Part 6
Let us lay aside theory and observe the effects of want upon the artist and his work. As a stimulus to the whole man, a prod to get him into action and keep him active, the spur of poverty is a blessing. But if it enter into the detail of his attention, while he is at work, it is damnation.
A man at work is like a string that is vibrating. Touch it with a feather and it is numb. A singer will sing flat if he sees a friend in the audience. Even a trained and cold-blooded lawyer who is trying a case, will not be at his best if he is watched by some one whom he wants to impress.
The artist is the easiest of all men to upset. He is dealing with subtle and fluid things,--memories, allusions, associations. It is all gossamer and sunlight when he begins. It is to be gossamer and sunlight when he is finished. But in the interim it is bricks and mortar, rubble and white lead. And the writer--I do not say that he must be more free from cares than the next man--but he must not let into the mint and forge of his thought some immaterial and petty fact about himself, for this will make him self-conscious. Consider how ingenuous, how unexpected, how natural is good conversation. At one moment you have nothing to say, at the next a vista of ideas has opened. They come crowding in, and the telling of them reveals new vistas. It is the same with the writer. In the process of writing the story is made. There is really nothing to say or do in the world until you make your start, and then the significance begins to steam out of the materials. And here, in the act and heat of creation, to have the cold fear thrust in, “I cannot use that phrase because the editor will think it too strong,” is enough to chill the brain of Rabelais. Human nature cannot stand such handling. Do this to a man and you break his spirit. He becomes tame, calculating, and ingenious. His powers are frozen.
It is impossible not to see in contemporary journalism a slaughter-house for mind. Here we have a great whale that browses on the young and eats them by thousands. This is the seamy side of popular education. The low level of the class at the dame’s school keeps the bright boys back and makes dunces of them.
We have been dealing in all this matter with one of the deepest facts of life, to wit, the influence that society at large has in cutting down and narrowing the development of the individual. The newspaper business displays the whole operation very vividly; but we may see the same thing happening in the other walks of life. There arrives a time in the career of most men when their powers become fixed. Men seem to expand to definite shapes, like those Japanese cuttings that open out into flowers and plants when you drop them into warm water. After reaching his saturation point each man fills his niche in society and changes little. He goes on doing whatever he was engaged upon at the time he touched his limit.
We almost believe that every man has his predestinate size and shape, and that some obscure law of growth arrests one man at thirty and the next at forty years of age. This is partly true; but the law is not obscure. It is not because the men stop growing that they repeat themselves, but they stop growing because they repeat themselves. They cease to experiment; they cease to search. The lawyer adopts routine methods; the painter follows up his success with an imitation of his success; the writer finds a recipe for style or plot. Every one saves himself the trouble of re-examining the contents of his own mind. He has the best possible reason for doing this. The public will not pay for his experiments as well as it will for his routine work. But the laws of nature are deaf to his reasons. Research is the price of intellectual growth. If you face the problems of life freshly and squarely each morning, you march. If you accept any solution as good enough, you drop.
For there is no finality and ending place to intellect. Examine any bit of politics, any law-case, or domestic complication, until you understand your own reasons for feeling as you do about it. Then write the matter down carefully and conclusively, and you will find that you have done no more than restate the problem in a new form. The more complete your exposition, the more loudly it calls for new solution. The masterly analysis of Tolstoi, his accurate explanations, his diagnosis and dissection of human life, leave us with a picture of society that for unsolved mystery competes with the original. But the point lies here. You must lay bare your whole soul in the statement you make. You must resolutely set down everything that touches the matter. Until you do this, the question refuses to assume its next shape. You cannot flinch and qualify in your first book, and speak plainly in your second.
It is the act of utterance that draws out the powers in a man and makes him a master of his own mind. Without the actual experience of writing Lohengrin, Wagner could not have discovered Parsifal. The works of men who are great enough to get their whole thought uttered at each deliverance, form a progression like the deductions of a mathematician. These men are never satisfied with a past accomplishment. Their eyes are on questions that beckon to them from the horizon. Their faculties are replenished with new energy because they seek. They are driving their ploughs through a sea of thought, intent, unresting, resourceful, creative. They are discoverers, and just to the extent that lesser men are worth anything they are discoverers too.
Beauty and elevation flash from the currents set up by intense speculation. Beauty is not the aim of the writer. His aim must be truth. But beauty and elevation shine out of him while he is on the quest. His mind is on the problem; and as he unravels it and displays it, he communicates his own spirit, as it were incidentally, as it were unwittingly, and this is the part that goes out from him and does his work in the world.
V
PRINCIPLES
Speech is a very small part of human intercourse. Indeed speech is often not connected with the real currents of intercourse. A comic actor has made you happy before he has uttered a word. This is by the responsive vibration of your apparatus to his. The external speech and gesture help the transfer of power, and that is all they do. The communion, upon whatever plane of being it takes place, is a contagion, and goes forward by leaps and darts, like the action of frost on a window-pane. An angry friend comes into my room, and before he has uttered a word I am in a blaze of anger. A baby too young to speak does some naughty thing. I remonstrate with him in a rational way. Perhaps I repeat to him Kant’s maxim from the Critique of Practical Reason. The child understands at once and is grateful for the treatment. Now, observe this, that if I said the same thing to a grown man in the same tone, it would be to the tone and not to the argument that he would respond.
The exchange of energy between man and man is so rapid that language becomes a bystander. It is like the passage of the electrical current,--we receive an impression or a message, or twenty messages at once. All this is the result of suggestion and inference. No strange phenomenon is here alluded to. The situation is the normal and constant situation whenever two human beings meet. The only mystery about it is that our senses should be so much more acute than we knew. Ask a man to dinner and talk to him about the Suez Canal, and the next morning your wife will be apt to give a truer account of him than you can give. She has been knitting in the corner and thinking about the best place to buy children’s shoes, but she knows which coils in her brain have been played upon by the brain of the stranger. The reason your wife knows that your Suez friend is no saint, is that she feels that certain strings of the benevolent harp that is sounding in herself are not being reinforced. There are dead notes in him.
The sensitiveness of children is so common a thing that we forget its explanation. It is just because the child cannot follow the argument, that he is free from the illusion that the argument is the main point. The lobes of his brain get a shock and respond to it ingenuously.
These facts have been neglected by philosophers, because the facts defy formulation. You cannot get them into a statement. They are life. But in the practical, workaday world, they have always been understood. Men of action owe their success to the habit of using their minds and bodies in a direct way. Men in every profession rely upon the accuracy of direct impressions. The great doctor, or the great general, or the great business man uses the whole of his sensibilities in each act of reading a man. There is no other way to read him correctly. People whose brains are preoccupied with formulated knowledge are not apt to be as good judges of character as spontaneous persons. Their thoughts are on logic. They follow what is said. A very small fraction of them is alive. They are like chess-players who are not listening to the opera.
The answer to any question in psychology always lies under our hand. We have only to ask what the normal man does. It will be found that he uses his faculties according to their nature, though it may be, he is embryonic and inarticulate. We speak of great men as “simple,” because they retain a sensitiveness to immediate impressions very common in uneducated persons and in children. Their thought subserves the direct currents of suggestion. Their instincts rule them. Their minds serve them. They are great because of this power to read the thoughts of others through the pores of their skin, and answer blindfold to unuttered appeals, whether of weakness or of strength. To do this means intellect, whether in Napoleon or Gladstone. Every pianist and public speaker, every actor and singer knows that his whole art consists in getting his intellectual apparatus into focus, so that the vibrations of his formulated thought shall correspond and fall in with the direct and spontaneous vibrations of his audience. This is truth, this is the discovery of law, this is art.
Men are profound and complicated creatures, and when any one of them expresses the laws of his construction and reveals his own natural history, he is called a genius. But he is a genius solely because he is comprehensible, and others say of him, “I am like that.” His suggestions carry. Their extreme subtlety baffles analysis, just as the suggestions of real life baffle analysis. The miracle of reality in art is due to refinement of suggestion. We cannot follow its steps or say how it is done. We see only the idea. Shakespeare gives you all the meaning, and none of the means. This is first-class artificial communication. It almost competes with the every-day, commonplace, familiar transfer of the incommunicable essence of life from man to man.
Our present problem is, how to influence people for their good. It is clear that when you and another man meet, the personal equation is the controlling thing. If you are more high-minded than he, the way to influence him is to stick to your own beliefs; for they alone can keep you high-minded. They alone can make you vibrate. It is they and not you that will do the work. There you stand, and there he stands; and you can only qualify him by the ideas that control you. It makes no difference whether you are an emperor and he a peasant, or you a Good Government Club man and he a merchant, the same forces are at work. Shift your ground, and he feels the shift; you are encouraging him to be shifty, like yourself. What can you do for him except to follow your conscience? But this is equally true of every meeting of all men everywhere. You address a labor meeting and talk about the Philippines. You meet the Turkish Ambassador and talk about Kipling’s poems. You talk to your son about kite-flying. To each of these contacts with another’s mind you bring the same power. If you start with the psychical value of 6, no matter what you do, a cross-section of your whole activity in the world will at any instant of time read 6. It may be that a page of ciphering cannot express the formula, but it will mean 6.
The immense amount of thought that man has given, during the last few thousand years, to his social arrangements and his destiny, has filled our minds with tangled formulas, and has attached our affection to particular matters. The pomp of preambles and the stress of language stun us. There is so much of organized society. There are so many good ends. If there were only one man in the world, we know that it would be impossible to do good to him by suggesting evil. We know that if we gave him a hint that contained both good and evil, the good would do him good, and the evil, evil. If we were bent on nothing but benefit, we should have to confine ourselves to suggestions of unalloyed virtue. But the world is such a tangle of personalities, that we do not hesitate to mix a little evil in the good we do, hoping that the evil will not be operative. We half believe that there may, somewhere in the community, be a hitch in the multiplication table that brings out good for evil. Liberty and democracy are thought to be such worthy ends, that we must obtain them by any means and all means, even by hiring mercenaries. Can we wonder that in the past, men’s minds were staggered by the importance of a papacy or of some dynastic succession? To-day everybody jumps to shield vice because it is called republicanism or democracy. The irony of history could go no further.
Let us consider our local reforms by the light of these views. Civil service laws, ballot-reform, elections, taxation,--dissolve all these into acts and impulses, and see whether the laws of human influence do not make a short cut through them all, like X-rays. No matter what I talk about to the Emperor, I am really conveying to him by suggestion a tendency to become as good or as bad a man as I myself. Chinese Gordon turned a dynamo of personal force upon the Orientals, and they understood him. He was talking religion, and he gave it to them straight. Now all religion, as everybody knows, is purely a matter of suggestion. But so is all other intercourse. We want honesty. Well, what makes people honest? Honesty. Does anything else spread the influence of honesty, except honesty? Are we here facing a scientific fact? Is this a law of the transference of human energy, or is it not? If it is, you cannot beat it. You cannot imagine any situation where your own total force, in favor of honesty, will consist of anything else than honesty. Of course you may put a case where honesty will result in somebody’s death. If in that case, you want his life, why, lie. But what you will get will be his life, not the spread of honesty. If the event is chronicled, you will find it used as a means of justifying dishonesty forever afterwards.
We do not want any of these reforms except as a means of stimulating character, and it is a law of nature that character can only be stimulated directly. Sincerity is the only need, courage the all-sufficing virtue. We can dump them into every occasion, and sleep sound at night. What interest can any rational man have in our municipal issues except as a grindstone on which to whet the people’s moral sense? How is it possible to deceive ourselves into looking at our own political activity from any other standpoint than this? You are to make a speech at Cooper Union on ballot reform. Somebody says, “Do not mention the liquor question or you will lose votes.” But some phase of that question seems to you pertinent and important. Shall you omit and submit? That would be an odd way of stimulating character. The need of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The maximum that any man can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself.
All the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation; and the vices likewise. Our people are deficient in righteous indignation. When you see a man righteously indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this the force. Nothing else will arouse courage but courage, faith but faith. You see, for instance, a knot of men who are really indignant at the injustice of the times. But their indignation seems to you a danger; because it is likely to defeat some candidate, some pet measure of yours. You wish to allay it. You wish yourself well rid of this sacred indignation; it is inconvenient. Open your eyes to the light of science. Here is a spark of that fire with which everybody ought to be filled. All your scheming was only for the purpose of getting this fire. Then foment it.
Virtue then, is a mode of motion, or it is an attitude of mind in a human organism, which enables that organism to transmit virtue to others. But vice is also a mere attitude of mind by which vice is transmitted. We know less about the natural history of vice than we do of dipsomania and consumption; but we know this much, that the vices are co-related, and breed one another _in transitu_; the tendency being towards lighter forms in the later catchers. Avoid another’s guilty side, and you reinforce it; sympathize with it, and you catch his disease, or some disease. I have held hands with my friend (who is in the wrong) over his family troubles, and it has given me the distemper for a week. The German actor, Devrient, went mad while studying the inmates of asylums, as a preparation to playing King Lear. It was not the living in asylums that drove him mad, but his sympathetic attitude toward the disease. This exposed him. Why is it we commend the man whose antagonism to crooked work is so great that he shows a tempter the door before he has finished his proposition? Parleying is not only a danger; it is the beginning of the trouble itself.
It is very difficult and very odious offending people, by forcing them to see in which direction our wheels really go round; and yet the alternative is to have our machinery forced back to a standstill. We are interlocked with other people and cannot break free. We are held in place by fate, and played upon against our will. When you see cruelty going on before you, you are put to the alternative of interposing to stop it, or of losing your sensibility. There is a law of growth here involved. It is inexorable. You are at the mercy of it. You wish yourself elsewhere, but you are here; you are a mere illustration of pitiless and undying force. The part you take, may run through a fit of bad temper or malice. It may turn to covetousness or conceit, who can tell? Some poison has entered your eye because you looked negligently upon corruption. It will cost you some part of your sense of smell. “Use or lose,” says Nature when she gives us capacities. What you condone, you support; what you neglect, you confirm.
It is true that your confirmation and support are managed through the mechanism of blindness. All the evil in the world receives its chief support from the people whose only connection with it is that they do not fight it, nor see it. Where politics is involved scarcely a man in America knows the difference between right and wrong. Our mayoralty contest five years ago would have left Lot searching for a man who could tell black from white. It was a clear moral issue. But it arose in politics: we could not see it. That we have intellectual cataract is entirely due to the habit of condoning embezzlement. It is a secondary form of the endemic theft, caught by the by-standers. The best people in town had it. If they had been lifting their hands against theft during the preceding years, they never would have caught it.
Of course we support all the good in the world, as well as all the evil; and the ratio in which we do both changes at every moment. It radiates forth from us, and is read correctly by every baby as he passes in his perambulator. Close thinking, and fresh observation of things too familiar to be noticed, bring us to this point.
Now, just as no complexity of institutions affects the transfer of virtue, so none affects the transfer and propagation of vice. Yesterday you were all for virtue. You were for leading a revolution against the bosses, and were ready to work and subscribe and vote. You were a man with the heart of a man. But to-day you are chop-fallen. “The thing cannot be done. It is not the year.” The degradation of your character is seen in your low spirits, and in the jaded and sophistical commonplaces you pour forth. I know the academical reasons for this change in you. I can express it in terms of ballot-law and civil service. But what is it that really has happened?
The power that has struck you was focalized the day before yesterday in the office of some law-broking politicians; and the direct rays of base passion have struck straight through stone walls and constitutions, and, falling upon you, have stopped your wheels. In them it was avarice and ambition. In you it is doubt. A drowsy inertia overcomes you, a blindness of the will. That is what has really happened. The rest is illusion and metaphysical talk. See, now, the real curse of injustice; it takes away the sight from the eyes, and that in a night.
Is it not perfectly natural that Tammany Hall should be everywhere, at all tables, in all churches, in all consciences, when these electrical currents run between man and man and connect them so easily?
I read in the newspaper that a well-known man is at Albany in the interests of a gas deal. He cannot get his way in the city, and is putting up a job with the legislature. I see the thing going through,--a thing utterly cynical, utterly corrupt. No paper will explain it because it cannot be explained without names; besides, the names own the papers. Everybody understands it; nobody minds it. Is any statute here at fault? Will any legislation cure this? If the moral sensibility of our people should become tensified by twenty per cent in twenty-four hours, twenty per cent of all our iniquities in every department would cease in forty-eight hours. Government is carried on by the lightning of personal suggestion which flashes through the community from day to day and from moment to moment. Those things are done which are demanded or are tolerated at the instant they are done.
I read in a newspaper that a syndicate has been formed to light the city. It is backed by the men who control the city administration, and they are now blackmailing the existing company to its ruin. Can I escape the knowledge of this thing? Alas, too easily: I own stock in it.
At first we think the legislature makes the laws, then we see it is done by a cabal, then by people behind the cabal, finally by the million bonds of popular prejudice which tie each man up with the times.
Look closely, take some particular man, and consider why it is that he does not spend his whole time in fighting for virtue. It will turn out, that in some form or other, he is a beneficiary of these evils, and has not the energy to fight them. One man depends upon the _status quo_ for his living, the next is held by affection for his friends, by the ties of old prejudice, by inertia, by hopelessness. Which of them is the more deeply injured victim of tyranny,--the active self-seeker or the listless man, the Tammany boy or the American gentleman?
Every man bears a direct and discoverable share in the responsibility. A janitor keeps his place through Tammany influence, a young lawyer gets business by keeping his mouth shut. Follow out the lines leading from any man, no matter how obscure he is, and they will lead you to the ante-chamber where gigantic business has its offices, where the highest functionaries of commerce and politics meet. The business world is all one organization. It is a sort of secret society, a great web. No matter where you touch it, the same spiders come out.