Chapter C: E. Montague, in Disenchantment, puts it beautifully

Ever since those disconcerting bombs [i. e., _the words of
Christ_] were originally thrown courageous divines and laymen
have been rushing in to pick them up and throw them away,
combining as well as they could an air of respect for the
thrower with tender care for the mental ease of congregations
occupied generally in making money and occasionally in making
war. Yet there they lie, miraculously permanent and disturbing,
as if just thrown. Now and then one will go off, with seismic
results, in the mind of some St. Francis or Tolstoy.

The Buddha, sitting under his Bo Tree (_ficus religiosa_--and it is fairly obvious why so many philosophers have chosen fig trees to sit under; a really lusty fig will bear, according to the New International Encyclopædia, three crops of fruit in a season, thus keeping the eremite well fed; and a fig, L. E. W. says, is what he doesn’t give for the ideas of rival magi) is to us an enviable vision. We wonder how his meditations would have fared if there had been a telephone at the foot of the tree.

The only drawback, as far as we are concerned, to becoming a Buddhist is the vow to abstain from intoxicating liquors. In this respect the Western religions seem to us more liberal. We have meditated long and earnestly on the subject and still have never been able to understand why an occasional exhilarating drink should be contrary to any wise man’s ethic. Indeed, if Nirvana (or Perfect Release from Struggle) is the object of life, we have seen it well attained by three or four juleps or Tom-and-Jerries. The lay Buddhist has to take five vows; the Bhikshus (or Brotherhood of the Elect) take ten. Some of these additional vows required of the Bhikshu are:

_I vow and promise not to eat food at unseasonable times--that
is, after the midday meal._

_I vow and promise not to dance, sing light songs, frequent
public amusements, and, in short, to avoid worldly dissipation
of every kind._

_I vow and promise not to wear any kind of ornament, nor to use
any scents or perfumes, and, in short, to avoid whatever tends
to vanity._

_I promise and vow to give up the use of soft bedding and to
sleep on a hard, low couch._

These, we admit, present some difficulties. Frequenting “public amusements” offers too many opportunities for quibble. In one sense every possible mingling with the world is a public amusement. If there is anything more amusing than a smoking car full of men or a Broadway pavement at lunch time we don’t know what it could be. Sleeping on a hard, low couch is easy enough--we can sleep anywhere with equal satisfaction, even on the floor. The queer thing that we always notice about every kind of moral code is that, sooner or later, it begins to lose sight of the distinction between essentials and non-essentials. Such matters as intoxicating drink and public amusements should not be (for the Western philosopher) subject to prescriptive legislation. The individual may very rightly impose restraints upon himself in non-essential matters; but to lay them upon him from above is to stultify the whole purport of ethics--which, if we understand it, is to encourage and develop a worthy personal will. And the Buddhist Catechism recognizes this in a very potent phrase--“Every one of us must become his own redeemer.”

But Buddhism seems to have a firm grasp on one very essential and valuable idea, which is comparatively rare among religions. Thus the Catechism:

43. _Does Buddhism teach its followers to hate, despise, or
persecute non-believers?_

Quite the reverse. It teaches us to love all men as brethren,
without distinction of race, nationality, or creed; to respect
the convictions of men of other beliefs, and to be careful
to avoid all religious controversy. The Buddhist religion is
imbued with the purest spirit of perfect toleration. Even where
dominant, it has never oppressed or persecuted non-believers,
and its success has never been attended with bloodshed.
The true Buddhist does not feel hatred, but only pity and
compassion for him who will not acknowledge or listen to the
truth, to his own loss and injury only.

Of course, all forms of human attempt to unscrew the inscrutable are fascinating and full of interest. The Westerner, however, is a bit troubled when he finds “Love of life on earth” listed among the “ten fetters” which, according to the Buddha, prevent the soul from receiving full freedom and enlightenment. That seems, to our earth-bound and muddied conceptions, a shabby doctrine. Even the most timid tincture of good manners suggests that a life so exciting, so amusing, so painful, so perplexing, and so variously endowed with unearned beauty and amazement deserves at least a courteous gratefulness on our part. Mr. C. E. Montague (if you will allow us to quote him once more), explains what we mean:

Among the mind’s powers is one that comes of itself to many
children and artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his
days, by any one who has ever had it. This is the power of
taking delight in a thing, or rather in anything, everything,
not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what
it is.... A child in the full health of his mind will put his
hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little shiver
of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not
thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep
upon.... No matter what the things may be, no matter what they
are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling
unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron
astringently cool under its paint, the painted wood familiarly
warmer, the clod crumbling enchantingly down in the hands, with
its little dry smell of the sun and of hot nettles; each common
thing a personality marked by delicious differences.

It is this sensuous cheerfulness in mere living, apparently, that the Buddhist would have us cast away. You remember Rupert Brooke’s fine poem _The Great Lover_. Western students may be pardoned for wondering whether “Love of life on earth,” whatever that life’s miseries, ills, and absurdities, is not too precious to be tossed lightly aside.

INTELLECTUALS AND ROUGHNECKS

I

We look forward with keen interest to reading _Civilization in the United States_, the work of thirty-three independent observers commenting upon various phases of the American scene. So far we have only glanced into it, and have already found much that looks as though it needed contradiction. It is obviously going to be a gloomy book, rather strongly flavoured with intellectual ammonia. Of course, it is a healthy thing that some of our Intellectuals are so depressed about America. It is a good thing for a nation, as it is for an individual, occasionally to go home at night cursing itself for being a boob, a numbskull, and a mental flounder. But we feel about some of our Extreme Intellectuals as we do about the Physical Culture restaurants. The people in these restaurants eat nothing but vitamines and plasms and protose; they live in an atmosphere of carefully planned Scandinavian hygiene; yet most of them look mysteriously pallid. And some of our most Conscientious Brows, in spite of leading lives of carefully regulated meditation, don’t seem any too robust in the region of the wits.

However, we shall study this book with care. It contains articles by a number of people whom we admire specially. What we have been wondering is whether among its rather acid comments it gives any panoramic picture of the America we see daily and admire--an America which, in spite of comical simplicities and tragic misdirections of energy, seems to us, in vitality, curiosity, and surprising beauty, the most thrilling experiment of the human race.

In one article in this book we find the following:

Everything in our society tends to check the growth of the
spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual
in himself. Considered with reference to its higher
manifestations, life itself has been thus far, in modern
America, a failure. Of this the failure of our literature is
merely emblematic. Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges
that the only hope of a change for the better lies in the
development of a native aristocracy that will stand between
the writer and the public, supporting him, appreciating him,
forming as it were a _cordon sanitaire_ between the individual
and the mob.

Well, our confidence in ourself is not yet wholly shattered, in spite of the grinding horror of American life. We feel confident enough to venture that this theory is dubious. Greatness in literature does not need to be protected from the insanitary infection of the mob. How Charles Dickens would have roared at such a timid little bluesock doctrine! Great writers do not need any clique of private appreciators or supporters. They are not produced by plaintive patter about ideals and the pride of the “artist.” They arise haphazard, and they carry in them an anger, an energy, and a fecundity that deny all classroom rules. And the mob, heaven help us! is the ground and source of their strength and their happiness. Nothing can “check the growth of their spirit,” because the spirit is big enough to turn everything to its own inscrutable account. You might as well say that Shakespeare couldn’t write great plays because the typewriter hadn’t been invented.

Of course, if by “a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public,” we are to understand an efficient service of tactful office boys and mendacious telephone girls to keep the chance caller from cutting the mortal artery of Time, we applaud. But we fear that is not meant.

When we get weary of upstage comments about literature we go aloft and have a talk to the fellows in the composing room (who, by the way, are all reading _Moby Dick_ nowadays). There is no priggishness in their criticism. They have the sound, sober, sincere instinct--as when one of them tells us, with magnificent insight, that _Moby Dick_ is “Hamlet stuff.” When professional connoisseurs can teach us as much as the composing room can about the human values that lie behind literature, then we will mend our manners.

The more we think about it, the more we are staggered by the statement that American life “tends to check the growth of the spirit.” To us the exact opposite seems true. American life as we see it all round us seems to be crying aloud for a spirit great enough to grasp and express it. It seems the most prodigious and stimulating material that any writer ever had for his contemplation. It is a perpetual challenge to the imagination--a challenge that hardly any one since Whitman has been great enough, or daring enough, to deal with; but to say that it stunts the spirit can only be valid as a personal opinion. It is to say that a hungry man going into a restaurant loses his appetite.

II

We have ventured a little further into _Civilization in the United States_ (which someone has said should really be called “Civilization between Fourteenth Street and Washington Square”) and, to tell the truth, we are astounded. This time we are astounded by the extraordinary mellow gravity of the Young Intellectual. It is sad, by the way, that the editor of the volume is actually not much younger than ourself; but indeed he makes us feel immeasurably aged and decadent.

There are, of course, admirable things in the book. Mr. Mencken is at his best in his attack upon Congressional mediocrity. Messrs. Macy, Van Loon, Lardner, and Ernest Boyd carry us with them, as they very often do. Mr. Henry Longan Stuart’s “As an Englishman Sees It” is the most quietly pregnant of the essays we have read. But we must confess that when the editor (Mr. Harold Stearns) writes on “The Intellectual Life” he leaves us puzzled and unhappy.

Perhaps Professor Colby’s contribution on “Humour” affords a clue. At first we did not quite “get” it; we did not realize that Mr. Colby was having his little joke at the expense of some of the masculine Hermiones who met fortnightly (so Mr. Stearns assures us) at the editor’s home “to clarify their individual fields, and contribute towards the advance of intellectual life in America.” After reading the appalling solemnities of Mr. Stearns’s Preface we realize how charmingly Mr. Colby is (as becomes a veteran) chaffing the young pyrophags. He remarks that the “upper literary class” in America is utterly devoid of humour. This intramural stab he must have meditated at one of those fortnightly meetings while the chairman was remarking that “the most moving and pathetic fact in the social life of America to-day is emotional and æsthetic starvation.”

When young men of thirty or so begin to talk about “contributing to the advance of intellectual life in America” they should do it with a smile. Otherwise someone else will have to do the smiling for them.

Consider the weight of the Great Problems faced by the editor of _Civilization in America_ at those fortnightly meetings, while (let us hope) the elder members, such as Jack Macy and Professor Colby, smiled a trifle wanly--

... “These larger points of policy were decided by common
agreement or, on occasion, by majority vote, and to the end I
settled no important question without consultation with as many
members of the group as I could approach within the limited
time we had agreed to have this volume in the hands of the
publisher. But with the extension of the scope of the book, the
negotiations with the publisher, and the mass of complexities
and details that are inevitable in so difficult an enterprise,
the authority to decide specific questions and the usual
editorial powers were delegated as a matter of convenience to
me, aided by a committee of three.”

But you must read that Preface entire, to get the full humour of the matter, to get the self-destroying seriousness of the Young Intellectual. It ought to be reprinted as a pamphlet for the warning of college students. Consider the syntax of the first sentence quoted above, as a “contribution to intellectual life in America.” For our own part, after reading that Preface we couldn’t help turning to the quiet and modest little prefaces of some of the great books, e. g., _Leviathan_ and _Religio Medici_.

We must not be ill humoured. The editor of the volume, we are told, has made his own contribution to the intellectual life in America by leaving for Paris as soon as the proofs were corrected. He is perhaps a victim of that oldest of American sophomore superstitions--the idea that Paris is the only city of the world where men of letters may enjoy true freedom of the body and the spirit. Mr. Stearns has for some time been threatening that the sterility and coarseness of American life will drive our sensitive young men overseas. Well, the rest of us must shuffle along as best we can, and see what we can do with this poor tawdry civilization of ours. And incidentally, as a gesture of divorce from American crassness, going to Paris and taking a job on the Parisian edition of the New York _Herald_ seems to us inadequate. We are reminded of another Young Intellectual--in Chicago this time--who greatly yearned to write a masterpiece of obscenity, but could not spell Messalina correctly.

Mr. Stearns speaks of himself and his friends as “unhappy intellectuals educated beyond our environment.” There is a roaring risibility in this that leaves us prostrate. The tragedy is that they apparently mean it. We admire their sincerity, their high-mindedness, and all that, but even at the risk of seeming argumentative we cannot, as long as honesty and clear thinking mean anything, let that sort of remark go by unprotested. It is impossible for any man to be educated beyond his environment--whatever that environment may be. For no man can be greater than Life itself, and in whatever field of life he may be placed, if he has the true insight and the true humility, he will find material for his art. The extraordinary panorama of American life, whatever its cruelties and absurdities, should be glowing material for any artist with the genuine receptive and creative gift. The real “artist” (since our Intellectuals love that term) will not timidly crawl into a corner and squeak; nor need he run away to some imagined Utopia abroad.

Perhaps this is a more serious matter than we had supposed. We are one of the stoutest--one of the sincerest, let us say, to avoid misunderstanding--partisans of the Young Intellectual. We used to like, in our wilder moments, to think ourself almost one of them. But it looks now as though we should have to organize a new clique--the Young Roughnecks. The Young Intellectuals are too easily pleased with themselves. In the first place, we honestly believe that few men have any real critical balance and judgment before they are forty. In the second place, the Young Intellectuals are perilously devoid of humour. Of that rich, magical, grotesque, and savoury quality they have far too little. They have it, but it works spasmodically.

We welcome a book like _Civilization in America_ because it shows in a clear cross-cutting what is wrong with a great many excellent young minds. They are quick to scoff, but they are not humorous; they are eager for human perfection, but want to escape from humanity itself. They say a great many admirable things, true things; but so condescendingly that, by some quaint perversion, they impel us to fly to the opposite view. Life itself, apparently, is too multitudinous, too terrible for them. They enjoy pouring ridicule upon the world of business and upon the business man. We should like to see them tackle their own tasks with the same devotion and lack of parade that the business man shows. Some of the most amazing beauties of American life have been the work of quiet business men who were not clamouring for admiration as “artists.” Our friends the Intellectuals keep shouting that the “creative class” (so they call themselves) must be more admired, more respected, more appreciated. We answer, they are already respected and applauded as much as--perhaps more than--is good for them. Let them cease to consider themselves a class above and apart. They are too painfully conscious of being “artists.” They make us feel like gathering a group of Young Roughnecks--let us say Heywood Broun and H. I. Phillips for a nucleus--and going off in a corner to be constructively and creatively vulgar.

THE FUN OF WRITING

On the way to the station this warm / chilly morning [_Note to Linotype Man: Please kill the inappropriate adjective; we like to be accurate, and this April weather is so inconstant_] we were thinking how little appreciated is the true pleasure of writing.

Writing is an art (or, if you prefer, a trade) never wholly and properly enjoyed except by the intensely indolent. What we mean is this: there are a lot of things in life that are not at all as they should be. But the writer, by magnificent pretence, improves all that. Gardening, for instance. No one enjoys seeing beds thickly decorated with bright flowers and superb vegetables more than we do. But the grubby and tiresome task of groping about with trowels and quicklime and all the other fertilizers is distasteful. Getting sweet peas to climb is a noxious business. Somehow the seedsman always palms off on us a kind of horizontal sweet pea that runs lowly along the ground and never blossoms at all. But take up the pen, or typewriter, and how quickly everything is rectified. When you set to work to compose a story, how easy it is to have things nice and genteel. Thus:

Out in the bland freshness of the suburban morning, Mr.
Frogbones was enjoying his garden. In twin beds under the tall
French windows the gardenias and sunflowers were just opening
towards the violent orb. Sweet peas and daffodils and vast
claret-coloured roses aspired upon a green trellis. “How I
love a little nosegay,” he said, as he clipped off a couple of
dozen of the great cider-tinted chrysanthemums, and bore them
indoors to his wife. In the breakfast room a well-trained maid
servant was putting the fragrant coffee on the table and the
children were drinking their morning milk with neatness and
gusto. “Elise,” said Mrs. Frogbones to the maid, “you may bring
in the sausages, kidneys, bacon, scrambled eggs, anchovy toast,
marmalade, grape fruit, porridge, raisin bread, and gooseberry
jam. Mr. Frogbones is ready for breakfast.”

Now what could be easier, what could be more agreeable, than to write that? And yet not a word of it is true. We know Henry Frogbones well: his garden is contemptible; the maid’s coffee is execrable, and she is going to leave at the end of the week anyway; his children roar with anguish when they see a mug of milk, which they detest. But how pleasant it is to lend a hand to the travailing universe when you are writing.

As Henry Frogbones finished his ample breakfast the large
absinthe-coloured limousine rolled with a quiet crunch
across the terrace which was pebbled with small blue gravel.
He slipped on his new herringbone surtout, lit a fine black
cheroot, hitched up one spat which had got twisted, and rolled
away to town. Ambrose, the chauffeur, was accustomed to his
employer’s ways: he drove gently so that Mr. Frogbones could
read the morning paper with comfort. After an hour’s ride
through exquisite scenery [_if the editor pays more than
five cents a word, it may be well to describe this scenery_]
Mr. Frogbones reached his office, where the morning mail had
already been opened and classified by a competent assistant. In
the anteroom a number of callers were waiting, held in check by
a respectful young man who was explaining to them that no one
can possibly disturb Mr. Frogbones until his morning article is
written....

As a matter of fact, we don’t feel that we can go on with this any further; it is beginning to seem too unlikely. But it only seems unlikely to us, because we know the truth about old Frogbones. The average magazine reader would swallow it without cavil. That is why we say that writing is huge fun, because you can solve all the perplexities and distractions of life as you go along, and really enjoy yourself at the same time, and (most remarkable of all) get paid for it.

A CHRISTMAS SOLILOQUY

I

In the most peaceful spot known to American life--a railroad train--we had several hours of that pleasure which offices are devised to prevent, viz., meditation; or even (if we may dare so high) thought. Our thoughts, or whatever they are that go round inside you when you are sitting passively in a train, were tinged by the approach of Christmas.

There was evidently something in the bright air and pre-Christmas feeling of that December afternoon that even softened the heart of the news butcher, for we noticed as the train hastened along the Connecticut shore his manner became more and more fond. He began, at Grand Central, in a mood of formality, even austerity. “Lots of nice reading matter here, gentlemen,” he cried. “Get a nice short story book” (by “book” he meant, of course, magazine) “to kill time for a coupla hours.” We thought, perhaps a little sadly, of the irony of begging men to annul Time when they had happily reached almost the only place in America where it can be enjoyed, examined, taken apart, and looked at. But, perhaps due to a niggardly spirit among his congregation in the smoker, the agent gradually became more fraternal. His manner was almost bedside by the time we had got to New Rochelle. “Choclut pepmints, figs, and lemon drops, fellas!” And at Stamford he was beginning to despair. “Peanuts: they’re delicious, boys.” We made up our mind, by the way, as to the correct answer to our old question, Where does New England begin? The frontier is at South Norwalk, for there we saw a sign _The New England Cereal Company_. And just about there, also, begin the billboards urging Codfish, surely the authentic image and superscription of New England.

Of course there is a great deal to think about in the signs you see along the track. There is that notice:

+------------+
| DANGEROUS |
| LIVE WIRES |
| KEEP AWAY |
+------------+

which is a good advice socially as well as electrically. But we thought that these warnings were a bit unfair to New England, where there are fewer human Live Wires than there are south of the Harlem Strait. We remembered a certain club in Philadelphia of which the bitter-minded used to say it was the only organization in the world whose membership was 100 per cent. Live Wires, Regular Fellows, and Go-Getters.

As we went through Greenwich, Riverside, Westport, we admired the blue shore of Long Island lying so placidly across the Sound. And it struck us almost with a sense of shock that there are a great many people to whom Long Island is only a dim, unreal haze on the horizon. Yes, foreign travel is a brisk aperient to the mind. We remembered, as we always do when travelling on the New Haven, Robert Louis Stevenson’s delight when he first went that way. In one of his letters he speaks of the succession of beautiful rocky coves that saluted his eye. “Why,” he wrote, “have Americans been so unfair to their own country?”

It would be impossible to tell you all the things we thought about: they have already faded. We did not forget our duty, as a travelling mandarin, to be a little magisterial when occasion seemed to require it. In the station at New Haven, for instance, there is a young woman, most remarkably coifed, who presides at the tobacco counter. She seemed of a notably cheerful and lenient disposition, and we ventured a remark upon the weather. She said she wished it would snow, so that she could have some real fun, by which she meant, we dare say, a little bobsledding with the youths of Yale College. We thought that this showed a dangerous inappreciation of her general opulent good fortune in being young, comely, and attached to a tobacco traffic. We looked at her quite sternly and said, “Young women can always have a good time, no matter what the weather.” To our regret, as we hastened on toward the Springfield train, we heard her squeaking with mirth.

But the starting point of our meditation was an attempt to describe and dissect this curious pre-Christmas feeling, which is one of the most subtle and genuine adventures of the whole year. When we try to examine it in its components we see that the whole thing is too delicate and pervasive for analysis. What are its ingredients? we said to ourself. We thought of the little shrill tingling bells of the Salvation Army; we thought of the warm juicy smell of roasting chicken that out-gushes from a certain rotisserie in Jamaica, Long Island. We thought of the bright colours and toys in the windows of that glorious main street in Jamaica, which is where we do our Christmas shopping. We thought of all the sparkle, the chill, clear air, the general bustle of the streets, that one associates with the Christmas season; and of the undercurrent of dumb and troubled realization of human misery and stupidity and frustration that comes to some more clearly now than at any other time. And we thought also of the mockers and the cheerful skeptics, to whom any candid expression of a simple human emotion is cause for nipping laughter. Never mind, we said to ourself, there is at least one time of year when they can all afford to put away their shining paradoxes and their gingerbread cynicisms--like the gilded circus wagons we saw shut up in winter quarters at Bridgeport.

Probably the most sensitive and complex of human sensations is the pre-Christmas feeling: because it is not merely personal but communal; not merely communal but national; not merely national but even international. We know then that for a few weeks a great part of the world is busily thinking of the same things: how it can surprise its friends, how it can encourage the miserable, how it can amuse the harmless. Even the dingiest street has its pathetic badges of colour. It is a great thing to have such a widespread community of sentiment, which, however varying in expression, is identical in essence. One may be amused when he sees the Christmas Annuals published by Australian magazines and finds under the title _A Happy Christmas in New South Wales_ a photograph of girls in muslin enjoying themselves by picnicking along shady streams with canoes and mosquito nettings. That kind of Christmas, we think, would seem very grotesque for us, but our friends the New South Welsh evidently find it exhilarating.

But it is that mysterious and agreeable pre-Christmas feeling which is the best of the whole matter. Christmas Day itself is sometimes almost too feverish a business of picking up blizzards of wrapping paper, convincing the Urchin that his own toys are just as interesting as the Urchiness’s, and treading on tiptoe for fear of walking on the clockwork train or the lurking doll. At Christmas time we always think--probably we are the only person who does--of the late admirable William Stubbs, once Bishop of Oxford and Regius Professor of history, the author of those three fat mulberry coloured volumes _The Constitutional History of England_, a work far from easy to read, and which, when we were compelled to study it, seemed of an intolerable dullness. Bishop Stubbs, in the dreadful words of the _Dictionary of National Biography_, “never forgot that he was a clergyman.” It is also said that “his lectures never attracted a large audience.” But what we are getting at is this, that on Christmas Day, 1873, the excellent Bishop retired from the gambols and gayeties of his five sons and one daughter and wrote the preface to his History. We love to think of him, worthy man, shutting himself up from the Yuletide riot in roomy old Kettel Hall (now a part of Trinity College, Oxford) and sitting down to write those words, “The History of Institutions cannot be mastered--can scarcely be approached--without an effort.” Now that we are somewhat matured, we think that we could probably reread his _Constitutional History_ with much profit. In that Christmas Day preface, written while the young Stubbses were (we suppose) filling the house with juvenile clamour, there is one phrase that catches our eye as we take the book down for its annual dusting:

“Constitutional History reads the exploits and characters of men by a different light from that shed by the false glare of arms. The world’s heroes are no heroes to it.”

II

We shall remember the Christmas of 1921, partly, at any rate, by the wonderful succession of pellucid, frosty, moonlit nights that preceded it. We walked round and round our rustic grange trying to focus just what we wanted to say to our friends as a Christmas greeting. A curious misery was upon our spirit, for we felt that in many ways we had been recreant to the spirit of friendship. When we think, for instance, of the unanswered letters.... We have sinned horribly. Yet we wanted to give ourself the selfish pleasure of saying a word of affection to those who have been kind to us, and to whom, in the foolish but unavoidable hurry of daily affairs, we have been discourteous. (The way to love humanity, we said to ourself, is not to see too much of it.) Moreover, to write a kind of Christmas sermon is, apparently, to put one’s self into the loathsome false position of seeming to assume those virtues one praises.

We remember the first clergyman who made an impression upon our childish mind. It was in a country church in a village where we were visiting some kinsmen. This parson was a great bearded fellow, long since gone the way of flesh. He was a bit of a ritualist; his white surplice and embroidered streamers of red and gold impressed us enormously. He came very close to our idea of Divinity itself. We used to sit and hear him booming away and think, vaguely, how wonderful to be as virtuous as that. When the organ throbbed and his vast gray beard rose ecstatically above his white-robed chest we thought that here was Goodness incarnate. Years later we asked what had become of him. We heard that he had lost his job because he drank too much. The more we think about that the tenderer our feeling is towards his memory. Only the sinner has a right to preach.

Thinking about this pre-Christmas feeling, and wanting to say something about it, but not knowing how, we got (as we started to tell you) on a train. We went, for a few hours, to another city. There we saw, exhilaratingly different, but fundamentally the same, the shining business of life going forward. The people in that city were carrying on their own affairs, were hotfoot upon their own concerns; we saw their eager, absorbed faces, and what struck us was, here are all these people, whose lives are totally sundered from our own, but they have, at heart, the same hopes and aspirations, the same follies, weaknesses, disgusts, and bitternesses as ourself. And the same would be so of a thousand cities, and of a hundred thousand. Then we got into one of those things called a sleeper, which ought to be called a thinker. An ideal cloister for meditation. All down the dark aisle we could hear the innocent snores of our fellows, but we ourself lay wakeful. We felt rather like the mystic Russian peasant who goes to bed in his coffin. We were whirled along through a midnight landscape of transparent white moonlight, and, quite as cheerful as the dead child in Hans Andersen borne through starry space by the angel, we made our peace with everything. We claim no credit for this. We would have slept if we could. There was a huge bump in the middle of the berth, and there was a vile cold draught. We read part of Stephen Crane’s magnificent sketch _The Scotch Express_. But those miserable little dim lamps----

And then, strangely enough, there came a sudden realization of the amazing richness and fecundity of life. Every signboard along the railroad track is an illustration of it. Hideous enough, still it is a kind of endless vista into the huge jumble of human affairs. Here is a billboard crying out something about a Spark Plug, or about the Hotel Theresa; or on the side of a little shabby brick tenement a painted legend about Bromo Seltzer. Someone worked to put that advertisement up; someone had sufficient credulity or gambling audacity to pay for it; somewhere children are fed and clothed by that spark plug. Christmas itself suddenly seemed a kind of spark plug that ignites the gases and vapours of selfishness and distrust and explodes them away. Everything seemed extraordinarily gallant and exciting. Take the Hotel Theresa, for instance. We had never heard of it before. It is on 125th Street, we gathered. We would like to wager that all sorts of adventures are lying in wait up there, if we can slip away and go looking for them.

As we were lying in our cool tomb (Carl Sandburg’s phrase) in the thinking car, we meditated something like this: Christmas is certainly a time when a reasonable man should overhaul his religion and see if it amounts to anything. Christmas is a time when millions of people are thinking of the same thing. Humanity is so constituted that you can never get the world to agree about things that have happened; but it is happily at one about something that probably never happened--the Christmas story as told in the Gospels. If millions of simple people believe a thing, that doesn’t make it true; but perhaps it makes it better than true: it makes it Poetry, it makes it Beauty. Stephen Graham says, in that moving book _With Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem_ (which certainly ought to be read by every one who is at all interested in religion; it is published by Thomas Nelson & Sons; you may have to get it from London, we don’t believe it is in print over here)--Stephen Graham says:

True Religion takes its rise out of Mystery, and not out of
Miracle.

Religion, which has proved to be one of the greatest dividing and hostilizing forces in the world, is in its essence just the opposite. Surely, in the origin of the word, religion means a binding together, a ligament. Now take the most opposite people you can think of--say Babe Ruth and the Sultan of Turkey (is there still a Sultan?); or say Mr. Balfour and the chap who runs the elevator in this office. No matter how different these may be in training and outlook, there will be some province of human thought and emotion, some small, sensitive spot of the mind, in which they can meet and feel at one. We can imagine them sitting down together for lunch and having a mutually improving time, each admiring and enjoying the other. Widen the incongruity of the individuals as much as you like: imagine Mr. Joseph Conrad and Dr. Berthold Baer; or Mr. James W. Elliott (the Business Builder) and Mahatma Gandhi--we care not who they are, if they can make their thoughts intelligible to each other they can find that remote but definite point of tangency where any experienced mind can meet and sympathize with any other human mind, discussing the problems of destiny which are common to all. It is this Common Multiple of humanity, this sensitive pulse in the mind, this realization of a universal share in an overburdening mystery too real to be ignored, but too terrific to be defined or blurbed about, that is the province of religion.

And then the devil of it (for there is always a Devil in every sensible religion) is that the best way to be sure there is this possible point of junction is not to attempt to find it. Both Mr. Balfour and the cheerful elevator boy would probably pray heartily to be delivered from sitting down to lunch together. This mysterious mental sensitive spot that we speak of remains sensitive only as long as it remains private and secret. Perhaps religion can be defined as a sense of human fellowship that is best preserved by not being too companionable.

We were thinking, too, how extremely modern and contemporary the Christmas story seems. It is appropriate that the final instalment of the Income Tax falls just before Christmas. The same thing happened 1921 years ago. “There went out a decree that all the world should be taxed,” says Luke. That was why Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem--to pay their tax. And we can imagine that the Bethlehem _Evening Star_, if there had been newspapers at that time, would have had a column of social notes just similar in spirit to those of our own press to-day. The arrival of Joseph and Mary would not have been noticed. We might have read:

Mr. and Mrs. Pharisee of “White Sepulchre,” Galilee, are
spending the winter at the Tiberius Hotel.

The Hon. Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judæa, is enjoying a
week-end visit with Tetrarch and Mrs. Herod at the tetrarchal
mansion.

Mr. and Mrs. Philip Herod are travelling in Syria for the
winter. Mrs. Herod was before her marriage Miss Herodias,
socially prominent.

Prof. Melchior, Prof. Balthazar, and Prof. Gaspar arrived last
night from the West. They are said to be in town for some
astronomical investigations. The professors had great trouble
in securing hotel accommodations, the city being so crowded.

Rev. Caiaphas, one of the most respected High Priests in this
diocese, has an apartment for the winter at Philactery Court.

The train pursued its steady way through the moonlight, and the silvered loveliness of earth and trees made us think generously of our own country. We are still foolish enough to love this America of ours with a dumb queer love. We still believe that in spite of Senates and Live Wires, in spite of the antics of some of the half-educated and well-meaning men who “govern” us, this country has a unique contribution to make to the world in future years. There should be international Christmas cards: there should be some way of one nation surprising another with a friendly message on the Morning of Mornings. We believe (perhaps we are not impartial) that the English-speaking race, by its contributions to human liberty, has a right to a leading place in the world’s affairs; but if it gives way to its characteristic vice of arrogance, we weary of it. We think of the feminine brilliance, charm, and emotional volatility of France; of the beautiful sensibility and self-control of Japan; of the melancholy idealism of Russia; of the sober industry of Germany. Have we, then, nothing to learn from these? Printers’ ink is scattered about these days with such profusion that it becomes almost meaningless. Sitting in the subway, and raising our eye plaintively from a newspaper to an advertising card, we have wondered which was the greater menace, Pyorrhea or Japan? Both were said to be menaces. It is our own conviction that nothing can be a menace to America but itself.

This seems a dismal kind of Christmas homily, but we enjoyed ourself immensely while we were meditating it in our lower berth. Very likely if it had been an upper berth the result would have been different. In any case, we take the liberty of wishing our friends--who are, by this time, too indurated to feel surprise or chagrin at anything we may say--a Merry Christmas. We wish for them a cheerful and laborious New Year, with good books to read, and both the time and the inclination to think. We even wish for them occasional eccentric seizures, such as we feel at the present; when we have a dim suspicion that behind the noble and never sufficiently praised comedy of life there lies some simple satisfying answer to many gropings. A simple thing, but too terrible and far-reaching ever to be wholly put into practice by puzzled and compromising mankind. We mean, of course, the teachings of Christ. Consider the German generals and military men, who lost everything. But the German toymakers conquered the world.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.