Mary R—— was telling us to-day the details of Zola's accidental death—if it was an accident. There are a few, she tells me, who whisper privately that the enemies he made by "Lourdes" and "Rome" are of the sort who wait long and patiently, and strike hard, and strike at the back when the time of vengeance comes. That sounds rather sensational, and certainly the general public have heard no such suggestion.
The story of the death-chamber is like a chapter from one of his own books, and one can't but feel how gruesome and vivid he would have made the account of the tragedy could he have recorded it.
It's rather odd how the multitude still judge Zola at the rating of twenty years since, before he had developed the meaning of his methods and proved himself one of the greatest of the moral teachers.
It was certainly as long ago as that when a battered, grimy copy of "Nana" drifted by some swirl of chance into my youthful hands. I was quite old enough to realize that my pastors and masters would be convulsed with horror did they at all suspect what I was at, but being in those days as omnivorous as Lamb—"Shaftesbury was not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low"—everything on which a hand could be laid passed into my greedy mental maw, from Locke "On the Human Understanding" to the novels of the Duchess, and I had intelligence enough not to chatter about every book I opened.
I remember with perfect vividness the moral revelation given me by the chapter descriptive of the drunken orgie in Nana's rooms, where they wound up the gaieties of the evening by the spirited jest of pouring the champagne into the piano. In a flash was made clear to me what I had never previously suspected, that vice was tedious and unamusing!
Until that moment I had accepted in perfect good faith the insistence of the moralists upon the delicious, exciting, irresistible nature of vice, which, though deplorable in its eventual effects, was too agreeable to be refrained from unless fortified by either religion or the choicest collection of moral maxims.
We were the contented owners, at that same period, of a large engraving of a popular painting entitled "The Prodigal Son"; one of those pictures supposed to have a "good moral" and help silently, in season and out of season, to point towards virtue like a sign at the crossroads. The engraving was divided into three parts, like a triptych; the central, and by far the largest portion, showed the famous ne'er-do-weel prodigalling with all his might in a sort of lordly pleasure dome, all columns and sweeping curtains and steps, open to the sunshine on every side, and decorated with the most expensive cut flowers. A meal, which plainly deserved to be called by no meaner name than a banquet, was toward, and the naughty young gentleman, bedecked in velvet and soothed by the music of viols, was feasting amid a medley of young ladies of the most dazzling physical charms, all attired in those sketchy toilets which have no visible means of support, and which allow the artist to prove his inexhaustible talent for drawing arms and busts. So vivacious and sumptuous was this scene that at first one hardly noticed the narrow panels to right and left, in one of which the profuse prodigal was on a subsequent occasion dining en famille with the swine, and later journeying toward forgiveness and veal.
The moralists, from Isaiah down, have so dearly loved to show their talent for drawing arms and busts. The delineation of vice always usurps all the foreground of the canvas. According to them, the broad road is unfailing in its crops of flowers, the wine is always red in the cup, "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim." The frisky enchantresses are without exception young and charming. The reverse of the picture is depressingly bleak—by way of proper dramatic contrast, perhaps, though to any one less austere than a moralist it would seem unintelligent to point out that in one direction all was gay, brilliant, and agreeable, yet one must follow the gloomy, tedious, and unpleasant road in order to find some intangible spiritual satisfaction, which to youthful and ardent minds seems drearily remote, and unsatisfying when reached. Besides it really isn't true. Life as a matter of fact is certainly more agreeable when one behaves one's self decently. Nothing was ever more blatantly untrue than the cynical proverb which declares that everything pleasant is either indigestible, expensive, or immoral. But the mind of youth is almost touchingly credulous. It rarely questions the accuracy of the descriptions of the moralists, who claim to be experts, though instinctively it develops a necessity for experimenting a little with those forbidden sweets of which it has heard so much praise.
Until I read "Nana" it never occurred to me to question that vice was in itself agreeable, since I had never heard aught to the contrary; but that champagne poured into the piano washed away the conviction forever. It seemed so squalid, so unimaginative, so dull; and all the vice I have observed since has shared its lack of charm. I found that the broad road had no patent on flowers and sunshine, that dishonesty nine times out of ten failed of returns at all commensurate with the energy devoted to it; that loose behaviour was nearly always noisome and fatiguing; that the prodigal, instead of being a beautiful young person in velvet, generally had a red nose and a waist, and borrowed from his acquaintances, and that the enchantresses had not nearly as good figures as the painters credited them with, and as a rule had no real feeling for soap and water. The truth is that all forms of vice are for the most part not only repulsive but intolerably unamusing, and Zola was the first of the moralists who had the courage to be original and speak disrespectfully of it.
A man who took me in to dinner Wednesday night said, pityingly,
"You seem to be a pessimist. Why is that? Are you unhappy?"
That sort of remark is a shot between wind and water, and leaves one speechless. I crossly denied being an ——ist of any sort, and changed the subject.
Possibly he was led to his banal personality by some remark I had made, of the sort that is commonly called cynical because it is true.
The optimists have a theory that those who don't take the same view of life as themselves must therefore be unhappy. It's an amazing conclusion. They seem to have no idea how the pessimists enjoy their own sense of superiority. It is as if the blind should say to the man with eyes: "How unhappy you must be to see things just as they are. Now I can imagine them to be anything I please!"
The man with eyes could, of course, only smile; it being obviously impossible to discuss such a proposition.
The believers in personal immortality labour under the same curious illusion apparently. They are so sorry for those who don't believe in it, and imagine them frightened at the thought of death. To their minds the universe is inconceivable without their presence, seemingly forgetful of the fact that it got on quite well before they came. It is rather an imposing bit of egotism, after all. It rises to the level of grandeur.
Catholics, I know, have the same pity and astonishment about the state of mind of Protestants that the optimists feel for pessimists, the religious for the unbelieving. Each thinks the heretic in parlous state and fancies he must be secretly disturbed by it, when of a truth the heretic is simply amused by this anxiety for his welfare, and cheerfully certain of his own superiority.
M——, who has, with some flourish of trumpet and tuck of drum, gone over to Rome, is the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, I am told, and, what is odder still, is a very clever and humorous creature. One can discount the parson and the cleverness, but a humorous Protestant 'verting is more difficult to understand.
I tried hard to get some explanation from her as to her point of view, but she was entirely vague. Fancy—she has a patron saint, beads, etc.! One can only gape.
Very probably every one is at birth—no matter what the environment—either Catholic or Protestant by nature. To many it is an absolute necessity that someone else should furnish their spiritual and mental support. With these, no matter how frequently one sets them on their feet their knees will give under them; no matter how often one starts them in spiritual business one has eventually to come again to the rescue. To such an one the perpetual supervision and personal tyranny of the Catholic Church must seem deliciously comfortable and protecting. No wonder they are drawn to it across all barriers.
To the born Protestant such bondage is as intolerable as spoon feeding and a wheeled chair would be to an athlete. Whatever the moral or mental situation may be he must deal with it for himself—must stand on his own feet—use his own moral muscles. Neither can ever understand the other. Their whole attitude toward life is directly opposed. Each seeks what his nature demands.
The book-club has eliminated Marcel Prevost's "Mariage de Julianne" as too naughty for our perusal—though not until we had all read it, to see how undesirable it was.
To what H—— calls my "robust nature" it seemed merely deliciously funny and human, and I am not fond of French fiction as a rule. Most of it leaves in my mind only a sense of dreary nastiness—a sort of more closely knit Hall Caine-ism, with his sloppiness of style left out. Yet a good many of one's contemporaries profess to find French fiction vastly superior to English literature of the same sort: to find Balzac a greater artist than Thackeray; but those who make this assertion are, I find, generally lacking in humour and imagination themselves, and therefore blind to a whole side of life. They, of nature, think marionettes liker life than beings of flesh and blood. Balzac's dry, minute descriptions give them an impression of reality. To hear that a man had a red nose, had iron-grey hair growing thin on top, and that his bottle-green trousers wrinkled at the knees, gives them the sensation that Balzac is presenting them with "a slice of life"—not being aware, it would seem, that this might be equally truthful a description of a wax figure at Madame Tussaud's. Such matters as these are not the essentials that differentiate a man from his fellows.
Henry James thinks this elaboration of detail is Balzac's "strongest gift" and adds, "Dickens often sets a figure before us with extraordinary vividness, but the outline is fantastic and arbitrary—we but half believe in it." It seems to me that James has, like Balzac, but a half developed sense of life. He too is meticulous in his efforts to make one see and feel what he wishes to convey, because he only half feels and sees it himself; though he is concerned rather with emotions than objects, and in spite of the labour and care expended by each, but a shadowy impression remains. Dickens can dash in a few broad, half caricatured lines of a portrait because the figure he wishes to show is so vivid to his own eye he feels it only necessary to indicate it broadly to make others recognize it. Uncle Pumblechook in "Great Expectations" is suggested, as far as written description goes, in merest outline—"A large, hard-breathing, middle-aged, slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head"—yet after half a page of his conversation and his welcome to Pip at the funeral, "breathing sherry and crumbs," one needs no more. The man lives and moves. One knows him inside and out.
James speaks again of Balzac's "choking one with his bricks and mortar," and thinks his houses, his rooms, his towns, "unequalled for vividness of presentation, of realization." To an imaginative reader they are as dry and superfluous as a real-estate agent's pamphlets; one has a sense of the author's heavy straining effort to make the places palpable to his own mental vision. It is the weary iteration of the bore, who having no imagination can leave nothing to that of his hearer.
Dickens somewhere describes a room merely by telling how the winking fire was reflected in every smooth object. The fire winks cheerily; the pewters winking dully, as if afraid of being suspected of not seeing the joke; the furniture twinkling slyly from every polished point, etc., etc., in Dickens's well-known fashion of pursuing a happy fancy round and round. There is not one word of catalogue of the room's contents, yet it remains forever as vivid in the reader's memory as a chamber with which one is intimately familiar.
Bulwer says that "French nature is not human nature," and if human nature was necessarily the Anglo-Saxon conception of life it would be true. Nothing so points French heterogeneousness from ourselves as the attitude of our two chosen masters of the novel, Balzac and Thackeray. Not a gleam of humour ever irradiates for a moment the pages of the former. A mere glimmer would make impossible his story of the young man who endeavours to compromise a pretty woman, whose refusal to yield to his dishonourable suggestions so puzzles and disgusts him that he can only explain her coldness as being the probable results of some secret but mortal disease!... A lover abducts a reluctant fair by mingled force and stratagem, and attempts to brand her with hot irons; accompanying this gentle gallantry with the mummeries of a thirteenth-century Inquisition. This picturesque proof of devotion so touches the lady that she promptly grovels in an agony of affection for this chivalrous admirer....
All this is told with perfect gravity, the author having not the smallest suspicion of its absurdity—and yet there be actually Anglo-Saxons who solemnly announce that Balzac knew human nature to its depths. French nature, perhaps; certainly not ours....
A spinster lives twenty years in a family, all of whose members she venomously hates, and not one of them suspect her unselfish devotion until she aids in humiliating them and wrecking their fortunes.... Madame Hulot is a saint, and yet at fifty years of age offers her person to a repulsive scoundrel in order to provide a marriage portion for her daughter; Balzac evidently considering this one of her noblest acts.
The point at which one finds the widest divergence of the French and English attitudes toward life is in the essay made by each of these chosen spokesmen to show us the adventuress. Taine, who honestly tried to see English literature from English eyes and interpret it to his countrymen, breaks down entirely when he reaches this angle of vision.
He says: "There is a personage unanimously recognized as Thackeray's masterpiece, Becky Sharp.... Let us compare her with a similar personage of Balzac in 'Les Parents Pauvre,' Valerie Marneff. The difference in the two works will exhibit the difference in the two literatures"—and they do indeed.
Valerie to the English reader is the old commonplace, stereotyped adventuress of the melodrama. One can imagine none save those as vile and stupid as herself being deceived by such a greedy, outrageous creature. The descriptions of her looks and behaviour smack of the unhumorous shilling shocker. She gives glances from beneath "her long eyelids like the glare of cannon seen through smoke!" ... and again "her eyes flashed like daggers."
Such figures of speech sound like the pompous rhodomontade of a Laura Jean Libby, yet Taine quotes them with much admiration.
Becky, Taine finds incomprehensible. He complains that Thackeray "degrades her" when he laughingly reveals her secret vulgar shifts. Also he is resentful because her carefully built schemes crumble one by one like houses of cards, being ignorant, apparently, of that choice old utilitarian proverb as to Honesty being the best policy, founded upon a very general observation that the same cleverness and energy employed by adventurers in their nefarious schemes pays a far higher rate of interest when turned to legitimate pursuits.
The half affectionate, half contemptuous humour with which her creator regards Becky shocks Taine. With his French passion for logical completeness he cannot comprehend that Thackeray's vision for truth should make him capable of admitting and admiring that arch-adventuress's good qualities,—the very qualities of her defects which made her career of deception possible. The consistent monster Valerie could delude no one, while Becky's patience, gaiety, and good nature made Rawdon Crawley's devotion plausible, and forced even Lord Steyne, who recognized her baseness, after a fashion to respect and like her, and consent to be used by her, until—by a fundamental impulse of womanliness—"she admired her husband standing there, grand, brave, victorious," above the prostrate body of her seducer. It is that same underlying womanliness in Becky—of which Valerie lacked even an intimation—which makes her human and real. Its absence leaves Valerie incredible and shadowy.
Take again Lear and Goriot. The latter's children have no excuse whatever for their crimes of greed and selfishness. They are grotesque succubi, while the astounding wickedness of Regan and Goneril is made credible by Lear's own violent foolishness and vanity. His tempestuous senility is of the sort that wakes the blindest revolt of youth, which is always restless under the dominance of age, a restlessness likely to deepen to cruelty when age is unrestrained by wisdom or dignity.
A Frenchman once complained to me bitterly of the comic porter in Macbeth, who comes grumbling to unlock the gate so soon after the horror of the murder of Duncan. To him the touch of comedy seemed vulgar and inept. It was impossible to make him understand how to the Anglo-Saxon mind this veracious touch of comedy jostling tragedy but heightened the dramatic poignancy of the play. This incapacity to see the humorous contrasts of life and character is generally characteristic of youth with its narrow inexperience of realities, and the French and the unhumorous of our own race seem never to outgrow this juvenility.
I wonder if anyone will ever muster up sufficient courage to write the true history of the ferocious egotism engendered in the human heart by a belief in human immortality. The most cynical might well shrink from the sorrowful task. Self-preservation, supposedly the first law of nature, is but a feeble instinct when placed in comparison, for motherhood, patriotism, sexual love; a thousand minor passions will induce human beings to abandon their inheritance in the warm precincts of the cheerful day, but all that a man hath, and all that his friends, and the wife of his bosom, and the children of his loins have, will he give for that wretched little flyspecked object he calls his soul.
Buckle rather shocked a pious world when he announced that in many cases the best kings, considered from the point of view of their private characters, made the worst rulers; but all history is loud with this truth. The moment anyone in power began to consider the question of his soul with seriousness, tears and blood soon began to flow. A ruler who had strong secular tendencies usually had some sort of consideration for human happiness, but one who turned his mind to what was called "higher things" waded through the wretchedness of those in his power with noble insouciance. Henri IV., who was cheerfully indifferent as to whether he heard preaching by parsons or the mass of priests, provided he might have Paris for his capital, quieted the fratricidal religious conflicts of France and made life happy for his subjects; and Henry II. of England, who was the only one of the Angevin Kings entirely unconcerned about his immortal future, did more for England than any ruler since Alfred, and would have trebled those wise secular benefits had à-Becket and the rest of the troublesome clergy permitted it.
I have been roused to these moral generalizations by Quiller-Couch's novel, "Hetty Wesley." It's a poignant book.
Hetty was the sister of the founders of Methodism, and Quiller-Couch has availed himself, in writing the book, of the letters and papers of that remarkable family. He has told his tale very simply and with an artist's comprehension and sympathy, setting down nothing in malice and leaving the reader to draw his own inferences.
The picture of that damp Epworth Rectory where Charles and John were born (two out of the ten living children, several others had died early) makes the Bronté Parsonage, over which it is the fashion to shiver, seem like an amiable idyl by contrast. Samuel Wesley, the father, was passionately religious. The first of his concerns was the saving of his own soul for immortal happiness, the second was the saving of as many other like heirs to bliss as possible, and a part of this second ambition implied the training of his sons for the ministry. In pursuit of these ends he sacrificed the comfort and happiness of his wife and seven lovely daughters with a ruthless persistency and consistency that would be incredible did we not have his own complacent writings in testimony thereto.
The sons found his example worthy of imitation, it appears. Of late, apropos of the Wesley Centennial, one has heard much of John Wesley, of his tangled love affairs and his amazing marriage, and one can't but be conscious of a secret liking for that tempestuous termagant, Mrs. John, because that she after a fashion avenged those eight unlucky kinswomen whose lives he so complacently sucked dry to nourish his religious aspirations.
One has wondered, when reading them, if those meek and loyal addresses from the scaffold, made to Henry VIII. by the innocent victims of his bloodthirstiness, could have been genuine documents. They contradict all one knows of human nature in their humble acquiescence and submissive affection; but here in this book we have Hetty Wesley's own tender appeal to her father—a father who had ruthlessly cast her into a lifelong hell—to forgive what he called a sin, really only a girl's generous foolish mistake, and we have also his answer. An answer which would have made even Tudor Henry blush for its cruelty. One could almost wish that there was somewhere an immortal part of Samuel Wesley, burning eternally in the knowledge of himself as he really was. Mrs. John Wesley saves us the need of wishing that Hetty's brother had a soul.
After all, this is but one of thousands of grim stories of human beings trampling upon the lives and hearts of their fellows in the endeavour to achieve for themselves an infinity of bliss. To my heretical mind such behaviour for such an end seems inexpressibly sordid, vulgar, and selfish. I at least prefer to be one with the dumb beasts that perish, but who pass away knowing that no creature has ever suffered a pang in order that they may have saved their souls alive.
I reproached J—— last night for sending me to dinner with E——. "This is the third time you have done it," I grumbled, "and it is just twice too often. None of the other women will talk to him, and because I treat him decently you take advantage of my good nature."
"Oh, but my dear," she countered impishly, "you know you are so juicy with bores!"
Of course, that was true, though there is nothing I envy more than the courage of ruthlessness—one of the first laws of social self-preservation. I am always the helpless prey of bores. They drink as they choose from my "sacred fount," though it is shallow enough, heaven knows! for me to need all its contents for myself. If this condition of affairs arose from good nature I should not be ashamed of it, but it is all sheer cowardliness. My imagination is so vivid that I can feel the corroding humiliation of neglect and indifference to the poor souls as if it were being applied to my own skin, and I labour on, crying protests inwardly, rather than free myself by a moment of brutality.
"Tell bores who waste my time and me" that the best hours of my life have been burned in their dull fires. Again and again have I lost my opportunity to seek the friendship of some adorably amusing creature while sweating to pull the oar that was the bore's own proper task.
This indolent cowardice enfeebles me in a dozen ways; makes it impossible for me to train my dogs for fear of hurting their feelings, and to discharge a servant costs me a white night and a fausse digestion. It is not kindliness, it is only that I feel their discomfort more than they do themselves.
H—— told a curious story last night of the bobstay on his yacht, which time after time rusted, broke, and betrayed him at critical moments of racing. Replacing with the best material and by the best workmen was futile, though all the rest of the wire rigging remained intact. It seemed a "hoodoo" until it was discovered to be due to oxydization from a bolt which touched a copper plate on the stem. F—— said it was easy to see how, before the chemical action of steel and copper were understood, the most sensible and logical mind might be driven to attribute such a thing to witchcraft, and it occurred to me that perhaps when we know more of the chemistry of psychology, many of our emotional puzzles will be more easily solved. Jealousy, anger, suspicion, ingratitude, it will then be easy to correct by some simple act of insulation. We know that many evil moral tendencies are caused by pressure upon certain portions of the brain, and my own personal experience and long observation makes me confident that half the baser passions are due to acidity in the blood. It makes one slow to indulge one's emotions when one realizes they may simply be the result of a lack of a therapeutic alkali. With such a conviction one will generally wait for the slower and more balanced action of reason.
What a great alteration would take place in the history of the world if it could be rewritten from the point of view of what the doctors describe as "the gouty acid diathesis."
Bess of Hardwicke's marital troubles, which convulsed all England, and even drew Elizabeth and Burleigh into the turmoil, were due entirely to the unhappy Earl's gout, as no one can doubt after reading his letters. Charles V. was driven from his throne by it, and Napoleon's gout lost him the battle of Leipsic and set his feet in "slippery places." Henry VIII.'s shoes were not slashed without reason, and Pitt was lost to England when she most needed him by the same agent. These are but a few of the notorious examples, but how many wars, revolutions, massacres, had their origin in that same corroding oxydization of the spirit of man we will probably never fully determine.
The Japanese possess a delightful word—Yumei Mujitsu—which signifies "Having-the-Name-but-not-the-Reality." They use it to express certain assumptions—such, for example, as the claim of the Mikado's descent from the Sun Goddess, which, like the formulæ of Algebra, achieve desired results though they recognize that in itself it has no existence. How valuable such a word would be to express the attitude of the Sentimentalist regarding a coloured man named Booker Washington, much discussed of late.
Now if there is one creature more than a saint whom I fear and distrust it is the Sentimentalist, whom Hawthorne pungently characterizes as "that steel machine of the Devil's own make." The ruthless heartlessness of the Sentimentalist would be unbelievable if one had not seen it with one's own eyes. Take, for example, the Abolitionists. To gratify their own emotions they caused the death of a million men, the infliction of wounds and pain that make the imagination shudder, and all that long succeeding anguish of a people—the grief, the poverty, humiliation, and despair that burned itself indelibly upon the hearts of those who shared it.
Stevenson—that misunderstood moralist now chiefly remembered as a story teller!—put his finger upon the enigma of the Sentimentalist's cruelty:
"Everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought or carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:—Ah, if I could show you these! if I could show you these men and women all the world over ... clinging in the brothel and on the scaffold to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!... They may seek to escape and yet they cannot ... they are condemned to some nobility, all their lives the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.... To touch the heart of his mystery we find in him the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God."
The Sentimentalist, along with all his kind, is hunted by that implacable need of virtue. To satisfy it he seizes upon the wrongs done by others, and in his hot denunciation of another's sin, in his clamour for its punishment, he experiences the warm ennobling glow of personal merit.
The pietist will meticulously perform rites and ceremonies in this same need to soothe the imperious call within him for some justification of his life. Having washed and bowed and recited, his sins of practice trouble him but little—those genuflections have made his balance good in the book of virtue. But the Sentimentalist cannot content himself with pale ceremonies. He is by instinct devouring and bloody, but his soul cringes before his inward monitor. By fierce denunciation of the sins he has no mind to he can soothe his desire to inflict pain in perfect content, upborne by a consciousness of his own righteousness. Torquemada was a type, John Brown of Ossawatamie another; both were criminal paranoics tortured by desire for blood and for self-justification. Real goodness does not stimulate the Sentimentalist's emotions—it gives no opportunity for the outcries that warm his heart with a consciousness of rectitude.
The Boer war was a great opportunity for the American Sentimentalist. Protesting against the suppression of a Republic, he could forget his own suppression of the Confederate Republic and of the nascent government of the Philippines. Execrating the burning of farmhouses in the Veldt, he could ignore the track of smoking desolation that marked Sherman's march through Georgia or Sheridan's raid in Virginia. Criticism of British greed for gold kept him cheerfully superior to the contrast of the gift of fifteen millions and the patient labour spent by the English to repatriate the Boer and start him again in life, with the protest he and his kind made against General Grant's willingness to leave to the Southern soldier his starved horse as a means of reaching his ruined home.
Conscience, demanding of the Sentimentalist the bread of uprightness, he prodigally offers it a stone upon which to break its gnawing teeth.
The African brother has long been one of the most valued of the Sentimentalist's resources. Passionately generous demands for the negro's equality have made it possible for him to cordially and contentedly insult and oppress his white fellow countrymen.
It is in this relation that the Sentimentalists find Booker Washington so greatly to their taste. Washington, innocent of their purposes, of course is an admirable and sensible man, who has established an excellent school for the young people of his race. A school far wiser and more merciful in conception than any attempt made by the negrophiles to benefit their protégés, and all honour is due this enlightened ex-slave for his own astonishing progress and his generous sharing of his fruitful labours with his own people. The Sentimentalist professes to find in it "something godlike," a "touch of the divine," as one of them recently characterized what is, reduced to simple facts, the establishing of an industrial school for negroes by a negro.
The man who has educated the negro, the man who has had in him really a touch of the divine, would never appeal to the Sentimentalist.
Booker Washington, very properly, of course, lives and lives well upon the results of his school. He has claimed from the rich, and justly has received, lavish aid for his enterprise. He dresses well, lives amply, travels in comfort, is entertained by Royalty and Chief Magistrates, and with his family, is put beyond even a chance of narrow means by his sympathizers' lavishness. But who heeds the man who has really educated the negro? What crowned head or President entertains the small farmer in rough brogans and faded jeans, who sweats over his hoe in the cotton and tobacco fields, or in the steaming rice and sugar-cane swamps, and who has in forty years spent more than a hundred millions upon the education of the negro? This is the man, and the son of the man who turned heart-brokenly home on the begrudged horse to fields overgrown and laid waste—fields to which his conquerors, unlike the English, contributed no seeds or implements or stock—and from that land he has wrung by the hard labour of his hands that hundred millions which has been spent in educating his ex-slave.
He has lived hardly, in dingy, decaying houses, he has eaten of the coarsest, he has known no beauty or grace, and but scant comfort, he has been clothed in the plainest, he has politically known little but injury and contempt from the larger and wealthier half of his country, and worst of all he has seen his sons grow to manhood but partially and inadequately equipped with learning, because so large a portion of their birthright must be shared in the teaching of the negro in whose name he had been plundered and slaughtered.
The touching point of the story is that it has all been done without any consciousness of special merit. The duty was to be done, and was done without trumpets or drums. Such silent, patient, unreflecting, unadvertised goodness would, of course, never appeal to the Sentimentalist. If he could be brought to see it 'twould merely disturb his self-satisfaction.
It is only to the fantastic mind of a heretic that its meaning appeals, only the heart of a cynic is touched by the instinctive heroism of the white man of the South.
I am just home from a meeting of one of those literary clubs we American women so much affect, in the absence of any masculine society, and we have been talking about Stevenson as the poet most typical of the mind of the nineteenth century. It was all that delicious welter in the sentimentalities of the domestic affections which any assemblage of females finds it impossible to avoid; and we read aloud to one another—with the vox humana lilt turned on—all those decidedly dull little lyrics in the "Child's Garden of Verses," and came away with just that moist brightness of the eye, that wistful, tender "mother-smile," which was correct of the occasion.
I say we, but of course my wicked old eyes were as hard as horn, yet, thank heaven! my unruly tongue uttered not a note out of tune with the Domestic Symphony. Who will say that social slappings have taught me nothing? Even I can be daunted by the unhappy silences that so often greet my blurted comments, and by the soft rustles of relief that respond to the rising of some gentle lady, who will obliquely but certainly crush me with her pious phrases, that throb with the warm sweetness of the dear old human platitudes, and which are rewarded by applause which politely accentuates my disgrace.... Oh, amiable and philosophic white page! To you I can be a tiresome and protesting bore, sure of no strictures in your silence. Here I can unpack my heart with words, unrebuked. Here I can whisper safely my suspicion that dear R. L. S. himself would have been consumed with cheerful amusement at our gentle comments upon his doughty spirit.
The world says all sorts of absurd things about Stevenson. Some one the other day called him "an unquenchable Calvinist"!—He who was all pagan and Roman. The Calvinist was the European most subdued by the Semitic beliefs, most merged into Oriental preconceptions of life.
Certainly the European mind in its natural state faced its consciousness of existence with no preconceived theories. Its attitude was that of the child. It found itself face to face with a great, astonishing, beautiful universe, and asked itself what it must think of this universe; how use its opportunities therein. The child stumbled into a thousand infantile delusions and misconceptions, but its eyes were unclouded, its intelligence good. He soon discovered that though many things were pleasant, these pleasant things, when used indiscreetly, had a hidden potentiality of pain. With this second discovery, however—being a wise child—came no foolish horror of all pleasant things; only an illumination as to the value of moderation.
The phenomena of age, death, and decay left the child serious, but not depressed. These were not pleasant things, admittedly; but since they appeared inevitable, there was plainly no use in attempting to escape them. The proper attitude toward such solemnities was a manly courage, a brave submission. In any case, the child concluded, with all the sufferings, contradictions, and puzzling inequalities of existence, at least for all those called upon to face these griefs, there remained some small space of clear, warm, beautiful life; sunshine, food, love, and—more and better than all—that tingling, exquisite quiver of the senses which he agreed to call by the divine name of Beauty. He saw that the pains, the joys, the growth and blight, decay and extinction, were not of his lot only, but were shared by all his surroundings. Feeling himself alone neither in his opportunities nor his inevitable doom, he accepted his fate with the courageous calm, the uncomplaining resignation, of his fellow-creatures. He lived and he died as unresentfully as did the summer leaves, whose season of existence was so much briefer than his own.
His kinship with encompassing nature was so close that it touched him on every side. He became as aware of the souls of all things about him as he was aware of his own. He felt a similar spirit of life in the trees of the forest, the stones of the mountains, in the sea winds, in the brooks, the rivers and their reeds. He guessed at their names, their loves, their histories, as one guesses at those of unknown passers-by travelling the same road. Out of these speculations arose all his arts, his poetry, his legends, and his myths. When the moon stooped toward the western hills she leaned in a passion like his own toward youth and desire. The blood of a slain love became visible to him as it returned to the upper air in dim, faint-scented blossoms, bearing written on their purple leaves the plaintive ai! ai! of her left mourning for dead beauty. The very breeze that sighed through the rushes was the wistful voice of one unwisely reluctant of earthly joy and pain.
It is almost impossible for us—so long saturated with Semitic thought—to recreate for ourselves the mind of the Greeks and Romans fed upon the strength and beauty of a noble pantheism—whose interpretation of life knit their souls to the wholesome earth, and filled them with zest to live and patience to die—whose gods embodied their own lovely ideals of youth immortal, beauty unfading, serene wisdom, the soil's natural wealth, the vine's purple joy. Their attention was fixed upon the present life—their problem how to live it bravely, wisely, richly. All beyond this were uncertain shadows, about which it was impossible to know, and useless to speculate.
Upon the Etruscan tombs, of all mortuary monuments the most lovely, is to be found a revelation clearer than words of the European attitude toward death—those recumbent figures, all grace and peace, carved by the hands of forgotten genius with so inexplicable a skill that the immemorial stone grows deliquescent before one's eyes as if melting and sinking into the mother earth. In them is no sense of struggle or rebellion. They consent to extinction as gently as autumn's last day fades into the silence and darkness of winter. Their season has been fulfilled. They have lived and loved, and they are proudly willing to sink into the elements from which they rose.
It was not until the Asiatic conquests of Alexander brought the mind of Europe into contact with the religions of the East, that this sane attitude was darkened by a conception as radically opposite as the antipodes. Nor did the Roman civilization suffer a shadow upon its manhood until it in turn brought home with its eastern captives that fierce egotism that feared extinction as an irremediable horror. This mind of the other hemisphere could never reconcile itself to the inevitable blotting out of its own individuality. Impossible as it was to deny the incontrovertible fact of death, it conceived, as an escape from the greatest of evils, the idea of the continuance of its identity either in an endless round of reincarnations, or as an impalpable essence triumphant in heaven or defeated in hell. The shadow of their own terror cast upon their imagination the figures of monstrous deities—thousand-armed, myriad-eyed, maleficent, and unakin to themselves. Gods not to be propitiated by song and dance, or the offering of fruit and flowers, but loving to snuff at altars drenched in blood; placated for the sins of the guilty only by the anguish of the innocent, and so meticulous in their tyranny as to require not only the abandonment of all natural appetites, but pursuing even unwitting lapses from submission with eternal and malignant penalties.
Oriental egotism flung itself with equal persistence against the limitations of time, space, and character. In the East arose the systems of magic which sought philosopher's stones, elixirs of youth; which endeavoured to overcome all obstacles through pure intensity of will, and undertook to constrain even the prodigious gods it had itself created by sheer force of its own asceticism and determination.
Rome had been completely honeycombed and corrupted by Eastern mysticism before the final fatal clash of faiths occurred under Constantine, and the Semitic conception of the immortal importance of the human individual overthrew European nature-worship. So potent was this idea that for more than a thousand years Europe lent itself to scorn and repression of nature, and attempted to deal with life as only a pathway to death and the infinitely more important future beyond. The miserable confusion of the Dark Ages was the result of this struggle of the materialistic spirit of the European race in the bonds of a mysticism foreign to its genius.
The Renaissance was rightly named a new birth. Out of the womb of this long night arose once again the mind of the West in its natural shape. Slowly beauty, knowledge, health, regained their old empire. Life grew in importance, and the futile, millennial-long struggle against death began to seem what it truly was—a mere terrified dream of the darkness.
All this appears a long way around to Stevenson, but it is by this avenue I travelled—amid all those soft declamations—to find him the typical poet of the nineteenth century. Stevenson is pure Roman, not a touch of the Semitic is upon him. Every line of his prose and verse attests it. Someone said the other day that Hardy was not so much a pagan as a "revolted Christian," and brought as a charge against him that he did not resent the hard fates of the characters in his books. The second charge, of course, contradicts the first. It was the Eastern rebellion against Fate—against things as they are—that nourished its mysticism. But however one may decide as to Hardy there is no uncertainty as to Stevenson. His relish for life—life with all its pains and limitations—was keen to ecstasy. He leaves no dubiety on that head. Here was no wish for a city of gold and pearl, fenced from care, in which to take the refuge of ease in an impossible Elysium. His "House Beautiful" was