Part 8
It is the man that makes this unity--this stained-glass window through which truth shines. The artists have had a monopoly of logic, and are the only people who get the credit of being expressive. Yet now and then a philosopher like Kant draws together a lot of old junk, and thinks over it, and arranges it till it becomes--to anyone who can follow the reasoning--a sort of cathedral of logic. Or again, a man who is the very antipodes of Kant--a man of action who arranges nothing, but whose thought and conduct are arranged for him by nature--becomes so polarized and at one with himself that he sheds a sort of glow about him; but whether this glow comes out of his words or from his conduct and words taken together we hardly know. The vehicle is nothing; the man is all. Such unitary natures are rare enough; and Howe, within his own limitations, and while standing over his own tripod with his own peculiar lyre in his hand, is one of them.
The outbreak of the war put an end to all those conditions which had been turning human nature inside out during the fifties. It was no longer necessary for idealism to seek its outlet in crime, nor for half-good men to be turned into devils because they had not in them the stuff that makes martyrs. When the war came, the average man found the sacrifice prepared for him in a form which he could understand. He gave himself freely. He gave all he had. There followed such an outpouring of virtue and heroism that the crimes of all humanity might seem to have been wiped out by it; and at the end of the war the United States resumed her place among modern nations, and took up the conventional problems of modern life.
During the war Dr. Howe was a member of the Sanitary Commission; and during the remainder of his life he continued to be the greatest authority on everything that concerned organized charity, and probably the most active individual who had ever taken part in such things in the United States.
In this sketch there has not been time to touch upon the international side of Howe’s life; his relation to the liberals and philanthropists of Europe, from Lafayette to Kossuth. I omit the picturesque episodes which that relation gave rise to, as, for instance, Howe’s imprisonment in Prussia in 1832, and his being chosen, at a later date, as the depository for the stolen crown jewels of Hungary. “When the jewels were recovered,” writes Mr. W. J. Stillman in his autobiography, “they were to be hidden in a box of a conserve for which that vicinity was noted, and then carried to Constantinople, from which point I was to take charge of them and deliver them in Boston to Dr. S. G. Howe, the well-known Philhellene.” The jewels were recovered by the Austrian Government before they could be transferred to America, and this was, no doubt, a fortunate outcome for all concerned. Dr. Howe’s liberalism remained at the same temperature throughout his life. It led him in 1867 to revisit Greece for the last time, as a distributor of supplies to the insurgent Cretans. It led him in 1871 to favor the Annexation of Santo Domingo to the United States.
Howe died in 1876. The rapid cycle of social revolutions in the United States which followed the Civil War, heightened the contrast between the veteran and the new age, and strengthened the romance that had always hung about him. To have taken part in the Greek Revolution seemed, in 1870, almost the same thing as to have been present at the siege of Troy. The mantle of Byron and the Isles of Greece never quite fell from his shoulders.
Dr. Howe seems to have been one of those nimble, playful, light-footed natures who are as strong as steel and can be as stern as steel upon occasion. His physical endurance was so great that it led to his habitually overtaxing himself. His excitability made him a hard man to live with; and he was occasionally hasty, harsh, and exacting. This irritability of Dr. Howe’s is deeply related to his whole mind and being. He was constitutionally deficient in the power to rest. The blind headaches which clouded the last third of his life were probably the convulsions through which outraged nature resumed her functions. He supposed them to be the residuum of Grecian malaria; but anyone reading of Howe’s daily life would look for breakdown somewhere. There is a gleaming elfin precocity about him which the human machine cannot support forever. He was ever in action: as he so wonderfully says of himself, “he prayed with his hands and feet.”
Dr. Howe had that kind of modesty which seems to be confined to the heroes of romantic adventure: rough soldiers have it, and people whose courage has been put to the proof a thousand times.
“I do assure you, my dear Sumner,” he writes in 1846, “the sort of vulgar notoriety which follows any movement of this kind is a very great drawback to the pleasure of making it. To the voice of praise I am sensible, too sensible I know; but I do detest this newspaper puffing, and I have been put to the blush very often by it.”
The following is his account of his reception by the peasants on the Isthmus of Corinth when he was recognized in 1844.
“The whole village gathered about the house, and to make a long story short, I went away amid demonstrations of affectionate remembrance and continued attachment, so earnest and so obvious that they made one of my companions shed tears, though he understood not a word of the spoken language. But I must not enlarge on this now, for I have no time; perhaps I ought not to do so even had I ever so much time; but you will not, I know, suspect me of vanity in making any communications to you.”
Charles Sumner is almost the only man to whom he unbosoms himself on such subjects: “It is quite too bad to keep people under such a delusion about me. One gentleman, an F. R. S., writes that he wants to see me more than any other man in Europe. He has published a little book, with physiological reflections on privation of senses, which he dedicates “To Dr. Howe, the ingenious and successful teacher of Laura Bridgman.” The man looks _up_ to me; yet it is evident, from reading his books, that he has himself tenfold more talent, acquirement, and merit than I have or ever shall have.”... To Horace Mann he writes in 1848, “It is absurd for me to reach up from my littleness to tender counsel to one so high as you; but my love for you is as great as though we stood face to face.”
He thus questions Sumner as to whether he himself can learn to be an editor: “Tell me my best, my almost only friend, is there any reason to suppose that by any apprenticeship I could, without rashness, enter the editorial field.” This from a man who had only to touch any cause to make the world ring with it, is incredible. One cannot hope really to understand such a character: it reminds one of the meekness of Moses. There is a rose-leaf girlish quality about this modesty which makes it one of the most wonderful things in nature. Few of us have ever seen it; we have only read about it; for people are always writing about it, and it evokes literature. No sooner does one of these modest people appear than everyone praises him. I suppose people feel that praise cannot injure such a nature: there is nothing for praise to stick to. The bitter lips of malice break into eulogy before this quality, which shrinks from commendation as most people shrink from censure. In Dr. Howe’s case this modesty set off not only deeds of physical prowess, but intellectual accomplishments of a most dazzling kind. Hence the enormous number of somewhat tedious eulogies upon him. One is obliged to approach him through a stack of funeral wreaths.
He was totally without personal thought, personal self-consciousness, and more like a disembodied spirit than a man. This impersonal quality gave him the power of telling home truths to people without offending them. To strangers, to acquaintances, to intimate friends, to proud spoiled egotists, to bad men with whom he is at odds--he can always tell the exact truth without conveying any personal ill-feeling. He flashes in through the walls and turrets of Charles Sumner, or of Theodore Parker, and puts the house in order with lightning strokes of wit, and with bold home-thrusts of spontaneous ridicule. He touches his friend’s soul with celestial surgery, then quickly rubs salve upon the wounds, and is back again at his desk before the patient has discovered his visitation. To say that he is the warmest nature that ever came out of New England would not be expressive. He is the warmest Anglo Saxon of whom I have ever read or heard tell. Constant expressions of love and affection flow from him, effusive, demonstrative, emotional. It is not necessary to cite them. Open the book. The German romanticists of whom Jean Paul Richter is a type come into one’s mind; but there was a literary tang to their sentiment. I must, however, quote two passages illustrative of Howe’s ordinary state of mind:--
“My Well-beloved Friend:--
“Your note from New York found me last evening, and gave me a feeling as near akin to pure joy as I ever expect to feel on earth. Why is it that we men are so shy about manifesting a natural feeling in a natural way, and letting down the flood-gates of the eye to the flow of tears? I feared to go and bid you adieu on Wednesday, lest I should not be able to conceal my emotion, hide my tears. I succeeded, however; I wept not until I was alone!”
Dr. Howe’s aged friend, Mr. F. W. Bird, has left an anecdote of their last meeting which would add a beauty to Homer:
“As I rose to leave, he followed me into the hall, threw his arms around my neck and with a beautiful smile said: ‘My dear old fellow, let me kiss you,’ and gave me a warm kiss. Within two days the thick curtain fell.” At the time of this parting Bird was sixty-six, and Howe seventy-five.
Is it not evident from all that has gone before that Dr. Howe was a saint? He constantly suggests one or other of the great saints in the Roman Calendar. And I will predict that the world has rather begun than finished with its interest in him. His work in charity will never be superseded. Succeeding penologists will recur to it to save them from the science of their times.
JESTERS.
It is right to break up old china because it is ugly; but to destroy the china because you enjoy the sound of the crash is a little depraved. Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton, _et id omne genus_--the race of joyous tomboys who dash things about--have a great charm always. The bored, cultivated, sedentary people in any old civilization wake up more cheerfully in the morning when there is one of these fellows at work. A new thrill comes into the journals which the literati had grown to hate so heartily. “Ah,” cry the leisure classes, “what has Tommy got to say this morning, I wonder.”
These two gentlemen, Shaw and Chesterton, are the Max and Moritz of the present epoch. For this reason I have tried to like them. I have tried to tolerate them. I have tried to believe that they are serviceable to mankind from some point of view which is not yet revealed to me. I do believe this; but I believe it with the head and not with the heart. The following reflections are, after all, a mere groping toward the light, and the tapping of the staff of a blind man.
Any one who has ever passed through London must have been struck with the competition for notice among all classes of people whose conspicuousness depends upon their personal activity. In England there are such masses of any one kind of man or woman that the desire for identification--in itself a noble desire--leads people to resort to every expedient for attracting notice to themselves. This is the explanation of the hyphen in names. Edward B. Jones is a name that no one can remember; but Edward Burne-Jones is easy. In like manner ladies turn to lion-hunting, not because they love lions but because it gives them a status. Indeed, England has always been full of sham lions, who spring into existence to supply the demand created by these ladies. So of charity; so of culture; so of politics.
Now there are often intellectual men--like Beaconsfield, and Oscar Wilde, and Whistler--who are unwilling to wait for their talents to lift them into notice, but who resort to artificial notoriety in order to expedite matters. They stick a feather in their cap and call it ‘maccaroni’. Their times suggest this course to them, and their times claim them instantly when they have complied with the suggestion. In literary England there is such an enormous and immediate acclaim for any new cleverness, that a poor and talented young man is under strong temptation to become surprising and brilliant in his writing. If he will only do this he will find himself petted, fed, and proclaimed almost at once.
This particular entry into the Temple of Fame, however, exacts a heavy toll; for a man who has written in order to break the crust of the public with his pungency, is not allowed ever thereafter to write without pungency. I believe that the talent of all the men I have named would have developed more seriously if they had not in early life given way to the taste of the public for sensation. But they would not wait: they must sting themselves into notice.
As for Shaw and Chesterton, they seem to have become partners in a sort of game of buffoonery--for the world will have its jesters. They are tumblers on a raft, floating down stream, surrounded by a whole Henley regatta, an armada of applauding multitudes, on barges, wherries, tugs, and ferry-boats and river-craft innumerable, whose holiday passengers shout their admiration to the performers on the raft, and egg on the favorites to superhuman effort. Shaw shows how far he can stick out his tongue while continuing to stand on one leg. “Bravo! Huzzah!” roars the audience. “Did you ever see the like? O Jesu, this is excellent sport! Faith! How he holds his countenance! He doth it as like one of these harlotry players as ever I see.”
Chesterton thereupon puts his wrists on the carpet and lifts his back like a cat. “Lord save us! This was Ercles’ vein! He hath simply the best wit of any handy-craftsman in Athens. You have not a man in all Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he!”
There is some exaggeration in this picture; but, I think, some truth also. The loss which Shaw and Chesterton share in common is a loss of delicacy. They are crude: they are all edge. They are, indeed, a little vulgar. But this is not the serious objection to them. The serious objection to Shaw and Chesterton is that they have no intellectual independence. They are moving with the show. It will pass, and they with it.
THE COMIC.
I.
In the caverns of our nature lie hid various emotions, like beasts in a lair. They are shy to the voice of question or of curiosity, and they slink and crouch all the more, if we try to lure them out for inspection. But they come gambolling and roaring forth at the call of ingenuous human utterance. Any utterance that has in it no afterthought, but is mere speech that has grown out of a need to speak, lays a spell upon the wild things within us. Before the echo of it has died away they are rampant in the open, ignorant of how they came forth. Let no one then wonder at the difficulties that surround all study of the human emotions,--blushing giants, vanishing Genii that they are.
It is easy for us to-day to see that comedy is in its nature the same sort of thing as tragedy. They arise out of the same need, convey the same truth, depend upon the same talent. The English drama interwove comedy and tragedy in the same play, and Shakespeare’s greatness in one is of a piece with his greatness in the other. Indeed there are scenes in Lear, Shylock, and Henry IV where tragedy and comedy are overlaid--where the same scene is both tragic and comic and we laugh and cry at the same time. But for a Greek to have seen this identity is very remarkable; because Greek tragedy and Greek comedy represented distinct professions and were totally different in their methods of appeal. A Greek tragedy was a drama of fate, based on a familiar bit of religious folk-lore. The plot was known, the interest lay in the treatment. A Greek comedy, however, was a farrago of licentious nonsense, developed in the course of a fantastic narrative-play: it was what we should call a musical extravaganza. Greek comedy is gigantesque buffoonery, interspersed with lyric and choral passages of divine beauty--the whole, following a traditional model as to its arrangement.
With this machinery Aristophanes proceeds to shake the stones of the Greek theatre with inextinguishable laughter. He will do anything to raise a laugh. He introduces Socrates hung up in a basket and declaring that he is flying in the air and speculating about the sun. He makes the god Dionysus--the very god in whose honor the theatre and festival exist--to leap from the stage in a moment of comic terror, and hide himself under the long cloak of his own high-priest, whose chair of state was in the front row of the pit. Is it possible to imagine what sort of a scene in the theatre this climax must have aroused? There has been no laughter since Aristophanes. There is something of the same humor in Rabelais; but Rabelais is a book, and there each man laughs alone over his book, not in company with his whole city or tribe, as in the Greek theatre.
Now what is it they are laughing at? It is sallies of wit, personal hits, local allusions, indecencies, philosophical cracks, everything from refined satire to the bludgeons of abuse--and the whole thing is proceeding in an atmosphere of fun, of wild spirits, of irrepressible devilry. Compared to Aristophanes, Shakespeare is not funny; he lacks size. He is a great and thoughtful person, of superabundant genius and charm, who makes Dutch interiors, drenched in light. But Aristophanes splits the heavens with a jest, and the rays of truth stream down from inaccessible solitudes of speculation. He has no epigram, no cleverness, no derivative humor. He is bald foolery. And yet he conveys mysticism: he conveys divinity. He alone stands still while the whole empyrean of Greek life circles about him.
From what height of suddenly assumed superiority does the race of birds commiserate mankind:
[A]“Come now, ye men, in nature darkling, like to the race of leaves, of little might, figures of clay, shadowy feeble tribes, wingless creatures of a day, miserable mortals, dream-like men, give your attention to us the immortals, the ever-existing, the ethereal, the ageless, who meditate eternal counsels, in order that when you have heard everything from us accurately about sublime things, the nature of birds, and the origin of gods and rivers, of Erebus and Chaos, you may henceforth bid Prodicus from me go weep, when you know them accurately.”
[A] Hickie’s translation.
Into what depth of independent thought did the man dream himself, that such fancies could take hold of him? When Aristophanes has had his say, there is nothing left over: there is no frame nor shell: there is no theatre nor world. Everything is exploded and scattered into sifting, oscillating, shimmering, slowly-sinking fragments of meaning and allusion. If anyone should think that I am going to analyze the intellect of Aristophanes, he is in error. I wish only to make a remark about it; namely, that his power is somehow rooted in personal detachment, in philosophical independence.
It was the genius of Aristophanes which must have suggested to Plato the idea which he throws out in the last paragraph of the Symposium. That great artist, Plato, has left many luminous half-thoughts behind him. He sets each one in a limbo--in a cocoon of its own light--and leaves it in careless-careful fashion, as if it were hardly worth investigation. The rascal! The setting has cost him sleepless nights and much parchment. He has redrawn and arranged it a hundred times. He is unable to fathom the idea, and yet it fascinates him. The setting in which Plato has placed his suggestion about the genius of tragedy and comedy is so very wonderful--both as a picture and as his apology for not carrying the idea further--that I must quote it, if only as an act of piety, and for my own pleasure.
[B]“Agathon arose in order that he might take his place on the couch by Socrates, when suddenly a band of revellers entered, and spoiled the order of the banquet. Someone who was going out having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and everyone was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus and others went away--he himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long, took a good rest: he was awakened toward daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep or had gone away; there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half awake, and he did not hear the beginning of the discourse; the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy and not quite following the argument. And first of all Aristophanes dropped off; then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart, Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own home.”
[B] Jowett’s translation.
What can Plato have had in mind, that glimmers to us in the dawn as a sort of dim, divine intimation, and is almost immediately drowned by daylight and the market place? I suppose that Plato may have had in mind certain moments in comedy where the self-deluded isolation of some character is so perfectly given as to be almost sublime, and thus to suggest tragedy; or Plato may have had the opposite experience, and may have found himself almost ready to laugh at the fate of Ajax, whose weaknesses of character work out so inevitably, so logically, so beautifully in the tragedy of Sophocles. Perhaps the thought passed through Plato’s mind: “If this were not tragedy, what wonderful comedy it would be! If only the climax were less painful, if the mad Ajax, instead of killing himself should merely be driven to eat grass like an ox for a season, or put on his clothes hind-side-before--in fact, if Ajax’s faults could only be punished quite mildly in the outcome, here would be a comedy indeed!”
The stuff of which tragedy and comedy are made is the same stuff. The foibles of mankind work up more easily into comedy than into tragedy; and this is the chief difference between the two. We readily understand the Nemesis of temperament, the fatality of character, when it is exposed upon a small scale. This is the business of comedy; and we do not here require the labored artifice of gods, mechanical plot, and pointed allegory to make us realize the moral.
But in tragedy we have the large scale to deal with. A tragedy is always the same thing. It is a world of complicated and traditional stage devices for making us realize the helplessness of mankind before destiny. We are told from the start to expect the worst: there is going to be suffering, and the suffering is going to be logical, inevitable, necessary. There is also an implication to be conveyed that this suffering is somehow in accord with the moral constitution of the universe. The aim of the whole thing is to teach us to submit--to fit us for life.