,,prejudices ,,second ,,series ,by ,h4 ,l4 ,,mencken ,,jonathan ,,cape #aa ,,gower ,,street ,,london #aiba ,,contents ,i ,,the ,,national ,,letters1 #i #a4 ,prophets and ,their ,visions1 #i #b4 ,the ,answering ,fact1 #ad #c4 ,the ,ashes of ,new ,england1 #ah #d4 ,the ,ferment ,underground1 #be #e4 ,in the ,literary ,abattoir1 #cb #f4 ,underlying ,causes1 #ci #g4 ,the ,lonesome ,artist1 #ed #h4 ,the ,cultural ,background1 #fe #i4 ,under the ,campus ,pump1 #gh #aj4 ,the ,intolerable ,burden1 #hg #aa4 ,epilogue1 #ih ,,ii ,,roosevelt3 ,,an ,,autopsy1 #ajb ,,iii ,,the ,,sahara ,,of ,,the ,,bozart1 #acf ,,iv ,,the ,,divine ,,afflatus1 #aee ,v ,,scientific ,,examination ,,of ,a ,,popular ,,virtue1 #agb ,,vi ,,exeunt ,,omnes1 #ahj ,,vii ,,the ,,allied ,,arts1 #aid #a4 ,on ,music-,lovers1 #aid #b4 ,opera1 #aig #c4 ,the ,music of ,to-morrow1 #bja #d4 ,tempo di ,valse1 #bjd #e4 ,the ,puritan as ,artist1 #bjf #f4 ,the ,human ,face1 #bjf #g4 ,the ,cerebral ,mime1 #bjh ,,viii ,,the ,,cult ,,of ,,hope1 #baa ,,ix ,,the ,,dry ,,millennium1 #bai #a4 ,the ,holy ,war1 #bai #b4 ,the ,lure of ,babylon1 #bbb #c4 ,cupid and ,well-,water1 #bbe #d4 ,the ,triumph of ,idealism1 #bbf ,x ,,appendix ,,on ,a ,,tender ,,theme1 #bbi #a4 ,the ,nature of ,love1 #bbi #b4 ,the ,incomparable ,buzzsaw1 #bcf #c4 ,women as ,spectacles1 #bch #d4 ,woman and the ,artist1 #bdj #e4 ,martyrs1 #bdc #f4 ,the ,burnt ,child1 #bdd #g4 ,the ,supreme ,comedy1 #bdd #h4 ,a ,hidden ,cause1 #bde #i4 ,bad ,workmanship1 #bde ,,prejudices3 ,,second ,,series ,i4 ,,the ,,national ,,letters #a ,prophets and ,their ,visions ,it is convenient to begin1 like the gentlemen of ,god1 with a glance at a text or two4 ,the first1 a short one1 is from ,ralph ,waldo ,emerson's celebrated oration1 ,the ,american ,scholar1 delivered before the ,phi ,beta ,kappa ,society at ,cambridge on ,august #cast1 #ahcg4 ,emerson was then thirty-four years old and almost unknown in his own country31 though he had already published ,nature and established his first contacts with ,landor and ,carlyle4 ,but ,the ,american ,scholar brought him into instant notice at home1 partly as man of letters but more importantly as seer and prophet1 and the fame thus founded has endured without much diminution1 at all events in ,new ,england1 to this day4 ,oliver ,wendell ,holmes1 giving words to what was undoubtedly the common feeling1 hailed the address as the intellectual declaration of independence of the ,american people1 and that judgment1 amiably passed on by three generations of pedagogues1 still survives in the literature books4 ,i quote from the first paragraph3 ,our day of dependence1 our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands1 draws to a close4444 ,events1 actions arise1 that must be sung1 that will sing themselves4 ,who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age1 as the star in the constellation ,harp1 which now flames in our zenith1 astronomers announce1 shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years8 ,this1 as ,i say1 was in #ahcg4 ,thirty-three years later1 in #ahgj1 ,walt ,whitman echoed the prophecy in his even more famous ,democratic ,vistas4 ,what he saw in his vision and put into his gnarled and gasping prose was a class of native authors1 literatuses1 far different1 far higher in grade1 than any yet known1 sacerdotal1 modern1 fit to cope with our occasions1 lands1 permeating the whole mass of ,american morality1 taste1 belief1 breathing into it a new breath of life1 giving it decision1 affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage1 with results inside and underneath the elections of ,presidents or ,congress--radiating1 begetting appropriate teachers1 schools1 manners1 and1 as its grandest result1 accomplishing1 7what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplished1 and without which this nation will no more stand1 permanently1 soundly1 than a house will stand without a substratum17 a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the ,states4 ,and out of the vision straightway came the prognostication3 ,the promulgation and belief in such a class or order--a new and greater literatus order--its possibility1 7nay1 certainty17 underlies these entire speculations4444 ,above all previous lands1 a great original literature is sure to become the justification and reliance1 7in some respects the sole reliance17 of ,american democracy4 ,thus ,whitman in #ahgj1 the time of the first draft of ,democratic ,vistas4 ,he was of the same mind1 and said so1 in #ahhh1 four years before his death4 ,i could bring up texts of like tenor in great number1 from the years before #ahcg1 from those after #ahhh1 and from every decade between4 ,the dream of ,emerson1 though the eloquence of its statement was new and arresting1 embodied no novel projection of the fancy2 it merely gave a sonorous ,wald-horn tone to what had been dreamed and said before4 ,you will find almost the same high hope1 the same exuberant confidence in the essays of the elder ,channing and in the ,lectures on ,american ,literature of ,samuel ,lorenzo ,knapp1 ,,ll4,d41 the first native critic of beautiful letters--the primordial tadpole of all our later ,mores1 ,brownells1 ,phelpses1 ,mabies1 ,brander ,matthewses and other such grave and glittering fish4 ,knapp believed1 like ,whitman long after him1 that the sheer physical grandeur of the ,new ,world would inflame a race of bards to unprecedented utterance4 ,what are the ,tibers and ,scamanders1 he demanded1 measured by the ,missouri and the ,amazon8 ,or what the loveliness of ,illysus or ,avon by the ,connecticut or the ,potomack8 ,whenever a nation wills it1 prodigies are born4 ,that is to say1 prodigies literary and ineffable as well as purely material--prodigies aimed1 in his own words1 at the olympick crown as well as at mere railroads1 ships1 wheatfields1 droves of hogs1 factories and money4 ,nor were ,channing and ,knapp the first of the haruspices4 ,noah ,webster1 the lexicographer1 who taught millions to spell but not one to sin1 had seen the early starlight of the same ,golden ,age so early as #aghi1 as the curious will find by examining his ,dissertations on the ,english ,language1 a work fallen long since into undeserved oblivion4 ,nor was ,whitman1 taking sober second thought exactly a century later1 the last of them4 ,out of many brethren of our own day1 extravagantly articulate in print and among the chautauquas1 ,i choose one--not because his hope is of purest water1 but precisely because1 like ,emerson1 he dilutes it with various discreet where-ases4 ,he is ,van ,wyck ,brooks1 a young man far more intelligent1 penetrating and hospitable to fact than any of the reigning professors--a critic who is sharply differentiated from them1 indeed1 by the simple circumstance that he has information and sense4 ,yet this extraordinary ,mr4 ,brooks1 in his ,letters and ,leadership1 published in #aiah1 rewrites ,the ,american ,scholar in terms borrowed almost bodily from ,democratic ,vistas--that is to say1 he prophesies with ,emerson and exults with ,whitman4 ,first there is the ,emersonian doctrine of the soaring individual made articulate by freedom and realizing the responsibility that lies upon us1 each in the measure of his own gift4 ,and then there is ,whitman's vision of a self-interpretative democracy1 forced into high literary adventures by ,joseph ,conrad's obscure inner necessity1 and so achieving a new synthesis adaptable to the unique conditions of our life4 ,and finally there is the specific prediction1 the grandiose1 ,adam ,forepaugh mirage3 ,we shall become a luminous people1 dwelling in the light and sharing our light4 444 ,as ,i say1 the roll of such soothsayers might be almost endlessly lengthened4 ,there is1 in truth1 scarcely a formal discourse upon the national letters 7forgetting1 perhaps1 ,barrett ,wendell's sour threnody upon the ,new ,england ,aufklrung7 that is without some touch of this previsional exultation1 this confident hymning of glories to come1 this fine assurance that ,american literature1 in some future always ready to dawn1 will burst into so grand a flowering that history will cherish its loveliest blooms even above such salient ,american gifts to culture as the moving-picture1 the phonograph1 the ,new ,thought and the bi-chloride tablet4 ,if there was ever a dissenter from the national optimism1 in this as in other departments1 it was surely ,edgar ,allan ,poe--without question the bravest and most original1 if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious1 of all the critics that we have produced4 ,and yet even ,poe1 despite his general habit of disgust and dismay1 caught a flash or two of that engaging picture--even ,poe1 for an instant1 in #ahdf1 thought that he saw the beginnings of a solid and autonomous native literature1 its roots deep in the soil of the republic--as you will discover by turning to his forgotten essay on ,j4 ,g4 ,c4 ,brainard1 a thrice-forgotten doggereleer of ,jackson's time4 ,poe1 of course1 was too cautious to let his imagination proceed to details2 one feels that a certain doubt1 a saving peradventure or two1 played about the unaccustomed vision as he beheld it4 ,but1 nevertheless1 he unquestionably beheld it4444 #b ,the ,answering ,fact ,now for the answering fact4 ,how has the issue replied to these visionaries8 ,it has replied in a way that is manifestly to the discomfiture of ,emerson as a prophet1 to the dismay of ,poe as a pessimist disarmed by transient optimism1 and to the utter collapse of ,whitman4 ,we have1 as every one knows1 produced no such new and greater literatus order as that announced by old ,walt4 ,we have given a gaping world no books that radiate1 and surely none intelligibly comparable to stars and constellations4 ,we have achieved no prodigies of the first class1 and very few of the second class1 and not many of the third and fourth classes4 ,our literature1 despite several false starts that promised much1 is chiefly remarkable1 now as always1 for its respectable mediocrity4 ,its typical great man1 in our own time1 has been ,howells1 as its typical great man a generation ago was ,lowell1 and two generations ago1 ,irving4 ,viewed largely1 its salient character appears as a sort of timorous flaccidity1 an amiable hollowness4 ,in bulk it grows more and more formidable1 in ease and decorum it makes undoubted progress1 and on the side of mere technic1 of the bald capacity to write1 it shows an ever-widening competence4 ,but when one proceeds from such agencies and externals to the intrinsic substance1 to the creative passion within1 that substance quickly reveals itself as thin and watery1 and that passion fades to something almost puerile4 ,in all that mass of suave and often highly diverting writing there is no visible movement toward a distinguished and singular excellence1 a signal national quality1 a ripe and stimulating flavor1 or1 indeed1 toward any other describable goal4 ,what one sees is simply a general irresolution1 a pervasive superficiality4 ,there is no sober grappling with fundamentals1 but only a shy sporting on the surface2 there is not even any serious approach1 such as ,whitman dreamed of1 to the special experiences and emergencies of the ,american people4 ,when one turns to any other national literature--to ,russian literature1 say1 or ,french1 or ,german or ,scandinavian--one is conscious immediately of a definite attitude toward the primary mysteries of existence1 the unsolved and ever-fascinating problems at the bottom of human life1 and of a definite preoccupation with some of them1 and a definite way of translating their challenge into drama4 ,these attitudes and preoccupations raise a literature above mere poetizing and tale-telling2 they give it dignity and importance2 above all1 they give it national character4 ,but it is precisely here that the literature of ,america1 and especially the later literature1 is most colorless and inconsequential4 ,as if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas1 the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes1 it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what1 after all1 must be every healthy literature's elementary materials4 ,one is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it1 of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure1 of no organized determination to think things out4 ,what is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness1 a bloodless respectability1 a submergence of matter in manner--in brief1 what is there is the feeble1 uninspiring quality of ,german painting and ,english music4 ,it was so in the great days and it is so to-day4 ,there has always been hope and there has always been failure4 ,even the most optimistic prophets of future glories have been united1 at all times1 in their discontent with the here and now4 ,the mind of this country1 said ,emerson1 speaking of what was currently visible in #ahcg1 is taught to aim at low objects4444 ,there is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant4444 ,books are written 444 by men of talent 444 who start wrong1 who set out from accepted dogmas1 not from their own sight of principles4 ,and then1 turning to the way out3 ,the office of the scholar 7i4e41 of ,whitman's 'literatus'7 is to cheer1 to raise and to guide men by showing them facts amid appearances4 ,whitman himself1 a full generation later1 found that office still unfilled4 ,our fundamental want to-day in the ,united ,states1 he said1 with closest1 amplest reference to present conditions1 and to the future1 is of a class1 and the clear idea of a class1 of native authors1 literatuses1 far different1 far higher in grade1 than any yet known--and so on1 as ,i have already quoted him4 ,and finally1 to make an end of the prophets1 there is ,brooks1 with nine-tenths of his book given over1 not to his prophecy--it is crowded1 indeed1 into the last few pages--but to a somewhat heavy mourning over the actual scene before him4 ,on the side of letters1 the sthetic side1 the side of ideas1 we present to the world at large1 he says1 the spectacle of a vast1 undifferentiated herd of good-humored animals--,knights of ,pythias1 ,presbyterians1 standard model ,ph4,d4's1 readers of the ,saturday ,evening ,post1 admirers of ,richard ,harding ,davis and ,o4 ,henry1 devotees of ,hamilton ,wright ,mabie's white list of books1 members of the ,y4 ,m4 ,c4 ,a4 or the ,drama ,league1 weepers at chautauquas1 wearers of badges1 #ajj per cent4 patriots1 children of ,god4 ,poe ,i pass over2 ,i shall turn to him again later on4 ,nor shall ,i repeat the parrotings of ,emerson and ,whitman in the jeremiads of their innumerable heirs and assigns4 ,what they all establish is what is already obvious3 that ,american thinking1 when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory1 is extraordinarily timid and superficial--that it evades the genuinely serious problems of life and art as if they were stringently taboo--that the outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues1 not of profundity1 not of courage1 not of originality1 but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism4 #c ,the ,ashes of ,new ,england ,the current scene is surely depressing enough4 ,what one observes is a literature in three layers1 and each inordinately doughy and uninspiring--each almost without flavor or savor4 ,it is hard to say1 with much critical plausibility1 which layer deserves to be called the upper1 but for decorum's sake the choice may be fixed upon that which meets with the approval of the reigning ,lessings4 ,this is the layer of the novels of the late ,howells1 ,judge ,grant1 ,alice ,brown and the rest of the dwindling survivors of ,new ,england ,kultur1 of the brittle1 academic poetry of ,woodberry and the elder ,johnson1 of the tea-party essays of ,crothers1 ,miss ,repplier and company1 and of the solemn1 highly judicial1 coroner's inquest criticism of ,more1 ,brownell1 ,babbitt and their imitators4 ,here we have manner1 undoubtedly4 ,the thing is correctly done2 it is never crude or gross2 there is in it a faint perfume of college-town society4 ,but when this highly refined and attenuated manner is allowed for what remains is next to nothing4 ,one never remembers a character in the novels of these aloof and de-,americanized ,americans2 one never encounters an idea in their essays2 one never carries away a line out of their poetry4 ,it is literature as an academic exercise for talented grammarians1 almost as a genteel recreation for ladies and gentlemen of fashion--the exact equivalent1 in the field of letters1 of eighteenth century painting and ,german ,augenmusik4 ,what ails it1 intrinsically1 is a dearth of intellectual audacity and of sthetic passion4 ,running through it1 and characterizing the work of almost every man and woman producing it1 there is an unescapable suggestion of the old ,puritan suspicion of the fine arts as such--of the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for good citizens only when some ulterior and superior purpose is carried into them4 ,this purpose1 naturally enough1 most commonly shows a moral tinge4 ,the aim of poetry1 it appears1 is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy1 but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue4 ,the essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age4 ,the novel1 properly conceived1 is a means of uplifting the spirit2 its aim is to inspire1 not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man4 ,the ,puritan1 of course1 is not entirely devoid of sthetic feeling4 ,he has a taste for good form2 he responds to style2 he is even capable of something approaching a purely sthetic emotion4 ,but he fears this sthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life3 the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct4 ,art is a temptation1 a seduction1 a ,lorelei1 and the ,good ,man may safely have traffic with it only when it is broken to moral uses--in other words1 when its innocence is pumped out of it1 and it is purged of gusto4 ,it is precisely this gusto that one misses in all the work of the ,new ,england school1 and in all the work of the formal schools that derive from it4 ,one observes in such a fellow as ,dr4 ,henry ,van ,dyke an excellent specimen of the whole clan4 ,he is1 in his way1 a genuine artist4 ,he has a hand for pretty verses4 ,he wields a facile rhetoric4 ,he shows1 in indiscreet moments1 a touch of imagination4 ,but all the while he remains a sound ,presbyterian1 with one eye on the devil4 ,he is a ,presbyterian first and an artist second1 which is just as comfortable as trying to be a ,presbyterian first and a chorus girl second4 ,to such a man it must inevitably appear that a ,molire1 a ,wagner1 a ,goethe or a ,shakespeare was more than a little bawdy4 ,the criticism that supports this decaying caste of literary ,brahmins is grounded almost entirely upon ethical criteria4 ,you will spend a long while going through the works of such typical professors as ,more1 ,phelps1 ,boynton1 ,burton1 ,perry1 ,brownell and ,babbitt before ever you encounter a purely sthetic judgment upon an sthetic question4 ,it is almost as if a man estimating daffodils should do it in terms of artichokes4 ,phelps' whole body of we church-goers criticism--the most catholic and tolerant1 it may be said in passing1 that the faculty can show--consists chiefly of a plea for correctness1 and particularly for moral correctness2 he never gets very far from the axiom of the moral law4 ,brownell argues eloquently for standards that would bind an imaginative author as tightly as a ,sunday-school super-intendent is bound by the ,ten ,commandments and the ,mann ,act4 ,sherman tries to save ,shakespeare for the right-thinking by proving that he was an ,iowa ,methodist--a member of his local ,chamber of ,commerce1 a contemner of ,reds1 an advocate of democracy and the ,league of ,nations1 a patriotic dollar-a-year-man during the ,armada scare4 ,elmer ,more devotes himself1 year in and year out1 to denouncing the ,romantic movement1 i4 e41 the effort to emancipate the artist from formul and categories1 and so make him free to dance with arms and legs4 ,and ,babbitt1 to make an end1 gives over his days and his nights to deploring ,rousseau's anarchistic abrogation of the veto power over the imagination1 leading to such wrongness in both art and life that it threatens to wreck civilization4 ,in brief1 the alarms of schoolmasters4 ,not many of them deal specifically with the literature that is in being4 ,it is too near to be quite nice4 ,to ,more or ,babbitt only death can atone for the primary offense of the artist4 ,but what they preach nevertheless has its echoes contemporaneously1 and those echoes1 in the main1 are woefully falsetto4 ,i often wonder what sort of picture of ,these ,states is conjured up by foreigners who read1 say1 ,crothers1 ,van ,dyke1 ,babbitt1 the later ,winston ,churchill1 and the old maids of the ,freudian suppression school4 ,how can such a foreigner1 moving in those damp1 asthmatic mists1 imagine such phenomena as ,roosevelt1 ,billy ,sunday1 ,bryan1 the ,becker case1 the ,i4 ,w4 ,w41 ,newport1 ,palm ,beach1 the ,university of ,chicago1 ,chicago itself--the whole1 gross1 glittering1 excessively dynamic1 infinitely grotesque1 incredibly stupendous drama of ,american life8 ,as ,i have said1 it is not often that the ordentlichen ,professoren deign to notice contemporary writers1 even of their own austere kidney4 ,in all the ,shelburne ,essays there is none on ,howells1 or on ,churchill1 or on ,mrs4 ,wharton2 ,more seems to think of ,american literature as expiring with ,longfellow and ,donald ,g4 ,mitchell4 ,he has himself hinted that in the department of criticism of criticism there enters into the matter something beyond mere aloof ignorance4 ,i soon learned 7as editor of the pre-,bolshevik ,nation71 he says1 that it was virtually impossible to get fair consideration for a book written by a scholar not connected with a university from a reviewer so connected4 ,this class consciousness1 however1 should not apply to artists1 who are admittedly inferior to professors1 and it surely does not show itself in such men as ,phelps and ,spingarn1 who seem to be very eager to prove that they are not professorial4 ,yet ,phelps1 in the course of a long work on the novel1 pointedly omits all mention of such men as ,dreiser1 and ,spingarn1 as the aforesaid ,brooks has said1 appears to be less inclined even than the critics with whom he is theoretically at war to play an active1 public part in the secular conflict of darkness and light4 ,when one comes to the ,privat-,dozenten there is less remoteness1 but what takes the place of it is almost as saddening4 ,to ,sherman and ,percy ,boynton the one aim of criticism seems to be the enforcement of correctness--in ,emerson's phrase1 the upholding of some great decorum1 some fetish of a government1 some ephemeral trade1 or war1 or man--e4 g41 ,puritanism1 democracy1 monogamy1 the ,league of ,nations1 the ,wilsonian piffle4 ,even among the critics who escape the worst of this schoolmastering frenzy there is some touch of the heavy culture of the provincial schoolma'm4 ,for example1 consider ,clayton ,hamilton1 ,m4,a41 vice-president of the ,national ,institute of ,arts and ,letters4 ,here are the tests he proposes for dramatic critics1 i4 e41 for gentlemen chiefly employed in reviewing such characteristic ,american compositions as the ,ziegfeld ,follies1 ,up in ,mabel's ,room1 ,ben-,hur and ,the ,witching ,hour3 #a4 ,have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave of ,amiens8 #b4 ,have you ever climbed to the ,acropolis by moonlight8 #c4 ,have you ever walked with whispers into the hushed presence of the ,frari ,madonna of ,bellini8 ,what could more brilliantly evoke an image of the eternal ,miss ,birch1 blue veil flying and ,baedeker in hand1 plodding along faithfully through the interminable corridors and catacombs of the ,louvre1 the while bands are playing across the river1 and young bucks in three-gallon hats are sparking the gals1 and the ,jews and harlots uphold the traditions of ,french hig leef at ,longchamps1 and ,american deacons are frisked and debauched up on martyrs' hill8 ,the banality of it is really too exquisite to be borne2 the lack of humor is almost that of a ,fifth avenue divine4 ,one seldom finds in the pronunciamentoes of these dogged professors1 indeed1 any trace of either ,attic or ,gallic salt4 ,when they essay to be jocose1 the result is usually simply an elephantine whimsicality1 by the chautauqua out of the ,atlantic ,monthly4 ,their satire is mere ill-nature4 ,one finds it difficult to believe that they have ever read ,lewes1 or ,hazlitt1 or1 above all1 ,saintsbury4 ,i often wonder1 in fact1 how ,saintsbury would fare1 an unknown man1 at the hands of1 say1 ,brownell or ,more4 ,what of his iconoclastic gayety1 his boyish weakness for tweaking noses and pulling whiskers1 his obscene delight in slang8444 #d ,the ,ferment ,underground ,so much for the top layer4 ,the bottom layer is given over to the literature of ,greenwich ,village1 and by ,greenwich ,village1 of course1 ,i mean the whole of the advanced wing in letters1 whatever the scene of its solemn declarations of independence and forlorn hopes4 ,miss ,amy ,lowell is herself a fully-equipped and automobile ,greenwich ,village1 domiciled in ,boston amid the crumbling gravestones of the ,new ,england intelligentsia1 but often in waspish joy-ride through the hinterland4 ,vachel ,lindsay1 with his pilgrim's staff1 is another4 ,there is a third in ,chicago1 with ,poetry3 ,a ,magazine of ,verse as its ,exhibit ,a2 it is1 in fact1 the senior of the ,village fornenst ,washington ,square4 ,others you will find in far-flung factory towns1 wherever there is a ,little ,theater1 and a couple of local ,synges and ,chekovs to supply its stage4 ,st4 ,louis1 before ,zo ,akins took flight1 had the busiest of all these ,greenwiches1 and the most interesting4 ,what lies under the whole movement is the natural revolt of youth against the pedagogical ,prussianism of the professors4 ,the oppression is extreme1 and so the rebellion is extreme4 ,imagine a sentimental young man of the provinces1 awaking one morning to the somewhat startling discovery that he is full of the divine afflatus1 and nominated by the hierarchy of hell to enrich the literature of his fatherland4 ,he seeks counsel and aid4 ,he finds1 on consulting the official treatises on that literature1 that its greatest poet was ,longfellow4 ,he is warned1 reading ,more and ,babbitt1 that the literatus who lets feeling get into his compositions is a psychic fornicator1 and under ,german influences4 ,he has formal notice from ,sherman that ,puritanism is the lawful philosophy of the country1 and that any dissent from it is treason4 ,he gets the news1 plowing through the ,new ,york ,times ,book ,review1 the ,nation 7so far to the left in its politics1 but hugging the right so desperately in letters67 the ,bookman1 the ,atlantic and the rest1 that the salient artists of the living generation are such masters as ,robert ,underwood ,johnson1 ,owen ,wister1 ,james ,lane ,allen1 ,george ,e4 ,woodberry1 ,hamlin ,garland1 ,william ,roscoe ,thayer and ,augustus ,thomas1 with polite bows to ,margaret ,deland1 ,mary ,johnston and ,ellen ,glasgow4 ,it slowly dawns upon him that ,robert ,w4 ,chambers is an academician and ,theodore ,dreiser isn't1 that ,brian ,hooker is and ,george ,sterling isn't1 that ,henry ,sydnor ,harrison is and ,james ,branch ,cabell isn't1 that ,chimmie ,fadden ,townsend is and ,sherwood ,anderson isn't4 ,is it any wonder that such a young fellow1 after one or two sniffs of that prep-school fog1 swings so vastly backward that one finds him presently in corduroy trousers and a velvet jacket1 hammering furiously upon a pine table in a ,macdougal street cellar1 his mind full of malicious animal magnetism against even so amiable an old maid as ,howells1 and his discourse full of insane hair-splittings about vers libre1 futurism1 spectrism1 vorticism1 ,expressionismus1 hliogabalisme8 ,the thing1 in truth1 is in the course of nature4 ,the ,spaniards who were outraged by the ,palmerism of ,torquemada did not become members of the ,church of ,england2 they became atheists4 ,the ,american colonists1 in revolt against a bad king1 did not set up a good king2 they set up a democracy1 and so gave every honest man a chance to become a rogue on his own account4 ,thus the young literatus1 emerging from the vacuum of ,ohio or ,arkansas4 ,an early success1 as we shall see1 tends to halt and moderate him4 ,he finds that1 after all1 there is still a place for him1 a sort of asylum for such as he1 not over-populated or very warmly-heated1 but nevertheless quite real4 ,but if his sledding at the start is hard1 if the corrective birch finds him while he is still tender1 then he goes1 as ,andrew ,jackson would say1 the whole hog1 and another voice is added to the raucous bellowing of the literary ,reds4 ,i confess that the spectacle gives me some joy1 despite the fact that the actual output of the ,village is seldom worth noticing4 ,what commonly engulfs and spoils the ,villagers is their concern with mere technique4 ,among them1 it goes without saying1 are a great many frauds--poets whose yearning to write is unaccompanied by anything properly describable as capacity1 dramatists whose dramas are simply ,schnitzler and well-water1 workers in prose fiction who gravitate swiftly and inevitably to the machine-made merchandise of the cheap magazines--in brief1 ,american equivalents of the bogus painters of the ,boul' ,mich'4 ,these pretenders1 having no ideas1 naturally try to make the most of forms4 ,half the wars in the ,village are over form2 content is taken for granted1 or forgotten altogether4 ,the extreme leftists1 in fact1 descend to a meaningless gibberish1 both in prose and in verse2 it is their last defiance to intellectualism4 ,this childish concentration upon externals unfortunately tends to debauch the small minority that is of more or less genuine parts2 the good are pulled in by the bad4 ,as a result1 the ,village produces nothing that justifies all the noise it makes4 ,i have yet to hear of a first-rate book coming out of it1 or a short story of arresting quality1 or even a poem of any solid distinction4 ,as one of the editors of a magazine which specializes in the work of new authors ,i am in an exceptional position to report4 ,probably nine-tenths of the stuff written in the dark dens and alleys south of the arch comes to my desk soon or late1 and ,i go through all of it faithfully4 ,it is1 in the overwhelming main1 jejune and imitative4 ,the prose is quite without distinction1 either in matter or in manner4 ,the verse seldom gets beyond a hollow audaciousness1 not unlike that of cubist painting4 ,it is not often1 indeed1 that even personality is in it2 all of the ,villagers seem to write alike4 ,unless one is an expert in some detective method1 said a recent writer in ,poetry1 one is at a loss to assign correctly the ownership of much free verse--that is1 if one plays fairly and refuses to look at the signature until one has ventured a guess4 ,it is difficult1 for instance1 to know whether ,miss ,lowell is writing ,mr4 ,bynner's verse1 or whether he is writing hers4 ,moreover1 this monotony keeps to a very low level4 ,there is no poet in the movement who has produced anything even remotely approaching the fine lyrics of ,miss ,reese1 ,miss ,teasdale and ,john ,mc,clure1 and for all its war upon the clich it can show nothing to equal the clich-free beauty of ,robert ,loveman's ,rain ,song4 ,in the drama the ,village has gone further4 ,in ,eugene ,o',neill1 ,rita ,wellman and ,zo ,akins it offers dramatists who are obviously many cuts above the well-professored mechanicians who pour out of ,prof4 ,dr4 ,baker's ,ibsenfabrik at ,cambridge4 ,but here we must probably give the credit1 not to any influence residing within the movement itself1 but to mere acts of ,god4 ,such pieces as ,o',neill's one-acters1 ,miss ,wellman's ,the ,gentile ,wife and ,miss ,akins' extraordinary ,papa lie quite outside the ,village scheme of things4 ,there is no sign of formal revolt in them4 ,they are simply first-rate work1 done miraculously in a third-rate land4 ,but if the rebellion is thus sterile of direct results1 and1 in more than one aspect1 fraudulent and ridiculous1 it is at all events an evidence of something not to be disregarded1 and that something is the gradual formulation of a challenge to the accepted canons in letters and to the accepted canon lawyers4 ,the first hoots come from a tatterdemalion horde of rogues and vagabonds without the gates1 but soon or late1 let us hope1 they will be echoed in more decorous quarters1 and with much greater effect4 ,the ,village1 in brief1 is an earnest that somewhere or other new seeds are germinating4 ,between the young tutor who launches into letters with imitations of his seminary chief's imitations of ,agnes ,repplier's imitations of ,charles ,lamb1 and the young peasant who tries to get his honest exultations into free verse there can be no hesitant choice3 the peasant is1 by long odds1 the sounder artist1 and1 what is more1 the sounder ,american artist4 ,even the shy and somewhat stagey carnality that characterizes the ,village has its high symbolism and its profound uses4 ,it proves that1 despite repressions unmatched in civilization in modern times1 there is still a sturdy animality in ,american youth1 and hence good health4 ,the poet hugging his ,sonia in a ,washington square beanery1 and so giving notice to all his world that he is a devil of a fellow1 is at least a better man than the emasculated stripling in a ,y4 ,m4 ,c4 ,a4 gospel-mill1 pumped dry of all his natural appetites and the vacuum filled with double-entry book-keeping1 business economics and auto-erotism4 ,in so foul a nest of imprisoned and fermenting sex as the ,united ,states1 plain fornication becomes a mark of relative decency4 #e ,in the ,literary ,abattoir ,but the theme is letters1 not wickedness4 ,the upper and lower layers have been surveyed4 ,there remains the middle layer1 the thickest and perhaps the most significant of the three4 ,by the middle layer ,i mean the literature that fills the magazines and burdens the book-counters in the department-stores--the literature adorned by such artists as ,richard ,harding ,davis1 ,rex ,beach1 ,emerson ,hough1 ,o4 ,henry1 ,james ,whitcomb ,riley1 ,augustus ,thomas1 ,robert ,w4 ,chambers1 ,henry ,sydnor ,harrison1 ,owen ,johnson1 ,cyrus ,townsend ,brady1 ,irvin ,cobb and ,mary ,roberts ,rinehart--in brief1 the literature that pays like a bucket-shop or a soap-factory1 and is thus thoroughly ,american4 ,at the bottom this literature touches such depths of banality that it would be difficult to match it in any other country4 ,the inspirational and patriotic essays of ,dr4 ,frank ,crane1 ,orison ,sweet ,marden1 ,porter ,emerson ,browne1 ,gerald ,stanley ,lee1 ,e4 ,s4 ,martin1 ,ella ,wheeler ,wilcox and the ,rev4 ,dr4 ,newell ,dwight ,hillis1 the novels of ,harold ,bell ,wright1 ,eleanor ,h4 ,porter and ,gene ,stratton-,porter1 and the mechanical sentimentalities in prose and verse that fill the cheap fiction magazines--this stuff has a native quality that is as unmistakable as that of ,mother's ,day1 ,billy-,sundayism or the ,junior ,order of ,united ,american ,mechanics4 ,it is the natural outpouring of a nave and yet half barbarous people1 full of delight in a few childish and inaccurate ideas4 ,but it would be a grave error to assume that the whole of the literature of the middle layer is of the same infantile quality4 ,on the contrary1 a great deal of it--for example1 the work of ,mrs4 ,rinehart1 and that of ,corra ,harris1 ,gouverneur ,morris1 ,harold ,mac,grath and the late ,o4 ,henry--shows an unmistakably technical excellence1 and even a certain civilized sophistication in point of view4 ,moreover1 this literature is constantly graduating adept professors into something finer1 as witness ,booth ,tarkington1 ,zona ,gale1 ,ring ,w4 ,lardner and ,montague ,glass4 ,s4 ,l4 ,clemens came out of forty years ago4 ,nevertheless1 its general tendency is distinctly in the other direction4 ,it seduces by the power of money1 and by the power of great acclaim no less4 ,one constantly observes the collapse and surrender of writers who started out with aims far above that of the magazine nabob4 ,i could draw up a long1 long list of such victims3 ,henry ,milner ,rideout1 ,jack ,london1 ,owen ,johnson1 ,chester ,bailey ,fernald1 ,hamlin ,garland1 ,will ,levington ,comfort1 ,stephen ,french ,whitman1 ,james ,hopper1 ,harry ,leon ,wilson1 and so on4 ,they had their fore-runner1 in the last generation1 in ,bret ,harte4 ,it is1 indeed1 a characteristic ,american phenomenon for a young writer to score a success with novel and meritorious work1 and then to yield himself to the best-seller fever1 and so disappear down the sewers4 ,even the man who struggles to emerge again is commonly hauled back4 ,for example1 ,louis ,joseph ,vance1 ,rupert ,hughes1 ,george ,bronson-,howard1 and1 to go back a few years1 ,david ,graham ,phillips and ,elbert ,hubbard--all men flustered by high aspiration1 and yet all pulled down by the temptations below4 ,even ,frank ,norris showed signs of yielding4 ,the pull is genuinely powerful4 ,above lies not only isolation1 but also a dogged and malignant sort of opposition4 ,below1 as ,morris has frankly admitted1 there is the place at ,aiken1 the motor-car1 babies1 money in the bank1 and the dignity of an important man4 ,it is a commonplace of the envious to put all the blame upon the ,saturday ,evening ,post1 for in its pages many of the ,magdalens of letters are to be found1 and out of its bulging coffers comes much of the lure4 ,but this is simply blaming the bull for the sins of all the cows4 ,the ,post1 as a matter of fact1 is a good deal less guilty than such magazines as the ,cosmopolitan1 ,hearst's1 ,mc,clure's and the ,metropolitan1 not to mention the larger women's magazines4 ,in the ,post one often discerns an effort to rise above the level of shoe-drummer fiction4 ,it is edited by a man who1 almost alone among editors of the great periodicals of the country1 is himself a writer of respectable skill4 ,it has brought out 7after lesser publications unearthed them7 a member of authors of very solid talents1 notably ,glass1 ,lardner and ,e4 ,w4 ,howe4 ,it has been extremely hospitable to men not immediately comprehensible to the mob1 for example1 ,dreiser and ,hergesheimer4 ,most of all1 it has avoided the ,barnum-like exploitation of such native bosh-mongers as ,crane1 ,hillis and ,ella ,wheeler ,wilcox1 and of such exotic mountebanks as ,d',annunzio1 ,hall ,caine and ,maeterlinck4 ,in brief1 the ,post is a great deal better than ever ,greenwich ,village and the ,cambridge campus are disposed to admit4 ,it is the largest of all the literary ,hog ,islands1 but it is by no means the worst4 ,appealing primarily to the great masses of right-thinking and unintelligent ,americans1 it must necessarily print a great deal of preposterous tosh1 but it flavors the mess with not a few things of a far higher quality1 and at its worst it is seldom downright idiotic4 ,in many of the other great magazines one finds stuff that it would be difficult to describe in any other words4 ,it is gaudily romantic1 furtively sexual1 and full of rubber-stamp situations and personages--a sort of amalgam of the worst drivel of ,marie ,corelli1 ,elinor ,glyn1 ,e4 ,phillips ,oppenheim1 ,william ,le ,quex and ,hall ,caine4 ,this is the literature of the middle layer--the product of the national ,rockefellers and ,duponts of letters4 ,this is the sort of thing that the young author of facile pen is encouraged to manufacture4 ,this is the material of the best sellers and the movies4 ,of late it is the movies that have chiefly provoked its composition3 the rewards they offer are even greater than those held out by the commercial book-publishers and the train-boy magazines4 ,the point of view of an author responsive to such rewards was recently set forth very naively in the ,authors' ,league ,bulletin4 ,this author undertook1 in a short article1 to refute the fallacies of an unknown who ventured to protest against the movies on the ground that they called only for bald plots1 elementary and generally absurd1 and that all the rest of a sound writer's equipment--the artistry of his style1 the felicity of his apt expression1 his subtlety and thoroughness of observation and comprehension and sympathy1 the illuminating quality of his analysis of motive and character1 even the fundamental skillful development of the bare plot--was disdained by the ,selznicks1 ,goldfishes1 ,zukors and other such entrepreneurs1 and by the overwhelming majority of their customers4 ,i quote from the reply3 ,there are some conspicuous word merchants who deal in the ,english language1 but the general public doesn't clamor for their wares4 ,they write for the thinking class4 ,the lite1 the discriminating4 ,as a rule1 they scorn the crass commercialism of the magazines and movies and such catch-penny devices4 ,however1 literary masterpieces live because they have been and will be read1 not by the few1 but by the many4 ,that was true in the time of ,homer1 and even to-day the first move made by an editor when he receives a manuscript1 or a gentle reader when he buys a book1 or a ,t4 ,b4 ,m4 when he sinks into an orchestra chair is to look around for ,john ,henry ,plot4 ,if ,mr4 ,plot is too long delayed in arriving or doesn't come at all1 the editor usually sends regrets1 the reader yawns and the tired business man falls asleep4 ,it's a sad state of affairs and awful tough on art1 but it can't be helped4 ,observe the lofty scorn of mere literature--the superior irony at the expense of everything beyond the bumping of boobs4 ,note the sound judgment as to the function and fate of literary masterpieces1 e4 g41 ,endymion1 ,the ,canterbury ,tales1 ,faust1 ,typhoon4 ,give your eye to the chaste diction--,john ,henry ,plot1 ,t4 ,b4 ,m41 awful tough1 and so on4 ,no doubt you will at once assume that this curious counterblast to literature was written by some former bartender now engaged in composing scenarios for ,pearl ,white and ,theda ,bara4 ,but it was not4 ,it was written and signed by the president of the ,authors' ,league of ,america4 ,here we have1 unconsciously revealed1 the secret of the depressing badness of what may be called the staple fiction of the country--the sort of stuff that is done by the ,richard ,harding ,davises1 ,rex ,beaches1 ,houghs1 ,mc,cutcheons1 and their like1 male and female4 ,the worse of it is not that it is addressed primarily to shoe-drummers and shop-girls2 the worst of it is that it is written by authors who are1 to all intellectual intents and purposes1 shoe-drummers and shop-girls4 ,american literature1 even on its higher levels1 seldom comes out of the small and lonesome upper classes of the people4 ,an ,american author with traditions behind him and an environment about him comparable to those1 say1 of ,george ,moore1 or ,hugh ,walpole1 or ,e4 ,f4 ,benson is and always has been relatively rare4 ,on this side of the water the arts1 like politics and religion1 are chiefly in the keeping of persons of obscure origin1 defective education and elemental tastes4 ,even some of the most violent upholders of the ,new ,england superstition are aliens to the actual ,new ,england heritage2 one discovers1 searching ,who's ,who in ,america1 that they are recent fugitives from the six-day sock and saleratus ,kultur of the cow and hog ,states4 ,the artistic merchandise produced by liberated yokels of that sort is bound to show its intellectual newness1 which is to say1 its deficiency in civilized culture and sophistication4 ,it is1 on the plane of letters1 precisely what evangelical ,christianity is on the plane of religion1 to wit1 the product of ill-informed1 emotional and more or less pushing and oafish folk4 ,life1 to such ,harvardized peasants1 is not a mystery2 it is something absurdly simple1 to be described with surety and in a few words4 ,if they set up as critics their criticism is all a matter of facile labeling1 chiefly ethical2 find the pigeon-hole1 and the rest is easy4 ,if they presume to discuss the great problems of human society1 they are equally ready with their answers3 draw up and pass a harsh enough statute1 and the corruptible will straightway put on incorruption4 ,and if1 fanned by the soft breath of beauty1 they go into practice as creative artists1 as poets1 as dramatists1 as novelists1 then one learns from them that we inhabit a country that is the model and despair of other states1 that its culture is coextensive with human culture and enlightenment1 and that every failure to find happiness under that culture1 is the result of sin4 #f ,underlying ,causes ,here is one of the fundamental defects of ,american fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction4 ,it habitually exhibits1 not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence1 but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment1 and so achieving what1 under a third-rate civilization1 passes for success4 ,to get on3 this is the aim4 ,to weigh and reflect1 to doubt and rebel3 this is the thing to be avoided4 ,i describe the optimistic1 the inspirational1 the ,authors' ,league1 the popular magazine1 the peculiarly ,american school4 ,in character creation its masterpiece is the advertising agent who1 by devising some new and super-imbecile boob-trap1 puts his hook-and-eye factory on the map1 ruins all other factories1 marries the daughter of his boss1 and so ends as an eminent man4 ,obviously1 the drama underlying such fiction--what ,mr4 ,beach would call its ,john ,henry ,plot--is false drama1 ,sunday-school drama1 puerile and disgusting drama4 ,it is the sort of thing that awakens a response only in men who are essentially unimaginative1 timorous and degraded--in brief1 in democrats1 bagmen1 yahoos4 ,the man of reflective habit cannot conceivably take any passionate interest in the conflicts it deals with4 ,he doesn't want to marry the daughter of the owner of the hook-and-eye factory2 he would probably burn down the factory itself if it ever came into his hands4 ,what interests this man is the far more poignant and significant conflict between a salient individual and the harsh and meaningless fiats of destiny1 the unintelligible mandates and vagaries of ,god4 ,his hero is not one who yields and wins1 but one who resists and fails4 ,most of these conflicts1 of course1 are internal1 and hence do not make themselves visible in the overt melodrama of the ,beaches1 ,davises and ,chamberses4 ,a superior man's struggle in the world is not with exterior lions1 trusts1 margraves1 policemen1 rivals in love1 ,german spies1 radicals and tornadoes1 but with the obscure1 atavistic impulses within him--the impulses1 weaknesses and limitations that war with his notion of what life should be4 ,nine times out of ten he succumbs4 ,nine times out of ten he must yield to the dead hand4 ,nine times out of ten his aspiration is almost infinitely above his achievement4 ,the result is that we see him sliding downhill--his ideals breaking up1 his hope petering out1 his character in decay4 ,character in decay is thus the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction4 ,one has it in ,dostoievsky1 in ,balzac1 in ,hardy1 in ,conrad1 in ,flaubert1 in ,zola1 in ,turgenieff1 in ,goethe1 in ,sudermann1 in ,bennett1 and1 to come home1 in ,dreiser4 ,in nearly all first-rate novels the hero is defeated4 ,in perhaps a majority he is completely destroyed4 ,the hero of the inferior--i4 e41 the typically ,american--novel engages in no such doomed and fateful combat4 ,his conflict is not with the inexplicable ukases of destiny1 the limitations of his own strength1 the dead hand upon him1 but simply with the superficial desires of his elemental fellow men4 ,he thus has a fair chance of winning--and in bad fiction that chance is always converted into a certainty4 ,so he marries the daughter of the owner of the factory and eventually gobbles the factory itself4 ,his success gives thrills to persons who can imagine no higher aspiration4 ,he embodies their optimism1 as the other hero embodies the pessimism of more introspective and idealistic men4 ,he is the protagonist of that great majority which is so inferior that it is quite unconscious of its inferiority4 ,it is this superficiality of the inferior man1 it seems to me1 that is the chief hallmark of the ,american novel4 ,whenever one encounters a novel that rises superior to it the thing takes on a subtle but unmistakable air of foreignness--for example1 ,frank ,norris' ,vandover and the ,brute1 ,hergesheimer's ,the ,lay ,anthony and ,miss ,cather's ,my ,antonia1 or1 to drop to short stories1 ,stephen ,crane's ,the ,blue ,hotel and ,mrs4 ,wharton's ,ethan ,frome4 ,the short story is commonly regarded1 at least by ,american critics1 as a preminently ,american form2 there are even patriots who argue that ,bret ,harte invented it4 ,it meets very accurately1 in fact1 certain characteristic demands of the ,american temperament3 it is simple1 economical and brilliantly effective4 ,yet the same hollowness that marks the ,american novel also marks the ,american short story4 ,its great masters1 in late years1 have been such cheese-mongers as ,davis1 with his servant-girl romanticism1 and ,o4 ,henry1 with his smoke-room and variety show smartness4 ,in the whole canon of ,o4 ,henry's work you will not find a single recognizable human character2 his people are unanimously marionettes2 he makes ,mexican brigands1 ,texas cowmen and ,new ,york cracksmen talk the same highly ornate ,broadwayese4 ,the successive volumes of ,edward ,j4 ,o',brien's ,best ,short-,story series throw a vivid light upon the feeble estate of the art in the land4 ,o',brien1 though his sthetic judgments are ludicrous1 at least selects stories that are thoroughly representative2 his books are trade successes because the crowd is undoubtedly with him4 ,he has yet to discover a single story that even the most nave professor would venture to mention in the same breath with ,joseph ,conrad's ,heart of ,darkness1 or ,andrieff's ,silence1 or ,sudermann's ,das ,sterbelied1 or the least considerable tale by ,anatole ,france4 ,in many of the current ,american makers of magazine short stories--for example1 ,gouverneur ,morris--one observes1 as ,i have said1 a truly admirable technical skill4 ,they have mastered the externals of the form4 ,they know how to get their effects4 ,but in content their work is as hollow as a jug4 ,such stuff has no imaginable relation to life as men live it in the world4 ,it is as artificial as the heroic strut and romantic eyes of a moving-picture actor4 ,i have spoken of the air of foreignness that clings to certain exceptional ,american compositions4 ,in part it is based upon a psychological trick--upon the surprise which must inevitably seize upon any one who encounters a decent piece of writing in so vast a desert of mere literacy4 ,but in part it is grounded soundly enough on the facts4 ,the native author of any genuine force and originality is almost invariably found to be under strong foreign influences1 either ,english or ,continental4 ,it was so in the earliest days4 ,freneau1 the poet of the ,revolution1 was thoroughly ,french in blood and traditions4 ,irving1 as ,h4 ,r4 ,haweis has said1 took to ,england as a duck takes to water1 and was in exile seventeen years4 ,cooper1 with the great success of ,the ,last of the ,mohicans behind him1 left the country in disgust and was gone for seven years4 ,emerson1 ,bryant1 ,lowell1 ,hawthorne and even ,longfellow kept their eyes turned across the water2 ,emerson1 in fact1 was little more than an importer and popularizer of ,german and ,french ideas4 ,bancroft studied in ,germany2 ,prescott1 like ,irving1 was enchanted by ,spain4 ,poe1 unable to follow the fashion1 invented mythical travels to save his face--to ,france1 to ,germany1 to the ,greek isles4 ,the ,civil ,war revived the national consciousness enormously1 but it did not halt the movement of migrs4 ,henry ,james1 in the seventies1 went to ,england1 ,bierce and ,bret ,harte followed him1 and even ,mark ,twain1 absolutely ,american though he was1 was forever pulling up stakes and setting out for ,vienna1 ,florence or ,london4 ,only poverty tied ,whitman to the soil2 his audience1 for many years1 was chiefly beyond the water1 and there1 too1 he often longed to be4 ,this distaste for the national scene is often based upon a genuine alienness4 ,the more1 indeed1 one investigates the ancestry of ,americans who have won distinction in the fine arts1 the more one discovers tempting game for the critical ,know ,nothings4 ,whitman was half ,dutch1 ,harte was half ,jew1 ,poe was partly ,german1 ,james had an ,irish grand-father1 ,howells was largely ,irish and ,german1 ,dreiser is ,german and ,hergesheimer is ,pennsylvania ,dutch4 ,fully a half of the painters discussed in ,john ,g4 van ,dyke's ,american ,painting and ,its ,tradition were of mixed blood1 with the ,anglo-,saxon plainly recessive4 ,and of the five poets singled out for encomium by ,miss ,lowell in ,tendencies in ,modern ,american ,poetry one is a ,swede1 two are partly ,german1 one was educated in the ,german language1 and three of the five exiled themselves to ,england as soon as they got out of their nonage4 ,the exiles are of all sorts3 ,frank ,harris1 ,vincent ,o',sullivan1 ,ezra ,pound1 ,herman ,scheffauer1 ,t4 ,s4 ,eliot1 ,henry ,b4 ,fuller1 ,stuart ,merrill1 ,edith ,wharton4 ,they go to ,england1 ,france1 ,germany1 ,italy--anywhere to escape4 ,even at home the literatus is perceptibly foreign in his mien4 ,if he lies under the ,new ,england tradition he is furiously colonial--more ,english than the ,english4 ,if he turns to revolt1 he is apt to put on a ,french hat and a ,russion red blouse4 ,the ,little ,review1 the organ of the extreme wing of rvolts1 is so violently exotic that several years ago1 during the plupatriotic days of the war1 some of its readers protested4 ,with characteristic lack of humor it replied with an ,american number--and two of the stars of that number bore the fine old ,anglo-,saxon names of ,ben ,hecht and ,eisa von ,freytag-,loringhoven4 ,this tendency of ,american literature1 the moment it begins to show enterprise1 novelty and significance1 to radiate an alien smell is not an isolated phenomenon4 ,the same smell accompanies practically all other sorts of intellectual activity in the republic4 ,whenever one hears that a new political theory is in circulation1 or a scientific heresy1 or a movement toward rationalism in religion1 it is always safe to guess that some discontented stranger or other has a hand in it4 ,in the newspapers and on the floor of ,congress a new heterodoxy is always denounced forthwith as a product of foreign plotting1 and here public opinion undoubtedly supports both the press and the politicians1 and with good reason4 ,the native culture of the country--that is1 the culture of the low caste ,anglo-,saxons who preserve the national tradition--is almost completely incapable of producing ideas4 ,it is a culture that roughly corresponds to what the culture of ,england would be if there were no universities over there1 and no caste of intellectual individualists and no landed aristocracy--in other words1 if the tone of the national thinking were set by the non-conformist industrials1 the camorra of ,welsh and ,scotch political scoundrels1 and the town and country mobs4 ,as we shall see1 the ,united ,states has not yet produced anything properly describable as an aristocracy1 and so there is no impediment to the domination of the inferior orders4 ,worse1 the ,anglo-,saxon strain1 second-rate at the start1 has tended to degenerate steadily to lower levels--in ,new ,england1 very markedly4 ,the result is that there is not only a great dearth of ideas in the land1 but also an active and relentless hostility to ideas4 ,the chronic suspiciousness of the inferior man here has full play2 never in modern history has there been another civilization showing so vast a body of prohibitions and repressions1 in both conduct and thought4 ,the second result is that intellectual experimentation is chiefly left to the immigrants of the later migrations1 and to the small sections of the native population that have been enriched with their blood4 ,for such a pure ,anglo-,saxon as ,cabell to disport himself in the field of ideas is a rarity in the ,united ,states--and no exception to the rule that ,i have just mentioned1 for ,cabell belongs to an aristocracy that is now almost extinct1 and has no more in common with the general population than a ,baltic baron has with the indigenous herd of ,letts and ,esthonians4 ,all the arts in ,america are thoroughly exotic4 ,music is almost wholly ,german or ,italian1 painting is ,french1 literature may be anything from ,english to ,russian1 architecture 7save when it becomes a mere branch of engineering7 is a maddening phantasmagoria of borrowings4 ,even so elemental an art as that of cookery shows no native development1 and is greatly disesteemed by ,americans of the ,anglo-,saxon majority2 any decent restaurant that one blunders upon in the land is likely to be ,french1 and if not ,french1 then ,italian or ,german or ,chinese4 ,so with the sciences3 they have scarcely any native development4 ,organized scientific research began in the country with the founding of the ,johns ,hopkins ,university1 a bald imitation of the ,german universities1 and long held suspect by native opinion4 ,even after its great success1 indeed1 there was rancorous hostility to its scheme of things on chauvinistic grounds1 and some years ago efforts were begun to ,americanize it1 with the result that it is now sunk to the level of ,princeton1 ,amherst and other such glorified high-schools1 and is dominated by native savants who would be laughed at in any ,continental university4 ,science1 oppressed by such assaults from below1 moves out of the academic grove into the freer air of the great foundations1 where the pursuit of the shy fact is uncontaminated by football and social pushing4 ,the greatest of these foundations is the ,rockefeller ,institute4 ,its salient men are such investigators as ,flexner1 ,loeb and ,carrel--all of them ,continental ,jews4 ,thus the battle of ideas in the ,united ,states is largely carried on under strange flags1 and even the stray natives on the side of free inquiry have to sacrifice some of their nationality when they enlist4 ,the effects of this curious condition of affairs are both good and evil4 ,the good ones are easily apparent4 ,the racial division gives the struggle a certain desperate earnestness1 and even bitterness1 and so makes it the more inviting to lively minds4 ,it was a benefit to the late ,d4 ,c4 ,gilman rather than a disadvantage that national opinion opposed his traffic with ,huxley and the ,german professors in the early days of the ,johns ,hopkins2 the stupidity of the opposition stimulated him1 and made him resolute1 and his resolution1 in the long run1 was of inestimable cultural value4 ,scientific research in ,america1 indeed1 was thus set securely upon its legs precisely because the great majority of right-thinking ,americans were violently opposed to it4 ,in the same way it must be obvious that ,dreiser got something valuable out of the grotesque war that was carried on against him during the greater war overseas because of his ,german name--a jehad fundamentally responsible for the suppression of ,the ',genius4' ,the chief danger that he ran six or seven years ago was the danger that he might be accepted1 explained away1 and so seduced downward to the common level4 ,the attack of professional patriots saved him from that calamity4 ,more1 it filled him with a keen sense of his isolation1 and stirred up the vanity that was in him as it is in all of us1 and so made him cling with new tenacity to the very peculiarities that differentiate him from his inferiors4 ,finally1 it is not to be forgotten that1 without this rebellion of immigrant iconoclasts1 the whole body of the national literature would tend to sink to the #ajj ,american level of such patriotic literary business men as the president of the ,authors' ,league4 ,in other words1 we must put up with the sthetic ,bolshevism of the ,europeans and ,asiatics who rage in the land1 for without them we might not have any literature at all4 ,but the evils of the situation are not to be gainsaid4 ,one of them ,i have already alluded to3 the tendency of the beginning literatus1 once he becomes fully conscious of his foreign affiliations1 to desert the republic forthwith1 and thereafter view it from afar1 and as an actual foreigner4 ,more solid and various cultures lure him2 he finds himself uncomfortable at home4 ,sometimes1 as in the case of ,henry ,james1 he becomes a downright expatriate1 and a more or less active agent of anti-,american feeling2 more often1 he goes over to the outlanders without yielding up his theoretical citizenship1 as in the cases of ,irving1 ,harris1 ,pound and ,o',sullivan4 ,but all this1 of course1 works relatively light damage1 for not many native authors are footloose enough to indulge in any such physical desertion of the soil4 ,of much more evil importance is the tendency of the cultural alienism that ,i have described to fortify the uncontaminated native in his bilious suspicion of all the arts1 and particularly of all artists4 ,the news that the latest poet to flutter the dovecotes is a ,jew1 or that the last novelist mauled by comstockery has a ,german or ,scandinavian or ,russian name1 or that the critic newly taken in sacrilege is a partisan of ,viennese farce or of the ,french moral code or of ,english literary theory--this news1 among a people so ill-informed1 so horribly well-trained in flight from bugaboos1 and so savagely suspicious of the unfamiliar in ideas1 has the inevitable effect of stirring up opposition that quickly ceases to be purely sthetic objection1 and so becomes increasingly difficult to combat4 ,if ,dreiser's name were ,tompkins or ,simpson1 there is no doubt whatever that he would affright the professors a good deal less1 and appear less of a hobgoblin to the intelligentsia of the women's clubs4 ,if ,oppenheim were less palpably levantine1 he would come much nearer to the popularity of ,edwin ,markham and ,walt ,mason4 ,and if ,cabell kept to the patriotic business of a ,southern gentleman1 to wit1 the praise of ,general ,robert ,e4 ,lee1 instead of prowling the strange and terrible fields of medival ,provence1 it is a safe wager that he would be sold openly over the counter instead of stealthily behind the door4 ,in a previous work ,i have discussed this tendency in ,america to estimate the artist in terms of his secular character4 ,during the war1 when all of the national defects in intelligence were enormously accentuated1 it went to ludicrous lengths4 ,there were then only authors who were vociferous patriots and thus geniuses1 and authors who kept their dignity and were thus suspect and without virtue4 ,by this gauge ,chambers became the superior of ,dreiser and ,cabell1 and ,joyce ,kilmer and ,amy ,lowell were set above ,sandburg and ,oppenheim4 ,the test was even extended to foreigners3 by it ,h4 ,g4 ,wells took precedence of ,shaw1 and ,blasco ,ibez became a greater artist than ,romain ,rolland4 ,but the thing is not peculiar to war times2 when peace is densest it is to be observed4 ,the man of letters1 pure and simple1 is a rarity in ,america4 ,almost always he is something else--and that something else commonly determines his public eminence4 ,mark ,twain1 with only his books to recommend him1 would probably have passed into obscurity in middle age2 it was in the character of a public entertainer1 not unrelated to ,coxey1 ,dr4 ,mary ,walker and ,citizen ,george ,francis ,train1 that he wooed and won his country4 ,the official criticism of the land denied him any solid literary virtue to the day of his death1 and even to-day the campus critics and their journalistic valets stand aghast before ,the ,mysterious ,stranger and ,what is ,man8 ,emerson passed through almost the same experience4 ,it was not as a man of letters that he was chiefly thought of in his time1 but as the prophet of a new cult1 half religious1 half philosophical1 and wholly unintelligible to nine-tenths of those who discussed it4 ,the first author of a handbook of ,american literature to sweep away the codfish ,moses and expose the literary artist was the ,polish ,jew1 ,leon ,kellner1 of ,czernowitz4 ,so with ,whitman and ,poe--both hobgoblins far more than artists4 ,so1 even1 with ,howells3 it was as the exponent of a dying culture that he was venerated1 not as the practitioner of an art4 ,few actually read his books4 ,his celebrity1 of course1 was real enough1 but it somehow differed materially from that of a pure man of letters--say ,shelley1 ,conrad1 ,hauptmann1 ,hardy or ,synge4 ,that he was himself keenly aware of the national tendency to judge an artist in terms of the citizen was made plain at the time of the ,gorky scandal1 when he joined ,clemens in an ignominious desertion of ,gorky1 scared out of his wits by the danger of being manhandled for a violation of the national pecksniffery4 ,howells also refused to sign the ,dreiser ,protest4 ,the case of ,frank ,harris is one eloquently in point4 ,harris has written1 among other books1 perhaps the best biography ever done by an ,american4 ,yet his politics keep him in a sort of ,coventry and the average ,american critic would no more think of praising him than of granting ,treitschke any merit as an historian4 #g ,the ,lonesome ,artist ,thus falsely judged by standards that have no intelligible appositeness when applied to an artist1 however accurately they may weigh a stock-broker or a ,presbyterian elder1 and forced to meet not only the hunkerous indifference of the dominant mob but also the bitter and disingenuous opposition of the classes to which he might look reasonably for understanding and support1 the ,american author is forced into a sort of social and intellectual vacuum1 and lives out his days1 as ,henry ,james said of ,hawthorne1 an alien everywhere1 an sthetic solitary4 ,the wonder is that1 in the face of so metallic and unyielding a front1 any genuine artists in letters come to the front at all4 ,but they constantly emerge2 the first gestures are always on show2 the prodigal and gorgeous life of the country simply forces a sensitive minority to make some attempt at representation and interpretation1 and out of many trying there often appears one who can4 ,the phenomenon of ,dreiser is not unique4 ,he had his forerunners in ,fuller and ,frank ,norris and he has his compagnons du voyage in ,anderson1 ,charles ,g4 ,norris and more than one other4 ,but the fact only throws up his curious isolation in a stronger light4 ,it would be difficult to imagine an artist of his sober purpose and high accomplishment1 in any civilized country1 standing so neglected4 ,the prevailing criticism1 when it cannot dispose of him by denying that he exists--in the two chief handbooks of latter-day literature by professors he is not even mentioned6--seeks to dispose of him by arraying the shoddy fury of the mob against him4 ,when he was under attack by the ,comstocks1 more than one ,american critic gave covert aid to the common enemy1 and it was with difficulty that the weight of the ,authors' ,league was held upon his side4 ,more help for him1 in fact1 came from ,england1 and quite voluntarily1 than could be drummed up for him at home4 ,no public sense of the menace that the attack offered to free speech and free art was visible2 it would have made a nine-days' sensation for any layman of public influence to have gone to his rescue1 as would have certainly happened in ,france1 ,england or ,germany4 ,as for the newspaper-reading mob1 it probably went unaware of the business altogether4 ,when ,arnold ,bennett1 landing in ,new ,york some time previously1 told the reporters that ,dreiser was the ,american he most desired to meet1 the news was quite unintelligible to perhaps nine readers out of ten3 they had no more heard of ,dreiser than their fathers had heard of ,whitman in #ahge4 ,so with all the rest4 ,i have mentioned ,harris4 ,it would be difficult to imagine ,rolland meeting such a fate in ,france or ,shaw in ,england as he has met in the ,united ,states4 ,o',sullivan1 during the war1 came home with ,a ,good ,girl in his pocket4 ,the book was republished here--and got vastly less notice than the latest piece of trade-goods by ,kathleen ,norris4 ,fuller1 early in his career1 gave it up as hopeless4 ,norris died vainly battling for the young ,dreiser4 ,an ,abraham ,cahan goes unnoticed4 ,miss ,cather1 with four sound books behind her1 lingers in the twilight of an esoteric reputation4 ,cabell1 comstocked1 is apprehended by his country only as a novelist to be bought by stealth and read in private4 ,when ,hugh ,walpole came to ,america a year or two ago he favored the newspapers1 like ,bennett before him1 with a piece of critical news that must have puzzled all readers save a very small minority4 ,discussing the living ,american novelists worth heeding1 he nominated three--and of them only one was familiar to the general run of novel-buyers1 or had ever been mentioned by a native critic of the apostolic succession4 ,only the poets of the land seem to attract the notice of the professors1 and no doubt this is largely because most of the more salient of them--notably ,miss ,lowell and ,lindsay--are primarily press-agents4 ,even so1 the attention that they get is seldom serious4 ,the only professor that ,i know of who has discussed the matter in precise terms holds that ,alfred ,noyes is the superior of all of them4 ,moreover1 the present extraordinary interest in poetry stops short with a few poets1 and one of its conspicuous phenomena is its lack of concern with the poets outside the movement1 some of them unquestionably superior to any within4 ,nor is this isolation of the artist in ,america new4 ,the contemporary view of ,poe and ,whitman was almost precisely like the current view of ,dreiser and ,cabell4 ,both were neglected by the ,brahmins of their time1 and both were regarded hostilely by the great body of right-thinking citizens4 ,poe1 indeed1 was the victim of a furious attack by ,rufus ,w4 ,griswold1 the ,hamilton ,wright ,mabie of the time1 and it set the tone of native criticism for years4 ,whitman1 living1 narrowly escaped going to jail as a public nuisance4 ,one thinks of ,hawthorne and ,emerson as writers decently appreciated by their contemporaries1 but it is not to be forgotten that the official criticism of the era saw no essential difference between ,hawthorne and ,cooper1 and that ,emerson's reputation1 to the end of his life1 was far more that of a theological prophet and ethical platitudinarian1 comparable to ,lyman ,abbott or ,frank ,crane1 than that of a literary artist1 comparable to ,tennyson or ,matthew ,arnold4 ,perhaps ,carlyle understood him1 but who in ,america understood him8 ,to this day he is the victim of gross misrepresentation by enthusiasts who read into him all sorts of flatulent bombast1 as ,puritanism is read into the ,new ,testament by ,methodists4 ,as for ,hawthorne1 his extraordinary physical isolation during his lifetime was but the symbol of a complete isolation of the spirit1 still surviving4 ,if his preference for the internal conflict as opposed to the external act were not sufficient to set him off from the main stream of ,american speculation1 there would always be his profound ethical skepticism--a state of mind quite impossible to the normal ,american1 at least of ,anglo-,saxon blood4 ,hawthorne1 so far as ,i know1 has never had a single professed follower in his own country4 ,even his son1 attempting to carry on his craft1 yielded neither to his meticulous method nor to his detached point of view4 ,in the third generation1 with infinite irony1 there is a grand-daughter who is a reviewer of books for the ,new ,york ,times1 which is almost as if ,wagner should have a grand-daughter singing in the operas of ,massenet4 ,of the four indubitable masters thus named1 ,hawthorne1 ,emerson1 ,whitman and ,poe1 only the last two have been sufficiently taken into the consciousness of the country to have any effect upon its literature1 and even here that influence has been exerted only at second-hand1 and against very definite adverse pressure4 ,it would certainly seem reasonable for a man of so forceful a habit of mind as ,poe1 and of such prodigal and arresting originality1 to have founded a school1 but a glance at the record shows that he did nothing of the sort4 ,immediately he was dead1 the shadows of the ,irving tradition closed around his tomb1 and for nearly thirty years thereafter all of his chief ideas went disregarded in his own country4 ,if1 as the literature books argue1 ,poe was the father of the ,american short story1 then it was a posthumous child1 and had step-fathers who did their best to conceal its true parentage4 ,when it actually entered upon the vigorous life that we know to-day ,poe had been dead for a generation4 ,its father1 at the time of its belated adolescence1 seemed to be ,bret ,harte--and ,harte's debt to ,dickens was vastly more apparent1 first and last1 than his debt to ,poe4 ,what he got from ,poe was essential2 it was the inner structure of the modern short story1 the fundamental devices whereby a mere glimpse at events could be made to yield brilliant and seemingly complete images4 ,but he himself was probably largely unaware of this indebtedness4 ,a man little given to critical analysis1 and incompetent for it when his own work was under examination1 he saw its externals much more clearly than he saw its intrinsic organization1 and these externals bore the plain marks of ,dickens4 ,it remained for one of his successors1 ,ambrose ,bierce1 to bridge belatedly the space separating him from ,poe1 and so show the route that he had come4 ,and it remained for foreign criticism1 and particularly for ,french criticism1 to lift ,poe himself to the secure place that he now holds4 ,it is true enough that he enjoyed1 during his lifetime1 a certain popular reputation1 and that he was praised by such men as ,n4 ,p4 ,willis and ,james ,russell ,lowell1 but that reputation was considerably less than the fame of men who were much his inferiors1 and that praise1 especially in ,lowell's case1 was much corrupted by reservations4 ,not many native critics of respectable position1 during the #ej's and #fj's1 would have ranked him clearly above1 say1 ,irving or ,cooper1 or even above ,longfellow1 his old enemy4 ,a few partisans argued for him1 but in the main1 as ,saintsbury has said1 he was the victim of extreme and almost incomprehensible injustice at the hands of his countrymen4 ,it is surely not without significance that it took ten years to raise money enough to put a cheap and hideous tombstone upon his neglected grave1 that it was not actually set up until he had been dead twenty-six years1 that no contemporary ,american writer took any part in furthering the project1 and that the only one who attended the final ceremony was ,whitman4 ,it was ,baudelaire's ,french translation of the prose tales and ,mallarm's translation of the poems that brought ,poe to ,valhalla4 ,the former1 first printed in #ahef1 founded the ,poe cult in ,france1 and during the two decades following it flourished amazingly1 and gradually extended to ,england and ,germany4 ,it was one of the well-springs1 in fact1 of the whole so-called decadent movement4 ,if ,baudelaire1 the father of that movement1 cultivated hysteria with delight and terror1 he was simply doing what ,poe had done before him4 ,both1 reacting against the false concept of beauty as a mere handmaiden of logical ideas1 sought its springs in those deep feelings and inner experiences which lie beyond the range of ideas and are to be interpreted only as intuitions4 ,emerson started upon the same quest1 but was turned off into mazes of contradiction and unintelligibility by his ethical obsession--the unescapable burden of his ,puritan heritage4 ,but ,poe never wandered from the path4 ,you will find in ,the ,poetic ,principle what is perhaps the clearest statement of this new and sounder concept of beauty that has ever been made--certainly it is clearer than any ever made by a ,frenchman4 ,but it was not until ,frenchmen had watered the seed out of grotesque and vari-colored pots that it began to sprout4 ,the tide of ,poe's ideas1 set in motion in ,france early in the second half of the century1 did not wash ,england until the last decade1 and in ,america1 save for a few dashes of spray1 it has yet to show itself4 ,there is no ,american writer who displays the influence of this most potent and original of ,americans so clearly as whole groups of ,frenchmen display it1 and whole groups of ,germans1 and even a good many ,englishmen4 ,what we have from ,poe at first hand is simply a body of obvious yokel-shocking in the ,black ,cat manner1 with the tales of ,ambrose ,bierce as its finest flower--in brief1 an imitation of ,poe's externals without any comprehension whatever of his underlying aims and notions4 ,what we have from him at second-hand is a somewhat childish ,maeterlinckism1 a further dilution of ,poe-and-water4 ,this ,maeterlinckism1 some time ago1 got itself intermingled with the ,whitmanic stream flowing back to ,america through the channel of ,french ,imagism1 with results destructive to the sanity of earnest critics and fatal to the gravity of those less austere4 ,it is significant that the critical writing of ,poe1 in which there lies most that was best in him1 has not come back2 no normal ,american ever thinks of him as a critic1 but only as a poet1 as a raiser of goose-flesh1 or as an immoral fellow4 ,the cause thereof is plain enough4 ,the ,french1 instead of borrowing his critical theory directly1 deduced it afresh from his applications of it2 it became criticism of him rather than by him4 ,thus his own speculations have lacked the authority of foreign approval1 and have consequently made no impression4 ,the weight of native opinion is naturally against them1 for they are at odds1 not only with its fundamental theories1 but also with its practical doctrine that no criticism can be profound and respectable which is not also dull4 ,poe1 says ,arthur ,ransome1 in his capital study of the man and the artist1 was like a wolf chained by the leg among a lot of domestic dogs4 ,the simile here is somewhat startling1 and ,ransome1 in a footnote1 tries to ameliorate it3 the domestic dogs it refers to were magnificoes of no less bulk than ,longfellow1 ,whittier1 ,holmes and ,emerson4 ,in the case of ,whitman1 the wolf was not only chained1 but also muzzled4 ,nothing1 indeed1 could be more amazing than the hostility that surrounded him at home until the very end of his long life4 ,true enough1 it was broken by certain feeble mitigations4 ,emerson1 in #ahee1 praised him--though later very eager to forget it and desert him1 as ,clemens and ,howells1 years afterward1 deserted ,gorky4 ,alcott1 ,thoreau1 ,lowell and even ,bryant1 during his brief ,bohemian days1 were polite to him4 ,a group of miscellaneous enthusiasts gradually gathered about him1 and out of this group emerged at least one man of some distinction1 ,john ,burroughs4 ,young adventurers of letters--for example1 ,huneker--went to see him and hear him1 half drawn by genuine admiration and half by mere deviltry4 ,but the general tone of the opinion that beat upon him1 the attitude of domestic criticism1 was unbrokenly inimical2 he was opposed by misrepresentation and neglect4 ,the prevailing range of criticism on my book1 he wrote in ,a ,backward ,glance on ,my ,own ,road in #ahhd1 has been either mockery or denunciation--and 444 ,i have been the marked object of two or three 7to me pretty serious7 official bufferings4 ,after thirty years of trial1 he wrote in ,my ,book and ,i1 three years later1 public criticism on the book and myself as author of it shows marked anger and contempt more than anything else4 ,that is1 at home4 ,abroad he was making headway all the while1 and long years afterward1 by way of ,france and ,england1 he began to force his way into the consciousness of his countrymen4 ,what could have been more ironical than the solemn celebrations of ,whitman's centenary that were carried off in various ,american universities in #aiai8 ,one can picture the old boy rolling with homeric mirth in hell4 ,imagine the fate of a university don of #ahfj1 or #ahgj1 or #ahhj1 or even #ahij who had ventured to commend ,leaves of ,grass to the young gentlemen of his seminary6 ,he would have come to grief as swiftly as that ,detroit pedagogue of day before yesterday who brought down the ,mothers' ,legion upon him by commending ,jurgen4 #h ,the ,cultural ,background ,so far1 the disease4 ,as to the cause1 ,i have delivered a few hints4 ,i now describe it particularly4 ,it is1 in brief1 a defect in the general culture of the country--one reflected1 not only in the national literature1 but also in the national political theory1 the national attitude toward religion and morals1 the national habit in all departments of thinking4 ,it is the lack of a civilized aristocracy1 secure in its position1 animated by an intelligent curiosity1 skeptical of all facile generalizations1 superior to the sentimentality of the mob1 and delighting in the battle of ideas for its own sake4 ,the word ,i use1 despite the qualifying adjective1 has got itself meanings1 of course1 that ,i by no means intend to convey4 ,any mention of an aristocracy1 to a public fed upon democratic fustian1 is bound to bring up images of stock-brokers' wives lolling obscenely in opera boxes1 or of haughty ,englishmen slaughtering whole generations of grouse in an inordinate and incomprehensible manner1 or of ,junkers with tight waists elbowing ,american schoolmarms off the sidewalks of ,german beer towns1 or of perfumed ,italians coming over to work their abominable magic upon the daughters of breakfast-food and bathtub kings4 ,part of this misconception1 ,i suppose1 has its roots in the gaudy imbecilities of the yellow press1 but there is also a part that belongs to the general ,american tradition1 along with the oppression of minorities and the belief in political panaceas4 ,its depth and extent are constantly revealed by the nave assumption that the so-called fashionable folk of the large cities--chiefly wealthy industrials in the interior-decorator and country-club stage of culture--constitute an aristocracy1 and by the scarcely less remarkable assumption that the peerage of ,england is identical with the gentry--that is1 that such men as ,lord ,northcliffe1 ,lord ,iveagh and even ,lord ,reading are ,english gentlemen1 and of the ancient line of the ,percys4 ,here1 as always1 the worshiper is the father of the gods1 and no less when they are evil than when they are benign4 ,the inferior man must find himself superiors1 that he may marvel at his political equality with them1 and in the absence of recognizable superiors de facto he creates superiors de jure4 ,the sublime principle of one man1 one vote must be translated into terms of dollars1 diamonds1 fashionable intelligence2 the equality of all men before the law must have clear and dramatic proofs4 ,sometimes1 perhaps1 the thing goes further and is more subtle4 ,the inferior man needs an aristocracy to demonstrate1 not only his mere equality1 but also his actual superiority4 ,the society columns in the newspapers may have some such origin3 they may visualize once more the accomplished journalist's understanding of the mob mind that he plays upon so skillfully1 as upon some immense and cacophonous organ1 always going fortissimo4 ,what the inferior man and his wife see in the sinister revels of those amazing first families1 ,i suspect1 is often a massive witness to their own higher rectitude--to their relative innocence of cigarette-smoking1 poodle-coddling1 child-farming and the more abstruse branches of adultery--in brief1 to their firmer grasp upon the immutable axioms of ,christian virtue1 the one sound boast of the nether nine-tenths of humanity in every land under the cross4 ,but this bugaboo aristocracy1 as ,i hint1 is actually bogus1 and the evidence of its bogusness lies in the fact that it is insecure4 ,one gets into it only onerously1 but out of it very easily4 ,entrance is effected by dint of a long and bitter straggle1 and the chief incidents of that struggle are almost intolerable humiliations4 ,the aspirant must school and steel himself to sniffs and sneers2 he must see the door slammed upon him a hundred times before ever it is thrown open to him4 ,to get in at all he must show a talent for abasement--and abasement makes him timorous4 ,worse1 that timorousness is not cured when he succeeds at last4 ,on the contrary1 it is made even more tremulous1 for what he faces within the gates is a scheme of things made up almost wholly of harsh and often unintelligible taboos1 and the penalty for violating even the least of them is swift and disastrous4 ,he must exhibit exactly the right social habits1 appetites and prejudices1 public and private4 ,he must harbor exactly the right political enthusiasms and indignations4 ,he must have a hearty taste for exactly the right sports4 ,his attitude toward the fine arts must be properly tolerant and yet not a shade too eager4 ,he must read and like exactly the right books1 pamphlets and public journals4 ,he must put up at the right hotels when he travels4 ,his wife must patronize the right milliners4 ,he himself must stick to the right haberdashery4 ,he must live in the right neighborhood4 ,he must even embrace the right doctrines of religion4 ,it would ruin him1 for all opera box and society column purposes1 to set up a plea for justice to the ,bolsheviki1 or even for ordinary decency4 ,it would ruin him equally to wear celluloid collars1 or to move to ,union ,hill1 ,n4 ,j41 or to serve ham and cabbage at his table4 ,and it would ruin him1 too1 to drink coffee from his saucer1 or to marry a chambermaid with a gold tooth1 or to join the ,seventh ,day ,adventists4 ,within the boundaries of his curious order he is worse fettered than a monk in a cell4 ,its obscure conception of propriety1 its nebulous notion that this or that is honorable1 hampers him in every direction1 and very narrowly4 ,what he resigns when he enters1 even when he makes his first deprecating knock at the door1 is every right to attack the ideas that happen to prevail within4 ,such as they are1 he must accept them without question4 ,and as they shift and change in response to great instinctive movements 7or perhaps1 now and then1 to the punished but not to be forgotten revolts of extraordinary rebels7 he must shift and change with them1 silently and quickly4 ,to hang back1 to challenge and dispute1 to preach reforms and revolutions--these are crimes against the brummagen ,holy ,ghost of the order4 ,obviously1 that order cannot constitute a genuine aristocracy1 in any rational sense4 ,a genuine aristocracy is grounded upon very much different principles4 ,its first and most salient character is its interior security1 and the chief visible evidence of that security is the freedom that goes with it--not only freedom in act1 the divine right of the aristocrat to do what he jolly well pleases1 so long as he does not violate the primary guarantees and obligations of his class1 but also and more importantly freedom in thought1 the liberty to try and err1 the right to be his own man4 ,it is the instinct of a true aristocracy1 not to punish eccentricity by expulsion1 but to throw a mantle of protection about it--to safeguard it from the suspicions and resentments of the lower orders4 ,those lower orders are inert1 timid1 inhospitable to ideas1 hostile to changes1 faithful to a few maudlin superstitions4 ,all progress goes on on the higher levels4 ,it is there that salient personalities1 made secure by artificial immunities1 may oscillate most widely from the normal track4 ,it is within that entrenched fold1 out of reach of the immemorial certainties of the mob1 that extraordinary men of the lower orders may find their city of refuge1 and breathe a clear air4 ,this1 indeed1 is at once the hall-mark and the justification of an aristocracy--that it is beyond responsibility to the general masses of men1 and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions4 ,it is nothing if it is not autonomous1 curious1 venturesome1 courageous1 and everything if it is4 ,it is the custodian of the qualities that make for change and experiment2 it is the class that organizes danger to the service of the race2 it pays for its high prerogatives by standing in the forefront of the fray4 ,no such aristocracy1 it must be plain1 is now on view in the ,united ,states4 ,the makings of one were visible in the ,virginia of the later eighteenth century1 but with ,jefferson and ,washington the promise died4 ,in ,new ,england1 it seems to me1 there was never any aristocracy1 either in being or in nascency3 there was only a theocracy that degenerated very quickly into a plutocracy on the one hand and a caste of sterile ,gelehrten on the other--the passion for ,god splitting into a lust for dollars and a weakness for mere words4 ,despite the common notion to the contrary--a notion generated by confusing literacy with intelligence--,new ,england has never shown the slightest sign of a genuine enthusiasm for ideas4 ,it began its history as a slaughter-house of ideas1 and it is to-day not easily distinguishable from a cold-storage plant4 ,its celebrated adventures in mysticism1 once apparently so bold and significant1 are now seen to have been little more than an elaborate hocus-pocus--respectable ,unitarians shocking the peasantry and scaring the horned cattle in the fields by masquerading in the robes of ,rosicrucians4 ,the ideas that it embraced in those austere and far-off days were stale1 and when it had finished with them they were dead3 to-day one hears of ,jakob ,bhme almost as rarely as one hears of ,allen ,g4 ,thurman4 ,so in politics4 ,its glory is ,abolition--an ,english invention1 long under the interdict of the native plutocracy4 ,since the ,civil ,war its six states have produced fewer political ideas1 as political ideas run in the ,republic1 than any average county in ,kansas or ,nebraska4 ,appomattox seemed to be a victory for ,new ,england idealism4 ,it was actually a victory for the ,new ,england plutocracy1 and that plutocracy has dominated thought above the ,housatonic ever since4 ,the sect of professional idealists has so far dwindled that it has ceased to be of any importance1 even as an opposition4 ,when the plutocracy is challenged now1 it is challenged by the proletariat4 ,well1 what is on view in ,new ,england is on view in all other parts of the nation1 sometimes with ameliorations1 but usually with the colors merely exaggerated4 ,what one beholds1 sweeping the eye over the land1 is a culture that1 like the national literature1 is in three layers--the plutocracy on top1 a vast mass of undifferentiated human blanks at the bottom1 and a forlorn intelligentsia gasping out a precarious life between4 ,i need not set out at any length1 ,i hope1 the intellectual deficiencies of the plutocracy--its utter failure to show anything even remotely resembling the makings of an aristocracy4 ,it is badly educated1 it is stupid1 it is full of low-caste superstitions and indignations1 it is without decent traditions or informing vision2 above all1 it is extraordinarily lacking in the most elemental independence and courage4 ,out of this class comes the grotesque fashionable society of our big towns1 already described4 ,imagine a horde of peasants incredibly enriched and with almost infinite power thrust into their hands1 and you will have a fair picture of its habitual state of mind4 ,it shows all the stigmata of inferiority--moral certainty1 cruelty1 suspicion of ideas1 fear4 ,never did it function more revealingly than in the late pogrom against the so-called ,reds1 i4 e41 against humorless idealists who1 like ,andrew ,jackson1 took the platitudes of democracy quite seriously4 ,the machinery brought to bear upon these feeble and scattered fanatics would have almost sufficed to repel an invasion by the united powers of ,europe4 ,they were hunted out of their sweat-shops and coffee-houses as if they were so many ,carranzas or ,ludendorffs1 dragged to jail to the tooting of horns1 arraigned before quaking judges on unintelligible charges1 condemned to deportation without the slightest chance to defend themselves1 torn from their dependent families1 herded into prison-ships1 and then finally dumped in a snow waste1 to be rescued and fed by the ,bolsheviki4 ,and what was the theory at the bottom of all these astounding proceedings8 ,so far as it can be reduced to comprehensible terms it was much less a theory than a fear--a shivering1 idiotic1 discreditable fear of a mere banshee--an overpowering1 paralyzing dread that some extra-eloquent ,red1 permitted to emit his balderdash unwhipped1 might eventually convert a couple of courageous men1 and that the courageous men1 filled with indignation against the plutocracy1 might take to the highroad1 burn down a nail-factory or two1 and slit the throat of some virtuous profiteer4 ,in order to lay this fear1 in order to ease the jangled nerves of the ,american successors to the ,hapsburgs and ,hohenzollerns1 all the constitutional guarantees of the citizen were suspended1 the statute-books were burdened with laws that surpass anything heard of in the ,austria of ,maria ,theresa1 the country was handed over to a frenzied mob of detectives1 informers and agents provocateurs--and the ,reds departed laughing loudly1 and were hailed by the ,bolsheviki as innocents escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane4 ,obviously1 it is out of reason to look for any hospitality to ideas in a class so extravagantly fearful of even the most palpably absurd of them4 ,its philosophy is firmly grounded upon the thesis that the existing order must stand forever free from attack1 and not only from attack1 but also from mere academic criticism1 and its ethics are as firmly grounded upon the thesis that every attempt at any such criticism is a proof of moral turpitude4 ,within its own ranks1 protected by what may be regarded as the privilege of the order1 there is nothing to take the place of this criticism4 ,a few feeble platitudes by ,andrew ,carnegie and a book of moderate merit by ,john ,d4 ,rockefeller's press-agent constitute almost the whole of the interior literature of ideas4 ,in other countries the plutocracy has often produced men of reflective and analytical habit1 eager to rationalize its instincts and to bring it into some sort of relationship to the main streams of human thought4 ,the case of ,david ,ricardo at once comes to mind4 ,there have been many others3 ,john ,bright1 ,richard ,cobden1 ,george ,grote1 and1 in our own time1 ,walther von ,rathenau4 ,but in the ,united ,states no such phenomenon has been visible4 ,there was a day1 not long ago1 when certain young men of wealth gave signs of an unaccustomed interest in ideas on the political side1 but the most they managed to achieve was a banal sort of ,socialism1 and even this was abandoned in sudden terror when the war came1 and ,socialism fell under suspicion of being genuinely international--in brief1 of being honest under the skin4 ,nor has the plutocracy of the country ever fostered an inquiring spirit among its intellectual valets and footmen1 which is to say1 among the gentlemen who compose headlines and leading articles for its newspapers4 ,what chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the ,united ,states from the press of all other countries pretending to culture is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor1 for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere1 but its incurable fear of ideas1 its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears1 its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion4 ,it is1 in the true sense1 never well-informed4 ,it is seldom intelligent1 save in the arts of the mob-master4 ,it is never courageously honest4 ,held harshly to a rigid correctness of opinion by the plutocracy that controls it with less and less attempt at disguise1 and menaced on all sides by censorships that it dare not flout1 it sinks rapidly into formalism and feebleness4 ,its yellow section is perhaps its most respectable section1 for there the only vestige of the old free journalist survives4 ,in the more conservative papers one finds only a timid and petulant animosity to all questioning of the existing order1 however urbane and sincere--a pervasive and ill-concealed dread that the mob now heated up against the orthodox hobgoblins may suddenly begin to unearth hobgoblins of its own1 and so run amok4 ,for it is upon the emotions of the mob1 of course1 that the whole comedy is played4 ,theoretically the mob is the repository of all political wisdom and virtue2 actually it is the ultimate source of all political power4 ,even the plutocracy cannot make war upon it openly1 or forget the least of its weaknesses4 ,the business of keeping it in order must be done discreetly1 warily1 with delicate technique4 ,in the main that business consists of keeping alive its deep-seated fears--of strange faces1 of unfamiliar ideas1 of unhackneyed gestures1 of untested liberties and responsibilities4 ,the one permanent emotion of the inferior man1 as of all the simpler mammals1 is fear--fear of the unknown1 the complex1 the inexplicable4 ,what he wants beyond everything else is safety4 ,his instincts incline him toward a society so organized that it will protect him at all hazards1 and not only against perils to his hide but also against assaults upon his mind--against the need to grapple with unaccustomed problems1 to weigh ideas1 to think things out for himself1 to scrutinize the platitudes upon which his everyday thinking is based4 ,content under kaiserism so long as it functions efficiently1 he turns1 when kaiserism falls1 to some other and perhaps worse form of paternalism1 bringing to its benign tyranny only the docile tribute of his pathetic allegiance4 ,in ,america it is the newspaper that is his boss4 ,from it he gets support for his elemental illusions4 ,in it he sees a visible embodiment of his own wisdom and consequence4 ,out of it he draws fuel for his simple moral passion1 his congenital suspicion of heresy1 his dread of the unknown4 ,and behind the newspaper stands the plutocracy1 ignorant1 unimaginative and timorous4 ,thus at the top and at the bottom4 ,obviously1 there is no aristocracy here4 ,one finds only one of the necessary elements1 and that only in the plutocracy1 to wit1 a truculent egoism4 ,but where is intelligence8 ,where are ease and surety of manner8 ,where are enterprise and curiosity8 ,where1 above all1 is courage1 and in particular1 moral courage--the capacity for independent thinking1 for difficult problems1 for what ,nietzsche called the joys of the labyrinth8 ,as well look for these things in a society of half-wits4 ,democracy1 obliterating the old aristocracy1 has left only a vacuum in its place2 in a century and a half it has failed either to lift up the mob to intellectual autonomy and dignity or to purge the plutocracy of its inherent stupidity and swinishness4 ,it is precisely here1 the first and favorite scene of the ,great ,experiment1 that the culture of the individual has been reduced to the most rigid and absurd regimentation4 ,it is precisely here1 of all civilized countries1 that eccentricity in demeanor and opinion has come to bear the heaviest penalties4 ,the whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes1 and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom1 and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society4 #i ,under the ,campus ,pump ,but there remain the intelligentsia1 the free spirits in the middle ground1 neither as ansthetic to ideas as the plutocracy on the one hand nor as much the slaves of emotion as the proletariat on the other4 ,have ,i forgotten them8 ,i have not4 ,but what actually reveals itself when this small brotherhood of the superior is carefully examined8 ,what reveals itself1 it seems to me1 is a gigantic disappointment4 ,superficially1 there are all the marks of a caste of learned and sagacious men--a great book-knowledge1 a laudable diligence1 a certain fine reserve and sniffishness1 a plain consciousness of intellectual superiority1 not a few gestures that suggest the aristocratic4 ,but under the surface one quickly discovers that the whole thing is little more than play-acting1 and not always very skillful4 ,learning is there1 but not curiosity4 ,a heavy dignity is there1 but not much genuine self-respect4 ,pretentiousness is there1 but not a trace of courage4 ,squeezed between the plutocracy on on side and the mob on the other1 the intelligentsia face the eternal national problem of maintaining their position1 of guarding themselves against challenge and attack1 of keeping down suspicion4 ,they have all the attributes of knowledge save the sense of power4 ,they have all the qualities of an aristocracy save the capital qualities that arise out of a feeling of security1 of complete independence1 of absolute immunity to onslaught from above and below4 ,in brief1 the old bogusness hangs about them1 as about the fashionable aristocrats of the society columns4 ,they are safe so long as they are good1 which is to say1 so long as they neither aggrieve the plutocracy nor startle the proletariat4 ,immediately they fall into either misdemeanor all their apparent dignity vanishes1 and with it all of their influence1 and they become simply somewhat ridiculous rebels against a social order that has no genuine need of them and is disposed to tolerate them only when they are not obtrusive4 ,for various reasons this shadowy caste is largely made up of men who have official stamps upon their learning--that is1 of professors1 of doctors of philosophy2 outside of academic circles it tends to shade off very rapidly into a half-world of isolated anarchists4 ,one of those reasons is plain enough3 the old democratic veneration for mere schooling1 inherited from the ,puritans of ,new ,england1 is still in being1 and the mob1 always eager for short cuts in thinking1 is disposed to accept a schoolmaster without looking beyond his degree4 ,another reason lies in the fact that the higher education is still rather a novelty in the country1 and there have yet to be developed any devices for utilizing learned men in any trade save teaching4 ,yet other reasons will suggest themselves4 ,whatever the ramification of causes1 the fact is plain that the pedagogues have almost a monopoly of what passes for the higher thinking in the land4 ,not only do they reign unchallenged in their own chaste grove2 they also penetrate to all other fields of ratiocination1 to the almost complete exclusion of unshrived rivals4 ,they dominate the weeklies of opinion2 they are to the fore in every review2 they write nine-tenths of the serious books of the country2 they begin to invade the newspapers2 they instruct and exhort the yokelry from the stump2 they have even begun to penetrate into the government4 ,one cannot turn in the ,united ,states without encountering a professor4 ,there is one on every municipal commission4 ,there is one in every bureau of the federal government4 ,there is one at the head of every intellectual movement4 ,there is one to explain every new mystery4 ,professors appraise all works of art1 whether graphic1 tonal or literary4 ,professors supply the brain power for agriculture1 diplomacy1 the control of dependencies and the distribution of commodities4 ,a professor was until lately sovereign of the country1 and pope of the state church4 ,so much for their opportunity4 ,what1 now1 of their achievement8 ,i answer as one who has had thrown upon him1 by the impenetrable operations of fate1 the rather thankless duties of a specialist in the ways of pedagogues1 a sort of professor of professors4 ,the job has got me enemies4 ,i have been accused of carrying on a defamatory jehad against virtuous and laborious men2 ,i have even been charged with doing it in the interest of the ,wilhelmstrasse1 the ,white ,slave ,trust and the ghost of ,friedrich ,wilhelm ,nietzsche4 ,nothing could be more absurd4 ,all my instincts are on the side of the professors4 ,i esteem a man who devotes himself to a subject with hard diligence2 ,i esteem even more a man who puts poverty and a shelf of books above profiteering and evenings of jazz2 ,i am naturally monkish4 ,moreover1 there are more ,ph4,d4's on my family tree than even a ,boston bluestocking can boast2 there was a whole century when even the most ignorant of my house was at least ,juris utriusque ,doctor4 ,but such predispositions should not be permitted to color sober researches4 ,what ,i have found1 after long and arduous labors1 is a state of things that is surely not altogether flattering to the ,gelehrten under examination4 ,what ,i have found1 in brief1 is that pedagogy turned to general public uses is almost as timid and flatulent as journalism--that the professor1 menaced by the timid dogmatism of the plutocracy above him and the incurable suspiciousness of the mob beneath him1 is almost invariably inclined to seek his own security in a mellifluous inanity--that1 far from being a courageous spokesman of ideas and an apostle of their free dissemination1 in politics1 in the fine arts1 in practical ethics1 he comes close to being the most prudent and skittish of all men concerned with them--in brief1 that he yields to the prevailing correctness of thought in all departments1 north1 east1 south and west1 and is1 in fact1 the chief exponent among us of the democratic doctrine that heresy is not only a mistake1 but also a crime4 ,a philosophy is not put to much of a test in ordinary times1 for in ordinary times philosophies are permitted to lie like sleeping dogs4 ,when it shows its inward metal is when the band begins to play4 ,the turmoils of the late lamentable war1 it seems to me1 provided for such a trying out of fundamental ideas and attitudes upon a colossal scale4 ,the whole thinking of the world was thrown into confusion2 all the worst fears and prejudices of ignorant and emotional men came to the front2 it was a time1 beyond all others in modern history1 when intellectual integrity was subjected to a cruel strain4 ,how did the intelligentsia of ,these ,states bear up under that strain8 ,what was the reaction of our learned men to the challenge of organized hysteria1 mob fear1 incitement to excess1 downright insanity8 ,how did they conduct themselves in that universal whirlwind8 ,they conducted themselves1 ,i fear1 in a manner that must leave a brilliant question mark behind their claim to independence and courage1 to true knowledge and dignity1 to ordinary self-respect--in brief1 to every quality that belongs to the authentic aristocrat4 ,they constituted themselves1 not a restraining influence upon the mob run wild1 but the loudest spokesmen of its worst imbecilities4 ,they fed it with bogus history1 bogus philosophy1 bogus idealism1 bogus heroics4 ,they manufactured blather for its entertainment4 ,they showed themselves to be as nave as so many ,liberty ,loan orators1 as emotional1 almost1 as the spy hunters1 and as disdainful of the ordinary intellectual decencies as the editorial writers4 ,i accumulated1 in those great days1 for the instruction and horror of posterity1 a very large collection of academic arguments1 expositions and pronunciamentos2 it fills a trunk1 and got me heavily into debt to three clipping-bureaux4 ,its contents range from solemn hymns of hate in the learned 7and even the theological7 reviews and such official donkeyisms as the formal ratification of the so-called ,sisson documents down to childish harangues to student-bodies1 public demands that the study of the enemy language and literature be prohibited by law1 violent denunciations of all enemy science as negligible and fraudulent1 vitriolic attacks upon enemy magnificos1 and elaborate proofs that the ,american ,revolution was the result of a foul plot hatched in the ,wilhelmstrasse of the time1 to the wanton injury of two loving bands of brothers4 ,i do not exaggerate in the slightest4 ,the proceedings of ,mr4 ,creel's amazing corps of twenty-five hundred ,american historians went further than anything ,i have described4 ,and in every far-flung college town1 in every one-building university on the prairie1 even the worst efforts of those historians were vastly exceeded4 ,but ,i am forgetting the like phenomena on the other side of the bloody chasm8 ,i am overlooking the darker crimes of the celebrated ,german professors8 ,not at all4 ,those crimes against all reason and dignity1 had they been committed in fact1 would not be evidence in favor of the ,americans in the dock3 the principle of law is too well accepted to need argument4 ,but ,i venture to deny them1 and out of a very special and singular knowledge1 for ,i seem to be one of the few ,americans who has ever actually read the proclamations of the ,german professors3 all the most indignant critics of them appear to have accepted second-hand accounts of their contents4 ,having suffered the onerous labor of reading them1 ,i now offer sworn witness to their relative mildness4 ,now and then one encounters in them a disconcerting bray4 ,now and then one weeps with sore heart4 ,now and then one is bogged in ,german made wholly unintelligible by emotion4 ,but taking them as they stand1 and putting them fairly beside the corresponding documents of ,american vintage1 one is at once struck by their comparative suavity and decorum1 their freedom from mere rhetoric and fustian--above all1 by their effort to appeal to reason1 such as it is1 rather than to emotion4 ,no ,german professor1 from end to end of the war1 put his hand to anything as transparently silly as the ,sisson documents4 ,no ,german professor essayed to prove that the ,seven ,years' ,war was caused by ,downing ,street4 ,no ,german professor argued that the study of ,english would corrupt the soul4 ,no ,german professor denounced ,darwin as an ignoramus and ,lister as a scoundrel4 ,nor was anything of the sort done1 so far as ,i know1 by any ,french professor4 ,nor even by any reputable ,english professor4 ,all such honorable efforts on behalf of correct thought in war-time were monopolized by ,american professors4 ,and if the fact is disputed1 then ,i threaten upon some future day1 when the stealthy yearning to forget has arisen1 to print my proofs in parallel columns--the most esteemed extravagances of the ,german professors in one column and the corresponding masterpieces of the ,american professors in the other4 ,i do not overlook1 of course1 the self-respecting men who1 in the midst of all the uproar1 kept their counsel and their dignity4 ,a small minority1 hard beset and tested by the fire6 ,nor do ,i overlook the few sentimental fanatics who1 in the face of devastating evidence to the contrary1 proceeded upon the assumption that academic freedom was yet inviolable1 and so got themselves cashiered1 and began posturing in radical circles as martyrs1 the most absurd of men4 ,but ,i think ,i draw a fair picture of the general4 ,i think ,i depict with reasonable accuracy the typical response of the only recognizable intelligentsia of the land to the first great challenge to their aristocratic aloofness--the first test in the grand manner of their freedom alike from the bellicose imbecility of the plutocracy and the intolerable fears and childish moral certainties of the mob4 ,that test exposed them shamelessly4 ,it revealed their fast allegiance to the one thing that is the antithesis of all free inquiry1 of all honest hospitality to ideas1 of all intellectual independence and integrity4 ,they proved that they were correct--and in proving it they threw a brilliant light upon many mysteries of our national culture4 #aj ,the ,intolerable ,burden ,among others1 upon the mystery of our literature--its faltering feebleness1 its lack of genuine gusto1 its dearth of salient personalities1 its general air of poverty and imitation3 ,what ails the beautiful letters of the ,republic1 ,i repeat1 is what ails the general culture of the ,republic--the lack of a body of sophisticated and civilized public opinion1 independent of plutocratic control and superior to the infantile philosophies of the mob--a body of opinion showing the eager curiosity1 the educated skepticism and the hospitality to ideas of a true aristocracy4 ,this lack is felt by the ,american author1 imagining him to have anything new to say1 every day of his life4 ,he can hope for no support1 in ordinary cases1 from the mob3 it is too suspicious of all ideas4 ,he can hope for no support from the spokesmen of the plutocracy3 they are too diligently devoted to maintaining the intellectual status quo4 ,he turns1 then1 to the intelligentsia--and what he finds is correctness6 ,in his two prime functions1 to represent the life about him accurately and to criticize it honestly1 he sees that correctness arrayed against him4 ,his representation is indecorous1 unlovely1 too harsh to be borne4 ,his criticism is in contumacy to the ideals upon which the whole structure rests4 ,so he is either attacked vigorously as an anti-patriot whose babblings ought to be put down by law1 or enshrouded in a silence which commonly disposes of him even more effectively4 ,soon or late1 of course1 a man of genuine force and originality is bound to prevail against that sort of stupidity4 ,he will unearth an adherent here and another there2 in the long run they may become numerous enough to force some recognition of him1 even from the most immovable exponents of correctness4 ,but the business is slow1 uncertain1 heart-breaking4 ,it puts a burden upon the artist that ought not to be put upon him4 ,it strains beyond reason his diligence and passion4 ,a man who devotes his life to creating works of the imagination1 a man who gives over all his strength and energy to struggling with problems that are essentially delicate and baffling and pregnant with doubt--such a man does not ask for recognition as a mere reward for his industry2 he asks for it as a necessary help to his industry2 he needs it as he needs decent subsistence and peace of mind4 ,it is a grave damage to the artist and a grave loss to the literature when such a man as ,poe has to seek consolation among his inferiors1 and such a man as the ,mark ,twain of ,what ,is ,man8 is forced to conceal his most profound beliefs1 and such men as ,dreiser and ,cabell are exposed to incessant attacks by malignant stupidity4 ,the notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding1 that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility--this notion is nine-tenths nonsense4 ,if it were true1 then one would never hear of painters going to ,france or of musicians going to ,germany4 ,what the artist actually needs is comprehension of his aims and ideals by men he respects--not necessarily approval of his products1 but simply an intelligent sympathy for him in the great agony of creation4 ,and that sympathy must be more than the mere fellow-feeling of other craftsmen2 it must come1 in large part1 out of a connoisseurship that is beyond the bald trade interest2 it must have its roots in the intellectual curiosity of an aristocracy of taste4 ,billroth1 ,i believe1 was more valuable to ,brahms than even ,schumann4 ,his eager interest gave music-making a solid dignity4 ,his championship offered the musician a visible proof that his labors had got for him a secure place in a civilized and stable society1 and that he would be judged by his peers1 and safeguarded against the obtuse hostility of his inferiors4 ,no such security is thrown about an artist in ,america4 ,it is not that the country lacks the standards that ,dr4 ,brownell pleads for2 it is that its standards are still those of a primitive and timorous society4 ,the excesses of ,comstockery are profoundly symbolical4 ,what they show is the moral certainty of the mob in operation against something that is as incomprehensible to it as the theory of least squares1 and what they show even more vividly is the distressing lack of any automatic corrective of that outrage--of any firm and secure body of educated opinion1 eager to hear and test all intelligible ideas and sensitively jealous of the right to discuss them freely4 ,when ,the ,genius was attacked by the ,comstocks1 it fell to my lot to seek assistance for ,dreiser among the intelligentsia4 ,i found them almost unanimously disinclined to lend a hand4 ,a small number permitted themselves to be induced1 but the majority held back1 and not a few1 as ,i have said1 actually offered more or less furtive aid to the ,comstocks4 ,i pressed the matter and began to unearth reasons4 ,it was1 it appeared1 dangerous for a member of the intelligentsia1 and particularly for a member of the academic intelligentsia1 to array himself against the mob inflamed--against the moral indignation of the sort of folk who devour vice reports and are converted by the ,rev4 ,billy ,sunday6 ,if he came forward1 he would have to come forward alone4 ,there was no organized support behind him4 ,no instinctive urge of class1 no prompting of a great tradition1 moved him to speak out for artistic freedom 444 ,england supplied the lack4 ,over there they have a mob too1 and something akin to ,comstockery1 and a cult of hollow correctness--but they also have a caste that stands above all that sort of thing1 and out of that caste came aid for ,dreiser4 ,england is always supplying the lack--,england1 or ,france1 or ,germany1 or some other country1 but chiefly ,england4 ,my market and my reputation1 said ,prescott in #ahch1 rest principally with ,england4 ,to ,poe1 a few years later1 the ,united ,states was a literary colony of ,great ,britain4 ,and there has been little change to this day4 ,the ,english leisure class1 says ,prof4 ,dr4 ,veblen1 is for purposes of reputable usage the upper leisure class of this country4 ,despite all the current highfalutin about melting pots and national destinies the ,united ,states remains almost as much an ,english colonial possession1 intellectually and spiritually1 as it was on ,july #c1 #aggf4 ,the ,american social pusher keeps his eye on ,mayfair2 the ,american literatus dreams of recognition by the ,london weeklies2 the ,american don is lifted to bliss by the imprimatur of ,oxford or ,cambridge2 even the ,american statesman knows how to cringe to ,downing ,street4 ,most of the essential policies of ,dr4 ,wilson between #aiad and #aibj--when the realistic ,english1 finding him no longer useful1 incontinently dismissed him--were1 to all intents and purposes1 those of a ,british colonial premier4 ,he went into the ,peace ,conference willing to yield everything to ,english interests1 and he came home with a treaty that was so extravagantly ,english that it fell an easy prey to the anti-,english minority1 ever alert for the makings of a bugaboo to scare the plain people4 ,what lies under all this subservience is simple enough4 ,the ,american1 for all his braggadocio1 is quite conscious of his intrinsic inferiority to the ,englishman1 on all cultural counts4 ,he may put himself first as a man of business1 as an adventurer in practical affairs or as a pioneer in the applied arts and sciences1 but in all things removed from the mere pursuit of money and physical ease he well understands that he belongs at the second table4 ,even his recurrent attacks of ,anglophobia are no more than ,freudian evidences of his inferiority complex4 ,he howls in order to still his inner sense of inequality1 as he howls against imaginary enemies in order to convince himself that he is brave and against fabulous despotisms in order to prove that he is free4 ,the ,englishman is never deceived by this hocus-pocus4 ,he knows that it is always possible to fetch the rebel back into camp by playing upon his elemental fears and vanities4 ,a few dark threats1 a few patronizing speeches1 a few ,oxford degrees1 and the thing is done4 ,more1 the ,english scarcely regard it as hunting in the grand manner2 it is a business of subalterns4 ,when1 during the early stages of the war1 they had occasion to woo the ,american intelligentsia1 what agents did they choose8 ,did they nominate ,thomas ,hardy1 ,joseph ,conrad1 ,george ,moore and company8 ,nay1 they nominated ,conan ,doyle1 ,coningsby ,dawson1 ,alfred ,noyes1 ,ian ,hay1 ,chesterton1 ,kipling1 ,zangwill and company4 ,in the choice there was high sagacity and no little oblique humor--as there was a bit later in the appointment of ,lord ,reading and ,sir ,auckland ,geddes to ,washington4 ,the valuation they set upon the aluminados of the ,republic was exactly the valuation they were in the habit of setting1 at home1 upon ,,mm4 of the ,free ,church ,federation4 ,they saw the eternal green-grocer beneath the master's gown and mortarboard4 ,let us look closely and we shall see him1 too4 ,the essence of a self-reliant and autonomous culture is an unshakable egoism4 ,it must not only regard itself as the peer of any other culture2 it must regard itself as the superior of any other4 ,you will find this indomitable pride in the culture of any truly first-rate nation3 ,france1 ,germany or ,england4 ,but you will not find it in the so-called culture of ,america4 ,here the decadent ,anglo-,saxon majority still looks obediently and a bit wistfully toward the motherland4 ,no good ,american ever seriously questions an ,english judgment on an sthetic question1 or even on an ethical1 philosophical or political question4 ,there is1 in fact1 seldom any rational reason why he should3 it is almost always more mature1 more tolerant1 more intelligent than any judgment hatched at home4 ,behind it lies a settled scheme of things1 a stable point of view1 the authority of a free intellectual aristocracy1 the pride of tradition and of power4 ,the ,english are sure-footed1 well-informed1 persuasive4 ,it is beyond their imagination that any one should seriously challenge them4 ,in this over-grown and oafish colony there is no such sureness4 ,the ,american always secretly envies the ,englishman1 even when he professes to flout him4 ,the ,englishman never envies the ,american4 ,the extraordinary colonist1 moved to give utterance to the ideas bubbling within him1 is thus vastly handicapped1 for he must submit them to the test of a culture that1 in the last analysis1 is never quite his own culture1 despite its dominance4 ,looking within himself1 he finds that he is different1 that he diverges from the ,english standard1 that he is authentically ,american--and to be authentically ,american is to be officially inferior4 ,he thus faces dismay at the very start3 support is lacking when he needs it most4 ,in the motherland--in any motherland1 in any wholly autonomous nation--there is a class of men like himself1 devoted to translating the higher manifestations of the national spirit into ideas--men differing enormously among themselves1 but still united in common cause against the lethargy and credulity of the mass4 ,but in a colony that class1 if it exists at all1 lacks coherence and certainty2 its authority is not only disputed by the inertia and suspiciousness of the lower orders1 but also by the superior authority overseas2 it is timorous and fearful of challenge4 ,thus it affords no protection to an individual of assertive originality1 and he is forced to go as a suppliant to a quarter in which nothing is his by right1 but everything must go by favor--in brief to a quarter where his very application must needs be regarded as an admission of his inferiority4 ,the burden of proof upon him is thus made double4 ,obviously1 he must be a man of very strong personality to surmount such obstacles triumphantly4 ,such strong men1 of course1 sometimes appear in a colony1 but they always stand alone2 their worst opposition is at home4 ,for a colonial of less vigorous soul the battle is almost hopeless4 ,either he submits to subordination and so wears docilely the inferior badge of a praiseworthy and tolerated colonist1 or he deserts the minority for the far more hospitable and confident majority1 and so becomes a mere mob-artist4 ,examples readily suggest themselves4 ,i give you ,poe and ,whitman as men strong enough to weather the adverse wind4 ,the salient thing about each of these men was this3 that his impulse to self-expression1 the force of his obscure1 inner necessity1 was so powerful that it carried him beyond all ordinary ambitions and prudences--in other words1 that the ego functioned so heroically that it quite disregarded the temporal welfare of the individual4 ,neither ,poe nor ,whitman made the slightest concession to what was the predominant ,english taste1 the prevailing ,english authority1 of his time4 ,and neither yielded in the slightest to the maudlin echoes of ,english notions that passed for ideas in the ,united ,states2 in neither will you find any recognizable reflection of the things that ,americans were saying and doing all about them4 ,even ,whitman1 preaching democracy1 preached a democracy that not one actual democrat in a hundred thousand could so much as imagine4 ,what happened8 ,imprimis1 ,english authority1 at the start1 dismissed them loftily2 they were1 at best1 simply rare freaks from the colonies4 ,secondly1 ,american stupidity1 falling into step1 came near overlooking them altogether4 ,the accident that maintained them was an accident of personality and environment4 ,they happened to be men accustomed to social isolation and of the most meager wants1 and it was thus difficult to deter them by neglect and punishment4 ,so they stuck to their guns--and presently they were discovered1 as the phrase is1 by men of a culture wholly foreign to them and perhaps incomprehensible to them1 and thereafter1 by slow stages1 they began to win a slow and reluctant recognition in ,england 7at first only from rebels and iconoclasts71 and finally even in ,america4 ,that either1 without ,french prompting1 would have come to his present estate ,i doubt very much4 ,and in support of that doubt ,i cite again the fact that ,poe's high talents as a critic1 not having interested the ,french1 have never got their deserts either in ,england or at home4 ,it is lesser men that we chiefly have to deal with in this world1 and it is among lesser men that the lack of a confident intellectual viewpoint in ,america makes itself most evident4 ,examples are numerous and obvious4 ,on the one hand1 we have ,fenimore ,cooper first making a cringing bow for ,english favor1 and then1 on being kicked out1 joining the mob against sense2 he wrote books so bad that even the ,americans of #ahcj admired them4 ,on the other hand1 we nave ,henry ,james1 a deserter made by despair2 one so depressed by the tacky company at the ,american first table that he preferred to sit at the second table of the ,english4 ,the impulse was1 and is common2 it was only the forthright act that distinguished him4 ,and in the middle ground1 showing both seductions plainly1 there is ,mark ,twain--at one moment striving his hardest for the ,english imprimatur1 and childishly delighted by every favorable gesture2 at the next1 returning to the native mob as its premier clown-monkey-shining at banquets1 cavorting in the newspapers1 shrinking poltroonishly from his own ideas1 obscenely eager to give no offense4 ,a much greater artist than either ,poe or ,whitman1 so ,i devoutly believe1 but a good deal lower as a man4 ,the ultimate passion was not there2 the decent householder always pulled the ear of the dreamer4 ,his fate has irony in it4 ,in ,england they patronize him3 he is1 for an ,american1 not so bad4 ,in ,america1 appalled by his occasional ascents to honesty1 his stray impulses to be wholly himself1 the dunderheads return him to arm's length1 his old place1 and one of the most eminent of them1 writing in the ,new ,york ,times1 argues piously that it is impossible to imagine him actually believing the commonplace heresies he put into ,what ,is ,man8 #aa ,epilogue ,i have described the disease4 ,let me say at once that ,i have no remedy to offer4 ,i simply set down a few ideas1 throw out a few hints1 attempt a few modest inquiries into causes4 ,perhaps my argument often turns upon itself3 the field is weed-grown and paths are hard to follow4 ,it may be that insurmountable natural obstacles stand in the way of the development of a distinctively ,american culture1 grounded upon a truly egoistic nationalism and supported by a native aristocracy4 ,after all1 there is no categorical imperative that ordains it4 ,in such matters1 when the conditions are right1 nature often arranges a division of labor4 ,a nation shut in by racial and linguistic isolation--a ,sweden1 a ,holland or a ,france--is forced into autonomy by sheer necessity2 if it is to have any intellectual life at all it must develop its own4 ,but that is not our case4 ,there is ,england to hold up the torch for us1 as ,france holds it up for ,belgium1 and ,spain for ,latin ,america1 and ,germany for ,switzerland4 ,it is our function1 as the younger and less confident partner1 to do the simpler1 rougher parts of the joint labor--to develop the virtues of the more elemental orders of men3 industry1 piety1 docility1 endurance1 assiduity and ingenuity in practical affairs--the wood-hewing and water-drawing of the race4 ,it seems to me that we do all this very well2 in these things we are better than the ,english4 ,but when it comes to those larger and more difficult activities which concern only the superior minority1 and are1 in essence1 no more than products of its efforts to demonstrate its superiority--when it comes to the higher varieties of speculation and self-expression1 to the fine arts and the game of ideas--then we fall into a bad second place4 ,where we stand1 intellectually1 is where the ,english non-conformists stand2 like them1 we are marked by a fear of ideas as disturbing and corrupting4 ,our art is imitative and timorous4 ,our political theory is hopelessly sophomoric and superficial2 even ,english ,toryism and ,russian ,bolshevism are infinitely more profound and penetrating4 ,and of the two philosophical systems that we have produced1 one is so banal that it is now imbedded in the ,new ,thought1 and the other is so shallow that there is nothing in it either to puzzle or to outrage a school-marm4 ,nevertheless1 hope will not down1 and now and then it is supported by something rather more real than mere desire4 ,one observes an under-current of revolt1 small but vigorous1 and sometimes it exerts its force1 not only against the superficial banality but also against the fundamental flabbiness1 the intrinsic childishness of the ,puritan ,anschauung4 ,the remedy for that childishness is skepticism1 and already skepticism shows itself3 in the iconoclastic political realism of ,harold ,stearns1 ,waldo ,frank and company1 in the groping questions of ,dreiser1 ,cabell and ,anderson1 in the operatic rebellions of the ,village4 ,true imagination1 ,i often think1 is no more than a function of this skepticism4 ,it is the dull man who is always sure1 and the sure man who is always dull4 ,the more a man dreams1 the less he believes4 ,a great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation4 ,shakespeare1 at a time of rising democratic feeling in ,england1 flung the whole force of his genius against democracy4 ,cervantes1 at a time when all ,spain was romantic1 made a headlong attack upon romance4 ,goethe1 with ,germany groping toward nationalism1 threw his influences on the side of internationalism4 ,the central trouble with ,america is conformity1 timorousness1 lack of enterprise and audacity4 ,a nation of third-rate men1 a land offering hospitality only to fourth-rate artists4 ,in ,elizabethan ,england they would have bawled for democracy1 in the ,spain of ,cervantes they would have yelled for chivalry1 and in the ,germany of ,goethe they would have wept and beat their breasts for the ,fatherland4 ,to-day1 as in the day of ,emerson1 they set the tune4444 ,but into the singing there occasionally enters a discordant note4 ,on some dim to-morrow1 perhaps1 perchance1 peradventure1 they may be challenged4 ,,ii4 ,,roosevelt3 ,,an ,,autopsy ,one thinks of ,dr4 ,woodrow ,wilson's biography of ,george ,washington as of one of the strangest of all the world's books4 ,washington3 the first1 and perhaps also the last ,american gentleman4 ,wilson3 the self-bamboozled ,presbyterian1 the right-thinker1 the great moral statesman1 the perfect model of the ,christian cad4 ,it is as if the ,rev4 ,dr4 ,billy ,sunday should do a biography of ,charles ,darwin--almost as if ,dr4 ,wilson himself should dedicate his senility to a life of the ,chevalier ,bayard1 or the ,cid1 or ,christ4444 ,but such phenomena1 of course1 are not actually rare in the republic2 here everything happens that is forbidden by the probabilities and the decencies4 ,the chief native critic of beautiful letters1 for a whole generation1 was a ,baptist clergyman2 he was succeeded by a literary ,wall ,street man1 who gave way1 in turn1 to a soviet of ninth-rate pedagogues2 this very curious apostolic succession ,i have already discussed4 ,the dean of the music critics1 even to-day1 is a translator of grand opera libretti1 and probably one of the worst that ever lived4 ,return1 now1 to political biography4 ,who can think of anything in ,american literature comparable to ,morley's life of ,gladstone1 or ,trevelyan's life of ,macaulay1 or ,carlyle's ,frederick1 or even ,winston ,churchill's life of his father8 ,i dredge my memory hopelessly2 only ,william ,graham ,sumner's study of ,andrew ,jackson emerges--an extraordinarily astute and careful piece of work by one of the two most underestimated ,americans of his generation1 the other being ,daniel ,coit ,gilman4 ,but where is the first-rate biography of ,washington--sound1 fair1 penetrating1 honest1 done by a man capable of comprehending the ,english gentry of the eighteenth century8 ,and how long must we wait for adequate treatises upon ,jefferson1 ,hamilton1 ,sam ,adams1 ,aaron ,burr1 ,henry ,clay1 ,calhoun1 ,webster1 ,sumner1 ,grant1 ,sherman1 ,lee8 ,even ,lincoln is yet to be got vividly between the covers of a book4 ,the ,nicolay-,hay work is quite impossible2 it is not a biography1 but simply a huge storehouse of biographical raw materials2 whoever can read it can also read the official ,records of the ,rebellion4 ,all the other standard lives of old ,abe--for instance1 those of ,lamon1 ,herndon and ,weil1 ,stoddard1 ,morse and ,miss ,tarbell--fail still worse2 when they are not grossly preachy and disingenuous they are trivial4 ,so far as ,i can make out1 no genuinely scientific study of the man has ever been attempted4 ,the amazing conflict of testimony about him remains a conflict2 the most elemental facts are yet to be established2 he grows vaguer and more fabulous as year follows year4 ,one would think that1 by this time1 the question of his religious views 7to take one example7 ought to be settled1 but apparently it is not1 for no longer than a year ago there came a reverend author1 ,dr4 ,william ,e4 ,barton1 with a whole volume upon the subject1 and ,i was as much in the dark after reading it as ,i had been before ,i opened it4 ,all previous biographers1 it appeared by this author's evidence1 had either dodged the problem1 or lied4 ,the official doctrine1 in this as in other departments1 is obviously quite unsound4 ,one hears in the ,sunday-schools that ,abe was an austere and pious fellow1 constantly taking the name of ,god in whispers1 just as one reads in the school history-books that he was a shining idealist1 holding all his vast powers by the magic of an inner and ineffable virtue4 ,imagine a man getting on in ,american politics1 interesting and enchanting the boobery1 sawing off the horns of other politicians1 elbowing his way through primaries and conventions1 by the magic of virtue6 ,as well talk of fetching the mob by hawking exact and arctic justice6 ,abe1 in fact1 must have been a fellow highly skilled at the great democratic art of gum-shoeing4 ,i like to think of him as one who defeated such politicians as ,stanton1 ,douglas and ,sumner with their own weapons--deftly leading them into ambuscades1 boldly pulling their noses1 magnificently ham-stringing and horn-swoggling them--in brief1 as a politician of extraordinary talents1 who loved the game for its own sake1 and had the measure of the crowd4 ,his official portraits1 both in prose and in daguerreotype1 show him wearing the mien of a man about to be hanged2 one never sees him smiling4 ,nevertheless1 one hears that1 until he emerged from ,illinois1 they always put the women1 children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard1 and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the ,state ,legislature was indistinguishable from that of a ,tammany ,nietzsche4 ,but1 as ,i say1 it is hopeless to look for the real man in the biographies of him3 they are all full of distortion1 chiefly pious and sentimental4 ,the defect runs through the whole of ,american political biography1 and even through the whole of ,american history4 ,nearly all our professional historians are poor men holding college posts1 and they are ten times more cruelly beset by the ruling politico-plutocratic-social oligarchy than ever the ,prussian professors were by the ,hohenzollerns4 ,let them diverge in the slightest from what is the current official doctrine1 and they are turned out of their chairs with a ceremony suitable for the expulsion of a drunken valet4 ,during the recent war a herd of two thousand and five hundred such miserable slaves was organized by ,dr4 ,creel to lie for their country1 and they at once fell upon the congenial task of rewriting ,american history to make it accord with the ideas of ,h4 ,p4 ,davison1 ,admiral ,sims1 ,nicholas ,murray ,butler1 the ,astors1 ,barney ,baruch and ,lord ,northcliffe4 ,it was a committee of this herd that solemnly pledged the honor of ,american scholarship to the authenticity of the celebrated ,sisson documents4444 ,in the face of such acute miliary imbecility it is not surprising to discover that all of the existing biographies of the late ,colonel ,roosevelt--and they have been rolling off the presses at a dizzy rate since his death--are feeble1 inaccurate1 ignorant and preposterous4 ,i have read1 ,i suppose1 at least ten of these tomes during the past year or so1 and in all of them ,i have found vastly more gush than sense4 ,lawrence ,abbott's ,impressions of ,theodore ,roosevelt and ,william ,roscoe ,thayer's ,theodore ,roosevelt may well serve as specimens4 ,abbott's book is the composition1 not of an unbiased student of the man1 but of a sort of groom of the hero4 ,he is so extremely eager to prove that ,roosevelt was the perfect right-thinker1 according to the transient definitions of right-thinking1 that he manages to get a flavor of dubiousness into his whole chronicle4 ,i find myself doubting him even when ,i know that he is honest and suspect that he is right4 ,as for ,thayer1 all he offers is a hasty and hollow pot-boiler--such a work as might have been well within the talents of1 say1 the late ,murat ,halstead or the editor of the ,new ,york ,times4 ,this ,thayer has been heavily praised of late as the ,leading ,american ,biographer1 and one constantly hears that some new university has made him ,legum ,doctor1 or that he has been awarded a medal by this or that learned society1 or that the post has brought him a new ribbon from some literary potentate in foreign parts4 ,if1 in fact1 he is actually the cock of the walk in biography1 then all ,i have said against ,american biographers is too mild and mellow4 ,what one finds in his book is simply the third-rate correctness of a ,boston colonial4 ,consider1 for example1 his frequent discussions of the war--a necessity in any work on ,roosevelt4 ,in ,england there is the mob's view of the war1 and there is the view of civilized and intelligent men1 e4 g41 ,lansdowne1 ,loreburn1 ,austin ,harrison1 ,morel1 ,keynes1 ,haldane1 ,hirst1 ,balfour1 ,robert ,cecil4 ,in ,new ,england1 it would appear1 the two views coalesce1 with the first outside4 ,there is scarcely a line on the subject in ,thayer's book that might not have been written by ,horatio ,bottomley4444 ,obviously1 ,roosevelt's reaction to the war must occupy a large part of any adequate biography of him1 for that reaction was probably more comprehensively typical of the man than any other business of his life4 ,it displayed not only his whole stock of political principles1 but also his whole stock of political tricks4 ,it plumbed1 on the one hand1 the depths of his sagacity1 and on the other hand the depths of his insincerity4 ,fundamentally1 ,i am convinced1 he was quite out of sympathy with1 and even quite unable to comprehend the body of doctrine upon which the ,allies1 and later the ,united ,states1 based their case4 ,to him it must have seemed insane when it was not hypocritical1 and hypocritical when it was not insane4 ,his instincts were profoundly against a new loosing of democratic fustian upon the world2 he believed in strongly centralized states1 founded upon power and devoted to enterprises far transcending mere internal government2 he was an imperialist of the type of ,cecil ,rhodes1 ,treitschke and ,delcass4 ,but the fortunes of domestic politics jockeyed him into the position of standing as the spokesman of an almost exactly contrary philosophy4 ,the visible enemy before him was ,wilson4 ,what he wanted as a politician was something that he could get only by wresting it from ,wilson1 and ,wilson was too cunning to yield it without making a tremendous fight1 chiefly by chicane--whooping for peace while preparing for war1 playing mob fear against mob fear1 concealing all his genuine motives and desires beneath clouds of chautauqual rhetoric1 leading a mad dance whose tune changed at every swing4 ,here was an opponent that more than once puzzled ,roosevelt1 and in the end flatly dismayed him4 ,here was a mob-master with a technique infinitely more subtle and effective than his own4 ,so lured into an unequal combat1 the ,rough ,rider got bogged in absurdities so immense that only the democratic ansthesia to absurdity saved him4 ,to make any progress at all he was forced into fighting against his own side4 ,he passed from the scene bawling piteously for a cause that1 at bottom1 it is impossible to imagine him believing in1 and in terms of a philosophy that was as foreign to his true faith as it was to the faith of ,wilson4 ,in the whole affair there was a colossal irony4 ,both contestants were intrinsically frauds4 ,the fraudulence of ,wilson is now admitted by all save a few survivors of the old corps of official press-agents1 most of them devoid of both honesty and intelligence4 ,no unbiased man1 in the presence of the revelations of ,bullitt1 ,keynes and a hundred other witnesses1 and of the ,russian and ,shantung performances1 and of innumerable salient domestic phenomena1 can now believe that the ,doctor dulcifluus was ever actually in favor of any of the brummagem ideals he once wept for1 to the edification of a moral universe4 ,they were1 at best1 no more than ingenious ruses de guerre1 and even in the day of their widest credit it was the ,espionage ,act and the ,solicitor-,general to the ,postoffice1 rather than any plausibility in their substance1 that got them their credit4 ,in ,roosevelt's case the imposture is less patent2 he died before it was fully unmasked4 ,what is more1 his death put an end to whatever investigation of it was under way1 for ,american sentimentality holds that it is indecent to inquire into the weaknesses of the dead1 at least until all the flowers have withered on their tombs4 ,when1 a year ago1 ,i ventured in a magazine article to call attention to ,roosevelt's philosophical kinship to the ,kaiser ,i received letters of denunciation from all parts of the ,united ,states1 and not a few forthright demands that ,i recant on penalty of lynch law4 ,prudence demanded that ,i heed these demands4 ,we live in a curious and often unsafe country4 ,haled before a ,roosevelt judge for speeding my automobile1 or spitting on the sidewalk1 or carrying a jug1 ,i might have been railroaded for ten years under some constructive corollary of the ,espionage ,act4 ,but there were two things that supported me in my contumacy to the departed4 ,one was a profound reverence for and fidelity to the truth1 sometimes almost amounting to fanaticism4 ,the other was the support of my venerable brother in epistemology1 the eminent ,iowa right-thinker and patriot1 ,prof4 ,dr4 ,s4 ,p4 ,sherman4 ,writing in the ,nation1 where he survives from more seemly days than these1 ,prof4 ,dr4 ,sherman put the thing in plain terms4 ,with the essentials in the religion of the militarists of ,germany1 he said1 ,roosevelt was utterly in sympathy4 ,utterly8 ,perhaps the adverb is a bit too strong4 ,there was in the man a certain instinctive antipathy to the concrete aristocrat and in particular to the aristocrat's private code--the product1 no doubt1 of his essentially bourgeois origin and training4 ,but if he could not go with the ,junkers all the way1 he could at least go the whole length of their distrust of the third order--the undifferentiated masses of men below4 ,here1 ,i daresay1 he owed a lot to ,nietzsche4 ,he was always reading ,german books1 and among them1 no doubt1 were ,also sprach ,zarathustra and ,jenseits von ,gut und ,bse4 ,in fact1 the echoes were constantly sounding in his own harangues4 ,years ago1 as an intellectual exercise while confined to hospital1 ,i devised and printed a give-away of the ,rooseveltian philosophy in parallel columns--in one column1 extracts from ,the ,strenuous ,life2 in the other1 extracts from ,nietzsche4 ,the borrowings were numerous and unescapable4 ,theodore had swallowed ,friedrich as a peasant swallows ,peruna--bottle1 cork1 label and testimonials4 ,worse1 the draft whetted his appetite1 and soon he was swallowing the ,kaiser of the ,garde-,kavallerie-mess and battleship-launching speeches--another somewhat defective ,junker4 ,in his palmy days it was often impossible to distinguish his politico-theological bulls from those of ,wilhelm2 during the war1 indeed1 ,i suspect that some of them were boldly lifted' by the ,british press bureau1 and palmed off as felonious imprudences out of ,potsdam4 ,wilhelm was his model in ,weltpolitik1 and in sociology1 exegetics1 administration1 law1 sport and connubial polity no less4 ,both roared for doughty armies1 eternally prepared--for the theory that the way to prevent war is to make all conceivable enemies think twice1 thrice1 ten times4 ,both dreamed of gigantic navies1 with battleships as long as ,brooklyn ,bridge4 ,both preached incessantly the duty of the citizen to the state1 with the soft pedal upon the duty of the state to the citizen4 ,both praised the habitually gravid wife4 ,both delighted in the armed pursuit of the lower fauna4 ,both heavily patronized the fine arts4 ,both were intimates of ,god1 and announced ,his desires with authority4 ,both believed that all men who stood opposed to them were prompted by the devil and would suffer for it in hell4 ,if1 in fact1 there was any difference between them1 it was all in favor of ,wilhelm4 ,for one thing1 he made very much fewer speeches2 it took some colossal event1 such as the launching of a dreadnaught or the birthday of a colonel-general1 to get him upon his legs2 the ,reichstag was not constantly deluged with his advice and upbraiding4 ,for another thing1 he was a milder and more modest man--one more accustomed1 let us say1 to circumstance and authority1 and hence less intoxicated by the greatness of his state4 ,finally1 he had been trained to think1 not only of his own immediate fortunes1 but also of the remote interests of a family that1 in his most expansive days1 promised to hold the throne for many years1 and so he cultivated a certain prudence1 and even a certain ingratiating suavity4 ,he could1 on occasion1 be extremely polite to an opponent4 ,but ,roosevelt was never polite to an opponent2 perhaps a gentleman1 by ,american standards1 he was surely never a gentle man4 ,in a political career of nearly forty years he was never even fair to an opponent4 ,all of his gabble about the square deal was merely so much protective coloration1 easily explicable on elementary ,freudian grounds4 ,no man1 facing ,roosevelt in the heat of controversy1 ever actually got a square deal4 ,he took extravagant advantages2 he played to the worst idiocies of the mob2 he hit below the belt almost habitually4 ,one never thinks of him as a duelist1 say of the school of ,disraeli1 ,palmerston and1 to drop a bit1 ,blaine4 ,one always thinks of him as a glorified longshoreman engaged eternally in cleaning out bar-rooms--and not too proud to gouge when the inspiration came to him1 or to bite in the clinches1 or to oppose the relatively fragile brass knuckles of the code with chair-legs1 bung-starters1 cuspidors1 demijohns1 and ice-picks4 ,abbott and ,thayer1 in their books1 make elaborate efforts to depict their hero as one born with a deep loathing of the whole ,prussian scheme of things1 and particularly of the ,prussian technique in combat4 ,abbott even goes so far as to hint that the attentions of the ,kaiser1 during ,roosevelt's historic tour of ,europe on his return from ,africa1 were subtly revolting to him4 ,nothing could be more absurd4 ,prof4 ,dr4 ,sherman1 in the article ,i have mentioned1 blows up that nonsense by quoting from a speech made by the tourist in ,berlin--a speech arguing for the most extreme sort of militarism in a manner that must have made even some of the ,junkers blow their noses dubiously4 ,the disproof need not be piled up2 the ,america that ,roosevelt dreamed of was always a sort of swollen ,prussia1 truculent without and regimented within4 ,there was always a clank of the saber in his discourse2 he could not discuss the tamest matter without swaggering in the best dragoon fashion4 ,abbott gets into yet deeper waters when he sets up the doctrine that the invasion of ,belgium threw his darling into an instantaneous and tremendous fit of moral indignation1 and that the curious delay in the public exhibition thereof1 so much discussed since1 was due to his 7,abbott's7 fatuous interference--a faux pas later regretted with much bitterness4 ,unluckily1 the evidence he offers leaves me full of doubts4 ,what the doctrine demands that one believe is simply this3 that the man who1 for mere commercial advantage and 7in ,frederick's famous phrase7 to make himself talked of in the world1 tore up the treaty of #ahdh between the ,united ,states and ,colombia 7geb4 ,new ,granada71 whereby the ,united ,states forever guaranteed the sovereignty and ownership of the ,colombians in the isthmus of ,panama--that this same man1 thirteen years later1 was horrified into a fever when ,germany1 facing powerful foes on two fronts1 tore up the treaty of #ahcb1 guaranteeing1 not the sovereignty1 but the bald neutrality of ,belgium--a neutrality already destroyed1 according to the evidence before the ,germans1 by ,belgium's own acts4 ,it is hard1 without an inordinate strain upon the credulity1 to believe any such thing1 particularly in view of the fact that this instantaneous indignation of the most impulsive and vocal of men was diligently concealed for at least six weeks1 with reporters camped upon his doorstep day and night1 begging him to say the very thing that he left so darkly unsaid4 ,can one imagine ,roosevelt1 with red-fire raging within him and sky-rockets bursting in his veins1 holding his peace for a month and a half8 ,i have no doubt whatever that ,abbott1 as he says1 desired to avoid embarrassing ,dr4 ,wilson--but think of ,roosevelt showing any such delicacy6 ,for one1 ,i am not equal to the feat4 ,all that unprecedented reticence1 in fact1 is far more readily explicable on other and less lofty grounds4 ,what really happened ,i presume to guess4 ,my guess is that ,roosevelt1 like the great majority of other ,americans1 was not instantly and automatically outraged by the invasion of ,belgium4 ,on the contrary1 he probably viewed it as a regrettable1 but not unexpected or unparalleled device of war--if anything1 as something rather thrillingly gaudy and effective--a fine piece of virtuosity1 pleasing to a military connoisseur4 ,but then came the deluge of ,belgian atrocity stories1 and the organized campaign to enlist ,american sympathies4 ,it succeeded very quickly4 ,by the middle of ,august the ,british press bureau was in full swing2 by the beginning of ,september the country was flooded with inflammatory stuff2 six weeks after the war opened it was already hazardous for a ,german in ,america to state his country's case4 ,meanwhile1 the ,wilson administration had declared for neutrality1 and was still making a more or less sincere effort to practice it1 at least on the surface4 ,here was ,roosevelt's opportunity1 and he leaped to it with sure instinct4 ,on the one side was the adminstration that he detested1 and that all his self-interest 7e4 g41 his yearning to get back his old leadership and to become ,president again in #aiag7 prompted him to deal a mortal blow1 and on the other side was a ready-made issue1 full of emotional possibilities1 stupendously pumped up by extremely clever propaganda1 and so far unembraced by any other rabble-rouser of the first magnitude4 ,is it any wonder that he gave a whoop1 jumped upon his cayuse1 and began screaming for war8 ,in war lay the greatest chance of his life4 ,in war lay the confusion and destruction of ,wilson1 and the melodramatic renaissance of the ,rough ,rider1 the professional hero1 the national ,barbarossa4 ,in all this1 of course1 ,i strip the process of its plumes and spangles1 and expose a chain of causes and effects that ,roosevelt himself1 if he were alive1 would denounce as grossly contumelious to his native purity of spirit--and perhaps in all honesty4 ,it is not necessary to raise any doubts as to that honesty4 ,no one who has given any study to the developement and propagation of political doctrine in the ,united ,states can have failed to notice how the belief in issues among politicians tends to run in exact ratio to the popularity of those issues4 ,let the populace begin suddenly to swallow a new panacea or to take fright at a new bugaboo1 and almost instantly nine-tenths of the master-minds of politics begin to believe that the panacea is a sure cure for all the malaises of1 the republic1 and the bugaboo an immediate and unbearable menace to all law1 order and domestic tranquillity4 ,at the bottom of this singular intellectual resilience1 of course1 there is a good deal of hard calculation2 a man must keep up with the procession of crazes1 or his day is swiftly done4 ,but in it there are also considerations a good deal more subtle1 and maybe less discreditable4 ,for one thing1 a man devoted professionally to patriotism and the wisdom of the fathers is very apt to come to a resigned sort of acquiescence in all the doctrinaire rubbish that lies beneath the national scheme of things--to believe1 let us say1 if not that the plain people are gifted with an infallible sagacity1 then at least that they have an inalienable right to see their follies executed4 ,poll-parroting nonsense as a matter of daily routine1 the politician ends by assuming that it is sense1 even though he doesn't believe it4 ,for another thing1 there is the contagion of mob enthusiasm--a much underestimated murrain4 ,we all saw what it could do during the war--college professors taking their tune from the yellow journals1 the rev4 clergy performing in the pulpit like so many ,liberty ,loan orators in five-cent moving-picture houses1 hysteria grown epidemic like the influenza4 ,no man is so remote and arctic that he is wholly safe from that contamination2 it explains many extravagant phenomena of a democratic society2 in particular1 it explains why the mob leader is so often a victim to his mob4 ,roosevelt1 a perfectly typical politician1 devoted to the trade1 not primarily because he was gnawed by ideals1 but because he frankly enjoyed its rough-and-tumble encounters and its gaudy rewards1 was probably moved in both ways--and also by the hard calculation that ,i have mentioned4 ,if1 by any ineptness of the ,british press-agents1 tear-squeezers and orphan-exhibitors1 indignation over the invasion of ,belgium had failed to materialize--if1 worse still1 some gross infringement of ,american rights by the ,english had caused it to be forgotten completely--if1 finally1 ,dr4 ,wilson had been whooping for war with the populace firmly against him--in such event it goes without saying that the moral horror of ,dr4 ,roosevelt would have stopped short at a very low amperage1 and that he would have refrained from making it the center of his polity4 ,but with things as they were1 lying neatly to his hand1 he permitted it to take on an extraordinary virulence1 and before long all his old delight in ,german militarism had been converted into a lofty detestation of ,german militarism1 and its chief spokesman on this side of the ,atlantic became its chief opponent4 ,getting rid of that old delight1 of course1 was not easily achieved4 ,the concrete enthusiasm could be throttled1 but the habit of mind remained4 ,thus one beheld the curious spectacle of militarism belabored in terms of militarism--of the ,kaiser arraigned in unmistakably kaiserliche tones4 ,such violent swallowings and regurgitations were no novelties to the man4 ,his whole political career was marked1 in fact1 by performances of the same sort4 ,the issues that won him most votes were issues that1 at bottom1 he didn't believe in2 there was always a mental reservation in his rhetoric4 ,he got into politics1 not as a tribune of the plain people1 but as an amateur reformer of the snobbish type common in the eighties1 by the ,nation out of the ,social ,register4 ,he was a young ,harvard man scandalized by the discovery that his town was run by men with such names as ,michael ,o',shaunnessy and ,terence ,googan--that his social inferiors were his political superiors4 ,his sympathies were essentially anti-democratic4 ,he had a high view of his private position as a young fellow of wealth and education4 ,he believed in strong centralization--the concentration of power in a few hands1 the strict regimentation of the nether herd1 the abandonment of democratic platitudes4 ,his heroes were such ,federalists as ,morris and ,hamilton2 he made his first splash in the world by writing about them and praising them4 ,worse1 his daily associations were with the old ,union ,league crowd of high-tariff ,republicans--men almost apoplectically opposed to every movement from below--safe and sane men1 highly conservative and suspicious men--the profiteers of peace1 as they afterward became the profiteers of war4 ,his early adventures in politics were not very fortunate1 nor did they reveal any capacity for leadership4 ,the bosses of the day took him in rather humorously1 played him for what they could get out of him1 and then turned him loose4 ,in a few years he became disgusted and went ,west4 ,returning after a bit1 he encountered catastrophe3 as a candidate for ,mayor of ,new ,york he was drubbed unmercifully4 ,he went back to the ,west4 ,he was1 up to this time1 a comic figure--an anti-politician victimized by politicians1 a pseudo-aristocrat made ridiculous by the mob-masters he detested4 ,but meanwhile something was happening that changed the whole color of the political scene1 and was destined1 eventually1 to give ,roosevelt his chance4 ,that something was a shifting in what might be called the foundations of reform4 ,up to now it had been an essentially aristocratic movement--superior1 sniffish and anti-democratic4 ,but hereafter it took on a strongly democratic color and began to adopt democratic methods4 ,more1 the change gave it new life4 ,what ,harvard1 the ,union ,league ,club and the ,nation had failed to accomplish1 the plain people now undertook to accomplish4 ,this invasion of the old citadel of virtue was first observed in the ,west1 and its manifestations out there must have given ,roosevelt a good deal more disquiet than satisfaction4 ,it is impossible to imagine him finding anything to his taste in the outlandish doings of the ,populists1 the wild schemes of the pre-,bryan dervishes4 ,his instincts were against all that sort of thing4 ,but as the movement spread toward the ,east it took on a certain urbanity1 and by the time it reached the seaboard it had begun to be quite civilized4 ,with this new brand of reform ,roosevelt now made terms4 ,it was full of principles that outraged all his pruderies1 but it at least promised to work4 ,his entire political history thereafter1 down to the day of his death1 was a history of compromises with the new forces--of a gradual yielding1 for strategic purposes1 to ideas that were intrinsically at odds with his congenital prejudices4 ,when1 after a generation of that sort of compromising1 the so-called ,progressive party was organized and he seized the leadership of it from the ,westerners who had founded it1 he performed a feat of wholesale englutination that must forever hold a high place upon the roll of political prodigies4 ,that is to say1 he swallowed at one gigantic gulp1 and out of the same herculean jug1 the most amazing mixture of social1 political and economic perunas ever got down by one hero1 however valiant1 however athirst--a cocktail made up of all the elixirs hawked among the boobery in his time1 from woman suffrage to the direct primary1 and from the initiative and referendum to the short ballot1 and from prohibition to public ownership1 and from trust-busting to the recall of judges4 ,this homeric achievement made him the head of the most tatterdemalion party ever seen in ,american politics--a party composed of such incompatible ingredients and hung together so loosely that it began to disintegrate the moment it was born4 ,in part it was made up of mere disordered enthusiasts--believers in anything and everything1 pathetic victims of the credulity complex1 habitual followers of jitney messiahs1 incurable hopers and snufflers4 ,but in part it was also made up of rice converts like ,roosevelt himself--men eager for office1 disappointed by the old parties1 and now quite willing to accept any aid that half-idiot doctrinaires could give them4 ,i have no doubt that ,roosevelt himself1 carried away by the emotional storms of the moment and especially by the quasi-religious monkey-shines that marked the first ,progressive convention1 gradually convinced himself that at least some of the doctrinaires1 in the midst of all their imbecility1 yet preached a few ideas that were workable1 and perhaps even sound4 ,but at bottom he was against them1 and not only in the matter of their specific sure cures1 but also in the larger matter of their childish faith in the wisdom and virtue of the plain people4 ,roosevelt1 for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words1 democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master1 had no such faith in his heart of hearts4 ,he didn't believe in democracy2 he believed simply in government4 ,his remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority1 but a hard concentration of authority4 ,he was not in favor of unlimited experiment2 he was in favor of a rigid control from above1 a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen4 ,he was not for democracy as his followers understood democracy1 and as it actually is and must be2 he was for a paternalism of the true ,bismarckian pattern1 almost of the ,napoleonic or ,ludendorffian pattern--a paternalism concerning itself with all things1 from the regulation of coal-mining and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights4 ,his instincts were always those of the property-owning ,tory1 not those of the romantic ,liberal4 ,all the fundamental objects of ,liberalism --free speech1 unhampered enterprise1 the least possible governmental interference--were abhorrent to him4 ,even when1 for campaign purposes1 he came to terms with the ,liberals his thoughts always ranged far afield4 ,when he tackled the trusts the thing that he had in his mind's eye was not the restoration of competition but the subordination of all private trusts to one great national trust1 with himself at its head4 ,and when he attacked the courts it was not because they put their own prejudice before the law but because they refused to put his prejudices before the law4 ,in all his career no one ever heard him make an argument for the rights of the citizen2 his eloquence was always expended in expounding the duties of the citizen4 ,i have before me a speech in which he pleaded for a spirit of kindly justice toward every man and woman1 but that seems to be as far as he ever got in that direction--and it was the gratuitous justice of the absolute monarch that he apparently had in mind1 not the autonomous and inalienable justice of a free society4 ,the duties of the citizen1 as he understood them1 related not only to acts1 but also to thoughts4 ,there was1 to his mind1 a simple body of primary doctrine1 and dissent from it was the foulest of crimes4 ,no man could have been more bitter against opponents1 or more unfair to them1 or more ungenerous4 ,in this department1 indeed1 even so gifted a specialist in dishonorable controversy as ,dr4 ,wilson has seldom surpassed him4 ,he never stood up to a frank and chivalrous debate4 ,he dragged herrings across the trail4 ,he made seductive faces at the gallery4 ,he capitalized his enormous talents as an entertainer1 his rank as a national hero1 his public influence and consequence4 ,the two great law-suits in which he was engaged were screaming burlesques upon justice4 ,he tried them in the newspapers before ever they were called2 he befogged them with irrelevant issues2 his appearances in court were not the appearances of a witness standing on a level with other witnesses1 but those of a comedian sure of his crowd4 ,he was1 in his dealings with concrete men as in his dealings with men in the mass1 a charlatan of the very highest skill--and there was in him1 it goes without saying1 the persuasive charm of the charlatan as well as the daring deviousness1 the humanness of navet as well as the humanness of chicane4 ,he knew how to woo--and not only boobs4 ,he was1 for all his ruses and ambuscades1 a jolly fellow4 ,it seems to be forgotten that the current ,american theory that political heresy should be put down by force1 that a man who disputes whatever is official has no rights in law or equity1 that he is lucky if he fares no worse than to lose his constitutional benefits of free speech1 free assemblage and the use of the mails--it seems to be forgotten that this theory was invented1 not by ,dr4 ,wilson1 but by ,roosevelt4 ,most ,liberals1 ,i suppose1 would credit it1 if asked1 to ,wilson4 ,he has carried it to extravagant lengths2 he is the father superior of all the present advocates of it2 he will probably go down into ,american history as its greatest prophet4 ,but it was first clearly stated1 not in any ,wilsonian bull to the right-thinkers of all lands1 but in ,roosevelt's proceedings against the so-called ,paterson anarchists4 ,you will find it set forth at length in an opinion prepared for him by his ,attorney-,general1 ,charles ,j4 ,bonaparte1 another curious and almost fabulous character1 also an absolutist wearing the false whiskers of a democrat4 ,bonaparte furnished the law1 and ,roosevelt furnished the blood and iron4 ,it was an almost ideal combination2 ,bonaparte had precisely the touch of ,italian finesse that the ,rough ,rider always lacked4 ,roosevelt believed in the ,paterson doctrine--in brief1 that the ,constitution does not throw its cloak around heretics--to the end of his days4 ,in the face of what he conceived to be contumacy to revelation his fury took on a sort of lyrical grandeur4 ,there was nothing too awful for the culprit in the dock4 ,upon his head were poured denunciations as violent as the wildest interdicts of a medival pope4 ,the appearance of such men1 of course1 is inevitable under a democracy4 ,consummate showmen1 they arrest the wonder of the mob1 and so put its suspicions to sleep4 ,what they actually believe is of secondary consequence2 the main thing is what they say2 even more1 the way they say it4 ,obviously1 their activity does a great deal of damage to the democratic theory1 for they are standing refutations of the primary doctrine that the common folk choose their leaders wisely4 ,they damage it again in another and more subtle way4 ,that is to say1 their ineradicable contempt for the minds they must heat up and bamboozle leads them into a fatalism that shows itself in a cynical and opportunistic politics1 a deliberate avoidance of fundamentals4 ,the policy of a democracy thus becomes an eternal improvisation1 changing with the private ambitions of its leaders and the transient and often unintelligible emotions of its rank and file4 ,roosevelt1 incurably undemocratic in his habits of mind1 often found it difficult to gauge those emotional oscillations4 ,the fact explains his frequent loss of mob support1 his periodical journeys into ,coventry4 ,there were times when his magnificent talents as a public comedian brought the proletariat to an almost unanimous groveling at his feet1 but there were also times when he puzzled and dismayed it1 and so awakened its hostility4 ,when he assaulted ,wilson on the neutrality issue1 early in #aiae1 he made a quite typical mistake4 ,that mistake consisted in assuming that public indignation over the wrongs of the ,belgians would maintain itself at a high temperature--that it would develop rapidly into a demand for intervention4 ,roosevelt made himself the spokesman of that demand1 and then found to his consternation that it was waning--that the great masses of the plain people1 prospering under the ,wilsonian neutrality1 were inclined to preserve it1 at no matter what cost to the ,belgians4 ,in #aiae1 after the ,lusitania affair1 things seemed to swing his way again1 and he got vigorous support from the ,british press bureau4 ,but in a few months he found himself once more attempting to lead a mob that was fast slipping away4 ,wilson1 a very much shrewder politician1 with little of ,roosevelt's weakness for succumbing to his own rhetoric1 discerned the truth much more quickly and clearly4 ,in #aiaf he made his campaign for relection on a flatly anti-,roosevelt peace issue1 and not only got himself relected1 but also drove ,roosevelt out of the ring4 ,what happened thereafter deserves a great deal more careful study than it will ever get from the timorous eunuchs who posture as ,american historians4 ,at the moment1 it is the official doctrine in ,england1 where the thing is more freely discussed than at home1 that ,wilson was forced into the war by an irresistible movement from below--that the plain people compelled him to abandon neutrality and move reluctantly upon the ,germans4 ,nothing could be more untrue4 ,the plain people1 at the end of #aiaf1 were in favor of peace1 and they believed that ,wilson was in favor of peace4 ,how they were gradually worked up to complaisance and then to enthusiasm and then to hysteria and then to acute mania--this is a tale to be told in more leisurely days and by historians without boards of trustees on their necks4 ,for the present purpose it is sufficient to note that the whole thing was achieved so quickly and so neatly that its success left ,roosevelt surprised and helpless4 ,his issue had been stolen from directly under his nose4 ,he was left standing daunted and alone1 a boy upon a burning deck4 ,it took him months to collect his scattered wits1 and even then his attack upon the administration was feeble and ineffective4 ,to the plain people it seemed a mere ill-natured snapping at a successful rival1 which in fact it was1 and so they paid no heed to it1 and ,roosevelt found himself isolated once more4 ,thus he passed from the scene in the shadows1 a broken politician and a disappointed man4 ,i have a notion that he died too soon4 ,his best days were probably not behind him1 but ahead of him4 ,had he lived ten years longer1 he might have enjoyed a great rehabilitation1 and exchanged his old false leadership of the inflammatory and fickle mob for a sound and true leadership of the civilized minority4 ,for the more one studies his mountebankeries as mob-master1 the more one is convinced that there was a shrewd man beneath the motley1 and that his actual beliefs were anything but nonsensical4 ,the truth of them1 indeed1 emerges more clearly day by day4 ,the old theory of a federation of free and autonomous states has broken down by its own weight1 and we are moved toward centralization by forces that have long been powerful and are now quite irresistible4 ,so with the old theory of national isolation3 it1 too1 has fallen to pieces4 ,the ,united ,states can no longer hope to lead a separate life in the world1 undisturbed by the pressure of foreign aspirations4 ,we came out of the war to find ourselves hemmed in by hostilities that no longer troubled to conceal themselves1 and if they are not as close and menacing to-day as those that have hemmed in ,germany for centuries they are none the less plainly there and plainly growing4 ,roosevelt1 by whatever route of reflection or intuition1 arrived at a sense of these facts at a time when it was still somewhat scandalous to state them1 and it was the capital effort of his life to reconcile them1 in some dark way or other1 to the prevailing platitudes1 and so get them heeded4 ,to-day no one seriously maintains1 as all ,americans once maintained1 that the states can go on existing together as independent commonwealths1 each with its own laws1 its own legal theory and its own view of the common constitutional bond4 ,and to-day no one seriously maintains1 as all ,americans once maintained1 that the nation may safely potter on without adequate means of defense4 ,however unpleasant it may be to contemplate1 the fact is plain that the ,american people1 during the next century1 will have to fight to maintain their place in the sun4 ,roosevelt lived just long enough to see his notions in these directions take on life1 but not long enough to see them openly adopted4 ,to the extent of his prevision he was a genuine leader of the nation1 and perhaps in the years to come1 when his actual ideas are disentangled from the demagogic fustian in which he had to wrap them1 his more honest pronunciamentoes will be given canonical honors1 and he will be ranked among the prophets4 ,he saw clearly more than one other thing that was by no means obvious to his age--for example1 the inevitability of frequent wars under the new world-system of extreme nationalism2 again1 the urgent necessity1 for primary police ends1 of organizing the backward nations into groups of vassals1 each under the hoof of some first-rate power2 yet again1 the probability of the breakdown of the old system of free competition2 once more1 the high social utility of the ,spartan virtues and the grave dangers of sloth and ease2 finally1 the incompatibility of free speech and democracy4 ,i do not say that he was always quite honest1 even when he was most indubitably right4 ,but in so far as it was possible for him to be honest and exist at all politically1 he inclined toward the straightforward thought and the candid word4 ,that is to say1 his instinct prompted him to tell the truth1 just as the instinct of ,dr4 ,wilson prompts him to shift and dissimulate4 ,what ailed him was the fact that his lust for glory1 when it came to a struggle1 was always vastly more powerful than his lust for the eternal verities4 ,tempted sufficiently1 he would sacrifice anything and everything to get applause4 ,thus the statesman was debauched by the politician1 and the philosopher was elbowed out of sight by the popinjay4 ,where he failed most miserably was in his remedies4 ,a remarkably penetrating diagnostician1 well-read1 unprejudiced and with a touch of genuine scientific passion1 he always stooped to quackery when he prescribed a course of treatment4 ,for all his sensational attacks upon the trusts1 he never managed to devise a scheme to curb them--and even when he sought to apply the schemes of other men he invariably corrupted the business with timorousness and insincerity4 ,so with his campaign for national preparedness4 ,he displayed the disease magnificently1 but the course of medication that he proposed was vague and unconvincing2 it was not1 indeed1 without justification that the plain people mistook his advocacy of an adequate army for a mere secret yearning to prance upon a charger at the head of huge hordes4 ,so1 again1 with his eloquent plea for national solidarity and an end of hyphenism4 ,the dangers that he pointed out were very real and very menacing1 but his plan for abating them only made them worse4 ,his objurgations against the ,germans surely accomplished nothing2 the hyphenate of #aiae is still a hyphenate in his heart--with bitter and unforgettable grievances to support him4 ,roosevelt1 very characteristically1 swung too far4 ,in denouncing ,german hyphenism so extravagantly he contrived to give an enormous impetus to ,english hyphenism1 a far older and more perilous malady4 ,it has already gone so far that a large and influential party endeavors almost openly to convert the ,united ,states into a mere vassal state of ,england's4 ,instead of national solidarity following the war1 we have only a revival of ,know-,nothingism2 one faction of hyphenates tries to exterminate another faction4 ,roosevelt's error here was one that he was always making4 ,carried away by the ease with which he could heat up the mob1 he tried to accomplish instantly and by force majeure what could only be accomplished by a long and complex process1 with more good will on both sides than ever so opinionated and melodramatic a pseudo-,junker was capable of4 ,but though he thus made a mess of the cure1 he was undoubtedly right about the disease4 ,the talented ,sherman1 in the monograph that ,i have praised1 argues that the chief contribution of the dead gladiator to ,american life was the example of his gigantic gusto1 his delight in toil and struggle1 his superb aliveness4 ,the fact is plain4 ,what he stood most clearly in opposition to was the superior pessimism of the three ,adams brothers--the notion that the public problems of a democracy are unworthy the thought and effort of a civilized and self-respecting man--the sad error that lies in wait for all of us who hold ourselves above the general4 ,against this suicidal aloofness ,roosevelt always hurled himself with brave effect4 ,enormously sensitive and resilient1 almost pathological in his appetite for activity1 he made it plain to every one that the most stimulating sort of sport imaginable was to be obtained in fighting1 not for mere money1 but for ideas4 ,there was no aristocratic reserve about him4 ,he was not1 in fact1 an aristocrat at all1 but a quite typical member of the upper bourgeoisie2 his people were not patroons in ,new ,amsterdam1 but simple traders2 he was himself a social pusher1 and eternally tickled by the thought that he had had a ,bonaparte in his cabinet4 ,the marks of the thoroughbred were simply not there4 ,the man was blatant1 crude1 overly confidential1 devious1 tyrannical1 vainglorious1 sometimes quite childish4 ,one often observed in him a certain pathetic wistfulness1 a reaching out for a grand manner that was utterly beyond him4 ,but the sweet went with the bitter4 ,he had all the virtues of the fat and complacent burgher4 ,his disdain of affectation and prudery was magnificent4 ,he hated all pretension save his own pretension4 ,he had a sound respect for hard effort1 for loyalty1 for thrift1 for honest achievement4 ,his worst defects1 it seems to me1 were the defects of his race and time4 ,aspiring to be the leader of a nation of third-rate men1 he had to stoop to the common level4 ,when he struck out for realms above that level he always came to grief3 this was the unsafe ,roosevelt1 the ,roosevelt who was laughed at1 the ,roosevelt retired suddenly to cold storage4 ,this was the ,roosevelt who1 in happier times and a better place1 might have been4 ,well1 one does what one can4 ,,iii4 ,,the ,,sahara ,,of ,,the ,,bozart ,alas1 for the ,south6 ,her books have grown fewer-- ,she never was much given to literature4 ,in the lamented ,j4 ,gordon ,coogler1 author of these elegaic lines1 there was the insight of a true poet4 ,he was the last bard of ,dixie1 at least in the legitimate line4 ,down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player1 a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician4 ,it is1 indeed1 amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity4 ,one thinks of the interstellar spaces1 of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether4 ,nearly the whole of ,europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms1 shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums3 one could throw in ,france1 ,germany and ,italy1 and still have room for the ,british ,isles4 ,and yet1 for all its size and all its wealth and all the progress it babbles of1 it is almost as sterile1 artistically1 intellectually1 culturally1 as the ,sahara ,desert4 ,there are single acres in ,europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the ,potomac2 there are probably single square miles in ,america4 ,if the whole of the late ,confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave to-morrow1 the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the ,yang-tse-kiang4 ,it would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization4 ,i say a civilization because that is what1 in the old days1 the ,south had1 despite the ,baptist and ,methodist barbarism that reigns down there now4 ,more1 it was a civilization of manifold excellences--perhaps the best that the ,western ,hemisphere has ever seen--undoubtedly the best that ,these ,states have ever seen4 ,down to the middle of the last century1 and even beyond1 the main hatchery of ideas on this side of the water was across the ,potomac bridges4 ,the ,new ,england shopkeepers and theologians never really developed a civilization2 all they ever developed was a government4 ,they were1 at their best1 tawdry and tacky fellows1 oafish in manner and devoid of imagination2 one searches the books in vain for mention of a salient ,yankee gentleman2 as well look for a ,welsh gentleman4 ,but in the south there were men of delicate fancy1 urbane instinct and aristocratic manner--in brief1 superior men--in brief1 gentry4 ,to politics1 their chief diversion1 they brought active and original minds4 ,it was there that nearly all the political theories we still cherish and suffer under came to birth4 ,it was there that the crude dogmatism of ,new ,england was refined and humanized4 ,it was there1 above all1 that some attention was given to the art of living--that life got beyond and above the state of a mere infliction and became an exhilarating experience4 ,a certain noble spaciousness was in the ancient southern scheme of things4 ,the ,ur-,confederate had leisure4 ,he liked to toy with ideas4 ,he was hospitable and tolerant4 ,he had the vague thing that we call culture4 ,but consider the condition of his late empire to-day4 ,the picture gives one the creeps4 ,it is as if the ,civil ,war stamped out every last bearer of the torch1 and left only a mob of peasants on the field4 ,one thinks of ,asia ,minor1 resigned to ,armenians1 ,greeks and wild swine1 of ,poland abandoned to the ,poles4 ,in all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate there is not a single picture gallery worth going into1 or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of ,beethoven1 or a single opera-house1 or a single theater devoted to decent plays1 or a single public monument 7built since the war7 that is worth looking at1 or a single workshop devoted to the making of beautiful things4 ,once you have counted ,robert ,loveman 7an ,ohioan by birth7 and ,john ,mc,clure 7an ,oklahoman7 you will not find a single southern poet above the rank of a neighborhood rhymester4 ,once you have counted ,james ,branch ,cabell 7a lingering survivor of the ancien rgime3 a scarlet dragonfly imbedded in opaque amber7 you will not find a single southern prose writer who can actually write4 ,and once you have--but when you come to critics1 musical composers1 painters1 sculptors1 architects and the like1 you will have to give it up1 for there is not even a bad one between the ,potomac mud-flats and the ,gulf4 ,nor an historian4 ,nor a sociologist4 ,nor a philosopher4 ,nor a theologian4 ,nor a scientist4 ,in all these fields the south is an awe-inspiring blank--a brother to ,portugal1 ,serbia and ,esthonia4 ,consider1 for example1 the present estate and dignity of ,virginia--in the great days indubitably the premier ,american state1 the mother of ,presidents and statesmen1 the home of the first ,american university worthy of the name1 the arbiter elegantiarum of the western world4 ,well1 observe ,virginia to-day4 ,it is years since a first-rate man1 save only ,cabell1 has come out of it2 it is years since an idea has come out of it4 ,the old aristocracy went down the red gullet of war2 the poor white trash are now in the saddle4 ,politics in ,virginia are cheap1 ignorant1 parochial1 idiotic2 there is scarcely a man in office above the rank of a professional job-seeker2 the political doctrine that prevails is made up of hand-me-downs from the bumpkinry of the ,middle ,west--,bryanism1 ,prohibition1 vice crusading1 all that sort of filthy claptrap2 the administration of the law is turned over to professors of ,puritanism and espionage2 a ,washington or a ,jefferson1 dumped there by some act of ,god1 would be denounced as a scoundrel and jailed overnight4 ,elegance1 esprit1 culture8 ,virginia has no art1 no literature1 no philosophy1 no mind or aspiration of her own4 ,her education has sunk to the ,baptist seminary level2 not a single contribution to human knowledge has come out of her colleges in twenty-five years2 she spends less than half upon her common schools1 per capita1 than any northern state spends4 ,in brief1 an intellectual ,gobi or ,lapland4 ,urbanity1 politesse1 chivalry8 ,co to6 ,it was in ,virginia that they invented the device of searching for contraband whisky in women's underwear4444 ,there remains1 at the top1 a ghost of the old aristocracy1 a bit wistful and infinitely charming4 ,but it has lost all its old leadership to fabulous monsters from the lower depths2 it is submerged in an industrial plutocracy that is ignorant and ignominious4 ,the mind of the state1 as it is revealed to the nation1 is pathetically nave and inconsequential4 ,it no longer reacts with energy and elasticity to great problems4 ,it has fallen to the bombastic trivialities of the camp-meeting and the chautauqua4 ,its foremost exponent--if so flabby a thing may be said to have an exponent--is a stateman whose name is synonymous with empty words1 broken pledges and false pretenses4 ,one could no more imagine a ,lee or a ,washington in the ,virginia of to-day than one could imagine a ,huxley in ,nicaragua4 ,i choose the ,old ,dominion1 not because ,i disdain it1 but precisely because ,i esteem it4 ,it is1 by long odds1 the most civilized of the southern states1 now as always4 ,it has sent a host of creditable sons northward2 the stream kept running into our own time4 ,virginians1 even the worst of them1 show the effects of a great tradition4 ,they hold themselves above other southerners1 and with sound pretension4 ,if one turns to such a commonwealth as ,georgia the picture becomes far darker4 ,there the liberated lower orders of whites have borrowed the worst commercial bounderism of the ,yankee and superimposed it upon a culture that1 at bottom1 is but little removed from savagery4 ,georgia is at once the home of the cotton-mill sweater and of the most noisy and vapid sort of chamber of commerce1 of the ,methodist parson turned ,savonarola and of the lynching bee4 ,a self-respecting ,european1 going there to live1 would not only find intellectual stimulation utterly lacking2 he would actually feel a certain insecurity1 as if the scene were the ,balkans or the ,china ,coast4 ,the ,leo ,frank affair was no isolated phenomenon4 ,it fitted into its frame very snugly4 ,it was a natural expression of ,georgian notions of truth and justice4 ,there is a state with more than half the area of ,italy and more population than either ,denmark or ,norway1 and yet in thirty years it has not produced a single idea4 ,once upon a time a ,georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice1 but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products1 not of white ,georgia1 but of black ,georgia4 ,writing afterward as a white man1 he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank4 ,and he is not only the glory of the literature of ,georgia2 he is1 almost literally1 the whole of the literature of ,georgia--nay1 of the entire art of ,georgia4 ,virginia is the best of the south to-day1 and ,georgia is perhaps the worst4 ,the one is simply senile2 the other is crass1 gross1 vulgar and obnoxious4 ,between lies a vast plain of mediocrity1 stupidity1 lethargy1 almost of dead silence4 ,in the north1 of course1 there is also grossness1 crassness1 vulgarity4 ,the north1 in its way1 is also stupid and obnoxious4 ,but nowhere in the north is there such complete sterility1 so depressing a lack of all civilized gesture and aspiration4 ,one would find it difficult to unearth a second-rate city between the ,ohio and the ,pacific that isn't struggling to establish an orchestra1 or setting up a little theater1 or going in for an art gallery1 or making some other effort to get into touch with civilization4 ,these efforts often fail1 and sometimes they succeed rather absurdly1 but under them there is at least an impulse that deserves respect1 and that is the impulse to seek beauty and to experiment with ideas1 and so to give the life of every day a certain dignity and purpose4 ,you will find no such impulse in the south4 ,there are no committees down there cadging subscriptions for orchestras2 if a string quartet is ever heard there1 the news of it has never come out2 an opera troupe1 when it roves the land1 is a nine days' wonder4 ,the little theater movement has swept the whole country1 enormously augmenting the public interest in sound plays1 giving new dramatists their chance1 forcing reforms upon the commercial theater4 ,everywhere else the wave rolls high--but along the line of the ,potomac it breaks upon a rock-bound shore4 ,there is no little theater beyond4 ,there is no gallery of pictures4 ,no artist ever gives exhibitions4 ,no one talks of such things4 ,no one seems to be interested in such things4 ,as for the cause of this unanimous torpor and doltishness1 this curious and almost pathological estrangement from everything that makes for a civilized culture1 ,i have hinted at it already1 and now state it again4 ,the south has simply been drained of all its best blood4 ,the vast blood-letting of the ,civil ,war half exterminated and wholly paralyzed the old aristocracy1 and so left the land to the harsh mercies of the poor white trash1 now its masters4 ,the war1 of course1 was not a complete massacre4 ,it spared a decent number of first-rate southerners--perhaps even some of the very best4 ,moreover1 other countries1 notably ,france and ,germany1 have survived far more staggering butcheries1 and even showed marked progress thereafter4 ,but the war not only cost a great many valuable lives2 it also brought bankruptcy1 demoralization and despair in its train--and so the majority of the first-rate southerners that were left1 broken in spirit and unable to live under the new dispensation1 cleared out4 ,a few went to ,south ,america1 to ,egypt1 to the ,far ,east4 ,most came north4 ,they were fecund2 their progeny is widely dispersed1 to the great benefit of the north4 ,a southerner of good blood almost always does well in the north4 ,he finds1 even in the big cities1 surroundings fit for a man of condition4 ,his peculiar qualities have a high social value1 and are esteemed4 ,he is welcomed by the codfish aristocracy as one palpably superior4 ,but in the south he throws up his hands4 ,it is impossible for him to stoop to the common level4 ,he cannot brawl in politics with the grandsons of his grand-father's tenants4 ,he is unable to share their fierce jealousy of the emerging black--the cornerstone of all their public thinking4 ,he is ansthetic to their theological and political enthusiasms4 ,he finds himself an alien at their feasts of soul4 ,and so he withdraws into his tower1 and is heard of no more4 ,cabell is almost a perfect example4 ,his eyes1 for years1 were turned toward the past2 he became a professor of the grotesque genealogizing that decaying aristocracies affect2 it was only by a sort of accident that he discovered himself to be an artist4 ,the south is unaware of the fact to this day2 it regards ,woodrow ,wilson and ,col4 ,john ,temple ,graves as much finer stylists1 and ,frank ,l4 ,stanton as an infinitely greater poet4 ,if it has heard1 which ,i doubt1 that ,cabell has been hoofed by the ,comstocks1 it unquestionably views that assault as a deserved rebuke to a fellow who indulges a lewd passion for fancy writing1 and is a covert enemy to the ,only ,true ,christianity4 ,what is needed down there1 before the vexatious public problems of the region may be intelligently approached1 is a survey of the population by competent ethnologists and anthropologists4 ,the immigrants of the north have been studied at great length1 and any one who is interested may now apply to the ,bureau of ,ethnology for elaborate data as to their racial strains1 their stature and cranial indices1 their relative capacity for education1 and the changes that they undergo under ,american ,kultur4 ,but the older stocks of the south1 and particularly the emancipated and dominant poor white trash1 have never been investigated scientifically1 and most of the current generalizations about them are probably wrong4 ,for example1 the generalization that they are purely ,anglo-,saxon in blood4 ,this ,i doubt very seriously4 ,the chief strain down there1 ,i believe1 is ,celtic rather than ,saxon1 particularly in the hill country4 ,french blood1 too1 shows itself here and there1 and so does ,spanish1 and so does ,german4 ,the last-named entered from the northward1 by way of the limestone belt just east of the ,alleghenies4 ,again1 it is very likely that in some parts of the south a good many of the plebeian whites have more than a trace of negro blood4 ,interbreeding under concubinage produced some very light half-breeds at an early day1 and no doubt appreciable numbers of them went over into the white race by the simple process of changing their abode4 ,not long ago ,i read a curious article by an intelligent negro1 in which he stated that it is easy for a very light negro to pass as white in the south on account of the fact that large numbers of southerners accepted as white have distinctly negroid features4 ,thus it becomes a delicate and dangerous matter for a train conductor or a hotel-keeper to challenge a suspect4 ,but the ,celtic strain is far more obvious than any of these others4 ,it not only makes itself visible in physical stigmata--e4 g41 leanness and dark coloring--but also in mental traits4 ,for example1 the religious thought of the south is almost precisely identical with the religious thought of ,wales4 ,there is the same nave belief in an anthropomorphic ,creator but little removed1 in manner and desire1 from an evangelical bishop2 there is the same submission to an ignorant and impudent sacerdotal tyranny1 and there is the same sharp contrast between doctrinal orthodoxy and private ethics4 ,read ,caradoc ,evans' ironical picture of the ,welsh ,wesleyans in his preface to ,my ,neighbors1 and you will be instantly reminded of the ,georgia and ,carolina ,methodists4 ,the most booming sort of piety1 in the south1 is not incompatible with the theory that lynching is a benign institution4 ,two generations ago it was not incompatible with an ardent belief in slavery4 ,it is highly probable that some of the worst blood of western ,europe flows in the veins of the southern poor whites1 now poor no longer4 ,the original strains1 according to every honest historian1 were extremely corrupt4 ,philip ,alexander ,bruce 7a ,virginian of the old gentry7 says in his ,industrial ,history of ,virginia in the ,seventeenth ,century that the first native-born generation was largely illegitimate4 ,one of the most common offenses against morality committed in the lower ranks of life in ,virginia during the seventeenth century1 he says1 was bastardy4 ,the mothers of these bastards1 he continues1 were chiefly indentured servants1 and had belonged to the lowest class in their native country4 ,fanny ,kemble ,butler1 writing of the ,georgia poor whites of a century later1 described them as the most degraded race of human beings claiming an ,anglo-,saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth--filthy1 lazy1 ignorant1 brutal1 proud1 penniless savages4 ,the ,sunday-school and the chautauqua1 of course1 have appreciably mellowed the descendants of these savages1 and their economic progress and rise to political power have done perhaps even more1 but the marks of their origin are still unpleasantly plentiful4 ,every now and then they produce a political leader who puts their secret notions of the true1 the good and the beautiful into plain words1 to the amazement and scandal of the rest of the country4 ,that amazement is turned into downright incredulity when news comes that his platform has got him high office1 and that he is trying to execute it4 ,in the great days of the south the line between the gentry and the poor whites was very sharply drawn4 ,there was absolutely no intermarriage4 ,so far as ,i know there is not a single instance in history of a southerner of the upper class marrying one of the bondwomen described by ,mr4 ,bruce4 ,in other societies characterized by class distinctions of that sort it is common for the lower class to be improved by extra-legal crosses4 ,that is to say1 the men of the upper class take women of the lower class as mistresses1 and out of such unions spring the extraordinary plebeians who rise sharply from the common level1 and so propagate the delusion that all other plebeians would do the same thing if they had the chance--in brief1 the delusion that class distinctions are merely economic and conventional1 and not congenital and genuine4 ,but in the south the men of the upper classes sought their mistresses among the blacks1 and after a few generations there was so much white blood in the black women that they were considerably more attractive than the unhealthy and bedraggled women of the poor whites4 ,this preference continued into our own time4 ,a southerner of good family once told me in all seriousness that he had reached his majority before it ever occurred to him that a white woman might make quite as agreeable a mistress as the octaroons of his jejune fancy4 ,if the thing has changed of late1 it is not the fault of the southern white man1 but of the southern mulatto women4 ,the more sightly yellow girls of the region1 with improving economic opportunities1 have gained self-respect1 and so they are no longer as willing to enter into concubinage as their grand-dams were4 ,as a result of this preference of the southern gentry for mulatto mistresses there was created a series of mixed strains containing the best white blood of the south1 and perhaps of the whole country4 ,as another result the poor whites went unfertilized from above1 and so missed the improvement that so constantly shows itself in the peasant stocks of other countries4 ,it is a commonplace that nearly all negroes who rise above the general are of mixed blood1 usually with the white predominating4 ,i know a great many negroes1 and it would be hard for me to think of an exception4 ,what is too often forgotten is that this white blood is not the blood of the poor whites but that of the old gentry4 ,the mulatto girls of the early days despised the poor whites as creatures distinctly inferior to negroes1 and it was thus almost unheard of for such a girl to enter into relations with a man of that submerged class4 ,this aversion was based upon a sound instinct4 ,the southern mulatto of to-day is a proof of it4 ,like all other half-breeds he is an unhappy man1 with disquieting tendencies toward anti-social habits of thought1 but he is intrinsically a better animal than the pure-blooded descendant of the old poor whites1 and he not infrequently demonstrates it4 ,it is not by accident that the negroes of the south are making faster progress1 economically and culturally1 than the masses of the whites4 ,it is not by accident that the only visible sthetic activity in the south is wholly in their hands4 ,no southern composer has ever written music so good as that of half a dozen white-black composers who might be named4 ,even in politics1 the negro reveals a curious superiority4 ,despite the fact that the race question has been the main political concern of the southern whites for two generations1 to the practical exclusion of everything else1 they have contributed nothing to its discussion that has impressed the rest of the world so deeply and so favorably as three or four books by southern negroes4 ,entering upon such themes1 of course1 one must resign one's self to a vast misunderstanding and abuse4 ,the south has not only lost its old capacity for producing ideas2 it has also taken on the worst intolerance of ignorance and stupidity4 ,its prevailing mental attitude for several decades past has been that of its own hedge ecclesiastics4 ,all who dissent from its orthodox doctrines are scoundrels4 ,all who presume to discuss its ways realistically are damned4 ,i have had1 in my day1 several experiences in point4 ,once1 after ,i had published an article on some phase of the eternal race question1 a leading southern newspaper replied by printing a column of denunciation of my father1 then dead nearly twenty years--a philippic placarding him as an ignorant foreigner of dubious origin1 inhabiting the ,baltimore ghetto and speaking a dialect recalling that of ,weber ,fields--two thousand words of incandescent nonsense1 utterly false and beside the point1 but exactly meeting the latter-day southern notion of effective controversy4 ,another time1 ,i published a short discourse on lynching1 arguing that the sport was popular in the south because the backward culture of the region denied the populace more seemly recreations4 ,among such recreations ,i mentioned those afforded by brass bands1 symphony orchestras1 boxing matches1 amateur athletic contests1 shoot-the-chutes1 roof gardens1 horse races1 and so on4 ,in reply another great southern journal denounced me as a man of wineshop temperament1 brass-jewelry tastes and pornographic predilections4 ,in other words1 brass bands1 in the south1 are classed with brass jewelry1 and both are snares of the devil6 ,to advocate setting up symphony orchestras is pornography6444 ,alas1 when the touchy southerner attempts a greater urbanity1 the result is often even worse4 ,some time ago a colleague of mine printed an article deploring the arrested cultural development of ,georgia4 ,in reply he received a number of protests from patriotic ,georgians1 and all of them solemnly listed the glories of the state4 ,i indulge in a few specimens3 ,who has not heard of ,asa ,g4 ,candler1 whose name is synonymous with ,coca-,cola1 a ,georgia product8 ,the first ,sunday-school in the world was opened in ,savannah4 ,who does not recall with pleasure the writings of 444 ,frank ,l4 ,stanton1 ,georgia's brilliant poet8 ,georgia was the first state to organize a ,boys' ,corn ,club in the ,south--,newton county1 #aijd4 ,the first to suggest a common ,united ,daughters of the ,confederacy badge was ,mrs4 ,raynes1 of ,georgia4 ,the first to suggest a state historian of the ,united ,daughters of the ,confederacy was ,mrs4 ,c4 ,helen ,plane 7,macon convention1 #ahif74 ,the first to suggest putting to music ,heber's ,from ,green-land's ,icy ,mountains was ,mrs4 ,f4 ,r4 ,goulding1 of ,savannah4 ,and so on1 and so on4 ,these proud boasts came1 remember1 not from obscure private persons1 but from ,leading ,georgians--in one case1 the state historian4 ,curious sidelights upon the ex-,confederate mind6 ,another comes from a stray copy of a negro paper4 ,it describes an ordinance lately passed by the city council of ,douglas1 ,ga41 forbidding any trousers presser1 on penalty of forfeiting a #ejj bond1 to engage in pressing for both white and colored4 ,this in a town1 says the negro paper1 where practically all of the white inhabitants have their food prepared by colored hands1 their babies cared for by colored hands1 and the clothes which they wear right next to their skins washed in houses where negroes live--houses in which the said clothes remain for as long as a week at a time4 ,but if you marvel at the absurdity1 keep it dark6 ,a casual word1 and the united press of the south will be upon your trail1 denouncing you bitterly as a scoundrelly ,yankee1 a ,bolshevik ,jew1 an agent of the ,wilhelmstrasse4444 ,obviously1 it is impossible for intelligence to flourish in such an atmosphere4 ,free inquiry is blocked by the idiotic certainties of ignorant men4 ,the arts1 save in the lower reaches of the gospel hymn1 the phonograph and the chautauqua harangue1 are all held in suspicion4 ,the tone of public opinion is set by an upstart class but lately emerged from industrial slavery into commercial enterprise--the class of hustling business men1 of live wires1 of commercial club luminaries1 of drive managers1 of forward-lookers and right-thinkers--in brief1 of third-rate southerners inoculated with all the worst traits of the ,yankee sharper4 ,one observes the curious effects of an old tradition of truculence upon a population now merely pushful and impudent1 of an old tradition of chivalry upon a population now quite without imagination4 ,the old repose is gone4 ,the old romanticism is gone4 ,the philistinism of the new type of town-boomer southerner is not only indifferent to the ideals of the old south2 it is positively antagonistic to them4 ,that philistinism regards human life1 not as an agreeable adventure1 but as a mere trial of rectitude and efficiency4 ,it is overwhelmingly utilitarian and moral4 ,it is inconceivably hollow and obnoxious4 ,what remains of the ancient tradition is simply a certain charming civility in private intercourse--often broken down1 alas1 by the hot rages of ,puritanism1 but still generally visible4 ,the southerner1 at his worst1 is never quite the surly cad that the ,yankee is4 ,his sensitiveness may betray him into occasional bad manners1 but in the main he is a pleasant fellow--hospitable1 polite1 good-humored1 even jovial4444 ,but a bit absurd4444 ,a bit pathetic4 ,,iv4 ,,the ,,divine ,,afflatus ,the suave and oedematous ,chesterton1 in a late effort to earn the honorarium of a ,chicago newspaper1 composed a thousand words of labored counterblast to what is called inspiration in the arts4 ,the thing itself1 he argued1 has little if any actual existence2 we hear so much about it because its alleged coyness and fortuitousness offer a convenient apology for third-rate work4 ,the man taken in such third-rate work excuses himself on the ground that he is a helpless slave of some power that stands outside him1 and is quite beyond his control4 ,on days when it favors him he teems with ideas and creates masterpieces1 but on days when it neglects him he is crippled and impotent--a fiddle without a bow1 an engine without steam1 a tire without air4 ,all this1 according to ,chesterton1 is nonsense4 ,a man who can really write at all1 or paint at all1 or compose at all should be able to do it at almost any time1 provided only he is not drunk or asleep4 ,so far ,chesterton4 ,the formula of the argument is simple and familiars to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists4 ,but there are plenty of men1 ,i believe1 who find themselves unable to resolve the difficulty in any such cavalier manner--men whose chief burden and distinction1 in fact1 is that they do not employ formul in their thinking1 but are thrown constantly upon industry1 ingenuity and the favor of ,god4 ,among such men there remains a good deal more belief in what is vaguely called inspiration4 ,they know by hard experience that there are days when their ideas flow freely and clearly1 and days when they are dammed up damnably4 ,say a man of that sort has a good day4 ,for some reason quite incomprehensible to him all his mental processes take on an amazing ease and slickness4 ,almost without conscious effort he solves technical problems that have badgered him for weeks4 ,he is full of novel expedients1 extraordinary efficiencies1 strange cunnings4 ,he has a feeling that he has suddenly and unaccountably broken through a wall1 dispersed a fog1 got himself out of the dark4 ,so he does a double or triple stint of the best work that he is capable of--maybe of far better work than he has ever been capable of before--and goes to bed impatient for the morrow4 ,and on the morrow he discovers to his consternation that he has become almost idiotic1 and quite incapable of any work at all4 ,i challenge any man who trades in ideas to deny that he has this experience4 ,the truth is that he has it constantly4 ,it overtakes poets and contrapuntists1 critics and dramatists1 philosophers and journalists2 it may even be shared1 so far as ,i know1 by advertisement writers1 chautauqua orators and the rev4 clergy4 ,the characters that all anatomists of melancholy mark in it are the irregular ebb and flow of the tides1 and the impossibility of getting them under any sort of rational control4 ,the brain1 as it were1 stands to one side and watches itself pitching and tossing1 full of agony but essentially helpless4 ,here the man of creative imagination pays a ghastly price for all his superiorities and immunities2 nature takes revenge upon him for dreaming of improvements in the scheme of things4 ,sitting there in his lonely room1 gnawing the handle of his pen1 racked by his infernal quest1 horribly bedevilled by incessant flashes of itching1 toothache1 eye-strain and evil conscience--thus tortured1 he makes atonement for his crime of being intelligent4 ,the normal man1 the healthy and honest man1 the good citizen and householder--this man1 ,i daresay1 knows nothing of all that travail4 ,it is reserved especially for artists and metaphysicians4 ,it is the particular penalty of those who pursue strange butterflies into dark forests1 and go fishing in enchanted and forbidden streams4 ,let us1 then1 assume that the fact is proved3 the nearest poet is a witness to it4 ,but what of the underlying mystery8 ,how are we to account for that puckish and inexplicable rise and fall of inspiration8 ,my questions1 of course1 are purely rhetorical4 ,explanations exist2 they have existed for all time2 there is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat1 plausible1 and wrong4 ,the ancients1 in the case at bar1 laid the blame upon the gods3 sometimes they were remote and surly1 and sometimes they were kind4 ,in the ,middle ,ages lesser powers took a hand in the matter1 and so one reads of works of art inspired by ,our ,lady1 by the ,blessed ,saints1 by the souls of the departed1 and even by the devil4 ,in our own day there are explanations less super-natural but no less fanciful--to wit1 the explanation that the whole thing is a matter of pure chance1 and not to be resolved into any orderly process--to wit1 the explanation that the controlling factor is external circumstance1 that the artist happily married to a dutiful wife is thereby inspired--finally1 to make an end1 the explanation that it is all a question of ,freudian complexes1 themselves lurking in impenetrable shadows4 ,but all of these explanations fail to satisfy the mind that is not to be put off with mere words4 ,some of them are palpably absurd2 others beg the question4 ,the problem of the how remains1 even when the problem of the why is disposed of4 ,what is the precise machinery whereby the cerebrum is bestirred to such abnormal activity on one day that it sparkles and splutters like an arclight1 and reduced to such feebleness on another day that it smokes and gutters like a tallow dip8 ,in this emergency1 having regard for the ages-long and unrelieved sufferings of artists great and small1 ,i offer a new1 simple1 and at all events not ghostly solution4 ,it is supported by the observed facts1 by logical analogies and by the soundest known principles of psychology1 and so ,i present it without apologies4 ,it may be couched1 for convenience1 in the following brief terms3 that inspiration1 so-called1 is a function of metabolism1 and that it is chiefly conditioned by the state of the intestinal flora--in larger words1 that a man's flow of ideas is controlled and determined1 both quantitatively and qualitatively1 not by the whims of the gods1 nor by the terms of his armistice with his wife1 nor by the combinations of some transcendental set of dice1 but by the chemical content of the blood that lifts itself from his liver to his brain1 and that this chemical content is established in his digestive tract1 particularly south of the pylorus4 ,a man may write great poetry when he is drunk1 when he is cold and miserable1 when he is bankrupt1 when he has a black eye1 when his wife glowers at him across the table1 when his children lie dying of smallpox2 he may even write it during an earthquake1 or while crossing the ,english channel1 or in the midst of a ,methodist revival1 or in ,new ,york4 ,but ,i am so far gone in materialism that ,i am disposed to deny flatly and finally1 and herewith do deny flatly and finally1 that there has lived a poet in the whole history of the world1 ancient or modern1 near or far1 who ever managed to write great poetry1 or even passably fair and decent poetry1 at a time when he was suffering from stenosis at any point along the thirty-foot via dolorosa running from the pylorus to the sigmoid flexure4 ,in other words1 when he was-- ,but perhaps ,i had better leave your medical adviser to explain4 ,after all1 it is not necessary to go any further in this direction2 the whole thing may be argued in terms of the blood stream--and the blood stream is respectable1 as the duodenum is an outcast4 ,it is the blood and the blood only1 in fact1 that the cerebrum is aware of2 of what goes on elsewhere it can learn only by hearsay4 ,if all is well below1 then the blood that enters the brain through the internal carotid is full of the elements necessary to bestir the brain-cells to their highest activity2 if1 on the contrary1 anabolism and katabolism are going on ineptly1 if the blood is not getting the supplies that it needs and not getting rid of the wastes that burden it1 then the brain-cells will be both starved and poisoned1 and not all the king's horses and all the king's men can make them do their work with any show of ease and efficiency4 ,in the first case the man whose psyche dwells in the cells will have a moment of inspiration--that is1 he will find it a strangely simple and facile matter to write his poem1 or iron out his syllogism1 or make his bold modulation from ,f sharp minor to ,c major1 or get his flesh-tone1 or maybe only perfect his swindle4 ,but in the second case he will be stumped and helpless4 ,the more he tries1 the more vividly he will be conscious of his impotence4 ,sweat will stand out in beads upon his brow1 he will fish patiently for the elusive thought1 he will try coaxing and subterfuge1 he will retire to his ivory tower1 he will tempt the invisible powers with black coffee1 tea1 alcohol and the alkaloids1 he may even curse ,god and invite death--but he will not write his poem1 or iron out his syllogism1 or find his way into ,c major1 or get his flesh-tone1 or perfect his swindle4 ,fix your eye upon this hypothesis of metabolic inspiration1 and at once you will find the key to many a correlative mystery4 ,for one thing1 it quickly explains the observed hopelessness of trying to pump up inspiration by mere hard industry--the essential imbecility of the ,i1#jjj words a day formula4 ,let there be stenosis below1 and not all the industry of a ,hercules will suffice to awaken the lethargic brain4 ,here1 indeed1 the harder the striving1 the worse the stagnation--as every artist knows only too well4 ,and why not8 ,striving in the face of such an interior obstacle is the most cruel of enterprises--a business more nerve-wracking and exhausting than reading a newspaper or watching a bad play4 ,the pain thus produced1 the emotions thus engendered1 react upon the liver in a manner scientifically displayed by ,dr4 ,george ,w4 ,crile in his ,man3 ,an ,adaptive ,mechanism1 and the result is a steady increase in the intestinal demoralization1 and a like increase in the pollution of the blood4 ,in the end the poor victim comes to a familiar pass2 beset on the one hand by impotence and on the other hand by an impatience grown pathological1 he gets into a state indistinguishable from the frantic4 ,it is at such times that creative artists suffer most atrociously4 ,it is then that they writhe upon the sharp spears and red-hot hooks of a jealous and unjust ,creator for their invasion of ,his monopoly4 ,it is then that they pay a grisly super-tax upon their superiority to the great herd of law-abiding and undistinguished men4 ,the men of this herd never undergo any comparable torture2 the agony of the artist is quite beyond their experience and even beyond their imagination4 ,no catastrophe that could conceivably overtake a lime and cement dealer1 a curb broker1 a lawyer1 a plumber or a ,presbyterian is to be mentioned in the same breath with the torments that1 to the most minor of poets1 are familiar incidents of his professional life1 and1 to such a man as ,poe1 or ,beethoven1 or ,brahms1 are the commonplaces of every day4 ,beethoven suffered more during the composition of the ,fifth symphony than all the judges on the supreme benches of the world have suffered jointly since the time of the ,gerousia4 ,again1 my hypothesis explains the fact that inspiration1 save under extraordinary circumstances1 is never continuous for more than a relatively short period4 ,a banker1 a barber or a manufacturer of patent medicines does his work day after day without any noticeable rise or fall of efficiency2 save when he is drunk1 jailed or ill in bed the curve of his achievement is flattened out until it becomes almost a straight line4 ,but the curve of an artist1 even of the greatest of artists1 is frightfully zig-zagged4 ,there are moments when it sinks below the bottom of the chart1 and immediately following there may be moments when it threatens to run off the top4 ,some of the noblest passages written by ,shakespeare are in his worst plays1 cheek by jowl with padding and banality2 some of the worst music of ,wagner is in his finest music dramas4 ,there is1 indeed1 no such thing as a flawless masterpiece4 ,long labored1 it may be gradually enriched with purple passages--the high inspirations of widely separated times crowded together--1 but even so it will remain spotty1 for those purple passages will be clumsily joined1 and their joints will remain as apparent as so many false teeth4 ,only the most elementary knowledge of psychology is needed to show the cause of the zig-zagging that ,i have mentioned4 ,it lies in the elemental fact that the chemical constitution of the blood changes every hour1 almost every minute4 ,what it is at the beginning of digestion is not what it is at the end of digestion1 and in both cases it is enormously affected by the nature of the substances digested4 ,no man1 within twenty-four hours after eating a meal in a ,pennsylvania ,railroad dining-car1 could conceivably write anything worth reading4 ,a tough beefsteak1 ,i daresay1 has ditched many a promising sonnet1 and bad beer1 as every one knows1 has spoiled hundreds of sonatas4 ,thus inspiration rises and falls1 and even when it rises twice to the same height it usually shows some qualitative difference--there is the inspiration1 say1 of ,spring vegetables and there is the inspiration of ,autumn fruits4 ,in a long work the products of greatly differing inspirations1 of greatly differing streams of blood1 are hideously intermingled1 and the result is the inevitable spottiness that ,i have mentioned4 ,no one but a maniac argues that ,die ,meistersinger is all good4 ,one detects in it days when ,wagner felt1 as the saying goes1 like a fighting cock1 but one also detects days when he arose in the morning full of acidosis and despair--days when he turned heavily from the ,pierian spring to castor oil4 ,moreover1 it must be obvious that the very conditions under which works of art are produced tend to cause great aberrations in metabolism4 ,the artist is forced by his calling to be a sedentary man4 ,even a poet1 perhaps the freest of artists1 must spend a good deal of time bending over a desk4 ,he may conceive his poems in the open air1 as ,beethoven conceived his music1 but the work of reducing them to actual words requires diligent effort in camera4 ,here it is a sheer impossibility for him to enjoy the ideal hygienic conditions which surround the farmhand1 the curb-broker and the sailor4 ,his6 viscera are congested2 his eyes are astrain2 his muscles are without necessary exercise4 ,furthermore1 he probably breathes bad air and goes without needed sleep4 ,the result is inevitably some disturbance of metabolism1 with a vitiated blood supply and a starved cerebrum4 ,one is always surprised to encounter a poet who is ruddy and stout2 the standard model is a pale and flabby stenotic1 kept alive by patent medicines4 ,so with the painter1 the musical composer1 the sculptor1 the artist in prose4 ,there is no more confining work known to man than instrumentation4 ,the composer who has spent a day at it is invariably nervous and ill4 ,for hours his body is bent over his music-paper1 the while his pen engrosses little dots upon thin lines4 ,i have known composers1 after a week or so of such labor1 to come down with auto-intoxication in its most virulent forms4 ,perhaps the notorious ill health of ,beethoven1 and the mental break-downs of ,schumann1 ,tschaikowsky and ,hugo ,wolf had their origin in this direction4 ,it is difficult1 going through the history of music1 to find a single composer in the grand manner who was physically and mentally up to par4 ,i do not advance it as a formal corollary1 but no doubt this stenosis hypothesis also throws some light upon two other immemorial mysteries1 the first being the relative sthetic sterility of women1 and the other being the low sthetic development of certain whole classes1 and even races of men1 e4 g41 the ,puritans1 the ,welsh and the ,confederate ,americans4 ,that women suffer from stenosis far more than men is a commonplace of internal medicine2 the weakness is chiefly to blame1 rather than the functional peculiarities that they accuse1 for their liability to headache4 ,a good many of them1 in fact1 are habitually in the state of health which1 in the artist1 is accompanied by an utter inability to work4 ,this state of health1 as ,i have said1 does not inhibit all mental activity4 ,it leaves the powers of observation but little impaired2 it does not corrupt common sense2 it is not incompatible with an intelligent discharge of the ordinary duties of life4 ,thus a lime and cement dealer1 in the midst of it1 may function almost as well as when his metabolic processes are perfectly normal1 and by the same token a woman chronically a victim to it may yet show all the sharp mental competence which characterizes her sex4 ,but here the thing stops4 ,to go beyond--to enter the realm of constructive thinking1 to abandon the mere application of old ideas and essay to invent new ideas1 to precipitate novel and intellectual concepts out of the chaos of memory and perception--this is quite impossible to the stenotic4 ,ergo1 it is unheard of among classes and races of men who feed grossly and neglect personal hygiene2 the pill-swallower is the only artist in such groups4 ,one may thus argue that the elder ,beecham saved poetry in ,england1 as the younger ,beecham saved music4444 ,but1 as ,i say1 ,i do not stand behind the hypothesis in this department1 save1 perhaps1 in the matter of women4 ,i could amass enormous evidences in favor of it1 but against them there would always loom the disconcerting contrary evidence of the ,bulgarians4 ,among them1 ,i suppose1 stenosis must be unknown--but so are all the fine arts4 ,la force et la foiblesse de l'esprit1 said ,rochefoucauld1 sont mal nommes2 elles ne sont1 en effect1 que la bonne ou la mauvaise des organes du corps4 ,science wastes itself hunting in the other direction4 ,we are flooded with evidences of the effects of the mind on the body1 and so our attention is diverted from the enormously greater effects of the body on the mind4 ,it is rather astonishing that the ,wassermann reaction has not caused the latter to be investigated more thoroughly4 ,the first result of the general employment of that great diagnostic device was the discovery that thousands of cases of so-called mental disease were really purely physical in origin--that thousands of patients long supposed to have been crazed by seeing ghosts1 by love1 by grief1 or by reverses in the stock-market were actually victims of the small but extremely enterprising spirochte pallida4 ,the news heaved a bomb into psychiatry1 but it has so far failed to provoke a study of the effects of other such physical agents4 ,even the effects of this one agent remain to be inquired into at length4 ,one now knows that it may cause insanity1 but what of the lesser mental aberrations that it produces8 ,some of these aberrations may be actually beneficial4 ,that is to say1 the mild toxemia accompanying the less virulent forms of infection may stimulate the brain to its highest functioning1 and so give birth to what is called genius--a state of mind long recognized1 by popular empiricism1 as a sort of half-way station on the road to insanity4 ,beethoven1 ,nietzsche and ,schopenhauer suffered from such mild toxemias1 and there is not the slightest doubt that their extraordinary mental activity was at least partly due to the fact4 ,that tuberculosis1 in its early stages1 is capable of the same stimulation is a commonplace of observation4 ,the consumptive may be weak physically1 but he is usually very alert mentally4 ,the history of the arts1 in fact1 shows the names of hundreds of inspired consumptives4 ,here a physical infirmity produces a result that is beneficial1 just as another physical infirmity1 the stenosis aforesaid1 produces a result that is baleful4 ,the artist often oscillates horribly between the two effects2 he is normally anything but a healthy animal4 ,perfect health1 indeed1 is a boon that very few men above the rank of clodhoppers ever enjoy4 ,what health means is a degree of adaptation to the organism's environment so nearly complete that there is no irritation4 ,such a state1 it must be obvious1 is not often to be observed in organisms of the highest complexity4 ,it is common1 perhaps1 in the earthworm4 ,this elemental beast makes few demands upon its environment1 and is thus subject to few diseases4 ,it seldom gets out of order until the sands of its life are run1 and then it suffers one grand illness and dies forthwith4 ,but man is forever getting out of order1 for he is enormously complicated--and the higher he rises in complexity1 the more numerous and the more serious are his derangements4 ,there are whole categories of diseases1 e4 g41 neurasthenia and hay-fever1 that afflict chiefly the more civilized and delicate ranks of men1 leaving the inferior orders unscathed4 ,good health in man1 indeed1 is almost invariably a function of inferiority4 ,a professionally healthy man1 e4 g41 an acrobat1 an osteopath or an ice-wagon driver1 is always stupid4 ,in the ,greece of the great days the athletes we hear so much about were mainly slaves4 ,not one of the eminent philosophers1 poets or statesmen of ,greece was a good high-jumper4 ,nearly all of them1 in fact1 suffered from the same malaises which afflict their successors of to-day1 as you will quickly discern by examining their compositions4 ,the sthetic impulse1 like the thirst for truth1 might almost be called a disease4 ,it seldom if ever appears in a perfectly healthy man4 ,but we must take the aloes with the honey4 ,the artist suffers damnably1 but there is compensation in his dreams4 ,some of his characteristic diseases cripple him and make his whole life a misery1 but there are others that seem to help him4 ,of the latter1 the two that ,i have mentioned carry with them concepts of extreme obnoxiousness4 ,both are infections1 and one is associated in the popular mind with notions or gross immorality4 ,but these concepts of obnoxiousness should not blind us to the benefits that apparently go with the maladies4 ,there are1 in fact1 maladies much more obnoxious1 and they carry no compensating benefits4 ,cancer is an example4 ,perhaps the time will come when the precise effects of these diseases will be worked out accurately1 and it will be possible to gauge in advance their probable influence upon this or that individual4 ,if that time ever comes the manufacture of artists will become a feasible procedure1 like the present manufacture of soldiers1 capons1 right-thinkers and doctors of philosophy4 ,in those days the promising young men of the race1 instead of being protected from such diseases at all hazards1 will be deliberately infected with them1 as soils are now inoculated with nitrogen-liberating bacteria4444 ,at the same time1 let us hope1 some progress will be made against stenosis4 ,it is1 after all1 simply a question of technique1 like the artificial propagation of the race by the device of ,dr4 ,jacques ,loeb4 ,the poet of the future1 come upon a period of doldrums1 will not tear his hair in futile agony4 ,instead1 he will go to the nearest clinic1 and there get his rasher of ,bulgarian bacilli1 or an injection of some complex organic compound out of a ductless gland1 or an order on a masseur1 or a diet list1 or perchance a barrel of ,russian oil4 ,v4 ,,scientific ,,examination ,,of ,a ,,popular ,,virtue ,an old ,corpsbruder1 assaulting my ear lately with an abstruse tale of his sister's husband's brother's ingratitude1 ended by driving me quite out of his house1 firmly resolved to be his acquaintance no longer4 ,the exact offense ,i heard inattentively1 and have already partly forgotten--an obscure tort arising out of a lawsuit4 ,my ex-friend1 it appears1 was appealed to for help in a bad case by his grapevine relative1 and so went on the stand for him and swore gallantly to some complex and unintelligible lie4 ,later on1 essaying to cash in on the perjury1 he asked the fellow to aid him in some domestic unpleasantness1 and was refused on grounds of morals4 ,hence his indignation--and my spoiled evening4444 ,what is one to think of a man so asinine that he looks for gratitude in this world1 or so puerilely egotistical that he enjoys it when found8 ,the truth is that the sentiment itself is not human but doggish1 and that the man who demands it in payment for his doings is precisely the sort of man who feels noble and distinguished when a dog licks his hand4 ,what a man says when he expresses gratitude is simply this3 ,you did something for me that ,i could not have done myself4 ,ergo1 you are my superior4 ,hail1 ,durchlaucht6 ,such a confession1 whether true or not1 is degrading to the confessor1 and so it is very hard to make1 at all events for a man of self-respect4 ,that is why such a man always makes it clumsily and with many blushes and hesitations4 ,it is hard for him to put so embarrassing a doctrine into plain words4 ,and that is why the business is equally uncomfortable to the party of the other part4 ,it distresses him to see a human being of decent instincts standing before him in so ignominious a position4 ,he is as flustered as if the fellow came in handcuffs1 or in rags1 or wearing the stripes of a felon4 ,moreover1 his confusion is helped out by his inward knowledge--very clear if he is introspective1 and plain enough even if he is not--that he really deserves no such tribute to his high mightiness2 that the altruism for which he is being praised was really bogus2 that he did the thing behind the gratitude which now assails him1 not for any grand and lofty reason1 but for a purely selfish and inferior reason1 to wit1 for the reason that it pleases all of us to show what we can do when an appreciative audience is present2 that we delight to exercise our will to power when it is safe and profitable4 ,this is the primary cause of the benefits which inspire gratitude1 real and pretended4 ,this is the fact at the bottom of altruism4 ,find me a man who is always doing favors for people and ,i will show you a man of petty vanity1 forever trying to get fuel for it in the cheapest way4 ,and find me a man who is notoriously grateful in habit and ,i'll show you a man who is essentially third rate and who is conscious of it at the bottom of his heart4 ,the man of genuine self-respect--which means the man who is more or less accurately aware1 not only of his own value1 but also and more importantly1 of his own limitations--tries to avoid entering either class4 ,he hesitates to demonstrate his superiority by such banal means1 and he shrinks from confessing an inferiority that he doesn't believe in4 ,nevertheless1 the popular morality of the world1 which is the creation1 not of its superior men but of its botches and half-men--in brief1 of its majorities--puts a high value on gratitude and denounces the with-holding of it as an offense against the proprieties4 ,to be noticeably ungrateful for benefits--that is1 for the by-products of the egotism of others--is to be disliked4 ,to tell a tale of ingratitude is to take on the aspect of a martyr to the defects of others1 to get sympathy in an affliction4 ,all of us are responsive to such ideas1 however much we may resent them logically4 ,one may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring4444 ,let me recall a case within my own recent experience4 ,one day ,i received a letter from a young woman ,i had never heard of before1 asking me to read the manuscripts of two novels that she had written4 ,she represented that she had venerated my critical parts for a long while1 and that her whole future career in letters would be determined by my decision as to her talents4 ,the daughter of a man apparently of some consequence in some sordid business or other1 she asked me to meet her at her father's office1 and there to impart to her1 under socially aseptic conditions1 my advice4 ,having a standing rule against meeting women authors1 even in their fathers' banks and soap factories1 ,i pleaded various imaginary engagements1 but finally agreed1 after a telephone debate1 to read her manuscripts4 ,they arrived promptly and ,i found them to be wholly without merit--in fact1 the veriest twaddle4 ,nevertheless ,i plowed through them diligently1 wasted half an hour at the job1 wrote a polite letter of counsel and returned the manuscripts to her house1 paying a blackamoor #ej cents to haul them4 ,by all ordinary standards1 an altruistic service and well deserving some show of gratitude4 ,had she knitted me a pair of pulse-warmers it would have seemed meet and proper4 ,even a copy of the poems of ,alfred ,noyes would not have been too much4 ,at the very least ,i expected a note of thanks4 ,well1 not a word has ever reached me4 ,for all my laborious politeness and disagreeable labor my reward is exactly nil4 ,the lady is improved by my counsel--and ,i am shocked by her gross ingratitude4444 ,that is1 conventionally1 superficially1 as a member of society in good standing4 ,but when on sour afternoons ,i roll the affair in my mind1 examining1 not the mere surface of it but the inner workings and anatomy of it1 my sense of outrage gradually melts and fades away--the inevitable recompense of skepticism4 ,what ,i see clearly is that ,i was an ass to succumb to the blandishments of this discourteous miss1 and that she was quite right in estimating my service trivially1 and out of that clear seeing comes consolation1 and amusement1 and1 in the end1 even satisfaction4 ,i got exactly what ,i deserved4 ,and she1 whether consciously or merely instinctively1 measured out the dose with excellent accuracy4 ,let us go back4 ,why did ,i waste two hours1 or maybe three1 reading those idiotic manuscripts8 ,why1 in the first place1 did ,i answer her opening request--the request1 so inherently absurd1 that ,i meet her in her father's office8 ,for a very plain reason3 she accompanied it with flattery4 ,what she said1 in effect1 was that she regarded me as a critic of the highest talents1 and this ludicrous cajolery--sound1 ,i dare say1 in substance1 but reduced to naught by her obvious obscurity and stupidity--was quite enough to fetch me4 ,in brief1 she assumed that1 being a man1 ,i was vain to the point of imbecility1 and this assumption was correct1 as it always is4 ,to help out1 there was the concept of romantic adventure vaguely floating in my mind4 ,her voice1 as ,i heard it by telephone1 was agreeable2 her appearance1 since she seemed eager to show herself1 ,i probably judged 7subconsciously7 to be at least not revolting4 ,thus curiosity got on its legs1 and vanity in another form4 ,am ,i fat and half decrepit1 a man seldom noticed by cuties8 ,then so much the more reason why ,i should respond4 ,the novelty of an apparently comely and respectable woman desiring to witness me finished what the primary 7and very crude7 appeal to my vanity had begun4 ,i was1 in brief1 not only the literary popinjay but also the eternal male--and hard at the immemorial folly of the order4 ,now turn to the gal and her ingratitude4 ,the more ,i inspect it the more ,i became convinced that it is not discreditable to her1 but highly creditable--that she demonstrates a certain human dignity1 despite her imbecile writings1 by exhibiting it4 ,would a show of gratitude put her in a better light8 ,i doubt it4 ,that gratitude1 considering the unfavorable report ,i made on her manuscripts1 would be doubly invasive of her amour propre4 ,on the one hand it would involve a confession that my opinion of her literary gifts was better than her own1 and that ,i was thus her superior4 ,and on the other hand it would involve a confession that my own actual writings 7being got into print without aid7 were better than hers1 and that ,i was thus her superior again4 ,each confession would bring her into an attitude of abasement1 and the two together would make her position intolerable4 ,moreover1 both would be dishonest3 she would privately believe in neither doctrine4 ,as for my opinion1 its hostility to her aspiration is obviously enough to make her ego dismiss it as false1 for no organism acquiesces in its own destruction4 ,and as for my relative worth as a literary artist1 she must inevitably put it very low1 for it depends1 in the last analysis1 upon my dignity and sagacity as a man1 and she has proved by experiment1 and quite easily1 that ,i am almost as susceptible to flattery as a moving picture actor1 and hence surely no great shakes4 ,thus there is not the slightest reason in the world why the fair creature should knit me a pair of pulse-warmers or send me the poems of ,noyes1 or even write me a polite note4 ,if she did any of these things1 she would feel herself a hypocrite and hence stand embarrassed before the mirror of her own thoughts4 ,confronted by a choice between this sort of shame and the incomparably less uncomfortable shame of violating a social convention and an article of popular morals1 secretly and without danger of exposure1 she very sensibly chooses the more innocuous of the two4 ,at the very start1 indeed1 she set up barriers against gratitude1 for her decision to ask a favor of me was1 in a subtle sense1 a judgment of my inferiority4 ,one does not ask favors1 if it can be avoided1 of persons one genuinely respects2 one puts such burdens upon the nave and colorless1 upon what are called the good natured2 in brief1 upon one's inferiors4 ,when that girl first thought of me as a possible aid to her literary aspiration she thought of me 7perhaps vaguely1 but none the less certainly7 as an inferior fortuitously outfitted with a body of puerile technical information and competence1 of probable use to her4 ,this unfavorable view was immediately renforced by her discovery of my vanity4 ,in brief1 she showed and still shows the great instinctive sapience of her sex4 ,she is female1 and hence far above the nonsensical delusions1 vanities1 conventions and moralities of men4 ,,vi4 ,,exeunt ,,omnes ,one of the hardest jobs that faces an ,american magazine editor in this1 the one-hundred-and forty-fifth year of the ,republic1 is that of keeping the minnesingers of the land from filling his magazine with lugubrious dithyrambs to1 on and against somatic death4 ,of spiritual death1 of course1 not many of them ever sing4 ,most of them1 in fact1 deny its existence in plain terms2 they are all sure of the immortality of the soul1 and in particular they are absolutely sure of the immortality of their own souls1 and of those of their best girls4 ,in this department the most they ever allow to the materialism of the herds that lie bogged in prose is such a benefit of the half doubt as one finds in ,christina ,rossetti's ,when ,i am ,dead4 ,but when it comes to somatic death1 the plain brutal death of coroners' inquests and vital statistics1 their optimism vanishes1 and1 try as they may1 they can't get around the harsh fact that on such and such a day1 often appallingly near1 each and every one of us will heave a last sigh1 roll his eyes despairingly1 turn his face to the wall and then suddenly change from a proud and highly complex mammal1 made in the image of ,god1 to a mere inert aggregate of disintegrating colloids1 made in the image of a stale cabbage4 ,the inevitability of it seems to fascinate them4 ,they write about it more than they write about anything else save love4 ,every day my editorial desk is burdened with their manuscripts--poems in which the poet serves notice that1 when his time comes1 he will die bravely and even a bit insolently2 poems in which he warns his mistress that he will wait for her on the roof of the cosmos and keep his harp in tune2 poems in which he asks her grandly to forget him1 and1 above all1 to avoid torturing herself by vain repining at his grave2 poems in which he directs his heirs and assigns to bury him in some lonely1 romantic spot1 where the whippoorwills sing2 poems in which he hints that he will not rest easily if ,philistines are permitted to begaud his last anchorage with couronnes des perles2 poems in which he speaks jauntily of making a rendez-vous with death1 as if death were a wench2 poems in which-- ,but there is no need to rehearse the varieties4 ,if you read the strophes that are strung along the bottoms of magazine pages you are familiar with all of them2 even in the great moral periodical that ,i help to edit1 despite my own excessive watchfulness and ,dr4 ,nathan's general theory that both death and poetry are nuisances and in bad taste1 they have appeared multitudinously1 no doubt to the disgust of the intelligentsia4 ,as ,i say1 it is almost impossible to keep the minnesingers off the subject4 ,when my negro flops the morning bale of poetry manuscripts upon my desk and ,i pull up my chair to have at them1 ,i always make a bet with myself that1 of the first dozen1 at least seven will deal with death--and it is so long since ,i lost that ,i don't remember it4 ,periodically ,i send out a circular to all the recognized poets of the land1 begging them in the name of ,god to be less mortuary1 but it never does any good4 ,more1 ,i doubt that it ever will--or any other sort of appeal4 ,take away death and love and you would rob poets of both their liver and their lights2 what would remain would be little more than a feeble gurgle in an illimitable void4 ,for the business of poetry1 remember1 is to set up a sweet denial of the harsh facts that confront all of us--to soothe us in our agonies with emollient words--in brief1 to lie sonorously and reassuringly4 ,well1 what is the worst curse of life8 ,answer3 the abominable magnetism that draws unlikes and incompatibles into delirious and intolerable conjunction--the kinetic over-stimulation called love4 ,and what is the next worst8 ,answer3 the fear of death4 ,no wonder the poets give so much attention to both6 ,no other foe of human peace and happiness is one-half so potent1 and hence none other offers such opportunities to poetry1 and1 in fact1 to all art4 ,a sonnet designed to ease the dread of bankruptcy1 even if done by a great master1 would be banal1 for that dread is itself banal1 and so is bankruptcy4 ,the same may be said of the old fear of hell1 now no more4 ,there was a day when this latter raged in the breast of nearly every man--and in that day the poets produced antidotes that were very fine poems4 ,but to-day only the elect and anointed of ,god fear hell1 and so there is no more production of sound poetry in that department4 ,as ,i have hinted1 ,i tire of reading so much necrotic verse in manuscript1 and wish heartily that the poets would cease to assault me with it4 ,in prose1 curiously enough1 one observes a corresponding shortage4 ,true enough1 the short story of commerce shows a good many murders and suicides1 and not less than eight times a day ,i am made privy to the agonies of a widower or widow who1 on searching the papers of his wife or her husband immediately after her or his death1 discovers that she or he had a lover or a mistress4 ,but ,i speak of serious prose3 not of trade balderdash4 ,go to any public library and look under ,death3 ,human in the card index1 and you will be surprised to find how few books there are on the subject4 ,worse1 nearly all the few are by psychical researchers who regard death as a mere removal from one world to another or by ,new ,thoughters who appear to believe that it is little more than a sort of illusion4 ,once1 seeking to find out what death was physiologically--that is1 to find out just what happened when a man died--,i put in a solid week without result4 ,there seemed to be nothing whatever on the subject even in the medical libraries4 ,finally1 after much weariness1 ,i found what ,i was looking for in ,dr4 ,george ,w4 ,crile's ,man3 ,an ,adaptive ,mechanism--incidentally1 a very solid and original work1 much less heard of than it ought to be4 ,crile said that death was acidosis--that it was caused by the failure of the organism to maintain the alkalinity necessary to its normal functioning--and in the absence of any proofs or even arguments to the contrary ,i accepted his notion forthwith and have held to it ever since4 ,i thus think of death as a sort of deleterious fermentation1 like that which goes on in a bottle of ,chteau ,margaux when it becomes corked4 ,life is a struggle1 not against sin1 not against the ,money ,power1 not against malicious animal magnetism1 but against hydrogen ions4 ,the healthy man is one in whom those ions1 as they are dissociated by cellular activity1 are immediately fixed by alkaline bases4 ,the sick man is one in whom the process has begun to lag1 with the hydrogen ions getting ahead4 ,the dying man is one in whom it is all over save the charges of fraud4 ,but here ,i get into chemical physics1 and not only run afoul of revelation but also reveal1 perhaps1 a degree of ignorance verging upon intellectual coma4 ,the thing ,i started out to do was to call attention to the only full-length and first-rate treatise on death that ,i have ever encountered or heard of1 to wit1 ,aspects of ,death and ,correlated ,aspects of ,life1 by ,dr4 ,f4 ,parkes ,weber1 a fat1 hefty and extremely interesting tome1 the fruit of truly stupendous erudition4 ,what ,dr4 ,weber has attempted is to bring together in one volume all that has been said or thought about death since the time of the first human records1 not only by poets1 priests and philosophers1 but also by painters1 engravers1 soldiers1 monarchs and the populace generally4 ,the author1 ,i take it1 is primarily a numismatist1 and he apparently began his work with a collection of inscriptions on coins and medals4 ,but as it stands it covers a vastly wider area4 ,one traces1 in chapter after chapter1 the ebb and flow of human ideas upon the subject1 of the human attitude to the last and greatest mystery of them all--the notion of it as a mere transition to a higher plane of life1 the notion of it as a benign panacea for all human suffering1 the notion of it as an incentive to this or that way of living1 the notion of it as an impenetrable enigma1 inevitable and inexplicable4 ,few of us quite realize how much the contemplation of death has colored human thought throughout the ages4 ,there have been times when it almost shut out all other concerns2 there has never been a time when it has not bulked enormously in the racial consciousness4 ,well1 what ,dr4 ,weber does in his book is to detach and set forth the salient ideas that have emerged from all that consideration and discussion--to isolate the chief theories of death1 ancient and modern1 pagan and ,christian1 scientific and mystical1 sound and absurd4 ,the material thus digested is appallingly copious4 ,if the learned author had confined himself to printed books alone1 he would have faced a labor fit for a new ,hercules4 ,but in addition to books he has given his attention to prints1 to medals1 to paintings1 to engraved gems and to monumental inscriptions4 ,his authorities range from ,st4 ,john on what is to happen at the ,day of ,judgment to ,sir ,william ,osier on what happens upon the normal human death-bed1 and from ,socrates on the relation of death to philosophy to ,havelock ,ellis on the effects of ,christian ideas of death upon the medival temperament4 ,the one field that ,dr4 ,weber has overlooked is that of music1 a somewhat serious omission4 ,it is hard to think of a great composer who never wrote a funeral march1 or a requiem1 or at least a sad song to some departed love4 ,even old ,papa ,haydn had moments when he ceased to be merry1 and let his thought turn stealthily upon the doom ahead4 ,to me1 at all events1 the slow movement of the ,military ,symphony is the saddest of music--an elegy1 ,i take it1 on some young fellow who went out in the incomprehensible wars of those times and got himself horribly killed in a far place4 ,the trumpet blasts towards the end fling themselves over his hasty grave in a remote cabbage field2 one hears1 before and after them1 the honest weeping of his comrades into their wine-pots4 ,in truth1 the shadow of death hangs over all the music of ,haydn1 despite its lightheartedness4 ,life was gay in those last days of the ,holy ,roman ,empire1 but it was also precarious4 ,if the ,turks were not at the gate1 then there was a peasant rising somewhere in the hinterland1 or a pestilence swept the land4 ,beethoven1 a generation later1 growled at death surlily1 but ,haydn faced it like a gentleman4 ,the romantic movement brought a sentimentalization of the tragedy2 it became a sort of orgy4 ,whenever ,wagner dealt with death he treated it as if it were some sort of gaudy tournament--a thing less dreadful than ecstatic4 ,consider1 for example1 the ,char-,freitag music in ,parsifal--death music for the most memorable death in the history of the world4 ,surely no one hearing it for the first time1 without previous warning1 would guess that it had to do with anything so gruesome as a crucifixion4 ,on the contrary1 ,i have a notion that the average auditor would guess that it was a musical setting for some lamentable fornication between a ,bayreuth baritone seven feet in height and a ,german soprano weighing at least three hundred pounds4 ,but if ,dr4 ,weber thus neglects music1 he at least gives full measure in all other departments4 ,his book1 in fact1 is encyclopdic2 he almost exhausts the subject4 ,one idea1 however1 ,i do not find in it3 the conception of death as the last and worst of all the practical jokes played upon poor mortals by the gods4 ,that idea apparently never occurred to the ,greeks1 who thought of almost everything1 but nevertheless it has an ingratiating plausibility4 ,the hardest thing about death is not that men die tragically1 but that most of them die ridiculously4 ,if it were possible for all of us to make our exits at great moments1 swiftly1 cleanly1 decorously1 and in fine attitudes1 then the experience would be something to face heroically and with high and beautiful words4 ,but we commonly go off in no such gorgeous1 poetical way4 ,instead1 we die in raucous prose--of arterio-sclerosis1 of diabetes1 of toxemia1 of a noisome perforation in the ileo-caecal region1 of carcinoma of the liver4 ,the abominable acidosis of ,dr4 ,crile sneaks upon us1 gradually paralyzing the adrenals1 flabbergasting the thyroid1 crippling the poor old liver1 and throwing its fog upon the brain4 ,thus the ontogenetic process is recapitulated in reverse order1 and we pass into the mental obscurity of infancy1 and then into the blank unconsciousness of the prenatal state1 and finally into the condition of undifferentiated protoplasm4 ,a man does not die quickly and brilliantly1 like a lightning stroke2 he passes out by inches1 hesitatingly and1 one may almost add1 gingerly4 ,it is hard to say just when he is fully dead4 ,long after his heart has ceased to beat and his lungs have ceased to swell him up with the vanity of his species1 there are remote and obscure parts of him that still live on1 quite unconcerned about the central catastrophe4 ,dr4 ,alexis ,carrel has cut them out and kept them alive for months4 ,the hair keeps on growing for a long while4 ,every time another one of the corpses of ,barbarossa or ,king ,james ,i is examined it is found that the hair is longer than it was the last time4 ,no doubt there are many parts of the body1 and perhaps even whole organs1 which wonder what it is all about when they find that they are on the way to the crematory4 ,burn a man's mortal remains1 and you inevitably burn a good portion of him alive1 and no doubt that portion sends alarmed messages to the unconscious brain1 like dissected tissue under ansthesia1 and the resultant shock brings the deceased before the hierarchy of heaven in a state of collapse1 with his face white1 sweat bespangling his forehead and a great thirst upon him4 ,it would not be pulling the nose of reason to argue that many a cremated ,sunday-school super-intendent thus confronting the ultimate tribunal in the aspect of a man taken with the goods1 has been put down as suffering from an uneasy conscience when what actually ailed him was simply surgical shock4 ,the cosmic process is not only incurably idiotic2 it is also indecently unjust4 ,but here ,i become medico-legal4 ,what ,i had in mind when ,i began was this3 that the human tendency to make death dramatic and heroic has little excuse in the facts4 ,no doubt you remember the scene in the last act of ,hedda ,gabler1 in which ,dr4 ,brack comes in with the news of ,lvborg's suicide4 ,hedda immediately thinks of him putting the pistol to his temple and dying instantly and magnificently4 ,the picture fills her with romantic delight4 ,when ,brack tells her that the shot was actually through the breast she is disappointed1 but soon begins to romanticise even that4 ,the breast1 she says1 is also a good place4444 ,there is something beautiful in this6 ,a bit later she recurs to the charming theme1 ,in the breast--ah6 ,then ,brack tells her the plain truth--in the original1 thus3 ,nej1--det traf ham i underlivet6444 ,edmund ,gosse1 in his first ,english translation of the play1 made the sentence3 ,no--it struck him in the abdomen4 ,in the last edition ,william ,archer makes it ,no--in the bowels6 ,abdomen is nearer to underlivet than bowels1 but belly would probably render the meaning better than either4 ,what ,brack wants to convey to ,hedda is the news that ,lvborg's death was not romantic in the least--that he went to a brothel1 shot himself1 not through the cerebrum or the heart1 but through the duodenum or perhaps the jejunum1 and is at the moment of report awaiting autopsy at the ,christiania ,allgemeine-krankenhaus4 ,the shock floors her1 but it is a shock that all of us must learn to bear4 ,men upon whom we lavish our veneration reduce it to an absurdity at the end by dying of chronic cystitis1 or by choking upon marshmallows or dill pickles1 or as the result of getting cut by dirty barbers4 ,women whom we place upon pedestals worthy of the holy saints come down at last with mastoid abscesses or die obscenely of hiccoughs4 ,and we ourselves8 ,let us not have too much hope4 ,the chances are that1 if we go to war1 eager to leap superbly at the cannon's mouth1 we'll be finished on the way by an ingrowing toenail or by being run over by an army truck driven by a former ,greek bus-boy and loaded with imitation ,swiss cheeses made in ,oneida1 ,n4 ,y4 ,and that if we die in our beds1 it will be of measles or albuminuria4 ,the aforesaid ,crile1 in one of his smaller books1 ,a ,mechanistic ,view of ,war and ,peace1 has a good deal to say about death in war1 and in particular1 about the disparity between the glorious and inspiring passing imagined by the young soldier and the messy finish that is normally in store for him4 ,he shows two pictures of war1 the one ideal and the other real4 ,the former is the familiar print1 ,the ,spirit of '#gf1 with the three patriots springing grandly to the attack1 one of them with a neat and romantic bandage around his head--apparently1 to judge by his liveliness1 to cover a wound no worse than an average bee-sting4 ,the latter picture is what the movie folks call a close-up of a ,french soldier who was struck just below the mouth by a ,german one-pounder shell--a soldier suddenly converted into the hideous simulacrum of a cruller4 ,what one notices especially is the curious expression upon what remains of his face--an expression of the utmost surprise and indignation4 ,no doubt he marched off to the front firmly convinced that1 if he died at all1 it would be at the climax of some heroic charge1 up to his knees in blood and with his bayonet run clear through a ,bavarian at least four feet in diameter4 ,he imagined the clean bullet through the heart1 the stately last gesture1 the final words3 ,thrse6 ,sophie6 ,olympe6 ,marie6 ,suzette6 ,odette6 ,denise6 ,julie6444 ,france6 ,go to the book and see what he got4444 ,dr4 ,crile1 whose experience of war has soured him against it1 argues that the best way to abolish it would be to prohibit such romantic prints as ,the ,spirit of '#gf and substitute therefor a series of actual photographs of dead and wounded men4 ,the plan is plainly of merit4 ,but it would be expensive4 ,imagine a war getting on its legs before the conversion of the populace had become complete44 ,think of the huge herds of spy-chasers1 letter-openers1 pacifist-hounds1 burlesons and other such operators that it would take to track down and confiscate all those pictures6444 ,even so1 the vulgar horror of death would remain1 for1 as ,ellen ,la ,motte well says in her little book1 ,the ,backwash of ,war1 the finish of a civilian in a luxurious hospital1 with trained nurses fluttering over him and his pastor whooping and heaving for him at the foot of his bed1 is often quite as terrible as any form of exitus witnessed in war4 ,it is1 in fact1 always an unpleasant business4 ,let the poets disguise it all they may and the theologians obscure the issue with promises of post-mortem felicity1 the plain truth remains that it gives one pause to reflect that1 on some day not far away1 one must yield supinely to acidosis1 sink into the mental darkness of an idiot1 and so suffer a withdrawal from these engaging scenes4 ,no4 #h1 says the nurse in faded pink1 tripping down the corridor with a hooch of rye for the diabetic in ,no4 #b1 has just passed out4 ,which is ,no4 #h8 asks the new nurse4 ,the one whose wife wore that awful hat this afternoon8 444 ,but all the authorities1 it is pleasant to know1 report that the final scene is placid enough4 ,dr4 ,weber quotes many of them4 ,the dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid4 ,as his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity4 ,his mind fogs4 ,his will power vanishes4 ,he submits decently4 ,he scarcely gives a damn4 ,,vii4 ,,the ,,allied ,,arts ,i ,on ,music-,lovers ,of all forms of the uplift1 perhaps the most futile is that which addresses itself to educating the proletariat in music4 ,the theory behind it is that a taste for music is an elevating passion1 and that if the great masses of the plain people could be inoculated with it they would cease to herd into the moving-picture theaters1 or to listen to ,socialists1 or to beat their wives and children4 ,the defect in this theory lies in the fact that such a taste1 granting it to be elevating1 simply cannot be implanted4 ,either it is born in a man or it is not born in him4 ,if it is1 then he will get gratification for it at whatever cost--he will hear music if hell freezes over4 ,but if it isn't1 then no amount of education will ever change him--he will remain stone deaf until the last sad scene on the gallows4 ,no child who has this congenital taste ever has to be urged or tempted or taught to love music4 ,it takes to tone inevitably and irresistibly2 nothing can restrain it4 ,what is more1 it always tries to make music1 for the delight in sounds is invariably accompanied by a great desire to make them4 ,i have never encountered an exception to this rule4 ,all genuine music-lovers try to make music4 ,they may do it badly1 and even absurdly1 but nevertheless they do it4 ,any man who pretends to a delight in the tone-art and yet has never learned the scale of ,g major--any and every such man is a fraud4 ,the opera-houses of the world are crowded with such liars4 ,you will even find hundreds of them in the concert-halls1 though here the suffering they have to undergo to keep up their pretense is almost too much for them to bear4 ,many of them1 true enough1 deceive themselves4 ,they are honest in the sense that they credit their own buncombe4 ,but it is buncombe none the less4 ,music1 of course1 has room for philanthropy4 ,the cost of giving an orchestral concert is so great that ordinary music-lovers could not often pay for it4 ,here the way is open for rich backers1 most of whom have no more ear for music than so many ,chinamen4 ,nearly all the opera of the world is so supported4 ,a few rich cads pay the bills1 their wives posture obscenely in the boxes1 and the genuine music-lovers upstairs and down enjoy the more or less harmonious flow of sound4 ,but this business doesn't make music-lovers4 ,it merely gives pleasure to music-lovers who already exist4 ,in twenty-five years1 ,i am sure1 the ,metropolitan ,opera ,company hasn't converted a single music-lover4 ,on the contrary1 it has probably disgusted and alienated many thousands of faint-hearted quasi-music-lovers1 i4 e41 persons with no more than the most nebulous taste for music--so nebulous that one or two evenings of tremendous gargling by fat tenors was enough to kill it altogether4 ,in the ,united ,states the number of genuine music-lovers is probably very low4 ,there are whole states1 e4 g41 ,alabama1 ,arkansas and ,idaho1 in which it would be difficult to muster a hundred4 ,in ,new ,york1 ,i venture1 not more than one person in every thousand of the population deserves to be counted4 ,the rest are1 to all intents and purposes1 tone-deaf4 ,they can not only sit through the infernal din made by the current jazz-bands2 they actually like it4 ,this is precisely as if they preferred the works of ,the ,duchess to those of ,thomas ,hardy1 or the paintings of the men who make covers for popular novels to those of ,el ,greco4 ,such persons inhabit the sewers of the bozart4 ,no conceivable education could rid them of their native ignobility of soul4 ,they are born unspeakable and incurable4 #b4 ,opera ,opera1 to a person genuinely fond of aural beauty1 must inevitably appear tawdry and obnoxious1 if only because it presents aural beauty in a frame of purely visual gaudiness1 with overtones of the grossest sexual provocation4 ,the most successful opera singers of the female sex1 at least in ,america1 are not those whom the majority of auditors admire most as singers but those whom the majority of male spectators desire most as mistresses4 ,opera is chiefly supported in all countries by the same sort of wealthy sensualists who also support musical comedy4 ,one finds in the directors' room the traditional stock company of the stage-door alley4 ,such vermin1 of course1 pose in the newspapers as devout and almost fanatical partisans of art2 they exhibit themselves at every performance2 one hears of their grand doings1 through their press agents1 almost every day4 ,but one has merely to observe the sort of opera they think is good to get the measure of their actual artistic discrimination4 ,the genuine music-lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within1 but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it4 ,most musicians1 indeed1 prefer to hear operatic music outside the opera house2 that is why one so often hears such things as ,the ,ride of the ,valkyrie in the concert hall4 ,the ,ride of the ,valkyrie has a certain intrinsic value as pure music2 played by a competent orchestra it may give civilized pleasure4 ,but as it is commonly performed in an opera house1 with a posse of flat bel-dames throwing themselves about the stage1 it can only produce the effect of a dose of ipecacuanha4 ,the sort of person who actually delights in such spectacles is the sort of person who delights in plush furniture4 ,such half-wits are in a majority in every opera house west of the ,rhine4 ,they go to the opera1 not to hear music1 not even to hear bad music1 but merely to see a more or less obscene circus4 ,a few1 perhaps1 have a further purpose2 they desire to assist in that circus1 to show themselves in the capacity of fashionables1 to enchant the yokelry with their splendor4 ,but the majority must be content with the more lowly aim4 ,what they get for the outrageous prices they pay for seats is a chance to feast their eyes upon glittering members of the superior demi-monde1 and to abase their groveling souls before magnificoes on their own side of the footlights4 ,they esteem a performance1 not in proportion as true music is on tap1 but in proportion as the display of notorious characters on the stage is copious1 and the exhibition of wealth in the boxes is lavish4 ,a soprano who can gargle her way up to ,g sharp in alto is more to such simple souls than a whole drove of ,johann ,sebastian ,bachs2 her one real rival1 in the entire domain of art1 is the contralto who has a pension from a grand duke and is reported to be enceinte by several profiteers4 ,heaven visualizes itself as an opera house with forty-eight ,carusos1 each with forty-eight press agents4444 ,on the ,continent1 where frankness is unashamed1 the opera audience often reveals its passion for tone very naively4 ,that is to say1 it arises on its hind legs1 turns its back upon the stage and gapes at the boxes in charming innocence4 ,that such ignobles applaud is usually quite as shoddy as they are themselves4 ,to write a successful opera a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint is not enough2 one must also be a sort of ,barnum4 ,all the first-rate musicians who have triumphed in the opera house have been skillful mountebanks as well4 ,i need cite only ,richard ,wagner and ,richard ,strauss4 ,the business1 indeed1 has almost nothing to do with music4 ,all the actual music one finds in many a popular opera--for example1 ,thas--mounts up to less than one may find in a pair of ,gung'l waltzes4 ,it is not this mild flavor of tone that fetches the crowd2 it is the tinpot show that goes with it4 ,an opera may have plenty of good music in it and fail1 but if it has a good enough show it will succeed4 ,such a composer as ,wagner1 of course1 could not write even an opera without getting some music into it4 ,in nearly all of his works1 even including ,parsifal1 there are magnificent passages1 and some of them are very long4 ,here his natural genius overcame him1 and he forgot temporarily what he was about4 ,but these magnificent passages pass unnoticed by the average opera audience4 ,what it esteems in his music dramas is precisely what is cheapest and most mountebankish--for example1 the more lascivious parts of ,tristan und ,isolde4 ,the sound music it dismisses as tedious4 ,the ,wagner it venerates is not the musician1 but the showman4 ,that he had a king for a backer and was seduced by ,liszt's daughter--these facts1 and not the fact of his stupendous talent1 are the foundation stones of his fame in the opera house4 ,greater men1 lacking his touch of the quack1 have failed where he succeeded--,beethoven1 ,schubert1 ,schumann1 ,brahms1 ,bach1 ,haydn1 ,haendel4 ,not one of them produced a genuinely successful opera2 most of them didn't even try4 ,imagine ,brahms writing for the diamond horseshoe6 ,or ,bach6 ,or ,haydn6 ,beethoven attempted it1 but made a mess of it2 ,fidelio survives to-day chiefly as a set of concert overtures4 ,schubert wrote more actual music every morning between #aj o'clock and lunch time than the average opera composer produces in #bej years1 and yet he always came a cropper in the opera house4 #c ,the ,music of ,to-morrow ,viewing the current musical scene1 ,carl ,van ,vechten finds it full of sadness4 ,even ,debussy bores him2 he heard nothing interesting from that quarter for a long while before the final scene4 ,as for ,germany1 he finds it a desert1 with ,arnold ,schoenberg behind the bar of its only inviting ,gasthaus4 ,richard ,strauss8 ,pooh6 ,strauss is an exploded torpedo1 a ,zeppelin brought to earth2 he has nothing more to say4 7,even the opening of the ,alpine symphony1 it would appear1 is more stick-candy47 ,england8 ,go to6 ,italy8 ,back to the barrel-organ6 ,where1 then1 is the tone poetry of to-morrow to come from8 ,according to ,van ,vechten1 from ,russia4 ,it is the steppes that will produce it--or1 more specifically1 ,prof4 ,igor ,strawinsky1 author of ,the ,nightingale and of various revolutionary ballets4 ,in the scores of ,strawinsky1 says ,van ,vechten1 music takes a vast leap forward4 ,here1 at last1 we are definitely set free from melody and harmony2 the thing becomes an ineffable complex of rhythms2 all rhythms are beaten into the ears4 ,new8 ,of the future8 ,i have not heard all of the powerful shiverings and tremblings of ,m4 ,strawinsky1 but ,i presume to doubt it none the less4 ,the ancient ,greeks1 says ,van ,vechten1 accorded rhythm a higher place than either melody or harmony4 ,well1 what of it8 ,so did the ancient ,goths and ,huns4 ,so do the modern ,zulus and ,new ,yorkers4 ,the simple truth is that the accentuation of mere rhythm is a proof1 not of progress in music1 but of a reversion to barbarism4 ,rhythm is the earliest1 the underlying element4 ,the ,african savage1 beating his tom-tom1 is content to go no further2 the ,american composer of fox trots is with him4 ,but music had scarcely any existence as an art-form until melody came to rhythm's aid1 and its fruits were little save dullness until harmony began to support melody4 ,to argue that mere rhythm1 unsupported by anything save tone-color1 may now take their place is to argue something so absurd that its mere statement is a sufficient answer to it4 ,the rise of harmony1 true enough1 laid open a dangerous field4 ,its exploration attracted meticulous minds2 it was rigidly mapped in hard1 geometrical forms2 in the end1 it became almost unnavigable to the man of ideas4 ,but no melodramatic rejection of all harmony is needed to work a reform4 ,the business1 indeed1 is already gloriously under way4 ,the dullest conservatory pupil has learned how to pull the noses of the old-time schoolmasters4 ,no one cares a hoot any more about the ancient laws of preparation and resolution4 7,the rules grow so loose1 indeed1 that ,i may soon be tempted to write a tone-poem myself74 ,but out of this chaos new laws will inevitably arise1 and though they will not be as rigid as the old ones1 they will still be coherent and logical and intelligible4 ,already1 in fact1 gentlemen of professorial mind are mapping them out2 one needs but a glance at such a book as ,ren ,lenormand's to see that there is a certain order hidden in even the wildest vagaries of the moment4 ,and when the boiling in the pot dies down1 the truly great musicians will be found to be1 not those who have been most daring1 but those who have been most discreet and intelligent--those who have most skillfully engrafted what is good in the new upon what was sound in the old4 ,such a discreet fellow is ,richard ,strauss4 ,his music is modern enough--but not too much4 ,one is thrilled by its experiments and novelties1 but at the same time one can enjoy the thing as music4 ,haydn1 ,mozart1 ,beethoven and ,wagner belonged to the same lodge4 ,they were by no means the wildest revolutionaries of their days1 but they were the best musicians4 ,they didn't try to improve music by purging it of any of the elements that made it music2 they tried1 and with success1 to give each element a new force and a new significance4 ,berlioz1 ,i dare say1 knew more about the orchestra than ,wagner2 he surely went further than ,wagner in reaching out for new orchestral effects4 ,but nothing he ever wrote has a fourth of the stability and value of ,die ,meistersinger4 ,he was so intrigued by his tone-colors that he forgot his music4 #d ,tempo di ,valse ,those ,puritans who snort against the current dances are quite right when they argue that the tango and the shimmie are violently aphrodisiacal1 but what they overlook is the fact that the abolition of such provocative wriggles would probably revive something worse1 to wit1 the ,viennese waltz4 ,the waltz never quite goes out of fashion2 it is always just around the corner2 every now and then it comes back with a bang4 ,and to the sore harassment and corruption1 ,i suspect1 of chemical purity1 the ideal of all right-thinkers4 ,the shimmie and the tango are too gross to be very dangerous to civilized human beings2 they suggest drinking beer out of buckets2 the most elemental good taste is proof enough against them4 ,but the waltz6 ,ah1 the waltz1 indeed6 ,it is sneaking1 insidious1 disarming1 lovely4 ,it does its work1 not like a college-yell or an explosion in a munitions plant1 but like the rustle of the trees1 the murmur of the illimitable sea1 the sweet gurgle of a pretty girl4 ,the jazz-band fetches only vulgarians1 barbarians1 idiots1 pigs4 ,but there is a mystical something in ,weiner ,blut or ,knstler ,leben that fetches even philosophers4 ,the waltz1 in fact1 is magnificently improper--the art of tone turned bawdy4 ,i venture to say that the compositions of one man alone1 ,johann ,strauss ,,ii1 have lured more fair young creatures to lamentable complaisance than all the hyperdermic syringes of all the white slave scouts since the fall of the ,western ,empire4 ,there is something about a waltz that is simply irresistible4 ,try it on the fattest and sedatest or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of women1 and she will be ready1 in ten minutes1 for a stealthy kiss behind the door--nay1 she will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her husband misunderstands her1 and drinks too much1 and cannot appreciate ,maeterlinck1 and is going to ,cleveland1 ,o41 on business to-morrow4444 ,i often wonder that the ,comstocks have not undertaken a crusade against the waltz4 ,if they suppress ,the ',genius' and ,jurgen1 then why do they overlook ,rosen aus dem ,sden8 ,if they are so hot against ,madame ,bovary and the ,decameron1 then why the immunity of ,wein1 ,weib und ,gesang8 ,i throw out the suggestion and pass on4 ,nearly all the great waltzes of the world1 incidently1 were written by ,germans--or ,austrians4 ,a waltz-pogrom would thus enlist the ,american ,legion and the ,daughters of the ,revolution4 ,moreover1 there is the ,public ,health ,service3 it is already engaged upon a campaign to enforce virginity in both sexes by statute and artillery4 ,imagine such an enterprise with every band free to play ,wiener ,md'l6 #e ,the ,puritan as ,artist ,the saddest thing that ,i have ever heard in the concert hall is ,herbert ,k4 ,hadley's overture1 ,in ,bohemia4 ,the title is a magnificent piece of profound1 if unconscious irony4 ,one looks1 at least1 for a leg flung in the air1 a girl kissed1 a cork popped1 a flash of drawer-ruffles4 ,what one encounters is a meeting of the ,lake ,mohonk ,conference4 ,such prosy correctness and hollowness1 in music1 is almost inconceivable4 ,it is as if the most voluptuous of the arts were suddenly converted into an abstract and austere science1 like comparative grammar or astro-physics4 ,who's ,who in ,america says that ,hadley was born in ,somerville1 ,mass41 and studied violin and other branches in ,vienna4 ,a prodigy thus unfolds itself3 here is a man who lived in ,vienna1 and yet never heard a ,strauss waltz6 ,this1 indeed1 is an even greater feat than being born an artist in ,somerville4 #f ,the ,human ,face ,probably the best portrait that ,i have ever seen in ,america is one of ,theodore ,dreiser by ,bror ,nordfeldt4 ,who this ,bror ,nordfeldt may be ,i haven't the slightest notion--a ,scandinavian1 perhaps4 ,maybe ,i have got his name wrong2 ,i can't find any ,nordfeldt in ,who's ,who in ,america4 ,but whatever his name1 he has painted ,dreiser in a capital manner4 ,the portrait not only shows the outward shell of the man2 it also conveys something of his inner spirit--his simple-minded wonder at the mystery of existence1 his constant effort to argue himself out of a despairing pessimism1 his genuine amazement before life as a spectacle4 ,the thing is worth a hundred ,sargents1 with their slick lying1 their childish facility1 their general hollowness and tackiness4 ,sargent should have been a designer of candy-box tops4 ,the notion that he is a great artist is one of the astounding delusions of ,anglo-,saxondom4 ,what keeps it going is the patent fact that he is a very dexterous craftsman--one who understands thoroughly how to paint1 just as a good plumber knows how to plumb4 ,but of genuine sthetic feeling the man is almost as destitute as the plumber4 ,his portrait of the four ,johns ,hopkins professors is probably the worst botch ever palmed off on a helpless committee of intellectual hay and feed dealers4 ,but ,nordfeldt1 in his view of ,dreiser1 somehow gets the right effect4 ,it is rough painting1 but real painting4 ,there is a knock-kneed vase in the foreground1 and a bunch of flowers apparently painted with a shaving-brush--but ,dreiser himself is genuine4 ,more1 he is made interesting4 ,one sees at once that he is no common man4 ,the artist himself seems to hold the portrait in low esteem4 ,having finished it1 he reversed the canvas and used the back for painting a vapid snow scenes--a thing almost bad enough to go into a ,fifth ,avenue show-window4 ,then he abandoned both pictures4 ,i discovered the portrait by accidentally knocking the snow scene off a wall4 ,it has never been framed4 ,drieser himself has probably forgotten it4 444 ,no1 ,i do not predict that it will be sold to some ,pittsburgh nail manufacturer1 in #aiej1 for #ajj1jjj4 ,if it lasts two or three more years1 unframed and disesteemed1 it will be running in luck4 ,when ,dreiser is hanged1 ,i suppose1 relic-hunters will make a search for it4 ,but by that time it will have died as a door-mat4 #g ,the ,cerebral ,mime ,of all actors1 the most offensive to the higher cerebral centers is the one who pretends to intellectuality4 ,his alleged intelligence1 of course1 is always purely imaginary3 no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor4 ,even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage1 as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos1 his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night4 ,that nonsense enters into the very fiber of the actor4 ,he becomes a grotesque boiling down of all the preposterous characters that he has ever impersonated4 ,their characteristics are seen in his manner1 in his reactions to stimuli1 in his point of view4 ,he becomes a walking artificiality1 a strutting dummy1 a thematic catalogue of imbecilities4 ,there are1 of course1 plays that are not wholly nonsense1 and now and then one encounters an actor who aspires to appear in them4 ,this aspiration almost always overtakes the so-called actor-manager--that is to say1 the actor who has got rich and is thus ambitious to appear as a gentleman4 ,such aspirants commonly tackle ,shakespeare1 and if not ,shakespeare1 then ,shaw1 or ,hauptmann1 or ,rostand1 or some other apparently intellectual dramatist4 ,but this is seldom more than a passing madness4 ,the actor-manager may do that sort of thing once in a while1 but in the main he sticks to his garbage4 ,consider1 for example1 the late ,henry ,irving4 ,he posed as an intellectual and was forever gabbling about his high services to the stage1 and yet he appeared constantly in such puerile things as ,the ,bells1 beside which the average newspaper editorial or college yell was literature4 ,so with the late ,mansfield4 ,his pretension1 deftly circulated by press-agents1 was that he was a man of brilliant and polished mind4 ,nevertheless1 he spent two-thirds of his life in the theater playing such abominable drival as ,a ,parisian ,romance and ,dr4 ,jekyll and ,mr4 ,hyde4 ,it is commonly urged in defense of certain actors that they are forced to appear in that sort of stuff by the public demand for it--that appearing in it painfully violates their secret pruderies4 ,this defense is unsound and dishonest4 ,an actor never disdains anything that gets him applause and money2 he is almost completely devoid of that sthetic conscience which is the chief mark of the genuine artist4 ,if there were a large public willing to pay handsomely to hear him recite limericks1 or to blow a cornet1 or to strip off his underwear and dance a polonaise stark naked1 he would do it without hesitation--and then convince himself that such buffooning constituted a difficult and elevated art1 fully comparable to ,wagner's or ,dante's4 ,in brief1 the one essential1 in his sight1 is the chance to shine1 the fat part1 the applause4 ,who ever heard of an actor declining a fat part on the ground that it invaded his intellectual integrity8 ,the thing is simply unimaginable4 ,,viii4 ,,the ,,cult ,,of ,,hope ,of all the sentimental errors which reign and rage in this incomparable republic1 the worst1 ,i often suspect1 is that which confuses the function of criticism1 whether sthetic1 political or social1 with the function of reform4 ,almost invariably it takes the form of a protest3 ,the fellow condems without offering anything better4 ,why tear down without building up8 ,so coo and snivel the sweet ones3 so wags the national tongue4 ,the messianic delusion becomes a sort of universal murrain4 ,it is impossible to get an audience for an idea that is not constructive--i4 e41 that is not glib1 and uplifting1 and full of hope1 and hence capable of tickling the emotions by leaping the intermediate barrier of the intelligence4 ,in this protest and demand1 of course1 there is nothing but a hollow sound of words--the empty babbling of men who constantly mistake their mere feelings for thoughts4 ,the truth is that criticism1 if it were thus confined to the proposing of alternative schemes1 would quickly cease to have any force or utility at all1 for in the overwhelming majority of instances no alternative scheme of any intelligibility is imaginable1 and the whole object of the critical process is to demonstrate it4 ,the poet1 if the victim is a poet1 is simply one as bare of gifts as a herring is of fur3 no conceivable suggestion will ever make him write actual poetry4 ,the cancer cure1 if one turns to popular swindles1 is wholly and absolutely without merit--and the fact that medicine offers us no better cure does not dilute its bogusness in the slightest4 ,and the plan of reform1 in politics1 sociology or what not1 is simply beyond the pale of reason2 no change in it or improvement of it will ever make it achieve the downright impossible4 ,here1 precisely1 is what is the matter with most of the notions that go floating about the country1 particularly in the field of governmental reform4 ,the trouble with them is not only that they won't and don't work2 the trouble with them1 more importantly1 is that the thing they propose to accomplish is intrinsically1 or at all events most probably1 beyond accomplishment4 ,that is to say1 the problem they are ostensibly designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble4 ,to tackle them with a proof of that insolubility1 or even with a colorable argument of it1 is sound criticism2 to tackle them with another solution that is quite as bad1 or even worse1 is to pick the pocket of one knocked down by an automobile4 ,unluckily1 it is difficult for a certain type of mind to grasp the concept of insolubility4 ,thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle2 other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion4 ,the number of persons so afflicted is far greater than the records of the ,patent ,office show1 for beyond the circle of frankly insane enterprise there lie circles of more and more plausible enterprise1 and finally we come to a circle which embraces the great majority of human beings4 ,these are the optimists and chronic hopers of the world1 the believers in men1 ideas and things4 ,these are the advocates of leagues of nations1 wars to make the world safe for democracy1 political mountebanks1 clean-up campaigns1 laws1 raids1 ,men and ,religion ,forward ,movements1 eugenics1 sex hygiene1 education1 newspapers4 ,it is the settled habit of such credulous folk to give ear to whatever is comforting2 it is their settled faith that whatever is desirable will come to pass4 ,a caressing confidence--but one1 unfortunately1 that is not borne out by human experience4 ,the fact is that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization to-day than they were in the time of ,rameses1 and that there is not the slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near to-morrow4 ,plans for hurrying them on have been tried since the beginning2 plans for forcing them overnight are in copious and antagonistic operation to-day2 and yet they continue to hold off and elude us1 and the chances are that they will keep on holding off and eluding us until the angels get tired of the show1 and the whole earth is set off like a gigantic bomb1 or drowned1 like a sick cat1 between two buckets4 ,but let us avoid the grand and chronic dreams of the race and get down to some of the concrete problems of life under the ,christian enlightenment4 ,let us take a look1 say1 at the so-called drink problem1 a small sub-division of the larger problem of saving men from their inherent and incurable hoggishness4 ,what is the salient feature of the discussion of the drink problem1 as one observes it going on eternally in ,these ,states8 ,the salient feature of it is that very few honest and intelligent men ever take a hand in the business--that the best men of the nation1 distinguished for their sound sense in other fields1 seldom show any interest in it4 ,on the one hand it is labored by a horde of obvious jackasses1 each confident that he can dispose of it overnight4 ,and on the other hand it is sophisticated and obscured by a crowd of oblique fellows1 hired by interested parties1 whose secret desire is that it be kept unsolved4 ,to one side1 the professional gladiators of ,prohibition2 to the other side1 the agents of the brewers and distillers4 ,but why do all neutral and clear-headed men avoid it8 ,why does one hear so little about it from those who have no personal stake in it1 and can thus view it fairly and accurately8 ,is it because they are afraid8 ,is it because they are not intrigued by it8 ,i doubt that it would be just to accuse them in either way4 ,the real reason why they steer clear of the gabble is simpler and more creditable4 ,it is this3 that none of them--that no genuinely thoughtful and prudent man--can imagine any solution which meets the tests of his own criticism--that no genuinely intelligent man believes the thing is soluble at all4 ,here1 of course1 ,i generalize a bit heavily4 ,honest and intelligent men1 though surely not many of them1 occasionally come forward with suggestions4 ,in the midst of so much debate it is inevitable that even a man of critical mind should sometimes lean to one side or the other--that some salient imbecility should make him react toward its rough opposite4 ,but the fact still remains that not a single complete and comprehensive scheme has ever come from such a man1 that no such man has ever said1 in so many words1 that he thought the problem could be solved1 simply and effectively4 ,all such schemes come from idiots or from sharpers disguised as idiots to win the public confidence4 ,the whole discussion is based upon assumptions that even the most casual reflection must reject as empty balderdash4 ,and as with the drink problem1 so with most of the other great questions that harass and dismay the helpless human race4 ,turn1 for example1 to the sex problem4 ,there is no half-baked ecclesiastic1 bawling in his galvanized-iron temple on a suburban lot1 who doesn't know precisely how it ought to be dealt with4 ,there is no fantoddish old suffragette1 sworn to get her revenge on man1 who hasn't a sovereign remedy for it4 ,there is not a shyster of a district attorney1 ambitious for higher office1 who doesn't offer to dispose of it in a few weeks1 given only enough help from the city editors4 ,and yet1 by the same token1 there is not a man who has honestly studied it and pondered it1 bringing sound information to the business1 and understanding of its inner difficulties and a clean and analytical mind1 who doesn't believe and hasn't stated publicly that it is intrinsically and eternally insoluble4 ,i can't think of an exception1 nor does a fresh glance through the literature suggest one4 ,the latest expert to tell the disconcerting truth is ,dr4 ,maurice ,parmelee1 the criminologist4 ,his book1 ,personality and ,conduct1 is largely devoted to demonstrating that the popular solutions1 for all the support they get from vice crusaders1 complaisant legislators and sensational newspapers1 are unanimously imbecile and pernicious--that their only effect in practice is to make what was bad a good deal worse4 ,his remedy is--what8 ,an alternative solution8 ,not at all4 ,his remedy1 in brief1 is to abandon all attempts at a solution1 to let the whole thing go1 to cork up all the reformers and try to forget it4 ,and in this proposal he merely echoes ,havelock ,ellis1 undoubtedly the most diligent and scientific student of the sex problem that the world has yet seen--in fact1 the one man who1 above all others1 has made a decorous and intelligent examination of it possible4 ,ellis' remedy is simply a denial of all remedies4 ,he admits that the disease is bad1 but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse1 and so he proposes going back to the plain disease1 and advocates bearing it with philosophy1 as we bear colds in the head1 marriage1 the noises of the city1 bad cooking and the certainty of death4 ,man is inherently vile--but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness4 ,no prostitute was ever so costly to a community as a prowling and obscene vice crusader1 or as the dubious legislator or prosecuting officer who jumps as he pipes4 ,ellis1 in all this1 falls under the excommunication of the sentimentalists4 ,he demolishes one scheme without offering an alternative scheme4 ,he tears down without making any effort to build up4 ,this explains1 no doubt1 his general unpopularity2 into mouths agape for peruna1 he projects only paralyzing streams of ice-water4 ,and it explains1 too1 the curious fact that his books1 the most competent and illuminating upon the subject that they discuss1 are under the ban of the ,comstocks in both ,england and ,america1 whereas the hollow treatises of ignorant clerics and smutty old maids are merchanted with impunity1 and even commended from the sacred desk4 ,the trouble with ,ellis is that he tells the truth1 which is the unsafest of all things to tell4 ,his crime is that he is a man who prefers facts to illusions1 and knows what he is talking about4 ,such men are never popular4 ,the public taste is for merchandise of a precisely opposite character4 ,the way to please is to proclaim in a confident manner1 not what is true1 but what is merely comforting4 ,this is what is called building up4 ,this is constructive criticism4 ,,ix4 ,,the ,,dry ,,millennium #a ,the ,holy ,war ,the fact that the enforcement of ,prohibition entails a host of oppressions and injustices--that it puts a premium upon the lowest sort of spying1 affords an easy livelihood to hordes of professional scoundrels1 subjects thousands of decent men to the worst sort of blackmail1 violates the theoretical sanctity of domicile1 and makes for bitter and relentless enmities1--this fact is now adduced by its ever-hopeful foes as an argument for the abandonment of the whole disgusting crusade4 ,by it they expect to convert even a large minority of the drys1 apparently on the theory that the latter got converted emotionally and hastily1 and that an appeal to their sense of justice and fair-dealing will debamboozle them4 ,no hope could be more vain4 ,what all the current optimists overlook is that the illogical and indefensible persecutions certain to occur in increasing number under the ,prohibition ,amendment constitute the chief cause of its popularity among the sort of men who are in favor of it4 ,the typical ,prohibitionist1 in other words1 is a man full of religious excitement1 with the usual sadistic overtones4 ,he delights in persecution for its own sake4 ,he likes to see the other fellow jump and to hear him yell4 ,this thirst is horribly visible in all the salient mad mullahs of the land--that is1 in all the genuine leaders of ,american culture4 ,such skillful boob-bumpers as the ,rev4 ,dr4 ,billy ,sunday know what that culture is2 they know what the crowd wants4 ,thus they convert the preaching of the alleged ,word of ,god into a rough-and-tumble pursuit of definite sinners--saloon-keepers1 prostitutes1 ,sabbath-breakers1 believers in the ,darwinian hypothesis1 ,german exegetes1 hand-books1 poker-players1 adulterers1 cigarette-smokers1 users of profanity4 ,it is the chase that heats up the great mob of ,methodists1 not the ,word4 ,and the fact that the chase is unjust only tickles them the more1 for to do injustice with impunity is a sign of power1 and power is the thing that the inferior man always craves most violently4 ,every time the papers print another account of a ,prohibionist agent murdering a man who resists him1 or searching some woman's underwear1 or raiding a ,vanderbilt yacht1 or blackmailing a ,legislature1 or committing some other such inordinate and anti-social act1 they simply make a thousand more votes for ,prohibition4 ,it is precisely that sort of entertainment that makes ,prohibition popular with the boobery4 ,it is precisely because it is unjust1 imbecile1 arbitrary and tyrannical that they are so hot for it4 ,the incidental violation of even the inferior man's liberty is not sufficient to empty him of delight in the chase4 ,the victims reported in the newspapers are commonly his superiors2 he thus gets the immemorial democratic satisfaction out of their discomfiture4 ,besides1 he has no great rage for liberty himself4 ,he is always willing to surrender it at demand4 ,the most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man1 but the most despotic man4 ,the common folk delight in the exactions of such a man4 ,they like him to boss them4 ,their natural gait is the goose-step4 ,it was predicted by romantics that the arrival of ,prohibition would see the ,american workingman in revolt against its tyranny1 with mills idle and industry paralyzed4 ,certain boozy labor leaders even went so far as to threaten a general strike4 ,no such strike1 of course1 materialized4 ,not a single ,american workingman uttered a sound4 ,the only protests heard of came from a few barbarous foreigners1 and these malcontents were quickly beaten into submission by the ,polizei4 ,in a week or two all the reserve stocks of beer were exhausted1 and every jug of authentic hard liquor was emptied4 ,since then1 save for the ghastly messes that he has brewed behind locked doors1 the ,american workingman has been dry4 ,worse1 he has also been silent4 ,not a sound has come out of him4444 ,but his liver is full of bile8 ,he nourishes an intolerable grievance8 ,he will get his revenge1 soon or late1 at the polls8 ,all moonshine6 ,he will do nothing of the sort4 ,he will actually do what he always does--that is1 he will make a virtue of his necessity1 and straightway begin believing that he likes ,prohibition1 that it is doing him a lot of good1 that he wouldn't be without it if he could4 ,this is the habitual process of thought of inferior men1 at all times and everywhere4 ,this is the sturdy common sense of the plain people4 #b ,the ,lure of ,babylon ,one of the ultimate by-products of ,prohibition and the allied ,puritanical barbarities will probably be an appreciable slackening in the present movement of yokels toward the large cities4 ,the thing that attracted the peasant youth to our gaudy ,sodoms and ,ninevehs1 in the past1 was not1 as sociologists have always assumed1 the prospect of less work and more money4 ,the country boy1 in point of fact--that is1 the average country boy1 the normal country boy--had to work quite as hard in the city as he ever worked in the country1 and his wages were anything but princely4 ,unequipped with a city trade1 unprotected by a union1 and so forced into competition with the lowest types of foreign labor1 he had to be content with monotonous1 uninspiring and badly-paid jobs4 ,he did not become a stock-broker1 or even a plumber2 until the war gave him a temporary chance at its gigantic swag1 he became a car conductor1 a porter or a wagon-driver4 ,and it took him many years to escape from that sordid fate1 for the city boy1 with a better education and better connections1 was always a lap or two ahead of him4 ,the notion that yokels always succeed in the cities is a great delusion4 ,the overwhelming majority of our rich men are city-born and city-bred4 ,and the overwhelming majority of our elderly motormen1 forlorn corner grocerymen1 neighborhood carpenters and other such blank cartridges are country-bred4 ,no1 it was not money that lured the adolescent husbandman to the cities1 but the gay life4 ,what he dreamed of was a more spacious and stimulating existence than the farm could offer--an existence crowded with intriguing and usually unlawful recreations4 ,a few old farmers may have come in now and then to buy gold bricks or to hear the current ,henry ,ward ,beechers1 but these oldsters were mere trippers--they never thought of settling down--the very notion of it would have appalled them4 ,the actual settlers were all young1 and what brought them on was less an economic impulse than an sthetic one4 ,they wanted to live magnificently1 to taste the sweets that drummers talked of1 to sample the refined divertisements described in such works as ,the ,confessions of an ,actress1 ,night ,life in ,chicago and ,what ,every ,young ,husband ,should ,know4 ,specifically1 they yearned for a semester or two in the theaters1 the saloons and the bordellos--particularly1 the saloons and bordellos4 ,it was this gorgeous bait that dragged them out of their barn-yards4 ,it was this bait that landed a select few in ,wall street and the ,united ,states ,senate--and millions on the front seats of trolley-cars1 delivery-wagons and ash-carts4 ,but now ,puritanism eats the bait4 ,in all our great cities the public stews are closed1 and the lamentable irregularities they catered to are thrown upon an individual initiative that is quite beyond the talents and enterprise of a plow-hand4 ,now the saloons are closed too1 and the blind-pigs begin to charge such prices that no peasant can hope to pay them4 ,only the theater remains--and already the theater loses its old lavish devilishness4 ,true enough1 it still deals in pornography1 but that pornography becomes exclusive and even esoteric3 a yokel could not understand the higher farce1 nor could he afford to pay for a seat at a modern leg-show4 ,the cheap burlesque house of other days is now incurably moral2 ,i saw a burlesque show lately which was almost a dramatization of a wall-card by ,dr4 ,frank ,crane4 ,there remains the movie1 but the peasant needn't come to the city to see movies--there is one in every village4 ,what remains1 then1 of the old lure8 ,what sane youth1 comfortably housed on a farm1 with ,theda ,bara performing at the nearest cross-roads1 wheat at #b4be a bushel and milkers getting #ge a month and board--what jejune rustic1 not downright imbecile1 itches for the city to-day8 #c ,cupid and ,well-,water ,in the department of amour1 ,i daresay1 the first effect of ,prohibition will be to raise up impediments to marriage4 ,it was alcohol1 in the past1 that was the primary cause of perhaps a majority of alliances among civilized folk4 ,the man1 priming himself with cocktails to achieve boldness1 found himself suddenly bogged in sentimentality1 and so yielded to the ancient tricks of the lady4 ,absolutely sober men will be harder to snare4 ,coffee will never mellow them sufficiently4 ,thus ,i look for a fall in the marriage rate4 ,but only temporarily4 ,in the long run1 ,prohibition will make marriage more popular1 at least among the upper classes1 than it has ever been in the past1 and for the plain reason that1 once it is in full effect1 the life of a civilized bachelor will become intolerable4 ,in the past he went to his club4 ,but a club without a bar is as hideously unattractive as a beautiful girl without hair or teeth4 ,no sane man will go into it4 ,in two years1 in fact1 nine out of ten clubs will be closed4 ,the only survivors will be a few bleak rookeries for senile widowers4 ,the bachelor of less years1 unable to put up with the society of such infernos1 will inevitably decide that if he must keep sober he might just as well have a charming girl to ease his agonies1 and so he will expose himself in society1 and some fair one or other will nab him4 ,at the moment1 observing only the first effect of ,prohibition1 the great majority of intelligent women are opposed to it4 ,but when the secondary effect begins to appear they will become in favor of it4 ,they now have the vote4 ,i see no hope4 #d ,the ,triumph of ,idealism ,another effect of ,prohibition will be that it will gradually empty the ,united ,states of its present small minority of civilized men4 ,almost every man that one respects is now casting longing eyes across the ocean4 ,some of them talk frankly of emigrating1 once ,europe pulls itself together4 ,others merely propose to go abroad every year and to stay there as long as possible1 visiting the ,united ,states only at intervals1 as a ,russian nobleman1 say1 used to visit his estates in the ,ukraine4 ,worse1 ,prohibition will scare off all the better sort of immigrants from the other side4 ,the lower order of laborers may continue to come in small numbers--each planning to get all the money he can and then escape1 as the ,italians are even now escaping4 ,but no first-rate man will ever come--no ,stephen ,girard1 or ,william ,osier1 or ,carl ,schurz1 or ,theodore ,thomas1 or ,louis ,agassiz1 or ,edwin ,klebs1 or ,albert ,gallatin1 or ,alexander ,hamilton4 ,it is not ,prohibition per se that will keep them away2 it is the whole complex of social and political attitudes underlying ,prohibition--the whole clinical picture of ,puritanism rampant4 ,the ,united ,states will become a sort of huge ,holland--fat and contented1 but essentially undistinguished4 ,its superior men will leave it automatically1 as nine-tenths of all superior ,hollanders leave ,holland4 ,but all this1 from the standpoint of ,prohibitionists1 is no argument against ,prohibition4 ,on the contrary1 it is an argument in favor of ,prohibition4 ,for the men the ,prohibitionist--i4 e41 the inferior sort of ,puritan--distrusts and dislikes most intensely is precisely what the rest of humanity regards as the superior man4 ,you will go wrong if you imagine that the honest yeomen of1 say1 ,mississippi deplore the fact that in the whole state there is not a single distinguished man4 ,they actually delight in it4 ,it is a source of genuine pride to them that no such irreligious scoundrel as ,balzac lives there1 and no such scandalous adulterer as ,wagner1 and no scoundrelly atheist as ,huxley1 and no such rambunctious piano-thumper as ,beethoven1 and no such ,german spy as ,nietzsche4 ,such men1 settling there1 would be visited by a ,vigilance ,committee and sharply questioned4 ,the ,puritan ,commonwealth1 now as always1 has no traffic with heretics4 ,x4 ,,appendix ,,on ,a ,,tender ,,theme #a ,the ,nature of ,love ,whatever the origin 7in the soul1 the ductless glands or the convolutions of the cerebrum7 of the thing called romantic love1 its mere phenomenal nature may be very simply described4 ,it is1 in brief1 a wholesale diminishing of disgusts1 primarily based on observation1 but often1 in its later stages1 taking on an hallucinatory and pathological character4 ,friendship has precisely the same constitution1 but the pathological factor is usually absent4 ,when we are attracted to a person and find his or her proximity agreeable1 it means that he or she disgusts us less than the average human being disgusts us--which1 if we have delicate sensibilities1 is a good deal more than is comfortable4 ,the elemental man is not much oppressed by this capacity for disgust2 in consequence1 he is capable of falling in love with almost any woman who seems sexually normal4 ,but the man of a higher type is vastly more sniffish1 and so the majority of women whom he meets are quite unable to interest him1 and when he succumbs at last it is always to a woman of special character1 and often she is also one of uncommon shrewdness and enterprise4 ,because human contacts are chiefly superficial1 most of the disgusts that we are conscious of are physical4 ,we are never honestly friendly with a man who is dirtier than we are ourselves1 or who has table manners that are cruder than our own 7or merely noticeably different71 or who laughs in a way that strikes us as gross1 or who radiates some odor that we do not like4 ,we never conceive a romantic passion for a woman who employs a toothpick in public1 or who suffers from acne1 or who offers the subtle but often quite unescapable suggestion that she has on soiled underwear4 ,but there are also psychical disgusts4 ,our friends1 in the main1 must be persons who think substantially as we do1 at least about all things that actively concern us1 and who have the same general tastes4 ,it is impossible to imagine a ,brahmsianer being honestly fond of a man who enjoys jazz1 or a man who admires ,joseph ,conrad falling in love with a woman who reads ,rex ,beach4 ,by the same token1 it is impossible to imagine a woman of genuine refinement falling in love with a ,knight of ,pythias1 a ,methodist or even a chauffeur2 either the chauffeur is a ,harvard aviator in disguise or the lady herself is a charwoman in disguise4 ,here1 however1 the force of aversion may be greatly diminished by contrary physical attractions2 the body1 as usual1 is enormously more potent than the so-called mind4 ,in the midst of the bitterest wars1 with every man of the enemy held to be a fiend in human form1 women constantly fall in love with enemy soldiers who are of pleasant person and wear attractive uniforms4 ,and many a fair agnostic1 as every one knows1 is on good terms with a handsome priest4444 ,imagine a young man in good health and easy circumstances1 entirely ripe for love4 ,the prompting to mate and beget arises within his interstitial depths1 traverses his lymphatic system1 lifts his blood pressure1 and goes whooping through his meatus auditorium externus like a fanfare of slide trombones4 ,the impulse is very powerful4 ,it staggers and dismays him4 ,he trembles like a stag at bay4 ,why1 then1 doesn't he fall head over heels in love with the first eligible woman that he meets8 ,for the plain reason that the majority of women that he meets offend him1 repel him1 disgust him4 ,often it is in some small1 inconspicuous and1 at first glance1 unanalyzable way4 ,she is1 in general1 a very pretty girl--but her ears stand out too much4 ,or her hair reminds him of oakum4 ,or her mouth looks like his aunt's4 ,or she has beer-keg ankles4 ,here very impalpable things1 such as bodily odors1 play a capital part2 their importance is always much underestimated4 ,many a girl has lost a husband by using the wrong perfume1 or by neglecting to have her hair washed4 ,many another has come to grief by powdering her nose too much or too little1 or by shrinking from the paltry pain of having some of her eyebrows pulled1 or by employing a lip-salve with too much purple in it1 or by patronizing a bad dentist1 or by speaking incautiously of chilblains4444 ,but eventually the youth finds his love--soon or late the angel foreordained comes along4 ,who is this prodigy8 ,simply the first girl to sneak over what may be called the threshold of his disgusts--simply the first to disgust him so little1 at first glance1 that the loud1 insistent promptings of the ,divine ,schadchen have a chance to be heard4 ,if he muffs this first1 another will come along1 maybe soon1 maybe late4 ,for every normal man there are hundreds of thousands in ,christendom1 thousands in his own town1 scores within his own circle of acquaintance4 ,this normal man is not too delicate4 ,his fixed foci of disgust are neither very numerous nor very sensitive4 ,for the rest1 he is swayed by fashion1 by suggestion1 by transient moods4 ,anon a mood of cynicism is upon him and he is hard to please1 but anon he succumbs to sentimentality and is blind to everything save the grossest offendings4 ,it is only the man of extraordinary sensitiveness1 the man of hypertrophied delicacy1 who must search the world for his elective affinity4 ,once the threshold is crossed emotion comes to the aid of perception4 ,that is to say1 the blind1 almost irresistible mating impulse1 now fortuitously relieved from the contrary pressure of active disgusts1 fortifies itself by manufacturing illusions4 ,the lover sees with an eye that is both opaque and out of focus4 ,thus he begins the familiar process of editing and improving his girl4 ,features and characteristics that1 observed in cold blood1 might have quickly aroused his most active disgust are now seen through a rose-tinted fog1 like drabs in a musical comedy4 ,the lover ends by being almost ansthetic to disgust4 ,while the spell lasts his lady could shave her head or take to rubbing snuff1 or scratch her leg at a communion service1 or smear her hair with bear's grease1 and yet not disgust him4 ,here the paralysis of the faculties is again chiefly physical--a matter of obscure secretions1 of shifting pressure1 of metabolism4 ,nature is at her tricks4 ,the fever of love is upon its victim4 ,his guard down1 he is little more than a pathetic automaton4 ,the shrewd observer of gaucheries1 the sensitive sniffer1 the erstwhile cynic1 has become a mere potential papa4 ,this spell1 of course1 doesn't last forever4 ,marriage cools the fever and lowers the threshold of disgust4 ,the husband begins to observe what the lover was blind to1 and often his discoveries affect him as unpleasantly as the treason of a trusted friend4 ,and not only is the fever cooled3 the opportunities for exact observation are enormously increased4 ,it is a commonplace of juridical science that the great majority of divorces have their origin in the connubial chamber4 ,here intimacy is so extreme that it is fatal to illusion4 ,both parties1 thrown into the closest human contact that either has suffered since their unconscious days in utero1 find their old capacity for disgust reviving1 and then suddenly flaming4 ,the girl who was perfect in her wedding gown becomes a ghastly caricature in her robe de nuit2 the man who was a ,chevalier ,bayard as a wooer becomes a snuffling1 shambling1 driveling nuisance as a husband--a fellow offensive to eyes1 ears1 nose1 touch and immortal soul4 ,a learned judge of my acquaintance1 constantly hearing divorce actions and as constantly striving to reconcile the parties1 always tries to induce plaintiff and defendant to live apart for a while1 or1 failing that1 to occupy separate rooms1 or1 failing that1 to at least dress in separate rooms4 ,according to this jurist1 a husband who shaves in his wife's presence is either an idiot or a scoundrel4 ,the spectacle1 he argues1 is intrinsically disgusting1 and to force it upon a refined woman is either to subject her to the most exquisite torture or to degrade her gradually to the insensate level of an ,abortfrau4 ,the day is saved1 as every one knows1 by the powerful effects of habit4 ,the acquisition of habit is the process whereby disgust is overcome in daily life--the process whereby one may cease to be disgusted by a persistent noise or odor4 ,one suffers horribly at first1 but after a bit one suffers less1 and in the course of time one scarcely suffers at all4 ,thus a man1 when his marriage enters upon the stage of regularity and safety1 gets used to his wife as he might get used to a tannery next door1 and vice versa4 ,i think that women1 in this direction1 have the harder row to hoe1 for they are more observant than men1 and vastly more sensitive in small ways4 ,but even women succumb to habit with humane rapidity1 else every marriage would end in divorce4 ,disgusts pale into mere dislikes1 disrelishes1 distastes4 ,they cease to gag and torture4 ,but though they thus shrink into the shadow1 they are by no means disposed of4 ,deep down in the subconscious they continue to lurk1 and some accident may cause them to flare up at any time1 and so work havoc4 ,this flaring up accounts for a familiar and yet usually very mystifying phenomenon --the sudden collapse of a marriage1 a friendship or a business association after years of apparent prosperity4 #b ,the ,incomparable ,buzzsaw ,the chief 7and perhaps the only genuine7 charm of women is seldom mentioned by the orthodox professors of the sex4 ,i refer to the charm that lies in the dangers they present4 ,the allurement that they hold out to men is precisely the allurement that ,cape ,hatteras holds out to sailors3 they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating4 ,to the average man1 doomed to some banal and sordid drudgery all his life long1 they offer the only grand hazard that he ever encounters4 ,take them away and his existence would be as flat and secure as that of a milch-cow4 ,even to the unusual man1 the adventurous man1 the imaginative and romantic man1 they offer the adventure of adventures4 ,civilization tends to dilute and cheapen all other hazards4 ,war itself1 once an enterprise stupendously thrilling1 has been reduced to mere caution and calculation2 already1 indeed1 it employs as many press-agents1 letter-openers1 and chautauqua orators as soldiers4 ,on some not distant to-morrow its salient personality may be ,potash1 and if not ,potash1 then ,perlmutter4 ,but the duel of sex continues to be fought in the ,berserker manner4 ,whoso approaches women still faces the immemorial dangers4 ,civilization has not made them a bit more safe than they were in ,solomon's time2 they are still inordinately barbarous and menacing1 and hence inordinately provocative1 and hence inordinately charming and romantic4444 ,the most disgusting cad in the world is the man who1 on grounds of decorum and morality1 avoids the game of love4 ,he is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies4 ,women have a hard time of it in this world4 ,they are oppressed by man-made laws1 man-made social customs1 masculine egoism1 the delusion of masculine superiority4 ,their one comfort is the assurance that1 even though it may be impossible to prevail against man1 it is always possible to enslave and torture a man4 ,this feeling is fostered when one makes love to them4 ,one need not be a great beau1 a seductive catch1 to do it effectively4 ,any man is better than none4 ,no woman is ever offended by admiration4 ,the wife of a millionaire notes the reverent glance of a head-waiter4 ,to withhold that devotion1 to shrink poltroonishly from giving so much happiness at such small expense1 to evade the business on the ground that it has hazards--this is the act of a puling and tacky fellow4 #c ,women as ,spectacles ,women1 when it comes to snaring men1 through the eye1 bait a great many hooks that fail to fluster the fish4 ,nine-tenths of their primping and decorating of their persons not only doesn't please men2 it actually repels men4 ,i often pass two days running without encountering a single woman who is charmingly dressed4 ,nearly all of them run to painful color schemes1 absurd designs and excessive over-ornamentation4 ,one seldom observes a man who looks an absolute guy1 whereas such women are very numerous2 in the average theater audience they constitute a majority of at least nine-tenths4 ,the reason is not far to seek4 ,the clothes of men are plain in design and neutral in hue4 ,the only touch of genuine color is in the florid blob of the face1 the center of interest--exactly where it ought to be4 ,if there is any other color at all1 it is a faint suggestion in the cravat--adjacent to the face1 and so leading the eye toward it4 ,it is color that kills the clothes of the average woman4 ,she runs to bright spots that take the eye away from her face and hair4 ,she ceases to be woman clothed and becomes a mere piece of clothing womaned4 ,even at the basic feminine art of pigmenting their faces very few women excel4 ,the average woman seems to think that she is most lovely when her sophistication of her complexion is most adroitly concealed--when the poudre de riz is rubbed in so hard that it is almost invisible1 and the penciling of eyes and lips is perfectly realistic4 ,this is a false notion4 ,most men of appreciative eye have no objection to artificiality per se1 so long as it is intrinsically sightly4 ,the marks made by a lip-stick may be very beautiful2 there are many lovely shades of scarlet1 crimson and vermilion4 ,a man with eyes in his head admires them for themselves2 he doesn't have to be first convinced that they are non-existent1 that what he sees is not the mark of a lip-stick at all1 but an authentic lip4 ,so with the eyes4 ,nothing could be more charming than an eye properly renforced2 the naked organ is not to be compared to it2 nature is an idiot when it comes to shadows4 ,but it must be admired as a work of art1 not as a miraculous and incredible eye4 444 ,women1 in this important and venerable art1 stick too closely to crude representation4 ,they forget that men do not admire the technique1 but the result4 ,what they should do is to forget realism for a while1 and concentrate their attention upon composition1 chiaroscuro and color4 #d ,woman and the ,artist ,much gabble is to be found in the literature of the world upon the function of woman as inspiration1 stimulant and agente provocateuse to the creative artist4 ,the subject is a favorite one with sentimentalists1 most of whom are quite beyond anything properly describable as inspiration1 either with or without feminine aid4 ,i incline to think1 as ,i hint1 that there is little if any basis of fact beneath the theory4 ,women not only do not inspire creative artists to high endeavor2 they actually stand firmly against every high endeavor that a creative artist initiates spontaneously4 ,what a man's women folks almost invariable ask of him is that he be respectable--that he do something generally approved--that he avoid yielding to his aberrant fancies--in brief1 that he sedulously eschew showing any sign of genuine genius4 ,their interest is not primarily in the self-expression of the individual1 but in the well-being of the family organization1 which means the safety of themselves4 ,no sane woman would want to be the wife of such a man1 say1 as ,nietzsche or ,chopin4 ,his mistress perhaps1 yes--for a mistress can always move on when the weather gets too warm4 ,but not a wife4 ,i here speak by the book4 ,both ,nietzsche and ,chopin had plenty of mistresses1 but neither was ever able to get a wife4 ,shakespeare and ,ann ,hathaway1 ,wagner and ,minna ,planer1 ,molire and ,armande ,bjart--one might multiply instances almost endlessly4 ,minna1 at least in theory1 knew something of music2 she was thus what romance regards as an ideal wife for ,wagner4 ,but instead of helping him to manufacture his incomparable masterpieces1 she was for twenty-five years the chief impediment to their manufacture4 ,lohengrin gave her the horrors2 she begged ,richard to give up his lunacies and return to the composition of respectable cornet music4 ,in the end he had to get rid of her in sheer self-defense4 ,once free1 with nothing worse on his hands than the illicit affection of ,cosima ,liszt von ,blow1 he produced music drama after music drama in rapid succession4 ,then1 married to ,cosima1 he descended to the anticlimax of ,parsifal1 a truly tragic mixture of the stupendous and the banal1 of work of genius and sinfonia domestica--a great man dying by inches1 smothered by the smoke of ,french fried potatoes1 deafened by the wailing of children1 murdered in his own house by the holiest of passions4 ,sentimentalists always bring up the case of ,schumann and his ,clara in rebuttal4 ,but does it actually rebut8 ,i doubt it4 ,clara1 too1 perpetrated her attentat against art4 ,her fair white arms1 lifting from the keyboard to encircle ,robert's neck1 squeezed more out of him than mere fatuous smirks4 ,he had the best head on him that music had seen since ,beethoven's day2 he was1 on the cerebral side1 a colossus2 he might have written music of the very first order4 ,well1 what he did write was piano music--some of it imperfectly arranged for orchestra4 ,the sad eyes of ,clara were always upon him4 ,he kept within the limits of her intelligence1 her prejudices1 her wifely love4 ,no grand experiments with the orchestra4 ,no superb leapings and cavortings4 ,no rubbing of sand-paper over critical ears4 ,robert lived and died a respectable musical ,hausvater4 ,he was a man of genuine genius--but he didn't leave ten lines that might not have been passed by old ,prof4 ,jadassohn4 ,the truth is that1 no matter how great the domestic concord and how lavish the sacrifices a man makes for his women-folk1 they almost always regard him secretly as a silly and selfish fellow1 and cherish the theory that it would be easily possible to improve him4 ,this is because the essential interests of men and women are eternally antithetical4 ,a man may yield over and over again1 but in the long run he must occasionally look out for himself--and it is these occasions that his women-folk remember4 ,the typical domestic situation shows a woman trying to induce a man to do something that he doesn't want to do1 or to refrain from something that he does want to do4 ,this is true in his bachelor days1 when his mother or his sister is his antagonist4 ,it is preminently true just before his marriage1 when the girl who has marked him down is hard at the colossal job of overcoming his reluctance4 ,and after marriage it is so true that there is hardly need to state it4 ,one of the things every man discovers to his disquiet is that his wife1 after the first play-acting is over1 regards him essentially as his mother used to regard him--that is1 as a self-worshiper who needs to be policed and an idiot who needs to be protected4 ,the notion that women admire their men-folks is pure moonshine4 ,the most they ever achieve in that direction is to pity them4 ,when a woman genuinely loves a man it is a sign that she regards him much as a healthy man regards a one-armed and epileptic soldier4 #e ,martyrs ,nearly the whole case of the birth-controllers who now roar in ,christendom is grounded upon the doctrine that it is an intolerable outrage for a woman to have to submit to motherhood when her private fancies may rather incline to automobiling1 shopping or going to the movies4 ,for this curse the husband is blamed2 the whole crime is laid to his swinish lasciviousness4 ,with the highest respect1 nonsense6 ,my private suspicion1 supported by long observation1 copious prayer and the most laborious cogitation1 is that no woman delights in motherhood so vastly as this woman who theoretically abhors it4 ,she experiences1 in fact1 a double delight4 ,on the one hand1 there is the caressing of her vanity--a thing enjoyed by every woman when she achieves the banality of viable offspring4 ,and on the other hand1 there is the fine chance it gives her to play the martyr--a chance that every woman seeks as diligently as a man seeks ease4 ,all these so-called unwilling mothers wallow in their martyrdom4 ,they revel in the opportunity to be pitied1 made much over and envied by other women4 #f ,the ,burnt ,child ,the fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself1 and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness4 ,his habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle4 ,he never quite trusts himself thereafter4 #g ,the ,supreme ,comedy ,marriage1 at ,best1 is full of a sour and inescapable comedy1 but it never reaches the highest peaks of the ludicrous save when efforts are made to escape its terms--that is1 when efforts are made to loosen its bonds1 and so ameliorate and denaturize it4 ,all projects to reform it by converting it into a free union of free individuals are inherently absurd4 ,the thing is1 at bottom1 the most rigid of existing conventionalities1 and the only way to conceal the fact and so make it bearable is to submit to it docilely4 ,the effect of every revolt is merely to make the bonds galling1 and1 what is worse1 poignantly obvious4 ,who are happy in marriage8 ,those with so little imagination that they cannot picture a better state1 and those so shrewd that they prefer quiet slavery to hopeless rebellion4 #h ,a ,hidden ,cause ,many a woman1 in order to bring the man of her choice to the altar of ,god1 has to fight him with such relentless vigilance and ferocity that she comes to hate him4 ,this1 perhaps1 explains the unhappiness of many marriages4 ,in particular1 it explains the unhappiness of many marriages based upon what is called love4 #i ,bad ,workmanship ,the essential slackness and incompetence of women1 their congenital incapacity for small expertness1 already descanted upon at length in my psychological work1 ,in ,defense of ,women1 is never more plainly revealed than in their manhandling of the primary business of their sex4 ,if the average woman were as competent at her trade of getting a husband as the average car conductor is at his trade of robbing the fare-box1 then a bachelor beyond the age of twenty-five would be so rare in the world that yokels would pay ten cents to gape at him4 ,but women1 in this fundamental industry1 pursue a faulty technique and permit themselves to be led astray by unsound principles4 ,the axioms into which they have precipitated their wisdom are nearly all untrue4 ,for example1 the axiom that the way to capture a man is through his stomach--which is to say1 by feeding him lavishly4 ,nothing could be more absurd4 ,the average man1 at least in ,england and ,america1 has such rudimentary tastes in victualry that he doesn't know good food from bad4 ,he will eat anything set before him by a cook that he likes4 ,the true way to fetch him is with drinks4 ,a single bottle of drinkable wine will fill more men with the passion of love than ten sides of beef or a ton of potatoes4 ,even a ,seidel of beer1 deftly applied1 is enough to mellow the hardest bachelor4 ,if women really knew their business1 they would have abandoned cooking centuries ago1 and devoted themselves to brewing1 distilling and bartending4 ,it is a rare man who will walk five blocks for a first-rate meal4 ,but it is equally a rare man who1 even in the old days of freedom1 would not walk five blocks for a first-rate cocktail4 ,to-day he would walk five miles4 ,another unsound feminine axiom is the one to the effect that the way to capture a man is to be distant--to throw all the burden of the courtship upon him4 ,this is precisely the way to lose him4 ,a man face to face with a girl who seems reserved and unapproachable is not inspired thereby to drag her off in the manner of a caveman2 on the contrary1 he is inspired to thank ,god that here1 at last1 is a girl with whom it is possible to have friendly doings without getting into trouble--that here is one not likely to grow mushy and make a mess4 ,the average man does not marry because some marble fair one challenges his enterprise4 ,he marries because chance throws into his way a fair one who repels him less actively than most1 and because his delight in what he thus calls her charm is renforced by a growing suspicion that she has fallen in love with him4 ,in brief1 it is chivalry that undoes him4 ,the girl who infallibly gets a husband--in fact1 any husband that she wants--is the one who tracks him boldly1 fastens him with sad eyes1 and then1 when his conscience has begun to torture him1 throws her arms around his neck1 bursts into maidenly tears on his shoulder1 and tells him that she fears her forwardness will destroy his respect for her4 ,it is only a colossus who can resist such strategy4 ,but it takes only a man of the intellectual grade of a ,y4 ,m4 ,c4 ,a4 secretary to elude the girl who is afraid to take the offensive4 ,a third bogus axiom ,i have already discussed1 to wit1 the axiom that a man is repelled by palpable cosmetics--that the wise girl is the one who effectively conceals her sophistication of her complexion4 ,what could be more untrue8 ,the fact is that very few men are competent to distinguish between a layer of talc and the authentic epidermis1 and that the few who have the gift are quite free from any notion that the latter is superior to the former4 ,what a man seeks when he enters the society of women is something pleasing to the eye4 ,that is all he asks4 ,he does not waste any time upon a chemical or spectroscopic examination of the object observed2 he simply determines whether it is beautiful or not beautiful4 ,has it so long escaped women that their husbands1 when led astray1 are usually led astray by women so vastly besmeared with cosmetics that they resemble barber-poles more than human beings8 ,are they yet blind to the superior pull of a ,french maid1 a chorus girl1 a stenographer begauded like a painter's palette8 444 ,and still they go on rubbing off their varnish1 brushing the lampblack from their eyelashes1 seeking eternally the lip-stick that is so depressingly purple that it will deceive6 ,alas1 what folly6 ,,index ,abbott1 ,lawrence ,abbott1 ,lyman ,akins1 ,zo ,alcott1 ,a4 ,b4 ,allen1 ,james ,lane ,also sprach ,zarathustra ,american ,painting and ,its ,tradition ,american ,scholar1 ,the ,amherst ,college ,anderson1 ,sherwood ,archer1 ,william ,aspects of ,death and ,correlated ,aspects of ,life ,atlantic ,monthly ,authors' ,league ,bulletin ,babbitt1 ,irving ,backward ,glance ,along ,my ,own ,road1 ,a ,backwash of ,war1 ,the ,baker1 ,george ,p4 ,bancroft1 ,george ,barton1 ,wm4 ,e4 ,baudelaire1 ,charles ,beach1 ,rex ,beethoven1 ,ludwig ,bennett1 ,arnold ,benson1 ,e4 ,f4 ,bierce1 ,ambrose ,billroth1 ,theodor ,blasco1 ,ibez1 ,v4 ,blue ,hotel1 ,the ,bhme1 ,jakob ,bonaparte1 ,charles ,j4 ,bookman ,boynton1 ,p4 ,h4 ,brady1 ,cyrus ,townsend ,brahms1 ,johannes ,brainard1 ,j4 ,g4 ,c4 ,bright1 ,john ,bronson-,howard1 ,george ,brooks1 ,van ,wyck ,brown1 ,alice ,browne1 ,porter ,emerson ,brownell1 ,w4 ,c4 ,bruce1 ,philip ,alexander ,bryant1 ,wm4 ,cullen ,burroughs1 ,john ,burton1 ,richard ,butler1 ,fanny ,kemble ,bynner1 ,witter ,cabell1 ,james ,branch ,cahan1 ,abraham ,caine1 ,hall ,candler1 ,asa ,g4 ,carlyle1 ,thomas ,carnegie1 ,andrew ,carrel1 ,alexis ,cather1 ,willa ,sibert ,chambers1 ,robert ,w4 ,channing1 ,wm4 ,ellery ,chesterton1 ,g4 ,k4 ,churchill1 ,winston ,clemens1 ,s4 ,l4 ,cobb1 ,irvin ,cobden1 ,richard ,comfort1 ,will ,levington ,comstockery ,confessions of an ,actress1 ,the ,conrad1 ,joseph ,coogler1 ,j4 ,gordon ,cooper1 ,j4 ,fenimore ,corelli1 ,marie ,cosmopolitan ,crane1 ,frank ,crane1 ,stephen ,crile1 ,george ,w4 ,crothers1 ,samuel ,,mcc ,d',annunzio1 ,gabriel ,dawson1 ,coningsby ,davis1 ,richard ,harding ,debussy1 ,claude ,deland1 ,margaret ,democratic ,vistas ,dickens1 ,charlesx ,die ,meistersinger ,dissertations on the ,english ,language ,doyle1 ,a4 ,conan ,dreiser ,protest ,dreiser1 ,theodore ,eliot1 ,t4 ,s4 ,ellis1 ,havelock ,emerson1 ,ralph ,waldo ,ethan ,frome ,evans1 ,caradoc ,fernald1 ,chester ,bailey ,flexner1 ,simon ,frank1 ,waldo ,freneau1 ,philip ,freytag-,loringhoven1 ,elsa von ,fuller1 ,henry ,b4 ,gale1 ,zona ,garland1 ,hamlin ,geddes1 ,auckland ,genius2 ,the ,georgia ,gilman1 ,daniel ,coit ,glasgow1 ,ellen ,glass1 ,montague ,glyn1 ,elinor ,good ,girl1 ,a ,gorky1 ,maxim ,gosse1 ,edmund ,grant1 ,robert ,graves1 ,john ,temple ,greenwich ,village ,griswold1 ,rufus ,w4 ,grote1 ,george ,hadley1 ,herbert ,k4 ,hamilton1 ,clayton ,harris1 ,corra ,harris1 ,frank ,harrison1 ,henry ,sydnor ,harte1 ,bret ,haweis1 ,h4 ,r4 ,hawthorne1 ,hildegarde ,hawthorne1 ,julian ,hawthorne1 ,nathaniel ,hay1 ,ian ,haydn1 ,josef ,heart of ,darkness ,hearst's ,hecht1 ,ben ,hedda ,gabler#aij ,henry1 ,o4 ,hergesheimer1 ,joseph ,hillis1 ,newell ,dwight ,holmes1 ,oliver ,wendell ,hooker1 ,brian ,hopper1 ,james ,hough1 ,emerson ,howe1 ,e4 ,w4 ,howells1 ,wm4 ,dean ,hubbard1 ,elbert ,huneker1 ,james ,impressions of ,theodore ,roosevelt ,in ,defense of ,women ,industrial ,history of ,virginia in the ,seventeenth ,century ,irving1 ,henry ,irving1 ,washington ,iveagh1 ,lord ,james1 ,henry ,jenseits von ,gut und ,bse ,johns ,hopkins ,university ,johnson1 ,owen ,johnson1 ,robert ,u4 ,johnston1 ,mary ,kellner1 ,leon ,kilmer1 ,joyce ,kipling1 ,rudyard ,knapp1 ,samuel ,lorenzo ,la ,motte1 ,ellen ,lardner1 ,ring ,w4 ,last of the ,mohicans1 ,the ,lay ,anthony1 ,the ,leaves of ,grass ,lectures on ,american ,literature ,lee1 ,gerald ,stanley ,le ,quex1 ,william ,letters and ,leadership ,lincoln1 ,abraham ,lindsay1 ,vachel ,little ,review ,loeb1 ,jacques ,london1 ,jack ,longfellow1 ,h4 ,w4 ,lowell1 ,amy ,lowell1 ,james ,russell ,loveman1 ,robert ,mabie1 ,hamilton ,wright ,mc,clure1 ,john ,mc,clure's ,mac,grath1 ,harold ,maeterlinck1 ,maurice ,mallarm1 ,stephen ,man3 ,an ,adaptive ,mechanism ,mansfield1 ,richard ,marden1 ,orison ,swett ,markham1 ,edwin ,martin1 ,e4 ,s4 ,mason1 ,walt ,matthews1 ,brander ,mechanistic ,view of ,war and ,peace1 ,a ,merrill1 ,stuart ,metropolitan ,mitchell1 ,donald ,g4 ,moore1 ,george ,more1 ,paul ,elmer ,morris1 ,gouverneur ,my ,antonia ,my ,book and ,i ,my ,neighbors ,mysterious ,stranger1 ,the ,nation ,nietzsche1 ,f4 ,w4 ,night ,life in ,chicago ,nordfeldt1 ,bror ,norris1 ,charles ,g4 ,norris1 ,frank ,norris1 ,kathleen ,northcliffe1 ,lord ,noyes1 ,alfred ,o',brien1 ,edward ,j4 ,o',neill1 ,eugene ,oppenheim1 ,e4 ,phillips ,oppenheim1 ,james ,o',sullivan1 ,vincent ,parmelee1 ,maurice ,parsifal ,perry1 ,bliss ,personality and ,conduct ,phelps1 ,wm4 ,lyon ,phillips1 ,david ,graham ,poe1 ,edgar ,allan ,poetic ,principle1 ,the ,poetry3 a ,magazine of ,verse ,porter1 ,eleanor ,h4 ,pound1 ,ezra ,prescott1 ,w4 ,h4 ,puritanism ,ransome1 ,arthur ,rathenau1 ,walther von ,reading1 ,lordx ,reese1 ,lizette ,woodworth ,repplier1 ,agnes ,ricardo1 ,david ,ride of the ,valkyrie1 ,the ,rideout1 ,henry ,milner ,riley1 ,james ,whitcomb ,rinehart1 ,mary ,roberts ,rockefeller1 ,john ,d4 ,rolland1 ,romain ,roosevelt1 ,theodore ,rossetti1 ,christina ,saintsbury1 ,george ,sandburg1 ,carl ,sargent1 ,john ,saturday ,evening ,post ,scheffauer1 ,herman ,george ,schubert1 ,franz ,schumann1 ,robert ,shakespeare1 ,wm4 ,shaw1 ,george ,bernard ,shelburne ,essays ,sherman1 ,s4 ,p4 ,sisson documents ,spingarn1 ,j4 ,e4 ,stanton1 ,frank ,l4 ,stearns1 ,harold ,sterbelied1 ,das ,sterling1 ,george ,stratton-,porter1 ,gene ,strauss1 ,johann ,strauss1 ,richard ,strawinsky1 ,igor ,sudermann1 ,hermann ,sumner1 ,william ,graham ,sunday1 ,billy ,tarkington1 ,booth ,teasdale1 ,sara ,tendencies in ,modern ,american ,poetry ,thayer1 ,william ,roscoe ,theodore ,roosevelt ,thomas1 ,augustus ,thoreau1 ,henry ,david ,times ,book ,review1 ,new ,york ,townsend1 ,e4 ,w4 ,vance1 ,louis ,joseph ,vandover and the ,brute ,van ,dyke1 ,henry van ,dyke1 ,john ,c4 ,van ,vechten1 ,carl ,veblen1 ,thorstein ,virginiax ,wagner1 ,richard ,walpole1 ,hugh ,weber1 ,f4 ,parkes ,webster1 ,noah ,wellman1 ,rita ,wells1 ,h4 ,g4 ,wendell1 ,barrett ,wharton1 ,edith ,what ,every ,young ,husband ,should ,know ,what is ,man8 ,whitman1 ,stephen ,french ,whitman1 ,walt ,whittier1 ,j4 ,g4 ,wilcox1 ,ella ,wheeler ,willis1 ,n4 ,p4 ,wilson1 ,harry ,leon ,wilson1 ,woodrow ,wister1 ,owen ,woodberry1 ,george1 ,e4 ,wright1 ,harold ,bell ,zangwill1 ,israel