Part 6

It is an age of specialism, and the criminal, like the scientist, has specialized. Stealing Liberty Bonds is a field full of promise for youth. Apparently nothing can shake the confidence of brokers in the messengers who disappear with one lot of bonds, only to be released on a suspended sentence, and speedily entrusted with a second. The term “juvenile delinquency” has been stretched to cover every offence from murder to missing school. A fourteen-year-old girl who poisoned a fourteen-month-old baby in Brooklyn, in the summer of 1919, and who was tried in the Children’s Court, was found guilty of juvenile delinquency, and committed to a home for delinquent girls. It is hard to say what else could have been done with a murderess of such tender years; but the New York authorities should see to it that Solomon Kramer is the last baby whom Frances Sulinski kills. She poisoned this one with the single purpose of implicating in the crime a woman of seventy with whom she had quarrelled. The poor infant lingered in pain twenty-four hours before released by death. It is not easy to throw a kindly light upon the deed; and while a baby’s life is of small value to the State (“as well be drowned as grow up a tinker,” said Sir Walter Scott), civilization means that it has a right to protection. The law exists, not for the punishment of the offender, and not for his reformation, but that the public may be safe from his hands.

A robust sense of humour might help to straighten out the tangles which have deranged the simple processes of jurisdiction. When the court rendered a decision freeing the prison authorities of Tacoma from all responsibility in the event of a hunger strike, a light dawned on that stricken town. The I.W.W., who had refused to eat because they objected to being detained in the county, instead of in the city jail, were accorded liberty to follow their desires. A threat which for years had sufficed to throw British and American prisons into consternation was suddenly found to be harmless to all but the threateners. What really agitated the citizens of Tacoma just then was, not so much whether demagogues would consent to eat the food provided for them, as whether honest men could afford food to eat.

A comic opera might be staged with Ellis Island as a _mise en scène_. The seventy-three “reds,” detained on that asylum as undesirables, who sent an “ultimatum,” modelled on the Berlin pattern, to the Congressional Committee, would have charmed Gilbert and inspired Sullivan. The solemnity with which they notified the indifferent Congressmen that at half-past eight o’clock, Tuesday morning, November 25th, 1919, they would declare a hunger strike, the consequences of which “shall fall upon the head of the administration of the island,” was surpassed by the calmness with which they gave warning that they would no longer attend the hearings of the committee. Like the heroine of Mr. Davidson’s ballad, who told the Devil she would not stay in hell, these gentlemen registered themselves as outside the pale of coercion. They seemed to think that by refusing to eat, they could bend the law to their will, and that by refusing to have their cases heard, they could stop the slow process of deportation.

It is painful to record this lack of healthy humour on the part of political offenders. Ordinary criminals are as a rule neat hands at a joke, a practical joke especially, and convicts respond alacritously to all intelligent efforts to amuse them. Comedians, who from time to time have offered their services to relieve the sad monotony of prison life, have found their audiences alert and responsive. Not a joke is lost, not a song or a skit but wins its way to favour. It is this engaging receptiveness which has made our captive thieves and cut-throats so dear to the public heart. They dilate with correct emotions when they hear good music; and, in the dearth of other diversions, they can produce very creditable entertainments of their own. The great Sing Sing pageant in honour of Warden Osborne was full of fun and fancy. It would have done credit to the dramatic talent of any college in the land. No wonder that we detect a certain ostentation in the claims made by honest men to familiarity with rogues. The Honourable T. P. O’Connor published a few years ago a series of papers with the arrogant title, “Criminals I Have Known.” Could he have attracted readers by boasting the acquaintanceship of any other class of fellow-creatures?

The sourness incidental to a grievance deprives the political offender of this winning vivacity. He is lamentably high-flown in his language, and he has no sense of the ridiculous. The Sinn Feiners who wrecked the office of a Dublin newspaper because it had alluded to one of the men who tried to kill Lord French as a “would-be assassin,” should expend some of the money received from the United States (in return for stoning our sailors in Cork and Queenstown) in the purchase of a dictionary. “Assassin” is as good a word as “murderer” any day of the week, and a “would-be assassin” is no other than a “would-be murderer.” The Sinn Feiners explained in a letter to the editor that the calumniated man was really a “high-souled youth,” but this goes without the saying. _All_ political offenders are high-souled youths. It is their sub-title, eligible in oratory and obituary notices, but not in the simple language of the press.

Mr. W. C. Brownell alludes casually to the social sentiment which instinctively prefers the criminal to the police; but he declines to analyze its rationale. Perhaps, as I have already hinted, we may inherit it from our father, Adam, who could have felt no great kindness for Saint Michael, the first upholder of the given law. Justice is an unaccommodating, unappealing virtue. Deep in our hearts is a distaste for its rulings, and a distrust of the fallible creatures who administer it. Mr. Howells, writing ten years ago in the “North American,” condemned without reserve the authority which, however assailable, is our only bulwark against anarchy. “The State,” he said, “is a collective despot, mostly inexorable, always irresponsible, and entirely inaccessible to the personal appeals which have sometimes moved the obsolete tyrant to pity. In its selfishness and meanness it is largely the legislated and organized ideal of the lowest and stupidest of its citizens, whose daily life is nearest the level of barbarism.”

I am not without hope that the events of the past ten years modified Mr. Howells’s point of view. If the German State revealed itself as something perilously close to barbarism, the Allied States presented a superb concentration of their peoples’ unfaltering purpose. That the world was saved from degradation too deep to be measured was due to individual heroism, animated, upheld, and focused by the State. Though temperamentally conservative, I feel no shadow of regret for the “obsolete” and very picturesque tyrant who softened or hardened by caprice. I would rather trust our stupid and venal authorities, because, while each member of a legislative body is kind to his own deficiencies, he is hard on his neighbour’s. Collective criticism is a fair antidote for collective despotism, and robs it of its terrors.

If we were less incorrigibly sentimental, we should be more nobly kind. Sentimentalism is, and has always been, virgin of standards. It is, and it has always been, insensible to facts. The moralists who, in the first years of the war, protested against American munitions because they were fresh-made for purposes of destruction, would have flung the victory into Germany’s hands because her vast stores of munitions had been prepared in times of peace. When the news of the Belgian campaign sickened the heart of humanity, more than one voice was raised to say that England had, by her treatment of militant suffragists (a treatment so feeble, so wavering, so irascible, and so soft-hearted that it would not have crushed a rebellious snail), forfeited her right to protest against the dishonouring of Belgian women. The moral confusion which follows mental confusion with a sure and steady step is equally dangerous and distasteful. It denies our integrity, and it makes a mock of our understanding.

An irritated Englishman, who must have come into close quarters with British pacifists,--the least lovely of their species,--has protested in “Blackwood’s Magazine” that the one thing dearer than the criminal to the heart of the humanitarian is the enemy of his country, whose offences he condones, and whose punishment he sincerely pities. Thus it happened that British women joined American women in protesting against the return of the cattle stolen during the last months of the war from northern France. They said--what was undoubtedly true--that German children needed the milk. French children also needed the milk (witness the death-rates from tuberculosis in and about Lille), but this concerned them less. The herds belonged to France, and their sympathy went out to the raiders rather than to the raided.

In fact all pacifists seem disposed to look benignly upon the “noble old piracy game.” The Honourable Bertrand Russell, whose annoyance at England’s going to war deepened into resentment at her winning it (a consummation which, to speak truth, he did his best to avert), expressed regret that the sufferings of Belgium should have been mistakenly attributed to Germany. Not Berlin, he said, but war must be held to blame; and if war were a natural phenomenon, like an earth quake or a thunderstorm, he would have been right. The original Attila was not displeased to be called the “Scourge of God,” and pious Christians of the fifth century acquiesced in this shifting of liability. They said, and they probably believed, that Heaven had chosen a barbarian to punish them for their sins. To-day we are less at home in Zion, and more insistent upon international law. The sternest duty of civilization is the assigning of responsibility for private and for public crimes as the rules of evidence direct.

In the Christmas issue of the “Atlantic Monthly,” 1919, another Englishman of letters, Mr. Clutton-Brock, preached a sermon to Americans (we get a deal of instruction from our neighbours), the burden of which was the paramount duty of forgiveness. Naturally he illustrated his theme with an appeal for Germany, because there is so much to be forgiven her. That he made no distinction between the injuries which a citizen of Lille or Louvain, and the injuries which a reader of the “Atlantic Monthly” has to forgive, was eminently right, forgiveness being due for the greatest as well as for the least of offences. The Frenchman or the Belgian who forgives “from his heart” reaches a higher standard than we do; but the ethics of Christianity bind him to that standard. It is his supreme spiritual test.

What was less endearing in Mr. Clutton-Brock’s sermon was the playful manner in which he made light of wrongs which, to say the least, were not matters for sport. We were called on to pardon, “not as an act of virtue, but in good-humour, because we are all absurd, and all need forgiveness.... We all fail, and we have no right to say that another man’s, or another nation’s, failure is worse than our own.... We must govern our behaviour to each other by the axiom that no man is to be judged by his past.”

These sentences aptly illustrate my contention that the sentimentalist is as unconcerned with standards as with facts. “Absurd” is not the word to apply to Germany’s campaign in France and Flanders. A man whose home has been burned and whose wife has been butchered cannot be expected to regard the incident as an absurdity, or to recall it with good-humour. The sight of a child bayoneted on the roadside (five wounds in one poor little body picked up near Namur) arouses something deep and terrible in the human heart. To say that one man’s failure is no worse than another man’s failure, that one nation’s failure is no worse than another nation’s failure, is to deny any vital distinction between degrees of right and wrong. It is to place the German Kaiser by the side of Belgium’s King, and George Washington by the side of George the Third.

And by what shall men be judged, if not by their past? What other evidence can we seek? What other test can we apply? A man who has run away with his neighbour’s wife may not care to repeat the offence; he may be cured forever of this particular form of covetousness; but he is not welcomed in sedately conducted households. A defaulter may be converted to the belief that honesty is the best policy; but few there are who will entrust him with funds, and fewer still who will receive him as a gentleman. If such behaviour is, as Mr. Clutton-Brock authoritatively asserts, opposed to “a Christian technique,” it defines the value of facts, and it holds upright the standard of honour.

The well-meaning ladies and gentlemen who flood society with appeals to “open the prison door,” and let our good-will shine as a star upon political prisoners, seem curiously indifferent as to what the liberated ones will do with their liberty. There are few of us so base as to desire to deprive our fellow-creatures of sunlight and the open road. There are not many of us so unpractical as to want to keep them a burden upon the State, if we have any assurance that they will not be a menace to the State when released. Sufficiency, security, and freedom have been defined as the prerogatives of civilized man. The cry of the revolutionist for freedom is met by the call of sober citizens for security. Sympathy for the lawless (the beloved sinner) is not warranted in denying equity to the law-abiding, who have a right to protection from the Republic which they voluntarily serve and obey.

The Virtuous Victorian

When Miss Amy Lowell, in her essay on Émile Verhaeren, says that the influence of Zola on the younger writers of France and Belgium was necessary “to down the long set of sentimental hypocrisies known in England as ‘Victorian,’” she repeats a formula which has been in popular use for many years, and to which we attach no very exact significance. “Early-Victorian,” “mid-Victorian,” we use the phrases glibly, and without being aware that the mental attitude to which we refer is sometimes not Victorian at all, but Georgian. Take, for example, that fairly famous sentiment about the British navy being “if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.” Nothing more oppressively smug was ever uttered in the reign of the virtuous Queen; yet it was written by the most humorous and most pitiless of Georgian novelists, and it expressed the conviction of her soul.

When we permit ourselves to sneer at Victorian hypocrisies, we allude, as a rule, to the superficial observance of religious practices, and to the artificial reticence concerning illicit sexual relations. The former affected life more than it did literature; the latter affected literature more than it did life. A resolute silence is apt to imply or involve an equally resolute denial; and there came a time when certain plain truths were denied because there was no other way of keeping them out of sight. Novelists and poets conformed to a standard which was set by the taste of their day. So profoundly was the great Victorian laureate influenced by this taste that he grew reluctant to accept those simple old English stories, those charming old English traditions, the propriety or impropriety of which had never been a matter for concern. His “fair Rosamond” believes herself a wedded wife, and so escapes culpability. His “Maid Marian” wanders through Sherwood Forest under the respectable chaperonage of her father, and will not permit to Robin Hood the harmless liberties common among betrothed lovers.

“Robin, I will not kiss thee, For that belongs to marriage; but I hold thee The husband of my heart; the noblest light That ever flashed across my life, and I Embrace thee with the kisses of the soul. _Robin_: I thank thee.”

It is a bit frigid and a bit stilted for the merry outlaws. “If love were all,” we might admit that conventionalism had chilled the laureate’s pen; but, happily for the great adventures we call life and death, love is not all. The world swings on its way, peopled by other men than lovers; and it is to Tennyson we owe the most splendid denial of domesticity--and duty--that was ever made deathless by verse. With what unequalled ardour his Ulysses abandons home and country, the faithful, but ageing, Penelope, the devoted, but dull, Telemachus, and the troublesome business of law-making! He does not covet safety. He does not enjoy the tranquil reward of his labours, nor the tranquil discharge of his obligations. He will drink life to the lees. He will seek the still untravelled world, and take what buffets fortune sends him.

“For my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles whom we knew.”

Poor Penelope! What chance has she against such glad decision, such golden dreams! It is plain that the Ithacan navy was less distinguished than the British navy for the development of domestic virtues. Until such time as Germany fulfils her threat, and drives the “bastard tongue of canting island pirates” from its hold on the civilized world, Tennyson’s Ulysses will survive as the embodiment of the adventurous spirit which brooks no restraint, and heeds no liability.

The great Victorian novelists were well aware that, albeit the average man does his share of love-making, he neither lives nor dies for love. Mr. Edmund Gosse, reared in the strictest sect of Plymouth Brethren, and professing religion at ten, was nevertheless permitted by his father to read the novels of Dickens, because they dealt with the passion of love in a humorous manner. More often they deal with it in a purely perfunctory manner, recognizing it as a prelude to marriage, and as something to which the novelist must not forget to make an occasional reference. Nicholas Nickleby is a young man and a hero. Consequently an assortment of female virtues and of female charms is labelled, docketed, provided with ringlets and a capacity for appropriate swooning,--and behold, Nicholas has a wife. Kate Nickleby’s husband is even more sketchily outlined. He has a name, and--we are told--an impetuous and generous disposition. He makes his appearance when a suitor is needed, stands up to be married when a husband is called for, and that is all there is of him. But what do these puppets matter in a book which gives us Mrs. Nickleby, Vincent Crummles, Fanny Squeers, and the ever-beloved Kenwigses. It took a great genius to enliven the hideous picture of Dotheboys Hall with the appropriate and immortal Fanny, whom we could never have borne to lose. It took a great genius to evolve from nothingness the name “Morleena Kenwigs.” So perfect a result, achieved from a mere combination of letters, confers distinction on the English alphabet.

The charge of conventionalism brought against Thackeray and Trollope has more substance, because these novelists essayed to portray life soberly and veraciously. “Trollope,” says Sir Leslie Stephen, “was in the awkward position of a realist, bound to ignore realities.” Thackeray was restrained, partly by the sensitive propriety of British readers who winced at the frank admission of sexual infirmities, and partly by the quality of his own taste. In deference to the public, he forbore to make Arthur Pendennis the lover of Fanny Bolton; and when we remember the gallant part that Fanny plays when safely settled at Clavering, her loyalty to her old friend, Bows, and her dexterity in serving him, we are glad she went unsmirched into that sheltered port.

The restrictions so cheerfully accepted by Thackeray, and his reticence--which is merely the reticence observed by every gentleman of his day--leave him an uncrippled spectator and analyst of the complicated business of living. The world is not nearly so simple a place as the sexualists seem to consider it. To the author of “Vanity Fair” it was not simple at all. Acting and reacting upon one another, his characters crowd the canvas, their desires and ambitions, their successes and failures, inextricably interwoven into one vast social scheme. It is not the decency of Thackeray’s novels which affronts us (we are seldom unduly aware that they are decent), but the severity with which he judges his own creations, and his rank and shameless favouritism. What business has he to coddle Rawdon Crawley (“honest Rawdon,” forsooth!), to lay siege to our hearts with all the skill of a great artificer, and compel our liking for this fool and reprobate? What business has he to pursue Becky Sharp like a prosecuting attorney, to trip her up at every step, to betray, to our discomfiture, his cold hostility? He treats Blanche Amory in the same merciless fashion, and no one cares. But Becky! Becky, that peerless adventuress who, as Mr. Brownell reminds us, ran her memorable career before psychology was thought of as an essential element of fiction. Becky whose scheming has beguiled our weary hours, and recompensed us for the labour of learning to read. How shall we fathom the mental attitude of a novelist who could create such a character, control her fluctuating fortunes, lift her to dizzy heights, topple her to ruin, extricate her from the dust and débris of her downfall,--and hate her!

Trollope, working on a lower level, observant rather than creative, was less stern a moralist than Thackeray, but infinitely more cautious of his foot-steps. He kept soberly in the appointed path, and never once in thirty years trod on the grass or flower-beds. Lady Glencora Palliser thinks, indeed, of leaving her husband; but she does not do it, and her continency is rewarded after a fashion which is very satisfactory to the reader. Mr. Palliser aspires somewhat stiffly to be the lover of Lady Dumbello; but that wise worldling, ranking love the least of assets, declines to make any sacrifice at its shrine. Trollope unhesitatingly and proudly claimed for himself the quality of harmlessness. “I do believe,” he said, “that no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was before, and that some girls may have learned from them that modesty is a charm worth possessing.”

This is one of the admirable sentiments which should have been left unspoken. It is a true word as far as it goes, but more suggestive of “Little Women,” or “A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life,” than of those virile, varied and animated novels which make no appeal to immaturity. In Trollope’s teeming world, as in the teeming world about us, a few young people fall in love and are married, but this is an infrequent episode. Most of his men and women, like the men and women whom we know, are engrossed in other activities. Once, indeed, Bishop Proudie wooed and won Mrs. Proudie. Once Archdeacon Grantly wooed and won Mrs. Grantly. But neither of these gentlemen could possibly have belonged to “the great cruising brotherhood of the Pilgrims of Love.” “Le culte de la femme” has never been a popular pastime in Britain, and Trollope was the last man on the island to have appreciated its significance. He preferred politics, the hunting-field, and the church.