Part 3
We have been told that the Great War stands responsible for our mental disturbance, for the repeated assaults upon taste and credulity before which the walls of our minds are giving way. Mr. Howells, observing rather sympathetically the ghostly stir and thrill which pervades literature, asked if it were due to the overwhelming numbers of the dead, if it came to us straight from sunken ships, and from the battle-fields of Europe.
What answer can we make save that natural laws work independently of circumstance? A single dead man and a million of dead men stand in the same relation to the living. If ever there was a time when it was needful to hold on to our sanity with all our might, that time is now. Our thoughts turn, and will long turn, to the men who laid down their lives for our safety. How could it be otherwise? There is, and there has always been, a sense of comradeship with the departed. It is a noble and a still comradeship, untarnished by illusions, unvulgarized by extravagant details. Newman has portrayed it in “A Voice from Afar”; and Mr. Rowland Thirlmere has made it the theme of some very simple and touching verses called “Jimmy Doane.” The elderly Englishman who has lost his friend, a young American aviator, “generous, clever, and confident,” and who sits alone, with his heart cold and sore, feels suddenly the welcome nearness of the dead. No table heaves its heavy legs to announce that silent presence. No alphabet is needed for his message. But the living man says simply to his friend, “My house is always open to you,” and hopes that they may sit quietly together when the dreams of both are realized, and the hour of deliverance comes.
The attitude of spirit authors to the war varies from the serene detachment of Raymond, who had been a soldier, to the passionate partisanship of the “Living Dead Man,” who had been a civilian; but who, like the anonymous “Son,” cannot refrain from playing a lively part in the struggle. “Many a time have I clutched with my too-tenuous hands a German soldier who was about to disgrace himself.” Harry and Helen express some calm regret that the lack of unselfish love should make war possible, and report that “Hughey”--their brother-in-law’s brother--“has gone to throw all he possesses of light into the dark struggle.” Apparently his beams failed signally to illuminate the gloom, which is not surprising when we learn that “a selfish or ill-natured thought” (say from a Bulgarian or a Turk) “lowers the rate of vibration throughout the entire universe.” They also join the “White Cross” nurses, and are gratified that their knowledge of French enables them to receive and encourage the rapidly arriving French soldiers. Helen, being the better scholar of the two, is able to give first aid, while Harry brushes up his verbs. In the absence of French caretakers, who seem to have all gone elsewhere, the two young Americans are in much demand.
Remote from such crass absurdities (which have their confiding readers) is the quiet, if somewhat perfunctory, counsel given by “The Invisible Guide” to Mr. C. Lewis Hind, and by him transmitted to the public. There is nothing offensive or distasteful in this little volume which has some charming chapters, and which purports to be an answer to the often asked question, “How may I enter into communion with the departed?” If the admonitions of the dead soldier, who is the “Guide,” lack pith and marrow, they do not lack it more perceptibly than do the admonitions of living counsellors, and he is always commendably brief. What depresses us is the quality of his pacifism expressed at a time which warranted the natural and noble anger awakened by injustice.
It is the peculiarity of all pacifists that wrongdoing disturbs them less than does the hostility it provokes. The “Guide” has not a sigh to waste over Belgium and Serbia. Air-raids and submarines fail to disturb his serenity. But he cannot endure a picture called _Mitrailleuse_, which represents four French soldiers firing a machine gun. When his friend, the author, so far forgets himself as to be angry at the insolence of some Germans, the “Guide,” pained by such intolerance, refuses any communication; and when, in more cheerful mood, the author ventures to be a bit enthusiastic over the gallant feats of a young aviator, the “Guide” murmurs faintly and reproachfully, “It is the mothers that suffer.”
One is forced to doubt if guidance such as this would ever have led to victory.
Raymond, though he has been thrust before the public without pity and without reserve, has shown no disposition to enter the arena of authorship. He has been content to prattle to his own family about the conditions that surround him, about the brick house he lives in, the laboratories he visits, where “all sorts of things” are manufactured out of “essences and ether and gases,”--rather like German war products, and the lectures that he attends. The subjects of these lectures are spirituality, concentration, and--alas!--“the projection of uplifting and helpful thoughts to those on the earth plane.” Such scraps of wisdom as are vouchsafed him he passes dutifully on to his parents. He tells his mother that, on the spiritual plane, “Rank doesn’t count as a virtue. High rank comes by being virtuous.”
“Kind hearts are more than coronets.”
Also that “It isn’t always the parsons that go highest first,” and that “It isn’t what you’ve professed; it’s what you’ve done.” Something of this kind we have long suspected. Something of this kind has long been hinted from the plain pulpits of the world.
I fear it is the impatience of the human mind, the hardness of the human heart, which make us restless under too much preaching. Volume after volume of “messages” have been sent to us by spirits during the last few years. There is no fault to be found with any of them, and that sad word, “uplifting,” may well apply to all. Is it possible that, when we die, we shall preach to one another; or is it the elusiveness of ghostly audiences which drives determined preachers to the ouija board? The somewhat presumptuous title, “To Walk With God,” which Mrs. Lane and Mrs. Beale have given to their volume of revelations, was, we are told, commanded by the spirit who dictated it. “Stephen,” the dead soldier who stands responsible for the diffuse philosophy of “Our Unseen Guest,” dedicates the book to the “wistful” questioners who seek enlightenment at his hands. “Anne Simon,” a transcendental spirit with a strong bias for hyphenated words, sends her modest “Message,” dictated through her husband, to “world-mortals for their regeneration.”
How lightly that tremendous word, “regeneration,” is bandied about by our ghostly preceptors. Mr. Basil King, in “The Abolishing of Death,” reports the spirit of Henry Talbot, the distinguished Boston chemist, as saying, “My especial mission is to regenerate the world.” It is a large order. The ungrateful but always curious mortal who would like a few practical hints about chemistry, is told instead that “grief is unrhythmical,” which proves that Mr. Talbot never read “In Memoriam”; or finds himself beset by figurative phrases. “Literature is the sun, music is the water, sculpture is the earth, dancing is life, and painting is the soul. These in their purity can never be evil. I have spread a table in your sight. Whatever is on it is for your use. Take freely, and give it to others. They hunger for the food.”
For what do we hunger? For any word which will help us on our hard but interesting way, any word which is wise, or practically useful, or beautiful. It has been revealed to Mr. King that poets as splendid as Homer and Shakespeare bloom in the spirit world. Why, in the general assault by dead authors, are _they_ the silent ones? Could they not give us one good play, one good lyric, one good sonnet, just to show a glint of their splendour? What is wrong with psychic currents that they bear nothing of value? “Stephen,” the “Unseen Guest,” assures us that many a man we call a genius “simply puts into words the thoughts of some greater mentality in the other life.” But this is not adding to our store. It is trying to take away from us the merit of what we have. “Anne Simon” reads the riddle thus: “In earth-proximity the spirit leaves behind him his efficacy, for the time, of Heaven-emanation; so it is better to open the heart, and wish the larger beneficence than to visualize the spirit-form. For the spirit-form without its spirit-treasure does not bring the mortal to the higher places.”
Which, though not wholly intelligible, is doubtless true.
If we do not get what we hunger for, what is it we receive? Professor Hyslop once assured me that the authorship of “Jap Herron” was “proved beyond question.” This contented him, but dismayed me. The eclipse of the “merry star” which danced above Mark Twain’s cradle, and which shone on him fitfully through life, suggests direful possibilities in the future. It is whispered that O. Henry is busily dictating allegories and tracts; that Dickens may yet reveal “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”; that Washington Irving has loomed on the horizon of an aspiring medium. The publication of “Shakespeare’s Revelations, by Shakespeare’s Spirit: A Soul’s Record of Defeat,” adds a touch of fantastic horror to the situation. The taste of the world, like the sanity of the world, has seemingly crashed into impotence.
Patience Worth is fortunate in so far that she has no earlier reputation at stake. In fact, we are informed that three of her stories are told in “a dialect which, taken as a whole, was probably never spoken, and certainly never written. Each seems to be a composite of dialect words and idioms of different periods and different localities.” It is Mr. Yost’s opinion, however, that her long historical novel, “The Sorry Tale,” is composed “in a literary tongue somewhat resembling the language of the King James version of the Bible in form and style, but with the unmistakable verbal peculiarities of Patience Worth.” “What bringeth thee asearch?” and “Who hath the trod of the antelope?” are doubtless verbal peculiarities; but for any resemblance to the noble and vigorous lucidity of the English Bible we may search in vain through the six hundred and forty closely printed pages of this confused, wandering, sensuous, and wholly unreadable narrative, which purports to tell the life-history of the penitent thief. I quote a single paragraph, snatched at random from the text, which may serve as a sample of the whole:
“And within, upon the skins’-pack, sat Samuel, who listed him, and lo, the jaws of him hung ope. And Jacob wailed, and the Jew’s tongue of him sounded as the chatter of fowls, and he spake of the fool that plucked of his ass that he save of down. Yea, and walked him at the sea’s edge, and yet sought o’ pools. And he held aloft unto the men who hung them o’er the bin’s place handsful of brass and shammed precious stuffs, and cried him out.”
Six hundred and forty pages of this kind of writing defy a patient world. And we are threatened with “the larger literature to come”!
“Hope Trueblood,” Patience Worth’s last novel, is written in intelligible English, as is also the greater part of her verse. The story deals with the doubtful legitimacy of a little girl in an English village which has lived its life along such straight lines that the mere existence of a bastard child, or a child thought to be a bastard, rocks it to its foundations, and furnishes sufficient matter for violent and heart-wounding scenes from the first chapter to the last. It is difficult to follow the fortunes of this child (who might have been the great original devil baby of Hull House for the pother she creates) because of the confusion of the narrative, and because of the cruelly high pitch at which all emotions are sustained; but we gather that the marriage lines are at last triumphantly produced, and that the village is suffered to relapse into the virtuous somnolence of earlier days.
Mr. Yost, who has edited all of Patience Worth’s books, and who is perhaps a partial critic, praises her poems for their rare individuality. We may search in vain, he says, through literature for anything resembling them. “They are alike in the essential features of all poetry, and yet they are unalike. There is something in them that is not in other poetry. In the profusion of their metaphor there is an etherealness that more closely resembles Shelley, perhaps, than any other poet; but the beauty of Shelley’s poems is almost wholly in their diction; there is in him no profundity of thought. In these poems there is both beauty and depth,--and something else.”
Whatever this “something else” may be, it is certainly not rhyme or rhythm. The verses brook no bondage, but run loosely on with the perilous ease of enfranchisement. For the most part they are of the kind which used to be classified by compilers as “Poems of Nature,” and “Poems of Sentiment and Reflection.” Spring, summer, autumn, and winter are as inspirational for the dead as for the living.
“’Tis season’s parting. Yea, and earth doth weep. The Winter cometh, And he bears her jewels for the decking Of his bride. A glittered crown Shall fall ’pon earth, and sparkled drop Shall stand like gem that flasheth ’Pon a nobled brow. Yea, the tears Of earth shall freeze and drop As pearls, the necklace o’ the earth ’Tis season’s parting. Yea, The earth doth weep. ’Tis Fall.”
These simple statements might justifiably be printed without the capital letters which distinguish prose from verse; but we can understand them, and we are familiar with the phenomena they describe.
Byron has recorded in a letter to Hoppner the profound impression made upon him by two concise epitaphs in the cemetery of Bologna.
MARTINI LUIGI Implora pace.
LUCREZIA PICINI Implora eterna quiete.
It seemed to the poet--himself in need of peace--that all the weariness of life, and all the gentle humility of the tired but trusting soul, were compressed into those lines. There is nothing calamitous in death.
“The patrimony of a little mould, And entail of four planks,”
is the common heritage of mankind, and we accept it reverently. A belief in the immortality of the soul has been fairly familiar to Christendom before the spiritualists adopted it as their exclusive slogan. But to escape from time, only to enter upon an eternity shorn of everything which could make eternity endurable, to pass through the narrow door which opens on the highways of God, only to find ourselves dictating dull books, and delivering platitudinous lectures,--which of us has courage to face such possibilities!
We are told that once, when Patience Worth was spelling out the endless pages of “The Sorry Tale,” she came to a sudden stop, then wrote, “This be nuff,” and knocked off for the night. A blessed phrase, and, of a certainty, her finest inspiration. Would that all dead authors would adopt it as their motto; and with ouija boards, and table-legs, and automatic pencils, write as their farewell message to the world those three short, comely words, “This be nuff.”
Consolations of the Conservative
There is a story of Hawthorne’s which is little known, because it is too expansively dull to be read. It tells how the nations of the earth, convulsed by a mighty spasm of reform, rid themselves of the tools and symbols of all they held in abhorrence. Because they would have no more war, they destroyed the weapons of the world. Because they would have no more drunkenness, they destroyed its wines and spirits. Because they banned self-indulgence, they destroyed tobacco, tea, and coffee. Because they would have all men to be equal, they destroyed the insignia of rank, from the crown jewels of England to the medal of the Cincinnati. Wealth itself was not permitted to survive, lest the new order be as corrupt as was the old. Nothing was left but the human heart with its imperishable and inalienable qualities; and while it beats within the human breast, the world must still be moulded by its passions. “When Cain wished to slay his brother,” murmured a cynic, watching the great guns trundled to the blaze, “he was at no loss for a weapon.”
If belief in the perfectibility of man--and not of man only, but of governments--is the inspiration of liberalism, of radicalism, of the spirit that calls clamorously for change, and that has requisitioned the words reform and progression, sympathy with man and with his work, with the beautiful and imperfect things he has made of the chequered centuries, is the keynote of conservatism. The temperamental conservative is a type vulnerable to ridicule, yet not more innately ridiculous than his neighbours. He has been carelessly defined as a man who is cautious because he has a good income, and content because he is well placed; who is thick-headed because he lacks vision, and close-hearted because he is deaf to the moaning wind which is the cry of unhappy humanity asking justice from a world which has never known how to be just. Lecky, who had a neat hand at analysis, characterized the great conflicting parties in an axiom which pleased neither: “Stupidity in all its forms is Tory; folly in all its forms is Whig.”
These things have been too often said to be quite worth the saying. Stupidity is not the prerogative of any one class or creed. It is Heaven’s free gift to men of all kinds, and conditions, and civilizations. A practical man, said Disraeli, is one who perpetuates the blunders of his predecessor instead of striking out into blunders of his own. Temperamental conservatism is the dower (not to be coveted) of men in whom delight and doubt--I had almost said delight and despair--contend for mastery; whose enjoyment of colour, light, atmosphere, tradition, language and literature is balanced by chilling apprehensiveness; whose easily won pardon for the shameless revelations of an historic past brings with it no healing belief in the triumphant virtues of the future.
The conservative is not an idealist, any more than he is an optimist. Idealism has worn thin in these days of colossal violence and colossal cupidity. Perhaps it has always been a cloak for more crimes than even liberty sheltered under her holy name. The French Jacobins were pure idealists; but they translated the splendour of their aspirations, the nobility and amplitude of their great conception, into terms of commonplace official murder, which are all the more displeasing to look back upon because of the riot of sentimentalism and impiety which disfigured them. It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable. If we had resolutely severed the word “idealism” from the bloody chaos which is Russia, we should have understood more clearly, and have judged no less leniently, the seething ambitions of men who passionately desired, and desire, control. The elemental instinct of self-preservation is the first step to the equally elemental instinct of self-interest. Natural rights, about which we chatter freely, are not more equably preserved by denying them to one class of men than by denying them to another. They have been ill-protected under militarism and capitalism; and their subversion has been a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance. They are not protected at all under any Soviet government so far known to report.
Nothing is easier than to make the world safe for democracy. Democracy is playing her own hand in the game. She has every intention and every opportunity to make the world safe for herself. But democracy may be divorced from freedom, and freedom is the breath of man’s nostrils, the strength of his sinews, the sanction of his soul. It is as painful to be tyrannized over by a proletariat as by a tsar or by a corporation, and it is in a measure more disconcerting, because of the greater incohesion of the process. It is as revolting to be robbed by a reformer as by a trust. Oppressive taxation, which forced the great Revolution upon France; dishonest “deals,” which have made a mockery of justice in the United States; ironic laws, framed for the convenient looting of the bourgeoisie in Russia;--there is as much idealism in one device as in the others. Sonorous phrases like “reconstruction of the world’s psychology,” and “creation of a new world-atmosphere,” are mental sedatives, drug words, calculated to put to sleep any uneasy apprehensions. They may mean anything, and they do mean nothing, so that it is safe to go on repeating them. But a Bolshevist official was arrested in Petrograd in March, 1919, charged with embezzling fifteen million rubles. Not content with the excesses of the new régime, he must needs revert to the excesses of the old,--a discouraging study in evolution.
When Lord Hugh Cecil published his analysis of conservatism nine years ago, the British reviewers devoted a great deal of time to its consideration,--not so much because they cared for what the author had to say (though he said it thoughtfully and well), as because they had opinions of their own on the subject, and desired to give them utterance. Cecil’s conception of temperamental, as apart from modern British political conservatism (which he dates from Pitt and Burke), affords the most interesting part of the volume; but the line of demarcation is a wavering one. That famous sentence of Burke’s concerning innovations that are not necessarily reforms, “They shake the public security, they menace private enjoyment,” shows the alliance between temperament and valuation. It was Burke’s passionate delight in life’s expression, rather than in life’s adventure, that made him alive to its values. He was not averse to change: change is the law of the universe; but he changed in order to preserve. The constructive forces of the world persistently won his deference and support.
The intensely British desire to have a moral, and, if possible, a religious foundation for a political creed would command our deepest respect, were the human mind capable of accommodating its convictions to morality and religion, instead of accommodating morality and religion to its convictions. Cecil, a stern individualist, weighted with a heavy sense of personal responsibility, and disposed to distrust the kindly intervention of the State, finds, naturally enough, that Christianity is essentially individualistic. “There is not a line of the New Testament that can be quoted in favour of the enlargement of the function of the State beyond the elementary duty of maintaining order and suppressing crime.”
The obvious retort to this would be that there is not a line in the New Testament which can be quoted in favour of the confinement of the function of the State to the elementary duty of maintaining order and suppressing crime. The counsel of Christ is a counsel of perfection, and a counsel of perfection is necessarily personal and intimate. What the world asks now are state reforms and social reforms,--in other words, the reformation of our neighbours. What the Gospel asks, and has always asked, is the reformation of ourselves,--a harassing and importunate demand. Mr. Chesterton spoke but the truth when he said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and not tried.