Part 10
"Enthusiasts very often lose the sense of justice, become oblivious to everything--except the invisible. I know too well the nobility of the motives; I know that there are more of them on the East Side than any other place in America; I know, also, that a cause requires such sacrifices, yet, what are the results? Very often, failure. It has been observed that a man, who in the midst of a savage or barbarous community, in defiance of current social or religious customs, should attempt to live the ideal life of a perfect civilization, would doubtless be quickly eliminated from such a society by violent and tragical means, and thus effectively be stopped from influencing those around him to better ways of living. A great deal of our enforced civilization of savage races has been fatal in its effects upon the health and happiness of the vast majority, while it has failed to elevate the average morals of the survivors. Authorities say that this is likely to be the result, whenever conventional education is forced upon a people in advance of their functional development. The Hawaiian Islanders are pointed out as an impressive example, and the missionaries, as well as the radicals of the Ghetto, trying to convert their orthodox brethren, ought to remember these things.
"The way out of it? Some one says: 'That course of conduct must be adopted which will promote the greatest possible development of life-giving energies, both in the individuals immediately affected, and in society at large, including the life of posterity.' That's science, if I have the quotation right. Principles should be founded on fact, and be conducive to the largest happiness, including even the happiness of the one who holds the principles. In size, they should be more than 8 by 12 inches. They should be a yard wide--wide enough and true enough for all. Yet they should be such principles as to allow others to hold other principles. The right principles, in accord with the best laws of life, and not theology, will come up to all requirements, and they will be moral.
"Yes, individualism by all means," he added; "be yourself, but don't be a savage."
XVII
The Exile of the Earnest
I met Keidansky at the performance of a Yiddish play, and our talk turned to matters dramatic.
"I notice by the papers," I remarked, "that Sarah Bernhardt has just produced a play written for her by F. Marion Crawford, the American novelist. So we are going to supply the theatres of other countries with plays. Are you interested?"
"Very much," said Keidansky; "this is not the only case of an American writing for the foreign stage, and it suggests to me a fine possibility. About Crawford I know but little; but he is one of our popular men. He has, according to his own confession, written to please; he has never offended any living beings by putting them into his works; he has never attempted to picture life, uninteresting as it is, and he is, on the whole, not one of those that we should want to send away to write plays for the people of other lands. And I am rather glad his 'Francesca da Rimini' has failed in London.
"But if there are any among us who are terribly in earnest, with tremendous intentions to elevate the stage, to write plays that will instruct, stimulate, uplift, to take all the struggles of humanity and put them into dramas--why let them learn some one of the foreign languages and go abroad and write plays for the serious people of Europe. Yes, if they persist in these things, and want to make us think, and all that sort of thing, which is short of pleasure, if they cannot amuse us with something funny or entertain us with something nice and romantic, why let them go abroad. It's the only way we can get rid of them, and we shall not mourn the loss of those who would have us do nothing else but mourn.
"We Americans do not want any plays that require intellect, for we need all that we have in our business enterprises; we do not want to think in the theatre, because it takes all our thoughts to advertise and sell our goods, nor do we want our emotions stirred, for that is a nervous strain, clouds the mind, and makes people unfit for speculation, scheming or anything on the next day. Then, these plays that arrest the brain and touch our very soul, they make us sentimental, soft-hearted, kind-natured, and draw us out on long conversations with our wives, children and friends. Meanwhile the wheels of trade are turning, and in the race for success we are left behind.
"We are a healthy people, and we don't want any morbid, lurid, ghastly productions over here, and in a large sense all very serious works are morbid, lugubrious and gloomy. At bottom of them there is always a problem, an evil, a crying wrong, a morbid state of something. A happy home is not dramatic; people at peace with themselves and the world are not good subjects for tragedy. According to the conception of these earnest writers there is no plot for a play without a peck of trouble. We don't want any such dramatic dishes served. We don't want people to play upon our feelings, and yet pay them for it. Occasionally, we are willing to have something a little bit sad, but we want it to end happily. But the earnest ones tell us that in real life few sad stories end happily, that their pictures are true to life. Hang it, we ourselves know they are true to life. There's plenty of trouble at home,--that's why we go to the theatre--to forget it. Gorky pictures a man--fat and forty, successful and comfortable as a government official--a man, who after reading 'a book of one of these modern much-praised writers,' comes to the conclusion that he is 'an insignificant nonentity, a superfluous being, of no use to any one.'
"This is just what one of the modern plays does for you. See, it seems to say, see, you crown of creation, what a crawling creature you are. Your past is what it ought not to have been. Your present is what it ought not to be. 'The future is but the past again, entered through another gate.' Yesterday you were a fool--to-morrow you will be a still greater one. Your best resolutions shall become bitter regrets. You are weak, and you make laws and build governments and create creeds, and they make you weaker yet. All the adornments of your civilization are relics of barbarism. Evolution is too slow for anything, and you cannot get ahead of yourself. You have talked all your life and not uttered an original thought. There have been a few original beings, but most of you are poor imitations--you must follow others. You must have a master, either in heaven, or on earth; you are a slave of society. You strike for freedom and anti-conventionality only when it becomes a fad. You don't understand. Your children cannot teach you anything. You are too old to learn. When you were young you had only your parents to instruct you. Your home rests upon false assumptions. It is a field of battle--or there are no strong individuals in it and all is peace. The theory of heredity is not true--your children are stupid; your wife is a doll, which you have chosen for her pretty cheeks, and, though she is fading, claims the rights of a free-born human being, and does not understand--but what's the use? Of what earthly good can such plays be? Why should we in this free, independent and prosperous country listen to such things? Besides, family quarrels, filial relations, disagreements between relatives are not fit materials for the dramatist. It is none of his business to meddle in such private matters. If there is trouble in the home, if a man and a woman find that one and one is two, if the interests of certain persons, or classes, are against those of others, if people find their religion too small for them and their laws not big enough, why there are courts that they can go to, and legislatures and clergymen and lawyers and Christian Scientists and so many other sources of help and salvation. For a writer it is extremely bad taste to deal with such matters. His mission is to amuse us, and he has no right to abdicate the sovereignty of his exalted office.
"At least that is what we Americans--the majority of our people--think, and if there are writers among us so abnormally serious as to see things otherwise, there is but one thing to do with them--we should send them away to other countries where people like that kind of dreary drama.
"Let them, like Marion Crawford, write for the French stage. The French are not even shocked when they see a real resemblance between life and the drama. In fact they put everything into their plays, all their faults, and I wonder how they can look at these plays. So many things happen in France, and it is all in their books and plays, besides a lot of things that never happen. You cannot in their country escape life and all its troubles by going to the theatre or reading one of their novels. All life's tribulations, turmoil and travail are in them. Not that the people are over-earnest, but that they like something strong, love to be stirred and moved, and are recklessly unafraid of the vertigoes of thought. They have great artists and wonderfully fine writers, but their dramatic works are terribly upsetting. A good performance of 'Camille' breaks a person up for several days. They are a dangerous lot, all the French writers.
"No, we over here do not want such productions. There are plenty of pretty incidents and fables out of our romantic history that we can use on our stage.
Every veteran of our wars tells enough of his own heroic deeds to make a dozen of plays. Then there are so many historical novels, guaranteed to have nothing to do with life, that have not as yet been dramatized. Such plays would help us to understand our grand history.
"But there is lots of room in Europe for our would-be realists, and our government would do well by making an appropriation for their instruction in foreign languages and their deportation to the lands of burdensome intentions, revolutionary movements and problem plays. This would mean peace in our own country.
"There are the Germans, who love Schopenhauer and beer and usually drink the two together. They feel intensely, revel in realism and have the keenest enjoyment of tragedy. Nothing is too sad, sombre, or too stirring for their stage. All the unanswered questions that have vainly troubled the ages are raised in their dramatic and literary works. What an uncomfortable prospect that is! They always have men who writes plays that will never die. They have no shame, these Germans. They feel strongly and openly show it. Altogether they have a passion for the thoughtful, and give the modern playwright with tendencies a splendid opportunity. But what is to be said of a country that can produce such play as Hauptmann's 'Die Weber'--a country that can send fifty Socialist members to the Reichstag? Yes, we can safely send them to Germany, or else to Russia. It would be hard for an American to learn that language, but Russia is the land where they say the most daring, the boldest things in the most candid manner, or without any manner at all. I don't know why it is unless it is because free speech is forbidden in that country. There the play, or the novel, palpitates with life and vibrates with heart-throbs. All the evil and oppression and ruin of the country cries out through its literature and drama, and the people worship such art. Life itself is seen on the Russian stage. This is where we should send our earnest writers. True, there is a censorship in Russia, but the radical utterances of an American author will easily pass the Russian censor.
"There is Norway, where a man like Ibsen, who has made that country the scene of action of all the tragedies of the world, is allowed at large after an exile of many years. Ibsen has held up the Land of the Midnight Sun as a dominion of darkness, yet they like him and are also proud of him in his country. Belgium is another good market for the serious and revolutionary drama. In Spain, Echegaray is doing nearly what Ibsen is doing in Norway, and he has a number of literary companions with similar sombre intentions. Even in England they are beginning to write such plays, and an American can easily learn the English language. It's a good thing that Henry James prefers to live in England, only we ought to put a tariff on his psychological stories. We need not fear. Any and all these countries will serve us as places of exile for our earnest authors.
"But hold on, I've nearly forgotten. Perhaps the expenses of sending these people to Europe can be saved. Let them learn to write in Yiddish, for in the Jewish theatres of the New York Ghetto all sorts of serious, sombre, life-like, problematic and powerful plays are produced."
XVIII
Why Social Reformers Should Be Abolished
"It's quite a problem," said Keidansky, suddenly, after a pensive pause, as he watched the glimmering lights of the Cambridge bridge across the gloomy Charles.
"What is?" I asked.
"How to abolish the social reformers," he answered in a tone of determination.
It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when we left the little café where we spent part of the evening, and he said it was too early to go home, which in any case was the last resort. It was so roasting hot up in his attic, that no matter what time he climbed up there, he would be "well done" by the time he rose in the morning. But the place he told me of had this advantage: it was delightfully cool in the winter. Keidansky was physically exhausted and mentally lazy, and would say but little at first. He had spent the day in preparing an article for one of the Jewish papers, and during the evening gave two lessons in English, visiting his pupils at their homes; for it was thus, he once informed me, that he learned what English he knew--by teaching it to others. Incidentally these lessons he gave and his journalistic efforts helped to pay for the necessities of life, such as rent, laundry, lunches, symphony concerts ("on the rush"), admissions to picture exhibitions, books, gallery tickets to the best plays that came to town, etc. He had worked very hard that day, he said, which was a direct violation of his principle. He did what he could to keep his ideas out of his article, and he hoped it would be published. He felt tired, did not want to go home, and proposed that we walk over to the Charlesbank Park where, on a night like this, we could at least in imagination conjure up a breeze.
"Your whim is law," I said, and we set off for the park. I had been speaking of a Yiddish melodrama which had been produced in Boston a few days before. Keidansky had not seen the play, but he intended to write a review of it for one of the New York papers. He knew all about it and the species to which it belonged. When capital punishment was abolished, sitting through one of these plays would be an all-sufficient penalty for murder, he said. Then this subject gave out and there was a pause, after which Keidansky made the startling remark concerning social reformers.
"Abolish them? Do you really mean it?" I asked.
"Yes, though I do say it," he replied.
"What for?" I, being puzzled, queried again, and he answered:
"For the welfare of society, and perhaps also the sure approach of the millennium." He continued: "The social reformers, as a rule, are a most unsocial job lot of people. As I have known them, their business has been to frighten, to scowl, to scare, and to make a mountain of evil out of a mole-hill that did not exist. They are often the most blinded zealots, the narrowest-minded, one-sided partisans, with tremendous, almost Dante-like propensities to conjure up hair-raising horribles, but with the genius and the poetry of a Dante left out. Their method is to cut life up piecemeal, pepper it good and heavy, and send you to bed with a few bitter morsels. After a night of the most excruciating nightmares, you wake up with a nauseous taste in your mouth, and a pronounced case of reformania. It is not so much what they say, as how they emphasize it; the very dictionary groans beneath the weight of their abuse of adjectives, and after a time they convince you that you don't know your own address, that you have not, as you imagined, been living on the planet earth, but in the most devilish, hellish purgatory.
"In order to convert this earth into a heaven, they must needs make it appear to be the blackest hell. In order to abolish evil, they must prove that nothing else exists. To convince you of the infinite possibilities in the development of men, they must prove to you that they have ever been divided between parasitic capitalists and starving slaves. Evolution, as they concoct it for you, has been a process of going from bad to worse, from a mild form of slavery to a more abject one.
"You see, they are in for effect, and with the aid of the most bombastic language and turgid phraseology they are bound to make it, no matter how many people they dishearten, discourage and dismay. To damn humanity, they think, is but a trifle when their supreme end is to save the world. Hope is not in heaven, earth sees no gentler star; earth is hell and hell bows down before the social reformer. The reformer that I mean is a man ever wandering about with a pail of black paint in one hand, a brush in the other, and with an expression of heartrending sorrow in his face because he cannot find a ladder high enough to enable him to put a few coats of his paint on the skies. The world must be saved at any cost, say these reformers, and if the world is the cost, why it is dead cheap at that, when they can become saviors of society and possibly sainted martyrs. And so they proceed to exaggerate the evils that exist in the most brazen-faced manner and to magnify the evils they imagine to the utmost extent. They generously enlarge every iniquity that is and fully describe those that have never been; they complicate every simple problem in order to puzzle mankind and to be misunderstood and to appear great. The world has become so civilized, the reformers reason, or rather think, that it is hard to find its monstrous wrongs and social reform are being forgotten, and so out with our telescopes, magnifying glasses and alarm clocks. The capitalists must be dethroned, the down-trodden wage-slave must be enthroned, and then our saviors riot and revel in their never-ending disquisitions. Yes, when there are many reformers in the world, the world is in sore need of reform.
"These people are pitifully short-sighted and can barely see one side of life at a time; they dissect life and remove it from reality. Their solutions are so fine that they have nothing to do with the real problems. They detach humanity from the world. They abolish the concrete (for convenience) and get lost in their abstractions like the detective who disguised himself so much that he could not discover his own identity. They conceive more evil than exists because they rarely know the difference between right and wrong. They are visionaries without breadth of visions; theorists, not knowing the uselessness of all theories; people who would save the world because they do not know it; builders without a foundation; saviors without the saving graces of truth and beauty. They embitter humanity, they darken the world, painting it blacker than it ever was in the barbaric past and--they make me weary, the more so because they constantly remind me how foolish I once was myself.
"I tell you, the world is better to-day than it ever was before, and it would become still better if we could abolish these disparaging, discouraging, slanderous social reformers. The true reformers are those who make us see how good and great the old world is. As you said the other day, the greatest explorers were those who discovered heaven on earth. And after we have abolished the reformers we could gradually also abolish the other evils which afflict our civilization and mar existence. They would no longer impede our progress and we could little by little wipe out the wrongs that oppress us and institute more just conditions for all members of society. These things could be done gradually, reasonably, with good cheer, and with the best results. For another trouble with the vaudeville social reformers that I did not mention is their overweening, overwhelming conceit, which makes them so ludicrously unreasonable and prevents them from seeing that the world is just a trifle bigger than one of their numbers."
It was nearing dawn, and I asked him how he was going to do away with the reformers.
"Well, there's the rub," he said. "I do not know exactly, but I've been thinking that perhaps the only and best way of abolishing the social reformers would be by finding the true solution of the social problem and abolishing all the wrongs and iniquities of our civilization. Let us destroy, annihilate the evils of unjust laws, governments and monopolies, and institute a just system of society and the social reformers will disappear.
"Let us have a society wherein all will share equally in all the joys and sorrows of life, wherein none shall be starved and none shall be pampered to death, wherein none shall have too much of the goods of the world and all shall have enough, wherein no hungry babes will wallow in the gutters to become candidates for the prisons and insane asylums, and no children shall be ruined by riches; a world wherein there will be no temperance movements to drive men to drink, no trust to destroy men's souls, and no churches to harbor infidels; a world without the constant clouds of harrowing, sad thoughts, without the rains of tears, and with more and more of sunshine. Let us do that and we will abolish the obnoxious reformers. Let us abolish the monstrous crime of poverty, which has not the shadow of a reason for existence in a world that is overwhelmed with wealth, and the occupation of the reformers will be gone, and they will vanish. Really, we ought to be willing and ready to do anything for their abolition."
XIX
Buying a Book in Salem Street
"I am going to buy a book on Salem street," said my friend, when we suddenly encountered on Tremont Row. "Do you wish to come along?"
I was bent on any adventure, and so we started for the quarter, down through Hanover street. It was but a short distance, and before we had done much chatting in the way of exchanging ideas, we were at the head of the street, facing the pawnshop of No. 1, with the welcome legend of "Money to Loan."
We passed safely the bedecked and bedraggled second-hand clothing stores, though the pullers-in were out in full force. As my companion explained, it is only the seeming strangers who are approached and asked to buy, or sell, but familiar figures and persons in their company are never molested. One of these attendants, a dark, sad-eyed, kind-faced young man, was leaning against the door-post of a store and intently reading a Jewish magazine. We were across the street and we stopped to look. This fellow, who was engaged in the most sordid business, was reading the "Zukunft," the magazine of dreams, ideals and Utopias, published by the New York radicals. An elderly, bearded and stout man came down the street. Without looking up from his booklet the youth mechanically asked: "Any clothing to-day?"