Chapter VI: Part 6

Burton Rascoe, I suppose, is one of the most nervous men who ever lived. He is never still. He talks in stammering rushes. He moves about the room as he talks. He is slender, sleek, with high cheek bones, prominent lips, and eyes that are intense, and arresting. As violent in his opinions as in his person, he is a critic and a colyumist who is constantly provoking his public to disagreement and comment. In other words, he is an excellent journalist. He was born in Sulton, Kentucky. His family moved when he was quite young, however, to Shawnee, Oklahoma, where he lived until the time when he went to the University of Chicago. His first writing was done for a Shawnee paper. Later, he was literary critic for the Chicago “Tribune”. In New York, his “Bookman’s Day Book” for the New York “Tribune” caused a sensation by its rather breathless revealments. His first book, which has been years in preparation, is to be a collection of his critical essays. A voracious reader, a student of French, a young gentleman of violent opinions, he is always stimulating and often annoying.

GEORGE SANTAYANA’S “LIFE OF REASON”

George Santayana is a gifted Spaniard who succeeded to a chair of philosophy at Harvard, began to write when he was forty, got fed up with the Harvard atmosphere, and fled to Paris where he is now writing what are certainly the finest contributions, from the point of view of style and ideas, to philosophic thought since Remy de Gourmont’s death. To say that Santayana is the Emerson of his era is far from flattering to Santayana who is a logical, clear thinking psychologist, dissociator of ideas, and æsthetician as against Emerson’s confused and impalpable transcendentalism, Unitarian freedom of spirit, minor parish breath of vision, and suburban æsthetics; but Santayana occupies or is beginning to occupy with his generation in America a position analogous to that of Emerson in his. By fleeing to Europe he has been able to perform a pedagogical service of vaster importance than was permitted him when he was irked by the formalism of collegiate education, the petty academic fussing and narrowness of his colleagues, and the discouraging stupidity prevalent among students seeking mass instruction. He is now the one spar to which educated youths are able to cling amid the perpetual flux. He is the only remaining philosopher writing in English who is not a specialist in something or other--psychiatry, education, single tax, Manchester labor, Chinese history, or what not; hence he is the only one who can see things in the round, criticize freely with an unbiased and open mind, and offer ideas and suggestions not tinged with Utopian pink or parti pris. He is a free spirit, with all that that felicitous French phrase connotes. Philosophically he is a man of the world; spiritually, scientifically, literarily he knows his way about; he is nobody’s fool, not Lenin’s, Balfour’s, Freud’s, Cézanne’s, Rolland’s, Shaw’s, Morgan’s, or God’s. What is rarest among his coevals in his clan, he has taken the trouble to learn how to write.

You will not get the finest flavor of his style in the books listed here, of which, in a new edition, these remarks are apropos. When he wrote “The Life of Reason”, Santayana was still struggling with his technique of expression in a language alien to him by birth and temperament. He was still occasionally mixing his tenses, achieving an uneasy idiom with a foreign accent, and escaping only with the greatest difficulty from the jargon of the professional philosophers.

It is not that he is difficult to read in his earlier work, but that it is sometimes quaint reading, as if he were overwhelmed by the importance of what he had to say and was taking infinite pains to say it slowly, deliberately, distinctly. With “Winds of Doctrine” he had become at ease with his medium and familiar with his ideas; when he wrote “Soliloquies in England”, he had perfected the most charming address imaginable in English--subtle, smiling, cultured, allusive, witty, cadenced and nuanced. All traces of the old constraint had gone; his fancy was liberated to dance gaily and in rhythm with his thought; the data of his experience and the residuum of his reading had lost the blighting touch of the treatise and become the materials of an amiable and exquisite discourse.

But, nevertheless, it is important for the reader who is charmed and stimulated by Santayana’s later essays to know something of the foundation upon which this charm is builded. He will get that in “The Life of Reason”, wherein Santayana applies the intelligence test to the aspects of human progress observable in society, religion, art, science, and common sense. What he attempted to do, and succeeded in a great measure in doing, was to examine the concepts involved in those terms and pick away from them all the fallacious excrescences which have grown up and surrounded them. He sought the reasonable, the intelligent idea expressed by those terms. He pursued the Socratic method of elimination of the false by question and answer. He applied the rule of common sense to matters of belief, doctrine, theoretical ethics, personal conduct, artistic expression, and social theory--and by common sense he means an understanding arrived at by intelligent analysis, free from myth, illusion, and messianic hope.

One has the feeling that Santayana wrote “The Life of Reason” in order to discover himself, to give order and form to the impressions, conclusions, and intimations about life he had gained from experience and meditation. That is, of course, what all artists, philosophers, poets, and theologians do; but I believe there was in Santayana more than the usual serious self-communion. One finds in him no trace of vanity, of cocking an eye to a possible audience of influential but closed minds, of posturing for posterity, or impressing by erudition and long words. On the other hand, there is an intellectual self-reliance discoverable in almost no other thinker or essayist: he writes without footnotes and bibliographies; he almost never uses a quotation from another writer. He does not bolster up his ideas and opinions with pilferings from the accumulations of libraries. He is, in brief, independent, honest, and courageous.

Now, let us see what are some of his ideas. It is an ironic paradox that Santayana, who first built up a philosophy of reason in five volumes, has now come pretty much to distrust reason as an effective agent in the governance of human affairs. What he would now term a reasonable attitude toward life is one which holds that every man must forge his own philosophy. As for one George Santayana he has found it advantageous to sit like patience on a monument smiling at grief, checking his passions that he may savor and conserve--not waste--them, do unto his neighbor as he would wish to be done by, forego possessions and attachments as a check upon his freedom, and enjoy life as a spectacle (to write about) rather than submerge himself in the business of living. To arrive at this he has examined the possible other courses and has found what he conceives to be the factors of satisfaction and happiness in each.

But it would be wrong to assume that “The Life of Reason” is in the nature of a preachment or an exhortation. It becomes a moral philosophy only by its implications as a history of human ideas. Santayana is a naturalist of the mind, a questioner, a tester, a sceptic, and he has written: “Scepticism is a moral force, a tendency to sincerity, economy and fine adjustment of life and mind to experience.” The calibre of his reasoning, the light he throws upon human institutions, is seen to good advantage in his elucidation of the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in “Reason in Religion”:

This underlying Teuton religion, which we must call Protestantism
for lack of a better name, is anterior to Christianity and can
survive it. To identify it with the Gospel may have seemed possible
so long as, in opposition to pagan Christianity, the Teutonic
spirit could appeal to the Gospel for support. The Gospel has
indeed nothing pagan about it, but it has also nothing Teutonic;
and the momentary alliance of two such disparate forces must
naturally cease with the removal of the common enemy which alone
united them. The Gospel is unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; it
treats ecclesiastical establishments with tolerant contempt,
conforming to them with indifference; it regards prosperity as a
danger, earthly ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition;
it revels in miracles; it is democratic and antinomian; it loves
contemplation, poverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with
sympathy and heartfelt forgiveness, but Pharisees and Puritans
with biting scorn. In a word, it is a product of the Orient,
where all things are old and equal and a profound indifference to
the business of earth breeds a silent dignity and high sadness
of spirit. Protestantism is the exact opposite of all this.
It is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity;
it abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it
idleness, solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonorable
punishment. It is constrained and punctilious in righteousness;
it regards a married and industrious life as typically godly,
and there is a sacredness to it, as of a vacant Sabbath, in the
unoccupied higher spaces which such an existence leaves for the
soul. It is sentimental, its ritual is meagre and unctuous, it
expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to piety, and regards
profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a sort of moral
vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes so prominent in the
Gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment. Its
benevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventional
well-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity
which, being merely remedial in physical matters, begins by
renunciation and looks to spiritual freedom and peace.

You will see from this that the dominant spirit of the United States, as it is of England and Germany, is Protestantism. Protestantism is a religious spirit best suited to a raw, new, energetic people. It becomes, as Santayana points out, unpleasantly materialistic by the very excess of its own virtues as an inspiration to progress and achievement. For himself, Santayana is steeped in the Catholic spirit and we find in his poetry no less than in his later essays the passive attitude toward life, the attitude of good-humored resignation; but he is never blind to the merits of Protestantism. England and the English fascinate him; he admires the Englishman’s bland ability to get on in the world, his self-control, his self-isolation, his manners, and his enterprise.

There is perhaps in no European literature a more illuminating and intelligent discussion of love, family life, industry, aristocracy, democracy and patriotism than is to be found in “Reason in Society”; there is no saner short history of religions than is to be found in “Reason in Religion”; there is no more provocative upsetting of petty complaisances than is to be found in “Reason in Common Sense”. In “Reason in Art”, Santayana pursues the dialectical method perhaps too far; but in this book he does away with a vast amount of lumber and gets at the essentials of great art and of the artist’s relation to society, about which relation he has none of the common or artistic sentimentalism. Best to illuminate Santayana’s attitude one should recall his answers to a critic who used the phrase, “one has a right to--”; to which Santayana replied that “right” does not exist in the abstract, that no one possesses “rights” except those which have been granted him or he has been able to exact. Santayana is not a sentimentalist or a mystic praying to the moon.

His poems are chill and formal, as they would be from his habit of checking his impulses or laughing at them. He has too much of the comic spirit in him to be a good poet; he is too much a man of cities to paint poetic landscapes; and he is too much a sceptic to put much fervor in meditative poetic sighs and grief at the tears of things. But in his poetry you will get, condensed, much of his philosophy, as in his essays, particularly his later ones, you will find him much of a poet.

_Dorothy Canfield Fisher_

Dorothy Canfield Fisher was born at Lawrence, Kansas; but in my mind she belongs firmly with her ancestors in the hills of Vermont. Perhaps the addition of middle-western practicality to New England imagination is one secret of her really great power as a novelist and her determination as a student. In her house at Arlington, Vermont, not so far from Robert Frost at South Shaftsbury, she is an eager mother and wife, a swift, active, almost bird-like little woman. When I last saw her she was busy on the proofs of her translation of Papini’s “Life of Christ”. It is a rare thing for an author of such scope and imagination to be also a student of language, of French, of Italian, even of Old English, an earnest interpreter of Madame Montessori. Her understanding of American life and of French character has made her novels unique in contemporary fiction. They have a quality of wholesome regard for social standards as well as a brave facing of fact. This creed she gives us in the “Nietzschean Pilgrim Fathers”. She travels much in Europe; but her keen interest in the people of Vermont and their community affairs brings her back often to the Green Mountains.

NIETZSCHEAN PILGRIM FATHERS

When I first spelled my way through my history primer’s account of the Pilgrim Fathers, the threadbare, too familiar story was all new to me and came fresh-coined from the mint of glory. Swinging my feet and chewing my tongue as I read, I glowed with sympathy for their intrepid resistance to a tyranny which tried hideously to lay hands on the sacred freedom of thought. I was hurrahing inwardly for them as they fought their way across the hostile Atlantic, as they endured the heartbreaking difficulties of their first winter, and I nearly shed tears of admiration when they gloriously refused to go back on the ship that would have set them back where men had the monstrous pretension to dictate to other men what they should or should not believe. Swimming in a golden haze of hero worship I rolled under my tongue the quotation from Mrs. Hemans which ended the chapter:

Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod!
They left unstained what there they found--
Freedom to worship God.

And all unsuspecting, I turned over the page for the next lesson.

Roger Williams and the Quakers were in the next lesson.

I strained my poor nine year old eyes hotly over the unbelievable story. Two hundred and sixty years divided me from the actors of those times, but that afternoon I went off into the woods and shouted excitedly at the top of my voice back across the centuries, to my forefathers, “But looky-here, looky-here! You’re doing just what you left England so people wouldn’t do it to you. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Oh, _please_ don’t!”

My forefathers returning no answer to my heartbroken appeal, I tried the generation immediately before mine, and shyly put a brief question to my father on the subject. My father’s carelessly cynical answer brought a club down on what was left of my cracked and tottering ideal. “Oh, shucks, the Pilgrim Fathers wanted the same sort of ‘freedom of thought’ that everybody wants ... freedom to bully everybody else into thinking as they do.”

Of course the elasticity of childhood and youth being invincible, I did not keep this disillusion in the centre of my consciousness. I poked it down into the darkest corner of my mind and thought I had forgotten it. I grew up to be nineteen and twenty, and as automatically as I put up my hair and learned how to dance, I plunged into the other natural accompaniment of being nineteen and twenty, and became a radical. “Down with the tyranny of the past” resounds recurrently with healthy vigor as each generation advances toward its later teens, and I sallied forth with others of my age, a red flag in one hand and a bomb in the other. I cannot now remember just what we attacked but I suppose, from the dates, that we waged war on such moth-eaten old formulæ as, “Woman’s sphere is the home”: “My father’s God is good enough for me”: “Impressionism is all poppycock, paint pots thrown in the face of the public”: “Organized Labor is flying in the face of the immutable law of supply and demand”, etc., etc. I do remember that any adverse criticism of Ibsen made us froth at the mouth, and that we were prepared to shed our heart’s blood for the right of women to wear rainy day skirts as high as their shoe tops. “Liberty, sacred liberty!” we shouted as we charged.

When did I begin to notice a certain deadly likeness to our Puritan forebears? When did the recollection of Roger Williams and the Quakers begin to seep coldly into my mind? I don’t know when. With advancing years, I suppose, and with that recognition of the vast, incalculable diversity of human nature which can only come after a considerable first-hand contact with all kinds of people.

Perhaps it was the too great vogue of our campaign for emancipating women from domestic slavery that made me first wonder whether it was such an uphill battle for liberty we were fighting, and whether it was really liberty we were getting. We had repudiated at the tops of our voices the ridiculously sweeping generalization that every woman is happier bringing up children than in any other occupation. Things began to go our way; the writers on our side began to be in fashion, to be considered the knowing and sophisticated ones. The other side hung its sentimental head in defeated silence.

And then--oh, bother, take it! It seemed to me I began to see Roger Williams and the Quakers approaching. The sound, much needed axiom “Every woman is not a natural mother” seemed insensibly to have become “No woman is a natural mother”. After all there are women, just as there are men, who prefer children and home life to anything else. In the generation of our grandmothers no girl “in our set” had ventured to say she wanted anything in life but to marry and bring up children. After we had said our say, no girl “in our set” ventured to say that she _did_ want to marry and bring up children.

All that we had done, apparently, was to vary the kind of intimidation, from the kind that had not suited our tastes to the kind that did. We had summoned people to free themselves from the tyrannical dicta of preachers in the pulpits, and had clapped upon them the other tyranny of the radical magazines. Were they getting any more chance to be themselves? Weren’t they being bullied into believing what radical thinkers told them to believe, rather than what they really did believe? Were people with a mystical, poetic, religious turn of mind getting any fairer show now than people with a logical, clean cut turn of mind had when we were twenty? When we said “self-expression” did we mean the expression of Bernard Shaw’s self? Did we not yell “sentimental hypocrite” at people who ventured to express other personalities than the brisk, clear eyed, level headed, disillusioned type which happened to suit our fancy?

My early fierce outraged scorn for the Puritan Fathers began to be tempered with humility. It wasn’t such an easy trick to turn ... to leave people free to believe what you _knew_ was all nonsense.

And yet, with every year that revolved before my eyes the kaleidoscope of the infinitely various differences between human beings, there was forced upon me the intolerable conviction that perhaps what we knew was all nonsense might not be all nonsense for everybody.

One’s first conception of that idea is a terrible moment in life. I suppose it is the beginning of old age--certainly of middle age. It is as devastating as an earthquake to the exhilarating cocksureness which has hitherto been the solid ground under one’s feet. Forever afterward one advances with craven caution, one tries to modify sweeping generalizations by those qualifying clauses which normal human beings instinctively detest. It is unpopular enough business to temper any sweeping generalization whatever--people are uneasy when historians try to qualify to greater truthfulness even such dead issues as opinions on the causes of the Civil War, or what sort of man George Washington really was. But when anyone tries to limit with qualifying phrases the generalizations actually in fashion, then indeed do people cast him out of the righteous ranks of orthodox Plymouth and drive him off to live with the Indians.

Somewhat aloofly then--my natural inheritance of human intolerance inhibited by the certainty that there is much to be said on both sides--and considerably ashamed of my aloofness, I look on at the old struggle being fought as fiercely today as it was twenty years ago.

One of the sweeping generalizations in fashion now is that the late war was caused solely by capitalists and fought either by men naturally brutes, or by finer specimens forced against their will into the ranks by brutalized public opinion. Everybody knows in his heart that this is not a complete statement of the truth, but no one in the ranks of the sophisticated may be permitted to qualify the statement. The tyranny of what is “the thing” to think is as absolute in one direction now as it was during the war when no one was permitted to qualify the equally outrageous statement that the war was caused solely by sympathy for ravaged Belgium and was fought by snowy souled Crusaders.

Another sweeping generalization just now settling itself in the saddle is that middle western American life starves and cramps all souls submitting to it--starves and cramps, that is, more than any other organized human society puts the screws on originality and personality anywhere else. Nobody must qualify that statement under pain of a sentence of exile, passed by the new Pilgrim Fathers, battling gloriously for universal freedom to think as they do.

Another more intimate and personal conviction is that self-control is synonymous with self-mutilation, that self-abnegation is always perverse morbidity.

Another one states that ethics based on enlightened self-interest should and will take the place of religion in human life and that any form of “religion” which involves a mystical sense of communion with a power greater than ourselves, is as out of date in the human mind as the appendix in the human body.

These, since they happen to arouse no personal passion of mine, I can consider calmly. But the Old Adam is not dead in me. Let anyone maintain that the principle of authority _qua_ authority is needed in human life, and every atom of me rises up aflame in denial. I cannot conceive it calmly, cannot put my mind on it impartially as I do on other matters. Any mention of it in my presence is like dropping a lighted match into a keg of gunpowder. I go off with a shattering bang. It is my flaming conviction that _nobody_ should pretend to tell _any_body how to run his life. This conviction seems so axiomatic to me that it was like turning all my brain cells inside out, to get a faint, distant glimpse of the possibility that perhaps, occasionally in some cases, once in a while, the principle of authority might be necessary for the stiffening into shape of certain especially jelly-like temperaments. I don’t believe it! Heavens, no! I can never _believe_ it! But as from time to time I encounter, among the maddeningly diverse specimens of human nature which surround me, a specimen especially inchoate, born without the necessary structure of moral bones, I _almost_ perceive the possibility that even my own pet sweeping generalization may need occasional qualification.

This perception, faint and passing as it is, makes me so dizzy and sick that I am sure I could never act on it. I am not even sure that I could refrain from attacking someone else trying to act on it. I try to be flexible minded and tolerant but I stiffen and flame when that conviction is touched. This makes me understand how other people feel about their special generalizations, how the woman who has fought her way out of a hideous, hide bound, joy killing creed, stiffens and flames at any suggestion that some people need a mystical religion: how a man who has lived with an exasperatingly “devoted mother” flares up ragingly at the idea that self-sacrifice may be commendable. I understand that there is no help for us, that we are none of us battling for freedom of thought. We are battling to set up our dogmatic convictions just as our fathers did, and as we despised them for doing. Our convictions are different from theirs. That is all. We are ready to fight to force on others what Samuel Butler has told us to believe, instead of what Tennyson told our fathers to believe. We don’t intend to allow any variation from our standards if we can help it, any more than they did.

For a time I was greatly cast down over the discovery of this invincible intolerance in all our hearts. Apparently we were no better than anyone else. Had any good come at all of our fine ideas of liberalism and freedom? Had we helped the younger generation in the least?

I began to look around me at the younger generation, the really younger ones, those under adolescence, the ones who have been brought up in the best modern manner, unrepressed by stale old restrictions, unhampered by stale old beliefs. And I began to think that I saw two things: first, that the beliefs from which we revolted are not stale and old to them at all, but gleaming bright with novelty; and second, as to these beliefs of ours which we have tried to force on them, they are preparing a revolt from us, as they advance toward their later teens. One of my modern acquaintances told me the other day, “What do you think? My Jeannette is just crazy about babies. She’ll leave a bunch of her twelve year old playmates _any_ day to fool around the whole afternoon with our neighbor’s eight months old little girl. And she says when she grows up and marries, she wants to have seven children, and _not belong to a single club_! Where does she get such ideas? It’s nothing _I’ve_ taught her; nothing she’s picked up at home!”

It occurs to me that the great saints and heroes of mysticism never come from religious families, but out of a free thinking, materialistic milieu. There comes to me with a clap, what every old woman knows, that rigidly neat housekeepers always have careless, slack daughters and that the daughters of careless, slack housekeepers always react violently into violent tidiness.

I begin to wonder, just wonder speculatively, how Christian ideals will seem to young people who have the intimate excitement and triumph of discovering them under protest, rather than having them crammed down their throats. It occurs to me that perhaps all we have been doing, as we impetuously emptied the baby out of the bath, was to enhance the value of babies. Will not the youngest generation have a perfectly fresh, spontaneous joy in rushing to rescue what we have thrown away? Isn’t it possible that in a generation brought up to ruthless logic _à la_ Shaw, there may be individuals with spiritual and mystical minds, who will revolt against ruthless logic as hotly as we against dogmas, and who, reveling in all the inimitable joys of martyrdom, will fight, bleed, and die for the right to believe in what they believe--even if it is in a religion of faith? Among children brought up to believe that self-development is the highest duty of man, may there not even now be growing up here and there some whose brain cells are different from those of the majority, who will stumble some day by accident into a self-abnegating deed, recognize in the sweetness of the pleasure it gives them their own rightful inheritance, and fleeing the intolerance of the latter day Nietzschean Pilgrim Fathers, betake themselves off to live the life they were meant for? We will persecute them I dare say, and call them reactionary, and hold them up as horrible examples of sentimental self-deception. And all that we will really accomplish, as far as they are concerned, will be to tear from the pure gold of their ideals the disfiguring rags of outgrown dogma, which we mistook for the thing itself.

On the whole, as I think it over, it seems to me that if we do that, we will have done about all that can be expected of any generation. Human progress is slow and spiral. Perhaps, although it is certainly not in the least what we meant to do, that will be counted as our sufficient contribution.

_Oliver Herford_

A slight, white-haired, indefinite, hilariously entertaining gentleman is Oliver Herford. His caricatures, his drawings, his verses, his fables, his essays have long delighted American audiences. He is almost as well known an illustrator as he is a humorist. In a triple capacity, therefore, he is associated with “Life”, for he is also on its staff of editors. He was born in England; but his father who was a preacher brought him in his youth to Boston. He was educated, curiously enough, at Antioch College, Ohio. From this curious background he emerged radiating a sense of humor. He is known as a _farceur_, as a player of practical jokes, as a _bon vivant_. Popular wherever he goes, one hears that since his last trip to England he has become thoroughly American--he no longer wears a monocle.

THE HUNDREDTH AMENDMENT

_A Chapter from The Outline of Posterity_

After the passage of the Ninety-eighth Amendment making it a misdemeanor to “_manufacture, sell, own, possess, purchase, nurse, dandle or otherwise caress or display that effigy of the infant form commonly known as a Doll_” ... the abolition of that feathered symbol of vicarious maternity, the Stork, followed as a matter of course.

The passage of the Anti-Stork Bill or, to be more accurate, the Ninety-ninth Amendment, thanks to the tenacity and tact of President John Quincy Epstein, was the most expeditious piece of legislation put through by the hundred and fifth Congress.

It must not be forgotten, however, that the introduction of lectures on obstetrics into the curriculum of the kindergartens had done much to educate the child vote and that at the time the fate of the Stork was hanging in the balance, that once esteemed Bird of Prurient Evasion was already becoming unpopular and well on its way to join the Dodo.

And now the department of government devoted to the cause of Infant Uplift, having abolished the Mock-Offspring and settled the fate of the Bird of Nativity, cast about for some new Field of Endeavor.

And what more fitting than that they should light upon that hoary old impostor masquerading under the several aliases Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringle, and Father Christmas?

At once the Propaganda was started.

Press agents were engaged, lecture tours arranged, magazines subsidized.

No matter what it might cost, this “Vulture gnawing at the Palladium of Infant Emancipation” must be destroyed!!

Santa Claus, once, in the memory of living men and women, adored by children and winked at by their parents, was now branded as an impostor, a mountebank, a public nuisance, and a perverter of infant intelligence.

Santa Claus was an outlaw from the Commonwealth of Reason.

It was “thumbs down” for Santa!

It may be well to explain right here (since none of the events chronicled in this History has yet happened) that the movement for the Emancipation and Self-Determination of Infants, which has now taken such great strides, had its initiation in the presidential term of Miles Standish Sovietski when Congress extended the franchise to every child over five years of age who had made any serious contribution to literature or higher mathematics.

It was in the same year that President Sovietski signed the Sixty-fourth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, prohibiting the publication of fairy tales, and Congress suspended the Limitation-of-Search Act in order that private libraries and nurseries might be raided without warning and all copies of the forbidden works summarily seized and destroyed.

Simultaneously with the federal enactment, the states of Washington, Illinois, Nevada, and Oregon, ever in the advance of any great intellectual movement, passed laws prohibiting “_the personification or representation, public or private, in theatre, music hall, club house, lodge, church fair, schoolhouse, or private residence, of any supernatural fairy, or otherwise mythical person or persons or fraction thereof_”.

The passing of a Constitutional Amendment was now an almost everyday occurrence. Indeed, since the ratification of the Forty-fourth Amendment prohibiting the use of sarsaparilla as a beverage (coffee and tea had been legislated out of existence five years earlier) the enactment of a new Amendment excited little or no comment. Even the Seventy-ninth Amendment forbidding “_the use of caviar, club sandwiches, and buttonhole bouquets, except for medicinal purposes_”, received only casual notice in the Metropolitan Dailies.

The twentieth century was rapidly nearing its close and the political apathy that for fifty years had been gradually benumbing the Public morale now threatened to paralyze completely what little still remained of courage and initiative.

Even the latest work of Bernard Shaw, “A Bird’s-Eye View of the Infinite”, published (with a five volume preface) on Mr. Shaw’s hundred and fortieth birthday, aroused so little resentment that his projected visit to the United States had to be abandoned, in spite of the fact that “Bean and Soup o’Bean”, written only a week earlier, was acknowledged to have contributed largely to the triumph of the Seventy-ninth Amendment, making Vegetarianism compulsory in the United States.

The Hundredth Amendment passed quickly through the earlier stages of routine and perfunctory debate without any appreciable sign of anything approaching popular protest.

Here and there a guarded expression such as “Poor old Santa! I’m sorry he’s got to go!” was voiced, in the privacy of a club, by some elderly gentleman. Nothing more.

Somewhere, behind Somebody, was a Power that directed and guided,--perhaps threatened. Nobody knew who or what or where it was or in what manner it worked, but work it did and to such purpose that, after a scant week of cut and dried speech-making that deceived no one, the Amendment was submitted unanimously by both houses of Congress and the foregone conclusion of ratification was all that remained to make the abolition of Santa Claus an accomplished fact.

Then, inevitably as fish follows soup, followed the ratification.

The Hundredth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, prohibiting Santa Claus, slipped through the ratification process like an oil prospectus in a mail chute. There was only one hitch, Rhode Island, but since Rhode Island had refused to ratify a single one of the last Seventy-nine Amendments, her action was accepted as part of the program and a proof of unanimity.

So Santa Claus was abolished?

Not so fast please!--Who’s writing this History anyway?

’Twas the night before Christmas
And in the White House
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a *****

For the benefit of the clever reader who may have guessed the word left out in the last line of the above quatrain, I will explain that the asterisks are used in obedience to a clause of the Ninety-first Amendment prohibiting, both in speech and print, the use of the word ***** which, as the political emblem of the Free People’s Party (now happily defunct), came into such contempt that it was made a misdemeanor “_to print, publish, own, sell, purchase, or consult any book, pamphlet, catalogue, circular, or dictionary containing the word_ *****”. It has been estimated that over eighty million dollars’ worth of Century and Standard dictionaries were destroyed in the first year of this Amendment’s operation. The loss in Nursery Rhymes, children’s books, and Natural Histories is beyond computation.

But to return to the White House.

President John Quincy Epstein had retired to his study on the second floor shortly before midnight, taking with him the engrossed copy of the Hundredth Amendment which now only required his Spencerian signature to expunge the name of Santa Claus forever from the American speech and language as utterly and irrevocably as the forbidden word *****.

The hours passed in a perfectly orderly manner, like school children at a fire drill--_one, two, three, four_--without pushing or jostling--_five, six, seven, eight_--(don’t you think history is much more interesting in the form of a simple “Outline” like this than spun out in the common manner?)--_nine, ten--!_ At eleven o’clock the door of the President’s study was burst open by the order of the Vice President, Rebecca Crabtree, now, by a sudden and mysterious stroke of Fate, herself become the President of the United States.

For John Quincy Epstein was dead.

How or just when he died will never be known. Always a cold, forbidding (not to say prohibiting) man, his body when found was still cold--if anything colder; his watch which should have marked the exact moment of his demise, was ticking merrily, so the exact moment will forever remain unrecorded.

But Santa Claus still lives and will live forever!

On the massive gold-inlaid-with-ivory desk (a Christmas gift from the United Department Stores of America), lay a paper, inscribed, and signed in the President’s handwriting, and sealed with his official seal.

It was the presidential veto of the Hundredth Amendment; and by virtue of a clause in Amendment Thirty-three “_no Constitutional Amendment vetoed by the President shall ever be resubmitted to the country nor any fraction thereof_--”

Santa Claus will live forever! Hurray for Santa Claus!

_Benjamin Brawley_

The Negro question in America has become a peculiarly delicate one. I have never met Benjamin Brawley; but he is one of the most respected members of his race in America. He is said to be a preacher of ability and an earnest and able student of letters. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and was educated at Morehouse College, the University of Chicago and Harvard. He is now pastor of a Baptist church in Brockton, Massachusetts. His books vary from discussions of the Negro to works on the drama. I asked him as one of the intellectual leaders among the Negroes to express frankly his opinions of the Negro problem in American writing. This he did, and I have published here, as in +The Bookman+, this strong statement without editorial excision. As representing a viewpoint, I believe it to be exceedingly enlightening.

THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

I have often wondered why someone has not written as a supplement to Lowell an essay entitled “On a Certain Condescension in Americans”. Such an effort, in some small measure at least, might serve to give us a clearer estimate of ourselves.

When the drums beat we are not likely to recall that we are the most inconsistent people in the world. We pride ourselves on spending millions for education, but the draft showed us where we stood, and we have recently been informed that we are merely a nation of sixth-graders. We still value buildings more than brains, and if you will ask the average college student to read aloud a page of Newman or Pater you will see how literate we are. We are aghast at Armenia--naturally, for in Texas we lynch ten men in twice as many days.

We have been accused of intolerance, and a finger has been pointed at the Puritan. As a matter of fact we are exceedingly long suffering. We tolerate everything from sixteen dollar coal to our most recent Congress. We tolerate the Ku Klux Klan. A score of men were killed in Herrin in cold blood, and the authorities are paralyzed. For a sensible liberty loving people we are the most easily browbeaten and bamboozled on this planet, and no one knows this better than the politician.

Our powerlessness, our utter futility in the face of a concrete situation is sometimes amazing. We intend well, but either we ourselves or our machinery are at fault. In our courts the conviction of a man of means does not necessarily imply a real conviction but simply a new trial. We are torn by industrial and social unrest, and for a whole session our statesmen discuss the bonus and ship subsidy with an eye to the next election. Sometimes our national honor is involved. If occasion demands we can send a million men to Europe, but not until we have been trampled upon and our rights flouted for months. Is it any wonder that our flag is not always respected abroad?

Sometimes in our leisurely democracy we develop kindliness at an astonishing rate. Nothing can surpass our real generosity and charity. A few months ago, however, we read that the President of the United States and the Governor of Pennsylvania both interceded for the life of a dog that had been condemned to death. Dick, it appeared, was owned by an alien contrary to law. I could not help wondering about this animal that was able to call forth such remarkable weight of executive clemency. Was it white or black or brown? Did its ancestors come over in the “Mayflower”? Could its grandfather vote? Mark you this, however: you have not for these many years heard of any president’s writing to a governor about a citizen who was sliced or burned to death within these United States.

Our inconsistency does not mean that as a nation we have lost sight of our port. It does mean, however, that we wander needlessly at sea before finding it. Democracy does not always move in a straight line, and sometimes when far off its course it has to make a violent effort to find its way. While moreover we talk about democracy, the fact is that there are always with us those who want something else. In the good old days Rhode Island was the most offensive little slave dealer in the country, and we do not always stop to think that there was a time when the students at Harvard were registered in the catalogue on the basis of their social standing. Among the rockribbed families of Boston there was ever a welcome for the courtly southerner with whom trade was good and behind whom was the romance of plantations and slaves. It is not an accident that in recent discussion of the Jew and the Negro New England has again beckoned to the south. Sooner or later in such a civilization the worm turns; the underdog wriggles out of our grasp; and, the glory of democracy is that it gives him a chance to work out his freedom--and live.

In the new day to which we have come it is necessary first of all then that we keep our faith--faith in our country, in ourselves, in humanity. Let us also as never before honor Truth--not propaganda, not the flattery of a demagogue, and not the jaundice of a hectic journalism, but simple, clear eyed Truth. This will mean that we shall have to readjust many old values and beware of all outgrown shibboleths. Our country is changing, and those persons who insist on abiding by the opinions formed twenty years ago simply insist on living in another age and another world.

With nothing shall we have to be more careful about hasty judgment than with subjects relating to the Negro. Today there is no telling what an individual Negro may or may not do. At the close of the Civil War hardly more than one in ten could read; today illiteracy has been reduced to nearly twenty per cent, and instead of his being your tenant you may even find that the Negro you know is your landlord. The race is increasingly complex, and in some matters of music and other forms of art it is just now among the most “advanced” in the country. The Negro is naturally such an artist and he has such an innate appreciation of acting that, keeping his essential faith unchanged, he is likely to take on a new form of worship quite as easily as a new garment. Just now Bahaism is popular with the esoteric, and since the war cynicism has been developed almost to a cult.

This, however, is only one phase of the matter. The other is that of the strange prominence of the Negro throughout the whole course of American history. In the colonial era it was the economic advantage of slavery over servitude that caused it to displace this institution as a system of labor. Two of the three compromises that entered into the making of the Constitution were prompted by the presence of the Negro in the country; the expansion of the southwest depended on his labor; and the question or the excuse of fugitives was the real key to the Seminole Wars. The Civil War was simply to determine the status of the Negro in the Republic, and the legislation after the war determined for a generation the history not only of the south but very largely of the nation as well. The later disfranchising acts have had overwhelming importance, the unfair system of national representation controlling the election of 1916 and thus the attitude of America in the World War.

Here then are two great themes--that of the Negro’s aspiration and striving, and that of his influence on the American body politic--that might reasonably engage the attention of any writer who desires seriously to base a contribution to American literature on this general topic. The first would call for treatment primarily subjective, the second for treatment largely objective; but in any case the work should be sympathetic in the broadest sense. Such treatment I regret the Negro has not had. With our bigotry and conceit on this subject as no other we have been moved by the condescension of which I spoke in the beginning. Two great fallacies still most frequently recur as major premises. One is that the education of the Negro has been a failure, and the other is that the integrity of the womanhood of the race is always open to question. It makes no difference how much evidence there may be to the contrary, any writer of the day is still likely to start off with these two assumptions. The Negro himself moreover must be either a brute or a villain; no rôle more flattering can be thought of. “Othello” is not yet a popular play with American audiences, and I cannot help recalling that some years ago a Shakespearian company performing “The Merchant of Venice” in Atlanta found it advisable to leave out even the Prince of Morocco, because of local conditions.

Literature is supposed to be the reflection of the national life. Unfortunately much of our recent literature is not complimentary to the country’s life. We have the best printers and publishers in the world, but the books that they are asked to produce--tales of scandal sicklied o’er with sentimentalism--should make the nation blush. A generation ago people smiled at E. P. Roe; but Roe was at least harmless. More recently we have arrived at Harold Bell Wright, but even he has been out-Heroded. If we today go over the list of writers of fiction--especially the women--and consider only those who are most outstanding, the extent to which many will be found to have declined from the ideals with which they started is astonishing. In all this welter of commercialism and sensationalism the Negro’s one request of literature so far as he is concerned, is that it be fearlessly and absolutely honest. Let it portray life, realistically--just as it is, idealistically--as it ought to be, but let it cease to exploit outworn theories or be the vehicle merely of burlesque. A new age--a new world--is upon us, with new men, new visions, new desires. As never before patriotism demands that we see life clearly and see it whole.

It is now a little more than six years ago that I contributed to “The Dial” (then in Chicago) a paper entitled “The Negro in American Fiction”. In that discussion I endeavored to deal at some length with the work of several authors--notably George W. Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon--as well as with that of representative short story writers of the day who had introduced Negro characters into their work. In general I advanced the proposition that in our literature as in our social life we were largely dominated by the mob spirit. Much has happened within six years, and now that the war is four years behind us and we are trying to find the “normalcy” of which we have heard, we may not unreasonably ask if there has been any advance. At once we come face to face with the stories and sketches of E. K. Means and Octavus Roy Cohen, and these we find to be burlesque. Five other works of fiction also come to mind, however--“His Own Country” by Paul Kester, “The Shadow” by Mary White Ovington, “Birthright” by T. S. Stribling, “White and Black” by H. A. Shands, and “J. Poindexter, Colored” by Irvin S. Cobb. The last three of these books, it is interesting to observe, have all appeared within the present year, and practically every one of the five is, if not the only book, at least the first novel by its author. Taken together these books mark an advance, but one would hardly assert that they give an adequate reflection of the Negro problem in a treatment at once faithful, powerful, and tragic. “The Shadow” is honest in purpose and method. “His Own Country” and “White and Black”, however, while containing much of the machinery of tragedy, both fail to be genuine epics. “Birthright”, brilliant in some of its details, begs the whole question with which it undertakes to deal by its attitude on fundamentals, and the treatment of its hero is especially open to attack. J. Poindexter of Paducah, who awakens our interest and who is so thoroughly equal to the wiles and pitfalls of New York, himself advises us not to bother with the race problem. “I ain’t no problem, I’s a pusson,” he says; “I craves to be so reguarded.” To that extent he marks an advance.

As for the race itself, because of the pressing questions incident to and resultant from the war, its literary energy has recently been given mainly to journalistic work rather than to that more imaginative. Within the last few years we have had W. E. Burghardt DuBois’s collection of essays, “Darkwater”, and Claude McKay’s striking volume of poems, “Harlem Shadows”, but in fiction nothing as poignant as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Sport of the Gods” has recently appeared. Several capable writers are appearing on the horizon, however, and within the next few years we may not unreasonably expect more than one work of enduring quality.

It has well been said that to be as good as our fathers were we must be better. As the heirs of the ages it ill becomes us to represent anything but the highest standards of efficiency and the noblest ideals of faith. Our patriotism is too much capitalized; “100 per cent Americanism” too often becomes a specious cry to cover wrong. Has our melting pot been boiling too fast? Very well; let it simmer. Let us not, however, remove the ancient landmark. Let us not be so swept by the fires of bigotry or even by the glamour of industrialism that we fail to take note of men’s souls. Those who have been prosperous and happy can never tell what divine gift may not be in the hands of those who have yearned and suffered. The Negro and the Jew, the Italian and the Pole--“inferior races”, “scum of the earth”--exalted and uplifted, purified as we all must be, each brings something peculiar and eternal to the making of our country.

But, say we, they have not culture. No, they have not; none of us have. Those who think they have most are likely to be the most provincial in their outlook. I think I remember hearing Professor Kittredge remark some years ago that culture is a by-product. We tabulate a certain number of facts, reflect upon a few ideas of our own, add a little religion, and incidentally it may be that after a while we impress those about us as--cultured. As a nation, however, we are still in the making, and when we have all so far to go it ill becomes any of us to scorn any man who is struggling toward the light.