Chapter I: Part 1

POINTS OF FRICTION

BY

AGNES REPPLIER, LITT.D.

AUTHOR OF “BOOKS AND MEN,” “ESSAYS IN
IDLENESS,” “COUNTER-CURRENTS,” ETC., ETC.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY AGNES REPPLIER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Note

Six of the ten essays in this volume--“Living in History,” “Dead Authors,” “Consolations of the Conservative,” “The Cheerful Clan,” “Woman Enthroned,” and “Money”--are reprinted through the courtesy of _The Atlantic Monthly_; “The Beloved Sinner” and “The Strayed Prohibitionist” through the courtesy of _The Century Magazine_; “Cruelty and Humour” through the courtesy of _The Yale Review_; “The Virtuous Victorian” through the courtesy of _The Nation_.

Contents

Living in History 1

Dead Authors 31

Consolations of the Conservative 70

The Cheerful Clan 105

The Beloved Sinner 126

The Virtuous Victorian 149

Woman Enthroned 167

The Strayed Prohibitionist 204

Money 227

Cruelty and Humour 254

POINTS OF FRICTION

⁂

Living in History

When Mr. Bagehot spoke his luminous words about “a fatigued way of looking at great subjects,” he gave us the key to a mental attitude which perhaps is not the modern thing it seems. There were, no doubt, Greeks and Romans in plenty to whom the “glory” and the “grandeur” of Greece and Rome were less exhilarating than they were to Edgar Poe,--Greeks and Romans who were spiritually palsied by the great emotions which presumably accompany great events. They may have been philosophers, or humanitarians, or academists. They may have been conscientious objectors, or conscienceless shirkers, or perhaps plain men and women with a natural gift of indecision, a natural taste for compromise and awaiting developments. In the absence of newspapers and pamphlets, these peaceful pagans were compelled to express their sense of fatigue to their neighbours at the games or in the market-place; and their neighbours--if well chosen--sighed with them over the intensity of life, the formidable happenings of history.

Since August, 1914, the turmoil and anguish incidental to the world’s greatest war have accentuated every human type,--heroic, base, keen, and evasive. The strain of five years’ fighting was borne with astounding fortitude, and Allied statesmen and publicists saw to it that the clear outline of events should not be blurred by ignorance or misrepresentation. If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes. Men, “living between two eternities, and warring against oblivion,” make their indelible record on its pages; and other men receive these pages as their best inheritance, their avenue to understanding, their key to life.

Therefore it is unwise to gibe at history because we do not chance to know it. It pleases us to gibe at anything we do not know, but the process is not enlightening. In the second year of the war, the English “Nation” commented approvingly on the words of an English novelist who strove to make clear that the only things which count for any of us, individually or collectively, are the unrecorded minutiæ of our lives. “History,” said this purveyor of fiction, “is concerned with the rather absurd and theatrical doings of a few people, which, after all, have never altered the fact that we do all of us live on from day to day, and only want to be let alone.”

“These words,” observed the “Nation” heavily, “have a singular truth and force at the present time. The people of Europe want to go on living, not to be destroyed. To live is to pursue the activities proper to one’s nature, to be unhindered and unthwarted in their exercise. It is not too much to say that the life of Europe is something which has persisted in spite of the history of Europe. There is nothing happy or fruitful anywhere but witnesses to the triumph of life over history.”

Presuming that we are able to disentangle life from history, to sever the inseverable, is this a true statement, or merely the expression of mental and spiritual fatigue? Were the great historic episodes invariably fruitless, and had they no bearing upon the lives of ordinary men and women? The battles of Marathon and Thermopylæ, the signing of the Magna Charta, the Triple Alliance, the Declaration of Independence, the birth of the National Assembly, the first Reform Bill, the recognition in Turin of the United Kingdom of Italy,--these things may have been theatrical, inasmuch as they were certainly dramatic, but absurd is not a wise word to apply to them. Neither is it possible to believe that the life of Europe went on in spite of these historic incidents, triumphing over them as over so many obstacles to activity.

When the “Nation” contrasts the beneficent companies of strolling players who “represented and interpreted the world of life, the one thing which matters and remains,” with the companies of soldiers who merely destroyed life at its roots, we cannot but feel that this editorial point of view has its limitations. The strolling players of Elizabeth’s day afforded many a merry hour; but Elizabeth’s soldiers and sailors did their part in making possible this mirth. The strolling players who came to the old Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia interpreted “the world of life,” as they understood it; but the soldiers who froze at Valley Forge offered a different interpretation, and one which had considerably more stamina. The magnifying of small things, the belittling of great ones, indicate a mental exhaustion which would be more pardonable if it were less complacent. There are always men and women who prefer the triumph of evil, which is a thing they can forget, to prolonged resistance, which shatters their nerves. But the desire to escape an obligation, while very human, is not generally thought to be humanity’s noblest lesson.

Many smart things have been written to discredit history. Mr. Arnold called it “the vast Mississippi of falsehood,” which was easily said, and has been said in a number of ways since the days of Herodotus, who amply illustrated the splendours of unreality. Mr. Edward Fitzgerald was wont to sigh that only lying histories are readable, and this point of view has many secret adherents. Mr. Henry Adams, who taught history for seven years at Harvard, and who built his intellectual dwelling-place upon its firm foundations, pronounced it to be “in essence incoherent and immoral.” Nevertheless, all that we know of man’s unending efforts to adjust and readjust himself to the world about him we learn from history, and the tale is an enlightening one. “Events are wonderful things,” said Lord Beaconsfield. Nothing, for example, can blot out, or obscure, the event of the French Revolution. We are free to discuss it until the end of time; but we can never alter it, and never get away from its consequences.

The lively contempt for history expressed by readers who would escape its weight, and the neglect of history practised by educators who would escape its authority, stand responsible for much mental confusion. American boys and girls go to school six, eight, or ten years, as the case may be, and emerge with a misunderstanding of their own country, and a comprehensive ignorance of all others. They say, “I don’t know any history,” as casually and as unconcernedly as they might say, “I don’t know any chemistry,” or “I don’t know metaphysics.” A smiling young freshman in the most scholarly of women’s colleges told me that she had been conditioned because she knew nothing about the Reformation.

“You mean,--” I began questioningly.

“I mean just what I say,” she interrupted. “I didn’t know what it was, or where it was, or who had anything to do with it.”

I said I didn’t wonder she had come to grief. The Reformation was something of an episode. And I asked myself wistfully how it happened she had ever managed to escape it. When I was a little schoolgirl, a pious Roman Catholic child with a distaste for polemics, it seemed to me I was never done studying about the Reformation. If I escaped briefly from Wycliffe and Cranmer and Knox, it was only to be met by Luther and Calvin and Huss. Everywhere the great struggle confronted me, everywhere I was brought face to face with the inexorable logic of events. That more advanced and more intelligent students find pleasure in every phase of ecclesiastical strife is proved by Lord Broughton’s pleasant story about a member of Parliament named Joliffe, who was sitting in his club, reading Hume’s “History of England,” a book which well deserves to be called dry. Charles Fox, glancing over his shoulder, observed, “I see you have come to the imprisonment of the seven bishops”; whereupon Joliffe, like a man engrossed in a thrilling detective story, cried desperately, “For God’s sake, Fox, don’t tell me what is coming!”

This was reading for human delight, for the interest and agitation which are inseparable from every human document. Mr. Henry James once told me that the only reading of which he never tired was history. “The least significant footnote of history,” he said, “stirs me more than the most thrilling and passionate fiction. Nothing that has ever happened to the world finds me indifferent.” I used to think that ignorance of history meant only a lack of cultivation and a loss of pleasure. Now I am sure that such ignorance impairs our judgment by impairing our understanding, by depriving us of standards, of the power to contrast, and the right to estimate. We can know nothing of any nation unless we know its history; and we can know nothing of the history of any nation unless we know something of the history of all nations. The book of the world is full of knowledge we need to acquire, of lessons we need to learn, of wisdom we need to assimilate. Consider only this brief sentence of Polybius, quoted by Plutarch: “In Carthage no one is blamed, however he may have gained his wealth.” A pleasant place, no doubt, for business enterprise; a place where young men were taught how to get on, and extravagance kept pace with shrewd finance. A self-satisfied, self-confident, money-getting, money-loving people, honouring success, and hugging their fancied security, while in far-off Rome Cato pronounced their doom.

There are readers who can tolerate and even enjoy history, provided it is shorn of its high lights and heavy shadows, its heroic elements and strong impelling motives. They turn with relief to such calm commentators as Sir John Seeley, for years professor of modern history at Cambridge, who shrank as sensitively as an eighteenth-century divine from that fell word “enthusiasm,” and from all the agitation it gathers in its wake. He was a firm upholder of the British Empire, hating compromise and guiltless of pacifism; but, having a natural gift for aridity, he saw no reason why the world should not be content to know things without feeling them, should not keep its eyes turned to legal institutions, its mind fixed upon political economy and international law. The force that lay back of Parliament annoyed him by the simple primitive way in which it beat drums, fired guns, and died to uphold the institutions which he prized; also because by doing these things it evoked in others certain simple and primitive sensations which he strove always to keep at bay. “We are rather disposed to laugh,” he said, “when poets and orators try to conjure us with the name of England.” Had he lived a few years longer, he would have known that England’s salvation lies in the fact that her name is, to her sons, a thing to conjure by. We may not wisely ignore the value of emotions, nor underestimate the power of the human impulses which charge the souls of men.

The long years of neutrality engendered in the minds of Americans a natural but ignoble weariness. The war was not our war, yet there was no escaping from it. By day and night it haunted us, a ghost that would not be laid. Over and over again we were told that it was not possible to place the burden of blame on any nation’s shoulders. Once at least we were told that the causes and objects of the contest, the obscure fountains from which had burst this stupendous and desolating flood, were no concern of ours. But this proffered release from serious thinking brought us scant peace of mind. Every honest man and woman knew that we had no intellectual right to be ignorant when information lay at our hand, and no spiritual right to be unconcerned when great moral issues were at stake. We could not in either case evade the duty we owed to reason. The Vatican Library would not hold the books that have been written about the war; but the famous five-foot shelf would be too roomy for the evidence in the case, the documents which are the foundation of knowledge. They, at least, are neither too profuse for our patience, nor too complex for our understanding. “The inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of history,” said Huxley, “is just as much an affair of pure science as is the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of geology; and the value of the evidence in the two cases must be tested in the same way.”

The resentment of American pacifists, who, being more human than they thought themselves, were no better able than the rest of us to forget the state of Europe, found expression in petulant complaints. They kept reminding us at inopportune moments that war is not the important and heroic thing it is assumed to be. They asked that, if it is to figure in history at all (which seems, on the whole, inevitable), the truth should be told, and its brutalities, as well as its heroisms, exposed. They professed a languid amusement at the “rainbow of official documents” which proved every nation in the right. They inveighed bitterly against the “false patriotism” taught by American schoolbooks, with their absurd emphasis on the “embattled farmers” of the Revolution, and the volunteers of the Civil War. They assured us, in and out of season, that a doctor who came to his death looking after poor patients in an epidemic was as much of a hero as any soldier whose grave is yearly decorated with flowers.

All this was the clearest possible exposition of the lassitude induced in faint-hearted men by the pressure of great events. It was the wail of people who wanted, as the “Nation” feelingly expressed it, to be let alone, and who could not shut themselves away from the world’s great tragedy. None of us are prepared to say that a doctor and a nurse who perform their perilous duties in an epidemic are not as heroic as a doctor and a nurse who perform their perilous duties in war. There is glory enough to go around. Only he that loveth his life shall lose it. But to put a flower on a soldier’s grave is a not too exuberant recognition of his service, for he, too, in his humble way made the great sacrifice.

As for the brutalities of war, who can charge that history smooths them over? Certain horrors may be withheld from children, whose privilege it is to be spared the knowledge of uttermost depravity; but to the adult no such mercy is shown. Motley, for example, describes cruelties committed three hundred and fifty years ago in the Netherlands, which equal, if they do not surpass, the cruelties committed six years ago in Belgium. Men heard such tales more calmly then than now, and seldom sought the coward’s refuge--incredulity. The Dutch, like other nations, did better things than fight. They painted glorious pictures, they bred great statesmen and good doctors. They traded with extraordinary success. They raised the most beautiful tulips in the world. But to do these things peacefully and efficiently, they had been compelled to struggle for their national existence. The East India trade and the freedom of the seas did not drop into their laps. And because their security, and the comeliness of life which they so highly prized, had been bought by stubborn resistance to tyranny, they added to material well-being the “luxury of self-respect.”

To overestimate the part played by war in a nation’s development is as crude as to ignore its alternate menace and support. It is with the help of history that we balance our mental accounts. Voltaire was disposed to think that battles and treaties were matters of small moment; and Mr. John Richard Green pleaded, not unreasonably, that more space should be given in our chronicles to the missionary, the poet, the painter, the merchant, and the philosopher. They are not, and they never have been, excluded from any narrative comprehensive enough to admit them; but the scope of their authority is not always sufficiently defined. Man, as the representative of his age, and the events in which he plays his vigorous part,--these are the warp and woof of history. We can no more leave John Wesley or Ignatius Loyola out of the canvas than we can leave out Marlborough or Pitt. We know now that the philosophy of Nietzsche is one with Bernhardi’s militarism.

As for the merchant,--Froissart was as well aware of his prestige as was Mr. Green. “Trade, my lord,” said Dinde Desponde, the great Lombard banker, to the Duke of Burgundy, “finds its way everywhere, and rules the world.” As for commercial honour,--a thing as fine as the honour of the aristocrat or of the soldier,--what can be better for England than to know that after the great fire of 1666 not a single London shopkeeper evaded his liabilities; and that this fact was long the boast of a city proud of its shopkeeping? As for jurisprudence,--Sully was infinitely more concerned with it than he was with combat or controversy. It is with stern satisfaction that he recounts the statutes passed in his day for the punishment of fraudulent bankrupts, whom we treat so leniently; for the annulment of their gifts and assignments, which we guard so zealously; and for the conviction of those to whom such property had been assigned. It was almost as dangerous to steal on a large scale as on a small one under the levelling laws of Henry of Navarre.

In this vast and varied chronicle, war plays its appointed part. “We cannot,” says Walter Savage Landor, “push valiant men out of history.” We cannot escape from the truths interpreted, and the conditions established by their valour. What has been slightingly called the “drum-and-trumpet narrative” holds its own with the records of art and science. “It cost Europe a thousand years of barbarism,” said Macaulay, “to escape the fate of China.”

The endless endeavour of states to control their own destinies, the ebb and flow of the sea of combat, the “recurrent liturgy of war,” enabled the old historians to perceive with amazing distinctness the traits of nations, etched as sharply then as now on the imperishable pages of history. We read Froissart for human delight rather than for solid information; yet Froissart’s observations--the observations of a keen-eyed student of the world--are worth recording five hundred years after he set them down.

“In England,” he says, “strangers are well received”; yet are the English “affable to no other nation than their own.” Ireland, he holds to have had “too many kings”; and the Scotch, like the English, “are excellent men-at-arms, nor is there any check to their courage as long as their weapons endure.” France is the pride of his heart, as it is the pride of the world’s heart to-day. “In France also is found good chivalry, strong of spirit, and in great abundance; for the kingdom of France has never been brought so low as to lack men ready for the combat.” Even Germany does not escape his regard. “The Germans are a people without pity and without honour.” And again: “The Germans are a rude, unmannered race, but active and expert where their own personal advantage is concerned.” If history be “philosophy teaching by example,” we are wise to admit the old historians into our counsels.

To withhold from a child some knowledge--apportioned to his understanding--of the world’s sorrows and wrongs is to cheat him of his kinship with humanity. We would not, if we could, bruise his soul as our souls are bruised; but we would save him from a callous content which is alien to his immaturity. The little American, like the little Austrian and the little Serb, is a son of the sorrowing earth. His security--of which no man can forecast the future--is a legacy bequeathed him by predecessors who bought it with sweat and with blood; and with sweat and with blood his descendants may be called on to guard it. Alone among educators, Mr. G. Stanley Hall finds neutrality, a “high and ideal neutrality,” to be an attribute of youth. He was so gratified by this discovery during the years of the war, so sure that American boys and girls followed “impartially” the great struggle in Europe, and that this judicial attitude would, in the years to come, enable them to pronounce “the true verdict of history,” that he “thrilled and tingled” with patriotic--if premature--pride.

“The true verdict of history” will be pronounced according to the documentary evidence in the case. There is no need to vex our souls over the possible extinction of this evidence, for closer observers than our impartial young Americans are placing it permanently on record. But I doubt if the equanimity which escapes the ordeal of partisanship is to be found in the mind of youth, or in the heart of a child. Can we not remember a time when the Wars of the Roses were not--to us--a matter for neutrality? Our little school histories, those vivacious, anecdotal histories, banished long ago by rigorous educators, were in some measure responsible for our Lancastrian fervour. They fed it with stories of high courage and the sorrows of princes. We wasted our sympathies on “a mere struggle for power”; but Hume’s laconic verdict is not, and never can be, the measure of a child’s solicitude. The lost cause fills him with pity, the cause which is saved by man’s heroic sacrifice fires him to generous applause. The round world and the tale of those who have lived upon it are his legitimate inheritance.

Mr. Bagehot said, and said wisely after his wont, that if you catch an intelligent, uneducated man of thirty, and tell him about the battle of Marathon, he will calculate the chances, and estimate the results; but he will not really care. You cannot make the word “Marathon” sound in his ears as it sounded in the ears of Byron, to whom it had been sacred in boyhood. You cannot make the word “freedom” sound in untutored ears as it sounds in the ears of men who have counted the cost by which it has been preserved through the centuries. Unless children are permitted to know the utmost peril which has threatened, and which threatens, the freedom of nations, how can they conceive of its value? And what is the worth of teaching which does not rate the gift of freedom above all earthly benefactions? How can justice live save by the will of freemen? Of what avail are civic virtues that are not the virtues of the free? Pericles bade the Athenians to bear reverently in mind the Greeks who had died for Greece. “Make these men your examples, and be well assured that happiness comes by freedom, and freedom by stoutness of heart.” Perhaps if American boys bear reverently in mind the men who died for America, it will help them too to be stout of heart, and “worthy patriots, dear to God.”

In the remote years of my childhood, the study of current events, that most interesting and valuable form of tuition, which, nevertheless, is unintelligible without some knowledge of the past, was left out of our limited curriculum. We seldom read the newspapers (which I remember as of an appalling dulness), and we knew little of what was happening in our day. But we did study history, and we knew something of what had happened in other days than ours; we knew and deeply cared. Therefore we reacted with fair intelligence and no lack of fervour when circumstances were forced upon our vision. It was not possible for a child who had lived in spirit with Saint Genevieve to be indifferent to the siege of Paris in 1870. It is not possible for a child who has lived in spirit with Jeanne d’Arc to be indifferent to the destruction of Rheims Cathedral in 1914. If we were often left in ignorance, we were never despoiled of childhood’s generous ardour. Nobody told us that “courage is a sublime form of hypocrisy.” Nobody fed our young minds on stale paradoxes, or taught us to discount the foolish impulsiveness of adults. Our parents, as Mr. Henry James rejoicingly observes, “had no desire to see us inoculated with importunate virtues.” The Honourable Bertrand Russell had not then proposed that all teaching of history shall be submitted to an “international commission,” “which shall produce neutral text-books, free from patriotic bias.” There was something profoundly fearless in our approach to life, in the exposure of our unarmoured souls to the assaults of enthusiasms and regrets.

The cynic who is impatient of primitive emotions, the sentimentalist whose sympathy is confined exclusively to his country’s enemies, grow more shrill-voiced as the exhaustion of Europe becomes increasingly apparent. They were always to be heard by those who paused amid the thunderings of war to listen to them; but their words were lost in the whirlwind. It was possible for a writer in the “Survey” to allude brutally in the spring of 1916 to the “cockpit of Verdun.” It was possible for Mr. Russell to turn from the contemplation of Ypres, and say: “The war is trivial for all its vastness. No great human purpose is involved on either side, no great principle is at stake.” If the spiritual fatigue of the looker-on had found an echo in the souls of those who were bearing the burden and heat of the day, the world would have sunk to destruction. “The moral triumph of Belgium,” said Cardinal Mercier, when his country had been conquered and despoiled, “is an ever memorable fact for history and civilization.” Who shall be the spokesman of the future?

In the last melancholy pages of that able and melancholy book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” Mr. Keynes describes the apathy of victorious England, too spent to savour victory. “Our power of feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. We have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never, in the lifetime of men now living, has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.”

Never perhaps in the centuries, for when in the centuries has that element been so ruthlessly consumed? England is like a swimmer who has carried the lifeline to shore, battling amid the breakers, tossed high on their crests, hurled into their green depths, pounded, battered, blinded, until he lies, a broken thing, on the shore. The crew is safe, but until the breath comes back to his labouring lungs, he is past all acute consideration for its welfare. Were Mr. Keynes generous enough to extend his sympathy alike to foes and friends, he might even now see light shining on the horizon. It would do him--it would do us all--good to meditate closely on the probable state of Europe had Germany triumphed. The “hidden currents” of which we are warned may be sweeping us on a reef; but the most imminent and most appalling calamity has been averted. “Events are wonderful things,” and we may yet come to believe with Froissart, lover of brave deeds and honourable men, that “the most profitable thing in the world for the institution of human life is history.”

Dead Authors

“Les morts n’écrivent point,” said Madame de Maintenon, who lived in a day of tranquil finalities. If men’s passions and vanities were admittedly strong until the hour of dissolution, the finger of death obliterated all traces of them; and the supreme dignity of this obliteration sustained noble minds and solaced the souls that believed. An age which produced the _Oraisons Funèbres_ had an unquenchable reverence for the grave.

Echoes of Madame de Maintenon’s soothing conviction ring pleasantly through the intervening centuries. Book-making, which she knew only in its smiling infancy, had grown to ominous proportions when the Hon. Augustine Birrell, brooding over the fatality which had dipped the world in ink, comforted himself--and us--with the vision of an authorless future. “There were no books in Eden,” he said meditatively, “and there will be none in Heaven; but between times it is otherwise.”

For an Englishman more or less conversant with ghosts, Mr. Birrell showed little foreknowledge of their dawning ambitions. If we may judge by the recent and determined intrusion of spirits into authorship, Heaven bids fair to be stacked with printing-presses. One of their number, indeed, the “Living Dead Man,” whose amanuensis is Elsa Barker, and whose publishers have unhesitatingly revealed (or, I might perhaps say, announced) his identity, gives high praise to a ghostly library, well catalogued, and containing millions of books and records. Miss Lilian Whiting assures us that every piece of work done in life has its ethereal counterpart. “The artist creates in the astral before he creates in the material, and the creation in the astral is the permanent embodiment.” Consequently, when an author dies, he finds awaiting him an “imperishable record” of all he has ever written. Miss Whiting does not tell us how she comes to know this. Neither does she say how good a book has to be to live forever in the astral, or if a very bad book is never suffered to die a natural and kindly death as in our natural and kindly world. Perhaps it is the ease with which astral immortality is achieved, or rather the impossibility of escaping it, which prompts ambitious and exclusive spirits to force an entrance into our congested literary life, and compete with mortal scribblers who ask their little day.

The suddenness of the attack, and its unprecedented character, daunt and bewilder us. It is true that the apparitions that lend vivacity to the ordinary spiritualistic séance have from time to time written short themes, or dropped into friendly verse. Readers of that engaging volume, “Report of the Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern Spiritualism,” published in 1887, will remember that “Belle,” who claimed to be the original proprietor of Yorick’s skull (long a “property” of the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, but at that time in the library of Dr. Horace Howard Furness), voiced her pretensions, and told her story, in ten carefully rhymed stanzas.

“My form was sold to doctors three,
So you have all that’s left of me;
I come to greet you in white mull,
You that prizes my lonely skull.”

But these effusions were desultory and amateurish. They were designed as personal communications, and were betrayed into publicity by their recipients. We cannot regard their authors--painstaking but simple-hearted ghosts--as advance guards of the army of occupation which is now storming the citadel of print.

It is passing strange that the dead who seek to communicate with the living should cling so closely to the alphabet as a connecting link. Dying is a primitive thing. Men died, and were wept and forgotten, for many, many ages before Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth. But letters are artificial and complicated. They belong to fettered humanity which is perpetually devising ways and means. Shelley, whose impatient soul fretted against barriers, cried out despairingly that inspiration wanes when composition begins. We strive to follow Madame de Sévigné’s counsel, “Laissez trotter la plume”; but we know well how the little instrument halts and stumbles; and if a pen is too clumsy for the transmission of thought, what must be the effort to pick out letters on a ouija board, or with a tilting table? The spirit that invented table-rapping (which combines every possible disadvantage as a means of communication with every absurdity that can offend a fastidious taste) deserves to be penalized by its fellow spirits. Even Sir Oliver Lodge admits that the substitution of tables for pen and ink “has difficulties of its own.”

Yet nothing can overcome the infatuation of ghostly visitors for this particular piece of furniture. They cannot keep their spectral fingers off one, and they will come any distance, and take any pains, for the pleasure of such handling. Maeterlinck relates with enviable gravity the details of an evening call paid by a monk who had lain in the cloisters of the Abbaye de Saint Wandrille since 1693, and who broke a sleep of two centuries that he might spin a table on one leg for the diversion of the poet’s guests. Their host, while profoundly indifferent to the entertainment, accepted it with a tolerant shrug. If it amused both mortals and the monk, why cavil at its infantile simplicity?

The frolicsome moods of the Lodge table must have been disconcerting even to such a receptive and sympathetic circle. It performed little tricks like lying down, or holding two feet in the air, apparently for its own innocent delight. It emulated Æsop’s affectionate ass, and “seemed to wish to get into Lady Lodge’s lap, and made caressing movements to and fro, as if it could not get close enough to her.” It jocularly thumped piano-players on the back; and when a cushion was held up to protect them, it banged a hole in the cover. What wonder that several tables were broken “during the more exuberant period of these domestic sittings, before the power was under control”; and that the family was compelled to provide a strong and heavy article which could stand the “skylarking” (Sir Oliver’s word) of supernatural visitors.

The ouija board, though an improvement on the table, is mechanical and cumbersome. It has long been the chosen medium of that most prolific of spirit writers, Patience Worth; and a sympathetic disciple once ventured to ask her if there were no less laborious method by which she could compose her stories. To which Patience, who then used a language called by her editor “archaic,” and who preferred to “dock the smaller parts-o’-speech,” replied formidably,--

“The hand o’ her do I to put be the hand o’ her, and ’t is ascribe that setteth the one awither by eyes-fulls she taketh in.”

The disciple’s mind being thus set at rest, he inquired how Patience discovered this avenue of approach, and was told,--

“I did to seek at crannies for to put; ay, an’t wer the her o’ her who tireth past the her o’ her, and slippeth to a naught o’ putting; and ’t wer the me o’ me at seek, aye, and find. Aye, and ’t wer so.”

The casual and inexpert reader is not always sure what Patience means to say; but to the initiated her cryptic and monosyllabic speech offers no difficulties. When asked if she were acquainted with the spirit of the late Dr. William James, she said darkly,--

“I telled a one o’ the brothers and the neighbours o’ thy day, and he doth know.”

“This,” comments Mr. Yost, “was considered as an affirmative reply,” and with it her questioners were content.

All fields of literature are open to Patience Worth, and she disports herself by turns in prose and verse, fiction and philosophy. Other spirits have their specialties. They write, as a rule, letters, sermons, didactic essays, _vers libre_, and an occasional story. But Patience writes six-act dramas which, we are assured, could, “with a little alteration,” be produced upon the stage, short comedies “rich in humour,” country tales, mystical tales, parables, aphorisms, volumes of verse, and historical novels. In three years and a half she dictated to Mrs. Curran, her patient ouija-board amanuensis, 900,000 words. It is my belief that she represents a spirit syndicate, and lends her name to a large coterie of literary wraiths. The most discouraging feature of her performance is the possibility of its indefinite extension. She is what Mr. Yost calls “a continuing phenomenon.” Being dead already, she cannot die, and the beneficent limit which is set to mortal endeavour does not exist for her. “The larger literature is to come,” says Mr. Yost ominously; and we fear he speaks the truth.

Now what do we gain by this lamentable intrusion of ghostly aspirants into the serried ranks of authorship? What is the value of their work, and what is its ethical significance? Perhaps because literary distinction is a rare quality, the editors and publishers of these revelations lay stress upon the spiritual insight, the finer wisdom, which may accrue to us from direct contact with liberated souls. They even hint at some great moral law which may be thus revealed for our betterment. But the law of Christ is as pure and lofty as any code our human intelligence can grasp. We do not live by it, because it makes no concession to the sickly qualities which cement our earthly natures; but we hold fast to it as an incomparable ideal. It is not law or light we need. It is the power of effort and resistance. “Toutes les bonnes maximes sont dans le monde; on ne manque que de les appliquer.”

The didacticism of spirit authors is, so far, their most striking characteristic. As Mr. Henry James would put it, they are “awkward writers, but yearning moralists.” Free from any shadow of diffidence, they proffer a deal of counsel, but it is mostly of the kind which our next-door neighbour has at our command.

In the volume called “Letters from Harry and Helen,” the dead children exhort their relatives continuously; and their exhortations, albeit of a somewhat intimate character, have been passed on to the public as “an inspiration to the life of brotherhood.” Helen, for example, bids her mother and sister give away the clothes they do not need. “You had better send the pink dress to B. You won’t wear it. Lace and a few good bits of jewelry you can use, and these won’t hurt your progress.” She also warns them not to take long motor rides with large parties. The car holds four comfortably; but if her sister _will_ go all afternoon with five people packed into it, she is sure to be ill. This is sensible advice, but can it be needful that the dead should revisit earth to give it?

Harry, a hardy and boisterous spirit, with a fine contempt for precautions, favours a motor trip across the continent, gallantly assures his family that the project is “perfectly feasible,” tells his sister to “shoot some genuine food” at her sick husband, who appears to have been kept on a low diet, and observes with pleasure that his mother is overcoming her aversion to tobacco. “Mamma is learning,” he comments patronizingly. “Some day she will arrive at the point where a smoker will fail to arouse a spark of criticism, or even of interest. _When that day comes, she will have learned what she is living for this time._”

Here was a chance for a ghostly son to get even with the parent who had disparaged the harmless pleasures of his youth. Harry is not the kind of a spirit to miss such an opportunity. He finds a great deal to correct in his family, a great deal to blame in the world, and some things to criticize in the universe. “I suppose the Creator knows his own business best,” he observes grudgingly; “but there have been moments when I felt I could suggest improvements. For instance, had I been running affairs, I should have been a little more open about this reincarnation plan of elevating the individual. Why let a soul boggle along blindly for numberless lives, when just a friendly tip would have illuminated the whole situation, and enabled him to plan with far less waste?”

“O eloquent, just and mighty death!” Have we professed to break thy barriers, to force thy pregnant silence into speech, only to make of thy majesty a vulgar farce, and, of thy consolations, folly and self-righteousness?

The “Living Dead Man” has also a course of instruction, in fact several courses of instruction, to offer. His counsels are all of the simplest. He bids us drink plenty of water, because water feeds our astral bodies; to take plenty of sleep, because sleep fits us for work; and on no account to lose our tempers. He is a gentle, garrulous ghost, and his first volume is filled with little anecdotes about his new--and very dull--surroundings, and mild little stories of adventure. He calls himself an “astral Scheherazade,” but no sultan would ever have listened to him for a thousand and one nights. He chants _vers libre_ of a singularly uninspired order, and is particular about his quotations. “If you print these letters,” he tells his medium, “I wish you would insert here fragments from that wonderful poem of Wordsworth, ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’” Then follow nineteen lines of this fairly familiar masterpiece. There is something rather droll in having our own printed poets quoted to us lengthily by cultivated and appreciative spirits.

The “War Letters” dictated by the “Living Dead Man” in the spring and summer of 1915 are more animated and highly coloured. Some long-past episodes, notably the entrance of the German soldiers into Brussels, are well described, though not so vividly as by the living Richard Harding Davis. We are told in the preface that on the fourth of February, 1915, the spirit wrote: “When I come back” (he was touring to a distant star), “and tell you the story of this war, as seen from the other side, you will know more than all the Chancelleries of the nations.” This promises well; but in the three hundred pages that follow there is not one word to indicate that the “Living Dead Man” had any acquaintance with real happenings which were not published in our newspapers; or that he was aware of these happenings before the newspapers published them. He is always on the safe side of prophecy. In a letter dictated on the seventh of May, the date of the sinking of the Lusitania, he makes no mention of the crime; but the following morning, after the ghastly news was known to the world, he writes that he could have told it twenty-four hours earlier had he not feared to shock Mrs. Barker’s sensibilities.

It was a mistaken kindness. Nothing could save mankind from a knowledge of that terrible deed; but four words spoken on the seventh of May would have revolutionized the world of thought. They would have compelled belief in phenomena which we are now intellectually free to reject.

The events narrated by the “Living Dead Man” are of a kind which the Chancelleries of the nations had no need to know. He tells us that he and twenty other spirits stood for hours in the palace of Potsdam, trying with lamentable lack of success to reduce by the pressure of their will the greater pressure of the war-will surging through the German nation. He has a dramatic meeting with the spirit of the murdered Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, and a long interview with the spirit of Nietzsche, whom he commands--authoritatively--to go back to earth and teach humility. He rests and refreshes the jaded spirit of a British officer, killed in action, by showing him a dance of sylphs; and he meets an old acquaintance, the sylph Meriline (friend and familiar of a French magician), doing scout duty in the German trenches. Finally he assures us that Serbia is doomed to disaster, because a Serbian magician, who died many years ago, left her as a legacy a host of “astral monsters” that infest the land, awakening from slumber at the first hint of strife, and revelling in bloodshed and misery.

It is hard lines on Serbia, and it sounds a good deal like the fairy tales of our happy infancy. The “Living Dead Man” is careful to let us know that he has assisted at the war councils of Berlin, being enabled by an especial hardening of the astral ears to hear all that is spoken on earth. No secrets of state are hidden from him; but, on such weighty matters, discretion compels silence. Moreover, the vastness of his knowledge is out of accord with the puniness of our intelligence. It cannot be communicated, because there is no avenue of approach. “The attempt to tell the world what I know now is like trying to play Beethoven on a penny whistle. I feel as a mathematician would feel should he set himself down to teach addition to small children. I dare not tell you more than I do, for you could not contain it.”

And so we are told nothing.

In the little book entitled, “Thy Son Liveth,” which is said to have been dictated by an American soldier, killed in Flanders, to his mother, we have a cheerful picture of active young spirits “carrying on” the business of war, relieving the wounded, soothing the dying, working up wireless communications (“The German operators cannot see us when we are around”), and occasionally playing the part of the gods before the walls of Troy.

“I told you that we were not given any power over bullets, that we can comfort, but not save from what you call death. That is not quite the case, I find. Jack Wells directed me to stand by a junior lieutenant to-day, and impel him this way and that to avoid danger. I discovered that my perceptions are much more sensitive than they were before I came out. I can estimate the speed, and determine the course, of shells. I stood by this fellow, nudged him here and there, and kept him from being hurt. I asked Wells if that was an answer to prayer. Wells said, ‘No, the young chap is an inventor, and has a job ahead of him that’s of importance to the world.’”

It is an interesting episode; but intervention, as we learn from Homer, is an open game. Perhaps some German lieutenant had a job ahead of _him_, and scientifically-minded German ghosts saved him from Allied shells. When the dead American soldier writes that he is going to “get in touch with Edison,” and work on devices to combat German machines, we ask ourselves whether dead German soldiers got in touch with Dr. Haber, and helped him make the poison gas and the flame-throwers which won the Nobel prize.

That the son should proffer much good advice to his mother seems inevitable, because it is the passion of all communicative spirits to advise. He is also happy to correct certain false impressions which she has derived from the Evangelists.

“I got your wire calling my attention to the scriptural statement that in Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, and I do not know what to say. It seemed (until you gave me this jolt) that the Bible bears out everything that I have been able to tell you. Perhaps the chronicler got balled up in this particular quotation. For love and marriage are certainly in bud and flower here. I can see this fact with my own eyes.”

He can do more than see it with his own eyes. He can feel it with his own heart. A few pages later comes this naïve confession:

“Jack Wells and I are very close friends. His sister’s name is Alice, and she has grown up in the country beyond, where his folks live. It seems all reach or return to maturity. Youth blossoms and flowers, but does not decay. I can call up her vision at any time. But I want her near.”

A simple and guileless little book, preposterous only in the assumption that the human race has waited for centuries to receive its revelations.

We have been told that the Great War stands responsible for our mental disturbance, for the repeated assaults upon taste and credulity before which the walls of our minds are giving way. Mr. Howells, observing rather sympathetically the ghostly stir and thrill which pervades literature, asked if it were due to the overwhelming numbers of the dead, if it came to us straight from sunken ships, and from the battle-fields of Europe.

What answer can we make save that natural laws work independently of circumstance? A single dead man and a million of dead men stand in the same relation to the living. If ever there was a time when it was needful to hold on to our sanity with all our might, that time is now. Our thoughts turn, and will long turn, to the men who laid down their lives for our safety. How could it be otherwise? There is, and there has always been, a sense of comradeship with the departed. It is a noble and a still comradeship, untarnished by illusions, unvulgarized by extravagant details. Newman has portrayed it in “A Voice from Afar”; and Mr. Rowland Thirlmere has made it the theme of some very simple and touching verses called “Jimmy Doane.” The elderly Englishman who has lost his friend, a young American aviator, “generous, clever, and confident,” and who sits alone, with his heart cold and sore, feels suddenly the welcome nearness of the dead. No table heaves its heavy legs to announce that silent presence. No alphabet is needed for his message. But the living man says simply to his friend, “My house is always open to you,” and hopes that they may sit quietly together when the dreams of both are realized, and the hour of deliverance comes.

The attitude of spirit authors to the war varies from the serene detachment of Raymond, who had been a soldier, to the passionate partisanship of the “Living Dead Man,” who had been a civilian; but who, like the anonymous “Son,” cannot refrain from playing a lively part in the struggle. “Many a time have I clutched with my too-tenuous hands a German soldier who was about to disgrace himself.” Harry and Helen express some calm regret that the lack of unselfish love should make war possible, and report that “Hughey”--their brother-in-law’s brother--“has gone to throw all he possesses of light into the dark struggle.” Apparently his beams failed signally to illuminate the gloom, which is not surprising when we learn that “a selfish or ill-natured thought” (say from a Bulgarian or a Turk) “lowers the rate of vibration throughout the entire universe.” They also join the “White Cross” nurses, and are gratified that their knowledge of French enables them to receive and encourage the rapidly arriving French soldiers. Helen, being the better scholar of the two, is able to give first aid, while Harry brushes up his verbs. In the absence of French caretakers, who seem to have all gone elsewhere, the two young Americans are in much demand.

Remote from such crass absurdities (which have their confiding readers) is the quiet, if somewhat perfunctory, counsel given by “The Invisible Guide” to Mr. C. Lewis Hind, and by him transmitted to the public. There is nothing offensive or distasteful in this little volume which has some charming chapters, and which purports to be an answer to the often asked question, “How may I enter into communion with the departed?” If the admonitions of the dead soldier, who is the “Guide,” lack pith and marrow, they do not lack it more perceptibly than do the admonitions of living counsellors, and he is always commendably brief. What depresses us is the quality of his pacifism expressed at a time which warranted the natural and noble anger awakened by injustice.

It is the peculiarity of all pacifists that wrongdoing disturbs them less than does the hostility it provokes. The “Guide” has not a sigh to waste over Belgium and Serbia. Air-raids and submarines fail to disturb his serenity. But he cannot endure a picture called _Mitrailleuse_, which represents four French soldiers firing a machine gun. When his friend, the author, so far forgets himself as to be angry at the insolence of some Germans, the “Guide,” pained by such intolerance, refuses any communication; and when, in more cheerful mood, the author ventures to be a bit enthusiastic over the gallant feats of a young aviator, the “Guide” murmurs faintly and reproachfully, “It is the mothers that suffer.”

One is forced to doubt if guidance such as this would ever have led to victory.

Raymond, though he has been thrust before the public without pity and without reserve, has shown no disposition to enter the arena of authorship. He has been content to prattle to his own family about the conditions that surround him, about the brick house he lives in, the laboratories he visits, where “all sorts of things” are manufactured out of “essences and ether and gases,”--rather like German war products, and the lectures that he attends. The subjects of these lectures are spirituality, concentration, and--alas!--“the projection of uplifting and helpful thoughts to those on the earth plane.” Such scraps of wisdom as are vouchsafed him he passes dutifully on to his parents. He tells his mother that, on the spiritual plane, “Rank doesn’t count as a virtue. High rank comes by being virtuous.”

“Kind hearts are more than coronets.”