Part 9

As for Gilbert and Sullivan's women, I find that even if I were not so near to the end of my chapter, I could not enter upon a discussion of the subject. The field is too vast. I must content myself with merely pointing out that Gilbert's ideas on women were painfully Victorian. It is true that the eternal chase of the male by the female was no secret to him. In Katisha's pursuit of Nanki-Poo we have a striking anticipation of Anne's pursuit of John Tanner in "Man and Superman." But on the whole, Gilbert describes his women of the upper classes as simpering and sentimental--Josephine, Yum-Yum, Mabel, Iolanthe--and his women of the working classes as ignorant and incapable. What an extraordinary example of ineptitude is afforded by Little Buttercup, who, in her capacity as baby-farmer, so disastrously mixes up Ralph Rackstraw with Captain Corcoran. Or by Nurse Ruth of Penzance, who fails to carry out orders and, instead of apprenticing her young charge to a pilot, apprentices him to a pirate. Miss Ida Tarbell could not have framed a severer indictment of inefficiency in the home.

XXV

TWO AND TWO

Harding said that if he were ever called upon to deliver the commencement oration at his alma mater, he knew what he would do.

"Of course you know what you would do," I said. "So do I. So does every one. You would rise to your feet and tell the graduating class that after four years of sheltered communion with the noblest thought of the ages they were about to plunge into the maelstrom of life. If you didn't say maelstrom you would say turmoil or arena. You will tell them that never did the world stand in such crying need of devoted and unselfish service. You will say that we are living in an age of change, and the waves of unrest are beating about the standards of the old faith. You will follow this up with several other mixed metaphors expressive of the general truth that it is for the Class of '14 to say whether this world shall be made a better place to live in or shall be allowed to go to the demnition bow wows. You will conclude with a fervent appeal to the members of the graduating class never to cease cherishing the flame of the ideal. You will then sit down and the President will confer the degree of LL.D. on one of the high officials of the Powder Trust."

But Harding was so much in earnest that he forgot to receive my remarks with the bitter sneer which is the portion of any one unfortunate enough to disagree with him.

"The commencement address I expect to deliver," he said, "will precisely avoid every peculiarity you have mentioned. It is the fatal mistake of every commencement orator that he attempts to deal with principles. He knows that by the middle of June the senior class has forgotten most of the things in the curriculum. His error consists in supposing that this is as it should be; that Euclid and the rules of logic were made to be forgotten, and that the only thing the college man must carry out into the world is an Attitude to Life and a Purpose. Which is all rot. There is no necessity for preaching ideals to a graduating class. The ideals that a man ought to cling to in life are the same that a decent young man will have lived up to in college. The dangers and temptations he will confront are very much like those he has had to fight on the campus. The undergraduate of to-day is not a babe or a baa-lamb."

He paused and seemed to be weighing the significance of what he had said. Apparently he was pleased. He nodded a vigorous approval of his own views on the subject, and proceeded:

"It is not the temptations of the world the college man must be on the lookout against, but its stupidities, its irrelevancies, its general besotted ignorance. He is less in peril of the flesh and the devil than of the screaming, unintelligent newspaper headline, whether it leads off an interview with a vaudeville star or with a histrionic college professor. What he needs to be reminded of is not principles, but a few elementary facts. My own commencement address would consist of nothing more or less than a brief review of the four years' work in class--algebra, geometry, history, physics, chemistry, psychology, everything."

"How extraordinarily simple!" I said. "The wonder is no one has ever thought of this before."

"I admit," he said, "that it may be rather difficult to compress all that matter in fifteen hundred words, but it can be done. It can be done in less than that. My peroration, for instance, would go somewhat as follows--that is, if you care to listen?"

"It will do no harm to listen," I said.

"I would end in some such way: 'Members of the graduating class, as you leave the shades of alma mater for the career of life, the one thing above all others that you must carry with you is a clear and ready knowledge of the multiplication table. Wherever your destiny may lead you, to the Halls of Congress, to the Stock Exchange, to the counting room, the hospital ward, or the editorial desk, let not your mind wander from the following fundamental truths. Two times two is four. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Rome fell in the year 476, but it was founded in the year 753 B. C., and so took exactly 1,229 years to fall. The northern frontier of Spain coincides with the southern frontier of France. The Ten Commandments were formulated at least 2,500 years ago. Japan is sixty times as far away from San Francisco as it is from the mainland of Asia. Virginius killed his daughter rather than let her live in shame. The subject of illicit love was treated with conspicuous ability by Euripides. The legal rate of interest in most of the States of the Union is six per cent. The instinct for self-preservation is one of the elementary laws of evolution. Hamlet is a work of genius. Victor Hugo is the author of "Les Misérables." I thank you.'"

"Thus equipped, any young man ought to become President in time," I said.

"Thus equipped," retorted Harding, "any young man ought to make his way through life as a rational being, and not as a sheep. And that is the main purpose of a college education, or of any process of education. No amount of moral enthusiasm will safeguard a man against the statement that the panic of 1893 was caused by the Democratic tariff bill; but the knowledge that the tariff bill was passed in 1894 may be of use. It saves a rational being from talking like a fool. Idealism will not keep a man from investing in get-rich-quick corporation stock; but knowledge of the fact that the common sense and experience of mankind have agreed upon six per cent. as a fair return on capital will keep him from going after 520 per cent. Mind you, it is not the fact that he will lose his money which concerns me. It is the fact that there should be a mentality capable of believing in 520 per cent. The dignity of the human mind is at stake. Or take this matter of the boundary line between France and Spain."

"If you are sure it is related to the subject in hand," I said.

"It is, intimately," he replied. "I am, as you know, exceedingly fond of books of travel. I read them as eagerly as I do all the cheap fiction that deal with brave adventures in foreign lands. Now a very common trait in books of both kinds is the author's fondness for pointing out the differences between the people of the southern part of a particular country and the people living in the northern part. You are familiar with the distinction. The inhabitants of the south are hot-headed, amorous, given to mandolin playing, and lacking in political genius. The people of the north are phlegmatic, practical, averse to love-making, unimaginative, readers of the Bible, and tenacious of their rights. I don't recall who first called attention to the fact. Perhaps it was Macaulay. Perhaps it was Herodotus. The idea is sound enough.

"But observe what the writers have made out of this simple truth. It has escaped them that anything is north or south only by comparison with something else. In the minds of our parrot authors the south has simply become associated with one set of stock phrases and the north with another. Here is where my Franco-Spanish frontier comes in. We learn that the people of southern Spain are gay and fickle whereas the people of northern Spain are sturdy and sober-minded. But cross over into France and the people of southern France are once more gay and fickle, in spite of the fact that they live further north than the sober-minded inhabitants of northern Spain; and the people of northern France are calm and self-reliant. Moving still further toward the Pole, into Belgium, we find that the Belgians of the south are a frivolous lot, but the Belgians of the north are eminently desirable citizens. From what I have said you will no longer be surprised to hear that the inhabitants of southern Sweden are a harum-scarum populace, whereas in the north of Sweden every one attends to his own business. As a result of my long course in travel literature I am convinced that the southern Eskimos are not to be mentioned in the same breath, for hardihood and manly self-control, with the sturdy inhabitants of northern Congo. People go on writing this terrific nonsense and people go on reading it. A brief review in geography would put a stop to the nefarious practice. Have I made myself clear?"

"The question is whether people are interested in the countries you have mentioned," I said.

Even then Harding was patient with me.

"That is what I would try to do in my commencement oration--arm those young minds against the catch-words and imbecilities of the great world. Altruism, the passion for service, the passion for progress, are all very well in their way. But first of all comes the duty of every man to defend the integrity of his own mind and the multiplication table."

XXVI

BRICK AND MORTAR

It is a pleasure to put before my readers the first completely unauthorised interview with Professor Henri Bergson on the spiritual significance of American architecture. We were speaking of Mr. Guy Lowell's original design for New York's new County Court house.

M. Bergson smiled pragmatically.

"A round court house, you say? Suggestive of the Colosseum, with a touch of the Tower of Babel, and the merest _soupçon_ of Barnum and Bailey? Come then, why not? To me it is eminently just that your architecture should typify the different racial strains that have entered into the making of the American people. When one observes in the façade of your magnificent public buildings the characteristic marks of the Chinese, the Red Indian, the Turco-Tartar, the Provençal, the Lombard Renaissance, the Eskimo, and the Late Patagonian, one catches for the first time the full meaning of your so complex civilisation."

The distinguished philosopher turned in his seat, struck a match on a marble bust of Immanuel Kant just behind him, and lit his cigar. He gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Before him stretched the enchanting panorama of Paris so familiar to American eyes--Notre Dame, the Gare de St. Lazare, the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower, the cypresses of Père Lachaise, the tomb of Napoleon, and the offices of the American Express Company.

"Yes," he said, "one envies the advantages of your multi-millionaires. The kings and princes of former times, when they built themselves a home, had to be content with a single school of architecture. Your rich men on Fifth Avenue may have two styles, three, four--what say I?--a dozen! And on their country estates, where there is a garage, a conservatory, stables, kennels, the opportunities are unlimited."

"But we have pretty well exhausted all the known styles," I said. "What about the future?"

"Have no fear," he replied. "The archæologists are continually digging up new monuments of primitive architecture. By the time you need a new City Hall excavations will be very far advanced in Peru and Ceylon.

"The one secret of great architecture," M. Bergson went on, "is that it shall contain a soul, that it shall be the expression of an idea. A splendid courage accompanied by a high degree of disorder is what I regard as the American Idea. Hence the perfect propriety of a fifty-story Venetian tower overlooking a Byzantine temple devoted to the Presbyterian form of worship. Too many of my countrymen are tempted to scoff at your skyscrapers. But I maintain that a skyscraper perfectly expresses the spirit of a people which has created Pittsburg, the Panama Canal, and Mr. Hammerstein's chain of opera houses. Take your loftiest structures in New York and think what they stand for."

I thought in accordance with instructions, and recognised that the three tallest structures in New York symbolised, respectively, the triumph of the five and ten cent store, the sewing machine, and industrial insurance at ten cents a week.

"In your skyscrapers," he went on, "there speaks out the soul of American idealism."

I recalled what a drug the skyscrapers are on the real estate market, how they yield an average of two per cent. on the cost, and I decided that our tall buildings are indeed the expression of uncompromising idealism. As an investment there was little to be said for them.

"I repeat," said M. Bergson, "your skyscrapers stand for an idea, but they also express beauty. Not only do they reveal the restless energy of a people which waits five minutes to take the elevator from the tenth floor to the twelfth, but they also embody the most modern conception of fine taste. I think of them as displaying the perfection of the hobble-skirt in architecture--tall, slim, expensive, and never failing to catch the eye."

We were interrupted by a trim-looking maid who brought in a telegram. My host tore open the envelope, glanced at the message, and handed it to me with a smile. It was from a Chicago vaudeville manager who offered M. Bergson five thousand dollars a week for a series of twenty-minute talks on the influence of Creative Evolution on the Cubist movement to be illustrated with motion pictures. I handed the telegram to M. Bergson, who dropped it into the waste basket.

"People," he said, "have fallen into the habit of asserting that beauty in architecture is not to be separated from utility. To be beautiful a building must at once reveal the use to which it is devoted. But this need not mean that a certain architectural type must be devoted to a certain purpose. The essential thing is uniformity. The same form should be devoted to the same purpose. Then there would be no trouble in learning the peculiar architectural language of a city. When I was in New York I experienced no difficulty whatsoever. When I saw a Corinthian temple I knew it was a church. When I saw a Roman basilica I knew it was a bank. When I saw a Renaissance palace I knew it was a public bath house. When I saw an Assyrian palace I knew there was a cabaret tea inside. When I saw a barracks I knew it was a college laboratory. When I saw a fortress I knew it was an aquarium. The soul of the city spoke out very clearly to me."

He thought for a moment.

"But yes," he said. "When I think of New York and its architecture I am more than ever convinced that there is no such a thing as predestination, that your American architect is emphatically a free agent."

"This seems so very true," I murmured.

"Recently," he went on, "when I was the guest of your most hospitable countrymen there was a sharp controversy regarding the appropriateness of the architect's design for a memorial to be erected to your immortal Lincoln in the national capital. There were critics who professed to be shocked by the incongruity of placing a statue of Lincoln, the frontiersman, the circuit-rider of your raw Middle West, the teller of most amusing anecdotes, amusing, but--somewhat Gothic, shall I say?--putting a statue of this typical American inside a temple of pure Grecian design. Such critics, in my opinion, were in error. They made the same mistake of concentrating on the specific use, instead of searching after the broad meaning. Lincoln was an American. His monument should be American in spirit. And I contend that it is the American spirit to put a statesman in frock coat and trousers inside a Greek temple. For that matter, what structural form is there which one might call typical of your country, outside of your skyscrapers?"

"There is the log cabin," I said, "but that would hardly bear reproduction in marble. And there is the baseball stadium, but somehow that sounds rather inappropriate."

"So I should earnestly advise you," continued M. Bergson, "not to waste time in studying what your architectural types ought to be, but to build as the fancy seizes you. In the course of time the right fancy may seize you. If anything, avoid striving for perfection. Continue to mix your styles. It is not essential to cling to the original plans once you have started. Change your plans as you go along. Avoid the spick and span. If your foundations begin to sag a little before the roof is completed, so much the better. If the right wing of your building is out of line with the left wing, let it go at that. If your interior staircases blind the windows, if your halls run into a _cul-de-sac_, instead of leading somewhere, let them."

"But that is precisely the way we build our State Capitols," I said.

"Then you are to be congratulated on having solved the problem of a national style," said M. Bergson.

XXVII

INCOHERENT

A topsy-turvy chapter of no particular meaning and of little consequence; whether pointing to some divine, far-off event, the reader must determine for himself.

He came into the office and fixed me with his glittering eye across the desk. Under ordinary circumstances I should have found his manner of speech rather odd. But it was the last week of the Cubist Exhibition on Lexington Avenue, and a certain lack of coherence seemed natural. He said:

"Is there a soul in things we choose to describe as inanimate? Of course there is. Can we assign moral attributes to what people usually regard as dead nature? Of course we can. Why don't we do something then? Take the abandoned farm. Doesn't the term at once call up a picture of shocking moral degradation? We are surrounded by abandoned farms, and do nothing to reclaim them morally. But I have hope. That is the fine thing about the spirit of the present day. It abhors sentimentality. It is honest. It recognises that before we can do away with evil we must acknowledge that it exists. Look at the wild olive! Look at the vicious circle! Look at Bad Nauheim!"

"Are you sure it's me you wished to see?" I asked. "Because there's a man in the office whose name sounds very much the same and the boys are apt to confuse us. He is in the third room to your right."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "The main thing is that the present uplift does not go half far enough. Just consider the semi-detached family house. Can anything be more depressing? There are happy families; of them we need not speak. There are unhappy families; but there at least you find the dignity of tragedy, of fierce hatreds, of clamour, of hot blood running riot in the exultation of excess--Swinburne, you know, Dolores, Faustina, Matisse, and all that. But a semi-detached family, a home of chilly rancours and hidden sneers, too indifferent for love, too cowardly for hate, a stagnant pool of misery--can you blame me?"

"I do not," I said. "Far be it from me to censure the natural antipathy for real estate agents which surges up--"

"Thank you," he said. "That is all I wish to know." He rose, but turned back at the door. "Of course," he said, "there is the other side of the picture. Not all nature is degenerate. There are upright pianos. There are well-balanced sentences. There are reinforced-concrete engineers. I thank you for your courtesy." And he went out.

I had no scruples in directing my visitor to the third floor from mine on the right, because that room is occupied by the anti-suffragist member of the staff. Between editions he reads the foreign exchanges with a fixed sneer and polishes up his little anti-feminist aphorisms. These he recites to me with a venomous hatred which Charlotte Perkins Gilman would have no trouble in tracing back to the polygamous cave man. He came in now and sat down in the chair just vacated by my somewhat eccentric visitor.

"Mrs. Pankhurst," he said, "is completely justified in asserting that the leaders may perish, but the good fight will go on. There are plenty of frenzied Englishwomen to carry the torch. The practice of arson, you will observe, comes natural to woman as the historic guardian of the domestic fire. We have great difficulty in preventing our cook from pouring kerosene into the kitchen range. Instinct, you see."

"But look at the other side of the question," I said.

"That doesn't concern me in the least," he replied. "Of course you will say there is the hunger strike. But what does that prove? Simply that another ancient custom of the submerged classes has become an amusement of the well-to-do. We are all copying the underworld nowadays. We have borrowed their delightfully straightforward mode of speech. We have learned their dances. We are imitating their manners. Now we are acquiring their capacity for going without food. Not that I think the hunger-strike is altogether a futile invention. Practised on a large scale it will undeniably exercise a beneficent influence on the status of woman. Modern fashions in women's garments have already reduced the expenditure on dress material to an insignificant minimum. When the wives of the middle and upper classes have learned to be as abstemious with food as they are with clothes, it is plain that the economic independence of women will be close at hand."

"You are assuming that the sheath-gown is less expensive than the crinoline," I managed to interject.

"I consider your remarks utterly irrelevant to my argument," he said. "Mind you, I don't deny that forcible feeding is a disgusting business as it is carried on at present. But that is because it is being misdirected. If the British Government were to apply forcible feeding in Whitechapel and among the human wreckage that litters the Thames Embankment, I am confident that the problem of social unrest would be speedily disposed of."

He, too, turned back at the door.

"Mark my word," he said, "it won't be long before the manhood of England asserts itself, and then look out for trouble! You know, even the earth turns when you step upon it."

But sometimes you find yourself wondering whether it is really (1) the solid earth we tread to-day, or whether it is (2) on clouds we step, or whether (3) we walk the earth with our heads in the clouds, or whether (4) we are standing on our heads on earth with our feet in the clouds. It isn't an age of transition, because that means progress in one direction. It isn't revolution, because revolution is an extremely clear-cut process with heads falling and the sewers running red with blood; whereas the swollen channels to-day run heavy with talk chiefly. It isn't a transmutation of values, because we have no single accepted standard of exchange. It isn't a shifting of viewpoints, because it is much more than that.