Part 6

[The question of whether whatever it is that is meant by the word soul is immortal--immortal in the sense that it will live forever in a realm of the spirit or the blessed--is answered affirmatively by those who hold to the orthodox faith, is not worth discussing by a rational man who is informed, and is discussed by avowed or implied atheists with a fanatical seriousness that destroys whatever force their main contention may have. The legitimate domain of argument is limited; truth that is verifiable by men here and now is its only content. As regards what uncritical people call "immortality" serious argumentation is absolutely impossible. Faith, quotations, and personal desires are not arguments. Mrs. Gallichan's book is in parts scientific, and is therefore of importance to thousands of people whose religion is an achievement of courageous thinking and living. To many excellent persons their professed belief in what they term "immortality" is a kind of merciful necessity. They crave and even invent assurances of it. To such persons there is no argument against it. To persons who produce the "negative" arguments there is no argument for it. And there you are!--W. C. D.]

Book Discussion

Dostoevsky--Pessimist?

The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Shatov was an incorrigible idealist, with a keen satirical ability to destroy his own ideals. He had made a god out of Verhovensky, the leading figure in Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Verhovensky was, he imagined, a god of selfish courage and supreme unconcern, the sort of man whom everybody followed involuntarily. Shatov knew that his hero had irreparably injured three women, one of them half-witted and defenseless. That did not bother the idealist at all; it was "in character." But when Verhovensky lied about it to avoid condemnation, Shatov hit him a savage blow on the cheek and brooded for weeks over the disappointment. The disappointment was deepened by the fact that Verhovensky did not kill him for the blow.

There is something characteristically Russian about that. It goes far to explain Russian pessimism, and give the key to this very book. Your Russian wants above all things to be logical. He will fasten upon an idea and enshrine it in his holy of holies. He will relentlessly follow the dictates of his idea though it lead him to insanity. There is greatness in his attitude, also absurdity. Witness Tolstoy. And when he recognizes his own absurdity he becomes gloomy and savage; there is no escape from the vanity of the world, the spirit, and himself.

I can imagine the mood of Dostoevsky when this book germinated in his mind. He saw this trait in the people about him, he felt it in himself. The intellectuals, each with his little theory, were steadily working towards--nothing at all. The government with its elaborate systems for economic improvement and individual repression, the revolutionary with his scheming insincerity and chaotic program, were equally futile. The women with their pathetic loves, the frivolous with their mad pursuit of amusement, the great and the small, the sycophant and the rebel, were all bitter failures. Suddenly it occurred to him--they are all mad in an insane world, each in his way, one no more than another. I will vent my disgust with these vermin in a book; I will show what they really are. Like the madman who carefully traces out his meaningless labyrinth, I will with the most painstaking psychology unravel their minds, and in so doing I will find my release and my fiendish joy. The only thing lacking in this madhouse is complete self-consciousness. That I will furnish.--And so Dostoevsky logically and nobly followed his idea to its insane conclusion.

The fascinating result cannot be described in a paragraph. It is done, of course, with consummate ability. Beginning the book is like walking into a village of unknown people. They are real enough outwardly; you don't know their nature or direction. Little by little you learn about them, and begin to take sides. Long habit makes you pick favorites. This man will be noble and successful; perhaps he is the hero. Suddenly you begin to suspect that something is wrong. All things are not working together for one end, as in well-regulated novels. Your favorites become jumbled up with the others. The author doesn't give you a chance, because he never shows you a cross-section of a mind. He merely tells what the people do and say. You must draw your own conclusions as in ordinary life. When you get used to this, you see an occasional subtlety, a flash of sardonic laughter. Some of the people are not quite right in their minds. And at length the truth dawns; the sane people are even crazier than the others! This impression comes by sheer force of magic; how the author creates it is inexplicable. But once you have it, the fascination of following an idea obsesses you. And at the end it is impossible to find any meaning or direction in the world.

Of course, no such obsession can find a firm footing in the American temperament. After a while it seems Russian and incredible. If you can't answer Dostoevsky logically, you will abandon logic. But he has stirred you up, and certain important conclusions rise to the surface.

One is that it would be impossible to be such a pessimist unless one looked for a good deal in the world, and looked for it rather sharply. Idealism and courage began this course of thought. Isn't a big share of our optimism shallow? Shouldn't we go a little deeper into things before being so sure they are right? Another is that no living individual is worth very much, after all. Our only salvation is in creating a nobler race. And for that any sacrifice of present individuals is supremely worth while.

It is as if some inspired member of a negro tribe in central Africa had suddenly awakened to the fact that his voodoo-worshipping friends were not acting rationally. From their status the burden of his chant might be horrible for its devilish revelations. But in our eyes he would be a seer and a prophet. Why should he have considered the feelings of the miserable savages? There is something more important than that!

GEORGE SOULE.

The Salvation of the World à la Wells

Social Forces in England and America, by H. G. Wells. [Harper and Brothers, New York.]

Like many philosophers, Mr. Wells is concerned mainly with the need of a new human race. All profound reformers want that. The method of achieving this desirable result is, however, the rock of turning. It probably isn't necessary to say that our present reformer is not one of those blind apostles of effortless immediacy. Such transmution was respectable when Botany Bay was a popular seaside resort for radical poets and philosophers. They of today realize something of the immensity of the developmental process. Their hopes are often so remote that they seem almost despair, but still time is trusted with a reliance on science for the urge toward human perfectibility. Of such the leader is H. G. Wells.

Clearly the conviction that civilization needs a new race is well founded. All ideals, all ideas, civilization, culture are and have always been the products of a pitiful minority. The tendency at present is toward making the desire of the majority supreme. The majority do not cleave toward ideals--not even toward establishing their own glory. Rousseau imagined that millions loved righteousness; Jefferson made such beliefs the basis of the country's documents of incorporation. The idealists were manifestly mistaken. Men have never been drawn toward the ideals they have professed. Truth, justice, equality have never been valued when sex, property, or power were opposed. The virtues came in the early days from "Thus saith the Lord," and they come today, if they come at all, from "Thus saith a Strong Man."

Mr. Wells guesses that there are fifty thousand reading and thinking persons in England--keepers of the citadel. The fifty thousand are practically England. Perhaps his estimate is too low. John Brisben Walker says that in the United States the number of persons able to think independently about political and social matters has increased from a few score to about two hundred and fifty thousand within thirty years. The fact is, albeit, that the world has been fashioned always by this very small minority. Furthermore the present creation is not one in which there is reason for great pride.

The essay on the Great State is especially fine in this connection. Wells's idea of the Normal Social Life and of the constant divergence of a minority is altogether clarifying for the watcher from any vantage, but it is in his discussion of the labor unrest that the reader in Colorado discovers the prophecies he most needs. For illustration this:

The worker in a former generation took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilers begin to ask, not one man here and there, but in masses, in battalions, in trades: "Why, then, are we toilers, and for what is it that we toil?"

The ruling minority in Colorado has been confronted with this question during the coal strike. So far no response has been given save the impromptu utterances of a hideous rage and fright at the thought of awakening workers.

Wells answers his own questions. He replies as Colorado will sometime if Colorado is to persist. It is in this tone:

The supply of good-tempered, cheap labor--upon which the fabric of our contemporary ease and comfort is erected--is giving out. The spread of information and the means of presentation in every class and the increase of luxury and self-indulgence in the prosperous classes are the chief cause of that. In the place of the old convenient labor comes a new sort of labor, reluctant, resentful, critical, and suspicious. The replacement has already gone so far that I am certain that attempts to baffle and coerce the workers back to their old conditions must inevitably lead to a series of increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorder culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now for much longer upon the old lines; our civilization, if it is not to enter upon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to the new conditions, of which the first and foremost is that the wage earning laboring class, consenting to a distinctive treatment and accepting life at a disadvantage, is going to disappear.

That is the truth which men hate most to hear. It is the doctrine which "Mother" Jones preaches and for which she has been imprisoned regardless of laws and constitutions.

But this reasonableness of Wells appeals as little to the left wing of the socialists as it does to conservatives. The I. W. W.'s have no patience with the detailed delays suggested and Wells is as irritated with the losses in civilization to which a violent revolution is likely to lead. He sets forth his feeling in a discussion of the American population, a curious phrase, necessary on account of his distaste for the word people. In speaking of the possibility of a national revolutionary movement as an arrest for the aristocratic tendency now so pronounced he says:

The area of the country is too great and the means of communication between the workers in different parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even for effective political action in mass. In the worst event--and it is only in the worst event that a great insurrectionary movement becomes probable--the newspapers, magazines, telephones, and telegraphs, all the apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals, guns, flying machines, and all the materials of warfare, will be in the hands of the property owners, and the average of betrayal among the leaders of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspicious, united only by their discomforts and not by any constructive intentions, will necessarily be high.

It is true almost. There are always enough of the Gracchi family present to supply the minimum number of weapons essential. To the truth of this the revolutionary movement in Mexico is a witness and Colorado itself could tell tales.

Social Forces, a too collegiate title, sums up satisfactorily Wells's important opinions. The book isn't really a whole: some of the essays are journalistic and some are old. It lacks nearly everywhere the fierceness of The Passionate Friends. In this book Wells is in his dinner coat, comfortable and well fed. He is respectable--horrible admission--but he is still prophetic.

In a sense, too, Social Forces is a warehouse. There one may find stored the rough materials which on occasion are hammered into the poignancies of Marriage or Tono-Bungay. As a vista into a masterhand's workshop the book has its intense psychological interest, but most of all it is text for salvation of the world.

WILLIAM L. CHENERY.

A Novelist's Review of a Novel

Vandover and the Brute, by Frank Norris. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]

"I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now."--FRANK NORRIS.

It would seem inevitable that had Frank Norris lived he would have rewritten Vandover and the Brute. In the book, as it was rescued from the packing box that had been through the San Francisco fire and sent to the publisher, there is much that would have been discarded by the later Norris. Perhaps he would have thrown it all away and written a new story with the same theme. He was a big man and he had the courage of bigness. He could throw fairly good work into the waste-paper basket. The decay of man in modern society, the slow growth in him of the brute that goes upon all fours--what a big, terrible theme! What a book the later Norris would have made of it!

In the introduction by Charles G. Norris quotation is made from the Frank Norris essay, The True Reward of the Novelist, in which this sentence stands out: "To make money is not the province of the novelist." Also it is suggested that the book was written under the influence of Zola, and there is more than a hint of Zola's formula that everything in life is material for literature in the way the job is done.

As it stands, Vandover wants cutting--cutting and something else. With that said and understood, we are glad that the book has been rescued and that it can stand upon our book shelves. American letters cannot know and understand too much of the spirit of Frank Norris, and just at this time when there is much talk of the new note and some little sincere effort toward a return to truth and honesty in the craft of writing, it is good to have this visit from the boy Norris. He was a brave lad, an American writing man who lived, worked, and died without once putting his foot upon the pasteboard road that leads to easy money. "The easy money is not for us," he said and had the manhood to write and live with that warning in his mind. He had craft-love. With a few more writers working in his spirit we should hear less of the new note. Norris was the new note. He was of the undying brotherhood.

When Frank Norris wrote Vandover he was not the great artist he became, but he was the great man; and that's why this book of his is worth publishing and reading. The greater writer would have possessed a faculty the boy who wrote this book had not acquired--the faculty of selection. He would have been less intent upon telling truly unimportant details and by elimination would have gained dramatic strength.

Read Vandover therefore not as an example of the work of Norris the artist but as the work of a true man. It will inspire you. Its very rawness will show you the artist in the making. It will make you understand why Frank Norris with Mark Twain will perhaps, among all American writers, reach the goal of immortality.

The Immigrant's Pursuit of Happiness

They Who Knock at Our Gates, by Mary Antin. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

Shaking the Declaration of Independence in the face of all those opposed to immigration in any form Mary Antin makes an impassioned appeal for practically unrestricted immigration. Her motive is no doubt praiseworthy, her enthusiasm and eloquence are admirable. She contrasts the nature of our present-day immigrants with those who landed in the Mayflower. The self-satisfied middle class attitude peeps through the question: "Is immigration good for us?"

And of course it is good. The immigrants do more than three-quarters of our bituminous coal mining. They make seven-tenths of our steel. They do four-fifths of our woolen, nine-tenths of our cotton-mill work, nearly all our clothing, nearly all our sugar, eighty-five per cent of all labor in the stock-yards. You cannot but come to the same conclusions as Mary Antin: "Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness."

On his way to happiness? One thinks of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where immigrants are not exactly happy; or Paterson, New Jersey; or an incident of this kind from Marysville, California, related by Inez Haynes Gillmore in Harper's Weekly for April 4: "An English lad, the possessor of a beautiful tenor voice, song leader of the hop pickers, was walking along carrying a bucket of water. A deputy sheriff shot him down." One thinks of the Michigan copper mines. Alexander Irvine told us something about peonage in the South in his "Magyar." The New York East Side with its 364,367[2] dark rooms and its "lung block with nearly four thousand people, some four hundred of whom are babies. In the past nine years alone this block has reported two hundred and sixty-five cases of tuberculosis."[3] In Pittsburgh alone, according to The Literary Digest of January 16, 1909, five hundred laborers are killed and an unknown number injured every year in the steel industry. According to Dr. Peter Roberts about eighty per cent of those suffering from rickets in Chicago are Italians, Greeks, and Syrians. This disease is almost unknown in the southern countries. The following is taken from an article by Henry A. Atkinson in Harper's Weekly:

The policy of the companies has been to exclude the more intelligent, capable English-speaking laborers by importing large numbers from southern Europe: Greeks, Slavonians, Bulgarians, Magyars, Montenegrins, Albanians, Turks as well as representatives from all of the Balkan states. The Labor Bureau charges the large corporations of the state with hiring these men--"because they can be handled and abused with impunity."... Louis Tikas is dead. His body riddled with fifty-one shots from rapid fire guns, lay uncared for twenty-four hours at Ludlow where he had been for seven months the respected chief of his Greek countrymen. He was shot while attempting to lead the women and children to a place of safety. At least six women and fifteen little children died with him.

"Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness" says Mary Antin.

Sixty thousand illiterate women were admitted in 1911 to this country. The president of The Woman's National Industrial League says in this connection to the House Committee: "Syndicates exist in New York and Boston for the purpose of supplying fresh young girls from immigrants arriving in this country for houses of ill fame. Immigrants arriving in New York furnish twenty thousand victims annually." Mr. Jacob Riis said very recently: "Scarce a Greek comes here, man or boy, who is not under contract. A hundred dollars a year is the price, so it is said by those who know, though the padrone's cunning has put the legal proof beyond their reach."

But these are statistics, and Mary Antin is horrified by statistics except when she can prove that "the average immigrant family of the new period is represented by an ascending curve. The descending curves are furnished by degenerate families of what was once prime American stock." The "happiness" that those who knock at our gates run into once they land in our mines, factories, sweatshops, department stores, etc., might be traced further. The real question is this: Is immigration good for the immigrant? In view of the above facts there is but one answer so far as the illiterate and physically weak are concerned. Twisting of facts out of a desire to reach certain conclusions will only harm the immigrant and the inhabitants of this country.

Mary Antin would have been Mary Antin in Russia, Turkey, or Aphganistan. The weak and the illiterate are the ones who keep this question in the foreground. Probably the only exception is the Russian Jew. He has no country of his own and the New York East Side is a comparative improvement over the Czar's empire.

WILLIAM SAPHIER.

[Footnote 2: Fifth Report of Tenement House Department, 1909. Page 102.]

[Footnote 3: Ernest Poole:--A Handbook on the Prevention of Tuberculosis.]

The Unique James Family

Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.]

Whatever the deprecators of Henry James's later manner may have to say about the difficulties of his involved style there are some situations, some plots, for which it is most happily suited. Was so haunting a ghost story ever written as that truly horrible one which involved two children--the name of which has unfortunately escaped me, for I should like to recommend it for nocturnal perusal. And in The Golden Bowl the gradual way you are led to perceive the wrong relationship between two of the characters, which, had it been offered bluntly, with no five degrees of approach and insinuation, would have lost half its mystery of guilt. As he himself says, in the Notes of a Son and Brother, "I like ambiguities, and detest great glares."

Unfortunately, the style that is fitting to a slow unfolding of a psychological situation does not lend itself well to biography. The direct way is the only possible way there, if the reader is to keep an unflagging interest, and the direct way is simply not possible for Henry James. And one asks nothing more than to be told simply of the student days at Switzerland and Germany, and the life afterward at Newport, just as the Civil War was beginning or best of all throughout the story of a united family--the four boys, little sister, father, mother, and aunt, quite unlike, I imagine, any other family in the world. The quality of the genius of the brothers seems to have sprung from the association with a father as unlike as possible to the American father of today. He did not influence them, we are told, by any power of verbal persuasion to his own ideas. It was quite simply himself, his personality and character, the way he lived life, that took hold upon his sons' imagination. Of course that is the only way anyone ever is influenced, but I think most parents do try the verbal persuasion as well. Henry James says of his father: