Part 2

We might be sure of the same thing to-day, were it not for the tendency of the modern woman to sever her rights and wrongs from the rights and wrongs of men; thereby resembling the disputant who, being content to receive half the severed baby, was adjudged by the wise Solomon to be unworthy of any baby at all. Half a baby is every whit as valuable as the half-measure of reform which fails to take into impartial consideration the inseparable claims of men and women. Even in that most vital of all reforms, the crusade against social evils, the welfare of both sexes unifies the subject. Here again we are swayed by our anger at the indifference of an earlier generation, at the hard and healthy attitude of men like Huxley, who had not imagination enough to identify the possible saint with the certain sinner, and who habitually confined their labours to fields which promised sure results. “In my judgment,” wrote Huxley, “a domestic servant, who is perhaps giving half her wages to support her old parents, is more worthy of help than half a dozen Magdalens.”

If we are forced to choose between them,--yes. But our esteem for the servant’s self-respecting life, with its decent restraints and its purely normal activities, need not necessarily harden our hearts against the women whom Mr. Huxley called “Magdalens,” nor against those whom we luridly designate as “white slaves.” No work under Heaven is more imperative than the rescue of young and innocent girls; no crime is more dastardly than the sale of their youth and innocence; no charity is greater than that which lifts the sinner from her sin. But the fact that we habitually apply the term “white slave” to the wilful prostitute as well as to the entrapped child shows that a powerful and popular sentiment is absolved from the shackles of accuracy. Also that this absolution confuses the minds of men. The sentimentalist pities the prostitute as a victim; the sociologist abhors her as a menace. The sentimentalist conceives that men prey, and women are preyed upon; the sociologist, aware that evil men and women prey upon one another ceaselessly and ravenously, has no measure of mercy for sin. The sentimentalist clings tenaciously to the association of youth with innocence; the sociologist knows that even the age-limit which the law fixes as a boundary-line of innocence has no corresponding restriction in fact. It is inconceivable that so many books and pamphlets dealing with this subject--books and pamphlets now to be found on every library shelf, and in the hands of young and old--should dare to ignore the balance of depravity, the swaying of the pendulum of vice.

A new and painful instance of the cost of modern sentiment is afforded by the statement of Miss Addams and other pacifists that middle-aged men are in favour of strengthened defences, and that young men oppose them, as savouring of militarism; that middle-aged men cling to the belief that war may be just and righteous, and that young men reject it, as unreservedly and inevitably evil. I am loath to accept this statement, as I am loath to accept all unpleasant statements; but if it be--as I presume it is--based upon data, or upon careful observation, it fits closely with my argument. The men under thirty are the men who have done their thinking in an era of undiluted sentiment. The men over forty were trained in a simpler, sterner creed. The call to duty embraced for them the call to arms.

“A country’s a thing men should die for at need.”

Some of them remember the days when Americans died for their country, and it is a recollection good for the soul. Again, the men over forty were taught by men; the men under thirty were taught by women; and the most dangerous economy practised by our extravagant Republic is the eliminating of the male teacher from our public schools. It is no insult to femininity to say that the feminization of boys is not a desirable development.

It was thought and said a few years ago that the substitution of organized charities for the somewhat haphazard benevolence of our youth would exclude sentiment, just as it excluded human and personal relations with the poor. It was thought and said that the steady advance of women in commercial and civic life would correct the sentimental bias which only Mr. Chesterton has failed to observe in the sex. No one who reads books and newspapers, or listens to speeches, or indulges in the pleasures of conversation can any longer cherish these illusions. No one can fail to see that sentiment is the motor power which drives us to intemperate words and actions; which weakens our judgment, and destroys our sense of proportion. The current phraseology, the current criticisms, the current enthusiasms of the day, all betray an excess of emotionalism. I pick up a table of statistics, furnishing economic data, and this is what I read: “Case 3. Two children under five. Mother shortly expecting the supreme trial of womanhood.” That is the way to write stories, and, possibly, sermons; but it is not the way to write reports. I pick up a newspaper, and learn that an Englishman visiting the United States has made the interesting announcement that he is a reincarnation of one of the Pharaohs, and that an attentive and credulous band of disciples are gathering wisdom from his lips. I pick up a very serious and very well-written book on the Brontë sisters, and am told that if I would “touch the very heart of the mystery that was Charlotte Brontë” (I had never been aware that there was anything mysterious about this famous lady), I will find it--save the mark!--in her passionate love for children.

“We are face to face here, not with a want, but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness, and longing, and frustration; with a passion that found no clear voice in her works because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined, unuttered, unutterable!”

It was certainly unuttered. It was not even hinted at in Miss Brontë’s novels, nor in her voluminous correspondence. Her attitude toward children--so far as it found expression--was the arid but pardonable attitude of one who had been their reluctant caretaker and teacher. If, as we are now told, “there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see the children born of and possessed by other women,” there were certainly hours--so much she makes clear to us--in which the business of looking after them wearied her beyond her powers of endurance. It is true that Miss Brontë said a few, a very few friendly words about these little people. She did not, like Swift, propose that babies should be cooked and eaten. But this temperate regard, this restricted benevolence, gives us no excuse for wallowing in sentiment at her expense.

“If some virtues are new, all vices are old.” We can reckon the cost of misdirected emotions by the price which the past has paid for them. We know the full significance of that irresponsible sympathy which grows hysterical over animals it should soberly protect; which accuses the consumer of strange cruelties to the producer; which condones lawbreaking and vindicates the lawbreaker; which admits no difference between attack and resistance, between a war of aggression and a war of defence; which confuses moral issues, ignores experience, and insults the intelligence of mankind.

The reformer whose heart is in the right place, but whose head is elsewhere, represents a waste of force; and we cannot afford any waste in the conservation of honour and goodness. We cannot afford errors of judgment, or errors of taste. The business of leading lives morally worthy of men is neither simple nor easy. And there are moments when, with the ageing Fontenelle, we sigh and say, “I am beginning to see things as they are. It is surely time for me to die.”

Our Loss of Nerve

If any lover of Hogarth will look at the series of pictures which tell the story of the Idle and the Industrious Apprentice, he will feel that while the industrious apprentice fitted admirably into his time and place, the idle apprentice had the misfortune to be born out of date. In what a different spirit would his tragic tale be told to-day, and what different emotions it would awaken. A poor tired boy, who ought to be at school or at play, sleeping for very exhaustion at his loom. A cruel boss daring to strike the worn-out lad. No better playground given him in the scant leisure which Sunday brings than a loathsome grave-yard. No healthier sport provided for him than gaming. And, in the end, a lack of living wage forcing him to steal. Unhappy apprentice, to have lived and sinned nearly two centuries too soon! And as if this were not a fate bitter enough for tears, he must needs have contrasted with him at every step an industrious companion, whom that unenlightened age permitted to work as hard as he pleased, even for the benefit of a master, and to build up his own fortunes on the foundation of his own worth. Hogarth’s simple conception of personal responsibility and of personal equation is as obsolete as the clumsy looms at which his apprentices sit, and the full-skirted coats they wear.

Yet the softening of the hard old rules, the rigid old standards, has not tended to strengthen the fibre of our race. Nobody supposes that the industrious apprentice had an enjoyable boyhood. As far as we can see, going to church was his sole recreation, as it was probably the principal recreation of his master’s daughter, whose hymn-book he shares, and whom he duly marries. _Her_ home-life doubtless bore a strong resemblance to the home-life of the tumultuous heroine of “Fanny’s First Play,” who tells us with a heaving breast that she never knew what a glorious thing life was until she had knocked out a policeman’s tooth. Hogarth’s young lady would probably have cared little for this form of exercise, even had the London policemen of 1748 been the chivalrous sufferers they were in 1911. She is a buxom, demure damsel; and in her, as in the lad by her side, there is a suggestion of reserve power. They are citizens in the making, prepared to accept soberly the restrictions and responsibilities of citizenship, and to follow with relish the star of their own destinies.

And all things considered, what can be better than to make a good job out of a given piece of work? “That intricate web of normal expectation,” which Mr. Gilbert Murray tells us is the very essence of human society, provides incentives for reasonable men and women, and provides also compensations for courage. What Mr. Murray calls a “failure of nerve” in Greek philosophy and Greek religion is the relaxing of effort, the letting down of obligation. With the asceticism imposed, or at least induced, by Christianity, “the sacrifice of one part of human nature to another, that it may live in what survives the more completely,” he has but scant and narrow sympathy; but he explains with characteristic clearness that the ideals of Greek citizenship withered and died, because of a weakening of faith in normal human resistance. “All the last manifestations of Hellenistic religion betray a lack of nerve.”

It is with the best intentions in the world that we Americans are now engaged in letting down the walls of human resistance, in lessening personal obligation; and already the failure of nerve is apparent on every side. We begin our kindly ministrations with the little kindergarten scholar, to whom work is presented as play, and who is expected to absorb the elements of education without conscious effort, and certainly without compulsion. We encourage him to feel that the business of his teacher is to keep him interested in his task, and that he is justified in stopping short as soon as any mental process becomes irksome or difficult. Indeed, I do not know why I permit myself the use of the word “task,” since by common consent it is banished from the vocabulary of school. Professor Gilman said it was a word which should never be spoken by teacher, never heard by pupil, and no doubt a kind-hearted public cordially agreed with him.

The firm old belief that the task is a valuable asset in education, that the making of a good job out of a given piece of work is about the highest thing on earth, has lost its hold upon the world. The firm old disbelief in a royal road to learning has vanished long ago. All knowledge, we are told, can be made so attractive that school-children will absorb it with delight. If they are not absorbing it, the teacher is to blame. Professor Wiener tells us that when his precocious little son failed to acquire the multiplication tables, he took him away from school, and let him study advanced mathematics. Whereupon the child discovered the tables for himself. Mrs. John Macy, well known to the community as the friend and instructor of Miss Helen Keller, has informed a listening world that she does not see why a child should study _anything_ in which he is not interested. “It is a waste of energy.”

Naturally, it is hard to convince parents--who have the illusions common to their estate--that while exceptional methods may answer for exceptional cases (little William Pitt, for instance, was trained from early boyhood to be a prime minister), common methods have their value for the rank and file. It is harder still to make them understand that enjoyment cannot with safety be accepted as a determining factor in education, and that the mental and moral discipline which comes of hard and perhaps unwilling study is worth a mine of pleasantly acquired information. It is not, after all, a smattering of chemistry, or an acquaintance with the habits of bees, which will carry our children through life; but a capacity for doing what they do not want to do, if it be a thing which needs to be done. They will have to do many things they do not want to do later on, if their lives are going to be worth the living, and the sooner they learn to stand to their guns, the better for them, and for all those whose welfare will lie in their hands.

The assumption that children should never be coerced into self-control, and never confronted with difficulties, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that young people should never be burdened with responsibilities, and never, under any stress of circumstances, be deprived of the pleasures which are no longer a privilege, but their sacred and inalienable right, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that married women are justified in abandoning their domestic duties, because they cannot stand the strain of home-life and housekeeping, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that invalids must yield to invalidism, must isolate themselves from common currents of life, and from strong and stern incentives to recovery, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that religion should content itself with persuasiveness, and that morality should be sparing in its demands, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that a denial of civic rights constitutes a release from moral obligations makes for such a shattering failure of nerve that it brings insanity in its wake. And the assumption that poverty justifies prostitution, or exonerates the prostitute, lets down the last walls of human resistance. It is easier to find a royal road to learning than a royal road to self-mastery and self-respect.

A student of Mr. Whistler’s once said to him that she did not want to paint in the low tones he recommended; she wanted to keep her colours clear and bright. “Then,” replied Mr. Whistler, “you must keep them in your tubes. It is the only way.” If we want bright colours and easy methods, we must stay in our tubes, and avoid the inevitable complications of life by careful and consistent uselessness. We may nurse our nerves in comfortable seclusion at home, or we may brace them with travel and change of scene. It does not matter; we are tube-dwellers under any skies. We may be so dependent upon amusements that we never call them anything but duties; or we may be as devout as La Fontaine’s rat, which piously retired from the society of other rats into the heart of a Dutch cheese. We may be so rich that the world forgives us, or so poor that the world exonerates us. In each and every case we destroy life at the roots by a denial of its obligations, a fear of its difficulties, an indifference to its common rewards.

The seriousness of our age expresses itself in eloquent demands for gayety. The gospel of cheerfulness, I had almost said the gospel of amusement, is preached by people who lack experience to people who lack vitality. There is a vague impression that the world would be a good world if it were only happy, that it would be happy if it were amused, and that it would be amused if plenty of artificial recreation--that recreation for which we are now told every community stands responsible--were provided for its entertainment.

A few years ago an English clergyman made an eloquent appeal to the public, affirming that London’s crying need was a score of “Pleasure-Palaces,” supported by taxpayers, and free as the Roman games. Gladiators being, indeed, out of date, lions costly, and martyrs very scarce, some milder and simpler form of diversion was to be substituted for the vigorous sports of Rome. Comic songs and acrobats were, in the reverend gentleman’s opinion, the appointed agents for the regeneration of the London poor. It is worthy of note that the drama did not occur to him as a bigger and broader pastime. It is worthy of note that the drama is fast losing ground with the proletariat, once its staunch upholders. A very hard-thinking English writer, Mr. J. G. Leigh, sees in the substitution of cheap vaudeville for cheap melodrama an indication of what he calls loss of stamina, and of what Mr. Murray calls loss of nerve. “When the sturdy melodrama, with its foiled villainy and triumphant virtue, ceases to allure, and people want in its place the vulgar vapidities of the vaudeville, we may be sure there is a spirit of sluggish impotence in the air.”

To-day the moving pictures present the most triumphant form of cheap entertainment. They are good of their kind, and there is a visible effort to make them better; but the “special features” by which they are accompanied in the ten-and fifteen-cent shows,--the shrill songs, the dull jokes, the clumsy clog-dances,--are all of an incredible badness. Compared with them, the worst of plays seems good, and the ill-paid actors who storm and sob through “Alone in a Great City,” or “No Wedding Bells for Her,” assume heroic proportions, as ministering to the emotions of the heart.

The question of amusement is one with which all classes are deeply concerned. _Le Monde où l’on s’amuse_ is no longer the narrow world of fashion. It has extended its border lines to embrace humanity. It is no longer an exclusively adult world. The pleasures of youth have become something too important for interference, too sacred for denial. Whatever may be happening to parents, whatever their cares and anxieties, the sons and daughters must lose none of the gayeties now held essential to their happiness. They are trained to a selfishness which is foreign to their natures, and which does them grievous wrong. A few years ago I asked an acquaintance about her mother, with whom she lived, and who was, I knew, incurably ill. “She is no better,” said the lady disconsolately, “and I must say it is very hard on my children. They cannot have any of their young friends in the house. They cannot entertain. They have been cut off from all social pleasures this winter.”

I said it was a matter of regret, and I forbore to add that the poor invalid would probably have been glad to die a little sooner, had she been given the chance. It was not the mere selfishness of old age which kept her so long about it. Yet neither was my acquaintance the callous creature that she seemed. Left to herself, she would not have begrudged her mother the time to die; but she had been deeply imbued with the conviction that young people in general, and her own children in particular, should never be saddened, or depressed, or asked to assume responsibilities, or be called upon for self-denial. She was preparing them carefully for that failure of nerve which would make them impotent in the stress of life.

The desire of the modern philanthropist to provide amusement for the working-classes is based upon the determination of the working classes to be amused. He is as keen that the poor shall have their fill of dancing, as Dickens, in his less enlightened age, was keen that the poor should have their fill of beer. He knows that it is natural for young men and women to crave diversion, and that it is right for them to have it. What he does not clearly understand, what Dickens did not clearly understand, is that to crave either amusement or drink so weakly that we cannot conquer our craving, is to be worthless in a work-a-day world.

And worse than worthless in a world which is called upon for heroism and high resolve. A cruel lesson taught by the war is the degeneracy of the British workman, who, in the hour of his country’s need, has clung basely to his ease and his sottishness. What does it avail that English gentlemen fling away their lives with unshrinking courage, when the common people, from whose sturdy spirit England was wont to draw her strength, have shrivelled into a craven apathy. The contempt of the British soldier for the British artisan is not the contempt of the fighting man for the man of peace. It is the loathing of the man who has accepted his trust for the man who can do and bear nothing; who cries out if his drink is touched, who cries out if his work is heavy, who cries out if his hours are lengthened, who has parted with his manhood, and does not want it back. Whatever England has needed for the regeneration of her sons, it was certainly not “pleasure-palaces” and cheap amusements. The “sluggish impotence” which Mr. Leigh observed four years ago, did not call, and does not call, for relaxation. The only cure will be so stern that no one cares to prophesy its coming.

And Americans! Well, thousands of people bearing that name assembled in New York on the 13th of November, 1915, under the auspices of the Woman’s Peace Party, and amused themselves by denouncing the Administration, howling down all mention of national defence, and jeering every time the word patriotism (which we used to think a noble word) was spoken in their hearing. Men endeared themselves to the audience by declaring that they would not risk their all too precious lives to fight for any cause, and women intelligently asked why a foreign rule would not be just as good as a home one. They did not seem aware that Brussels was having a less enviable time than Boston or Milwaukee. Profound foolishness swayed the audience, abysmal ignorance soothed it. There was an abundant showing of childish irrationality; there was the apathy which befits old age; but of intelligence or of virility there was nothing.

This loss of nerve, this “weakening of faith in normal human resistance,” means the disintegration of citizenship. It is the sudden call to manhood which shows us where manhood is not to be found. We Americans, begirt by sentiment, mindful of our ease, and spared for more than half-a-century from ennobling self-sacrifice, have been seeking smooth and facile methods of reform. The world, grown old in ill-doing, responds nimbly to our offers of amusement, but balks at the austere virtues which no cajolery can disguise. The more it is amused, the more it assumes amusement to be its due; and this assumption receives the support and encouragement of those whose experience must have taught them its perils.