Part 5
The head of moral feeling in the community has got to grow strong enough to force the financier to take his clutch off the laboring man, before you can reach the laboring man. And yet labor itself will contribute more than its share towards this head of moral feeling; and therefore you must go among the laboring classes with your ideas and your propaganda. But beware lest you give him a stone for bread. You can do no more for a man because you call yourself a “politician” than if you were a mere philanthropist. A man’s standards of political thought are but a small fraction of his general standards, and unless your sense of truth is as sharp as a sword you had better not come near the laboring man.
The point here made is--and it is of great importance--that we candidly acknowledge at every instant the nature of our undertaking and the nature of our power, for in so far as we mistake them we weaken our practical utility.
It is not as the agent of any institution that you are here, but as the agent of conscience at the dictation of personal feeling. Do you need proof that you yourself draw all your power from sheer moral influence? Note what you do when you start your club. You go to the nearest well-to-do person and ask for money for rent. He gives it to you out of his fund of general benevolence. To whom do you really want to distribute this benevolence? To every one. You feel that by passing it on through a group and series of boys and young men you can benefit the whole country. You use them as a mere vehicle. You know that you can only help them by getting them to help others. Your appeal for clients then goes out to the whole district. Your club puts you in communication with every man in it. In teaching your club or in exhorting any mortal to good behavior, what method, what stimulus, do you use? Whether you know it or not, you are really drawing support from every one who is following the same principle, all over the city, all over the country, all over the world. Do you not ceaselessly appeal to the examples of Washington and Lincoln, to the books and conduct of men whose aims were your aims? Or take your own case. Why do you occupy yourself with this thing? This activity satisfies your demands upon life; nothing else does. You are the creature of a thousand influences, and if you begin to trace them you find that you are fulfilling the will of Toynbee, of John Stuart Mill, of Kant. You are a disciple of Tolstoi. You were inspired by William Lloyd Garrison. It is they, as much as you, who are doing this work. It is they who formulated the ideas and impressed them upon you. Your great friends are the founders of religions. Examine the actual persons who give you practical help. You will find Moses, you will find Christ behind them. What you are using is the world’s fund of unselfishness. It is necessary to employ the whole of it in order to accomplish anything, however small. As a practical matter, every one does employ the whole of it every time he even thinks of reform.
Now, just as we can trace the sources of our power in the great currents of human feeling that flow down to us out of the past; so we can foresee the accomplishments of that power in enlarging the lives of men who come after us. We are sinking the foundations of a new politics. You cannot always see every stone, but it has gone to its place. It is impossible to take a stand for what you think is a true theory without thereby becoming an integral factor for good in every man who hears of it. It is impossible to be that factor without taking that stand.
What is the nature of the good you can do to the laboring man? His mind analyzes you in a flash. If he is influenced by you, you may be sure that it is by something in you that you had not intended to give him. After the man has seen you, he has been moved by you; but how? Consult your own remembrance. What incident of character impressed you most when you were a child? Do you remember any act, any expression or gesture or anecdote or speech, that had a lasting influence upon you? Now I ask you this: Was it done for you? Were you the designed beneficiary of it? Was it not rather the silent part of some one else’s conduct, a thing you were perhaps not meant to see at all? And this was no accident. This is the natural history of influence; it passes unconsciously from life to life.
We must take the world as we find it. We must deal with human nature according to the laws of human nature. Our politics are at present so artificial that the average man thinks that the name “politics” prevents the well established and familiar principles of human nature from being operative. But he is wrong. Man has never yet succeeded in inventing any system that could evade them or affect them in the least. All the political organization of reform is already in existence, and needs only strengthening and developing. It is all in use, and every one understands its use and knows its headquarters and its agencies. It is all individual character and courage, and with the growth of character and courage it will become more defined and visible every day.
IV
LITERATURE
There are feelings and views about life, there are conviction and insight, which come from thinking at a high rate of speed, and vanish when the machinery moves slowly and the blood ebbs. The world not only accepts the intensity of the writer, but demands it. Nevertheless, the world has an imperfect knowledge as to where this intensity comes from, how it is produced, or what relation it bears to ugliness and falsehood. “What a pleasure it must be to you,” said Rothschild to Heine, “to be able to turn off those little songs!”
In our ordinary moods we regard the conclusions of the poets as both true and untrue,--true to feeling, untrue to fact; true as intimations of the next world or of some lost world; untrue here, because detached from those portions of society that are perennially visible. Most men have a duplicate philosophy which enables them to love the arts and the wit of mankind, at the same time that they conveniently despise them. Life is ugly and necessary; art is beautiful and impossible. “The farther you go from the facts of life, the nearer you get to poetry. The practical problem is to keep them in separate spheres, and to enjoy both.” The hypothesis of a duplicity in the universe explains everything, and staves off all claims and questionings.
Such are the convictions of the average cultivated man. His back is broken, but he lives in the two halves comfortably enough. He has to be protected at his weak spot, of course, and that spot is the present; ten years from now, to-morrow, yesterday, the day of judgment, the State of Pennsylvania,--all these you are welcome to. Every form of idealism appeals to him, so long as it does not ask him to budge out of his armchair. “Aha,” he says, “I understand this. It takes its place in the realm of the Imagination.”
This man does not know, and has no means of knowing, that good books are only written by men whose backs are not broken, and whose vital energy circulates through their entire system in one sweep. They have a unitary and not a duplicate philosophy. The present is their strong point. The actualities of life are their passion. They lay a bold hand upon everything within their reach, for they see it with new sight.
The glitter of the past makes us think of literature as embodied in books; but to understand literature we must fix our minds on authors, not on books. The men who write--what makes them write well or ill? What are the conditions that breed poetry, or music, or architecture? The current beliefs about art and letters are fatalistic. It is supposed that poets and artists crop up now and then, and that nothing can stop them; they need no aid, they conquer circumstances. I do not believe it. We see no analogy to it in nature. Among the plants and the fishes we see nothing but a wholesale and incredible destruction of germs on all sides. It seems a miracle that any seed should fall upon good ground, and be sheltered till it come to the flower. Why should the percentage of germs that come to maturity be greater with genius than it is with the eggs of the sturgeon? The enemies of each are numerous. If it were not for the fecundity of nature, we should have none of either of them. And how is it that the great man always happens to be young at the very moment when some events are going forward that ripen his powers; so that he grows up with his time, and does something that is comprehensible to all time?
The answer is, that all eras are sown thick with the seeds of genius, which for the most part die, but in a favoring age mature to greatness. Must we resort to a theory of special creation to explain the great talents of the world? And even this would not explain our own welcome and our own comprehension of them when they come. If it were not for the undeveloped powers, the seeds of genius, in ourselves, Plato and Bach would be meaningless, and Christ would have died in vain.
It must be that thousands of good intellects perish annually. The men do not die, but their powers wither, or rather never mature. Art, like everything else, represents an escape, a survival. In any age that lacks it, or is weak in it, we may look about for the enginery by which it is crushed. In looking into a past age we are put to inference and conjecture. We see the mark of fetters upon the Byzantine soul, and we begin dredging the dark waters of history for a metaphysical cause. We cannot walk into a Byzantine shop and watch the apprentice at work. But in our own time we can see the whole process in action. We can study our modern Inquisitions at leisure, and note every mark that is made upon a soul that is passing through them.
It does not involve any indignity to the pretensions of literature if we walk into that great bazaar, modern journalism, and see what is going on there behind the counters. Here is a factory of popular art. It is not the whole of letters; but it has an influence on the whole of letters. The press fills the consciousness of the people. A modern community breathes through its press. Journalism, to be sure, is a region of letters, where all the factors for truth are at a special and peculiar discount. Its attention is given to near and ugly things, to mean quarrels, business interests, and special ends. Every country shows up badly here. The hypocrisy of the press is the worst thing in England. It is the worst exhibition of England’s worst fault. The press of France gives you France at her weakest. The press of America gives you America at her cheapest. Perhaps the study of journalism in any country would illustrate the peculiar vices of that country; and it is fair to remember this in examining our own press. But examine it we must, for it is important.
The subject includes more than the daily newspapers. Those ephemeral sheets that flutter from the table into the waste-paper basket, which are something more than mere newspapers and less than magazines, and the magazines themselves, which are more than budgets of gossip and less than books, make up a perpetual rain of paper and ink. Thousands of people are engaged in writing them, and millions in reading them. This whole species of literature is typical of the age; let us see how it is conducted.
A journal is a meeting-place between the forces of intellect and of commerce. The men who become editors always bear some relation to the intellectual interests of the country. They make money, but they make it by understanding the minds of people who are not taking money, but thought, from the exchanges that the editors set up. A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect. Even trade journals have columns devoted to general information and jokes. The one thing a journal must have in order to be a journal is circulation. It must be carried into people’s houses, and this is brought about by an impulse in the buyer. The buyer has many opinions and modes of thought that he does not draw from the journal, and he is always ready to drop a journal that offends him. An editor is thus constantly forced to choose between affronting his public and placating his public. Now, whatever arguments may be given for his taking one course or the other, it remains clear that in so far as an editor is not publishing what he himself thinks of interest for its own sake, he is encouraging in the public something else besides intellect. He is subserving financial, political, or religious bias, or, it may be, popular whim. He is, to this extent at least, the custodian and protector of prejudice.
The thrift of an editor-owner, who is building up the circulation of a paper, tends to keep him conservative. Repetition is safer than innovation. An especially strong temptation is spread before the American editor in the shape of an enormous reading public, made up of people who have a common-school education, and who resemble each other very closely in their traits of mind. There is money to be made by any one who discerns a new way of reinforcing any prejudice of the American people.
It has come about very naturally during the last thirty years, that journalism has been developed in America as one of the branches in the science of catering to the masses on a gigantic scale. The different kinds of conservatism have been banked, consolidated, and, as it were, marshalled under the banners of as many journals. Money and energy have been expended in collecting these vast audiences, and sleepless vigilance is needed to keep them together.
The great investments in the good will of millions are nursed by editors who live by their talents, and who in another age would have been intellectual men. The highest type of editor now extant in America will as frankly regret his own obligation to cater to mediocrity, as the business man will regret his obligation to pay blackmail, or as the citizen will regret his obligation to vote for one of the parties. “There is nothing else to do. I am dealing with the money of others. There are not enough intelligent people to count.” He serves the times. The influence thus exerted by the public (through the editor) upon the writer tends to modify the writer and make him resemble the public. It is a spiritual pressure exerted by the majority in favor of conformity. This exists in all countries, but is peculiarly severe in countries and ages where the majority is made up of individuals very similar to each other. The tyranny of a uniform population always makes itself felt.
If any man doubt the hide-bound character of our journals to-day, let him try this experiment. Let him write down what he thinks upon any matter, write a story of any length, a poem, a prayer, a speech. Let him assume, as he writes it, that it cannot be published, and let him satisfy his individual taste in the subject, size, mood, and tenor of the whole composition. Then let him begin his peregrinations to find in which one of the ten thousand journals of America there is a place for his ideas as they stand. We have more journals than any other country. The whole field of ideas has been covered; every vehicle of opinion has its policy, its methods, its precedents. A hundred will receive him if he shaves this, pads that, cuts it in half; but not one of them will trust him as he stands, “Good, but eccentric,” “Good, but too long,” “Good, but new.”
Let us follow the steps of this withering influence. A young illustrator does an etching that he likes. He is told to reduce it to the conventional standard. This is easy, but what is happening in the process? He blurs the fine edges of vision, not only on the plate, but in his own mind. The real injury to intellect is not done in the editorial sanctum. It is done in the mind of the writer who himself attempts to cater to the prejudice of others. A man rewrites a scene in a story to please a public. In order to do this he is obliged to forget what his story was about. He is talking by rote; he is making an imitation. Does this seem a small thing? Let any one do it once and see where it leads him. The attitude of the whole human being towards his whole life is changed by the experience. Do it twice, and you can hardly shake off the practice. Write and publish six editorials for the “Universalist,” and then sit down to write one not in the style of the “Universalist.” You will find it, practically, an impossibility.
The notable lack in our literature is this: the prickles and irregularities of personal feeling have been pumice-stoned away. It is too smooth. There is an absence of individuality, of private opinion. This is the same lack that curses our politics,--the absence of private opinion.
The sacrifice in political life is honesty, in literary life is intellect; but the closer you examine honesty and intellect the more clearly they appear to be the same thing. Suppose that a judge, in order to please a boss, awards Parson Jones’ cow to Deacon Brown; does he boldly admit this even to himself? Never. He writes an able opinion in which he befogs his intelligence, and convinces himself that he has arrived at his award by logical steps. In like manner, the revising editor who reads with the eyes of the farmer’s daughter begins to lose his own. He is extinguishing some sparks of instructive reality which would offend--and benefit--the farmer’s daughter; and he is obliterating a part of his own mind with every stroke of his blue pencil. He is devitalizing literature by erasing personality. He does this in the money interests of a syndicate; but the debasing effect upon character is the same as if it were done at the dictate of the German Emperor. The harm done in either case is intellectual.
Take another example. A reporter writes up a public meeting, but colors it with the creed of his journal. Can he do this acceptably without abjuring his own senses? He is competing with men whose every energy is bent on seeing the occasion as the newspaper wishes it seen. Consider the immense difficulty of telling the truth on the witness stand, and judge whether good reporting is easy. The newspaper trade, as now conducted, is prostitution. It mows down the boys as they come from the colleges. It defaces the very desire for truth, and leaves them without a principle to set a clock by. They grow to disbelieve in the reality of ideas. But these are our future literati, our poets and essayists, our historians and publicists.
The experts who sit in the offices of the journals of the country have so long used their minds as commercial instruments, that it never occurs to them to publish or not publish anything, according to their personal views. They do not know that every time they subserve prejudice they are ruining intellect. If there were an editor who had any suspicion of the way the world is put together, he would respect talent as he respects honor. It would be impossible for him to make his living by this traffic. If he knew what he was doing, he would prefer penury.
These men, then, have not the least idea of the function they fulfil. No more has the agent of the Insurance Company who corrupts a legislature. The difference in degree between the two iniquities is enormous, because one belongs to that region in the scale of morality which is completely understood, and the other does not. We do not excuse the insurance agent; we will not allow him to plead ignorance. He commits a penal offence. We will not allow selfishness to trade upon selfishness and steal from the public in this form. But what law can protect the public interest in the higher faculties? What statute can enforce artistic truth?
We actually forbid a man by statute to sell his vote, because a vote is understood to be an opinion, a thing dependent on rational and moral considerations. You cannot buy and sell it without turning it into something else. The exercise of that infinitesimal fraction of public power represented by one man’s vote is hedged about with penalties; because the logic of practical government has forced us to see its importance. But the harm done to a community by the sale of a vote does not follow by virtue of the statute, but by virtue of a law of influence of which the statute is the recognition. The same law governs the sale of any opinion, whether it be conveyed in a book review or in a political speech, in a picture of life and manners, a poem, a novel, or an etching. There is no department of life in which you can lie for private gain without doing harm. The grosser forms of it give us the key to the subtler ones, and the jail becomes the symbol of that condition into which the violation of truth will shut any mind.
So far as any man comes directly in contact with the agencies of organized literature, let him remember that his mind is at stake. They can change you, but you cannot change them, except by changing the public they reflect. The faculties of man are as strong as steel if properly used, but they are like the down on a peach if improperly used. What shall a man take in exchange for his soul? No man has the privilege upon this earth of being more than one person. In this matter of expression, it is the last ten per cent of accuracy that saves or sells you. Talent evaporates as easily as a delegate holds his tongue or a lawyer smiles to a rich man; and the injury is irremediable. Let a man not alter a line or cut a paragraph at the suggestion of an editor. Those are the very words that are valuable. “Ah,” you say, “but I need criticism.” Then go to a critic. Consult the man who is farthest away from this influence, some one who cannot read the magazines, some one who does not have to read them. Your public, when you get one, will qualify the general public; but you must reach it as a whole man. The writer’s course is easy compared to that of the reform politician, because printing is cheap. He will get heard immediately. He covers the whole of the United States while the other is canvassing a ward. Literary self-assertion is as much needed as any of the virtue we pray for in politics. A resonant and unvexed independence makes a man’s words stir the fibres in other men; and it matters little whether you label his words literature or politics.
The difficulty in any revolt against custom, the struggle a man has in getting his mind free from the cobwebs of restraint, always turns out to involve financial distress; and this holds true of the writer’s attempt to override the senseless restrictions of the press. The magazines pay handsomely, and pay at once. A writer must earn his bread; a man must support his family. We accept this necessity with such a hearty concurrence, and the necessity itself becomes so sacred, that it seems to imply an answer to all ethical and artistic questions. We almost think that nature will connive at malpractice done in so good a cause as the support of a family. The subject must be looked at more narrowly. The spur of poverty is popularly regarded not only as an excuse for all bad work, but as a prerequisite to all good work. There is a misconception in this wholesale appropriation of a partial truth. The economic laws are valuable and suggestive, but they are founded on the belief that a man will pursue his own business interests exclusively. This is never entirely true even in trade, and the doctrines of the economists become more and more misleading when applied to fields of life where the money motive becomes incidental. The law of supply and demand does not govern the production of sonnets.