Chapter VII: Conclusion 135 (3)

The glitter of the past makes us think of literature as embodied in books; but to understand literature we must fix our minds on authors, not on books. The men who write--what makes them write well or ill? What are the conditions that breed poetry, or music, or architecture? The current beliefs about art and letters are fatalistic. It is supposed that poets and artists crop up now and then, and that nothing can stop them; they need no aid, they conquer circumstances. I do not believe it. We see no analogy to it in nature. Among the plants and the fishes we see nothing but a wholesale and incredible destruction of germs on all sides. It seems a miracle that any seed should fall upon good ground, and be sheltered till it come to the flower. Why should the percentage of germs that come to maturity be greater with genius than it is with the eggs of the sturgeon? The enemies of each are numerous. If it were not for the fecundity of nature, we should have none of either of them. And how is it that the great man always happens to be young at the very moment when some events are going forward that ripen his powers; so that he grows up with his time, and does something that is comprehensible to all time?

The answer is, that all eras are sown thick with the seeds of genius, which for the most part die, but in a favoring age mature to greatness. Must we resort to a theory of special creation to explain the great talents of the world? And even this would not explain our own welcome and our own comprehension of them when they come. If it were not for the undeveloped powers, the seeds of genius, in ourselves, Plato and Bach would be meaningless, and Christ would have died in vain.

It must be that thousands of good intellects perish annually. The men do not die, but their powers wither, or rather never mature. Art, like everything else, represents an escape, a survival. In any age that lacks it, or is weak in it, we may look about for the enginery by which it is crushed. In looking into a past age we are put to inference and conjecture. We see the mark of fetters upon the Byzantine soul, and we begin dredging the dark waters of history for a metaphysical cause. We cannot walk into a Byzantine shop and watch the apprentice at work. But in our own time we can see the whole process in action. We can study our modern Inquisitions at leisure, and note every mark that is made upon a soul that is passing through them.

It does not involve any indignity to the pretensions of literature if we walk into that great bazaar, modern journalism, and see what is going on there behind the counters. Here is a factory of popular art. It is not the whole of letters; but it has an influence on the whole of letters. The press fills the consciousness of the people. A modern community breathes through its press. Journalism, to be sure, is a region of letters, where all the factors for truth are at a special and peculiar discount. Its attention is given to near and ugly things, to mean quarrels, business interests, and special ends. Every country shows up badly here. The hypocrisy of the press is the worst thing in England. It is the worst exhibition of England’s worst fault. The press of France gives you France at her weakest. The press of America gives you America at her cheapest. Perhaps the study of journalism in any country would illustrate the peculiar vices of that country; and it is fair to remember this in examining our own press. But examine it we must, for it is important.

The subject includes more than the daily newspapers. Those ephemeral sheets that flutter from the table into the waste-paper basket, which are something more than mere newspapers and less than magazines, and the magazines themselves, which are more than budgets of gossip and less than books, make up a perpetual rain of paper and ink. Thousands of people are engaged in writing them, and millions in reading them. This whole species of literature is typical of the age; let us see how it is conducted.

A journal is a meeting-place between the forces of intellect and of commerce. The men who become editors always bear some relation to the intellectual interests of the country. They make money, but they make it by understanding the minds of people who are not taking money, but thought, from the exchanges that the editors set up. A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect. Even trade journals have columns devoted to general information and jokes. The one thing a journal must have in order to be a journal is circulation. It must be carried into people’s houses, and this is brought about by an impulse in the buyer. The buyer has many opinions and modes of thought that he does not draw from the journal, and he is always ready to drop a journal that offends him. An editor is thus constantly forced to choose between affronting his public and placating his public. Now, whatever arguments may be given for his taking one course or the other, it remains clear that in so far as an editor is not publishing what he himself thinks of interest for its own sake, he is encouraging in the public something else besides intellect. He is subserving financial, political, or religious bias, or, it may be, popular whim. He is, to this extent at least, the custodian and protector of prejudice.

The thrift of an editor-owner, who is building up the circulation of a paper, tends to keep him conservative. Repetition is safer than innovation. An especially strong temptation is spread before the American editor in the shape of an enormous reading public, made up of people who have a common-school education, and who resemble each other very closely in their traits of mind. There is money to be made by any one who discerns a new way of reinforcing any prejudice of the American people.

It has come about very naturally during the last thirty years, that journalism has been developed in America as one of the branches in the science of catering to the masses on a gigantic scale. The different kinds of conservatism have been banked, consolidated, and, as it were, marshalled under the banners of as many journals. Money and energy have been expended in collecting these vast audiences, and sleepless vigilance is needed to keep them together.

The great investments in the good will of millions are nursed by editors who live by their talents, and who in another age would have been intellectual men. The highest type of editor now extant in America will as frankly regret his own obligation to cater to mediocrity, as the business man will regret his obligation to pay blackmail, or as the citizen will regret his obligation to vote for one of the parties. “There is nothing else to do. I am dealing with the money of others. There are not enough intelligent people to count.” He serves the times. The influence thus exerted by the public (through the editor) upon the writer tends to modify the writer and make him resemble the public. It is a spiritual pressure exerted by the majority in favor of conformity. This exists in all countries, but is peculiarly severe in countries and ages where the majority is made up of individuals very similar to each other. The tyranny of a uniform population always makes itself felt.

If any man doubt the hide-bound character of our journals to-day, let him try this experiment. Let him write down what he thinks upon any matter, write a story of any length, a poem, a prayer, a speech. Let him assume, as he writes it, that it cannot be published, and let him satisfy his individual taste in the subject, size, mood, and tenor of the whole composition. Then let him begin his peregrinations to find in which one of the ten thousand journals of America there is a place for his ideas as they stand. We have more journals than any other country. The whole field of ideas has been covered; every vehicle of opinion has its policy, its methods, its precedents. A hundred will receive him if he shaves this, pads that, cuts it in half; but not one of them will trust him as he stands, “Good, but eccentric,” “Good, but too long,” “Good, but new.”

Let us follow the steps of this withering influence. A young illustrator does an etching that he likes. He is told to reduce it to the conventional standard. This is easy, but what is happening in the process? He blurs the fine edges of vision, not only on the plate, but in his own mind. The real injury to intellect is not done in the editorial sanctum. It is done in the mind of the writer who himself attempts to cater to the prejudice of others. A man rewrites a scene in a story to please a public. In order to do this he is obliged to forget what his story was about. He is talking by rote; he is making an imitation. Does this seem a small thing? Let any one do it once and see where it leads him. The attitude of the whole human being towards his whole life is changed by the experience. Do it twice, and you can hardly shake off the practice. Write and publish six editorials for the “Universalist,” and then sit down to write one not in the style of the “Universalist.” You will find it, practically, an impossibility.

The notable lack in our literature is this: the prickles and irregularities of personal feeling have been pumice-stoned away. It is too smooth. There is an absence of individuality, of private opinion. This is the same lack that curses our politics,--the absence of private opinion.

The sacrifice in political life is honesty, in literary life is intellect; but the closer you examine honesty and intellect the more clearly they appear to be the same thing. Suppose that a judge, in order to please a boss, awards Parson Jones’ cow to Deacon Brown; does he boldly admit this even to himself? Never. He writes an able opinion in which he befogs his intelligence, and convinces himself that he has arrived at his award by logical steps. In like manner, the revising editor who reads with the eyes of the farmer’s daughter begins to lose his own. He is extinguishing some sparks of instructive reality which would offend--and benefit--the farmer’s daughter; and he is obliterating a part of his own mind with every stroke of his blue pencil. He is devitalizing literature by erasing personality. He does this in the money interests of a syndicate; but the debasing effect upon character is the same as if it were done at the dictate of the German Emperor. The harm done in either case is intellectual.

Take another example. A reporter writes up a public meeting, but colors it with the creed of his journal. Can he do this acceptably without abjuring his own senses? He is competing with men whose every energy is bent on seeing the occasion as the newspaper wishes it seen. Consider the immense difficulty of telling the truth on the witness stand, and judge whether good reporting is easy. The newspaper trade, as now conducted, is prostitution. It mows down the boys as they come from the colleges. It defaces the very desire for truth, and leaves them without a principle to set a clock by. They grow to disbelieve in the reality of ideas. But these are our future literati, our poets and essayists, our historians and publicists.

The experts who sit in the offices of the journals of the country have so long used their minds as commercial instruments, that it never occurs to them to publish or not publish anything, according to their personal views. They do not know that every time they subserve prejudice they are ruining intellect. If there were an editor who had any suspicion of the way the world is put together, he would respect talent as he respects honor. It would be impossible for him to make his living by this traffic. If he knew what he was doing, he would prefer penury.

These men, then, have not the least idea of the function they fulfil. No more has the agent of the Insurance Company who corrupts a legislature. The difference in degree between the two iniquities is enormous, because one belongs to that region in the scale of morality which is completely understood, and the other does not. We do not excuse the insurance agent; we will not allow him to plead ignorance. He commits a penal offence. We will not allow selfishness to trade upon selfishness and steal from the public in this form. But what law can protect the public interest in the higher faculties? What statute can enforce artistic truth?

We actually forbid a man by statute to sell his vote, because a vote is understood to be an opinion, a thing dependent on rational and moral considerations. You cannot buy and sell it without turning it into something else. The exercise of that infinitesimal fraction of public power represented by one man’s vote is hedged about with penalties; because the logic of practical government has forced us to see its importance. But the harm done to a community by the sale of a vote does not follow by virtue of the statute, but by virtue of a law of influence of which the statute is the recognition. The same law governs the sale of any opinion, whether it be conveyed in a book review or in a political speech, in a picture of life and manners, a poem, a novel, or an etching. There is no department of life in which you can lie for private gain without doing harm. The grosser forms of it give us the key to the subtler ones, and the jail becomes the symbol of that condition into which the violation of truth will shut any mind.

So far as any man comes directly in contact with the agencies of organized literature, let him remember that his mind is at stake. They can change you, but you cannot change them, except by changing the public they reflect. The faculties of man are as strong as steel if properly used, but they are like the down on a peach if improperly used. What shall a man take in exchange for his soul? No man has the privilege upon this earth of being more than one person. In this matter of expression, it is the last ten per cent of accuracy that saves or sells you. Talent evaporates as easily as a delegate holds his tongue or a lawyer smiles to a rich man; and the injury is irremediable. Let a man not alter a line or cut a paragraph at the suggestion of an editor. Those are the very words that are valuable. “Ah,” you say, “but I need criticism.” Then go to a critic. Consult the man who is farthest away from this influence, some one who cannot read the magazines, some one who does not have to read them. Your public, when you get one, will qualify the general public; but you must reach it as a whole man. The writer’s course is easy compared to that of the reform politician, because printing is cheap. He will get heard immediately. He covers the whole of the United States while the other is canvassing a ward. Literary self-assertion is as much needed as any of the virtue we pray for in politics. A resonant and unvexed independence makes a man’s words stir the fibres in other men; and it matters little whether you label his words literature or politics.

The difficulty in any revolt against custom, the struggle a man has in getting his mind free from the cobwebs of restraint, always turns out to involve financial distress; and this holds true of the writer’s attempt to override the senseless restrictions of the press. The magazines pay handsomely, and pay at once. A writer must earn his bread; a man must support his family. We accept this necessity with such a hearty concurrence, and the necessity itself becomes so sacred, that it seems to imply an answer to all ethical and artistic questions. We almost think that nature will connive at malpractice done in so good a cause as the support of a family. The subject must be looked at more narrowly. The spur of poverty is popularly regarded not only as an excuse for all bad work, but as a prerequisite to all good work. There is a misconception in this wholesale appropriation of a partial truth. The economic laws are valuable and suggestive, but they are founded on the belief that a man will pursue his own business interests exclusively. This is never entirely true even in trade, and the doctrines of the economists become more and more misleading when applied to fields of life where the money motive becomes incidental. The law of supply and demand does not govern the production of sonnets.

Let us lay aside theory and observe the effects of want upon the artist and his work. As a stimulus to the whole man, a prod to get him into action and keep him active, the spur of poverty is a blessing. But if it enter into the detail of his attention, while he is at work, it is damnation.

A man at work is like a string that is vibrating. Touch it with a feather and it is numb. A singer will sing flat if he sees a friend in the audience. Even a trained and cold-blooded lawyer who is trying a case, will not be at his best if he is watched by some one whom he wants to impress.

The artist is the easiest of all men to upset. He is dealing with subtle and fluid things,--memories, allusions, associations. It is all gossamer and sunlight when he begins. It is to be gossamer and sunlight when he is finished. But in the interim it is bricks and mortar, rubble and white lead. And the writer--I do not say that he must be more free from cares than the next man--but he must not let into the mint and forge of his thought some immaterial and petty fact about himself, for this will make him self-conscious. Consider how ingenuous, how unexpected, how natural is good conversation. At one moment you have nothing to say, at the next a vista of ideas has opened. They come crowding in, and the telling of them reveals new vistas. It is the same with the writer. In the process of writing the story is made. There is really nothing to say or do in the world until you make your start, and then the significance begins to steam out of the materials. And here, in the act and heat of creation, to have the cold fear thrust in, “I cannot use that phrase because the editor will think it too strong,” is enough to chill the brain of Rabelais. Human nature cannot stand such handling. Do this to a man and you break his spirit. He becomes tame, calculating, and ingenious. His powers are frozen.

It is impossible not to see in contemporary journalism a slaughter-house for mind. Here we have a great whale that browses on the young and eats them by thousands. This is the seamy side of popular education. The low level of the class at the dame’s school keeps the bright boys back and makes dunces of them.

We have been dealing in all this matter with one of the deepest facts of life, to wit, the influence that society at large has in cutting down and narrowing the development of the individual. The newspaper business displays the whole operation very vividly; but we may see the same thing happening in the other walks of life. There arrives a time in the career of most men when their powers become fixed. Men seem to expand to definite shapes, like those Japanese cuttings that open out into flowers and plants when you drop them into warm water. After reaching his saturation point each man fills his niche in society and changes little. He goes on doing whatever he was engaged upon at the time he touched his limit.

We almost believe that every man has his predestinate size and shape, and that some obscure law of growth arrests one man at thirty and the next at forty years of age. This is partly true; but the law is not obscure. It is not because the men stop growing that they repeat themselves, but they stop growing because they repeat themselves. They cease to experiment; they cease to search. The lawyer adopts routine methods; the painter follows up his success with an imitation of his success; the writer finds a recipe for style or plot. Every one saves himself the trouble of re-examining the contents of his own mind. He has the best possible reason for doing this. The public will not pay for his experiments as well as it will for his routine work. But the laws of nature are deaf to his reasons. Research is the price of intellectual growth. If you face the problems of life freshly and squarely each morning, you march. If you accept any solution as good enough, you drop.

For there is no finality and ending place to intellect. Examine any bit of politics, any law-case, or domestic complication, until you understand your own reasons for feeling as you do about it. Then write the matter down carefully and conclusively, and you will find that you have done no more than restate the problem in a new form. The more complete your exposition, the more loudly it calls for new solution. The masterly analysis of Tolstoi, his accurate explanations, his diagnosis and dissection of human life, leave us with a picture of society that for unsolved mystery competes with the original. But the point lies here. You must lay bare your whole soul in the statement you make. You must resolutely set down everything that touches the matter. Until you do this, the question refuses to assume its next shape. You cannot flinch and qualify in your first book, and speak plainly in your second.

It is the act of utterance that draws out the powers in a man and makes him a master of his own mind. Without the actual experience of writing Lohengrin, Wagner could not have discovered Parsifal. The works of men who are great enough to get their whole thought uttered at each deliverance, form a progression like the deductions of a mathematician. These men are never satisfied with a past accomplishment. Their eyes are on questions that beckon to them from the horizon. Their faculties are replenished with new energy because they seek. They are driving their ploughs through a sea of thought, intent, unresting, resourceful, creative. They are discoverers, and just to the extent that lesser men are worth anything they are discoverers too.

Beauty and elevation flash from the currents set up by intense speculation. Beauty is not the aim of the writer. His aim must be truth. But beauty and elevation shine out of him while he is on the quest. His mind is on the problem; and as he unravels it and displays it, he communicates his own spirit, as it were incidentally, as it were unwittingly, and this is the part that goes out from him and does his work in the world.

V

PRINCIPLES

Speech is a very small part of human intercourse. Indeed speech is often not connected with the real currents of intercourse. A comic actor has made you happy before he has uttered a word. This is by the responsive vibration of your apparatus to his. The external speech and gesture help the transfer of power, and that is all they do. The communion, upon whatever plane of being it takes place, is a contagion, and goes forward by leaps and darts, like the action of frost on a window-pane. An angry friend comes into my room, and before he has uttered a word I am in a blaze of anger. A baby too young to speak does some naughty thing. I remonstrate with him in a rational way. Perhaps I repeat to him Kant’s maxim from the Critique of Practical Reason. The child understands at once and is grateful for the treatment. Now, observe this, that if I said the same thing to a grown man in the same tone, it would be to the tone and not to the argument that he would respond.

The exchange of energy between man and man is so rapid that language becomes a bystander. It is like the passage of the electrical current,--we receive an impression or a message, or twenty messages at once. All this is the result of suggestion and inference. No strange phenomenon is here alluded to. The situation is the normal and constant situation whenever two human beings meet. The only mystery about it is that our senses should be so much more acute than we knew. Ask a man to dinner and talk to him about the Suez Canal, and the next morning your wife will be apt to give a truer account of him than you can give. She has been knitting in the corner and thinking about the best place to buy children’s shoes, but she knows which coils in her brain have been played upon by the brain of the stranger. The reason your wife knows that your Suez friend is no saint, is that she feels that certain strings of the benevolent harp that is sounding in herself are not being reinforced. There are dead notes in him.

The sensitiveness of children is so common a thing that we forget its explanation. It is just because the child cannot follow the argument, that he is free from the illusion that the argument is the main point. The lobes of his brain get a shock and respond to it ingenuously.

These facts have been neglected by philosophers, because the facts defy formulation. You cannot get them into a statement. They are life. But in the practical, workaday world, they have always been understood. Men of action owe their success to the habit of using their minds and bodies in a direct way. Men in every profession rely upon the accuracy of direct impressions. The great doctor, or the great general, or the great business man uses the whole of his sensibilities in each act of reading a man. There is no other way to read him correctly. People whose brains are preoccupied with formulated knowledge are not apt to be as good judges of character as spontaneous persons. Their thoughts are on logic. They follow what is said. A very small fraction of them is alive. They are like chess-players who are not listening to the opera.

The answer to any question in psychology always lies under our hand. We have only to ask what the normal man does. It will be found that he uses his faculties according to their nature, though it may be, he is embryonic and inarticulate. We speak of great men as “simple,” because they retain a sensitiveness to immediate impressions very common in uneducated persons and in children. Their thought subserves the direct currents of suggestion. Their instincts rule them. Their minds serve them. They are great because of this power to read the thoughts of others through the pores of their skin, and answer blindfold to unuttered appeals, whether of weakness or of strength. To do this means intellect, whether in Napoleon or Gladstone. Every pianist and public speaker, every actor and singer knows that his whole art consists in getting his intellectual apparatus into focus, so that the vibrations of his formulated thought shall correspond and fall in with the direct and spontaneous vibrations of his audience. This is truth, this is the discovery of law, this is art.

Men are profound and complicated creatures, and when any one of them expresses the laws of his construction and reveals his own natural history, he is called a genius. But he is a genius solely because he is comprehensible, and others say of him, “I am like that.” His suggestions carry. Their extreme subtlety baffles analysis, just as the suggestions of real life baffle analysis. The miracle of reality in art is due to refinement of suggestion. We cannot follow its steps or say how it is done. We see only the idea. Shakespeare gives you all the meaning, and none of the means. This is first-class artificial communication. It almost competes with the every-day, commonplace, familiar transfer of the incommunicable essence of life from man to man.

Our present problem is, how to influence people for their good. It is clear that when you and another man meet, the personal equation is the controlling thing. If you are more high-minded than he, the way to influence him is to stick to your own beliefs; for they alone can keep you high-minded. They alone can make you vibrate. It is they and not you that will do the work. There you stand, and there he stands; and you can only qualify him by the ideas that control you. It makes no difference whether you are an emperor and he a peasant, or you a Good Government Club man and he a merchant, the same forces are at work. Shift your ground, and he feels the shift; you are encouraging him to be shifty, like yourself. What can you do for him except to follow your conscience? But this is equally true of every meeting of all men everywhere. You address a labor meeting and talk about the Philippines. You meet the Turkish Ambassador and talk about Kipling’s poems. You talk to your son about kite-flying. To each of these contacts with another’s mind you bring the same power. If you start with the psychical value of 6, no matter what you do, a cross-section of your whole activity in the world will at any instant of time read 6. It may be that a page of ciphering cannot express the formula, but it will mean 6.

The immense amount of thought that man has given, during the last few thousand years, to his social arrangements and his destiny, has filled our minds with tangled formulas, and has attached our affection to particular matters. The pomp of preambles and the stress of language stun us. There is so much of organized society. There are so many good ends. If there were only one man in the world, we know that it would be impossible to do good to him by suggesting evil. We know that if we gave him a hint that contained both good and evil, the good would do him good, and the evil, evil. If we were bent on nothing but benefit, we should have to confine ourselves to suggestions of unalloyed virtue. But the world is such a tangle of personalities, that we do not hesitate to mix a little evil in the good we do, hoping that the evil will not be operative. We half believe that there may, somewhere in the community, be a hitch in the multiplication table that brings out good for evil. Liberty and democracy are thought to be such worthy ends, that we must obtain them by any means and all means, even by hiring mercenaries. Can we wonder that in the past, men’s minds were staggered by the importance of a papacy or of some dynastic succession? To-day everybody jumps to shield vice because it is called republicanism or democracy. The irony of history could go no further.

Let us consider our local reforms by the light of these views. Civil service laws, ballot-reform, elections, taxation,--dissolve all these into acts and impulses, and see whether the laws of human influence do not make a short cut through them all, like X-rays. No matter what I talk about to the Emperor, I am really conveying to him by suggestion a tendency to become as good or as bad a man as I myself. Chinese Gordon turned a dynamo of personal force upon the Orientals, and they understood him. He was talking religion, and he gave it to them straight. Now all religion, as everybody knows, is purely a matter of suggestion. But so is all other intercourse. We want honesty. Well, what makes people honest? Honesty. Does anything else spread the influence of honesty, except honesty? Are we here facing a scientific fact? Is this a law of the transference of human energy, or is it not? If it is, you cannot beat it. You cannot imagine any situation where your own total force, in favor of honesty, will consist of anything else than honesty. Of course you may put a case where honesty will result in somebody’s death. If in that case, you want his life, why, lie. But what you will get will be his life, not the spread of honesty. If the event is chronicled, you will find it used as a means of justifying dishonesty forever afterwards.

We do not want any of these reforms except as a means of stimulating character, and it is a law of nature that character can only be stimulated directly. Sincerity is the only need, courage the all-sufficing virtue. We can dump them into every occasion, and sleep sound at night. What interest can any rational man have in our municipal issues except as a grindstone on which to whet the people’s moral sense? How is it possible to deceive ourselves into looking at our own political activity from any other standpoint than this? You are to make a speech at Cooper Union on ballot reform. Somebody says, “Do not mention the liquor question or you will lose votes.” But some phase of that question seems to you pertinent and important. Shall you omit and submit? That would be an odd way of stimulating character. The need of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The maximum that any man can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself.

All the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation; and the vices likewise. Our people are deficient in righteous indignation. When you see a man righteously indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this the force. Nothing else will arouse courage but courage, faith but faith. You see, for instance, a knot of men who are really indignant at the injustice of the times. But their indignation seems to you a danger; because it is likely to defeat some candidate, some pet measure of yours. You wish to allay it. You wish yourself well rid of this sacred indignation; it is inconvenient. Open your eyes to the light of science. Here is a spark of that fire with which everybody ought to be filled. All your scheming was only for the purpose of getting this fire. Then foment it.

Virtue then, is a mode of motion, or it is an attitude of mind in a human organism, which enables that organism to transmit virtue to others. But vice is also a mere attitude of mind by which vice is transmitted. We know less about the natural history of vice than we do of dipsomania and consumption; but we know this much, that the vices are co-related, and breed one another _in transitu_; the tendency being towards lighter forms in the later catchers. Avoid another’s guilty side, and you reinforce it; sympathize with it, and you catch his disease, or some disease. I have held hands with my friend (who is in the wrong) over his family troubles, and it has given me the distemper for a week. The German actor, Devrient, went mad while studying the inmates of asylums, as a preparation to playing King Lear. It was not the living in asylums that drove him mad, but his sympathetic attitude toward the disease. This exposed him. Why is it we commend the man whose antagonism to crooked work is so great that he shows a tempter the door before he has finished his proposition? Parleying is not only a danger; it is the beginning of the trouble itself.

It is very difficult and very odious offending people, by forcing them to see in which direction our wheels really go round; and yet the alternative is to have our machinery forced back to a standstill. We are interlocked with other people and cannot break free. We are held in place by fate, and played upon against our will. When you see cruelty going on before you, you are put to the alternative of interposing to stop it, or of losing your sensibility. There is a law of growth here involved. It is inexorable. You are at the mercy of it. You wish yourself elsewhere, but you are here; you are a mere illustration of pitiless and undying force. The part you take, may run through a fit of bad temper or malice. It may turn to covetousness or conceit, who can tell? Some poison has entered your eye because you looked negligently upon corruption. It will cost you some part of your sense of smell. “Use or lose,” says Nature when she gives us capacities. What you condone, you support; what you neglect, you confirm.

It is true that your confirmation and support are managed through the mechanism of blindness. All the evil in the world receives its chief support from the people whose only connection with it is that they do not fight it, nor see it. Where politics is involved scarcely a man in America knows the difference between right and wrong. Our mayoralty contest five years ago would have left Lot searching for a man who could tell black from white. It was a clear moral issue. But it arose in politics: we could not see it. That we have intellectual cataract is entirely due to the habit of condoning embezzlement. It is a secondary form of the endemic theft, caught by the by-standers. The best people in town had it. If they had been lifting their hands against theft during the preceding years, they never would have caught it.

Of course we support all the good in the world, as well as all the evil; and the ratio in which we do both changes at every moment. It radiates forth from us, and is read correctly by every baby as he passes in his perambulator. Close thinking, and fresh observation of things too familiar to be noticed, bring us to this point.

Now, just as no complexity of institutions affects the transfer of virtue, so none affects the transfer and propagation of vice. Yesterday you were all for virtue. You were for leading a revolution against the bosses, and were ready to work and subscribe and vote. You were a man with the heart of a man. But to-day you are chop-fallen. “The thing cannot be done. It is not the year.” The degradation of your character is seen in your low spirits, and in the jaded and sophistical commonplaces you pour forth. I know the academical reasons for this change in you. I can express it in terms of ballot-law and civil service. But what is it that really has happened?

The power that has struck you was focalized the day before yesterday in the office of some law-broking politicians; and the direct rays of base passion have struck straight through stone walls and constitutions, and, falling upon you, have stopped your wheels. In them it was avarice and ambition. In you it is doubt. A drowsy inertia overcomes you, a blindness of the will. That is what has really happened. The rest is illusion and metaphysical talk. See, now, the real curse of injustice; it takes away the sight from the eyes, and that in a night.

Is it not perfectly natural that Tammany Hall should be everywhere, at all tables, in all churches, in all consciences, when these electrical currents run between man and man and connect them so easily?

I read in the newspaper that a well-known man is at Albany in the interests of a gas deal. He cannot get his way in the city, and is putting up a job with the legislature. I see the thing going through,--a thing utterly cynical, utterly corrupt. No paper will explain it because it cannot be explained without names; besides, the names own the papers. Everybody understands it; nobody minds it. Is any statute here at fault? Will any legislation cure this? If the moral sensibility of our people should become tensified by twenty per cent in twenty-four hours, twenty per cent of all our iniquities in every department would cease in forty-eight hours. Government is carried on by the lightning of personal suggestion which flashes through the community from day to day and from moment to moment. Those things are done which are demanded or are tolerated at the instant they are done.

I read in a newspaper that a syndicate has been formed to light the city. It is backed by the men who control the city administration, and they are now blackmailing the existing company to its ruin. Can I escape the knowledge of this thing? Alas, too easily: I own stock in it.

At first we think the legislature makes the laws, then we see it is done by a cabal, then by people behind the cabal, finally by the million bonds of popular prejudice which tie each man up with the times.

Look closely, take some particular man, and consider why it is that he does not spend his whole time in fighting for virtue. It will turn out, that in some form or other, he is a beneficiary of these evils, and has not the energy to fight them. One man depends upon the _status quo_ for his living, the next is held by affection for his friends, by the ties of old prejudice, by inertia, by hopelessness. Which of them is the more deeply injured victim of tyranny,--the active self-seeker or the listless man, the Tammany boy or the American gentleman?

Every man bears a direct and discoverable share in the responsibility. A janitor keeps his place through Tammany influence, a young lawyer gets business by keeping his mouth shut. Follow out the lines leading from any man, no matter how obscure he is, and they will lead you to the ante-chamber where gigantic business has its offices, where the highest functionaries of commerce and politics meet. The business world is all one organization. It is a sort of secret society, a great web. No matter where you touch it, the same spiders come out.

The boss system, then, appears as the visible part of all the private selfishness in America. It is a great religion of self-interest, with its hierarchy, its chapels, its propaganda, and its confessors in every home. You yourself support it. I saw last week, at your table, a magnate whose business conduct you deplore, and to-day I heard a young man make the comment, that there was no use fighting the current so long as social influence could be bought. Do not accuse Tammany Hall; you yourself have corrupted that young man. So long as you think you can circumvent the laws of force, you will remain a pillar in the temple of iniquity.

But look closer still at each of those individuals, and see just what it is he is giving as the purchase money. One man gives $25,000 to pay a president’s private debts, and goes as minister to England; another gives merely his name to indorse a doubtful candidate for the assembly, and receives prospective good will from the organization. What is this great market overt where every one can get what he wants? The syndicate can get the franchises, and the aldermen the cash. No one is too small to be served, or so great as to require nothing. Upon what principle is this monstrous bazaar, this clearing-house for self-interest, conducted? It is as large as the United States--the transcontinental railroads use it--and so well managed that I can get my friend a job as the secretary of a reform movement. What is it that makes this universal shop run so smoothly? It is hooked together simply on business principles. The price you pay is always the rubbing of somebody the right way; the thing you get is advancement or personal comfort of some sort. It has happened, that by the operation of commercial forces, the whole of America’s seventy million people have been polarized into self-seekers; and our total condition is visibly Vanity Fair. You can actually follow the rays of power from the individual to the boss. All the evil in the world is seen to be in league. Embezzlement and laziness, selfish ambition and prejudice, cruelty and timidity here openly play into each other’s hands, support and console each other. Nay, every atom of vice, every impulse of malice or cupidity, can be shown up as a tendon or a sinew of the great organization of selfish forces. It is as if a magic glass had been superposed upon the continent, and, looking down through it, upon the motives of men, all complexity vanished, and we saw all the evil forces pulling one way.

The same thing has always been true in every society; but the names, powers, superstitions have been so extremely complicated that no one could follow the laws of interlocking motive, except by inference and prophetic insight. Take the case of a very selfish man fighting his way up through society in the reign of Louis XVIII. He meets a Bourbon influence, an ecclesiastical influence, a Napoleonic influence, a republican influence. He grapples with every man he meets, using the hooks of self-interest in that man. The forces at work under Louis XVIII. were as simple as with us. Only the nomenclature is different, and more complex. It is easy in America to see the working of one man’s selfishness upon another’s. Let alone the market overt, it is easy to trace the subtle social relations, when they are for the bad. It was easy to follow the effect of your conduct in asking the dishonest business magnate to dinner, because the young man spoke of it. He was shocked and injured. But we also found out by the episode that before you did the thing, you were really a factor for good in his life, holding up his conscience and his ideals.

The inexpressible subtlety in the mechanism of man makes the transmission of the force for good as easy as that of the force for evil. They are of the same character, and very often flow through the same channels. There is no more mystery in the one case than in the other.

Consider what is done in the course of any practical movement for reform. A bad bill is pending at Albany. In order to beat it, a party of men whose characters are trusted, get on a train, and the whole State watches them proceed to Albany. This is often enough to defeat a measure. The good their pilgrimage does, is done then and there instantly, by example, by suggestion. If, when they get to Albany, they sell out their cause, the harm they do is done then and there by example, by suggestion. They make some concession which lessens friction but suggests Tammany Hall. This is the only part of the transaction that reaches the great public. Ask the laboring man and he will give you a digest of the whole episode in a shrug. If a reform candidate is running on the platform “Thou shalt not steal,” and the boss desires to corrupt him, the boss asks him to drop in for a chat. If he goes, every one hears of it the next day, and every one is a little corrupted himself. A thousand well-meaning men say he did right. Had he resisted, these same men would have cried “Bravo!” and thereafter taken a higher view of human nature. It is by a succession of such minute shocks of good or bad example that communities are affected. The truth seems to be that our lives are ruled by laws of influence which are in themselves exceedingly direct. But the operation of them is concealed from us by our preoccupation over details.

It is impossible to regard these matters in too simple a light. Nothing is ever involved except the contagious impulse that makes one man yawn when he sees another man yawn. Both the good and the evil in the world run upon the winds. Moses’ habit of falling upon his face before the congregation, and calling God to witness that he could lead them no longer, was not a political trick done to frighten the people into submission by the threat of abandoning them. It was a sincere act of devotion; but it was also the most powerful form of appeal. He did the act; they followed in it, and thus made him absolute. Lincoln’s anecdotes and fables consisted of nothing but suggestion. They were one source of his power. The first thing a tyrant does is to suppress cartoons. Here we have something that is often sheer pantomime, and yet it is one of the most effective vehicles in the world. It was the only thing Platt could not stand. Within two years he has tried to stop it by legislation.

If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people. In literature this is obvious. The more far-reaching any truth is, the shorter grow its hieroglyphics. The great truths can only be given in hints, phrases, and parables. They lie in universal experience, and any comment belittles them. They are like the magnetic poles that can only be pointed out with a needle. Take any profound saying about life, and see if it does not imply short-hand, a sort of telegraphy as the ordinary means of communication between men. “He that loseth his life shall save it.” Here we have a poem, a system of ethics and a psychology. Or take any bit of worldly wisdom, “Money talks.” Here we have the whole philosophy of materialism. Does any one imagine that political bargains are reduced to writing? It would be injurious to the conscience. They are made by the merest hints on all sides. Every one is left free.

The extreme case of the power of suggestion is seen in the stock-market, where a rumor that Banker A has dined with Railroad President B drives values up or down. Cleveland’s Venezuela message makes a panic. The different parts of the financial world live, from day to day, in instantaneous and throbbing communication. This is one side of the popular life. Its thermometer is sensitive, and records one thousandth of a degree as readily as the political thermometer records a single degree. But the principle is the same. All the people run the stock-market, and all the people run politics. There has never been any difficulty in reaching the whole people with ideas. Even a private man can do it. But he must act them out.

VI

PRINCIPLES (_continued_).

Suppose a small child steals jam in the pantry. So long as he pretends that he did not do it, or did not know it was wrong, he suffers a certain oppression.

You can explain to an intelligent child that if he tells the whole truth about the thing, the telling will cost him pain and leave him happy. But you cannot save him the pain. So long as he persists in lying, some of his faculties lie under an inhibition; the vital energies flow past them instead of through them. The first shock of a through passage gives a spasm of pain, and then the child is happy. It is one of the facts of the world that moral awakening is accompanied by pain.

The quarrel that the world has with its agitators is that they do really agitate. People express this by saying that the men are dangerous or have bad taste. The epithets vary with the age. They are intended to excite public contempt, and they embody the aversions of society. In a martial age the reformer is called a molly-coddle; in a commercial age an incompetent, a disturber of values; in a fanatical age, a heretic. If an agitator is not reviled, he is a quack.