Chapter III

Her blazing candor lighted up for me every part of her world. We skirted abysses, but the language helped us wonderfully through. French has worn tracks in so many fields of experience where English blunders either boorishly or sentimentally. French is made for illumination and clear expression; it has kept its purity and crispness and can express, without shamefacedness or bungling, attitudes and interpretations which the Anglo-Saxon fatuously hides.

My friend was dimly sensible of some such contrast. I think she had as much difficulty in making me out as I had in making her out. She was very curious as to how she compared with American girls. She had once met one but had found her, though not a doll, yet not _sympathique_ and little understandable. I had to tell my friend how untranslatable she was. The Anglo-Saxon, I had to tell her, was apt to be either a schoolchild or a middle-aged person. To the first, ideas were strange and disturbing. To the second, they were a nuisance and a bore. I almost assured her that in America she would be considered a quite horrible portent. Her brimming idealism would make everybody uncomfortable. The sensual delight which she took in thinking, the way her ideas were all warmly felt and her feelings luminously expressed, would adapt her badly to a world of school-children and tired business men. I tried to go over for her the girls of her age whom I had known. How charming they were to be sure, but, even when they had ideas, how strangely inarticulate they sometimes were, and, if they were articulate, how pedantic and priggish they seemed to the world about them! And what forests of reticences and exaggerated values there were, and curious illogicalities. How jealous they were of their personalities, and what a suspicious and individualistic guard they kept over their candor and sincerities! I was very gay and perhaps a little cruel.

She listened eagerly, but I think she did not quite understand. If one were not frankly a doll, was not life a great swirl to be grappled with and clarified, and thought and felt about? And as for her personality, the more she gave the more she had. She would take the high risks of friendship.

To cross the seas and come upon my own enthusiasms and ideals vibrating with so intense a glow seemed an amazing fortune. It was like coming upon the same design, tinted in novel and picturesque colors of a finer harmony. In this intellectual flirtation, carried on in _musée_ and garden and on quay throughout that cloudless April, I began to suspect some gigantic flattery. Was her enthusiasm sincere, and her clean-cutting ideas, or had she by some subtle intuition anticipated me? Did she think, or was it to be expected of me, that I should fall in love with her? But perhaps there was a touch of the too foreign in her personality. And if I had fallen in love, I know it would not have been with herself. It would have been with the Frenchness of her, and perhaps was. It would have been with the eternal youth of France that she was. For she could never have been so very glowing if France had not been full of her. Her charm and appeal were far broader than herself. It took in all that rare spiritual climate where one absorbs ideas and ideals as the earth drinks in rain.

She was of that young France with its luminous understanding, its personal verve, its light of expression, its way of feeling its ideas and thinking its emotions, its deathless loyalty which betrays only at the clutch of some deeper loyalty. She adored her country and all its mystic values and aspirations. When she heard I was going to Germany, she actually winced with pain. She could scarcely believe it. I fell back at once to the position of a vulgar traveler, visiting even the lands of the barbarians. They were her country’s enemies, and some day they would attack. France awaited the onslaught fatalistically. She did not want to be a man, but she wished that they would let women be soldiers. If the war came, however, she would enlist at once as a Red Cross nurse. She thrilled at the thought that perhaps there she could serve to the uttermost.

And the war has come, hot upon her enthusiasms. She must have been long since in the field, either at the army stations, or moving about among the hospitals of Paris, her heart full of pride and pity for the France which she loved and felt so well, and of whose deathless spirit she was, for me, at least, so glowing a symbol.

FERGUS

My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney, its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat.

The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future. His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school. The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced him. On his parents’ anxiety that he “make something of himself” he looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance broker’s office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music notebook and Gomperz’s “Greek Thinkers” were rarely out of his hand.

Harmony and counterpoint had not appealed to him at the Conservatory, but now the themes that raced and rocketed through his head compelled him to composition. The bloodless scherzos and allegros which he produced and tried to play for me on his rickety piano had so archaic a flavor as to suggest that Fergus was inventing anew the art of music, somewhat as our childhood is supposed to pass through all the stages of the evolution of the race. As he did not seem to pass beyond a pre-Bachian stage, he began to feel at length, he told me, that there was something lacking in his style. But he was afraid that routine study would dull his inspiration. It was time that he needed, and not instruction. And time was slipping so quickly away. He was twenty-two, and he could not grasp or control it.

When summer was near he came to me with an idea. His office work was insupportable. Even accepting that one dropped eight of the best hours of one’s every day into a black and bottomless pit in exchange for the privilege of remaining alive, such a life was almost worse than none. I had friends who were struggling with a large country farm. He wished to offer them his services as farmhand on half-time in exchange for simple board and lodging. Working in the morning, he would have all the rest of his pastoral day for writing music.

Before I could communicate to him my friends’ reluctance to this proposal, he told me that his musical inspiration had entirely left him. He was now spending all his spare time in the Art Museum, discovering tastes and delights that he had not known were in him. Why had not some one told him of the joy of sitting and reading Plato in those glowing rooms? The Museum was more significant when I walked in it with Fergus. His gracious bearing almost seemed to please the pictures themselves. He walked as a princely connoisseur through his own historic galleries.

When I saw Fergus next, however, a physical depression had fallen upon him. He had gone into a vegetarian diet and was enfeebling himself with Spartan fare. He was disturbed by loneliness, the erotic world gnawed persistently at him, and all the Muses seemed to have left him. But in his gloominess, in the fine discrimination with which he analyzed his helplessness, in the noble despair with which he faced an insoluble world, he was more aristocratic than ever. He was not like one who had never attained genius, fame, voluptuous passion, riches, he was rather as one who had been bereft of all these things.

Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in irony. Priests whose “will to power” background he analyzed to me with Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him.

He was saved from falling back on the industrious parents who had so strangely borne him by an offer to play the harmonium in the orchestra of a fashionable restaurant. To this opportunity of making eighteen dollars a week he had evidently gone with a new and pleasurable sense of the power of wealth. It was easy, he said, but the heat and the lights, the food and the long evening hours fairly nauseated him, and he gave the work up.

All this time, I gathered, his parents had been restive over a certain economic waste. They seemed to feel that his expensive musical education should be capitalized more firmly and more profitably. His mother had even deplored his lack of ambition. She had explored and had discovered that one made much money as a “vaudeville act.” He had obtained a trial at an Upper Bronx moving-picture vaudeville theater. Fergus told me that the nervous girl who had gone on the stage before him had been cut short in the middle of her “Fox-Trot Lullaby,” or whatever her song was, by hostile yells from the audience. Fergus himself went on in rather a depressed mood, and hardly did himself justice. He played the Bach air, and a short movement from Brahms. He did not, however, get that rapport with his audience which he felt the successful vaudeville artist should feel. They had not yelled at him, but they had refused to applaud, and the circuit manager had declined to engage him.

After this experience it occurred to Fergus that he liked to teach, and that his training had made him a professional musician. His personality, he felt, was not unfavorable. By beginning modestly he saw no reason why he should not build up a clientèle and an honorable competence. When I saw him a week later at the Music Settlement, he told me that there was no longer any doubt that he had found his lifework. His fees are very small and his pupils are exacting. He has practised much besides. He told me the other day that teaching was uninspiring drudgery. He had decided to give it up, and compose songs.

Whenever I see Fergus I have a slight quickening of the sense of life. His rich and rather somber personality makes all ordinary backgrounds tawdry. He knows so exactly what he is doing and what he is feeling. I do not think he reads very much, but he breathes in from the air around him certain large aesthetic and philosophical ideas. There are many philosophies and many artists, however, that he has never heard of, and this ignorance of the concrete gives one a fine pleasure of impressing him. One can pour into receptive ears judgments and enthusiasms that have long ago been taken for granted by one’s more sophisticated friends. His taste in art as in music is impeccable, and veers strongly to the classics--Rembrandt and the Greeks, as Bach and Beethoven.

Fergus has been in love, but he does not talk much about it. A girl in his words is somewhat dark and inscrutable. She always has something haunting and finely-toned about her, whoever she may be. I always think of the clothed lady in the flowing silks, in Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love.” Yet withal Fergus gives her a touch of the allurement of her nude companion. His reserve, I think, always keeps these persons very dusky and distant. His chastity is a result of his fineness of taste rather than of feeble desire or conscious control. That impersonal passion which descends on people like Fergus in a sultry cloud he tells me he contrives to work off into his violin. I sometimes wonder if a little more of it with a better violin would have made him an artist.

But destiny has just clipped his wings so that he must live a life of noble leisure instead of artistic creation. His unconscious interest is the art of life. Against a background of Harlem flats and stodgy bourgeois prejudices he works out this life of _otium cum dignitate_, calm speculation and artistic appreciation that Nietzsche glorifies. On any code that would judge him by the seven dollars a week which is perhaps his average income he looks with cold disdain. He does not demand that the world give him a living. He did not ask to come into it, but being here he will take it with candor. Sometimes I think he is very patient with life. Probably he is not happy. This is not important. As his candor and his appreciations refresh me, I wonder if the next best thing to producing works of art is not to be, like Fergus, a work of art one’s self.

THE PROFESSOR

The Professor is a young man, but he had so obviously the misfortune of growing up too early that he seems already like a mournful relic of irrevocable days. His ardent youth was spent in that halcyon time of the early nineteen-hundreds when all was innocence in the heart of young America. “When I was in college,” the Professor often says, “all this discussion of social questions was unknown to us. The growing seriousness of the American college student is an inspiring phenomenon in our contemporary life.”

In those days the young men who felt an urge within them went in for literature. It was still the time when Presbyterian clergymen and courtly Confederate generals were contributing the inspiration of their ripe scholarship to the younger generation. It was the time when Brander Matthews still thrilled the world of criticism with his scintillating Gallic wit and his cosmopolitan wealth of friendships. The young men of that time are still a race apart. Through these literary masters they touched the intimate life of literature; they knew Kipling and Stevenson, Arthur Symons and the great Frenchmen, and felt themselves one with the charmed literary brotherhood throughout the world. It was still the time when, free from philosophic or sociologic taint, our American youth was privileged to breathe in from men like Henry van Dyke and Charles Eliot Norton the ideals of the scholar and the gentleman.

The Professor’s sensitive talent soon asserted itself. With Wordsworth he had absorbed himself into the circumambient life of nature and made the great reconciliation between her and man. With Shelley he had dared unutterable things and beaten his wings against the stars. With Tennyson he had shuddered pensively on the brink of declining faith. With Carlyle he had felt the call of duty, and all the revulsion against a sordid and mechanical age. With Arnold he had sought the sweetness and light which should come to him from knowing all the best that had been said and thought in the world. The Professor had scarcely begun to write verse before he found himself victor in a prize poetry contest which had enlisted the talent of all the best poets of America. He often tells his students of the intoxication of that evening when he encircled the dim vaulted corridors of the college library, while his excited brain beat out the golden couplets of the now celebrated “Ganymede.” The success of this undergraduate stripling fell like a thunderbolt upon the literary world. Already consecrated to the scholar’s career, he found fallen upon him the miracle of the creative artist. But Shelley and Keats had had their greatness very early, too. And when, at the early age of twenty-three, the Professor published his masterly doctoral dissertation on “The Anonymous Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century,” he at once attained in the world of literary scholarship the distinction that “Ganymede” had given him in the world of poetry.

His career has not frustrated those bright promises. His rare fusion of scholarship and genius won him the chair of English Literature in one of our most rapidly growing colleges, where he has incomparable opportunities for influencing the ideals of the young men under him. His courses are among the most popular in the college. Although his special scholarly research has been devoted to pre-Elizabethan literature, he is at home in all the ages. His lectures are models of carefully weighed criticism. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give my boys the spirit of the authors, and let them judge between them for themselves.” Consequently, however much Swinburne may revolt him, the Professor expounds the carnal and desperate message of that poet with the same care which he gives to his beloved Wordsworth. “When they have heard them all,” he told me once, “I can trust my boys to feel the insufficiency of any purely materialistic interpretation of life.”

Impeccable as is his critical taste where the classics are concerned, he is reluctant about giving his opinion to those students who come for a clue through the current literary maze. Stevenson was early canonized, and the Professor speaks with charm and fulness upon him, but G. B. S. and Galsworthy must wait. “Time, perhaps,” says the Professor, “will put the seal of approval upon them. Meanwhile our judgment can be only tentative.” His fine objectivity is shown in those lists of the hundred best books of the year which he is sometimes asked to compile for the Sunday newspapers. Rarely does a new author, never does a young author, appear among them. Scholarly criticism, the Professor feels, can scarcely be too cautious.

The Professor’s inspiring influence upon his students, however, is not confined to his courses. He has formed a little literary society in the college, which meets weekly to discuss with him the larger cultural issues of the time. Lately he has become interested in philosophy. “In my day,” he once told me, “we young literary men did not study philosophy.” But now, professor that he is, he goes to sit at the feet of the great metaphysicians of his college. He has been immensely stirred by the social and moral awakening of recent years. He willingly allows discussions of socialism in his little society, but is inclined to deprecate the fanaticism of college men who lose their sense of proportion on social questions. But in his open-mindedness to radical thought he is an inspiration to all who meet him. To be radical, he tells his boys, is a necessary part of experience. In professorial circles he is looked upon as a veritable revolutionist, for he encourages the discussion of vital questions even in the classroom. Questions such as evolution, capital punishment, free thought, protection and education of women, furnish the themes for composition. And from the essays of the masters--Macaulay, Huxley, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold--come the great arguments as freshly and as vitally as of yore. Literature, says the Professor, is not merely language; it is ideas. We must above all, he says, teach our undergraduates to think.

Although the Professor is thus responsive to the best radicalisms of the day, he does not let their shock break the sacred chalice of the past. He is deeply interested in the religious life of his college. A devout Episcopalian, he deplores the callousness of the present generation towards the immemorial beauty of ritual and dogma. The empty seats of the college chapel fill him with dismay. One of his most beautiful poems pictures his poignant sensations as he comes from a quiet hour within its dim, organ-haunted shadows out into the sunlight, where the careless athletes are running bare-leggedly past him, unmindful of the eternal things.

I think I like the Professor best in his study at home, when he talks on art and life with one or two respectful students. On the wall is a framed autograph of Wordsworth, picked up in some London bookshop; and a framed letter of appreciation from Richard Watson Gilder. On the table stands a richly-bound volume of “Ganymede” with some of the very manuscripts, as he has shown us, bound in among the leaves. His deep and measured voice flows pleasantly on in anecdotes of the Authors’ Club, or reminiscences of the golden past. As one listens, the glamor steals upon one. This is the literary life, grave, respected, serene. All else is hectic rush, modern ideas a futile babel. It is men like the Professor who keep the luster of scholarship bright, who hold true the life of the scholar and the gentleman as it was lived of old. In a world of change he keeps the faith pure.

ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

When Dr. Alexander Mackintosh Butcher was elected to the presidency of Pluribus University ten years ago, there was general agreement that in selecting a man who was not only a distinguished educator but an executive of marked business ability the trustees had done honor to themselves and their university as well as to the new president. For Dr. Butcher had that peculiar genius which would have made him as successful in Wall Street or in a governor’s chair as in the classroom. Every alumnus of Pluribus knows the story told of the young Alexander Mackintosh Butcher, standing at the age of twenty-two at the threshold of a career. Eager, energetic, with a brilliant scholastic record behind him, it was difficult to decide into what profession he should throw his powerful talents. To his beloved and aged president the young man went for counsel. “My boy,” said the good old man, “remember that no profession offers nobler opportunities for service to humanity than that of education.” And what should he teach? “Philosophy is the noblest study of man.” And a professor of philosophy the young Butcher speedily became.

Those who were so fortunate as to study philosophy under him at Pluribus will never forget how uncompromisingly he preached absolute idealism, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, or how witheringly he excoriated the mushroom philosophies which were springing up to challenge the eternal verities. I have heard his old students remark the secret anguish which must have been his when later, as president of the university, he was compelled to entertain the famous Swiss philosopher, Monsfilius, whose alluring empiricism was taking the philosophic world by storm.

Dr. Butcher’s philosophic acuteness is only equaled by his political rectitude. Indeed, it is as philosopher-politician that he holds the unique place he does in our American life, injecting into the petty issues of the political arena the immutable principles of Truth. Early conscious of his duty as a man and a citizen, he joined the historic party which had earned the eternal allegiance of the nation by rescuing it from slavery. By faithful service to the chiefs of his state organization, first under the powerful Flatt, and later under the well-known Harnes, himself college-bred and a political philosopher of no mean merit, the young Dr. Butcher worked his way up through ward captain to the position of district leader. The practical example of Dr. Butcher, the scholar and educator, leaving the peace of his academic shades to carry the banner in the service of his party ideals of Prosperity and Protection has been an inspiration to thousands of educated men in these days of civic cowardice. When, three years ago, his long and faithful services were rewarded by the honor of second place on the Presidential ticket which swept the great states of Mormonia and Green Mountain, there were none of his friends and admirers who felt that the distinction was undeserved.

President Butcher is frequently called into the councils of the party whenever there are resolutions to be drawn up or statements of philosophic principle to be issued. He is in great demand also as chairman of state conventions, which his rare academic distinction lifts far above the usual level of such affairs. It was at one of these conventions that he made the memorable speech in which he drew the analogy between the immutability of Anglo-Saxon political institutions and the multiplication table. To the applause of the keen and hard-headed business men and lawyers who sat as delegates under him, he scored with matchless satire the idea of progress in politics, and demonstrated to their complete satisfaction that it was as absurd to tinker with the fundamentals of our political system as it would be to construct a new arithmetic. In such characteristic wisdom we have the intellectual caliber of the man.

This brilliant and profound address came only as the fruit of a lifetime of thought on political philosophy. President Butcher’s treatise on “Why We Should Never Change Any Form of Government” has been worth more to thoughtful men than thousands of sermons on civic righteousness. No one who has ever heard President Butcher’s rotund voice discuss in a public address “those ideas and practices which have been tried and tested by a thousand years of experience” will ever allow his mind to dwell again on the progressive and disintegrating tendencies of the day, nor will he have the heart again to challenge on any subject the “decent respect for the common opinions of mankind.”

President Butcher’s social philosophy is as sound as his political. The flexibility of his mind is shown in the fact that, although an immutabilist in politics, he is a staunch Darwinian in sociology. Himself triumphantly fit, he never wearies of expressing his robust contempt for the unfit who encumber the earth. His essay on “The Insurrection of the Maladjusted” is already a classic in American literature. The trenchant attack on modern social movements as the impudent revolt of the unfit against those who, by their personal merits and industry, have, like himself, achieved success, has been a grateful bulwark to thousands who might otherwise have been swept sentimentally from their moorings by those false guides who erect their own weakness and failure into a criticism of society.

Dr. Butcher’s literary eminence has not only won him a chair in the American Academy of All the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophies, but has made him almost as well known abroad as at home. He has lectured before the learned societies of Lisbon on “The American at Home,” and he has a wide circle of acquaintances in every capital in Europe. Most of the foreign universities have awarded him honorary degrees. In spite of his stout Americanism, Dr. Butcher has one of the most cosmopolitan of minds. His essay on “The Cosmopolitan Intellect” has been translated into every civilized language. With his admired friend, Owen Griffith, he has collaborated in the latter’s endeavor to beat the swords of industrial exploitation into the ploughshares of universal peace. He has served in numerous capacities on Griffith’s many peace boards and foundations, and has advised him widely and well how to distribute his millions so as to prevent the recurrence of war in future centuries.

Let it not be thought that, in recounting President Butcher’s public life and services, I am minimizing his distinction as a university administrator. As executive of one of the largest universities in America, he has raised the position of college president to a dignity surpassed by scarcely any office except President of the United States. The splendid $125,000 mansion which President Butcher had the trustees of Pluribus build for him on the heights overlooking the city, where he entertains distinguished foreign guests with all the pomp worthy of his high office, is the precise measure both of the majesty with which he has endowed the hitherto relatively humble position, and the appreciation of a grateful university. The relations between President Butcher and the trustees of Pluribus have always been of the most beautiful nature. The warm and profound intellectual sympathy which he feels for the methods and practices of the financial and corporate world, and the extensive personal affiliations he has formed with its leaders, have made it possible to leave in his hands a large measure of absolute authority. Huge endowments have made Pluribus under President Butcher’s rule one of the wealthiest of our higher institutions of learning. With a rare intuitive response to the spirit of the time, the President has labored to make it the biggest and most comprehensive of its kind. Already its schools are numbered by the dozens, its buildings by the scores, its instructors by the hundreds, its students by the thousands, its income by the millions, and its possessions by the tens of millions.

None who have seen President Butcher in the commencement exercises of Pluribus can ever forget the impressiveness of the spectacle. His resemblance to Henry VIII is more marked now that he has donned the crimson gown and flat hat of the famous English university which gave him the degree of LL.D. Seated in a high-backed chair--the historic chair of the first colonial president of Pluribus--surrounded by tier upon tier of his retinue of the thousand professors of the university, President Alexander Mackintosh Butcher presents the degrees, and in his emphatic voice warns the five thousand graduates before him against everything new, everything untried, everything untested.

Only one office could tempt President Butcher from his high estate. Yet even those enthusiastic alumni and those devoted professors who long to see him President of the United States have little hope of tempting him from his duties to his alma mater. Having set his hand to the plough, he must see Pluribus through her harvest season, and may God prosper the work! So, beloved of all, alumni and instructors alike, the idol of the undergraduates, a national oracle of Prosperity and Peace, President Butcher passes to a green old age, a truly Olympian figure of the time.

THIS OLDER GENERATION