Part 15

Wendell’s actual books, I believe, are now all dead, even his arbitrary and ignorant but highly amusing “Literary History of America.” His volume on Shakespeare, published in 1894, is admired by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Mrs. Edith Wharton, but no one else seems to remember it. His novels and dramas are long forgotten. His “English Composition” was and is a school-book; he himself, in his old age, had doubts that it had accomplished even its pedagogic purpose. His political essays, once so salacious, now read like the heresies of the Jefferson era. What remains, then, of Prof. Barrett Wendell, A.B., Litt.D.? A great deal more, I believe, than a mere ghost. When, indeed, the roll of American literati is drawn up at last, and the high deeds of each are set down, it will be found that Wendell, too, did something, and that what he did was of considerable importance. In a few words, he helped to divert criticism from books to life itself--he was one of the first to see that mere literature is, after all, mere literature--that it cannot be understood without knowing something about the society which produced it. Even Poe, masterly critic that he was, overlooked this obvious and all-important fact. His discussion of books went on in a sort of vacuum. He had brilliant (and often sound) opinions about every technical problem imaginable, and about every question of taste, but only too often he overlooked the fact that his author was also a man, and that what the author wrote the man had first to think, feel and endure. Wendell got rid of that narrow bookishness, still lingering in Lowell. He was primarily a critic, not of literary manners and postures, but of human existence under the Republic. There was no scholarly affectation about him, for all his superficial play-acting, his delight in impressing sophomores. He did not bury his nose in books; he went out and looked at the world, and what he saw there amused him immensely and filled him with ideas. In Mr. Howe’s index the name of Longfellow appears but once, and that of Gilder but once, and that of Aldrich not at all, but that of Blaine is there six times, and after Democracy there are twenty-two entries.

It seems to me that this break with the old American tradition had its high uses, and has left its mark upon American letters. Criticism among us is vastly less cloistered than it once was. Even professors of the loftiest tone, if they would have themselves attended to, must descend from their ivory towers and show themselves at the sea-level. The aloof and austere spirit is now viewed with suspicion. There are, I daresay, ancients who deplore the change. A natural regret, for it has made criticism vastly more difficult. But few deplore it, I believe, who know what literature really is--few, that is, who know the difference between mere intellectual prettiness and a body of living ideas.

As for Wendell’s amazing contradictions and inconsistencies, his endless flounderings between orthodoxy and heresy, I believe that an adequate explanation of them is to be found in the compositions of Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud, the Viennese necromancer. Freud, himself a Jew, discusses in one of his books the curious fact that jokes at the expense of the Jews are chiefly circulated by Jews themselves, and especially by the younger ones. Two Jewish drummers in a Pullman smoking-room fall into an exchange of such jocosities almost automatically. Why? Because, says Freud, they attain thereby to an escape from their Jewishness, which often irks them. It is not they are ashamed of being Jews; it is that the Jewish practices of their elders are burdensome. They dare not revolt openly, for their sense of filial piety is strong, so they take it out by making jokes. By much the same psychological process, I believe, Wendell arrived at his curious mixture of contrarieties. Sentimentally and emotionally, he was moved powerfully by the New England tradition, and felt a strong impulse to defend it against the world. Intellectually, he saw clearly that it was in collapse around him--worse, that it had been full of defects and weaknesses even when, by his own doctrine, it had been strong. The result was his endless shuttling between worship and ribaldry. The last of the New Englanders, he clung pathetically to a faith which gradually succumbed to doubts. In his later years he thus stood upon a burning deck, whence all but him had fled.

Two things, for all his skepticism, he could never bring himself to admit formally, both obvious: first, that the so-called culture of Puritan New England was largely imaginary, that civilization was actually introduced into the region by anti-Puritans, and second, that when Transcendentalism came in, the leadership of Puritanism passed from New England and went to the South and Middle West. To admit the truth of either proposition was psychically impossible to a man of his romantic feelings. Each, baldly stated, seemed to flout the local Holy Ghost. And yet both were true, and their proofs were visible at a glance. The first, I daresay, will never be granted formally, or even heard patiently, by any genuine New Englander. Only a short while ago Walter Prichard Eaton, a very able Puritan, was arguing eloquently that his blue-nosed ancestors were really lovers of beauty, nay, downright artists--and offering the charming old houses on Nantucket Island as exhibits. Unfortunate examples, alas, alas! The houses on Nantucket were not built until the Puritan theocracy was completely demoralized and impotent--until Boston had a theatre, and was already two-thirds of the way to hell. And if they were actually built by Puritans at all, then it was by Puritans who had gone out into the wide, wide word and savored its dreadful and voluptuous marvels--Puritans who had come back from the Eastern seas with gaudy silks in their sea-chests, and the perfume of strange gals upon their whiskers, and a new glitter to their eyes.

Orthodox history, at least as it appears in school-books, assumes that the witch-burners and infant-damners had it all their own way in New England, even down to Revolutionary times. They actually met with sturdy opposition from the start. All of their sea-ports gradually filled up with sailors who were anything but pious Christian men, and even the back-country had its heretics, as the incessant wars upon them demonstrate. The fact that only Puritans could vote in the towns has deceived the historians; they mistake what was the law for what was really said and done. We have had proofs in our own time that that error is easy. Made by students of early New England, it leads to multiple absurdities. The fact is that the civilization that grew up in the region, such as it was, owed very little to the actual Puritans; it was mainly the product of anti-Puritans, either home-bred or imported. Even the school system, so celebrated in legend, owed whatever value was in it to what were currently regarded as criminals. The Puritans did not found their schools for the purpose of propagating what is now known as learning; they found them simply as nurseries of orthodoxy. Beyond the barest rudiments nothing of any worldly value was taught in them. The principal subject of study, first and last, was theology, and it was theology of the most grotesque and insane sort ever cherished by man. Genuine education began in New England only when the rising minority of anti-Puritans, eventually to become a majority, rose against this theology, and tried to put it down. The revolt was first felt at Harvard; it gradually converted a seminary for the training of Puritan pastors into a genuine educational institution. Harvard delivered New England, and made civilization possible there. All the men who adorned that civilization in the days of its glory--Emerson, Hawthorne and all the rest of them--were essentially anti-Puritans.

To-day, save in its remoter villages, New England is no more Puritan than, say, Maryland or Missouri. There is scarcely a clergyman in the entire region who, if the Mathers could come back to life, would not be condemned by them instantly as a heretic, and even as an atheist. The dominant theology is mild, skeptical and wholly lacking in passion. The evangelical spirit has completely disappeared. Save in a small minority of atavistic fanatics, there is a tolerance that is almost indistinguishable from indifference. Roman Catholicism and Christian Science are alike viewed amiably. The old heat is gone. Where it lingers in America is in far places--on the Methodist prairies of the Middle West, in the Baptist back-waters of the South. There, I believe, it still retains not a little of its old vitality. There Puritanism survives, not merely as a system of theology, but also as a way of life. It colors every human activity. Kiwanis mouths it; it is powerful in politics; learning wears its tinge. To charge a Harvard professor of to-day with agnosticism would sound as banal as to charge him with playing the violoncello. But his colleague of Kansas, facing the same accusation, would go damp upon the forehead, and his colleague of Texas would leave town between days.

Wendell, a sentimentalist, tried to put these facts behind him, though he must have been well aware of them. There got into his work, in consequence, a sense of futility, even when he was discussing very real and important things. He opened paths that he was unable to traverse himself. Sturdier men, following him, were soon marching far ahead of him. He will live in the history of American criticism, but his own criticism is already dead.

XIII. THE NATION

One often hears lamentation that the American weeklies of opinion are not as good as their English prototypes--that we have never produced anything in that line to equal, say, the _Athenæum_ or the _Saturday Review_. In the notion, it seems to me, there is nothing save that melancholy colonialism which is one of the curses of America. The plain fact is that our weeklies, taking one with another, are quite as well turned out as anything that England has ever seen, and that at least two of them, the _Nation_ and the _New Republic_, are a great deal better. They are better because they are more hospitable to ideas, because they are served by a wider and more various range of writers, and because they show an occasional sense of humor. Even the _New Republic_ knows how to be waggish, though it also knows, especially when it is discussing religion, how to be cruelly dull. Its Washington correspondence is better than any Parliamentary stuff in any English weekly ever heard of, if only because it is completely devoid of amateur statesmanship, the traditional defect of political correspondence at all times and everywhere. The editors of the English weeklies all ride political hobbies, and many of them are actively engaged in politics. Their American colleagues, I suspect, have been tempted in that direction more than once, but happily they have resisted, or maybe fate has resisted for them.

Of all the weeklies--and I go through at least twenty each week, American and English, including the Catholic _Commonweal_ and a Negro journal--I like the _Nation_ best. There is something charming about its format, and it never fails to print an interesting piece of news, missed by the daily newspapers. Moreover, there is always a burst of fury in it, and somewhere or other, often hidden in a letter from a subscriber, a flash of wit--two things that make for amusing reading. The _New Republic_, I suspect, is more authoritative in certain fields,--for example, the economic--but it is also more pontifical. The _Nation_ gets the air of a lark into many of its most violent crusades against fraud and folly; one somehow gathers the notion that its editors really do not expect the millennium to come in to-morrow. Of late they have shown many signs of forsaking Liberalism for Libertarianism--a far sounder and more satisfying politics. A Liberal is committed to sure cures that always turn out to be swindles; a Libertarian throws the bottles out of the window, and asks only that the patient be let alone.

What the circulation of the _Nation_ may be I don’t know. In its sixtieth anniversary number, published in 1925, there was a hint that the number then sold each week ran far ahead of the 11,000 with which E. L. Godkin began in 1865. I have heard gabble in the saloons frequented by New York publishers that the present circulation is above 30,000. But no one, so far as I know, has ever suggested that it equals the circulation of even a third-rate daily paper. Such dull, preposterous sheets as the New York _Telegram_, the Washington _Star_, the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_ and the Atlanta _Constitution_ sell two or three times as many copies. Such magazines for the herd as _True Stories_ and _Hot Dog_ sell fifty times as many. Nevertheless, if I were a fellow of public spirit and eager to poison the Republic with my sagacity, I’d rather be editor of the _Nation_ than editor of any of the other journals that I have mentioned--nay, I’d rather be editor of the _Nation_ than editor of all of them together, with every other newspaper and magazine in America, save perhaps four or five, thrown in. For the _Nation_ is unique in American journalism for one thing: it is read by its enemies. They may damn it, they may have it barred from libraries, they may even--as they did during the war--try to have it put down by the Postoffice, but all the while they read it. That is, the more intelligent of them--the least hopeless minority of them. It is to such minorities that the _Nation_ addresses itself, on both sides of the fence. It has penetrated to the capital fact that they alone count--that the ideas sneaked into them to-day will begin to sweat out of the herd day after to-morrow.

Is the Creel Press Bureau theory of the late war abandoned? Is it impossible to find an educated man who is not ashamed that he succumbed to the Wilson buncombe? Then thank the _Nation_ for that deliverance, for when it tackled Wilson it tackled him alone. Is the Coolidge Golden Age beginning to be sicklied o’er with a pale cast of green? Then prepare to thank the _Nation_ again, for it began to tell the harsh, cold truth about good Cal at a time when all the daily journals of America, with not ten exceptions, were competing for the honor of shining his shoes. I often wonder, indeed, that the great success of the _Nation_ under Villard has made such little impression upon American journalists--that they are so dead to the lessons that it roars into their ears. They all read it--that is, all who read anything at all. It prints news every week that they can’t find in their own papers--sometimes news of the very first importance. It comments upon that news in a tart and well-informed fashion. It presents all the new ideas that rage in the world, always promptly and often pungently. To an editorial writer the _Nation_ is indispensable. Either he reads it, or he is an idiot. Yet its example is very seldom followed--that is, forthrightly and heartily. Editorial writers all over the land steal ideas from it daily; it supplies, indeed, all the ideas that most of them ever have. It lifts them an inch, two inches, three inches, above the sedimentary stratum of Rotarians, bankers and ice-wagon drivers; they are conscious of its pull even when they resist. Yet very few of them seem to make the inevitable deduction that the kind of journalism it practices is better and more effective than the common kind--that they, too, might amount to something in this world if they would imitate it.

In such matters, alas, change is very slow. The whole press of the United States, I believe, is moving in the direction of the _Nation_--that is, in the direction of independence and honesty. Even such papers as the New York _Herald-Tribune_ are measurably less stupid and intransigeant than they used to be, in their news if not in their opinions. But the majority of active journalists in the higher ranks were bred on the old-time party organs, and it is very difficult for them to reform their ways. They still think, not as free men, but as party hacks. On the one side they put the truth; on the other side they put what they call policy. Thus there are thousands of them who still sit down nightly to praise Coolidge--though to the best of my knowledge and belief there is not a single journalist in the whole United States who ever speaks of Coolidge in private without sneering at him. This resistance to change grows all the more curious when one observes what happens to the occasional paper which abandons it. I offer the Baltimore _Sunpaper_ as an example--an especially apposite one, for the influence of the _Nation_ upon it must be apparent to everyone familiar with its recent history. It was, a dozen years ago, a respectable but immensely dull journal. It presented the day’s news in a formal, unintelligent fashion. It was accurate in small things, and free from sensationalism, but it seldom if ever went beyond the overt event to the causes and motives behind it. Its editorial opinions were flabby, and without influence. To-day it is certainly something far different. It must still go a long, long way, I suspect, before it escapes its old self altogether, but that must be a dull reader, indeed, who cannot see how vastly it has improved. It no longer prints the news formally; it devotes immense energy to discovering and revealing what is behind the news. In opinion it has thrown off all chains of faction and party, and is sharply and often intelligently independent. Its reaction to a new public problem is not that of a party hack, but that of a free man. It is, perhaps, sometimes grossly wrong, but no sane person believes that it is ever deliberately disingenuous.

Well, the point is that this new scheme has been tremendously successful--that it has paid in hard cash as well as in the usufructs of the spirit. There is no sign that the readers of the _Sunpaper_--barring a few quacks with something to sell--dislike its new vigor, enterprise and independence. On the contrary, there is every evidence that they like it. They have increased greatly in numbers. The paper itself rises in dignity and influence. And every other newspaper in America that ventures upon the same innovations, from the _World_ in New York to the _Enquirer-Sun_ down in Columbus, Ga., rises in the same way. It is my contention that the _Nation_ has led the way in this reform of American journalism--that it will be followed by many papers to-morrow, as it is followed by a few to-day. Its politics are sometimes outrageous. It frequently gets into lamentable snarls, battling for liberty with one hand and more laws with the other. It is doctrinaire, inconsistent, bellicose. It whoops for men one day, and damns them as frauds the next. It has no sense of decorum. It is sometimes a bit rowdy. But who will deny that it is honest? And who will deny that, taking one day with another, it is generally right--that its enthusiasms, if they occasionally send it mooning after dreamers, at least never send it cheering for rogues--that its wrongness, when it is wrong, is at all events not the dull, simian wrongness of mere stupidity? It is disliked inordinately, but not, I believe, by honest men, even among its enemies. It is disliked by demagogues and exploiters, by frauds great and small. They have all tasted its snickersnee, and they have all good reason to dislike it.

Personally, I do not subscribe to its politics, save when it advocates liberty openly and unashamed. I have no belief in politicians: the good ones and the bad ones seem to me to be unanimously thieves. Thus I hope I may whoop for it with some grace, despite the fact that my name appears on its flagstaff. How my name got there I don’t know; I receive no emolument from its coffers, and write for it very seldom, and then only in contravention of its ideas. I even have to pay cash for my annual subscription--a strange and painful burden for a journalist to bear. But I know of no other expenditure (that is, of a secular character) that I make with more satisfaction, or that brings me a better return. Most of the papers that I am doomed to read are idiotic even when they are right. The _Nation_ is intelligent and instructive even when it is wrong.

XIV. OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN

Hard luck pursues the American Navy. It is the common butt, not only of political mountebanks, but also of all the brummagem uplifters and soul-snatchers who now sweat to save us. If a Mr. Secretary Denby is not permitting the Falls and Dohenys to raid its goods, a Mr. Secretary Wilbur or Josephus Daniels is trying to convert it into a Methodist Sunday-school. Worse, the Navy gets more than its fair share of the national dirty work. It is told off to put down free speech in the Virgin Islands, and it is delegated to flog, hang and butcher the poor Haitians, and so convert them into black Iowans, with money in the bank. Elsewhere in the world such disagreeable jobs are given to the Army. The British Army, for example, performs all the massacres that are necessary in India, and the French Army attends to whatever routine murders and mayhems are called for in Syria and Morocco. But the American custom puts all such Christian endeavor upon the Navy.

However, unless my agents lie, it is not the gore that revolts the more high-toned naval officers, but the new rectitude that has been thrust upon them. They are, as a class, excellent fellows, and full of pride in their uniform. As officers, they are all theoretically gentlemen, and many of them are so in fact. They have traveled widely, and are familiar with the usages of the civilized world. They know what is decent and seemly. Well, try to imagine how they must feel when they read the daily papers. One day they read that the Secretary of the Navy has ordered a group of their colleagues to prosecute a woman nurse for bringing in a couple of jugs aboard a naval collier. The next day they observe that a high officer in the Marines has filled the newspapers with a meticulous and indignant account of what went on at a table where he was a guest, in the house of one of his subordinates. Explanations of this last episode have been offered, but they certainly do not explain it away. The essential and immovable point is that one officer snitched on another, his host--that the immemorial and invariable obligations of a guest were sacrificed to Law Enforcement. What would happen to an English naval officer who made any such assault upon the code? What, indeed would happen to an honest Elk?