Part 16

But I am not arguing here that any such things ought to happen; I am merely calling attention to the fact that, under democracy, it is becoming increasingly difficult for officers to be gentlemen, as the term is commonly understood in the world, and perhaps also increasingly improbable. We are, it would appear, passing through a time of changing values, and what was considered decent by our fathers will lose that quality to-morrow. The lower orders of men, having attained to political power, now proceed to force their ideas upon their betters, and some of those ideas naturally have to do with decorum. It is already unlawful in America to take a bottle of wine to a sick friend; in a few years it may also be indelicate. And simultaneously, it may become quite proper to go to the police with anything that is said or done in a friend’s house. Personally, I am inclined to oppose such changes, if only in sheer hunkerousness, but I am surely under no illusion that opposing them will stop them. They flow naturally out of the character of the common man, now in the saddle, and are thus irresistible. He is extremely and even excessively moral, but the concept of what is called honor is beyond him. If, for example, he aspires to public office, he believes that it is entirely proper to abandon one conviction and take on its opposite in order to get votes. And, having got into office, he believes that it is entirely proper to hold on at any cost, even at the cost of common decency.

There is a familiar example. I allude to the Cathcart case. In that case a high officer of State found himself confronting an uncomfortable dilemma. On the one hand he was bound by an outrageous law to engage in a public and obscene chase of a woman taken in adultery. On the other hand he was bound by the code of all civilized men to refuse and refrain. What was the way out for him? The way out, obviously, was for him to resign his office--in other words, to decline flatly to perform any such ignoble and disgusting duty, and to spurn as insults the honors and emoluments offered for doing it. But, as far as I can make out, he never so much as thought of that. Instead he played the bounder--and kept his dirty job. His conduct, I believe, seemed quite proper to the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. The newspapers, in discussing it, never once suggested that a man of honor, in his boots, would resign forthwith. Instead, they simply denounced him for doing his plain duty under the law--that is, they proposed that he get out of his dilemma by violating his oath of office. The device is characteristically American. Anything is fair and decent that keeps a man his job. That has been the settled American doctrine since Jackson’s time.

But it is only of late, I believe, that it has been defended openly, and its antithesis denounced as, in some mysterious fashion, inimical to democracy. We owe that change to the liberation of the lower orders which began with the Civil War. That liberation produced, on one side, an immense increase in political corruption, and, on the other, a rise in moral frenzy. All the characteristic ideas of the mob began to be reflected in public life and legislation. The typical American public officer, who had been a theorist willing to sacrifice anything, including his office, to his notions, became a realist willing to sacrifice anything, including his principles and his honor, to his job. We have him with us to-day, and he smells worse and worse as year chases year. Grover Cleveland was perhaps the last lonely survivor of the old days. He had his faults, God knows, but no one could have imagined him yielding to the mob in order to make votes. Right or wrong, he was his own man--and never more surely than when, by popular standards, he was wrong. In his successor, Dr. Coolidge, we have an almost perfect specimen of the new order. Coolidge is a professional trimmer, who has made his living at the art since his early manhood. It is impossible to imagine him sacrificing his political welfare to his convictions. He has vanity, but nothing properly describable as dignity or self-respect. One automatically pictures him doing, in the Cathcart case, precisely what his subordinate did. He performed many comparable acts during the stinking progress of the Fall case.

This general decay of honor is bound, plainly enough, to drive all the decenter sort of men out of public life among us. The process, indeed, has already gone a long way. I point to Congress. I point to the Federal judiciary. In both directions one observes an increase in trimmers and knee-benders and a decrease in independent and self-respecting men. The bench, in particular, has suffered. The better sort of judges, torn between their lawyer-like respect for all law and their inescapable conviction that many of the new laws they are called upon to enforce are unjust and dishonest, tend to throw off the ermine and go back to practice. And their places are filled by limber nonentities selected--and policed--by the Anti-Saloon League.

Until a few years ago the Army and the Navy escaped this general degradation. Their officers stood apart from the main body of public job-holders. They held office for life, and they were assumed to be innocent of politics. Having no need to curry favor with the mob, they could afford to disdain the common hypocrisies. Inheriting an austere and exact tradition of professional honor, they were what is called gentlemen. They did not blab upon one another. They had the fine tolerance of civilized men. They had dignity. It was as impossible to imagine a naval officer or an army officer playing the spy for the Anti-Saloon League as it was to imagine him using a table-napkin as a handkerchief or getting converted at a Methodist revival. But I fear those days are past. The pressure from outside, exerted through such mountebanks as Mr. Secretary Wilbur, becomes too heavy to be borne. Worse, there is disintegration within, due in part, perhaps, to the packing of the two Services with civilians from the gutter, but in part also to changes in the method of selecting candidates for Annapolis and West Point. Whatever the cause, the effects are already plain. In a few short years, perhaps, we shall see a major-general in the Army preaching Fundamentalism in Tennessee, and an admiral in the Navy going to work for the Anti-Saloon League.

XV. GOLDEN AGE

The rest of us, struggling onward painfully, must wait in patience for the boons and usufructs of Heaven; Judge Elbert Henry Gary, LL.D., chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, has them here and now. To few men in history, I believe, has it been given to live in a universe so nearly to their hearts’ desire. Let the learned ex-jurist look East or West, he will find only scenes to content him. Let him look North or South, and his eye will be caressed and frankincense will spray his gills. The emperor and pope of all the Babbitts, he sits at the center of a Babbitts’ paradise. For him and his like there dawns a Golden Age, and its hero is good Cal.

I hope I do not exaggerate. No doubt Judge Gary, in the privacy of his chamber, sweats and fumes against imperfections invisible to the rest of us. He is a man of imagination, and has, I daresay, a bold and soaring fancy. He can imagine a Republic even kinder and more osculatory than this one--that is, to Babbitts. He can even, perhaps, imagine a President more ineffable than Cal. But here we shoot into mere human weaknesses--the voluptuous, Freudian day-dreams of one who, like all of us, has his aberrant, goatish moods. Dr. John Roach Straton, I suppose, can imagine improvements in the Holy Scriptures--here a paragraph excised _pro bonos mores_, there a comma inserted to make sense. I myself have dreamed of a malt liquor better than Pilsner Bürgerbräu. But I do not sign my name to such inordinate speculations, and neither does Dr. Straton. Judge Gary, too, holds his tongue. The rest of us, contemplating him, can only envy him. A vast nation of 110,000,000 human beings, all of them alike, seems to be organized to the one end of making him happy. Whatever he wants it to do, it does. Its laws are framed to his precise taste; its public conscience approves his partisans and execrates his enemies; its high officers of state are his excellent friends, and humble and obedient servants. When he gives a feast, judges and ambassadors leap to grace it. When he would dine out, he is welcome at the White House. The newspapers fawn upon him. Labor licks his hand. His frown is dreaded in the Senate house and on the bench. Altogether, his life is happier than that of a Broadway actor, and if he is not content then it is only because contentment is physiologically impossible to _Homo sapiens_.

The United States, I believe, is the first great empire in the history of the world to ground its whole national philosophy upon business. There have been, of course, eminent trading nations in the past, but none ever went so far. Even in Carthage there was a _Junker_ hierarchy that stood above the merchants; in Hannibal it actually had a Crown Prince. And even in England, the nation of shopkeepers of Napoleon’s derision, there has always been an aristocracy (made up mainly of military freebooters, enterprising adulterers, the issue of the latter, and, in modern times, shyster lawyers, vaudeville magnates, and the proprietors of yellow newspapers) that has held its own against the men of trade, even at the cost of absorbing the more pugnacious of them. But here in this great Republic of the West the art of trafficking is king--and Judge Gary is its grand vizier, as Cal is its chief eunuch. No other human activity brings such great rewards in money and power, and none is more lavishly honored. The one aim of our jurisprudence is to safeguard business--to make its risks small and its profits sure. If the rights of the citizen get in the way, then the rights of the citizen must be sacrificed. Upon this point our higher courts have delivered themselves more than once, and in eloquent, ringing terms. Judge Gary and his friends prefer dry and dismal slaves to those who are stewed and happy. _Also_, to hell with the Bill of Rights! They prefer, when there is a strike, to win it rather than lose it. Out, then, with the pad of blank injunctions! They sweat under criticism, and shiver under attack. To the hoosegow, constable, with the Bolsheviks!

All this, of course, was not achieved without a struggle. For years the Constitution stood in the way--the Constitution and certain national superstitions--the latter sprung from the blather of the Revolutionary stump. But all those impediments are now surmounted. The bench gave Judge Gary to business, and business has reciprocated the favor by providing sound and sane men for the bench. To-day jurisprudence is unfettered. When, a year or so ago, the Supreme Court finally got rid of the Fourth Amendment, that delayed mopping up went almost unnoticed. As I say, Judge Gary, ought to be a happy man. The sun shines upon him from all four points of the compass. Congress, well rehearsed, plays soft jazz for him; bishops bring him his toddy; a straw issues from the White House and tickles him behind the ear. But never is his happiness greater, I believe, than when his thoughts turn idly upon the subject of labor, and he contemplates the state of the union movement in the Federal Union.

For this state, it is plain, he has the late Sam Gompers to thank--that great idealist and easy mark. If he sent less than ten hay-wagons of roses to Sam’s funeral, then he is a niggard, indeed. For Sam got upon the back of the American labor movement when it was beginning to be dangerous, and rode it so magnificently that at the end of his life it was as tame as a tabby cat. It retains that character to-day, and will continue to do so as long as the Gompersian hierarchy lasts,--that is, so long as Judge Gary and his friends continue to appoint Sam’s heirs and assigns to high-sounding committees, and to invite them to gaudy dinners. A plate of puddle duck and a chance to make a speech--that was always enough to fetch Sam. And when Sam was fetched, the 4,000,000 members of the American Federation of Labor were also fetched. Where else in the world is there a great union organization that has so long and honorable a record as a strike-breaker? Or that is so diligently devoted to keeping the lower ranks of labor in due subordination? If it had been conceived and hatched by Judge Gary himself, it could not have been more nearly perfect. Practically considered, it is not a labor organization at all; it is simply a balloon mattress interposed between capital and labor to protect the former from the latter. Gazing upon it, I daresay, Judge Gary feels a glow flickering along the periphery of his gizzard, and if he were not a Christian he would permit himself a guffaw.

I leave the sweetest to the last. The courts might be docile, Congress might be consecrated to right thought, labor might grovel and the bench of bishops might applaud, but if there were an anarchist in the White House it would all go for naught. Imagine, then, Judge Gary’s joy in contemplating the incomparable Cal! It is almost as if, in New York, a bootlegger were made king. The man’s merits, in the Babbitt view, are almost fabulous. He seems, indeed, scarcely like a man at all, but more like some miraculous visitation or act of God. He is the ideal made visible, if not audible--perfection put into a cutaway coat and trotted up and down like a mannequin in a cloak and suit atelier. Nor was there any long stress of training him--no season of doubt and misgiving. Nature heaved him forth full-blown, like a new star shot into the heavens. In him the philosophy of Babbitt comes to its perfect and transcendental form. Thrift, to him, is the queen of all the virtues. He respects money in each and every one of its beautiful forms--pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, five-dollar bills, and so on _ad infinitum_. He venerates those who have it. He believes that they have wisdom. He craves the loan and use of that wisdom. He invites them to breakfast, and listens to them. The things they revere, he reveres. The things they long for, he longs to give them.

Judge Gary is an old man--just how old I do not know, for he withholds the date of his birth from “Who’s Who in America,” along with the principal suffragettes. He remembers the dreadful days of Roosevelt, with bombs going off every two hours. He remembers the turmoils of the Taft administration. He remembers how _difficile_ Woodrow was--how he had to be wooed, flattered, led by the nose, drenched with goose-grease. He remembers the crude carnival under the martyr Harding--Broadway sports, pug managers, small-town Elks at the trough. And then he thinks of Washington to-day, and sees it bathed in pink sunshine. There he is ever welcome. There he is _imperator in imperio_. There is good _Geschäft_. There is the Athens of the new Golden Age.

XVI. EDGAR SALTUS

Forty years ago Edgar Saltus was a shining star in the national literature, leading the way out of the Egyptian night of Victorian sentimentality. To-day he survives only as the favorite author of the late Warren Gamaliel Harding. I can recall, in the circle of Athene, no more complete collapse. Saltus plunged from the top of the world to the bottom of the sea. His books, of late, have been reissued, and his surviving third wife has printed a biography of him. But all his old following, save for a few romantic die-hards, has vanished.

The causes of the débâcle are certainly not hard to determine. They were set forth twenty-five years ago by that ingenious man, the late Percival Pollard, and you will find them in his book, “Their Day in Court.” Saltus was simply a bright young fellow who succumbed to his own cleverness. The gaudy glittering phrase enchanted him. He found early in life that he had a hand for shaping it; he found soon afterward that it had a high capacity for getting him notice. So he devoted himself to its concoction--and presently he was lost. His life after that was simply one long intoxication. He was drunk on words. Ideas gradually departed from him. Day and night, for years and years, he held his nozzle against the jug of nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, prepositions and interjections. Some of his phrases, of course, were good ones. There were enough of that kind in “Imperial Purple,” for example, to fascinate the sainted Harding, a voluptuary in all the arts. But the rest quickly wore out--and with them Saltus himself wore out. He passed into the shadows, and was forgotten. When he died, a few years ago, all that remained of him was a vague name.

His wife’s biography is encased in an orange slip-cover which announces melodramatically that it is “an extraordinary revealing life.” It is, but I doubt that what it reveals will serve to resuscitate poor Saltus. The man who emerges from it is simply a silly and hollow trifler--a mass of puerile pretensions and affectations, vain of his unsound knowledge and full of sentimentalities. He began life by hawking the stale ribaldries of Arthur Schopenhauer, already dead twenty years; he departed to realms of bliss chattering the blowsy nonsense of theosophy. Mrs. Saltus, in the new and appalling fashion of literary wives, is extremely frank. Her Edgar was a handsome dog, but extremely foolish, and even childish. When he was engaged upon his rococo compositions he had to be protected like a queen bee in childbed. The slightest sound dissipated his inspiration, and set him to yelling. If a fish-peddler stopped beneath his window he was done for the day. If a cat came in and brushed his leg he was thrown into hysterics, and had to go to bed. His love affairs were highly complex, and apparently took up a great deal of his time. Early in life, while he was a student at Heidelberg, he had an affair with a lady of noble birth, and even ran away with her. The business was quickly broken up, apparently by the allied sovereigns of Europe. The bride-elect was immured in a convent, and died there “the year following.” Saltus then came back to the Republic and married the daughter of a partner in J. P. Morgan & Company. “She was no small catch,” but the alliance was doomed. The man was too fascinating to women. His pulchritude charmed them, and his epigrams finished them. In a few years Mrs. Saltus was suing for divorce.

There followed a series of morganatic affairs, culminating in a second marriage. This one also blew up quickly; the bride denounced Saltus as a liar, and even hinted that he had induced her to marry him by fraud. But though she soon left his bed and board, she clung resolutely to her other rights as his wife, and thereafter, for many long years, he devoted all the time he could spare from his writing to efforts to get rid of her. He moved from New York to California, in fact, mainly because the divorce laws on the Coast were easier than in the East. But they were not easy enough to free him. Finally, after endless waiting, he got news one day that the party of the second part was dead. He displayed the correct regrets, but was obviously much relieved. Meanwhile, Wife No. 3 was at call in the anteroom. She had been there, in fact, for years. When Saltus first met her she was a school-girl with her hair down her back, and his attentions to her--he was then rising forty--naturally outraged her family. But her own heart was lost, and so the effort to warn him off failed. He followed her, after that, all over the civilized world. Did she go to London, he was at her heels on the next steamer. Did she move to Los Angeles, he arrived by the next train. In the end they were married in Montreal, on a very hot day and after a pretty lovers’ quarrel.

This lady is the author of the biography with the orange slip-cover. Facing page 310 there is a portrait of her showing her “sitting at the table on which her husband wrote his books, burning incense before a Siamese Buddha, and meditating on a stanza from the Bhagavad-Gita.” She denies, however, that Saltus took to theosophy under her tutelage. The actual recruiting officer was a certain Mr. Colville, of Pasadena, who combined the “enthusiasm of a scholar and the erudition of a sage.” This Colville introduced Saltus to the theosophical elements, and later guided his faltering steps. In the end poor old Schopenhauer lost a customer and the art of epigram a gifted and diligent practitioner. Saltus passed into senility with his thoughts concentrated powerfully upon Higher Things.

A grotesque and somewhat pathetic story. The man began life with everything in his favor. His family was well-to-do and of good social position in New York; he was sent to Eton and then to Heidelberg, and apparently made useful friends at both places; he plunged into writing at the precise moment when revolt against the New England Brahmins was rising; he attracted attention quickly, and was given a lavish welcome. No American author of 1885 was more talked about. When his first novel, “The Truth About Tristrem Varick,” came out in 1888 it made a genuine sensation. But the stick came down almost as fast as the rocket had gone up. His books set the nation agog for a short while, and were then quietly forgotten. He began as the hope of American letters, and ended as a writer of yellow-backs and a special correspondent for the Hearst papers. What ailed him was simply lack of solid substance. He could be clever, as cleverness was understood during the first Cleveland administration, but he lacked dignity, information, sense. His books of “philosophy” were feeble and superficial, his novels were only facile improvisations, full of satanic melodrama and wooden marionettes.

Of late I have been re-reading them--a sad job, surely, for when I was a schoolboy they were nine-day wonders, barred from all the libraries but devoured eagerly by every aspiring youth. Now their epigrams are dulled, and there is nothing else left. “The Anatomy of Negation” and “The Philosophy of Disenchantment” have been superseded by far better books; “The Truth About Tristrem Varick” reads like one of the shockers of Gertrude Atherton; “Mary Magdalen” is a dead shell; the essays and articles republished as “Uplands of Dream” are simply ninth-rate journalism. Of them all only “Imperial Purple” holds up. A certain fine glow is still in it; it has gusto if not profundity; Saltus’s worst faults do not damage it appreciably. I find myself, indeed, agreeing thoroughly with the literary judgment of Dr. Harding. “Imperial Purple” remains Saltus’s best book. It remains also, alas, his only good one!

XVII. MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

1

_Martyrs_

To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! Searching history, I can find no such case. All the great martyrs of the books died for sheer nonsense--often for trivial matters of doctrine and ceremonial, too absurd to be stated in plain terms. But what of the countless thousands who have perished in the wars, fighting magnificently for their country? Well, show me one who knew precisely what the war he died in was about, and could put it into a simple and plausible proposition.

2

_The Ancients_