Part 2

In some ways the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect have always been expensive. The more obvious material comforts--rich food, for example--have not been necessary to either. Neither, in a sense, has fine clothing or expensive furniture. Yet it must be remembered that both the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect tend, in most cases, to develop the sense of beauty; and that too much ugliness can become a pain and an obstacle to calm. There is a simplicity that is pleasing, and a simplicity that is hideous. Leaving aside the social importance of good clothes and good furniture, there is, in downright ugliness, a power to fret the soul, a power to lessen the power to work. But we will neglect, for the moment, the æsthetic side of it. In the matter of food we will willingly simplify. In the matter of adornment, whether of our persons or of our houses, we shall have to simplify, and we can only hope that our simplification can be conducted more along quantitative than along qualitative lines. We shall try to omit rather than commit; to be austere rather than cheap.

The matter of servants is going to hit us harder; for only with “help”--in the quite literal sense--can we manage to get any peace or any time, in the hours left free by our wage-earning, for reading, for contemplation, for conversation. The “general houseworker” has tended to disappear; which is an acknowledgment that when a great many different things have to be done, one human being cannot stand the strain. Only by her being helped out by the family, only by some features of household service being scanted or ill done, could the general houseworker ever manage to keep outside her job. The good cook could not also be the perfect parlor-maid and the perfect child’s nurse. Neither can the good physician, the good lawyer, the good clergyman, also be the perfect choreman, the perfect gardener, and the perfect butler--with hours of casual bookkeeping, plumbing, and carpentering. Even if he had the talent, he would not have the time; for the physician, the lawyer, and the clergyman are not safeguarded by an “eight-hour day.” His wife, moreover, even if she has no private intellectual interests, cannot suffice to all the modern domestic tasks any more than can the general houseworker, who has faded out of existence precisely because she could not. We shall modify as we can; shall have our food sent in from outside where that is possible; shall buy vacuum cleaners (on the instalment plan); shall win occasional hours of freedom by hiring some safe person to come in and watch over the children while they sleep. Hospitality will, of necessity, be much curtailed. Our personal freedom--in any familiar sense of the term--will be almost _nil_. We might defy our house, our garden, our table, our door-bell, to shackle us; but we cannot defy our children to shackle us.

In these ways, we shall probably intrigue for the life of the spirit, the life of the intellect. But, still, they are expensive. Education--good education--is, in the first place, expensive. I do not know how much it costs to make a man a good plumber or a good coal-miner or a good carpenter; but I am sure it does not cost so much as it does to make him a good doctor or a good clergyman. It takes seven years after the “prep” school or the high school to start the professional man on his road, costing fairly heavily all the time. That is why I said that skilled labor is overpaid--it gets an exorbitant return for its expenditure. Most of us hope to have college for our boys, even if they do not take up a profession--just because we think that education is going to matter to a man, all his life, no matter in what field he works. The joys of travel, as I intimated, are going to be cut out for most of us; the opera and the play will become infrequent blessings. But we shall have to have some books--even if we do not start the furnace until December. Indeed, the books we have ourselves are perhaps going to be our best guarantee of our children’s being educated at all. To be sure, we shall be taxed on them, with increasing heaviness; but then, the coal-miner will (let us hope) be taxed on his motor-car.

It may be that we shall come to state-endowed motherhood, and all the rest. But the trouble is that all these socialistic schemes are based on a lower-class demand on life. State endowment of motherhood will perhaps have to come; but what does it guarantee except the child born under decent conditions? The health of the mother, and through her of the child, is to be safeguarded. Very well. _Et après?_ Pure milk may be provided at municipal stations; there will be a day nursery and then a public kindergarten. There will follow--if modern “educators” have their way--the whole desolating career in the public schools, where real education is reduced to a minimum, and “vocational” training is substituted. The child will, in time, be graduated into the ranks of skilled labor, and perhaps will eventually have his motor-car and his tiled bathroom and his “movie” every night.

Yet for some of us this is not a supremely cheering prospect, because it is a wholly materialistic vision. Certainly it is a good thing to start with health as a requisite. Certainly everything that can be done to insure a healthy childhood, in every case where it is physically possible, should be done. But the great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind. It may be that the enormous expense of guaranteeing health to all children born in our vast American community will take all the money that the community has. It may be that no one will ever be free to devote his health to pursuing the life of the mind and the spirit--to the purposes, that is, of civilization not purely physical. But we have not come to that yet; and the war is there to remind us that we really do not know precisely what will come. If real socialism--as distinguished from our temporary utilization of certain socialistic methods--comes, we shall inevitably turn our backs on civilization for a time. Successful socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even though it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them. And socialism, believing as it must (to hold its head high) in the spiritual as well as the political equality of men, is not going to create special opportunities for the special case. “To hell with the special case” is implicit in the socialist slogan. Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious? Is there any evidence whatever that the socialist is less avid of personal political power, less averse to demagogic methods, than the other person? Does he himself go far to prove his perfectionism? A good many socialists are calling other socialists names because they put nationality before internationality; though any one with any sense could have told them beforehand that they would, because human beings are--fortunately or unfortunately--like that. Lenin and Trotzky are disappointed because the German socialists do not rise to betray their rulers; and some socialists are disappointed because Lenin and Trotzky appear to be selling Russia out to Germany in order to keep themselves--two individuals--in places of power. Every one is calling names all round; and if socialism were anything in particular, it would (one would think) be very sorry for itself.

What is clear is this: that the socialization of governments places vast power in the hands of the skilled laborer. It is only in order that labor shall produce as fast and as furiously as possible that we have socialized our national organization. We need, chiefly for war’s sake, certain physical things--food, munitions, coal, khaki clothing, and transportation for the same. We are calling for Y. M. C. A. men, and K. of C., and chaplains; but what we really expect of them, more than anything else, is to go under fire, if necessary, to give the soldiers tobacco and hot chocolate. The newspapers lay eager and delighted stress on the unclerical nature of the services these gentlemen find themselves cheerfully performing. War, you see, is a physical business. Of the spiritual side of it I am not going to speak. No one really can speak of it in terms of actual achievement until the armies have come home and we see what manner of men they are. You cannot tell from the straws you see which way the great last wind of all is going to blow. Some wise people doubt whether the veterans of this war are going to spiritualize the world. Many of them will have had, at this or that supreme moment, something akin to a spiritual revelation. But the spiritual adventure is a desperately and exclusively personal thing; you cannot socialize it. It is incommunicable, and for the most part inexpressible. The attempt to socialize a spiritual experience ends in the camp-meeting; it goes no farther. Like all mental ecstasies, it cannot be felt simultaneously by millions of people. I fancy that the opinions the veterans are going to express at the polls are quite unforeknowable. We are all willingly kow-towing to the materialists for the sake of the armies. Whether the armies will wish to kow-tow to them when the war is over is a question more difficult of present solution than the Balkan boundaries. Certainly, if the armies have developed an _esprit de corps_ and a philosophy of their own, they will be listened to. We shall inevitably be very sentimental about them. Whether we shall continue to be sentimental about the man who selected this moment to hold up his country and his compatriots for exorbitant pay, and demonstrated his patriotism by earning it, I do not know. We can deal only with the present situation.

What, the present outlook being what it is, can we count on for our children? We shall be practically aided, in time, as I have said, by all sorts of co-operative schemes--invented for the use of the very poor, and adapted and expanded, of necessity, for the not quite so poor. Some of the amenities of life, some of the space and the privacy, will have gone irretrievably. After considerations of health come considerations of education. We shall not be able, probably, to afford private schools for our children; and our sole comfort must be that most private schools are not much good, anyhow. They are a little safer gamble, in most communities, than the public schools. That is all. We, the parents, must supplement the bad teaching as best we can, must keep at least some spark of intelligent interest in the universe alive by the gas-log. It may well become our painful and subversive duty to inform our children, from the beginning, that what is being offered them by the state as education is not really education at all; and that teaching a boy how to make bookshelves is in no sense a substitute for teaching him to read and appreciate Latin. (Better not mention Greek!) It is very desirable, if not absolutely necessary, for our daughter to know how to cook; but we must not permit her to consider that domestic science is education, in the proper sense. We must keep the fact before ourselves and before the next generation that the training of the mind does not mean quite the same thing as the training of the muscles. Time was when a cobbler--and I do not mean anything so remote and legendary as Hans Sachs--found philosophy a very natural complement to cobbling. I knew a cobbler in my childhood who was much in demand among the intellectuals, as being one of the few people who could expound Emerson’s transcendentalism in a completely satisfactory way. He went about--I can still recall the spun snow of his hair, the canny saintliness of his much-modelled face, the thin figure under the long black cloak--to philosophical conferences, to discuss metaphysics with the metaphysicians; and returned to sit in his little shop and cobble shoes. But one has yet to hear of philosophy’s coming from a member of the lasters’ union. Machinery means specialization; and it is an old story that there is no mental comfort or development in repeating the same gesture for eight hours a day, even if one has time and a half for overtime. The single gesture is not educative. When you saw the shoe as an entity, when it grew under your hands and you built up the whole consciously from the related parts; even when you were a mere cobbler, a physician to sick shoes, and had to know the whole shoe-organism--there was something in that humblest, most physical of tasks which demanded a conception in the brain. That time is gone, and if William Morris in the flesh could not bring it back, certainly his ghost will not. But if you think for a moment of the difference in mental attitude and mental grasp, it shows up skilled labor for what it is.

I am far from saying that, in this much simpler world which the increasing complication of life is going, paradoxically, to create for some of us, it is a bad thing that children should be “vocationally” trained. (You cannot say “vocationally educated,” for that is virtually a contradiction in terms.) Even so, it is only to a very limited degree that our sons can be, in the intervals, their own plumbers or their own carpenters or their own masons, for the unions will never allow it. It is a very minor tinkering that is permitted to the private person. You cannot help to paint your own woodwork in your own house, for the union painter will leave his job if you touch your private paint-brush in his presence. What good, after all, is this famous vocational training, except as you definitely choose to follow through life some one of the trades they teach you? It will not really make the whole man more efficient; for he will not be allowed to use his potential efficiency. It may teach him whether he prefers to be a steamfitter or a bricklayer; but it cannot guarantee him any power to practise either steamfitting or brick-laying, unless he is willing to forsake all else and cling only to that. Never was such nonsense talked by any one as by the new “educators.” Labor frankly uses the argument of might and the big stick; but labor, as far as I know, does not pretend that it is something else. It rests its case cynically on our own pampered inability to get on without it.

“Philosophy can bake no bread,” replied some philosopher to his critics, “but it can give us God, freedom, and immortality.” Those are the last things, I take it, that modern philosophy is really concerned with giving us; but the perversity of one generation need not obscure all history. It is possible for the contemplation of great ideas, of great art, of great poetry, of the epic motions of the human race as revealed in history, to mitigate physical deprivation. It is possible to have plain living and high thinking together--though it is not easy, and never has been, and some of the best-known exponents of that theory have been pitiful failures. Certainly we of the minority must accept for ourselves austerities we were not bred to in our easy-going, materialistic generation. Without taking, like St. Simeon, to the wilful discomfort of a pillar, we must learn to do without a hundred “necessities” that Dante and Shakespeare never dreamed of. We must keep it possible for our children to delight in Dante and Shakespeare; we must not let the authentic intellectual thrill disappear from the world. And, for that, we must insist that the past be not closed to them, and that learning shall not be an unknown good. They will have to do it on bread and milk, not on caviare; but it can be done on bread and milk. That is the point.

I confess that as I look forth in these distressed times on the vast American scene, I find myself pinning my hope to two things--the self-consciousness of this minority, and the older Eastern universities. For unless we plan our simplicities cannily, the other people will have won out; and unless the older universities keep up a standard of learning, hold the door open, by main force, to the past, the garnered lore of the world will fail us. We shall progress--but blindly, as the brute creation. The fact is that we are living in an obscurantist epoch. For surely it is obscurantism to deny the legitimacy of any field of knowledge or of virtue, and those folk who would reduce everything to a physical basis are as deadly foes of light as their ancestors who saw in physical experiments nothing but the black art. Every sane person wants science left free to accomplish its marvellous work; but no sane person past early youth would say, as a young woman fresh from her college laboratories said to me a few days since, that chemistry is the root of all knowledge. The Protestants, when they were on top, were as given to obscurantism, and its accompaniment of persecution, as the Catholics.

In the matter of education, as I have suggested, we shall have to rely on the older colleges of the East. We cannot count on the West to help us, for the West is cursed with state universities. It is by no means my intention or my private inclination to minimize the value of the state universities. The point is that they are uncertain; they are not free; they are dependent, in the last analysis, on public favor, which means public funds, on a kind of initiative and referendum. They may have good luck and become great schools of learning; they may have bad luck and become indifferent and negligible places. They are not really allowed to set their own standards; they must ever be compromising with the personnel of state legislatures. The private colleges and universities of the East at least are not dependent on politics. Their funds are for the most part inadequate, but they do not have to change their curricula to please people who know nothing about what a curriculum should be. As long as their private fortunes last, they can afford to say the thing which they believe to be true. One of the most heartening things that have happened since 1914 is the acquisition of great wealth by Yale University. It means--one hopes--that one at least of our old academic foundations can snap its fingers at ignorance enthroned; that it can send out its thousands endowed with some sense of intellectual values. Intellectual values are not the only ones; but most sane people believe that only by the rigid training of the mind can human beings be taught wise living and moral values. There is no morality by instinct, though there can be morality by inherited inhibitions. There is no social salvation--in the end--without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience. These things, because they are not the natural man, are not carelessly come by; they must be deliberately achieved. You will not learn them from the Bolsheviki, or from the I. W. W., or even from Mr. Arthur Henderson. A great deal is said nowadays about practical politics and the rôle of the practical man in building the social structure. Before you can carry out an idea you must have the idea. You cannot get rid of the world of abstract thought. One after the other, leaders of the Church are laying more and more stress on religion’s being a strictly social matter. Perhaps it is, though I do not believe it. I should have said that social regeneration was a by-product of religion, not religion itself. But even the folk who think that Christianity means no slums, and means little else, derive their sanction--or think they do--from Christ, who dealt in abstract ideas more exclusively than any other religious teacher the world has had.

We must, then, seriously facing the moral, political, and physical conditions of our time, be frankly ascetic. We must make our children healthy, first of all--if only because specialists will be beyond our pocketbooks. I have implied that the combination of plain living and high thinking is a difficult one; I fancy it is the most difficult in the world. “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.” We shall obliterate the coarser contacts, as far as possible, not by engaging other people to take the burden of those coarser contacts, but by buying, as we can, the machinery that will suffice to them impersonally. We shall “co-operate” to the limit of our incomes, losing thereby, I repeat, many of the amenities which tend to civilize. We shall not sleep soft, we shall not live high, and we shall do without external beauty to a painful extent. We shall exist in cramped quarters, and if we achieve the dignity of one spacious room, that will be a great deal. We cannot hope to furnish it fittingly. But if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season. If we have a holiday, we shall not go to Europe or Asia, which would be beyond our means; but we shall find some quiet spot where there will at least be trees and sky and no motor-cars or aeroplanes. We shall, I hope, ameliorate our lack of space and privacy by a very perfectly developed courtesy and by the capacity for silence. It sounds monastic, and, at its best, monastic it will be. Certain things we shall have given up at the start; certain ambitions will have been erased from our tablets. We shall not compete with, or interfere with, the lords of this world. We shall do our modest work, and receive our modest pay, and by a corresponding modesty of life and temper we shall disarm, we hope, the unsympathetic and uncomprehending. Our kingdom cannot be of this world; and instead of complaining and criticizing, we must apply ourselves to realizing that our compensations can be made greater than our losses. We shall be passionately concerned with humanity; the more so, that we shall endeavor to be aware of the voice of God as well as of the voice of the people. We shall not be snobs in any sense; for we shall have the same charity for other people’s choices that we beg them to have for ours. Besides, snobbishness dies out quickly--in America, at least--among the impoverished.

Even those who find all this an intolerable idea will dub it Utopian. A counsel of perfection it certainly is. But the higher the standard we set for ourselves the less likely we are to put up with a low one. And if we merely drift, I fear we shall find ourselves getting nothing--wearing ourselves out in the unequal, familiar race for physical privileges, and leaving to one side the intangible goods. We can guarantee our children nothing except that they shall be armored against certain kinds of suffering; the lust of non-essentials, for example. I do not say that we shall not lose much that our best interest would suggest our having; but we shall not lose everything. And with the new simplicity will come some of the compensations of earlier simplicity. The man who has three things gets more pleasure out of one than does the man who has a hundred. Perhaps we shall capture the “joy in widest commonalty spread.” A rose will always be cheaper than an alligator pear, and it is quite possible to enjoy it as much and as vividly. We shall be very grateful, I have no doubt, to Thomas Edison and the other genii of democracy. In some ways we shall fare better than folk of our clan in Europe. We must thank our stars for plumbing--itself a “joy in widest commonalty spread.” But we shall value it chiefly as it releases time for better things, and those better things not physical pleasures.