Chapter III: Part 3

It may be objected at this point that the fluctuations of colleges have nothing to do with our standards of culture. I think they have, a great deal. No one will deny that culture can be got elsewhere, or that colleges do not suffice in themselves to give it. But if colleges do not consider themselves custodians of culture, warders and cherishers of the flame, they have no reason for existence. It is a platitude that business men consider college a worthless preparation for business life--save as a young man may have laid up there treasure for himself in the shape of valuable “connections.” Even the conception of college as a four years’ paradise intervening before the hell of an active struggle for existence, does not touch upon the original reason for universities’ being at all. Universities were invented for the sake of bringing their fortunate students into contact with the precious lore of the world, there garnered and kept pure. There was no idea on the part of their founders that every one would or could partake of academic benefits. The social scheme would not originally have allowed that; still less would the conception of the public intellect have admitted the notion. Every one was not supposed to be congenitally qualified for intimacy with the best that has been thought and said in the world. They had no notion, until very recently, of so changing the terms of that intimacy that every one might think he could have it. Learning, culture, were not to be adulterated so that any mental digestive process whatsoever could take them in.

But now, in America, there is a tendency that way. If a boy does not feel a pre-established harmony between his soul and the humanities, then give him an academic degree on something with which his soul will be in pre-established harmony. And if there is no pre-established harmony between his soul and any form of learning, then create institutions that will give him a degree with no learning to speak of at all. I do not mean to deny that many of our virtually valueless colleges were founded in the pathetic inherited conviction that learning and culture were too great goods not to be accessible to all who cared passionately for them. But I do believe that the reverence for learning and culture has been largely replaced by a conviction that anything which has so great a reputation as a college degree must be put within the reach of all, even at the risk of making its reputation a farce. The privileged have been unwilling that their children should be made to work; the unprivileged have been unwilling that their children should see anything of good repute, anything with a prestige value, denied to them. We have all demanded a royal road to a thing to which there is no royal road. The expensive schools lead their pupils from kindergarten to nature-study and eurhythmics, with basket-work and gymnastics thrown in; the public schools follow them as closely as they can. Of real training of the mind there is very little in any school. The rich do not want their children overworked; the poor want a practical result for their children’s fantastically long school hours. So domestic science comes in for girls, and carpentering for boys. Anything to make it easy, on the one hand; anything to make a universal standard possible, on the other.

Take one example only: the attitude towards Greek. There are two arguments against teaching our children Greek: one, that it is too hard; the other, that it is useless. The mere fact that public opinion has drummed Greek out of court as an inevitable part of a college curriculum shows that these arguments have been potent. No person who could be influenced by either has the remotest conception of the meaning or the value of culture. Culture has never renounced a thing because it was difficult, or because it did not help people to make money. And the mere fact that Greek is no longer supposed by the vast majority of parents to be of any “use”--even as a matter of reputation--to their sons, shows that the old standards of culture have changed. The larger number of our public schools no longer teach Greek at all; a great many private schools have to make special arrangements for pupils who wish to study it. And the attitude towards Greek is only a sign of our democratic, materialistic times.

Now I have done with the colleges. I have dealt with them at all only by way of hinting that they have been so democratized that culture means, even to its avowed exponents, something different from what it has ever meant before. May I speak for one moment explicitly of the public schools? For we must trace all this back to the source--must begin with the ostensible homes of “culture” and follow up the stream to the latent public consciousness. Each class that comes into college has read fewer and fewer of what are called the classics of English literature. An astonishing number of boys and girls have read nothing worth reading except the books that are in the entrance requirements. An increasing proportion of the sons and daughters of the prosperous are positively illiterate at college age. They cannot spell; they cannot express themselves grammatically; and they are inclined to think that it does not matter. General laxity, and the adoption of educational fads which play havoc with real education, are largely responsible. In the less fortunate classes, the fact seems to be that the public schools are so swamped by foreigners that all the teachers can manage to do is to teach the pupils a little workable English. Needless to say, the profession of the public-school teacher has become less and less tempting to people who are really fit for it.

It is not only in the great cities that the immigrant population swamps the schoolroom. An educated woman told me, not long since, that there was no school in the place where she lived--one of our oldest New England towns--to which she could send her boy. The town could not support a private school for young children; and the public school was out of the question. I had been brought up to believe that public schools in old New England towns were very decent places; and I asked her why. The answer made it clear. Three fourths of the school-children were Lithuanians, and a decently bred American child could simply learn nothing in their classes. They had to be taught English, first of all; they approached even the most elementary subjects very slowly; and--natural corollary--the teachers themselves were virtually illiterate. Therefore she was teaching her boy at home until he could go to a preparatory school. Fortunately, she was capable of doing it; but there are many mothers who cannot ground their children in the languages and sciences. A woman who could not would have had to watch her child acquiring a Lithuanian accent and the locutions of the slum.

An isolated case is never worth much. But one has only to consider conditions at large to see that this has everything to make it typical. One has only to look at any official record of immigration, any chart of distribution of population by races, to see how the old American stock is being numerically submerged. If you do not wish to look at anything so dull as statistics, look at the comic papers. A fact does not become a stock joke until it is pretty well visible to the average man. Our forefathers cared immensely for education; they felt themselves humble before learning; and their schools followed, soon and sacredly, upon their churches. They stood in awe of the real thing; and they had no illusions as to the ease of the scholar’s path. They legislated for their schools solemnly, and if not with complete wisdom, always at least with accurate ideals. Educational (like all other) legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach to them. If any one chooses to say that culture must always be in the hands of an oligarchy, and that the oligarchy has not been touched, I will only ask him to consider the pupils and the teaching in most private schools. In the end, prestige values are going to tell; and the vast bulk of our population will see to it that the prestige values are not absolutely unattainable to them. The great fortunes have made their way to the top--yes, really to the top. In many cases there has been time for a quick veneer of grammar to be laid over their original English. In many cases there has not; and no one cares. The custodians of culture cannot afford to care; for their custody must either be endowed or be forsaken.

Oh, yes, there are a few Brahmins left; but one has only to look at the marriages of any given season to see what is becoming of the purity of the Brahmin caste. The Brahmins themselves are beginning to see that they are lost unless they compound with the materialists, and make or marry money--or increase, by aid of the materialists, what they have inherited. In what New England village, now, is the minister or the scholar looked up to as a fount of municipal wisdom because he is a learned man? Is he a “good mixer”? That is what they ask: I have heard them. Once it was possible in America for a poor man to hope to gain for his children, if they deserved it, the life of the intellect and of the spirit. Now it no longer is; for the poor themselves have defiled the fount. They are a different kind of poor, that is all; and they have become an active and discontented majority, with hands that pick and steal. When they no longer need to pick and steal, they carry their infection higher and give it as a free gift. And they have been aided by the Brahmins themselves; who, having dabbled in sociology _pour se désoeuvrer_, and then for charity’s sake, are now finding that sociology is a grim matter of life and death, and endow chairs of it--as if one should endow chairs of self-preservation. But self-preservation is not culture and never will be; and no study of the manners and customs of savages or slums can call itself “contact with the best that has been thought and said in the world.”

We owe, too, I think, a great deal of our cultural deterioration (which I admit is a villainous phrase) to science. Science has come in with a rush, and is at present--why deny it?--on top. “Scientific” is a word to charm with, even though it has already had time to be degraded. If Mrs. Eddy had called her bargain-counter Orientalism anything but “science,” would she have drawn so many followers? Science has done great things for us; it has also pushed us hopelessly back. For, not content with filling its own place, it has tried to supersede everything else. It has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts. To the plea, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” it has retorted that no word proceeds authentically out of the mouth of God save what it has issued in its own translations. It is more rigorous and more exclusive than the Index of the Roman Church. The Inquisition never did anything so oppressive as to put all men, innocent or guilty, into a laboratory. Science cares supremely for physical things. If it restricted itself to the physical world, it would be tolerable: we could shut ourselves away with our souls in peace. But it must control the soul as well as the body: it insists on reducing all emotions, however miraculous and dear, to a question of nerve-centres. There has never been tyranny like this.

Now I do not mean to say that all scientists despise culture. That would be silly and untrue. But the “scientific” obsession has changed all rankings in the intellectual world. The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject: no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness. Small wonder that the study of literature turns into philology, the study of history into archæology, and the study of morals and æsthetics into physical psychology. With the finer appeals of philosophy and poetry and painting and natural beauty, science need not meddle; because about their direct effect on the thought and wills of men if can say nothing valuable. You cannot determine the value of a Velasquez by putting your finger on the pulse of the man who is looking at it; or the value of Amiens Cathedral by registering the vibration of his internal muscles; or of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado by declaring that all perception of beauty is a function of sex. Nor does it matter very much, at the moment, to the enraptured reader or observer that such and such a work of art was the logical result of a given set of conditions. The point is that it is there; and that it works potently upon us in ways which we can scarce phrase. Culture puts us disinterestedly in communication with the distilled and sifted lore of the world. Science is in comparison a prejudiced affair--prejudiced because it seeks always to bring things back to literal and physical explanations. Far be it from me to deny that geology, biology, physics, have given us unapprehended vistas down which to stray--only, strictly speaking, it forbids the straying. The moment the layman’s imagination begins to profit, begins to get real exhilaration from scientific discoveries, it contributes something unwelcome to science. Science has its own stern value; in the end we are all profoundly affected by its gains in the field of fact. One’s quarrel is not with science as such, but with science as demanding an intellectual and spiritual hegemony. With nothing less than hegemony, however, will science be content.

Now if it is not yet clear what effect all this must have on culture, a few words may make it clearer. The great danger of the scientific obsession is not the destruction of all things that are not science, but the slow infection of those things. If the laboratory is your real test, then most philosophies and all art are no good. The scientists are not good philosophers, and they are not good artists; and if science is to rule everywhere, we must shelve philosophy and art, or else take them into the laboratory. I need not point out what has become of literature under a scientific régime. We all know the hopeless fiction that is created by the scientific method; fiction that banks on its anecdotal accuracy and has in it no spiritual truth. Literature is simply a different game: you do not get the greatest literary truth by the laboratory method. Art is not reducible to science, because science takes no account of the special truth which is beauty, of the special truth which is moral imagination.

It is not only by the laboratory method that our fiction has been ruined: a great many of our writers of fiction are not up to the laboratory method. But all our fiction has been harmed by the prevalent idea that no fiction is any good which is not done according to the laboratory method, and that even fiction which attempts that method is of little value in comparison with a card-catalogue. There were some snobs who were not affected by the democratic fallacy; but even the snobs have been affected by scientific scorn.

I may have seemed to be showing rather the reasons for the extirpation of culture among us than the fact of the extirpation. Perhaps that is not the best way to go to work. But the actual evidence is so multitudinously at hand that it was hardly worth while beginning with solemn proofs of the fact. In all branches of art and learning we have a cult of the modern. Modern languages rank Latin and Greek in our schools and colleges; practical and “vocational” training is displacing the rudiments of learning in all of our public and many of our private institutions for the teaching of the young; the books admitted to the lists of “literature” include many that never have been and never will be literature. I found, a few years ago, the following books on a list from which students of English were allowed to choose their reading for the course--this, in one of the old and respectable high schools of Massachusetts, not twenty miles from Boston: _Soldiers of Fortune_, _Pushing to the Front_, _Greifenstein_, _Doctor Latimer_, _The Prisoner of Zenda_, _The Honorable Peter Stirling_, _The First Violin_, and “any of the works of Stewart Edward White.” These, and many others, may be, in their way, good reading, but there is no excuse for offering them to the young student of English as examples of “literature.”

Standards of beauty and truth are no longer rigidly held up. In philosophy we have produced pragmatism; in art we have produced futurism--and what not, since then?--in literature we have produced the pathologic and the economic novel, and no poetry worth speaking of. The “grand style” has gone out; and the classics are back numbers. Our children do not even speak good English; and no one minds. They cannot be bored with Scott and Dickens; they cannot be bored with poetry at all. And why should they, when their fathers and mothers are reading _Laddie_ and _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_, and their clergymen are preaching about _The Inside of the Cup_--or the latest work dealing with the slums by some one who was slum-born and slum-bred and is proud of it? You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one. The cultured person must have put in a great many years with nothing to show for it; his parents have usually put in a great many years, for him, for which they have nothing to show. There is nothing to show, until you get the complex result of the disciplined and finished creature. “Culture” means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit. There is no money in it; there is nothing striking in it; there is in it no flattery of our own time, or of the majority.

Ours is a commercial age, in which most people are bent on getting money. That is a platitude. It is also, intellectually speaking, a materialistic age, when most of our intellectual power is given either to prophylaxis, or to industrial chemistry, or to the invention of physical conveniences--all ultimately concerned with the body. Even the philanthropists deal with the soul through the body, and Christianity has long since become “muscular.” How, in such an age, can culture flourish--culture, which cares even more about the spirit than about the flesh? It was pointed out not long ago, in an _Atlantic_ article, that many of our greatest minds have dwelt in bodies that the eugenists would have legislated out of existence. Many of the greatest saints found sainthood precisely in denying the power of the ailing flesh to restrict the soul. There is more in the great mystics than psychiatry will ever account for. But science, in spite of its vistas, is short-sighted. It talks in æons, but keeps its eye well screwed to the microscope. The geologic ages are dealt with by pick and hammer and reduced to slides, and the lore of the stars has become a pure matter of mathematical formulæ. Human welfare is a question of microbes. Neither pundit nor populace cares, at the present day, for perspectives. The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin.

So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog? And is it not a crime against human nature to consider negligible “the best that has been thought and said in the world”? It is only by considering it negligible that we can consent to let ourselves be overrun by the hordes of ignorance and materialism--the people (God save the mark!) of to-morrow. Let us stand, if we must, on practical grounds: the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. As if our only guaranty that to-morrow would be tolerable were not precisely that it is sprung from a past that we know to have been, at many points, noble! It is pathetic to see people refusing to learn the lessons of history; it is a waste that no efficiency expert ought to permit. All learning is a text-book which would save much time to him who works for the perfection of the world. But I begin to think that our age does not really care about perfection; and that it Would rather make a thousand-year-old mistake than learn a remedy from history. So much the worse for to-morrow!

But meanwhile let us--those of us who can--see to it that the pre-eminent brains of other ages shall not have passed away in vain. M. Anatole France, in _La Révolte des Anges_, has a good deal to say about the absurdity of a Jehovah who still believes in the Ptolemaïc system. Well, the Ptolemaïc system did not prevent the ancient world from giving us Greek theatres and Roman law, or England from giving us Magna Charta. We are still imitating Greek theatres (rather badly, I admit) in our stadia; Roman law is still, by and large, good enough for such an enlightened country as France; and Magna Charta--or its equivalent--had to be there before we could have a Declaration of Independence. Our superior scientific knowledge has not given us our standards of beauty or justice or liberty. Let us take what the present offers--airplanes and all. But let us not throw away what other men, in other ages, have died for the sake of discovering. If the lore of the past is useless, there is every chance--one must be very overweening indeed not to admit it--that the lore of our generation will be useless, too. Culture--whether you use the word itself or find another term--means only a decent economy of human experience. You cannot improve on things without keeping those things pretty steadily in mind. Otherwise you run the risk of wasting a lot of time doing something that has already been done. Any one, I think, will admit that. And it is not a far step to the realization that on the whole it is wise not to lose the past out of our minds. There is no glory in being wiser than the original savage; there is glory in being wiser than the original sage. But in order to be wiser than he, we must have a shrewd suspicion of how wise he was. By and large, without culture, that shrewd suspicion will never be ours.

FASHIONS IN MEN

Never, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of precipitate of human nature--_Don Quixote_ and _Tom Jones_ are equally “true,” and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern books give us every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, if read at all, may be too “quaint” for words. And to any one who has been reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that fashions in human nature have changed.

My first novel was _Jane Eyre_; and at the age of eight, I fell desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in being permitted to encounter the classics in infancy), and I dare say that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to some imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should have fallen in love--had time and chance permitted--with V. V. or The Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer assume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as modern tactics direct the assault.

People are always telling us that fashions in women have changed: what seems to me almost more interesting is that fashions in men (the stable sex) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore “up to” the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.

It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn, and Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curaçao and pâté de foie gras. No longer does Blanche Ingram declare, “An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.” Blanche Ingram wants--and gets--the Humanitarian Hero: some one who has particular respect for convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolstoï. He must qualify for the possession of her hand by long, voluntary residence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral acres only if he has, concerning them, socialistic intentions. He must be too altruistic to kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to eat them. He must never order “pistols and coffee”: his only permitted weapon is benevolent legislation.

I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop--“muscular Christianity” has at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands. And he should have the tongues of men and of angels. Gone is the inarticulate Guardsman--gone forever. The modern hero has read books that Burgo Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never heard of. He is ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, until dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of sex until the heroine arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is a very complicated and interesting creature. Some mediæval traits are discernible in him; but the eighteenth century would not have known him for human.

What has he lost, this hero, and what has he gained? How did it all begin? In life, doubtless, it began with a feminine change of taste. Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; and, I suspect, the peacock’s tail, as much as the anthropoid ape’s, is destined to elimination. We women of to-day are distrustful of the peacock’s tail. We are mortally afraid of being misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that the peacock’s soul is not quite the thing. Never has there been among the feminine young more scientific talk about sex, and never among the feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young woman suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably discussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery, eugenics, and race-suicide. The miracle--the everlasting miracle of Nature--is that she should want, in these circumstances, to marry him at all. She probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the peacock’s tail to do?

So much for life. In our English fiction, I am inclined to believe that George Eliot began it with Daniel Deronda. But, in our own day, Meredith did more. Up to the time of Meredith, the dominant male was the fashionable hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Fairfax Rochester, and “Stunning” Warrington are as different as possible; but all of them, in their several ways, keep up one male tradition in fiction. It is within our own day that that tradition has entirely changed. Have you ever noticed how inveterately, in Meredith’s novels, the schoolmaster or his spiritual kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont cannot stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleetwood against Owain Wythan, Sir Willoughby Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little girl who fell in love with Mr. Rochester would have preferred any one of these gentlemen (yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but I dare say the event would have proved her wrong. Certainly the wisdom of the ladies’ choice was never doubtful to Meredith himself. The soldier and the aristocrat cannot endure the test they are put to by the sympathetic male with a penchant for the enfranchised woman. Vain for Lord Ormont to accede to Aminta’s taste for publicity; vain for Lord Fleetwood to become the humble wooer of Carinthia Jane: each has previously been convicted of pride.

Now, in an earlier day, no woman would have looked at a man who was not proud--who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, by which Lucifer fell, was the chief hall-mark of the gentleman. Moreover, in that earlier day, women did not expect their heroes to explain everything to them: a certain amount of reticence, a measure of silence, was also one of the hall-marks of the gentleman. If a bit of mystery could be thrown in, so much the better. It gave her something to exercise her imagination on. Think of the Byronic males--Conrad, Lara, and the rest! If they had told all, where would they have been? Think of Lovelace and Heathcliff and Darcy and Brian de Bois Guilbert!

Heroes, once, were always disdaining to speak, and spurning their foes. Nowadays, no hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures to spurn anyone--least of all, his foes. He is humble of heart and very loquacious. Mrs. Humphry Ward has inherited from George Eliot; and the latest heroes of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are the children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, and Owain Wythan (of whom it is not explicitly written that they had any others). They are humanitarian and democratic; they are ignorant of hatred; they are inclined to think the ill-born necessarily better than the well-born; and they are quite sure that women are superior to men. True, Mr. Galsworthy always seems to be looking backward; he never forgets the ancient tradition that he is combating. His young aristocrats who eschew the ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in their case is “its only reward.” Perhaps that is why his novels always leave us with the medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. But take a handful of heroes elsewhere: the Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict “Daniel Smith,” V. V., or even Coryston, the Socialist peer. Where, in a lot of them, do you find either pride or reticence in the old sense? Where, in any one of them, do you find the Satanic charm? Which one would Harriet Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, or Elizabeth Bennett, have looked at with eyes of love?

The “Satanic charm.” The phrase is out. Milton, I suspect, is responsible for the tradition that has lasted so long, and is now being broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan delightful, and our good Protestant novelists for a long time followed his lead, in that they gave their delightful men some of the Satanic traits. Proud they were and scornfully silent, as we have recalled; and conventional to the last degree. “Conventional,” that is, in the stricter sense; by which it is not meant that as portraits they were unconvincing, or that, as men, they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They were conventional in that they followed a convention; in that they were, to a large extent, predicable. They were jealous of their honor, and believed it vindicable by the duel; they had no doubt that good women were better than bad, and that pedigree in human beings was as important as pedigree in animals; and though they might be quixotic on occasion, they were not democratic _pour deux sous_. The barmaid was not their sister, nor the stevedore their brother. (The Satan of _Paradise Lost_, as we all remember, was a splendid snob.)

Moreover, they were sophisticated--and not merely out of books. The Faust idea, having prevailed for many centuries, has at last been abandoned--and perhaps, our sober sense may tell us, rightly; but not so long ago there was still something more repellent to the female imagination about the man who chose not to know, than about the man who chose not to abstain. I do not mean that we were supposed always to be looking for a Tom Jones or a Roderick Random--we might be looking for a Sir Charles Grandison, no less; but at least, when we found our hero, we expected to find him wiser than we. Nowadays, a girl rather likes to give a man points--and often (in fiction, at least) has to. Meredith railed against the “veiled virginal doll” as heroine. Well: our heroines now are never veiled virginal dolls; but sometimes our heroes are. Lancelot has gone out, and Galahad has come in. I suspect that there is a literary law of compensation, and that, Ibsen and Strindberg to the contrary notwithstanding, there has to be a veiled virginal doll somewhere in a really taking romance. Perhaps it is fair that the sterner sex should have its turn at guarding ideals by the hearthstone, while women make the grand tour.

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not referring particularly to that knowledge which any man is better without, but to the Odyssean experience which, in their respective measures, heroes were wont to have behind them:

‘And saw the cities, and the counsels knew

* * * * *

Of many men, and many a time at sea
Within his heart he bore calamity.’

They had at least seen the towns and the minds of men, and their morals were the less likely to be upset by a conventional assault upon them. Does any one chance to remember, I wonder, Theron Ware, led to his “damnation” by his first experience of a Chopin nocturne? It would have taken more than a Chopin nocturne to make any of our seasoned heroes do something that he did not wish to. They knew something of society, and _ergo_ of women; they had experienced, directly or vicariously, human romance; and they had read history. Nowadays, they are apt to know little or nothing--to begin with--of society, women, or romance, except what may be got from brand-new books on sociology; and they pride themselves on knowing no history. History, with its eternal stresses and selections, is nothing if not aristocratic, and our heroes nowadays must be democratic or they die. It is an age of complete faith in the superiority of the lower classes--the swing of the pendulum, no doubt, from the other extreme of thinking the lower classes morally and æsthetically negligible. “Privilege” is as detestable now in matters of intellect and breeding as in matters of finance and politics. The man with the muck-rake has got past the office into the drawing-room. If your hero has the bad luck not to have been born in the slums, he must at least have the wit to take up his habitation there as soon as he comes of age. We have learned that riches are corrupting, but (except in the special sense of vice-commission reports) we have not yet learned that poverty is rather more corrupting than wealth.

Sophistication, whether social, intellectual, or æsthetic, is now the deadly sin. If we are sophisticated, we may not be good enough for Ellis Island. And there goes another of the hall-marks of the gentleman as he was once known to fiction. Our hero in old days might not have condescended to the glittering assemblies of fashion, but there was never any doubt that, if he had, he would, in spite of himself, have been king of his company as soon as he entered the room. He might have been hard up, but his necktie would not have been “a black sea holding for life a school of fat white fish.” He might have been lonely or gloomy, but he would not have been diffident, and he would never, never, _never_ have “blinked” at the heroine. “My godlike friend had carelessly put his hair-brush into the butter,” says Asticot, at the outset, of the Beloved Vagabond. Now in picaresque novels, we were always meeting people who did that sort of thing; but they were not gentlemen. Whereas, the Beloved Vagabond is of noble birth, and despite his ten years’ abeyance, finds the countess quite ready to marry him. She does not marry him in the end, to be sure, but we are permitted to feel that there was something lacking in her because Paragot’s manners at tea did not please her. The hero of old had what used to be called “a sense of fitness,” and a saving sense of humor, which combined to prevent his entering a ball-room as John the Baptist. The same lucky combination would have prevented him--in literature, at least--from wooing the millionaire’s child with dusty commonplaces of the Higher Criticism or jeremiads against the daughters of Heth. But perhaps millionaires’ children to-day take that sort of thing for manners. To the argument that a performance of the kind takes courage, one can only reply that, judging from the enthusiasm with which the preaching hero is received by the heroine, it apparently does not. And in any case, the hero is too sublimely ignorant of what socially constitutes courage to deserve any credit for it.

Sometimes, of course, like Mr. Galsworthy’s men, he perceives, with some inherited sense, that his kind of thing is not likely to be welcomed; and then he goes sadly and sternly away, leaving the girl to accept a wooer with more technique. But usually he cuts out everybody. For the chief hall-mark of a gentleman, now, is the desire to reform his own class out of all recognition.

Women, as we know, have long wanted to be talked to as if they were men; and the result is that heroines now let themselves be lectured at in a way that very few men would endure. Alison Parr marries the Rev. John Hodder, and Carlisle Heth would have married V. V. if he had lived. Well: Clara Middleton married Vernon Whitford, and Carinthia Jane married Owain Wythan, and Aminta married Matey Weyburn.

I may have seemed to be speaking cynically. That, I can give my word of honor, I am not. It is well that we have come to realize that there are some adventures which, in themselves, add no lustre to a man’s name. It is well that we take thought for the lower strata of humanity--though our actual reforms, I fancy, show their authors as taking thought not for to-morrow but for to-day. Certainly brutality, or the indifference which is negative brutality, is not a beautiful or a moral thing; and certainly we do not particularly sympathize with Thackeray shedding tears as he went away from his publishers because they had obliged him to save Pendennis’s chastity. That dreadful person, Arthur Pendennis, would surely not have been made any less dreadful by being permitted to seduce Fanny Bolton.

It is right to think of the poor; it is right to bend our energies, as citizens, to the economic bettering of their lot. No one could sanely regret our doing so. But there is always danger in saying the thing which is not, and in pretending that because some virtues have hitherto not been recognized, the virtues that have been recognized are no good. One sympathizes with Towneley (in that incomparable novel _The Way of All Flesh_) when Ernest asks him:

“‘Don’t you like poor people very much yourself?’”

“Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw and said quietly, but slowly and decidedly, ‘No, no, no,’ and escaped.”

“Of course, some poor people were very nice, and always would be so, but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable barrier.”

It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not live longer and write more novels. But in regretting him, we shall do well to remember that though publication was delayed until some time after the author’s death, the bulk of _The Way of All Flesh_ was written in the ’70’s. _The Way of All Flesh_ is not sympathetic to the contemporary mood; it is one of those books so much ahead of its time (except perhaps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has not yet caught up with it. It was doomed inevitably to an interval of oblivion. The case reminds one of _Richard Feverel_.

Only in one way is _The Way of All Flesh_ quite contemporary. The hero thinks so well of the prostitute that he marries her. On the other hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I do not mean that the hero’s marrying her is especially in the literary fashion, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our moral fever we do not leave the prostitute out of our novels--no, indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead of being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and she loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real life. I do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy the only kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the kind who would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are made differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the hero find himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable woman--which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough--he burns to introduce his fiancée to her. Now that, again, may be life--Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than I--but it is certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And when we have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the values as well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancée of Simon de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the nobler woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know from long experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with circus-people about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have his little foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have made the spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of her face having been nearly clawed off) and _then_ go with her into city missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke’s fault. The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and loves city missionary work, if possible, more.

The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith--and every one who is not imitating Tolstoï is imitating Meredith--he has failed to save us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly--except one. We have emancipated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we have learned all the Radical shibboleths and say them for our morning prayers; and we have faced the fact of sex so squarely that we can hardly see anything else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of the sentimentalist. Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her study of the three Brontës that Charlotte Brontë was exceedingly modern in her detestation of sentimentality. Modern she may have been--with Meredith; but not modern with the present novelists, for they are almost too sentimental to be endured. And there is the whole trouble. We think Thackeray an old fool for being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how does it better the case to be sentimental, instead, over the heroine of _The Promised Land_? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much nicer person, if not half so clever. She may have snivelled a good deal, but she was capable of loving some one else better than herself.

Of course, I have cited only a few instances--those that happened to come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the substitutions I have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor in the old sense to a burning passion for reform--“any old” reform? Do not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed of both sexes--and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we were not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now, the hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he is always passionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised to protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider that aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical taints has permeated fiction. “Is not one man as good as another?” asked the demagogue. “Of course he is, and a great deal better!” replied the excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a popular mania for thinking all the undesirables “a good deal better.” The modern hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an admirable figure; and though one rather expects him any day to give his whole fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that, find him any less likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get back his charm.

Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett of sentimentality--also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr. Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells is not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it is rather over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to think, is simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by his silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter a little. “Sentimental” is one of the most difficult catchwords in the world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people quarrelling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another, disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account, because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the truth. He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands of Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling’s phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private feeling). His own perversion may be æsthetic, or intellectual, or moral, or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering with truth.

Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in the case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl under twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to certain physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality that made him draw her as he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as he wanted her to love was just as conventional as any one else. You cannot have your cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses to accept that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature that Mr. Wells wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells’s heroes may not seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy’s. To be sure, Mr. Wells is not so sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like the author of _The Man of Property_, and _Fraternity_, and _Justice_, one--just one--fixed idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals with a man who is in love with some other man’s wife; and his world is thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is interested in a good many things, and his politics are not purely philanthropic as most of our novelists’ politics are. But Mr. Wells’s heroes, even when they are fairly fortunate, are pre-occupied with their own notions of sociological duty, even more than they are pre-occupied with passion, though their passion is “special” enough when it comes. Would any one except a Wells hero take a trip to India and come away having seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author’s sympathy is with the under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living out his long foredoomed existence, or George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with diabolic keenness and aching contempt. “I’m a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses,” says Ponderevo in a burst of frankness. There you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr. Bennett’s people are only spiritual guttersnipes who are _not_ in love with unimaginable goddesses.

The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if our American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign of grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course, there are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower classes than a passionate desire for reform tickets and municipal sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex’s state of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every way way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks the change of fashion in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way, benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the object of benevolence is _ex officio_ more interesting than the bestower.

I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed. One’s instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one’s acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hard-headed young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on a different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen thirty years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman’s way into politics, women have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention to problems which, thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for them. I said that the change of taste in women would probably account for much of the change of fashion in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me some years since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words), “He is tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn’t have been quite perfect if we hadn’t had that in common.” Both were spoiled darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have been “quite perfect” in the eyes of either.