Chapter V (2)

Simple Americanism goes to pieces like the pot of basil in this always expanding tale of a development. There are points about the development, about its acceptance of a "supersensual multiverse", which only a Karl Pearson or an Ernst Mach could satisfactorily discuss or criticize. A reader like myself gazes through the glass bottom of Adams's style into unplumbed depths of speculation. Those depths are clear and crisp. They deserve to be investigated. But a "dynamic theory of history" is no proper inhabitant of autobiography, and "the larger synthesis" is not yet so domesticated as the plebeian idea of God. That Adams should conduct his study to these ends is, in one sense, a magnificent culmination. A theory of life is the fit answer to the supersensual riddle of living. But when the theory must be technical and even professional, an autobiography has no climax in a theory. It is better to revert, as Adams does, to the classic features of human drama: "Even in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone--but never hustled." It is enough to have the knowledge that along certain lines the prime conceptions were shattered and the new conceptions pushed forward, the tree of Adams rooting itself firmly in the twentieth century, coiled round the dynamos and the law of acceleration.

Whatever the value of his theory, Henry Adams embraced the modernity that gradually dawned on him and gave him his new view of life. Take his fresh enthusiasm for world's fairs as a solitary example. One might expect him to be bored by them, but Hunt and Richardson and Stanford White and Burnham emerge heroically as the dramatizers of America, and Henry Adams soared over their obviousness to a perception of their "acutely interesting" exhibits. He was after--something. If the Virgin Mary could give it to him in Normandy, or St. Louis could give it to him among the Jugo-Slavs and the Ruthenians on the Mississippi, well done. No vulgar prejudices held him back. He who could interpret the fight for free silver without a sniff of impatience, who could study Grant without the least filming of patriotism, was not likely to turn up his nose at unfashionable faiths or to espouse fashionable heresies. He was after education and any century back or forward was grist to his mill. And his faith, even, was sure to be a sieve with holes in it. "All one's life," as he confesses grimly, "one had struggled for unity, and unity had always won," yet "the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was increasing, and threatened to increase beyond reason." Beyond reason, then, it was reasonable to proceed, and the son of Ambassador Adams moved from the sanctity of Union with his feet feeling what way they must, and his eye on the star of truth.

So steady is that gaze, one almost forgets how keen it is. But there is no single dullness, as I remember, in 505 large pages, and there are portraits like those of Lodge or La Farge or St. Gaudens or the Adamses, which have the economy and fidelity of Holbein. A colorist Adams is not, nor is he a dramatist. But he has few equals in the succinct expressiveness that his historical sense demands, and he can load a sentence with a world of meaning. Take, for instance, the phrase in which he denies unity to London society. "One wandered about in it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of, at dinner-time." He says of St. Gaudens that "he never laid down the law, or affected the despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the brutalities of his world." In a masterly chapter on woman, he summed up, "The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it.... She must, like the man, marry machinery." In Cambridge "the liveliest and most agreeable of men--James Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William James and a dozen others, who would have made the joy of London or Paris--tried their best to break out and be like other men in Cambridge and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors they had to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it. Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The elements were there; but society cannot be made up of elements--people who are expected to be silent unless they have observations to make--and all the elements are bound to remain apart if required to make observations."

Keen as this is, it does not alter one great fact, that Henry Adams himself felt the necessity of making observations. He approached autobiography buttoned to the neck. Like many bottled-up human beings he had a real impulse to release himself, and to release himself in an autobiography if nowhere else; but spontaneous as was the impulse, he could no more unveil the whole of an Adams to the eye of day than he could dance like Nijinski. In so far as the Adamses were institutional he could talk of them openly, and he could talk of John Hay and Clarence Kink and Henry Cabot Lodge and John La Farge and St. Gaudens as any liberated host might reveal himself in the warm hour after dinner. But this is not the Dionysiac tone of autobiography and Henry Adams was not Dionysiac. He was not limitedly Bostonian. He was sensitive, he was receptive, he was tender, he was more scrod than cod. But the mere mention of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the preface of this autobiography raises doubts as to Henry Adams's evasive principle, "the object of study is the garment, not the figure." The figure, Henry Adams's, had nagging interest for Henry Adams, but something racial required him to veil it. He could not, like a Rousseau or "like a whore, unpack his heart with words."

The subterfuge, in this case, was to lay stress on the word "education." Although he was nearly seventy when he laid the book aside and although education means nothing if it means everything, the whole seventy years were deliberately taken as devotion to a process, that process being visualized much more as the interminable repetition of the educational escalator itself than as the progress of the person who moves forward with it. Moves forward to where? It was the triumph of Henry Adams's detachment that no escalator could move him forward anywhere because he was not bound anywhere in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak of his life as perpetually educational. One reason, of course, was his economic security. There was no wolf to devour him if his education proved incomplete. Faculty _qua_ faculty could remain a permanent quandary to him, so long as he were not forced to be vocational, so long as he could speculate on "a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder."

The unemployed faculty of Henry Adams, however, is one of the principal fascinations of this altogether fascinating book. What was it that kept Henry Adams on a footstool before John Hay? What was it that sent him from Boston to Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres? The man was a capable and ambitious man, if ever there was one. He was not merely erudite and reflective and emancipatingly skeptical: he was also a man of the largest inquiry and the most scrupulous inclusiveness, a man of the nicest temper and the sanest style. How could such justesse go begging, even in the United States? Little bitter as the book is, one feels Henry Adams did go begging. Behind his modest screen he sat waiting for a clientage that never came, while through a hole he could see a steady crowd go pouring into the gilded doors across the way. The modest screen was himself. He could not detach it. But the United States did not see beyond the screen. A light behind a large globule of colored water could at any moment distract it. And in England, for that matter, only the Monckton Milneses kept the Delanes from brushing Adams away, like a fly.

The question is, on what terms did Adams want life? It is characteristic of him that he does not specify. But one gathers from his very reticence that he had least use of all for an existence which required moral multiplicity. Where he seems gravest and least self-superintending is in those criticisms of his friends that indicate the sacrifice of integrity. He was no prig. Not one bleat of priggishness is heard in all his intricate censure of the eminent British statesmen who sapped the Union. But there is a fund of significance in his criticism of Senator Lodge's career, pages 418 and on, in which "the larger study was lost in the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men." It is in a less concerned tone that the New Yorker Roosevelt is discussed. "Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter--the quality that medieval theology assigned to God--he was pure act." Pure act Henry Adams was not. If Roosevelt exhibited "the effect of unlimited power on limited mind," he himself exhibited the contrary effect of limited power on unlimited mind. Why his power remained so limited was the mystery. Was he a watched kettle that could not boil? Or had he no fire in his belly? Or did the fire fail to meet the kettle? Almost any problem of inhibition would be simpler, but one could scarcely help ascribing something to that refrigeration of enthusiasm which is the Bostonian's revenge on wanton life force. Except for his opaline ethics, never glaring yet never dulled, he is manifestly toned down to suit the most neurasthenic exaction. Or, to put it more crudely, he is emotion Fletcherized to the point of inanition.

Pallid and tepid as the result was, in politics, the autobiography is a refutation of anaemia. There was, indeed, something meager about Henry Adams's soul, as there is something meager about a butterfly. But the lack of sanguine or exuberant feeling, the lack of buoyancy and enthusiasm, is merely a hint that one must classify, not a command that one condemn. For all this book's parsimony, for all its psychological silences and timidities, it is an original contribution, transcending caste and class, combining true mind and matter. Compare its comment on education to the comment of Joan and Peter--Henry Adams is to H. G. Wells as triangulation to tape-measuring. That profundity of relations which goes by the name of understanding was part of his very nature. Unlike H. G. Wells, he was incapable of cant. He had no demagoguery, no mob-oratory, no rhetoric. This enclosed him in himself to a dangerous degree, bordered him on priggishness and on egoism. But he had too much quality to succumb to these diseases of the sedentary soul. He survives, and with greatness.

[2] _The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co._

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Sweet and wild, if you like, the first airs of spring, sweeter than anything in later days; but when we make an analogy between spring and youth and believe that the enchantment of one is the enchantment of the other, are we not dreaming a dream?

Youth, like spring, taunts the person who is not a poet. Just because it is formative and fugitive it evokes imagination; it has a bloom too momentary to be self-conscious, vanished almost as soon as it is seen. In boys as well as girls this beauty discloses itself. It is a delicacy as tender as the first green leaf, an innocence like the shimmering dawn, "brightness of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling water and singing birds." People feel this when they accept youth as immaculate and heed its mute expectancies. The mother whose boy is at twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think that youth has the air of spring about it, that spring is the morning of the gods. Youth is so often handsome and straight and fearless; it has its mysterious silences--its beings are beings of clear fire in high spaces, kin with the naked stars. Yet there is in it something not less fiery which is far more human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers on board.

As one grows older one is less impatient of the supposition that innocence actually exists. It exists, even though mothers may not properly interpret it for boys. Its sudden shattering is a barbarism which time may not easily heal. But in reality youth is neither innocence nor experience. It is a duel between innocence and experience, with the attainments of experience guarded from older gaze. Human beings take their contemporaries for granted, no one else: and neither teachers nor superiors nor even parents find it easy to penetrate the veil that innocence and ignorance are supposed to draw around youth.

If youth has borrowed the suppositions about its own innocence, the coming of experience is all the more painful. The process of change is seldom serene, especially if there is eagerness or originality. The impressionable and histrionic youth has incessant disappointment in trying misfit spiritual garments. The undisciplined faculty of make-believe, which is the rudiment of imagination, can go far to torture youthfulness until a few chevrons have been earned and self-acceptance begun.

Do mature people try to help this? Do they remember their own uncertainty and frustration? One of the high points in Mr. Trotter's keen psychological study, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, indicates adult jealousy of the young. Mr. Trotter goes beyond Samuel Butler and Edmund Gosse in generalizing their kind of youthful experience. He shows the forces at work behind the patronizing and victimizing of the young.

The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge and
experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man and to
surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or taste....

Herd instinct, invariably siding with the majority and the
ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of age
and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history,
proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence and
enterprise and in favor of age and caution, the immemorial
wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumbling of senile
decay.

The day will come when our present barbaric attitude toward youth will be altered. Before it can be altered, however, we must completely revise our conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly innocent than it is certainly happy, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounds youth is not to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness. Innocence, besides, can last too long. Every one has pitied stale innocence. If a New York child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may quite easily be shocking to older people. Already, without any particular viciousness or precocity, he has accumulated a huge number of undesirable impressions, and shoved them under the surface of his mind. What, then, to do? The air of spring that is about him need not mislead his guardians. They may as well accept him as a ripe candidate for a naughty world. Repression, in other words, is only one agent of innocence, and not the most successful. Certainly not the most successful for domesticating youth in the sphere that men and women consider fit to be occupied. If youth is invited to remain innocent long after it recognizes the example and feels the impulses of its elders, the invitation will go unaccepted. Youth cannot read the newspapers or see the moving pictures without realizing a discrepancy between conduct and precept, which is one hint to precept to take off its bib.

This knowingness is not quite what it seems to be. Youth is never so young as when experienced. But those who must deal with it cannot lose by making it more articulate, by saving it from the silly adult exclusions of jealousy and pride. For this jealousy and pride continually operates against youth in the name of dignity and discipline. And so the fiction of happy youth is favored, the fiction that portrays youth as the spring time of the spirit; that pipes a song about a lamb, and leads the lamb to slaughter.

THE IRISH REVOLT

"It may be a good thing to forget and forgive; but it is
altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven."

---- G. K. Chesterton in _The Crimes of England_, 1916.

When a rebellion has failed men say it was wicked or foolish. It is, on the contrary, wickedness and folly to judge in these terms. If men rise against authority the measure of their act cannot be loyalty or prudence. It is the character of the authority against which men revolt that must shape one's mind. No free man sets an ultimate value on his life. No free man sets an ultimate sanction on authority. Is it just authority, representative, tolerable? The only revolt that is wicked or foolish is the revolt against reasonable or tolerable authority. If authority is not livable, revolt is a thousand times justified.

The Irish rebellion was not prudent. Its imprudence did not weigh with the men who took to arms. Had hope inspired them, they would have been utterly insane. But hope did not inspire them. They longed for success; they risked and expected death. The only consequence to us, wrote Padraic Pearse before action, is that some of us may be launched into eternity. "But who are we, that we should hesitate to die for Ireland? Are not the claims of Ireland greater on us than any personal ones? Is it fear that deters us from such an enterprise? Away with such fears. Cowards die many times, the brave only die once." To strike a decisive blow was the aspiration of the Irish rebels. But decisive or not, they made up their minds to take action before the government succeeded in attaching all their arms.

In this rebellion there was no chance of material victory. Pearse, MacDonagh, Connolly, Clark, Plunkett, O'Rahilly, O'Hanrahan, Daly, Hobson, Casement, could only hope against hope. But their essential objective was not a soldiery. It was an idea, the idea of unprotested English authority in Ireland. It was to protest against the Irish nation's remaining a Crown Colony of the British Empire that these men raised their republican standard and under it shed their blood. In the first process of that revolt few of them were immediately sacrificed. Their fight was well planned. They made the most of their brief hour. But when they were captured the authority they had opposed fulfilled their expectations to the utmost. Before three army officers, without a legal defender, each of the leaders was condemned by court-martial. Their rebellion had been open. Their guilt was known and granted. They met, as they expected to meet, death.

The insurrection in Ireland is ended. A cold tribunal has finished by piecework the task that the soldiers began. The British Empire is still dominant in Dublin. But ruthless and remorseless behavior sharpens the issue between authority and rebellion. Even men who naturally condemn disorder feel impelled to scrutinize the authority which could deliberately dispense such doom. If that authority deserved respect in Ireland, if it stood for justice and the maintenance of right, its exaction of the pound of flesh cannot be questioned. It does not represent "frightfulness." It represents stern justice. Its hand should be universally upheld. But if, on the other hand, English authority did not deserve respect in Ireland, if it had forfeited its claims on these Irishmen, then there is something to be made known and said about the way in which this Empire can abuse its power.

Between the Irish people and English authority, as every one knows, there has been an interminable struggle. A tolerable solution of this contest has only recently seemed in sight. The military necessity of England has of itself precluded one solution, the complete independence of Ireland. The desire for self-government in Ireland has opposed another solution, complete acquiescence in the union. Between these two goals the struggle has raged bitterly. But human beings cannot live forever in profitless conflict. After many years the majority of the English people took up and ratified the Irish claims to self-government. In spite of the conservative element in England and the British element in Ireland, the _modus vivendi_ of home rule was arranged. It is the fate of this _modus vivendi_, accepted by the majority of Irishmen as a reasonable commutation of their claims, that explains the recent insurrection. These men who are dead were once for the most part Home Rulers. Their rebellion came about as a sequel to the unjust and dishonest handling of home rule.

For thirty-five years home rule has been an issue in Great Britain. The majority of the British people supported Gladstone during many home rule sessions. The lower house of Parliament repeatedly passed the measure. The House of Lords, however, turned a face of stone to Ireland. It icily rejected Ireland's offer to compound her claims. This irreconcilable attitude proved in the end so monstrous that English Liberalism revolted. It threw its weight against the rigid body that denied it. It compelled the House of Lords to accept the Parliament act, its scheme for circumventing the peers' veto. Then, three times in succession, it passed the home rule bill.

Every one knows what happened. During the probation of the bill the forces that could no longer avoid it constitutionally made up their minds that they would defeat it unconstitutionally. Men left the House of Lords and the House of Commons to raise troops in eastern Ulster. These, not the Irish, were Germany's primary allies in the British Isles. Cannon, machine guns, and rifles were shipped to Ireland. Every possible descendant of the implanted settlers of Ireland was rallied. Large numbers were openly recruited and armed. The Ulster leaders pleaded they were loyal, but they insisted that the Liberals of England did not and could not speak for the Empire. The only English authority they recognized was an authority like-minded to themselves. Lord Northcliffe joined with Lord Londonderry and Lord Abercorn and Lord Willoughby de Broke and Lord Roberts and Sir Edward Carson and Bonar Law to advise and stimulate rebellion. Some of the best British generals in the army, to the delight of Germany, were definitely available as leaders. A provisional government, with Carson as its premier, was arranged for in 1911. The Unionist and Orange organizations pledged themselves that under no conditions would they acknowledge a home rule government or obey its decrees. In 1912 the Solemn Covenanters pledged themselves "to refuse to recognize its authority." During this period the government negotiated, but took no action. There were no Nationalists under arms.

If free men have a right to rebel, how can any one gainsay Ulster? It was the Ulster contention that home rule would be unreasonable, intolerable, and unjust. This was a prophecy, perhaps a natural and credible prophecy. But it is not necessary to debate the Ulster rebellion. It was a hard heritage of England's crime against Ireland. It is enough to say that English authority refused to abandon the home rule measure and in April, 1914, Mr. Asquith promised to vindicate the law.

The British League for the support of Ulster had sent out "war calls." The Ulster Unionist Council had appropriated $5,000,000 for volunteer widows and orphans. Arms had been landed from America and, it was said, from Germany. Carson had refused to "negotiate" any further. His mobilization in 1914 became ominous. The government started in moving troops to Ulster. The King intervened. Mr. Balfour inveighed against the proposal to use troops. The army consulted with Carson. Generals French and Ewart resigned.

About this period, with Asquith and Birrell failing to put England's pledges to the proof, the National Volunteers at last were being organized. Mr. Asquith temporized further. At his behest John Redmond peremptorily assumed control of the Volunteers. Their selected leader was Professor MacNeill, a foremost spirit in the non-political Gaelic revival. There was formal harmony until the European war was declared, when Mr. Redmond sought to utilize the National Volunteers for recruiting. This move made definite the purely national dedication of the Irish Volunteers.

Four events occurred in rapid succession to destroy the Irish Volunteers' confidence in English authority. These were decisive events, and yet events over which the Irish Volunteers could have no control.

On July 10th, 1914, armed Ulster Volunteers marched through Belfast, and Sir Edward Carson held the first meeting of his provisional government.

On July 26th, 1914, the British troops killed three persons and wounded thirty-two persons because rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin, subsequent to their futile attempt to intercept Irish Volunteer arms.

On Sept. 19th, 1914, the home rule bill was signed, but its operation indefinitely suspended.

In May, 1915, Sir Edward Carson became a member of the British Cabinet.

These events were endured by John Redmond. He had early accepted a Fabian policy and put his trust in Englishmen who shirked paying the price of maintaining the law they decreed. The more radical men in Dublin were not so trusting. They had heard Asquith promise that no permanent division of Ireland would be permitted, and they learned he had bargained for it. They had heard him promise he would vindicate the law, and they saw him sanction the defiant military leader as commander-in-chief and the defiant civil leader as a minister of the crown. With the vivid memory of British troops killing Irish citizens on the streets of Dublin, they drew their conclusions as to English honor. They had no impulse to recruit for the defense on the Continent of an Empire thus honorable. They looked back on the evil history they had been ready to forget. They prepared to strike and to die.

Irishmen like myself who believed in home rule and disbelieved in revolution did not agree with this spirit. We thought southern Ireland might persuade Ulster. We thought English authority was possibly weak and shifty, but benign. We did not wish to see Ireland, in the words of Professor MacNeill, go fornicating with Germany. When our brothers went to the European war we took England's gratitude as heartfelt and her repentance as deep. Our history was one of forcible conquest, torture, rape, enforced subservience, ignorance, poverty, famine. But we listened to G. K. Chesterton about Englishmen in relation to magnanimous Ireland: "It was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment."

All the deeper, then, the shock we received from the execution of our men of finest mettle. They were guilty of rebellion in wartime, but so was De Wet in South Africa. There seems to have been a calculation based on the greater military strength of the Dutch. A government which had negotiated with rebels in the North, which had allowed the retention of arms in Ulster, which had put Carson in the Cabinet, could not mark an eternal bias in its judgment of brave men whose legitimate constitutional prospects it had raised high and then intolerably suspended. But this English government, often cringing and supine, was brave enough to slay one imprisoned rebel after another. It did so in the name of "justice," the judges in this rebellion being officers of an army that had refused to stand against rebellion in Ulster.

It is not in vain, however, that these poets and Gaelic scholars and Republicans have stood blindfolded to be shot by English soldiers. Their verdict on English authority was scarcely in fault. They estimated with just contemptuousness the temper of a ruling class whose yoke Ireland has long been compelled to endure. Until that yoke is gone from Ireland, by the fulfillment of England's bond, the memory of this rebellion must flourish. It testifies sadly but heroically that there are still Irishmen who cannot be sold over the counter, Irishmen who set no ultimate sanction on a dishonest authority, Irishmen who set no ultimate value on their merely mortal lives.

A LIMB OF THE LAW

"Look here," said the policeman, tapping me on the chest, "Mrs. Trotsky used to live up here above on Simpson Avenue, in three rooms. And then see what happens--she turns up in Stockholm with two million roubles."

"Oh, I don't blame her. But ain't we all human--Socialists, Democrats, Republicans? All we need is a chance."

"I admit, Socialism has beautiful ideas. But are they practical? That's what I ask. Now, pardon me, just a minute! Just one minute, please! Socialism is a fine theory, but look at Emma Goldman. That woman had seven lovers. Free love. Yes, many a time I've heard them, preaching the children belonged to the state. Here's their argument, see, they say that a man and a woman wants to get married but the man figures, have I enough to support her? and the woman figures, how much has he got? and the only thing for them to do in that case is to turn the children over to the state. Now, I ask you, is that human?"

"You say, a lot of these women in limousines practice free love without preaching it. Oh, I don't deny it. And, look't here, I'm surprised there isn't more bombs at that. Right here on the Avenue you see the cars in one long procession all day, like every one was a millionaire, and three blocks over you see people who haven't the means of livelihood, without a shirt to their backs. I'm a public officer, as you might say, and maybe it sounds queer what I'm going to say, but I'm afraid to have my own children on the steps of the apartment house. I takes the night-stick to them and I says, 'Beat it out of here, don't let the landlord see you, or he'll raise the rent again.'"

"You said it, something's rotten somewhere. What do you think of the government holding back all that meat, just because the packers want it fixed that way, and plenty of people on the Lower East Side there willing to buy it all up--and at good prices too? But, no, it has to be held back to suit the packers. And then they lower the price a little. Because why? The government lets them have all that meat for what they like."

"It's the same way with the ice. Did you see what they done? The mayor gets them all together, to prevent them boosting the price on it, and it's fixed; they can't raise the price this summer to more than five fifty a ton. They wait two days at the old price, and then they put it at five fifty. Two days they wait, that's all."

"Of course this is the best government in the world. I'll tell you what proves it--all these foreigners coming over here. Look at that soda-fountain man there. You heard him talk up for the Bolsheviki, didn't you? Well, he hasn't much gray matter in here, but just the same that fellow makes as much in three months as I get for a whole lousy year. Three months, and he hasn't been here ten years. And my people been here two hundred. But these immigrants come over ignorant and uneducated, and only down in Kentucky and Tennessee are our people not able to read and write. I hear down there they are regular tribes, fighting each other and all that. Of course that soda-fountain man, he couldn't associate with lots of the people I go with. If he walked in, they'd look at him as much as to say, 'Who have we here?' But he rolls up the coin just the same."

"But the trouble with the Russian people, I'll tell you. Why, eighty per cent of them can't read or write. Now I'll tell you what it's like. It's like this: the Russian people is like a dog was tied up in the back-yard, see, and then he was let loose and he run wild with joy all over the place, and then it depended who was the first to whistle to him, whee-whee, and Lenin and Trotsky they whistled, whee-whee, and the Russian people came right to them. Of course I don't think it'll work. They want to do away with money over there. You know, you want to buy a shoeshine and you give a man a head of cabbage. That's impractical. And then again the government can't own everything. It's all right for public utilities, but you take and try to control everything and what'll happen? It can't be done. What I say is, let a man earn a million or so, and then say to him, anything over and above that million we take away, see? And when he has his million he doesn't go on trying to monopolize everything. But now, you have all these uneducated people around here, and the more money they earn the worse they are."

"I'll tell you. Right across the hall from where my wife and me live there's a lovely woman, a Jewess, one of the nicest people you could want to meet, and I'm in her house and she's in mine all the time, until her husband comes home. But he's one of that kind, you know! The other night he comes home with three friends and he says to me, 'Say, Charlie, come on down to Long Island with us in the car for a week. I'll pay all your expenses!' 'You will, eh,' I says. 'Now I'll tell you something. That sort of thing don't go with me. In the first place, you know I can't get leave to be away from the police department for a week; in the second place, you know I can't leave my wife here; in the third place, you know damn well I can't afford to go with you. I know your kind! You have your three friends here and you want them to see what a great guy you are. Well, I'll tell you what you are,' and I told him. Now he'll be the same if he has a million. And I'll tell you another kind that hasn't respectability. No, I mean decency. She was a big fat woman and her baby was crying here the other day, and she opened her dress right there and leaned down to feed the child. You know, just like that statue, I forget the name. And all the little boys rubbering around. That's the class of people you have to contend with around here in this place, with the air full of fish guts they throw out of the windows, and everything."

"But the German ones are different. Not that I want to praise the Germans or the like of that, but they're self-respectful, you know. It's the lack of education with them others--those others."

"But you put the Socialists in power and what difference will it make? I'm--I'm not against Socialism, I want you to understand. But there's human nature!"

A PERSONAL PANTHEON

Not long ago, in the Metropolitan Magazine, Clarence Day shied a cocoanut at old Henri Fabre. Personally I had nothing against Henri. I rather liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clarence said publicly, "that old bird-artist, you don't have to admire him any longer." Without waiting for further encouragement I bounced Henri off the steps of my Pantheon.

Have you a little Pantheon? It is necessary, I admit, but nothing is so important as to keep it from getting crowded with half-gods. For many months my own Pantheon has been seriously congested. Most of the ancient deities are still around--George Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom Hardy and Sam Butler--and there is a long waiting list suggested by my friends. Joseph Conrad has been sitting in the lobby for several years, hungering for a vacant pedestal, and I have had repeated applications from such varied persons as Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau, Anatole France, Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P. Shelley, John Muir, George Washington and Mary Wollstonecraft. But with so many occupants already installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed in, it has been impossible to open the doors to newcomers. My gods are like the office-holders--few die and none resign. And when a happy accident occurs, like the demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel as one feels when some third person is good enough to smash the jardiniere.

I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while. Two or three years ago he swept into the Pantheon on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest gods I had ever encountered. His smile, his long jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a Tussaud figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and William Blakes. I stood him in the corner when he first arrived, debating where to put him, but at no time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young Teddy Junior helped me to like Woodrow. So did Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all, had kept Mr. Wilson from being a Republican? How did he differ intrinsically from a Henry Stimson, a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton? The pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had not the heart to enthrone him; and never shall I enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and commonplace humanity. He is President, as was Taft. So is he impressive. But the expectation I had blown up for him is punctured. He would have been a god, despite all my prejudice against his styles, if at any time he had proved himself to be the resolute democrat. But the resolute democrat he was not. He was just an ordinary college president inflating his chest as well as he could, and he has to get out of my Pantheon.

This eviction of the President relieves my feelings like a good spring cleaning. To be con-structive gives me pleasure, but not half so much pleasure as to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former mental and spiritual habitations. A great many people are catholic. They have hearts in which Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East Lynne. I envy these people and their receptive natures, but my own chief joy is to asphyxiate my young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bondage of loyalty.

There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I was unjust to Upton Sinclair that I almost subscribed to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel, Jimmie Higgins, I actually read it.

"My best book," Mr. Sinclair assures the world. If that is really the case, as I hope, I am happily emancipated from him forever. He is something of an artist. He converts into his own kind of music the muck-rake element in contemporary journalism. He is always a propagandist, and out of religious finance or the war or high society or the stockyards or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on such stimulants, one ought to choose them carefully, and I'd much rather go straight to Billy Sunday than take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on reading his well-known health books, I nearly fasted nine days under his influence. That is to say, I fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which I dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced me that I was perhaps a coarser organism than Mr. Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an ordinary diet. But until I had a good reason for expelling this uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was always in danger of taking him seriously. Now, I am glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am safe.

Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom Upton Sinclair is nothing but a gargoyle; yet the expulsion of Nietzsche was also required. When we used to read the _New Age_ ten years ago, with Oscar Levy's steady derision of everything and anything not Nietzschean, I had a horrible sense of inadequacy, and I started out to read the Master's works. It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and worm as I was, I found Nietzsche upsetting all the other fellows in the Pantheon. He and William Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christianity. Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny stories. He was sulky with George Meredith and frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but I voted him away.

This Olympian problem does not seem to bother men like William Marion Reedy. Mr. Reedy is the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops and publishers, and he is genuinely himself with all of them. He finds the common denominator in machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and without turning a hair he moves from tropical to arctic conversation. He is at home with Celtic fairies and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance and St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe he has, it must be a good deal like a Union depot, with gods coming in and departing on every train and he himself holding a glorious reception at the information booth. I am sure he can still see the silver lining to W. J. Bryan and the presidential timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a good word for Freud. He has nothing against Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This receptivity puzzles me. A person with such open sympathies is called upon to slave in their service, to rush here and there like a general practitioner, to sleep with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at his head. How does he find the energy to do it! I admire it. I marvel at men who understand all and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt Whitman. Think of those who have a good word to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a lot of much-needed vitality. Give me a temple on a high hill, with a long drop down from the exit.

NIGHT LODGING

It is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim Gorki's Night Lodging of "gloom." Gloomy plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a play like She Walked in Her Sleep? That defunct comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies that. But to believe that a somber play must necessarily be a "gloomy" play is like believing that Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply isn't true, and to suppose it is mentally inelastic.

But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We say, Ah yes, Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen, the man who bites on granite; or Gorki, the Big Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are simply human beings who have got beyond the comprehensions of the fifth grade. This is itself an old story in criticism. Only the story has to be re-told every time the New York newspaper critics are called upon to characterize a serious drama. With a regularity as unfailing as the moon, the New York critics reaffirm their conviction that a play concerning derelict human beings must of course be squalid, sodden, high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to believe and assert such things, yet their belief and assertion are endemic in the New York newspapers, like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps.

Mr. Arthur Hopkins's presentation of Night Lodging at the Plymouth Theatre may or may not be better than the presentation some time ago at the German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the performance at the German theatre and I am inclined to distrust the persons to whom the German theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick with which to whack the American theatre. But, better or worse than the German performance, Mr. Hopkins's is to the good. It is a strong, firm, spacious, capable performance, resting not so much on a few pinnacles as on a general level of excellence. It is presented bravely. Making no attempt to sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics, it allows the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate every word and action of the performance. The result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every actor in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness. But the result is viable, Russian or not. A sense of human incident and human presence is quickly secured, and after that there comes a stream of events which never loses its reality either in force or direction. The impact is tremendous. Gorki inundates one's consciousness with these human fortunes and misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while occasional accents slip awry in the tumult of his creation, the substance of his story finds one a corroborator--in a way that one simply never corroborates depression or gloom.

The men and women, who come together in this night lodging of a Russian city, are of the emancipated kind that one sees on the benches in Madison Square. They are recruited from the casual worker and the non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the criminals and the broken and the declasse. On the first evening when one hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement, one realizes that their anarchism is bitter. They grate on one another, sneer at one another, bawl at one another, tell one another to go to hell. They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled them. They do not understand or accept their fate. They are full of self-pity. They are, in a word, one's tired and naked self. But this relaxed and wanton selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps for his people the freshness of childhood--a freshness charming in some cases, horrible in others, but always with a touch of immortality. How they reveal themselves in this nudity of common poverty! A woman in the corner is coughing, coughing. She wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies a man half recovered from a drunken brawl. He aches loudly with stale liquor and stale wounds. In the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the wife of the lodging-house keeper--a mistress from whom he pines to escape. The "baron" sits in the shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young actor repeats the medical verdict that his organism is poisoned with alcohol. "You mean 'organon,'" shouts another. "No, organism. My organism...." And so, these lives sweep round and round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the sport of the winds of heaven.

Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical patriarchal wanderer. Quite simply he fits into this life of the basement, but unlike the rest he is no longer self-centered or self-afflicted. He walks erect in his anarchism. And gradually the lives of the night lodging group around him. He sits by the dying woman. He talks of women to the young thief, and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beckoning to the young. He stands like an untroubled oak in the gales that toss the others hither and thither. Lord, he has seen life! And he meets them all with compassion, a man among children.

He goes. His presence has not prevented the lodging-house keeper's wife from driving the young man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented that flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the young man really loves. But though the old man departs he leaves after him a rent of blue in the clouds that choke these people's lives. One after another the night lodgers question life afresh under the wanderer's influence. The tartar's arm is still smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The actor is still alcoholic. But there is aroused in the night lodging the imperishable dream of happiness, and no one is ready to quench it.

Why is the grave and beautiful play _not_ gloomy? It is not enough to say that the really gloomy play gives a naturalistic version of life which the spectator rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows or in its discords but in its absence of the vitamin of beauty. Many plays are denied truth because their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied beauty simply because their beauty is a stranger. Yet we know that truth or beauty may be as sable as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the child of ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental, conventional ugliness. It is the people who think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail in beholding life. It is not poor in sympathy.

YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC

In 1912, I think it was, Mr. Roosevelt told the public how Mr. Taft had bitten the hand that fed him. I have forgotten Mr. Taft's rejoinder but it was a hot rejoinder and it led to some further observations from the colonel. Those were the days. Nothing but peace on earth and good will among Republicans.

About that time I happened to have lunch with a most attractive young man, one of the first American aviators. He was such a clear-cut young man, with trusting brown eyes and no guile in him. And said he to me, "But how can these things be true? I can't understand it. If any one else said these things you'd pay no attention to them, but both of these men are fine men; they've both been president; and if these things they say _are_ true, then neither of them can be such fine gentlemen. I can't make it out, honestly." And he looked at me with a profundity of pained inquiry.

What could I say? What can you say when you meet with such simple faith? It took years of primary school and Fourth of July and American history to build up this conception of the American presidents, and now the worst efforts of a president and an ex-president had only barely shaken the top-structure. What was the good of forcing this youth to unlearn everything he had learned? If I took away his faith in the divine office of president, perhaps he might begin to lose his patriotism and his willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Perhaps he might go on and lose faith in the jury system, the institution of marriage, the right of free speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance of Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endowment. If I unhinged this lad's faith, perhaps he would follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther, Voltaire, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw and Emma Goldman--the "Goldman Woman" as the Ochs man and the Pulitzer man and the Ogden Mills Reed man call her in their outbursts of American chivalry. I wanted no such arid and lonely career for this splendid young man. I hated to think of his wearing an ironic smile like Anatole France or losing his fresh bloom to be a subversive idealist like Eugene Debs. Much better, said I to myself, that he should hug Taft to his bosom, even if mistaken, than that he should repulse him and face life without him. So I gave the lad soothing words and earnest though insincere glances, and he went his way puzzled but greatly reassured.