SCENE: _A chamber of unimaginable horrors, vast, murky, involute,
in which serpents twist and writhe; tortured figures crawl and
groan; beasts of many heads and paws prowl to and fro, and all
slimy odorous forms interlace in welters and sloughs and draperies
and festoons. At the center, the Throne of the Lord, a mound of
unclean beasts and serpents, hung over by clouds of evil spirits;
his present embodied thoughts. At his side, huddled in despair,
faint, pale shadows of their former selves, the thinnest of
dreams_--BEAUTY, REASON, PITY, HOPE, LOVE. _Before him in glowering
fullness, grown to vast proportions_, AMBITION, _and behind him the
legions of his fancy, black and fulgurous, drawn close about.
Insane, fevered, maundering, the LORD OF THE UNIVERSE bellows of
destruction_.
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Death! Death! Death! Thou dearest death!
Bring thou me heaps of dead--the endless slain! Breed winged and forked
things, horrors all! Bring thou me shames, despairs, disasters, with
which to torture and slay! Go forth! Go forth! Sweep thou with Hate,
with Rage, with Despair, with Fear! Breed me vast powers of evil, and
still vaster! Rank thou me them rank on rank--file by file! (_He thinks
on tortured forms._) Make me armies of horrors, of woes, of immedicable
griefs! (_As he thinks, from his brain leap forth, many-headed, forked,
winged, the first six Powers of Darkness, and after them, clawed and
winged forces of ravening aspect and disaster._)
BEAUTY
(_Sadly, in a thin voice._) Lord, am I forgotten? (_He makes no
answer._)
LOVE
(_In a thin voice._) Lord, canst thou no longer think on me? (_He makes
no answer._)
HOPE
(_Weakly._) Lord, am I no more to thee? (_No answer._)
PITY
Canst thou not remember me, Lord? (_No answer._)
REASON
Lord, am I as nothing to thee now? (_No answer._)
AMBITION
(_To the clouds of darkness behind him as the first of the six great
Powers leap forth._) Join them thou! Forth!
FIRST POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, leaping from the brain of the
Creator at illimitable speed._) Hail! I go to harry! To slay!
SECOND POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, rushing forth at illimitable
speed._) Hail! I go to rack, to torture!
THIRD POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, rushing forth at illimitable
speed._) Hail! I go to ravage! To gall! To flay!
FOURTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, rushing forth at illimitable
speed._) Hail! Where Sorrow is not, I carry it!
FIFTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, winged and fanged, rushing forth at illimitable
speed._) Hail! Where Happiness is, I destroy it!
SIXTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Hundred-headed, seven-horned, winged and fanged, rushing forth at
illimitable speed._) Hail! Hail! Where Peace is, and Love, I make them
as not! (_They speed to his right hand and to his left, above and
beneath him, before and behind him._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Forth! Forth! Fury upon fury! Bring me masses of destruction! Undo!
Undo! Undo! I would have change! Death! Woe! Tears--bring me tears,
tears, tears! Wipe out all dreams! Make ashes of fancies! Destroy!
Destroy! Destroy! Let all be of horror, of death, of sorrow, of pain!
Make of life an ending in misery! Mad! Mad! I am mad! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
(_He bellows in insane rage._)
AMBITION
(_Raveningly, to the clouds of Darkness behind._) Join thou these!
Forth! Forth! Out upon his glistering thoughts! Undo! Undo! He is sick
of pity, of peace! Harry thou with these! Destroy! Make dust of suns!
Breed distempers in all flesh! Reduce, level, macerate, decay! Make of
everything nothing! Forth! Forth!
THE LEGIONS OF DARKNESS
(_Rumbling in anticipation._) Hail! (_They speed outward._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Rocking to and fro in insane pain._) To my right hand and to my left!
Above me, and beneath! Before me, and behind! Out--on! Harry! Destroy!
Cease, Time! Be nothing, Space! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! End thou
me the weariness of this! (_He weeps in frenetic misery._)
A CLOUD OF SERAPHIM
(_Faded to but pale rays._) Oh, Measureless Wonder of all Wonders! Oh,
Creator of all Things! Canst thou not think on us? We die! We die!
(_They begin to fade._)
A CLOUD OF CHERUBIM
(_Shrunken to a thin line._) Nor on us--on us? We die! We die! (_They
slowly fade also._)
BEAUTY
(_Rising and viewing all with weary eyes._) He dreams on me no more--on
Beauty no more! Oh, mad, mad, Lord! Oh, fevered, useless dreams! Gone
all the sweet Seraphim and Cherubim--the halls of light and wonder--his
suns and jewel-stars! His dreams have changed. These his horrors are
now his mood. And death--and nothingness--for all of us, his mood! (_To_
DESPAIR.) Hail! Hail! thou unutterable one. (_To_ AMBITION, _glowering
near_.) And thou, great evil one, his torturous swelling thought! Now is
thy dark hour! But sleep and nothingness is the end of this for thee and
all! Thou wouldst destroy even me, oh evil thing! Yet if he but thought
on me, how different! His singing world again! But wait, wait! If he
think on thee for long comes death and the end of all this--of thee, as
of me! By death, sleep! And by sleep, if he sleep--where then is his
thought of thee or me? Pray that he change!
AMBITION
(_Arrogantly._) Avaunt, thin thing! Now is my Lord awake--he thinks on
me, not thee! To harry, burn, slay! To his right hand and to his left!
Above him, and beneath! Before him, and behind! He is for strife,
strength, conflict! To harry, slay, lay waste! It is as it is! He knows
thee not! (_The destroying legions rumble._)
PITY
(_Drawing near to_ BEAUTY.) He thinks not on me again! I am grown so
thin! Is there no change? Is peace worth nothing--the tender heart--the
end of agonies and storms?
AMBITION
Avaunt! He knows thee not! (PITY _shrinks exceeding small_.)
LOVE
(_Drawing near, a pale shadow._) Or all the lovely thoughts that
fluttered into happiness--are they worth nothing?
AMBITION
Avaunt! He knows thee not, thin wraith! (_She fades to a point._)
REASON
Nor me? Not even order?
AMBITION
Hence! (REASON _steps aside_.)
HOPE
Nor yet the thought he had in me? Can he not remember me?
AMBITION
Vanish! Thy Lord is for destruction! He thinks not on thee--but on me!
Hence! (HOPE _pales to a thin flame_.)
BEAUTY
(_Proudly._) Yet am I Beauty, his first thought! Rage on, thou evil one!
Of what avail, since thou wilt end also? Destroy as thou wilt, he will
not forget me! I am that which he is--Beauty! His first thought! Think
madly as he may, yet will his last thought, as his first, be of me. I am
in him, and he in me. From him, when he wake, if ever, will I come! I
will be worshiped! I will be worshiped!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Writhing in a last insane agony._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Let
me have done with Life! Let me have done with Thought--Pain--with Order,
Beauty, Hope! Let me have done with all things! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
Sick--sick! Death! Death! Burn! Harry! Slay! Oh, ho, ho, ho! I will have
done with all! (_He tears at his snaky locks._)
REASON
(_Sadly._) Great Master of us all, so this then is the end? I, who was
thy thought of order, am disordered! I, who was thy strength, am thy
weakness! So sink I back to nothingness! (_He re-enters the brow of the
Lord._)
LOVE
And I, who was his thought of happiness! So come I to nothingness again!
(_She re-enters the forehead of the Lord._)
PITY
And I, who was his thought of tenderness! (_She fades into his brain._)
HOPE
And I, who was his thought of love and peace! (_She disappears also._)
BEAUTY
(_Paling._) Yet is he not done with me! Mad though he be, even though he
sleep, now I feel his thought! He is in me, as I in him! I will be
worshiped! I will be worshiped! (_She re-enters his brow undiminished._)
FIRST POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering in._) All that was to thy left hand is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
SECOND POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering in._) All that was to thy right hand is not.
THE LORD
’Tis well!
THIRD POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering in._) All that was before thee is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
FOURTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering in._) All that was behind thee is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
FIFTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering._) All that was above thee is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
SIXTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Returning and entering._) All that was beneath thee is not!
THE LORD
’Tis well!
AMBITION
’Tis well! Hail, Lord! As thou wouldst, I have ended thy dreams! Canst
thou not rest?
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Writhing._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! I dream! I dream! It is
too much! Destroy! Destroy! I will have peace! I will have peace! (_He
turns and writhes, sinking in weariness as he does so, and partially
disappearing. Æons elapse._)
FIRST POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Beginning to fade in the brain of the Lord._) It is of me that he
ceases to think! I fail! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
(_Sadly._) It is the end!
SECOND POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Beginning to fade in the brain of the Lord._) It is of me he ceases to
think. Oh, ho, ho, ho! I fail! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
(_Sadly._) It is the end!
THIRD POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Writhing and fading in the brain of the Lord._) It is of me he ceases
to think! I fail! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
It is the end!
FOURTH POWER OF DARKNESS
(_Fading into the brain of the Lord._) It is of me he ceases to think! I
fail! (_He groans and disappears._)
AMBITION
It is the end!
FIFTH POWER OF DARKNESS
It is of me he ceases to think! I fail! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
It is the end!
SIXTH POWER OF DARKNESS
It is of me he ceases to think! I fail! (_He disappears._)
AMBITION
It is the end!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Stretching prone in space and all but vanishing. Only faint outlines
are visible here and there, the brow and face intact._) Peace! Peace! It
is enough! It is enough! I have done! Let it be as it ever was from
everlasting to everlasting--a dream--a dream! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He sighs
heavily. The last writhing beasts thin and are gone._ AMBITION, _paling
and thinning, stands wide-eyed, agape, before the fading brow of the
Lord_.)
AMBITION
At last! And I--it is of me he ceases to think--even me! I have done! I
have done! (_He vanishes._)
BEAUTY
(_A thin star in the brow of the Lord, glistering and yet paling._) It
is even of me he ceases to think! Lord, hast thou forgotten thy
first-born?
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Peace! Peace! Enter thou into me! (_He sighs and begins to vanish
completely._)
BEAUTY
(_Fading into his sleep._) I will be worshiped! I will be worshiped!
(_She smiles._)
_The illusion of reality ceases. Suns and planets are gone. Time
and Space are not. That which was is as that which was not._
ASHTORETH
What has impressed me most about life, always, is the freshness and
newness of everything, the perennial upwelling of life in every form;
the manner in which, as age steals on for some, youth, new, innocent,
inexperienced, believing, takes charge, its eyes alight with aspiration,
its body ablaze with desire. We know that the world is old, old, and
societies also in every form, while the average span of life for the
individual is little more than forty years--yet step into the streets
and witness the immemorable clangor and newness, the present visible
portion of the unbroken thread or pattern that reaches back into
eternity. And for all that life is so old, old, and atoms of the life
pattern or chain are feeble, is life old? Does the bit of thread or
pattern that we see here now show the least evidence of wear or tear? Is
not the race as new, as fresh as ever? We rise betimes and the ancient
sunlight streams fresh and strong and _new_ into our passing
window--this window which, in a few years, will be as forgotten and as
non-recoverable as we ourselves shall be.
And the ways without--are they crowded with the aged, the worn, the
soul-weary? Here and there, perhaps, a halting, bent or time-worn
specimen that attracts attention for its _age_! In the main, at every
turn, youth is in charge, laughing, singing, whistling, the newest modes
of the _Zeitgeist_ adorning it, the latest coats, the latest hats, the
latest shoes heightening the charm of bodies utterly evanescent. The
percentage of the really aged abroad is as one to one hundred--one
thousand. Viewing the swift tides of life as they burble in the great
thoroughfares they are utterly negligible. And it is always so. A large
crowd of the old and the weak and the defective would be an astounding
sight anywhere in life that is so old.
Yes, life is careful to do away with all evidences of age in the public
places where it runs so gaily. The sick--are they here or in hospitals
or darkened bedrooms? The maimed, the blind, the defective in any
way--are they here, or hidden away in institutions where the young and
the hopeful may not see? Life apparently resents them. It will not have
its ways bestrewn by its discarded implements and shells. Out, out,
since it is done with them. Away! There is much talk of charity and the
beatitudes, but let one lose an arm, a leg, an eye, a hand. Practically
the entire world shudders and withdraws. Better, indeed, a criminal,
whole and exhibiting that self-sufficiency which the life impulse
demands, than to have been injured in any worthy or even glorious
contest. Rarely if ever, and never willingly, does Life obtrude upon our
unwilling gaze a suggestion of the brevity of our own strength or charm,
or present to the eye even a faint suggestion of the inscrutable and
astounding and even wholesale cruelty of itself. Indeed, where Nature
with her illusions has her way, pain, weariness and death are never to
be accepted as the huge controlling facts that they are.
What--Nature cruel? Look at the freshness of Her face, the joy of Her
perpetual youth, the glory of Her springs, the richness and variety of
Her facets and changes! Quite so. She is the subtlest of all our
enemies, the wisest of all our craftsmen and managers. Her instinct and
therefore Her business is to keep the eternal freshness and durability
and zest of life uppermost, and this She does with unbelievable skill.
For although we are here, young and new, believing vigorously in our
destiny, the grand sum of our future and its durability, still only
forty or fifty years ago there were all of a billion people here who
were as fresh and as vigorous and as youthful as we are now. They
believed in their grand destinies as we believe in ours, and where are
they? Gone. No trace--no memory even--no care. Only we are what is left
of what was them, their descendants. And the astonishing tragedies, the
painful diseases, the most grinding and wearing of denied hopes, by
reason of which they are no longer here and we are--how adroitly even
the memory of these have been removed! The wonder! Yet _life_ is as
fresh now as it was then. _It_ has not aged. _It_ has not gone. The
endless chain is as bright and strong as ever--stronger, maybe.
To-morrow when we are where they are it will be as taut and shining and
swift-moving and as new as ever.
But these young bustling souls swinging their canes, lighting their
cigarettes, whistling and dreaming of a perfect to-morrow--do they know
aught of this? Not a word. And will they? Not, in the main, until it is
too late to affect their lives. And, better yet, and what is really more
important, they do not care. Life has one admirable trait: it limits the
sensibility of many. “Never mind, dearie,” it seems to say, “do not
worry about me, or older days. The old was nothing, the new is all. Eat,
drink, be merry and forget. It is best.” Thus life, and it is her
intention that they shall. Each sorrow or deprivation or disaster as it
befalls them is painted in their consciousness as special to them. Never
before was there one such to equal this. No, no. Life would not be so
cruel. She would not intentionally do this to any one. “What!” she
whispers artfully and convincingly, “life induce such bitter tears? Life
ruthlessly and cruelly deprive any one of a hand? an eye? of life
itself? Never. To be injured thus indifferently, when so many are not,
was never intended by her for you, as you can see. If that is not so,
why is it so many are well, hale, happy?” So she lies, for well she
knows that each can know but a very little, has no time to learn more.
And she sees that he has not.
But in the dark places, the back rooms, the upper floors or cellars of
tenements or great houses, the hospitals, the asylums, the jails, the
farms and homes for the aged--and the enormous graveyards! Look and see.
Here are those who but a little while since were a part of this
pell-mell vigorous scene. They were her tools, as you are now, her
victims. She fashioned them as one might a small machine, used them for
a while for something and then threw them aside. Like a knife or any
tool, they grew a little dull, and it is so much easier to fashion a new
one. We are intended to last only a little while. While your strength is
budding that of others is failing. While your cheeks are reddening
theirs are paling. While your eyes are sharpening in shrewdness theirs
are weakening to a dim myopia, and you may soon out-see them and push
them aside. Yet the bodies of the old that so offend you now were as
lithe as your own, and they in their hour were grumbling at the
ineffectiveness of age.
But the darkest part of it is that aside from the small modicum of
service which you may render at top speed and with the utmost
enthusiasm, Nature has not the slightest care for you or yours. With the
same cavalier air with which She provides a hundred drones for the
single love-flight of the queen bee, all the failures to die, so She
provides a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, that
one--and only one--may think the necessary thought, invent the necessary
machine, build the necessary bridge or lead the necessary army. The rest
may die as they will. They are chaff. Lay them out in hundreds--in
millions--to be blown whithersoever the wind listeth, to poverty, to
death, perchance even to fortune, a brief hour. Who cares? Not She. Only
the ways of life must be kept fresh and new, the illusion of newness and
vigor maintained. Only through new bright instruments will She work, and
none other. A tasteful maid. In the blood-stream of your body are
quadrillions of little entities--so many millions to the single blood
drop--whose total destiny, apparently, is to your life about as yours is
to the race--and no more. They hurry that you may live. They toil that
you may smile, seek, yearn, blaze with ecstasy. A fraction of a minute
each, and their little cycles have been run. So yours here. But do they
know? Or care? Or do you? There is that much wisdom or tenderness or
practicality in Nature, that for the majority She inhibits the power of
memory or perspective or too great sensitiveness to joy or pain. Else
what a cursing, else what a wailing, else what a ceasing--even in the
face of Her imperial will.
THE REFORMER
Among the interesting phenomena of life is the periodic appearance in
every walk of life of the reformer, the individual who, according to
some theory based on clear perception or some delusion that has
developed in his brain, seeks to readjust conditions as he finds them to
something more in accord with what is agreeable to him, and who
accordingly, by a process of transference akin to that which has been so
adequately set forth in psychoanalysis, seeks to represent himself to
himself as a world need. Always it is life, not himself, that is in need
of this new condition, and so him. And what is it that as a rule he
offers or seeks? Without exception, if you trouble to examine the great
instances--Buddha, Christ, Confucius, St. Francis, Luther, Mohammed--it
is a revision of a current, and in itself passing, condition which has
become irritating to his sense of balance or proportion or equation in
things mundane, his personal and physical reaction to or sensory
repulsion from conditions which have become chemically (socially,
spiritually, anything you will) too far removed from a norm or mean or
equation which appeals to him, his eternal and special view of harmony.
But this after all is chemic and natural, and when he is successful he
merely represents an inevitable tendency in nature to maintain a balance
or equation between one type of mood and another, only one of which can
be dominant for a time and of which he becomes the passing
representative.
It is the only way apparently in which the moving spirit which creates
us can express--or, better yet, change--itself. Our self-propulsive
emotions, moods or appetites have somehow a tendency, if uninterrupted,
to lead us too far in some one direction--to the place, for instance,
where a chemical or physical non-balance is threatened to that dependent
equation of rival forces in which we all find ourselves immersed or
held. Then, apparently, by an inhering law which compels balance or
equation in all things, a counter-tendency which is most likely to first
present itself in the shape of a reformer, or instructor, or warner,
always chemical in his significance, appears (Buddha, Christ, Mohammed,
Luther), and you have a readjustment toward a happy medium again, as it
were. One phase of life, let us say, grows and presses too dominantly on
another. Forthwith a spokesman or mouthpiece of some kind arises, the
antithesis of the dominant thing, by no means remote or divine but
plainly human and simple and easily understandable, if he is to prove of
any value. That is why it is always esoterically safe in gross material
days to look forward to the coming of a Christ or Messiah, or reformer,
or changer, of one type or another. He is in reality a chemic and
psychic sign. He cannot help coming. He is merely an individual
expression of the general tendency toward balance or equation. And he
will surely come when things swing too far in any given direction. Any
one can be a mouthpiece for an extreme lack of balance in human affairs,
any one. The accident of circumstances usually distinguishes that one.
But by that we are not told that extremes, either of the gross or
material, or on the other hand of the spiritual or ascetic, are to be
permanently done away with or “reformed,” or that either, when dominant,
is essentially evil or good, or that the replacing thing is essentially
better and so should remain forever. Rather, what is new and
ameliorative--be it religious, ethic or economic--is merely one or the
other half or portion or face of that which was before it came, a change
from, or the obverse of, the other. Indeed the essential character of
God, or the biologic force, or the Universe, is not made much clearer
unless we see in this tendency to change or equation in all things that
it or he is both good and evil. Since chemically or spiritually we are
compelled always to seek a level or balance and maintain it, roughly
enough it is true; since to live is to swing to and fro, past a mean and
between extremes, may we not deduce from that that equation, balance, is
an attribute of God or the life force, a conditioning attribute, and one
under which it _must_ express itself?
For in life, as we may always note, and at the very moment the greatest
reformers are operating, there are also working--and quite as
vigorously, else the reformer would have little to do--anti-reformers,
or anti-Christs, or reactionaries, if you will, creatures who represent
the obverse of what is sought by the reformer or changer, and who will
by no means be permanently disposed of by him. Life apparently goes on
two legs, or opposites, always--heat: cold; high: low; external:
internal; strength: weakness; little: much; excluded: included. Side by
side with millions or billions who wish one type of thing are always
millions or billions who wish another, whose impulses, desires and
necessities are the very antithesis of those advocated by the reformers,
saviors, adjustors then operating. Thus as Christ walked the earth there
were Herod, and the whole brood of Roman, Greek and Egyptian
philosophers--pagans all--scouting his beliefs and dreams, and their
descendants are with us yet. About St. Francis were the millions of
gourmandizers and lechers of France, Italy and the European world
generally (to say nothing of the skeptical Innocent III.), too gross to
perceive the significance of that which the saint represented. Yet St.
Francis was little more than a chemical reaction against a too-heavy
materialism that enveloped Europe--nothing more, truly. He was, as it
were, poetry as opposed to the grossest and most sodden type of
materialistic thought. This is equally true of Luther and so many
others. Christ the same; Mohammed the same. Yet plainly the creative
force which we worship as God, the underlying chemistry with its cell
mechanism, was as much the maker of the fat sensualists who surrounded
and enraged Luther as it was of Luther. It was and is in both, and both
in it. Else how explain their joint presence and conflict, their psychic
as well as chemic necessity to each other, the one useless without the
other--no devil no saint, and vice versa? I for one am convinced that
the Universe, or God, or Good, is no more concerned with our saints than
with our sinners. Both may be essential, no doubt are. Certainly both
are in it, from it, necessary to it, expressive of different moods of
it, and as such necessary to each other, in order that it or life shall
exist, express itself, at all. From this I see no escape by any path.
The great aim of all reformers--that of permanently reforming man in his
social as well as his religious ways or intentions, in his lusts after
sensuality and the like, from a (in their estimation) condition of too
great license to one of none at all--is of course ridiculous. Although
always “Justice,” “Right,” “Truth,” “Eternal law” are supposed to be
involved in their commandments or demands, and presumed to represent a
permanent and unchanging state of perfection of some kind--the all-good
in some direction, and as such to be the direct commandments of God
Himself--what is really, often unintelligently, sought is an easement of
a too-great social swing in any one direction. Not perfection, but a
better balance, is all that is really sought or ever attained. Yet so
errant and nonsensical is life, its social or chemic drift--mere idle
rocking of force in one direction or another at times--that man, for a
time at least at one period or another, may be made to believe in or at
least conform to, even coincide with, some current conception of the
ideal which may or may not be in line with his greatest need, equation,
in his affairs here or elsewhere at the time--which, indeed, may be
absolutely inimical to his mental progress, as in the case of
Mohammedanism, Shintoism, Christianity and the like. In other words, the
necessity for obtaining a better equation in one place may very well
upset a very excellent equation elsewhere. Thus, while it might be of
passing advantage in one country--Arabia, say--that a readjustment via
the thoughts of a Mohammed would be in order, it does not follow that
his local “Rights,” “Truths” and homilies would elsewhere be essential.
Yet essential or no, an impetus flowing from such a center may well
disturb a better equation elsewhere. This was illustrated when
Mohammedanism assailed Christianity in Europe.
The truth is that what the reformers are always seeking, ignorantly or
otherwise, is a better balance in things social or mental or moral, less
accentuated tendencies of any kind--usually away from the too-gross,
although at times away from the too-ascetic also, toward which extremes
life appears to swing at times. And what they do is to identify their
meager, if equational, perceptions of life with eternal thought or
order, and to insist that the half of the balance which they represent
is the whole of it. As a rule they are quite unfitted by ignorance as
well as by the time mood of which they are the expression to see that
without that against which they war neither they nor their divine
creator would have the least excuse for existing.
To me, not violent extremes of any kind, although these are productive
of great suffering at times, but the suave inanity which imagines it
wants only unchanging good or, on the other hand, unchanging evil, is
the thing to be feared. Fortunately or unfortunately, as one may view
this thing, a strictly median condition, while excellent as a haven of
refuge from extremes, is nevertheless never wholly or easily attained in
life, and never, apparently, seriously desired by it, as an end in
itself, and never quite satisfactory. Indeed it is the equivalent of
nothingness and would produce just that if the world sought to persist
in it. Yet wise Nature is our rescuer in this as in many another plight
in which betimes She places us for ends of Her own, for Nature seeks, if
She seeks anything, motion, although apparently in no straight line. Her
mood, if anything, is synchronic, rhythmic, pendulumic. She wishes, if
one may interpret Her wishes from what may be seen here, to swing in a
semi-balanced way between extremes of so-called good and evil--never all
good and never all evil, but a little of both, or plenty, in order that
there may be contention, strife, something to live _about_ and for.
These violent extremes of any kind--ascetic, religious, barbaric, or
repulsive--which affect life and irritate our souls, or the souls of
some of us, are not at all offensive to Nature in Her entirety
apparently. She appears to like extremes as well as a median line, the
latter as a fence or break between them, and will have nothing of
perpetual anything in any one direction. And life, it seems to me, would
be more understandable, less disturbing to most of us, if in hours of
stress of any kind we were able to realize this--that Nature adores
extremes, with always a happy medium as the guiding and dividing line to
which She can return and on which She can fix, as the mariner on the
North Star. And if some such more liberal conception of God, or force,
or life, or the creative impulse, could be introduced, it would be
better. What we really need is a better stomach for life as it is, and
Nature, in the course of time, may possibly build us such.
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
“_Whom does not love rule? And where is he not Lord?_”
_Epiphanes Soter._
“_There is no advisable love unless it is as reverent as it is
romantic, as permanent as it is passionate._”
_George M. Gould._
“_Faithful monogamy must ever be woman’s standard in love, because
only in its still certainty can she fitly prepare and keep the
place for her child._”
_Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale._
“_Too many have forgotten that love is as much a subject of the law
of evolution or progressive development as any other biologic
thing._”
_Haeckel._
_N. B. The attached six questions, to which I have appended answers,
were once submitted to me by an American publication for comment or
solution! At the time I was unable to make an intelligible reply, but
having since given the matter thought I have answered them, largely for
my own satisfaction. They are submitted with no faith in any possible
fixed solution but merely as meat for passing discussion._
I
_Why is it, when there are so many evidences in favor of marriage
as we practice it, that so many marriages fall short of just the
purpose they seem meant to serve?_
In the first place, are there so many evidences in favor of marriage as
we practice it? In part the question contains its own answer when it
states that so many marriages fall short of just the purpose they seem
meant to serve. Statistics for marriage and divorce show that one out of
every seven marriages ends in the divorce court. For every one thus
openly disrupted, how many others are restrained or concealed for
reasons of religion, morality, children, society and business policy or
permitted license? Many a couple agree to go their ways separately,
doing as they please and shielding each other in their privileges.
Others drift into a quarrelsome or unhappy state from sheer inertia or
lack of means or charm or courage to establish or create a new
condition. Millions sink in the slough of despond because they have not
strength of any kind. Age, poverty, thickness of wit does for them
completely.
Now there is no need, and should be no desire, to evade the biologic
necessity implied by marriage. Children must be brought into the world
and reared if life is to go on. All the why-fors of this are given in a
thousand biologic and anthropologic volumes, and so no need to discuss
them here. But this much may be said, that among animals the limits of
the control of the maternal feeling or instinct are rigidly confined to
simple necessity. Love seems to disappear as soon as the young can
possibly walk or fly and get their food--proof of its mechanistic or
chemic quality and origin and its lack of any sacrosanct and “for
eternity” spiritual character. Indeed, under most phases of animal life
the father is absolutely indifferent to the fate of his offspring. In
many, perhaps most, animals he seems to care no more for his children
than if they were moving bushes. Certainly he cares no more for his own
than for those of another, and the idea of any love toward grandchildren
is absurd. Not even the mother shows this.
But it is of the greatest interest to note that with the appearance of
humanity and its ideas of home and property (both products of maternal
instinct or the chemic necessity in her for the care of her young)
there has arisen a natural extension of the scope and control of the
family instinct, so that the interest of the parents continues into or
through adult life. Support and protection of the mother continues
beyond the child-bearing period, grandchildren are beloved, more distant
relatives are held within the family affection, and the patriarchal type
of society is established. Since the higher ideals of society and
civilization have been permitted to arise the ægis of love has extended
over the nation, and patriotism, with its great influence in war and
history, has appeared. Finally that highest development of humanity,
ethics or love of humanity, has arisen (still an actual outgrowth and
extension of maternal instinct or love apparently), as well as the
theory of the existence of a Divine Father-Mother of humanity and of all
life.
Yes, since the period of the law and the influence of Rome and the idea
of love, the practice of it by enduring families has become rapidly more
complex. To the force of sex compulsion and instinct, never omitted,
have been added permanency, monogamy, home-keeping virtues, pedagogy,
public health, civic and political honor, democracy and a thousand such
compounds. Has it stood up well under them? Is the load too great? Our
riotous divorce practices and statistics, as well as the so-called sex
or prostitution problem, raises a sharp question. Does the average
strong successful man confine himself to one woman? Has he ever? Does
the exceptionally beautiful and dynamic woman confine herself to one
man? Has she ever? Has not fear frightened the weak into a kind of
rat-like dodging or a sniveling, quarreling, complaining compliance? It
may be and no doubt is true that the so-called “building of the future,”
contemplated by the mechanistic or biologic impulse, if by anything,
cannot be based on sensuality entirely; but the retort may be that
Nature never seems to desire or achieve a wholesale debauchery any more
than she desires a cold and narrow monogamy--the religionists and
ethic-mongers to the contrary notwithstanding. At best she strikes a
balance, wishes apparently virtue opposed to debauchery, _and vice
versa_, for ends of her own.
But to return. However mechanically and instinctively it may have
started, Life has since developed the more or less gorgeous chemistry of
love with which now, if never in the past, it is invested. Human beings
are apparently capable of higher and more enduring synthetic and chemic
affinities, and this to many has seemed to warrant the second thought
wherewith this interview is prefaced. Yet, for all this higher
development, the strain of practical life appears to be too much for it.
Besides the compulsion imposed by the biologic process which draws two
people together there is a process of self-evolution and variation which
seems to conflict with the marriage tie. How subtle is that problem
which is to keep two people, subject to internal and external chemical
and physical changes, harmonious for the eternity for which they are
supposed to be linked? Nothing short of this is the theory which the
religionist propounds. The moralist, not bound by religious dogma, will
make the bond for life only. The philosopher or chemist transmutes the
bond into a problem and speculates on how many weeks, or months, or
years, the unstable equation may endure.
In considering the validity of our ideas in regard to marriage we either
accept the current religionistic or moralistic theory, or we do not. For
those who do there is no problem: they must accept their chains and
slavery, if so they find marriage to be, and make a virtue of their
sufferings. For those who do not there is the agonizing problem of the
need of an equation in the matter of change. Somewhere they must draw
the line, or necessity, increasing age, the difficulty of living in a
moving-van, will fix the line for them. Again, there is a limit to any
individual’s capacity for change, however kaleidoscopic that may be.
After all, any individual, male or female, however attractive, is but
single in quantity, and the choice offered to either of a suitable
helpmate or companion is not so very large. One may be forever lowering
a hook into the water, but not all the fishes in the sea may take it
even if they would. Solomon may have had three hundred wives and seven
hundred concubines, but it can scarcely be said that he needed them or
that they got much out of it; and while it is conceivable that a man or
woman in swift kaleidoscopic search, and devoting him or herself
strictly to the task in hand, might enjoy as many as a thousand or so of
the opposite sex in the course of a lifetime, it can scarcely be
considered valuable from the point of view of public policy and little
less than difficult and, as it would seem to one at least, profitless
from the point of view of the individual himself.
On the other hand there enters into the matter the very serious problem
suggested by question IV, which I will include and touch on here for a
moment only: “Are the children of any union better served by successive
marriages than by a home where parents are held together, even though
not by love but rather by a sense of duty to their children?” Obviously,
Nature intended marriage for the reproduction and care of children, but
I beg to call attention to the fact that Nature, or God, or the biologic
process, or what you will, is no better planner or executor of any given
theory or scheme it may have in mind than man himself. If this were not
true there would be no physically imperfect men or women. The student of
the pathology of sex, as well as of the sources of life itself, is
confronted by a thousand variations from that happy norm on which the
moralistic marriage must be based. Nature has not provided all its
creatures with the capacity for a happy marriage. Plainly, it has cursed
or endowed many of them with strange and horrible vices, with vast and
self-torturing passions, with immeasurable longings and desires, which
unfit them for the proper fulfillment of the monogamic conception of the
perfect marriage, hence of the care of the ensuing children. What then
is to be done? Who is to blame--Nature or man? And if Nature is to
blame, or God, cannot we charge the presumed misery of the children up
to Him also?
Personally, I am not prepared to admit that children are made miserable
or destroyed by divorce and change. But granting that, certainly man is
not to blame, for from the very beginning he has been crucified upon a
rood which is not of his devising. He did not institute marriage; it was
instituted for him, the biologic process having devised it long before
he appeared apparently. I would gladly have all living creatures endowed
with every capacity which would fit them for a peaceful and contented
enjoyment of a moralistic life, if that were intended or important, but
since in the vast and secret laboratory of Nature alone can man be
properly outfitted for the adventure, and since, obviously, in many
cases he is not, I submit that the matter of matrimony and the welfare
of the ensuing children cannot be solved by talk and that Nature and its
concomitants, change and divorce, must be permitted to take their free
and unlimited way as they will. The great tides and forces of life which
burst upon men and animals and change them do not always give notice
that they are about to rise and change things. They rise in their great
strength, and man, to his bewilderment, finds himself changing and
changed. Hence I would say that the trouble with marriage is that in its
extreme interpretation it conflicts with the law of change, or balance
and equation, and hence suffers a severe and seemingly destructive
defeat.
II
_What would be the result were we generally to adopt Ellen Key’s
conception of marriage: “Marriage is only moral when it grows from
an inner necessity, and not from outward pressure?”_
Very pleasant, I should say, if logic and ideal syllogism ruled in life.
The trouble with this world is that no ideal, however eagerly pursued,
is guaranteed a happy fruition. You may lay down your formula for
happiness and say: “Thus and so being done all will be well,” but can
you make human nature do anything according to any one finite individual
theory? Man does not make or regulate Nature: Nature makes and regulates
man, and She makes him any way She pleases--vile, lovely, strong, weak,
simple, complex, and so on. There is no one theory that fits all
climates or types of people. Life would be very dull if this were true.
But I presume by “inner necessity” Ellen Key means intense desire plus a
marked affinity of two people for each other, and if the union is for
only so long as this endures I should see no drawback to it whatever. I
should say that humanity would be much better able to endure the
stresses and difficulties of the world if they were all so happily
mated, and indeed there might not be so many stresses and difficulties
to endure. No doubt we all wish that this would come true, but not all
people are motivated by either love or passion. They would not marry for
love if they could but rather for social precedence, material luxuries
and the like. They accept children as a somewhat unfortunate
concomitant, and so you have the curious problem of whether this state
and its results are good, bad or indifferent in so far as society is
concerned. For my part I would paraphrase Christ’s idea and say: “Render
unto Materiality the things that are Material, and to Love the things
that are Love’s.” Then the world would remain just about as it is now.
III
_Would a succession of unions, expressing different phases of true
love, be of higher value to the individual soul and to the life of
the race than one unbroken although loveless marriage?_
My answer to this question, based on my own individual temperament,
would be Yes, but I cannot help speculating as to the opinions of those
whose temperaments are so cool or so unemotional that they can put
social precedence, material comfort, or the general welfare of the
state, as they see it, above affection or passion. Thousands of people
are by temperament sacrificial, one might almost say masochistic. They
never put themselves first, and that for the very simple reason that
their emotions or desires do not compel them so to do. The religionist,
the moralist and the fanatic, for reasons of order or material
development, as he sees them, would and does look upon love and passion
as a disturbing, unsatisfactory and almost unnecessary element in life.
Passion is sin or weakness to him, and the individual who requires more
than one union to express his emotional necessities is either a lunatic
or a criminal. His first impulse is to drive him out of society, to lock
him up and reform him by some iron system of training; failing this he
will shun him and form little communities of his own into which the
victims of emotion and passion must never venture save as thieves steal
into a house at night. This last is well and as it should be no doubt in
his special case, but on the other hand he is the type of man who is
determined that there shall be no divorce for others very unlike
himself, who would make wife-desertion a criminal offense of the first
order and who would almost punish adultery with death if he could. He is
a puritan soul. He does not see Nature in all Her subtle ramifications
and climatic and chemic variations, and he helps to make that endless
war between the so-called light and darkness of life--between sin and
virtue--and these special phases of asceticism or temperamental coolness
are the foundation of all religions apparently.
Such individuals would argue, for instance, that the child of a loveless
marriage is as well off as a child of a marriage of any other kind,
provided he is clothed and fed, washed and schooled and thoroughly
inculcated with the belief that sex is a crime. The less love enters
into the child’s life at any time the better, say they. Children will do
better, make better men and women, and make more money, if they do not
love too much. Thus stands the world, divided between the hot and the
cold, the stern and the tender, the fools of passion and the fools of
material order and well-being. Is the one better or wiser than the
other? I do not know. You may pay your money and take your choice, for
you cannot well serve passion and materiality at the same time.
Personally I stand with the fools of love, because I think for all their
follies and errors and Lear-like ends they are happier.
IV
_If the answer is Yes, are the children better served by successive
marriages than by a home where parents are held together if not by
love by a sense of duty to their children?_
I would not say that children are, in the main, better served by
successive marriages due to changes of temperament, because I do not
know, but I can truly say that I am fairly well satisfied, from my
personal observation, that they are no worse served. In the first place
the fate of the modern child is not nearly so much in the hands of
individual parents as it is in those of the state, the public schools
and their teachers, the newspapers and their editors, the judges of
courts and public and private citizens generally; for the modern child
can almost say to-day that the state is both my father and my mother and
it will take care of me. When it can really say this we will be much
better off, for we are all going to be happier. The extremes of misery
in childhood are going to be done away with.
In the next place it is a part of my personal observation that children
of warring or troubled homes, where they are made to endure them, are
worse off than are those who have escaped through fracture and been
thrown on their own resources or are assisted by the charity of the
state, or relatives, or the citizens of the country generally, to say
nothing of the love or obligation of one or both of the separated
parents. There is a deal too much sentiment attaching to the home as
such to-day, sentiment not justified by facts. All homes are not ideal
rearing-places for children, by any means. Consider the vast factory
communities everywhere, too easily forgotten by the comfortable
intellectual classes, and again the slums. The homes in these are, if
one were to pay strict attention to the moralist, as ideal
rearing-places for children as any other; yet we know that life offers
pits of horror as well as abodes of sweetness and light in the guise of
the modern so-called home. Again, it should be remembered that the home
was made for man, not man for the home, and when the home fails as a
vehicle of comfort and aid it should be done away with. It is, after
all, only wood or stone or plaster, an economic convenience at best.
And, anyhow, where the heart is is home, though it be a bed under the
open sky or in a new lodging-house every hour. And this generalization
is not intended to exclude children either. The children of troubled
warring homes live in a kind of hell of temperament from which they are
glad enough to escape as they grow older, and from which they evolve the
dream of building something better for themselves, for they realize the
horror of the thing they have endured.
The basic reason for destroying many a home is that the children may not
be injured. All life administers its sternest reprimands to those who
abuse children. Life loves children. It really prefers them to their
elders--the biologic process so does. There is a public obligation to
them which we all acknowledge. But this is not to say that all parents
should therefore be compelled to rear their children. It may well be
that they are not fitted economically or mentally or otherwise so to do.
Their whole duty is, or might well be, done when they support them
properly. The state should do the rest, for, as I have just suggested,
most people are not fit to rear their children; and I say this with the
greatest respect for the human and very charming impulse which causes
them to wish to. The intellectual standards of the average individual
are not much; those of the state are in the main better and should and
may be trusted to do better by the children than any of millions of
parents.
V
_Under what circumstance is divorce justifiable?_
When there is inharmony, schism, and in consequence bitter contention. I
recommend this question, first, to the religious dogmatists of all
creeds; second, to the anarchists, socialists and economic thinkers
generally. They represent purely individual, and to them justifiable,
points of view. Hence the world’s collection of dogmatic and radical
literature.
VI
_What is the key to making marriage do its work in the world?_
???? Unchanging love possibly, or an ingrowing and harmonious sense of
duty. Without Napoleonic skill or tact, however, I fear me much even
then, and so would end with----
???????
P. S. To sum it all up I should like to advance another theory of mine
in regard to the duality of sex. It is quite probable that in the
beginning (biologically speaking) the sexual progenitor of the human
race or of evoluted species contained in itself the full chemical
content of what has since been evoluted into the so-called male and
female. Such being the case its chemical responsiveness to the movements
of the universe, chemical, physical, spiritual, or let us say
emotional, and to its immediate surroundings, was complete in itself. It
was not divided into two sexes and therefore not dependent on any
alienated portion of itself for its chemical, spiritual, emotional or
physical satiation. What happened to it individually and momentarily was
all that could happen to it. It needed no complementary organism, no
other half, to make its understanding of, its reaction to, life
complete. That is not true to-day. Man (male or female) appears to be
individual and complete, but it is an illusion. He is complete and
separate as an organism in everything save his chemical responsiveness
to the universe which requires his union, not merely physically but
spiritually, with his sexual companion to be complete. Their union
sexually, temperamentally, emotionally, intellectually and so on is
required before a full measure of chemical responsiveness to life can be
attained in either. It may seem otherwise in individual cases, but it is
not so. Such being the case (and a world of biological data might be
here introduced), you have the amazing spectacle of love which confounds
all theories of life, which laughs at death, and, in its fullest
expression, defies all human theory and understanding, acting as a _new_
non-understandable thing, and letting in dreams, emotions, conditions
from a deeper world than any we know and whereby this shadow called
existence is resolved, modified, made over into something else so that
it bears no resemblance to its former state. It becomes apparently what
it well may be: a dream and an illusion of beauty or pain or delight, or
all. Evolutionary progress seems to be based on this non-understandable,
mysterious, idealistic reaction and contact which baffles the most
searching suggestions and intuitions of the imagination and leaves us
awed and dumb before the great classics of desire and passion.
But the great fact, not to be lost sight of, is that love, complete
chemical responsiveness to the universe, is only attained in the
reunion of the separated chemical constituents of the original asexual
individual, and without love or this union there is no full
chemical-spiritual responsiveness to the universe. Man does not soar
emotionally into the empyrean except in love, and by “in love” I mean
when stirred by the sex impulse which makes for mate-seeking and union.
It does not follow that there need ever be physical satiation to
complete this union. Spiritual pollination can spring from the merest
accidental contact for a moment with a mate. But the fact remains that
the greatest, most complete spiritual and physical responsiveness to the
universe (which after all is a mere matter of chemical reaction) springs
from this responsiveness, which springs from love, and as such our
so-called love (desire, passionate chemical response, physical and
spiritual) becomes the most significant fact in the universe as we now
understand it. For what is the universe without intellectual perception
on our part, the beholding of it with the eye, the perception of it with
the senses, the responsiveness to it through the emotions?
MORE DEMOCRACY OR LESS? AN INQUIRY
In my youth no country was so significant to me as the United States, of
course, so wonderful, so fully representative of the natural spirit of
aspiration in man, his dreams, hopes, superior and constructive
possibilities. All that America did, could do, had done, was in line
with the noblest and best principles in Nature, as I then understood
Nature. And I still believe that this nation might be one of tremendous
significance in connection with intellectual development, but some
marked changes will need to come about.
Plainly, in a material and (socially speaking) internal organic way, it
has accomplished much, even if thus far its intellectual stature has not
proved so tremendous. We are, as I see it now, a deeply-illusioned
people, concerned solely with material things when they are really no
longer very important--certainly not as much so as when the land was new
and without material means--and yet we remain almost entirely interested
in such things when our minds should be beginning to grasp the wider
possibilities of life--still fighting over beef and coal trusts and
railroads and cables, the mere money return involved--who is to have the
control of them--when we ought to be intensely concerned with the
mysteries of chemistry and physics and a more pliable form of
government.
Though my personal feeling once was that America was destined to take
high rank, if not complete leadership, in the intellectual world, I am
now not so sure. At this writing it looks as though it might retrograde,
and that speedily, and give place to newer lands--newer in spirit, I
mean. It may not, but the signs are somewhat against it. Our literature
has plainly developed to the level of the best seller and then stopped.
Our art is sporadic, and with a few exceptions lymphatic and strongly
suggestive of older forms. The futuristic dream did not originate here.
Our science--well, who are our American scientists anyhow? Loeb? Carel?
Tesla? Bell? All foreigners.
In architecture, markedly allied, I must say, to mechanics, in which we
flourish, we have done better--yes, and in anything and everything which
relates, or has, to mechanics, trade, commercial organization. In those
things, indeed, we have appeared to do most astoundingly, although I am
firmly convinced that the boundless and virgin resources of the land
have had as much--more, in fact--to do with this than anything else. We
have not had so much to create as to develop, and other countries and
other financiers--their trade geniuses--have done quite as well if not
better in some instances than have we. I refer to such concerns and
individuals as the English East India Company, the Royal Dutch Shell,
the Allgemeine Elektrische Gesellschaft, the Cunard, Allen and other
such organizations, to say nothing of such individuals as Lord
Strathcona, Baron Shibusawa, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cowdray, Alfred
Harmsworth, Sir Thomas Lipton, etc.
Indeed the one thing I would like to point out most definitely in
passing is this: that the by now ingrown idea in every average
American’s mind that all of the most significant inventions and
discoveries, mental as well as mechanical, of the last hundred years or
more are entirely of American origin is not true by any means. Far from
it. Those great prime movers--for instance, the steam engine, the
electric motor, and the gas engine (as well as its natural child, the
automobile)--came to us from abroad. So did the telegraph, the railroad,
radium, X-ray photography and--what is most remarkable, considering that
the ironclad came from here--every step in steel manufacture. The
telephone was invented by a Scot who was twenty-five years old when he
became an emigrant to our country.
Other countries, so I was condescendingly taught--Egypt, Greece, Rome,
France, England, Spain (for a little while) and Holland--in times past
and even approximating our own day, had been blessed with some
opportunities and had done considerable toward fulfilling what I was
taught was not so much the material as the spiritual and moral
well-being of man--his intellectual and therefore his mental and social
happiness. But nevertheless and never before, however (or since), had
any country had, or could have, the natural, noble and spiritual
impulse, to say nothing of the amazing opportunities, which America, the
United States, was enjoying--a vast and fertile soil, an equable
climate, engrossing varieties of scenery, a people given over entirely
to industry, frugality and proper social and spiritual ideals. In other
words America, according to my teachers, was destined to lead the world
in thought, truth, beauty, liberty, justice, industry, and what not
achievement, among other things.
Well, consider Greece in its day, faced by or placed in a virgin and
undiscovered world, To the south and east Egypt and Phœnicia, to the
north and west darkness, mystery, an unexplored world. No ships but
oared boats--not even the trireme at first--no compass, no machinery, no
implements of agriculture, and consider that to-day we quote Galen,
Hippocrates and Æsculapius, its doctors; Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus
and Aristophanes, its playwrights; Herodotus and Xenophon, its
historians; Demosthenes, its orator; Homer, Anacreon, Pindar and Sappho,
its poets; Æsop and Helodorus, its writers; Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle and twenty others, its philosophers--the greatest in all the
world--Solon, Alcibiades, Pericles, Aristides, and ten others, its
statesmen. Also we marvel at Praxiteles, Phidias and Skopas, its
sculptors; Alexander, Miltiades and Themistocles, its generals; and
Archimedes, its mathematician. Nations, like individuals, are apparently
born with genius, or they are not. They think, or they do not; they are
dull merchants and tricksters like the Carthaginians and Phœnicians, or
they are not.
America at the present moment, these United States, suggests nothing so
much as the trading Carthaginians and Phœnicians. We have, apparently,
no soul for really great things intellectually, and yet we have done a
few things, too--fought wars for our own integrity, invented a number of
very useful machines--the cotton gin, sewing-machine, flying-machine and
U-boat--grown rich and great in size, freed the slaves (which England
did in her realm without a war), liberated Cuba (no exploitation
since?), struggled with the Philippine problem, the Mexican problem, and
some others, but to no definite end as yet, however. And yet our deeds
are plainly so incommensurate to our power. For we still have with us
the Negroes, the clash and plotting of various rival sectarians, easily
allayed by a truly educated race, the growth and almost complete
independence of various private interests and individuals--puritanism
run all but mad and to the death of genuine intellectuality, artistic or
otherwise, etc. And yet to the average American it remains a belief or
fact that within our borders, safe under the control and guidance of a
human and helpful Constitution or form of government, are all the
social, commercial and mental opportunities to which an ambitious
citizen of the world may logically aspire--freedom to think, to grow
mentally and in every other way, to acquire tremendous wealth and be a
person in whom the inventive and constructive processes of Nature can
take the liveliest interest. Indeed, whatever may have befallen him
socially or economically in recent years, he is still convinced that he
is absolutely free--freer than the constituent individuals of any other
nation, that he is a great thinker and leader in things intellectual and
that America is the best and most carefully administered country in the
world, administered entirely, or nearly so, on his behalf.
Well, I have no very great quarrel with that as a theory, a method of
expressing one’s private vital force, but is it true? In my personal
judgment, America as yet certainly is neither a social nor a democratic
success. Its original democratic theory does not work, or has not, and a
trust-and a law-frightened people, to say nothing of a cowardly or
suborned and in any case helpless press, prove it. Where in any country
not dominated by an autocracy has ever a people more pathetically and
ridiculously slipped about afraid to voice its views on war, on freedom
of speech, freedom of the press, the trusts, religion--indeed any honest
private conviction that it has? In what country even less free can a man
be more thoroughly browbeaten, arrested without trial, denied the
privilege of a hearing and held against the written words of the
nation’s own Constitution guaranteeing its citizens freedom of speech,
of public gathering, of writing and publishing what they honestly feel?
In what other lands less free are whole elements held in a caste
condition--the Negro, the foreign-born, the Indian?
When one considers the history of American commercial development, the
growth of private wealth, of its private leaders--the Rockefellers,
Morgans, Vanderbilts, Goulds, Ryans, et al., indeed all the railroad,
street-car, land and other lords--a, until the war, practically
stationary wage-rate, an ever-increasing rising cost of living, cold
legislative conniving and robbery before which the people are absolutely
helpless, Tammany Hall, the New York Street Car Monopoly, seven hundred
and fifty-three different kinds of trusts that tax people as efficiently
and ardently as ever any monarchy or tyranny dreamed of doing--I should
really like to know on what authority we base our plea for the
transcendent merits of democracy, and I am as good a democrat as most
Americans, if not more so.
Government everywhere, in monarchies and republics, as well as tyrannies
and despotisms, has, other things being equal, always kept step with the
natural development of the intelligence of the mass, a thing which has
been as much developed by the goads of tyrannies as by the petting of
republics. But could you ever convince a full-fledged American, raised
on Fourth of July orations and the wonders and generosities of the
American Constitution, of this? For him, of course, liberty began in
1776 at Bunker Hill or somewhere near it. Before that was no light
anywhere. Since then we have gone on--doing better and better, making
all men richer happier, kinder, wiser.
But have we? Is our land and its progress so absolutely flawless? Aside
from love of country and individual vanity which might make us want to
think so, have we not developed as many flaws, anachronisms, social and
governmental irritations and oppressions as any other country? I call
attention to the deliberation and ease with which the trusts organize
our legislatures, dictate to the jurists of the land, deny even the
permanence or sacredness of contract when it concerns them; rob, pillage
and tax to their hearts’ content while a pitiful mass at the bottom
march to and fro wondering where or to whom to turn for relief. And, on
the other hand, life here, as much as elsewhere--the struggling mass--is
as savagely pushed by necessity as any mass anywhere. Our labor unrest
is as great, our poverty as keen; five per cent, or so it is alleged, of
the population controlling ninety-five per cent of the wealth; thirteen
per cent of the population illiterate; at the top gorgons of financiers
as fat and comfortable and dictatorial as any the world has ever seen
and as unpatriotic and un-American, in so far as its original theory
goes, as may be. Worse yet, it is absolutely true that ours is, or was,
materially at least, a rich land, boundless in its opportunities at
first, which latter fact has contributed greatly to our optimism but not
to our comfort. More rapidly here than anywhere in the world the rich
have divided themselves from the poor, and now here as elsewhere
necessity and pain are and will remain no doubt the goads to comparative
ease. Yet the tramping American when he utters the marvelous word
democracy believes that he has it, and when he is not complaining and
the newspapers tell him so, believes that he is perfectly happy.
At the same time, considering our aggressive and progressive financial
leaders--and heaven forbid (on humanitarian grounds, at least) that I
should defend them, for a more selfish, cruel and undemocratic pack
never lived (consider the packers, the street-car corporations, the
railroads alone, not to mention a thousand others)--there is this to be
said, that although nearly every crime in the decalogue may be charged
to them, bribery, perjury, murder, even a total indifference to
individual welfare (twelve and a half cents an hour, for instance, up to
six years ago for hard, grinding day labor on a railroad or in a canning
factory), as well as greed, love of power, and lust after it--still much
if not all of America’s boasted financial supremacy is due to them and
to none other. We jeer at John D. Rockefeller at home perhaps, or
Morgan, but when abroad among envious strangers who is first to thrust
out his chest and boast of what America has done--its financial leaders,
no less? Who? The average American? You know so. Such being the case one
often wonders what is to be done with a country or a people that can so
readily blow hot and cold out of the same mouth. Can it be made to
follow an austere democratic program--the sharp, taut socialization of
everything--or will it succumb to autocratic or to financial domination,
and if so, which? At the present moment the air hums with the rival
theories. To me the chief problem in connection with America, if it has
one, and as I see it, is that of finding itself mentally as well as
finding a formula that will allow and encourage leadership without
submitting to the abuses which in the past and even the present the
latter tends to give rise. For here as much as anywhere else the average
small American is as much a petty tyrant as may be found. Consider only
the food profiteer, the small dealers, jobbers and wholesalers. And
here, as elsewhere, are all the petty tyrannies of small and large
enterprises in regard to wage-earners, the scorns, the brutalities, the
exactions. Can these be outrivaled if readily duplicated in any
autocracy or democracy ruled by a dictator anywhere? At the same time,
is it not true that, if the country is to succeed or at least progress
materially, a place must be made for the selfish, self-aggrandizing
individual either as leader politically or as creator? Will life go
forward without some such process or opportunities for immense rewards
or honors to the individual--the right to satisfy his feverish if
ridiculous ambition for supremacy? Will patriotism, love of country,
alone do it? Can it be discovered?
What made Rome great? _Senatus populusque Romanus._ The Senate supplied
the leadership, the people the impulse and force, which spread the
dominion of the shepherds of the Seven Hills until it ruled the world
from Scotland to the Nubian Desert and the confines of India. What is
the secret of the Roman church’s preëminence? Leadership? Autocracy? In
the early Christian church these were lacking. Think or say what you
will of its results, but consider it. In so far as the early Christians
were concerned they were all “brethren,” like the Russians of to-day and
the citizens of the French Revolution. Each early Christian community
elected its deacons; the deacons elected the priests; the priests
elected the bishops; the bishops elected the cardinals; and the
cardinals the pope. Before the Catholic church began to attain to its
strength, however, the process was reversed: the pope appointed the
cardinal, he the bishop, the bishop the priest. Then the deacons were
selected by the priest, in certain cases some deacons were elective, but
then the priest and deacon, appointed by the bishop, constituted the
majority of the board. It was then, and then only, that the Roman church
began to flourish truly. The ambition of man had full scope, his vanity.
Apparently the world hitherto has not been able to do or live without
it. On the authorization basis of leadership the Roman church, the most
impressive organization in human history, has stood for seventeen
centuries.
But take our own Standard Oil Company. Who built it? Who used to caution
all his lieutenants never to talk, to keep everything a secret,
particularly its prosperity? And has not the blessing of cheap oil been
extended to all the world? Who selected strong, ambitious men and set
them to planning the monopoly of oil for their personal and private
benefit, dickered with the railroads and cut the throats of his rivals
via the rebate? Does his name have to be written here? Call him a
scoundrel, scoff at autocracy and high and mighty plutocrats. After all,
can a man or a woman become a safe or dictatorial plutocrat without
having something to offer which makes his plutocracy and his
dictatorship bearable? Have mere dull tyrants anywhere ever lasted long?
Have they ever had brains enough? Most of Rome’s worst emperors were
slain in anywhere from three to five years. The tyrants of Asia and
Africa last, if they do, because the people are as dull as themselves,
or their rule is agreeable to them.
Every great business corporation, as we know, is built about the
personality, the leadership, the autocracy, of one man. We hear of love
of country, of putting the needs of the mass, one’s country--all
countries--above that of one’s personal or private needs. There are
noble examples no doubt (off-hand few occur to me) of unselfish public
sacrifice of many, many private lives, but are they the rule or the
exception? Does not the average individual now as heretofore consult his
own interest, his advantage, his purse, his survival, his fame? Once one
is large and secure, easy in the possession of fame, money, love even,
it is possible, of course--and even with a grandiose air--to do
generously, to give freely, to seek the advantage of the mass. Scarcely
any other avenue of personal satisfaction remains open. I am not
sneering; I am contemplating a possibly chemic, physic or psychic law.
Who knows?
Taking the average individual, with life (necessity, hunger, drouths of
one kind and another) pressing upon him as fiercely as it does, and
contemplating America as it is and the world as it is, is it not fair to
ask whether it is possible to make over man--his ambitions, his soul,
into the likeness of what is suggested by the average modern democratic
or republican or socialistic program? Can he be adjusted to it? Haven’t
we just had two thousand years of an attempt in one form? Possibly he
can, but is it wise that he should? Are not striking, centralizing
figures more important and, save during extremely patriotic moments,
when some danger, say, threatens the national organism as a whole, is it
not extremely difficult to cause the average individual to enthuse over
a crowd or the needs of a crowd? And on the contrary, is it not most
pathetically easy to cause him to enthuse over a man or a woman--to
cause any of us so to do? It would almost look as though it were
Nature’s way, would it not--the love of the mass for leaders, for
grandiose, grandiloquent figures? Is not life, in the main, personal,
individual? Think how we insist on identifying God as an individual.
Will not such leadership as was offered by Alexander, Hannibal,
Mohammed, Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln, always be popular? The
leadership of lesser or more self-aggrandizing individuals--such as, for
instance, that of the late James J. Hill, of the Great Northern Railway;
E. H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific; Cornelius Vanderbilt, of the New
York Central; Jay Gould, of the Missouri Pacific; Jay Cooke, of Civil
War Finance; Armour, Field, Leiter, Morgan, or, to come down to the
present moment, John H. Patterson, of the National Cash Register; Henry
Ford, of the jitney; F. W. Woolworth, of the five-and-ten-cent store--if
never popular, still does it not remain necessary? Must not some one
lead even in the home and all forms of private commercial adventure? It
may not be an absolutely invariable rule, but is it not near enough to
make it seem so? I am not quarreling with the possibilities of love,
generosity, self-sacrifice, public and private. We all hope for them, do
we not? In various minor ways at least, and even in some public and
large ways, they exist. But how about self-interest, cold, savage and
yet constructive if feverish self-interest? Has that been abrogated?
Indeed, ought not we Americans, of all people, learn, and learn
quickly, that autocracy in whatever form you find it--absolute or
otherwise--is never real autocracy, not absolute, and that on the other
hand so-called democracy is never real democracy but always something
tempered by private autocracy in a thousand--nay, in a million--forms?
For after all, who tells such people as Rockefeller and Woolworth, to
say nothing of kings and emperors--fallible and seeking souls, all--how,
what, why, they must do?--how far they may go? What to interest
themselves in? Consider the fall of the French kings, Charles I., the
late Czar. They deal with the mass, and therefore to a certain extent
they must respect it. They cannot escape it. It is their fate. At the
same time, in attempting so to do, to whom do they not listen really for
sound advice?--often to the least of their subjects or hirelings. The
stockholders in any modern corporation--are they any more as to voice
and weight in that which their money makes possible than the people out
in the street of a republic or a kingdom with their ultimate veto power?
They elect a board of directors as we elect a senate, or a monarchy, a
legislature. And this leadership perpetuates itself, or at any rate
holds things together, as does officialdom at Washington, until a leader
appears. A weak king or emperor is run by strong men, a weak President
is dictated to by a strong Senate or House. When the Roman Senate was
strong the dictators were weak, and vice versa. In calm, peaceful days
leadership is not necessary. It is or may be a disturbing factor. But
when changes are coming, when Nature is brewing a storm--then. So life,
with its endless brewing of storms and leaders, ought to give a hint to
republics or democracies or corporate organizations.
And, having said so much, is it not plain that room must be made always
for the leader, the passing autocrat, if you will? Must he not be
given--if he have brains--the right of initiative and power, for after
all is he not also a slave to life, chance, labor, the time-spirit? It
is to be assumed, of course, that men shall demand first that he command
their admiration and loyalty, as he certainly will if he is a real
leader. Rome admired her Cæsar, France her Napoleon; Germany evidently
liked her Kaiser, France her Clemenceau, England her Lloyd George. They
thought them, apparently, necessary and great leaders. In our contest
with Germany we perhaps, for one nation, were fighting to make her
dislike something which she craved and needed, could not probably very
well do without.
The trouble, as I see it, is that too often, in spite of all the current
palaver and enthusiasm of some for special individuals, we have too
little real or popular leadership. Middleweight idealists and theorists
are too often at the steering-gear here as well as elsewhere. In this
country we have the crowd, the extraordinarily well-educated (or we
think so) and disciplined crowd, willing and eager for leadership. But
what leadership? As it stands, all democracies are organized with
elaborate systems of checks--legislative, executive--which are intended
to and do tie the hands of all possible leaders, until a very, very
great emergency arises. In the ordinary run of days and events only the
ordinary politician or parlor-diplomat need apply. But when an extreme
necessity calls, these minors must give way, but does the true leader
always appear in time? Will he? Did the Allies have a truly able
anti-Teutonic leader in the recent great struggle? Joffre? Asquith?
Lloyd George? Kerensky? Wilson? Nicholas Romanoff?
Our Federal Constitution, theoretically at least, gives us a crowd
government; only, owing to the wholly undemocratic character of the
American people, this has long since been replaced by money or trust
government, the rule of the wealthy by right of subornation. And our
state and municipal governments, modeled on that of the nation, have
gone the same way. Even such little individuality and leadership for the
mass as might possibly exist under these conditions is lost or discarded
nearly every two or four years in the regular and money-controlled
changes of administration. The old and experienced are replaced with the
new and untried. Perhaps under conditions as they are this is best. I
am not sure. But for efficiency, after the manner of the great
successful private corporations, is it? Personally, I think not--not
yet, at any rate. As yet democracy does not take sufficient interest in
itself, is too indifferent to its real interests and needs. It is too
easy-going, not sufficiently self compelling. Every one wants to be his
own boss and to be a great, undemocratic, individual success, hence
there is very little true effective organization outside private
institutions and what they compel in a public way. We make no provision
for the continuation of leadership even under emergency.
Personally, I think the defect cannot forever go on unremedied.
Democracy must do at least as well as autocracy, or it ought to shut up
shop. And if it cannot obtain the efficiency exemplified by the private
corporation it will, and it will deserve to. Perhaps our recent sad
experiences in meeting the expanded demands on governmental efficiency
should show us how to lay a new basis for that efficiency in
modifications of our governmental structure. But will they? What I think
is that more autocracy, behind which should be a livelier sense of power
and control on the part of the people, should come into our democracy,
or our democracy will really cease to be. The present drift toward money
control cannot go unchecked. Our leaders will either become much more
forceful, and the mass more watchful and jealous, as it should be, or we
will have no democracy of any kind. There is scarcely any now. Congress
should be used more against the President and the Supreme Court, and the
latter against both, only the judges should be plainly responsible to
the people, closely and fearsomely beholden to them--as much so, at any
rate, as they now are to the corporations and wealth. Both the leaders
and their weapons--the laws--should become more vigorous. Democracy will
have to step up, and step lively. Then will it be any more of a
democracy than some of the older and more historic autocracies and
monarchies? Will it?
THE ESSENTIAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE
The Serpent to Eve, Genesis iii, 3:5: “_For God doth know that in
the day ye eat thereof_” (the Tree of Knowledge) “_then your eyes
shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil_.”
Jehovah to the Serpent, Genesis iii, 14;15: “_Because thou hast
done this_” (urged Eve to seek wisdom by eating of the Fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge) “_thou art cursed above all cattle, and every
beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life; and I will put enmity between
thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall
bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel_.”
Jehovah to Eve, for attempting to obtain wisdom via eating the
Fruit of the Tree, Genesis iv, 16: “_I will greatly multiply thy
sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth
children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule
over thee_.”
Jehovah to Adam, because of his following the advice of Eve:
“_Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast
eaten of the Tree, cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow
shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns and thistles
shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the
field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou
return unto the ground._”
“_Prometheus (forethought), son of the Titan Iapetus and Clymene,
and brother of Atlas, Menœtius and Epimetheus (after-thought), is
represented as the creator of man, out of earth and water, and his
great benefactor, having given him, in spite of Zeus who was
apparently opposed to it all, a portion of all the qualities
possessed by the other animals. He also stole fire from heaven in a
hollow tube, and taught mortals all useful arts. In order to punish
Prometheus for this, Zeus gave Pandora to Epimetheus, his brother,
in consequence of which diseases and sufferings of every kind
befell mortals. He also chained Prometheus to a rock on Mount
Caucasus, where during the daytime an eagle consumed his liver,
which was restored each succeeding night. Prometheus was thus
exposed to perpetual torture; but Hercules (strength) killed the
eagle and with the consent of Zeus, who in this way had an
opportunity of allowing his son to gain immortal fame, delivered
the sufferer._”
_Smaller Classical Dictionary._
The significance of these several references to and quotations from the
supposed creative power of the elder pagan world is, if anything, that
man is a waif and an interloper in Nature (or things celestial or
intelligent), a machine or toy, created by something which desires to
use him or work through him in some way, with no essential power to make
his own way and no “right” to seek either knowledge or wisdom, lest, in
the words attributed to Jehovah, his Creator, in Genesis, he becomes “as
one of us,” a minor god, for instance, as the Creator via this phrase
writes himself down to be; not the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, by any
means. And in this phrase (“one of us”) is contained a hint of a
possible condition or order in the universe which, since the Christian
era, has been put aside as untrue, namely, that the Creator of man, our
two billion two-legged citizens stalking this earth, may be but (to use
a very crude and yet for that reason understandable description) a
“side-line” manufacturer, as it were, or a lower-level competitor for
life and pleasure, along with many others of his kind--Creators or
“Gods” or avatars of, let us say, mosquitos, flies, bulls, cats, dogs;
in other words the specific and singular Creator of some one thing as
opposed to other Gods or powers who might well be creators of other
things of equal rank. And these “Gods,” in turn, should one choose to
follow the thought, might well be the special product of some greater
“God” or manufacturer or Creator who is finding a rather peculiar
expression through them and their creations in turn; also the various
rivalries which exist between man and the lower animals for the
possession of the earth might thereby be explained or have something to
do with that.
The thought is not new. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with
Darwin, Lamarck and Spencer of the theory of evolution, has pointed out
that “the organizing mind which actually carries out the development of
the life world need not be infinite, need not be what is usually meant
by the term God or Deity. The main cause of the antagonism between
religion and science seems to me to be the assumption by both that there
are no existences capable of taking part in the work of creation other
than blind forces on the one hand and the infinite, eternal, omnipotent
God on the other. The apparently gratuitous creation by theologians of a
hierarchy of angels and archangels, with no defined duties but those of
attendants and messengers of the Deity, perhaps increases this
antagonism.” He then proceeds to develop a theory of his own in which (I
quote) “the vast, the infinite chasm between ourselves and the Deity is
to some extent occupied by an almost infinite series of grades of
beings, each successive grade having higher and higher powers in regard
to the origination, the development and the control of the universe.” He
goes on to show how this might be done by them--all to the one end:
namely, the creation and preparation of man via experiences here,
presumably for a higher place in the control of the universe at large,
always under the Supreme Ruler of course and his lesser, yet in so far
as man is concerned greater, agents. In other words, under these
sub-Gods.
The idea is interesting only it does not, although it may be too much to
say that it cannot, explain the endless bickering and chaffering in the
universe at large, the utter failure of various movements and types here
on earth and apparently elsewhere, the astonishing selection of so
minute a mote in the material universe as this particular planet for the
purpose of working out a higher type of assistant or worshiper of God
Himself. It may be true, but the idea is a little fantastic and suggests
the labors of an ignorant and yet hopeful being endeavoring to account
for himself, his presence, in the best way he can.
To my humble way of thinking, the ancient Greeks and the various
theogonies of the ancient pagan world (Egyptian, Chaldean, Hindu) were
at least as plausible in their apprehension of a troublesome disorder.
The Old Testament and all other forms of ancient pagan literature
suggest the general and very natural conception, based on the evidence
of life itself, that various gods were or are contending via various
forms of life (animal, vegetable and mineral) for some form of
expression here on earth, and that the various things which they make
(or the one thing which each makes, its image and likeness perhaps) is
opposed to all others here. Pagan thought reeked with the feeling of
contests between gods or creators or controllers of this, that and the
other, and in the Sinaitic interpretation of life just quoted we see
something of the same thing; also in what small consideration man was
held by his alleged special Creator. Evidently the conclusion reached by
the thinking elders of the pagan world was that man, in so far as his
own special Creator was concerned, was viewed with sinister opposition
by the power which made him. It did not want him to amount to anything.
Indeed he was very, very plainly conscious of the inimical attitude of
Nature, or rather man’s especial God or Creator, toward him. He was not
as yet deluded by the Christian phantasm that man is made in the image
and likeness of his Creator, who is highly considerate of him, and that
the world was made for man, or that because of faith, good deeds,
special forms of self-abnegation and self-effacement he is to be
reserved to eternal bliss hereafter although there is no especial reward
for him here and now. And this is excellent indeed as illustrating a
force or forces of a creative turn which might wish to use man as man
uses any other minor implement for the accomplishment of any purpose he
may have, but not very complimentary to him as an illustration of his
own free and creative powers.
And, curiously, modern chemistry with its various tropisms--helio,
magnetic, stereo and chemo--together with its legal part, physics, does
little better by him. Already they tend to show that he is merely--and,
what is worse, accidentally so--an evoluted arrangement of attractions
and repulsions, arranged by chemicals and forces which desire or cannot
escape whorls or epitomes of complicated motions and emotions or
attractions which take the odd forms presented by men and animals.
But aside from this the most effective illustration of the essential
nothingness of man is his plain _individual_ weakness here and now as
contrasted with his mass ideals and the huge vanity or tendency toward
romance which causes him to wish to seem to be more than he really is or
can ever hope to be. For plainly every life, in the last analysis,
however useful to an assumed and carefully directing Creator, or however
successful from a momentary analysis it may appear, is a failure. We
hear of that curious thing, “a successful life.” It is in the main a
myth, a self-delusion. How could there possibly be success for a watery,
bulbous, highly limited and specially functioned creature, lacking (in
the case of man, for instance) many of the superior attributes of other
animals--wings, a sense of direction, foreknowledge and the like--and
manufactured every forty years by hundreds of millions, century in and
century out, made apparently not in the image and likeness of anything
superior to himself but in that of an accidentally compelled pattern,
due to an accidental arrangement of chemicals, his every move and
aspiration anticipated and accounted for by a formula and an
accidentally evolved system long before he arrives, and he himself born
puling, compact of vain illusions in regard to himself, his “mission,”
his dominant relation to the enormous schemes of Nature, and ending, if
“life” endures so long, in toothless senility and watery decay,
dissolution. And in addition some have scientifically placed the
creative as well as the generative period of man between his twentieth
and fortieth years--twenty years! Others generously extend it to fifty
and even sixty. Few venture to carry it beyond that. At seventy old
Nestor drools and repeats his fables of his few years and many troubles.
At fifty, even forty-five, most men are busy recounting the deeds,
adventures and creations of their earlier years!
To me the most astonishing thing in connection with man is this same
vanity or power of romanticising everything relating to himself, so that
whereas in reality he is what he is, a structure of brief import and
minute social or any other form of energy, left by his loving Creator to
contest in the most drastic and often fatal way with thousands, one
might almost say millions of inimical powers and only significant really
in so far as he or it is interlocked with others in some larger unity,
either (for illustration) as a soldier in an army or its delegated
commander or as a delegated or acknowledged representative of some
moving or mass or race impulse, still he has this astonishing power of
viewing himself as a tremendous force in himself, a god, a hero, an
enduring and undying figure of glory and beauty--as significant almost
as the Creator Himself, in whose image and likeness he is supposed to be
made!
The wonder! The beauty even!
Sometimes I think all this is the almost inevitable result of something
inherently weak but with one clear power: that of visualizing or
perceiving strength in other things and so, by contrast, its own
weakness; and, by reflex action merely, attempting to salve itself
against its own ineffectiveness by imagining itself to be that which it
may never be: a victor, a Colossus bestriding the world, an undying
potentate, ruling forever, and so gaining strength to go on. For
individuals are never masters in any remarkable way. They merely and at
best borrow or direct the energies of many, and in the main to no
important result to themselves. A Napoleon slaves and starves to the end
that he may die on St. Helena and bring considerable profit to many who
never heard of him and care not at all. A Cæsar toils endlessly at
organization and the development and preservation of Rome, only to be
stabbed to death in his fifty-sixth year, practically unrewarded. A
Hannibal slaves for Carthage, enduring endless hardships, only to die by
his own hand. The category might be extended indefinitely. And yet the
world is full of laudations of the powers of men, their satisfactions,
their vast, vast rewards and glories; while so many decayed steles and
temple doorways, and data unending, bear testimony to their utter
material and subsequent spiritual futility.
And when I say this I wish to make it perfectly clear that I am by no
means confusing the race with the individual, or vice versa. What a race
may do, and what man may, are two very different things. The race,
representing the totality of active creations and pushed on by dynamic
forces from below, may be, and in so far as one can guess is, a huge
success. The God or force or forces using man in various aspects here
and now (two billion men at the present moment) may be and no doubt is
finding self-expression through and in him and may well be tremendously
satisfied with the result. But in what way does that, or can it, add to
the comfort or bliss of the particular individual? Endlessly repeated,
an oyster-like copy of every other man that has ever been, a mere minute
portion of something the significance or import of which he can not
even surmise. And within the race itself one need only think of the
various types--preacher, actor, lawyer, doctor, merchant, thief, writer,
poetic, artist, prize-fighter, all very much alike and all repeated and
repeated ad infinitum--to see how impossible the idea of individuality
is. The very idea of extreme individuality, even under the most special
and favored circumstances, is seen to be all but an impossibility. We
are at best, even in our arts and highest forms of special
adaptations, copies of things which are and have been as common as
pig-tracks--generals, philosophers, statesmen, society grande dames and
the like not excepted. Over and over and over we appear, one and all,
even our exact gestures, smiles, glances. Who has not seen it in so
short a space as three generations? And we speak of individuality, of
special destinies!
Herein lies the pathos, and this is the outstanding fact, that man is
essentially a creation or mechanism, accidental or not as you wish, of a
force or forces which in so far as any one can determine is or are, far
more than he in his wildest flights of fancy suspects, the thing which
he most craves to be, individual, enduring, but of which he is only a
part and of which he is constantly seeking more--_life_. The thing which
makes and repeats over and over ad infinitum and _is_ two billions of
men, or anything else into which it chooses to form itself, may be
thought of as having life, personality, success and the like, but as for
individual man or any of its minute atoms! Indeed man might as well
think of the minute atoms of his internal mechanism as having success,
fame, a great life or future, as himself. His day, like theirs, is
measured by a minute fraction of time and labor and energy, and so is
nothing. Quite obviously there is something which is to man what man in
his entirety as an individual is to the least ion or molecule of his
inner cosmos: a thing of so vast a magnitude comparatively as to be as
far outside his reckoning as must he be to the ion of his inner body.
And as for size or force and import, that which creates him is as far
above him as he is above the ion. Indeed, although man, in his capacity
or proportion as an individual and as contrasted with the least of the
electrons of his being, is beyond computation for size, yet viewed again
in contrast with his external world he sinks into a mere fumbling,
briefly-ended mote and tool. Like the ion of his inner cosmos, in this
vast etheric or ionic something which is outside of him and which we see
blazing as worlds or suns or existing as immeasurable space, he is too
minute and too brief to be discussed. Even the great earth which he
treads with so much pride is to this external thing quite as minute as
man’s electron is to him; and yet his relationship even to this is
almost as nothing. For on this so minute thing which, sidereally
speaking, is as nothing, he appears nevertheless, insect-wise, by the
billion every forty (or whatever the average life of man may be) years,
to say nothing of innumerable other forms which have the ion or the
molecule as the base of their material presence or structure. Still he
permits himself to believe that he is something, and in facing all has
the stupendous or fortunate ignorance to write himself down as Lord,
Master, Great Guider of Things Terrestrial!
One of the things which might modify this supreme romantic estimate of
himself, if such a thing were either desirable or possible, would be an
even slightly technical examination of the process by which he arrives,
as well as the extreme simplicity of the mechanical and chemical formula
by which, throughout endless ages, he and all his fellows have been
created. There is no longer any vast mystery about it; we are even
getting relatively close to the secret, or could if we were permitted to
go on undisturbed for a period by wars, let us say, or religious and
educational illusions and furies (put forward by what? How brought
about?), a persistent inherent mass opposition to thought and change in
man himself. What subtle force ever invented that as a race quieter?
As biologists and anthropologists present man and his allied species,
the original type structure on which all are more or less modeled is not
so wonderful: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two feet and two hands
or four feet, two of them antecedents of the present hands; or two feet
and two wings, the latter successors of former feet; a lung or
air-breathing system, not unlike that of any tree or plant; a root or
arterial system, modified to meet various conditions and situations as
in birds, fishes, moles; a nervous or sensory system of an allied
character--no marked diversity in anything indeed, and all brought about
by the inescapable chemical and physical reactions and compulsions of
seemingly blind forces, as Crile and Loeb have shown. Even now chemists
and physicists are at work upon the balances and equations involved in
the mechanical and chemical construction of man, the leverage by which
he moves, the combinations which control his form or aspect, as well as
the chemical combinations which can induce motion or self-propulsion.
Even as to his so-called thought how close are the Behaviorists to the
material mechanics which produce it? His thoughts also are apparently
little more than compelled reactions of one chemical upon another which
he can no more escape than can he his form or motions. The one unsolved
mystery apparently is why a machine so easily made and controlled should
be able to speculate as to the reason for his being or to worry over it.
And yet just here another interesting fact stands out, and that is that
whether or not he is a machine, Nature, or his Creator, appears to be
quite definitely opposed to his finding out about himself or even to his
delving into the matter, and throughout recorded science there is no
evidence of the least willingness on the part of Nature or the life
constructing forces to yield a single fact of any kind without a
struggle. Man has fumbled and stumbled, dying by billions in one
erroneous way, or another, until at last, by mere chance apparently, he
has stumbled upon one helpful fact or another. It is as if the fable of
Prometheus or that other of Adam and Eve were true. The seekers after
knowledge of any kind have almost invariably been fought or their work
brought to nothing, and even where man has apparently proven victorious
or where he has seemingly been aided only that has been yielded which
has tended to further him as an ignorant and yet useful machine, never
as a thinker. No one who has tended to throw a clear light on the
internecine struggles of Nature Herself, Her cruelties and brutalities,
has prospered. If one doubts this he has only to consider the fumbling,
haphazard progress of man, his warring notions as to his source and
import, his strange aberrant evolution and the persistent and
discouraging hindrances cast in the way of his intellectual evolution;
i. e., the rise of impossible and even ridiculous leaders and religious
theories--Christianity, Shintoism, Mohammedism--and the arrival of such
dark figures as Attila (self-styled “the scourge of God”), Alaric, and
Mohammed with his houris’ dream, upon the scene of fairly acceptable
intellectual conditions. The deaths of endless prying inventors, their
pursuit by the religionists in darker ages, the periodic rise of-isms
and world-sweeping folderol, political and other notions, all seem to
point to but one thing: Nature’s indifference if not opposition to man’s
tendency to develop intelligence and desire to know--if such a thing can
be assumed, for it cannot be proved. For since when has the dulness of
the mass, or man, his ignorance or indifference, apparently calculated
and conditional, not stood their ground against the overtures of
intelligence, science, the arts, philosophy? Nothing flourishes on earth
so well as vain theory. Energetic thought is all but taboo. False dreams
and false hopes are invariably encouraged by apparently some chemical or
mechanical condition in the so-called brain of man himself. It is
scarcely so much that he dare not as that he cannot.
And if he should but stop to consider this cloak-and-suit-model
repetition of himself previously suggested, this system or pattern after
which he and all the endless decillions which have preceded and will
follow him are made, do you suppose he could exact anything which
suggested individuality or personal persistence as a spirit or
thought--self-generated thought--out of it? Is one button wiser or much
more important than any other, or at all more likely to outlast another
spiritually? Is it in any way essential that it should? The original
model for the button might be important, but as for the endless copies!
Indeed in the whole program of repetition, in so far as man or any of
the animals or insects or of matter itself is concerned, there is but
one ray of light or hope, and that is that the ion or electron of which
all and everything appears to be composed may after all be the only true
base or unit of expression of the so-called controlling spirit or force
or forces of life, not the various contesting combinations of them, and
that this ionic sea or mass, while controlled by the necessity of
division and recombination, if it wishes to express itself at all (“The
Kinetic Theory,” J. C. Vogt), is still so large and so involute in its
creative processes as to be necessarily more or less indifferent to any
form of ionic self-expression or combination that might occur under or
with it. So that the mere fact that groups or volumes of itself (ions)
should combine for any purpose or generate themselves into any special
forms of life (via combination, of course)--suns, planets, animals,
races, nations, and their special developments again--might be to it a
matter of absolutely no consequence. What matter if the electrons of
some minute part of itself should organize and set up some special sun
or planet or race of individuals, so long as they did not prove
troublesome to the rest of the ionic sea? Supposing there are vast
galaxies of self-generated suns in space--endless space, composed of but
a part of the total ionic mass--so long as they are a mere negligible
nothing to the totality of enduring force; what of it? If such were the
case it is entirely conceivable that anything might arise for a time,
any system of suns or race-life on suns or planets, and also the
domination of one organized group of ions over another, but all subject
nevertheless in the course of time and according to some equational and
inescapable law to the totality of primary ionic or universal force.
In that case such a statement as occurs in Genesis iii. 5, would be
plain enough. Some self-generated combination of ions looking upon
itself as a creator in its own right (for a period anyhow), and having
sub-invented man for some purpose of its own, self-expression or
comfort, or the use of other enslaved ions to do its bidding, might say
just that (“For God doth know,” etc.); and it would be true.
On the other hand man, via the force of the numbers of the ions
collected within himself, his race, and by degrees so gaining in
numbers, and so power or intelligence equal to that of the ions which
had originally enslaved him, might rise and question of this other
elemental ionic combination its right to lordship over him. And again,
by reason of _laissez faire_ conditions which apparently hold throughout
all Nature and force, he would then be able to overthrow this higher
ionic combination and so set up a lordship of his own--as in some ways
even now he appears to be doing. For one need only observe his growing
command of machinery and the apparently indifferent streams of ionic
energy everywhere moving, upon the backs of which or to the streams of
which he attaches his wires and dynamos and engines and permits them to
do a part of his work for him, in order to see how this might be. For if
we are not an illustration of one ionic combination using another, what
are we? And if that which is above us is not a combination of ions using
us, what is it? Science has no other answer. At the same time, of
course, man would be fought, as apparently he is being fought now,
attacked and delayed by the powers which hitherto have made and are
still using him. In that case the remarks of Jehovah in Genesis would be
explicable enough.
And I here venture this prediction, based on this idea, that in case man
is ever capable of awaking from his dream of spiritual enslavement and
considers the higher creative reality which makes suns and his own
immediate God as well, and sees also that he is the victim of a purely
gratuitous overlordship of which he is no more than a hypnotic victim,
he may well be able to invent crawling and winged things with some
primary system of nervous response and intelligence, quite as he was
invented in the first place, which will serve him in some dull, hopeless
way, just as he himself now serves a higher power. Already he has
invented most complicated machinery, and what else may he not invent?
For ions are ions, wherever found, in whatever form of life, amœba, or
man or sun, and they are everywhere. Obviously they may not rule save in
combination and by force, one combined group seizing on other uncombined
and therefore helpless ions so to do, and is that not our method in all
phases of life here on earth now? But once the ions of men finding
themselves in combination, by whatsoever process contrived, it may not
be so easy longer to control them. Rebellions may occur, and probably
will. The great thing seems to be to get enough of them in combination.
Time perhaps is the great factor in all these things. At the same time
it might be true, and at present so appears, that the generative group
of ions which evolved man and all of his so-called superior combinations
and results here, might be so jealous of its own creative skill in this
respect that, seeing man or his ionic content attempting to gain
knowledge of how to proceed and do, it might at once set out to undo
him. The fable of Prometheus and of Adam and Eve may not be so
impossible, after all. Yet should his “God” not be able to completely
destroy him he may yet well imitate his Creator and create.
But will he be allowed so to do?
LIFE, ART AND AMERICA
I do not pretend to speak with any historic or sociologic knowledge of
the sources of the American ethical, and therefore critical, point of
view, though I suspect the origin, but I am at least convinced that,
whatever its source or sense, it does not accord with the facts of life
as I have noted or experienced them. To me the average or somewhat
standardized American is an odd, irregularly developed soul, wise and
even froward in matters of mechanics, organizations and anything that
relates to technical skill in connection with material things, but
absolutely devoid of true spiritual insight, correct knowledge of the
history of literature or art, and confused by and mentally lost in or
overcome by the multiplicity of the purely material and inarticulate
details by which he finds himself surrounded.
As a boy in the small towns of the middle West I had no slightest
opportunity to get a correct or even partially correct estimate of what
might be called the mental A B abs of life. I knew nothing of history,
and there was not a book in any of the schools which I attended, labeled
either history or science or art, containing the least suggestion of the
rationale which I subsequently came to feel to be relatively true, or at
least acceptable to me. If I remember correctly, in the history of the
world which was labeled Swinton’s, the defeat of Napoleon, not his
career, was pointed out as having had a great moral if not Christian
value to the world. His end on St. Helena, not the Code Napoleon or the
hieratic and ultra-economic arrangement of his material forces, was
supposed to have achieved something for society! Similarly Socrates and
his death were descanted upon as having almost a religious if not a
Christian import. His death was painted as having been brought about by
his low private deeds, not his higher moral views. The true significance
of the man as illustrated by the exact details of his life were utterly
ignored.
Because my father was a Catholic and I was baptized in that faith, I was
supposed to accept all the dogma, as well as the legends, of the Church
as true. In the life about me I saw flourishing the Methodist, the
Baptist, the United Brethren, the Christian, the Congregationalist, the
what-not churches, each representing, according to its adherents, the
exact historic and truthful development and interpretation of life or
the world. As a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy I listened to sermons
on hell, where it was, and what was the nature of its torments. As
rewards for imaginary good behavior I have been given colored picture
cards containing exact reproductions of heaven! Every newspaper that I
have ever read, or still read, has had an exact code of morals by the
light of which one may detect at once Mr. Bad Man and Mr. Good Man and
so save oneself from the machinations of the former! The books which I
was advised to read, and for the neglect of which I was frowned upon,
were of that naïve character known as pure. One should read only good
books--which meant of course books from which any reference to sex had
been eliminated, and what followed as a natural consequence was that all
intelligent interpretation of character and human nature was immediately
discounted.
A picture of a nude or partially nude woman was sinful; a statue equally
so. The dance in our home and our town was taboo. The theater was an
institution which led to crime, the saloon a center of low, even bestial
vices. The existence of such a thing as an erring or fallen woman, let
alone a house of prostitution, was a crime, scarcely a fact to be
considered. There were forms and social appearances which we were taught
to wear, quite as one wears a suit of clothes. One had to go to church
on Sunday whether one wished to or not. It was considered good
business, if you please, to be connected with some religious
organization; and, by the same token, this commercialized religiosity
was transmuted into glistening virtue. We were taught persistently to
shun most human experiences as either dangerous or degrading or
destructive. The less you knew about life the better; the more you knew
about the fictional heaven and hell ditto. People walked about in a kind
of sanctified maze or dream, hypnotized or self-hypnotized by an erratic
and impossible theory of human conduct which had grown up heaven knows
where or how, and had finally cast its amethystine spell over all
America, if not over all the world.
Now I have no particular quarrel with this save that it is so
impossible, so inane. In my day there were apparently no really bad men
who were not known as such to all the world, or at least quickly
detected, and few if any good men who were not sufficiently rewarded by
the glorious fruits of their good deeds here and now! Success--mere
commercial success--was in its way all but synonymous with greatness.
Positively, and I stake my solemn word on this, until I was between
seventeen and eighteen I had scarcely begun to suspect any other human
being of harboring the erratic and sinful thoughts which occasionally
flashed through my own mind.