Part 10

“_L’amour d’argent a passé en dogme de morale publique_,” wrote George Sand, whose words have now and then a strange prophetic ring. The “peril of prosperity,” to borrow President Hibben’s alliterative phrase, was not in her day the menace it is in ours, nor has it ever been in her land the menace it has been in ours, because of the many other perils, not to speak of other interests and other ideals, filling the Frenchman’s mind. But if George Sand perceived a growing candour in the deference paid to wealth, to wealth as an abstraction rather than to its possessor, a dropping of the old hypocrisies which made a pretence of doubt and disapproval, a development of honoured and authorized avarice, she was a close observer as well as a caustic commentator.

The artlessness of our American attitude might disarm criticism were anything less than public sanity at stake. We appeal simply and robustly to the love of gain, and we seldom appeal in vain. It is not only that education has substituted the principle of getting on for less serviceable values; but we are bidden to purchase marketable knowledge, no less than marketable foodstuffs, as an easy avenue to fortune. If we will eat and drink the health-giving comestibles urged upon us, our improved digestions will enable us to earn larger incomes. If we will take a highly commended course of horse-shoeing or oratorio-writing, prosperity will be our immediate reward. If we will buy some excellent books of reference, they will teach us to grow rich.

“There are one thousand more millionaires in the United States than there were ten years ago,” say the purveyors of these volumes. “At the present rate of increase, the new millionaires in the next few years will be at least twelve hundred. _Will you be one of them?_” There is a question to ask a young American at the outset of his career! There is an incentive to study! And by way of elucidating a somewhat doubtful situation, the advertisers go on to say: “Typical men of brains are those who have dug large commercial enterprises out of a copper mine, or transformed buying and selling into an art. You must take a leaf from the experience of such men if you would hold positions of responsibility and power.”

Just how the reference books--chill avenues of universal erudition--are going to give us control of a copper mine or of a department store is not made clear; but their vendors know that there is no use in offering anything less than wealth, or, as it is sometimes spelled, “success,” as a return for the price of the volumes. And if a tasteful border design of fat money-bags scattering a cascade of dollars fails to quicken the sales, there is no tempting the heart of man. Our covetousness is as simple and as easily played upon as was the covetousness of the adventurers who went digging for buried treasures on the unimpeachable authority of a soothsayer. The testimony offered in a New Jersey court that a man had bought some farmland because the spirit of a young negro girl had indicated that there was money hidden beneath the soil; the arraignment before a Brooklyn magistrate of two Gipsy women, charged with stealing the cash they had been commissioned to “bless,” are proof, if proof were needed, that intelligence has not kept pace with cupidity.

The endless stories about messenger boys and elevator men who have been given a Wall Street “tip,” and who have become capitalists in a day, are astonishingly like the stories which went their round when the South-Sea Bubble hung iridescent over London. Mankind has never wearied of such tales since Aladdin (one of Fortune’s fools) won his easy way to wealth. Even the old dime novel with “Dare-Devil Dick,” or “Jasper, the Boy Detective,” for a hero, has been transmogrified into a “Fame and Fortune,” series, with “Boys That Make Money,” figuring vaingloriously on the title-page. Gone is the Indian brave, the dauntless young seaman who saved the American navy, the calm-eyed lad who held up a dozen masked ruffians with one small pistol. In their place we have the boy in the broker’s office who finds out that “A. and C.” stock will double its value within ten days; or the exploits of a group of juvenile speculators, who form a “secret syndicate,” and outwit the wisest heads on Wall Street. The supremacy of youth--a vital feature of such fiction--is indicated when the inspired messenger boy gives a “pointer” to an old and influential firm of brokers, who receive it with glistening eyes and respectful gratitude. “I did not tip you in expectation of any compensation,” observes the magnanimous and up-to-date young hero. “I simply felt it was my duty to prevent you from losing the profit that was bound to come your way if you held on a few days longer.”

Our newspapers have told us (we should like to know who told the newspapers) that high prices are popular prices. It is fitting and proper that people who own the wealth of the world should pay a great deal for everything they buy. Shoppers with their purses full of money are affronted by any hint of cheapness or economy. This may be true, though it reminds me a little of a smiling Neapolitan who once assured me that his donkey liked to be beaten. One cannot, without entering into the mind of a donkey or of a rich American, deny the tastes imputed to them; but one may cherish doubts. It is true that “record prices” have been paid for every luxury, that the sales of furriers and jewellers have been unprecedented in the annals of our commerce, that the eager buying of rare books, pictures, and curios, flung on the markets by the destitution of Europe, has never been surpassed. One might wish that destitution anywhere (Vienna is not so far from New York that no cry of pain can reach us) would dim our pleasure in such purchases. This does not seem to be the case. “’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,” and ’tis his deepest and deadliest perdition to profit by the misfortunes of others.

An American rhapsodist, singing the pæan of money in the pages of the “Bankers’ Magazine,” says in its mighty name: “I am the minister of war and the messenger of peace. No army can march without my command. Until I speak, no ship of trade can sail from any port.”

“Until I speak”! Always the emphasis upon that powerful voice which is so mute and inglorious without the compelling mind of man. When President Cleveland said that if it took every dollar in the Treasury, and every soldier in the United States army, to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that postal card should be delivered, he was perhaps glad to think that the nation’s wealth, like the nation’s force, could be used to fulfil the nation’s obligations. But back of wealth, and back of force, was purpose. When man lays hand upon the “hilt of action,” money stops talking and obeys.

Mr. Shane Leslie, shrinking sensitively from that oppressive word, “efficiency,” and seeking what solace he can find in the survival of unpractical ideals, ventures to say that every university man “carries away among the husks of knowledge the certainty that there are less things saleable in heaven and earth than the advocates of sound commercial education would suppose.” This truth, more simply phrased by the Breton peasant woman who said “_Le bon Dieu ne vend pas ses biens_,” has other teachers besides religion and the classics. History, whether we read it or live in it, makes nothing clearer. Mr. Henry Ford is credited with saying that he would not give a nickel for all the history in the world; but though he can, and does, forbear to read it, he has to live in it with the rest of us, and learn its lessons first-hand. No one desired the welfare--or what he conceived to be the welfare--of mankind more sincerely than he did; and he was prepared to buy it at a handsome figure. Yet Heaven refused to sell, and earth, inasmuch as the souls of men are not _her_ possessions, had nothing worth his purchase.

The price of war can be computed in figures; the price of peace calls for another accountant. The tanker, Gold Shell, which first crossed the “forbidden” zone did more than a score of peace ships could have done to secure the civilization of the world. Its plain sailors who put something (I don’t know what they called it) above personal safety, and their plain captain who expressed in the regrettable language of the sea his scorn of German pirates, were prepared to pay a higher price than any millionaire could offer for their own and their country’s freedom. We know what these men risked because we know what agonizing deaths the sailors on the tanker, Healdton, suffered at Germany’s hands. The Gold Shell seamen knew it too, and met frightfulness with fearlessness. The world is never so bad but that men’s souls can rise above its badness, and restore our fainting faith.

Mohammed prayed that he might be found among the poor on the Judgment Day,--a prayer echoed by Saint Bernard, who took some pains to insure its being answered. Yet, as a mere abstraction, of what worth is poverty? The jewel in the toad’s head is as glittering as adversity is sweet. One has been well likened to the other. Bishop Lawrence, undismayed by the most humiliating page of our country’s history, seized a crucial moment in which to say very simply and gallantly that Americans are not wedded to ease, or enthralled by wealth. The time has come to prove him in the right. God will not sell us safety. We learned this much in the winter of 1917, when we dug our mail out of an American steamer, and asked Britain--Britain burdened with debt and bleeding at every pore--to carry it over the sea. For our own sake, no less than for the world’s sake, we must show that we coin money in no base spirit, that we cherish it with no base passion. The angel who looked too long at heaven’s golden pavement was flung, into hell.

Cruelty and Humour

The unhallowed alliance between the cruelty that we hate and the humour that we prize is a psychological problem which frets the candid mind. Hazlitt analyzed it pitilessly, but without concern, because humanity was not his playing card. No writer of the nineteenth century dared to be so clearly and consciously inhumane as was Hazlitt. Shakespeare and Scott recognized this alliance, and were equally unconcerned, because they accepted life on its own terms, and were neither the sport of illusions nor the prey of realities. It took the public--always more or less kind-hearted--two hundred years to sympathize with the wrongs of Shylock, and three hundred years to wince at the misery of Malvolio.

It was with something akin to regret that Andrew Lang watched the shrivelling of that “full-blown comic sense” which accompanied the cruel sports of an earlier generation, the bull-baiting and badger-drawing and cock-fights and prize-fights which Englishmen loved, and which taught them to value courage and look unmoved on pain. In 1699 the old East India Company lost its claim against the New Company by two parliamentary votes; and this measure was passed in the absence of friendly members who had been seduced from their posts by the unwonted spectacle of a tiger-baiting. In 1818 Christopher North (black be his memory!) described graphically and with smothered glee the ignoble game of cat-worrying, which ran counter to British sporting instincts, to the roughly interpreted fair play which severed brutality from baseness. There was never a time when some English voice was not raised to protest against that combination of cruelty and cowardice which pitted strength against weakness, or overwhelming odds against pure gallantry of spirit. The first Englishman to assert that animals had a right to legal protection was John Evelyn. He grasped this novel point of view through sheer horror and disgust because a stallion had been baited with dogs in London, and had fought so bravely that the dogs could not fasten on him until the men in charge ran him through with their swords. Evelyn asked, and asked in vain, that the law should intervene to punish such barbarity.

A century later we hear the same cry of indignation, the same appeal for pity and redress. This time it comes from Horace Walpole, who is beside himself with fury because some scoundrels at Dover had roasted a fox alive, to mark--with apt symbolism--their disapproval of Charles Fox. Walpole, whom Lord Minto characterized as “a prim, precise, pretending, conceited savage, but a most un-English one,” demonstrated on this occasion the alien nature of his sympathies by an outbreak of rage against the cruelty which he was powerless to punish. It is interesting to note that he denounced the deed as “a savage meanness which an Iroquois would have scorned”; showing that he and Lord Minto regarded savagery from different angles. So, it will be remembered, did Lord Byron and Izaak Walton. When the former dared to call the latter “a sentimental savage,” he brought down upon his own head, “bloody but unbowed,” the wrath of British sportsmen, of British churchmen, of British sensibility. Even in far-off America an outraged editor protested shrilly against this _monde bestorné_, this sudden onslaught of vice upon virtue, this reversal of outlawry and order.

The effrontery of the attack startled a decorous world. Lord Byron had so flaunted his immoralities that he had become the scapegoat of society. He had been driven forth from a pure, or at least respectable, island, to dally with sin under less austere skies. The household virtues shuddered at his name. Izaak Walton, on the contrary, had been recognized in his day as a model of domestic sobriety. He had lived happily with two wives (one at a time), and had spent much of his life “in the families of the eminent clergymen of England, of whom he was greatly beloved.” He was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where English fishermen erected a statue to commemorate his pastime. His bust adorns the church of Saint Mary, Stafford, where he was baptized. His second wife sleeps under a monument in Worcester Cathedral. Dr. Johnson and Wordsworth--great sponsors of morality--united in his praise. Mr. Lang (an enthusiastic angler) pronounced him to be “a kind, humorous, and pious soul.” Charles Lamb, who thought angling a cruel sport, wrote to Wordsworth, “Izaak Walton hallows any page in which his reverend name appears.”

This admirable Crichton, this honoured guest of “eminent clergymen,” was the man whom Byron--who had never so much as supped with a curate--selected to attack in his most scandalously indecent poem. His lilting lines,

“The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it,”

were ribald enough in all conscience; but, by way of superdefiance, he added a perfectly serious note in which he pointed out the deliberate character of Walton’s inhumanity. The famous passage in “The Compleat Angler,” which counsels fishermen to use the impaled frog as though they loved him,--“that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer,”--and the less famous, but equally explicit, passages which deal with the tender treatment of dace and snails, sickened Byron’s soul, especially when topped off by the most famous passage of all: “God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than fishing.” The picture of the Almighty smiling down on the pangs of his irrational creatures, in sportsmanlike sympathy with his rational creature (who could recite poetry and quote the Scriptures) was more than Byron could bear. He was keenly aware that he offered no shining example to the world; but he had never conceived of God as a genial spectator of cruelty or of vice.

Therefore this open-eyed sinner called the devout and decent Walton a sentimental savage. Therefore he wrote disrespectful words about the “cruel, cold, and stupid sport of angling.” Therefore he said, “No angler can be a good man”; which comprehensive remark caused the public to ask tartly--and not unreasonably--who appointed Lord Byron to be its monitor? The fantastic love of animals, which was one of the poet’s most engaging traits, may have been deepened by his resentment against men. Nevertheless, we recognize it as a genuine and generous sentiment, ennobling and also amusing, as most genuine and generous sentiments are apt to be. The eaglet that he shot on the shore of Lepanto, and whose life he vainly tried to save, was the last bird to die by his hand. He had an embarrassing habit of becoming attached to wild animals and to barnyard fowls. An ungrateful civet-cat, having bitten a footman, escaped from bondage. A goose, bought to be fattened for Michaelmas, never achieved its destiny; but was raised to the dignity and emoluments of a household pet, and carried about in a basket, swung securely under the poet’s travelling carriage. These amiable eccentricities won neither respect nor esteem. Byron could not in cold blood have hurt anything that breathed; but there was a general impression that a man who was living with another man’s wife had no business to be so kind to animals, and certainly no business to censure respectable and church-going citizens who were cruel to them.

Nevertheless, the battle so inauspiciously begun has been waged ever since, and has found more impeccable champions. It was possible for Charles Lamb to sigh with one breath over the “intolerable pangs” inflicted by “meek” anglers, and to rejoice with the next over the page hallowed by the angler’s reverend name. Happily for himself and for his readers, he had that kind of a mind. But Huxley, whose mind was singularly inflexible and unaccommodating, refused such graceful concessions. All forms of cruelty were hateful to him. Of one distinguished and callous vivisector he said plainly that he would like to send him to the treadmill. But he would hear no word against vivisection from gentlemen who angled with live bait, and he expressed this unsportsmanlike view in his “Elementary Lessons in Physiology.” Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson’s piteous lines on a little dace, whose hard fate it is to furnish an hour’s “innocent recreation” for an angler, had not then been written; but Huxley needed no such incentive to pity. No man in England reverenced the gospel of amusement less than he did. No man was less swayed by sentiment, or daunted by ridicule.

When Hazlitt wrote, “One rich source of the ludicrous is distress with which we cannot sympathize from its absurdity or insignificance,” he touched the keynote of unconcern. Insignificant distress makes merry a humane world. “La malignité naturelle aux hommes est le principe de la comédie.” Distress which could be forced to appear absurd made merry a world which had not been taught the elements of humanity. The elaborate jests which enlivened the Roman games were designed to show that terror and pain might, under rightly conceived circumstances, be infinitely amusing. When the criminal appointed to play the part of Icarus lost his wings at the critical moment which precipitated him into a cage of hungry bears, the audience appreciated the humour of the situation. It was a good practical joke, and the possible distaste of Icarus for his rôle lent pungency to the cleverly contrived performance. “By making suffering ridiculous,” said Mr. Pater, “you enlist against the sufferer much real and all would-be manliness, and do much to stifle any false sentiment of compassion.”

Scott, who had a clear perception of emotions he did not share, gives us in “Quentin Durward” an apt illustration of human suffering rendered absurd by its circumstances, and made serviceable by the pleasure which it gives. Louis the Eleventh and Charles of Burgundy are fairly healed of rancorous fear and hatred by their mutual enjoyment of a man-hunt. The sight of the mock herald, doubling and turning in mad terror with the great boar-hounds at his heels, so delights the royal spectators that the king, reeling with laughter, catches hold of the duke’s ermine mantle for support; the duke flings his arm over the king’s shoulder; and these mortal enemies are converted, through sympathy with each other’s amusement, into something akin to friendship. When Charles, wiping his streaming eyes, says poignantly, “Ah, Louis, Louis, would to God thou wert as faithful a monarch as thou art a merry companion!” we recognize the touch of nature--of fallen nature--which makes the whole world kin. Ambroise Paré tells us that at the siege of Metz, in 1552, the French soldiers fastened live cats to their pikes, and hung them over the walls, crying, “Miaut, Miaut”; while the Spanish soldiers shot at the animals as though they had been popinjays, and both besiegers and besieged enjoyed the sport in a spirit of frank derision.

This simple, undisguised barbarity lacks one element, intensely displeasing to the modern mind,--the element of bad taste. Imperial Rome had no conception of a slave or a criminal as a being whose sensations counted, save as they affected others, save as they afforded, or failed to afford, a pleasurable experience to Romans. Human rights were as remote from its cognizance as animal rights were remote from the cognizance of the Middle Ages. The survival of savagery in man’s heart is terrifying rather than repellent; it humiliates more than it affronts. Whatever is natural is likely to be bad; but it is also likely to come within the scope, if not of our sympathy, at least of our understanding. Where there is no introspection there is no incongruity, nothing innately and sickeningly inhuman and ill-bred.

The most unpleasant record which has been preserved for us is the long Latin poem written by Robert Grove, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, and printed in 1685. It is dedicated to the memory of William Harvey, and describes with unshrinking serenity the vivisection of a dog to demonstrate Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Such experiments, made before the day of anæsthetics, involved the prolonged agony of the animal used for experimentation. Harvey appears to have been a man as remote from pity as from ferocity. He desired to reach and to prove a supremely valuable scientific truth. He succeeded, and there are few who question his methods. But that a man should write in detail--and in verse--about such dreadful work, that he should dwell composedly upon the dog’s excruciating pain, and compliment the poor beast on the useful part he plays, goes beyond endurance. Grove, who had that pretty taste for classicism so prevalent among English clerics, calls on Apollo and Minerva to lend Harvey their assistance, and promises the dog that (if Apollo and Minerva play their parts) he will become a second Lycisca, and will join Procyon and Sirius in the heavens.

Here is an instance in which a rudimentary sense of propriety would have saved a gentleman and a scholar from insulting the principles of good taste. It is more agreeable to contemplate the brutal crowd surrounding a baited bear than to contemplate this clergyman writing in the seclusion of his library. Religion and scholarship have their responsibilities. The German soldiers who ravaged Belgium outraged the sentiments of humanity; but the German professors who sat at their desks, alternately defending and denying these ravages, outraged, not merely humanity, but the taste and intelligence of the world. Theirs was the unpardonable sin.