow.”
To presume agreement where none exists is the most dangerous form
of self-deception. When newspapers and orators tell us that to the
United States has come “the moral leadership of the world,” we must
understand them to imply that foreign nations, with whom we have little
in common, are of our way of thinking--provided always that they know
what we think, and that we know ourselves. For the wide divergence of
national aspirations, they make scant allowance; for misunderstanding
and ill-will, they make no allowance at all. Before the election of
1920, the spokesmen of both political parties assured us with equal
fervour that our country was destined to be the bulwark of the world’s
peace. Their prescriptions for peace differed radically in detail; but
all agreed that ours was to be the administering hand, and all implied
the readiness of Europe (and, if need be, Asia and Africa) to accept
our restoratives. “Want America to teach Turkey,” was the headline of
a leading newspaper, which, in October, 1920, deplored the general
unteachableness of the Turk.
Perhaps the careless crudeness of headlines deceives a large class of
hurried readers who rely too implicitly upon them. When the Conference
at Versailles was plodding through its task, a New York paper announced
in large type: “Italy dissatisfied with territory assigned her by
Colonel House.” It had a mirth-provoking sound; but, after all, the
absurdity was in no way attributable to Colonel House; and, in the
matter of dissatisfaction, not even a headline could go beyond the
facts. What has ever impelled the “Tribuna” and the “Avanti” to express
amicable agreement, save their mutual determination to repudiate the
intervention of the United States?
When Mr. Wilson risked speaking directly to the Italian people, he
paved the way for misunderstanding. To a government, words are words.
It deals with them itself, and it makes allowance for the difficulty
of translating them into action. But a proletariat is apt, not merely
to attach significance to words, but to read an intensive meaning into
them. We have not done badly by Italy. We spent a great deal of money
upon her cold and hungry children. She is sending us shiploads of
immigrants. Her resentment at our counsel has seemed to us unwise and
ungrateful, seeing that we must naturally know what is best for her.
We cannot accept ill-will with the unconcern of Great Britain, which
has been used to it, and has survived it, for centuries. We feel that
we deserve well of the world, because we are immaculately free from
coveting what we do not want or need.
And yet one wonders now and then whether, if there had been four years
of glorious and desolating war on this Western continent, and the
United States had emerged triumphant, but spent, broken and bankrupt,
we should be so sure of our mission to regenerate. Would we then be so
high-handed with England, so critical of France? No people in the world
resent strictures more than we do. No people in the world are less keen
for admonishment. The sixty-six members of the Yale Faculty who in 1920
sent a remonstrance to Congress, protesting against any interference in
the domestic policies of Great Britain, based their protest upon our
unalterable determination to preserve our own independence unviolated,
and to manage our own affairs. They felt, and said, that we should be
scrupulous to observe the propriety we exacted of others.
The ingenious device of appointing an American committee, which in its
turn appointed an American commission to sit as a court of appeal, and
receive evidence touching the relations of Great Britain and Ireland,
was the most original and comprehensive measure for counselling the
doubtful that this country has ever seen. The informality of the scheme
made it a pure delight. Governors of Wyoming and North Dakota, mayors
of Milwaukee and Anaconda, clergymen and college professors, ladies
and gentlemen of unimpeachable respectability and unascertainable
information, all responded to the “Nation’s” call, and placed their
diplomacy at its disposal.
Pains were taken by Mr. Villard to convince the public that the
object of the committee was to avert “the greatest calamity which
could befall the civilized world”--a war between Great Britain and
the United States, than which nothing seemed less likely. Its members
disclaimed anything like “improper interference in the concerns of
another nation.” They evidently did not consider that summoning
Ireland and England to appear as plaintiff and defendant before a
self-constituted tribunal three thousand miles away was in the nature
of an interference. “I meddle with no man’s conscience,” said Cromwell
broad-mindedly, when he closed the Catholic churches, and forbade the
celebration of Mass.
The humour of selecting a group of men and women in one corner of
the world, and delegating to them the unofficial task of settling
public affairs in another, was lost upon Americans, who, having been
repeatedly told that they were to “show the way,” conceived themselves
to be showing it. When Great Britain and Ireland settled their own
affairs without asking our advice or summoning our aid, there were
hyphenated citizens in New York and elsewhere who deeply resented
such independent action, and who have shown ever since a bitter
unfriendliness to their own kith and kin. Even Mr. Cosgrave’s burst of
Gaelic eloquence before the League of Nations, which should have melted
a heart of flint, was powerless to allay their ill-temper.
If well-meaning counsellors could be persuaded that there are phenomena
upon which they are not all qualified to give advice, they might
perhaps forbear to send delegations of children to the White House.
This is a popular diversion, and one which is much to be deplored. In
the hour of our utmost depression, when our rights as a free nation
were denied us, and the lives of our citizens were imperilled on land
and sea, a number of children were sent to Mr. Wilson, to ask him not
to go to war. It was as though they had asked him not to play games on
Sunday, or not to put Christmas candles in his windows. Three years
later, another deputation of innocents marched past the White House,
bearing banners with severely worded directions from their mothers
as to how the President (then a very ill man) should conduct himself.
The language used was of reprehensible rudeness. The exhortations
themselves appeared to be irrelevant. “American women demand that
anarchy in the White House be stopped!” puzzled the onlookers, who
wondered what was happening in that sad abode of pain, what women these
were who knew so much about it, and why a children’s crusade had been
organized for the control of our foreign and domestic policies.
The last query is the easiest answered. Picketing is a survival of the
childish instinct in the human heart. It represents the play-spirit
about which modern educators talk so glibly, and which we are bidden to
cherish and preserve. A society of “American Women Pickets” (delightful
phrase!) is out to enjoy itself, and its pleasures are as simple as
they are satisfying. To parade the streets, to proffer impertinent
instructions, to be stared at by passers-by, and to elude the law which
seeks to abate public nuisances--what better sport could be asked
either for little boys and girls, or for Peter Pans valiantly refusing
to mature? Mr. Harding was pursued in his day by picketing children,
and Mr. Coolidge has probably the same pleasure awaiting him. Even
the tomb at Mount Vernon has been surrounded by malcontents, bearing
banners with the inscription, “Washington, Thou Art Truly Dead!” To
which the mighty shade, who in his day had heard too often the sound
and fury of importunate counsels, and who, because he would not
hearken, had been abused, like “a Nero, a defaulter and a pickpocket,”
might well have answered from the safety and dignity of the tomb, “Deo
gratias!”
When a private citizen calls at the White House, to “frankly advise”
a modification of the peace treaty; when a private citizen writes to
the American Bar Association, to “frankly advise” this distinguished
body of men to forbear from any discussion of public affairs at their
annual meeting; when a private citizeness writes to the Secretary of
War to “frankly advise” that he should treat the slacker of to-day as
he would treat the hero of to-morrow, we begin to realize how far the
individual American is prepared to dry-nurse the Nation. Every land has
its torch-bearers, but nowhere else do they all profess to carry the
sacred fire. It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind
is unfavourable to preachment. We can hardly conceive a delegation of
little French girls sent to tell M. Millerand what their mothers think
of him. Even England shows herself at times impatient of her monitors.
“Mr. Norman Angell is very cross,” observed a British reviewer dryly.
“Europe is behaving in her old mad way without having previously
consulted him.”
“Causes are the proper subject of history,” says Mr. Brownell, “and
characteristics are the proper subject of criticism.” It may be that
much of our criticism is beside the mark, because we disregard the
weight of history. Our fresh enthusiasm for small nations is dependent
upon their docility, and upon their respect for boundary lines which
the big nations have painstakingly defined. That a boundary which has
been fought over for centuries should be more provocative of dispute
than a claim staked off in Montana does not occur to an American
who has little interest in events that antedate the Declaration of
Independence. Countries, small, weak and incredibly old, whose sons
are untaught and unfed, appear to be eager for supplies and insensible
to moral leadership. We recognize these characteristics, and resent
or deplore them according to our dispositions; but for an explanation
of the causes--which might prove enlightening--we must go further back
than Americans care to travel.