Part 3

“Causes are the proper subject of history,” says Mr. Brownell, “and characteristics are the proper subject of criticism.” It may be that much of our criticism is beside the mark, because we disregard the weight of history. Our fresh enthusiasm for small nations is dependent upon their docility, and upon their respect for boundary lines which the big nations have painstakingly defined. That a boundary which has been fought over for centuries should be more provocative of dispute than a claim staked off in Montana does not occur to an American who has little interest in events that antedate the Declaration of Independence. Countries, small, weak and incredibly old, whose sons are untaught and unfed, appear to be eager for supplies and insensible to moral leadership. We recognize these characteristics, and resent or deplore them according to our dispositions; but for an explanation of the causes--which might prove enlightening--we must go further back than Americans care to travel.

“I seldom consult others, and am seldom attended to; and I know no concern, either public or private, that has been mended or bettered by my advice.” So wrote Montaigne placidly in the great days of disputation, when men counselled the doubtful with sword and gun, reasoning in platoons, and correcting theological errors with the all-powerful argument of arms. Few men were then guilty of intolerance, and fewer still understood with Montaigne and Burton the irreclaimable obstinacy of convictions. There reigned a profound confidence in intellectual and physical coercion. It was the opinion of John Donne, poet and pietist, that Satan was deeply indebted to the counsels of Saint Ignatius Loyola, which is a higher claim for the intelligence of that great churchman than Catholics have ever advanced. Milton, whose ardent and compelling mind could not conceive of tolerance, failed to comprehend that Puritanism was out of accord with the main currents of English thought and temper. He not only assumed that his enemies were in the wrong, says Sir Leslie Stephen, “but he often seemed to expect that they would grant so obvious an assertion.”

This sounds modern. It even sounds American. We are so confident that we are showing the way, we have been told so repeatedly that what we show is the way, that we cannot understand the reluctance of our neighbours to follow it. There is a curious game played by educators, which consists in sending _questionnaires_ to some hundreds, or some thousands, of school-children, and tabulating their replies for the enlightenment of the adult public. The precise purport of this game has never been defined; but its popularity impels us to envy the leisure that educators seem to enjoy. A few years ago twelve hundred and fourteen little Californians were asked if they made collections of any kind, and if so, what did they collect? The answers were such as might have been expected, with one exception. A small and innocently ironic boy wrote that he collected “bits of advice.” His hoard was the only one that piqued curiosity; but, as in the case of Isacke Bucke and the quarrelsome couple of Plymouth, we were left to our own conjectures.

The fourth “Spiritual Work of Mercy” is “To comfort the sorrowful.” How gentle and persuasive it sounds after its somewhat contentious predecessors; how sure its appeal; how gracious and reanimating its principle! The sorrowful are, after all, far in excess of the doubtful; they do not have to be assailed; their sad faces are turned toward us, their sad hearts beat responsively to ours. The eddying drifts of counsel are loud with disputation; but the great tides of human emotion ebb and flow in obedience to forces that work in silence.

“The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, Moves all the labouring surges of the world.”

Are Americans a Timid People?

As the hare is timid--no! They have made good their fighting record in war. They have proved themselves over and over again to be tranquilly courageous in moments of acute peril. They have faced “their duty and their death” as composedly as Englishmen; and nobler comparison there is none. The sinking of the Titanic offered but one opportunity out of many for the display of a quality which is apt to be described in superlatives; but which is, nevertheless, an inherent principle of manhood. The protective instinct is strong in the native American. He does not prate about the sacredness of human life, because he knows, consciously or unconsciously, that the most sacred thing in life is the will to surrender it unfalteringly.

Of what then are Americans afraid, and what form does their timidity take? Mr. Harold Stearns puts the case coarsely and strongly when he affirms that our moral code resolves itself into fear of what people may say. With a profound and bitter distaste for things as they are, he bids us beware lest we confuse “the reformistic tendencies of our national life--Pollyanna optimism, prohibition, blue laws, clericalism, home and foreign missions, exaggerated reverence for women, with anything a civilized man can legitimately call moral idealism.... These manifestations are the fine flower of timidity, and fear, and ignorance.”

Mr. Stearns is a robust writer. His antagonists, if he has any, need never fear the sharp thrust of an understatement. He recognizes the tyranny of opinion in the United States; but he does not do full justice to its serio-comic aspects, to the part it plays in trivial as well as in august affairs, to the nervousness of our regard, to the absurdities of our subordination. There are successful newspapers and periodicals whose editors and contributors walk a chalked path, shunning facts, ignoring issues, avoiding the two things which spell life for all of us--men and customs--and triumphantly presenting a non-existent world to unobservant readers. Henry Adams said that the magazine-made female has not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam; but our first father’s experience, while intimate and conclusive, was necessarily narrow. We have evolved a magazine-made universe, unfamiliar to the eyes of the earth-dweller, and unrelated to his soul.

When this country was pronounced to be too democratic for liberty, the epigram came as close to the truth as epigrams are ever permitted to come. Democracies have been systematically praised because we stand committed to democratic tenets, and have no desire to foul our own roost. It is granted that equality, rather than freedom, is their animating principle. It is granted also that they are sometimes unfortunate in their representatives; that their legislative bodies are neither intelligent nor disinterested, and that their public service is apt to be distinguished for its incapacity. But with so much vigour and proficiency manifested every day in private ventures, we feel they can afford a fair share of departmental incompetence. The tremendous reserves of will and manhood, the incredible insufficiency of direction, which Mr. Wells remarked in democratic England when confronted by an overwhelming crisis, were equally apparent in the United States. It would seem as though a high average of individual force and intelligence failed to offer material for leadership.

The English, however, unlike Americans, refuse to survey with unconcern the spectacle of chaotic officialdom. They are a fault-finding people, and have expressed their dissatisfaction since the days of King John and the Magna Carta. They were no more encouraged to find fault than were other European commonalties that kept silence, or spoke in whispers. The Plantagenets were a high-handed race. The hot-tempered Tudors resented any opinions their subjects might form. Elizabeth had no more loyal servant than the unlucky John Stubbs, who lost his right hand for the doubtful pleasure of writing the “Gaping Gulf.” Any other woman would have been touched when the culprit, raising his hat with his left hand which had been mercifully spared, cried aloud, “God save the Queen!” Not so the great Elizabeth. Stubbs had expressed his views upon her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou, and it was no business of his to have views, much less to give them utterance; while his intimation that, at forty-six, she was unlikely to bear children was the most unpardonable truth he could have spoken.

The Stuarts, with the exception of the second Charles, were as resentful of candour as were the Tudors. “I hope,” said James the First to his Commons, “that I shall hear no more about liberty of speech.” The Hanoverians heartily disliked British frankness because they heartily disliked their unruly British subjects. George the Third had all Elizabeth’s irascibility without her power to indulge it. And Victoria was not much behind either of them--witness her indignation at the “Greville Memoirs,” “an insult to royalty,” and her regret that the publishers were not open to prosecution.

It was no use. Nothing could keep the Englishman from speaking his mind. With him it was not only “What is there that a man dare not do?” but “What is there that a man dare not say?” Many a time he paid more for the privilege than it was worth; but he handed it down to his sons, who took care that it was not lost through disuse. When Sorbière visited England in 1663, he was amazed to find the “common people” discussing public affairs in taverns and inns, recalling the glories as well as the discomforts of Cromwell’s day, and grumbling over the taxes. “They do not forbear saying what they think of the king himself.” In the “Memoirs” of the publisher, John Murray, there is an amusing letter from the Persian envoy, Mirza Abul Hassan, dated 1824, and expressing his opinion of a government which permitted such unrestrained liberty. Englishmen “do what they like, say what they like, write what they like in their newspapers,” comments the Oriental with bewildered but affectionate contempt. “How far do you think it safe to go in defying your sovereign?” asked Madame de Pompadour of John Wilkes, when that notorious plain-speaker had taken refuge in Paris from his incensed king and exasperated creditors. “That, Madame,” said the member from Aylesbury, “is what I am trying to find out.”

In our day the indifference of the British Government to what used to be called “treasonable utterances” has in it a galling element of contempt. Not that the utterances are invariably contemptible. Far from it. Blighting truths as well as extravagant senilities may still be heard in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square. But the orators might be addressing their audiences in classic Greek for any token the London bobby gives of listening or comprehending. “Words are the daughters of earth; deeds are the sons of Heaven.” The bobby has never heard this grandiloquent definition; but he divides them as clearly in his own mind into hot air and disorderly conduct, and he takes his measures accordingly.

In the United States, as in all countries which enjoy a representative government, censure and praise run in familiar grooves. The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out. This antagonism is duly reflected by the press; and the job of arriving at a correct conclusion is left to the future historian. As an instance of the fashion in which history can be sidetracked by politics, the reader is referred to the portraits of Andrew Jackson as drawn by Mr. Beveridge in his “Life of John Marshall,” and by Mr. Bowers in his “Party Battles of the Jackson Period.”

The first lesson taught us by the Great War was that we got nowhere in political leading-strings, and that none of our accustomed formulas covered this strange upheaval. It was like trying to make a correct survey of land which was being daily cracked by earthquakes. Our national timidity entrenched itself behind a wilful disregard of facts. It was content to view the conflict as a catastrophe for which nobody, or everybody, was to blame. Our national intrepidity manifested itself from the outset in a sense of human responsibility, in a bitter denial of our right to ignorance or indifference. The timidity was not an actual fear of getting hurt; the intrepidity was not insensitiveness to danger. What tore our Nation asunder was the question of accepting or evading a challenge which had--so we at first thought--only a spiritual significance.

In one of Birmingham’s most genially nonsensical stories, “The Island Mystery,” there is an American gentleman named Donovan. He is rich, elderly, good-tempered, brave, kind and humorous; as blameless in his private life as King Arthur, as corrupt politically and financially as Tweed or Fiske; a buyer of men’s souls in the market-place, a gentle, profound and invulnerable cynic. To him a young Irishman sets forth the value of certain things well worth the surrender of life; but the old American smiles away such a primitive mode of reckoning. The salient article of his creed is that nothing should be paid for in blood that can be bought for money; and that, as every man has his price, money, if there is enough of it, will buy the world. He is never betrayed, however, into a callous word, being mindful always of the phraseology of the press and platform; and the reader is made to understand that long acquaintance with such phraseology has brought him close to believing his own pretences. “In the Middle West where I was raised,” he observes mildly, “we don’t think guns and shooting the proper way of settling national differences. We’ve advanced beyond those ideas. We’re a civilized people, especially in the dry States, where university education is common, and the influence of women permeates elections. We’ve attained a nobler outlook upon life.” It reads like a humorous illustration of Mr. Stearns’s unhumorous invectives.

Sociologists are wont to point to the American public as a remarkable instance of the herd mind--a mind not to be utterly despised. It makes for solidity, if not for enlightenment. It is the most economical way of thinking; it saves trouble and it saves noise. So acute an observer as Lord Chesterfield set store by it as unlikely to disturb the peace of society; so practical a statesman as Sir Robert Walpole found it the best substratum upon which to rear the fabric of constitutional government. It is most satisfactory and most popular when void of all sentiment save such as can be expressed by a carnation on Mother’s Day, or by the social activities of an Old Home Week. Strong emotions are as admittedly insubordinate as strong convictions. “A world full of patriots,” sighs the peace-loving Honourable Bertrand Russell, “may be a world full of strife.” This is true. A single patriot has been known to breed strife in plenty. Who can measure the blood poured out in the cause that Wallace led, the “sacred” human lives sacrificed at his behest, the devastations that marked his victories and defeats? And all that came of such regrettable disturbances were a gallows at Smithfield, a name that shines like a star in the murk of history, and a deathless impulse to freedom in the hearts of a brave people.

The herd mind is essentially and inevitably a timid mind. Mr. Sinclair Lewis has analyzed it with relentless acumen in his amazing novel, “Babbitt.” The worthy citizen who gives his name to the story has reached middle age without any crying need to think for himself. His church and his newspaper have supplied his religious and political creeds. If there are any gaps left in his mind, they are filled up at his business club, or at his “lodge,” that kindly institution designed to give “the swaddled American husband” a chance to escape from home one night in the week. Church, newspaper, club and lodge afford a supply of ready-made phrases which pass muster for principles as well as for conversation.

Yet stirring sluggishly in Babbitt’s blood are a spirit of revolt, a regard for justice, and a love of freedom. He does not want to join the Good Citizens’ League, and he refuses to be coerced into membership. He does not like the word “Vigilante,” or the thing it represents. His own sane instinct rejects the tyranny of the conservative rich and of the anarchical poor. He dimly respects Seneca Doane and Professor Brockbank when he sees them marching in the strikers’ parade. “Nothing in it for them, not a cent!” But his distaste for the strikers themselves, for any body of men who obstruct the pleasant ways of prosperity, remains unchanged. In the end--and it is an end which comes quickly--he finds that the one thing unendurable to his soul is isolation. Cut off from the thought currents of his group, he is chilled, lonely, and beset by a vague uneasiness. He yields, and he yields without a pang, glad to get back into the warm familiar atmosphere of class complacency, of smugness, of “safety first”; glad to sacrifice a wavering idealism and a purposeless independence for the solid substance of smooth living and conformity to his neighbours’ point of view.

The curious thing about Mr. Lewis’s analysis is that back of the contempt he strives to awaken in our souls is a suspicion that Babbitt’s herd mind, the mind of many thousands of Americans, is, on the whole, a safe mind for the country. It will not raise us to any intellectual or spiritual heights, but neither will it plunge us into ruin. It is not making trouble for itself, or for the rest of the world. In its dull, imperfect way it represents the static forces of society. Sudden and violent change is hostile to its spirit. It may be trusted to create a certain measure of commercial prosperity, to provide work for workers, and safety for securities. It is not without regard for education, and it delights in practical science--the science which speeds transit, or which collects, preserves and distributes the noises of the world. It permits artists and authors to earn their daily bread, which is as much as artists and authors have any business to expect, and which is a very precious privilege. In revolutionary Russia, the intelligentsia were the first to starve, an unpleasant reminder of possibilities.

What Mr. Lewis implies is that, outside of the herd mind he is considering, may be found understanding and a sense of fair play. But this is an unwarranted assumption. The intelligence of the country--and of the world--is a limited quantity; and fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals. Katharine Fullerton Gerould, in an immensely discontented paper entitled “The Land of the Free,” presents the reverse of Mr. Lewis’s medal. She contends that, as a people, we have “learned fear,” and that, while England has kept the traditions of freedom (a point on which Mr. Chesterton vehemently disagrees with her), we are content with its rhetoric. But she finds us terrorized by labour as well as by capital, by reformers and theorists as well as by the unbudging conservative. Fanatics, she says, are no longer negligible. They have learned how to control votes by organizing ignorance and hysteria. “In company with your most intimate friends you may lift amused eyebrows over the Fundamentalists, over the anti-cigarette organization, over the film censors, over the people who wish to shape our foreign policy in the interests of Methodism, over the people who wish to cut ‘The Merchant of Venice’ out of school editions of Shakespeare. But it is only in company with your most intimate friends that you can do this. If you do it in public, you are going to be persecuted. You are sure, at the very least, to be called ‘un-American.’”

It is a bearable misfortune to be called un-American, because the phrase still waits analysis. The only sure way to escape it is by stepping warily--as in an egg-dance--among the complicated interests sacred to democracies. The agile egg-dancer, aware that there is nothing in the world so sensitive as a voter (Shelley’s coddled plant was a hardy annual by comparison), discountenances plain speech on any subject, as liable to awaken antagonism. There is no telling whom it may hit, and there is no calculating the return blows. “To covet the truth is a very distinguished passion,” observes Santayana. It has burned in the bosom of man, but not in the corporate bosoms of municipalities and legislative bodies. A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candour.

The plain-speaker may, for example, offend the Jews; and nothing can be more manifestly unwise than to give umbrage to a people, thin-skinned, powerful and clannish, who hold the purse-strings of the country. Look what happened to Sargent’s fresco in the Boston Library, which angered the Synagogue it inadequately represented. Or he may offend the Irish, who control wards, and councils, and local elections; and who, being always prompt to retaliate, are best kept in a good humour. Or he may offend either the Methodists or the Roman Catholics, powerful factors in politics, both of them, and capable of dealing knock-down blows. A presidential election was once lost and won through an unpardonable affront to Catholicism; and are we not now drinking soda-fountain beverages in obedience to the mandates of religious bodies, of which the Methodists are the most closely organized and aggressive?

It is well to consider these things, and the American press does very soberly and seriously consider them. The Boston “Transcript” ventured, it is true, to protest against the ruling of the Navy Department which gave to Jewish seamen of the ancient faith three days’ leave of absence, from the thirty-first of March, 1923, to the second of April, with such “additional time” as was practicable, that they might attend the rites of the Synagogue; while Gentile seamen of the Christian faith enjoyed no such religious privileges. The newspapers in general, however, discreetly avoided this issue. “Life” pointed out with a chuckle that the people who disapproved of President Lowell’s decision to exclude negroes from the Harvard Freshman dormitories “rose up and slammed him”; while the people who approved were “less vocal.” When Rear Admiral Sims said disconcertingly: “The Kentucky is not a battleship at all. She is the worst crime in naval construction ever perpetrated by the white race”; even those reviewers who admitted that the Admiral knew a battleship when he saw one, were more ready to soften his words than to uphold them.

The negro is a man and a brother. He is also a voter, and as such merits consideration. There is no more popular appeal throughout the length and breadth of the North than that of fairness to the coloured citizen. Volumes have been written about his rights; but who save President Roosevelt ever linked responsibilities with rights, duties with deliverance? Who, at least, save President Roosevelt ever paused in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the crime of lynching (a stain on the Nation’s honour and a blight on the Nation’s rectitude) to remind the black man that his part of the contract was to deliver up the felon to justice, that his duty to his country, his race, and his manhood was to refuse all sanctuary to crime? A few years ago an acute negro policeman in Philadelphia recognized and trapped a negro criminal. For this he received his full measure of commendation; but he also received threatening letters from other negroes whose simple conception of a policeman’s part was the giving of shelter and protection to offenders of his own race.