DAMN!

 A BOOK OF CALUMNY

 BY H. L. MENCKEN

 _Third Printing_

 PHILIP GOODMAN COMPANY NEW YORK NINETEEN EIGHTEEN

 COPYRIGHT 1918 BY PHILIP GOODMAN COMPANY

 CONTENTS

 I Pater Patriæ 7

 II The Reward of the Artist 9

 III The Heroic Considered 10

 IV The Burden of Humor 11

 V The Saving Grace 13

 VI Moral Indignation 14

 VII Stable-Names 17

 VIII The Jews 19

 IX The Comstockian Premiss 22

 X The Labial Infamy 23

 XI A True Ascetic 28

 XII On Lying 30

 XIII History 32

 XIV The Curse of Civilization 34

 XV Eugenics 35

 XVI The Jocose Gods 37

 XVII War 38

 XVIII Moralist and Artist 39

 XIX Actors 40

 XX The Crowd 45

 XXI An American Philosopher 48

 XXII Clubs 49

 XXIII Fidelis ad Urnum 50

 XXIV A Theological Mystery 52

 XXV The Test of Truth 53

 XXVI Literary Indecencies 54

 XXVII Virtuous Vandalism 55

 XXVIII A Footnote on the Duel of Sex 60

 XXIX Alcohol 64

 XXX Thoughts on the Voluptuous 67

 XXXI The Holy Estate 69

 XXXII Dichtung und Wahrheit 70

 XXXIII Wild Shots 71

 XXXIV Beethoven 73

 XXXV The Tone Art 75

 XXXVI Zoos 80

 XXXVII On Hearing Mozart 86

 XXXVIII The Road to Doubt 87

 XXXIX A New Use for Churches 88

 XL The Root of Religion 90

 XLI Free Will 91

 XLII Quid est Veritas? 95

 XLIII The Doubter's Reward 96

 XLIV Before the Altar 97

 XLV The Mask 98

 XLVI Pia Veneziani, poi Cristiani 99

 XLVII Off Again, On Again 101

 XLVIII Theology 102

 XLIX Exemplia Gratia 103

DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY

I. 

PATER PATRIÆ

If George Washington were alive today, what a shining mark he would befor the whole camorra of uplifters, forward-lookers and professionalpatriots! He was the Rockefeller of his time, the richest man in theUnited States, a promoter of stock companies, a land-grabber, anexploiter of mines and timber. He was a bitter opponent of foreignalliances, and denounced their evils in harsh, specific terms. He had aliking for all forthright and pugnacious men, and a contempt forlawyers, schoolmasters and all other such obscurantists. He was notpious. He drank whisky whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of ithandy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyedit more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the common people, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the republicfrom them. He advocated no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea existed. He took no interest in theprivate morals of his neighbors. 

Inhabiting These States today, George would be ineligible for any officeof honor or profit. The Senate would never dare confirm him; thePresident would not think of nominating him. He would be on trial inall the yellow journals for belonging to the Invisible Government, theHell Hounds of Plutocracy, the Money Power, the Interests. The ShermanAct would have him in its toils; he would be under indictment by everygrand jury south of the Potomac; the triumphant prohibitionists of hisnative state would be denouncing him (he had a still at Mount Vernon) asa debaucher of youth, a recruiting officer for insane asylums, apoisoner of the home. The suffragettes would be on his trail, withsentinels posted all along the Accotink road. The initiators andreferendors would be bawling for his blood. The young college men of the_Nation_ and the _New Republic_ would be lecturing him weekly. He wouldbe used to scare children in Kansas and Arkansas. The chautauquas wouldshiver whenever his name was mentioned.... 

And what a chance there would be for that ambitious young districtattorney who thought to shadow him on his peregrinations--and grab himunder the Mann Act!

II

THE REWARD OF THE ARTIST

A man labors and fumes for a whole year to write a symphony in G minor. He puts enormous diligence into it, and much talent, and maybe no littledownright genius. It draws his blood and wrings his soul. He dies in itthat he may live again.... Nevertheless, its final value, in the openmarket of the world, is a great deal less than that of a fur overcoat, half a Rolls-Royce automobile, or a handful of authentic hair from thewhiskers of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

III

THE HEROIC CONSIDERED

For humility and poverty, in themselves, the world has little liking andless respect. In the folk-lore of all races, despite thesentimentalization of abasement for dramatic effect, it is always powerand grandeur that count in the end. The whole point of the story ofCinderella, the most widely and constantly charming of all stories, isthat the Fairy Prince lifts Cinderella above her cruel sisters andstepmother, and so enables her to lord it over them. The same ideaunderlies practically all other folk-stories: the essence of each ofthem is to be found in the ultimate triumph and exaltation of itsprotagonist. And of the real men and women of history, the mostvenerated and envied are those whose early humiliations were butpreludes to terminal glories; for example, Lincoln, Whittington, Franklin, Columbus, Demosthenes, Frederick the Great, Catherine, Mary ofMagdala, Moses. Even the Man of Sorrows, cradled in a manger and done todeath between two thieves, is seen, as we part from Him at last, in asituation of stupendous magnificence, with infinite power in His hands. Even the Beatitudes, in the midst of their eloquent counselling ofrenunciation, give it unimaginable splendor as its reward. The meekshall inherit--what? The whole earth! And the poor in spirit? They shallsit upon the right hand of God!... 

IV

THE BURDEN OF HUMOR

What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it sodangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the publiclaugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic?Has humanity found by experience that the man who sees the fun of lifeis unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not. No man hadmore of the comic spirit in him than William Shakespeare, and yet hisserious reflections, by the sheer force of their sublime obviousness, have pushed their way into the race's arsenal of immortal platitudes. So, too, with Aesop, and with Balzac, and with Dickens, to come down thescale. All of these men were fundamentally humorists, and yet all ofthem achieved what the race has come to accept as a penetratingsagacity. Contrariwise, many a haloed pundit has had his occasionalguffaw. Lincoln, had there been no Civil War, might have survived inhistory chiefly as the father of the American smutty story--the onlyoriginal art-form that America has yet contributed to literature. Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age, might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesometrade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Molière; hissurviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring tothe heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the sardonic bull-fiddling of the _scherzo_. 

No, there is not the slightest disharmony between sense and nonsense, humor and respectability, despite the skittish tendency to assume thatthere is. But, why, then, that widespread error? What actual fact oflife lies behind it, giving it a specious appearance of reasonableness?None other, I am convinced, than the fact that the average man is fartoo stupid to make a joke. He may _see_ a joke and _love_ a joke, particularly when it floors and flabbergasts some person he dislikes, but the only way he can himself take part in the priming and pointing ofa new one is by acting as its target. In brief, his personal contactwith humor tends to fill him with an accumulated sense of disadvantage, of pricked complacency, of sudden and crushing defeat; and so, by aneasy psychological process, he is led into the idea that the thingitself is incompatible with true dignity of character and intellect. Hence his deep suspicion of jokers, however adept their thrusts. "What adamned fool!"--this same half-pitying tribute he pays to wit and buttalike. He cannot separate the virtuoso of comedy from his generalconcept of comedy itself, and that concept is inextricably mingled withmemories of foul ambuscades and mortifying hurts. And so it is not oftenthat he is willing to admit any wisdom in a humorist, or to condonefrivolity in a sage. 

V

THE SAVING GRACE

Let us not burn the universities--yet. After all, the damage they domight be worse.... Suppose Oxford had snared and disemboweledShakespeare! Suppose Harvard had set its stamp upon Mark Twain!

VI

MORAL INDIGNATION

The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock therepublic--against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sundaymoving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against thecigarette, against all things sinful and charming--these astoundingMethodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student ofmobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mobis eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favorof some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that lawwill be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates. The poornumskull who is so horribly harrowed by Puritan pulpit-thumpers that hecan't go to a ball game on Sunday afternoon without dreaming of hell andthe devil all Sunday night is naturally envious of the fellow who can, and being envious of him, he hates him and is eager to destroy hisoffensive happiness. The farmer who works 18 hours a day and never getsa day off is envious of his farmhand who goes to the crossroads andbarrels up on Saturday afternoon; hence the virulence of prohibitionamong the peasantry. The hard-working householder who, on some bitterevening, glances over the _Saturday Evening Post_ for a square andhonest look at his wife is envious of those gaudy drummers who gogallivanting about the country with scarlet girls; hence the Mann act. If these deviltries were equally open to all men, and all men wereequally capable of appreciating them, their unpopularity would tend towither. 

I often think, indeed, that the prohibitionist tub-thumpers make atactical mistake in dwelling too much upon the evils and horrors ofalcohol, and not enough upon its delights. A few enlarged photographs offirst-class bar-rooms, showing the rows of well-fed, well-dressed_bibuli_ happily moored to the brass rails, their noses in fragrant mintand hops and their hands reaching out for free rations of olives, pretzels, cloves, pumpernickle, Bismarck herring, anchovies, _schwartenmagen_, wieners, Smithfield ham and dill pickles--such agallery of contentment would probably do far more execution among thedismal _shudra_ than all the current portraits of drunkards' livers. Tovote for prohibition in the face of the liver portraits means to votefor the good of the other fellow, for even the oldest bibulomaniacalways thinks that he himself will escape. This is an act of altruismalmost impossible to the mob-man, whose selfishness is but littlecorrupted by the imagination that shows itself in his betters. His mostaustere renunciations represent no more than a matching of the joys ofindulgence against the pains of hell; religion, to him, is little morethan synthesized fear.... I venture that many a vote for prohibitioncomes from gentlemen who look longingly through swinging doors--and passon in propitiation of Satan and their alert consorts, the lake ofbrimstone and the corrective broomstick.... 

VII

STABLE-NAMES

Why doesn't some patient drudge of a _privat dozent_ compile adictionary of the stable-names of the great? All show dogs and racehorses, as everyone knows, have stable-names. On the list of entries afast mare may appear as Czarina Ogla Fedorovna, but in the stable she isnot that at all, nor even Czarina or Olga, but maybe Lil or Jennie. Anda prize bulldog, Champion Zoroaster or Charlemagne XI. On the bench, maybe plain Jack or Ponto _en famille_. So with celebrities of the _genushomo_. Huxley's official style and appellation was "The Right Hon. Thomas Henry Huxley, P. C. , M. D. , Ph. D. , LL. D. , D. C. L. , D. Sc. , F. R. S. , " and his biographer tells us that he delighted in its rollinggrandeur--but to his wife he was always Hal. Shakespeare, to his fellowsof his Bankside, was Will, and perhaps Willie to Ann Hathaway. TheKaiser is another Willie: the late Czar so addressed him in their famousexchange of telegrams. The Czar himself was Nicky in those days, and nodoubt remains Nicky to his intimates today. Edgar Allan Poe was alwaysEddie to his wife, and Mark Twain was always Youth to his. P. T. Barnum's stable-name was Taylor, his middle name; Charles Lamb's wasGuy; Nietzsche's was Fritz; Whistler's was Jimmie; the late KingEdward's was Bertie; Grover Cleveland's was Steve; J. Pierpont Morgan'swas Jack; Dr. Wilson's is Tom. 

Some given names are surrounded by a whole flotilla of stable-names. Henry, for example, is softened variously into Harry, Hen, Hank, Hal, Henny, Enery, On'ry and Heinie. Which did Ann Boleyn use when she cooedinto the suspicious ear of Henry VIII. ? To which did Henrik Ibsen answerat the domestic hearth? It is difficult to imagine his wife calling himHenrik: the name is harsh, clumsy, razor-edged. But did she make it Henor Rik, or neither? What was Bismarck to the Fürstin, and to the motherhe so vastly feared? Ottchen? Somehow it seems impossible. What wasGrant to his wife? Surely not Ulysses! And Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? AndRutherford B. Hayes? Was Robert Browning ever Bob? Was John Wesley everJack? Was Emmanuel Swendenborg ever Manny? Was Tadeusz Kosciusko everTeddy?

A fair field of inquiry invites. Let some laborious assistant professorexplore and chart it. There will be more of human nature in his reportthan in all the novels ever written. 

VIII

THE JEWS

The Jews, like the Americans, labor under a philosophical dualism, andin both cases it is a theological heritage. On the one hand there is theidealism that is lovely and uplifting and will get a man into heaven, and on the other hand there is the realism that works. The fact that theJews cling to both, thus running, as it were, upon two tracks, is whatmakes them so puzzling, now and then, to the _goyim_. In one aspect theystand for the most savage practicality; in another aspect they aredreamers of an almost fabulous other-worldiness. My own belief is thatthe essential Jew is the idealist--that his occasional flashing of hyenateeth is no more than a necessary concession to the harsh demands of thestruggle for existence. Perhaps, in many cases, it is due to an actualcorruption of blood. The Jews come from the Levant, and their women wereexposed for many centuries to the admiration of Greek, Arab andArmenian. The shark that a Jew can be at his worst is simply a Greek orArmenian at his best. 

As a statement of post-mortem and super-terrestrial fact, the religionthat the Jews have foisted upon the world seems to me to be as vast acurse as the influenza that we inherit from the Tatars or the democraticfallacies set afloat by the French Revolution. The one thing that canbe said in favor of it is that it is not true, and yet we suffer from italmost as much as if it were true. But with it, encasing it andpreserving it, there has come something that is positivelyvaluable--something, indeed, that is beyond all price--and that isJewish poetry. To compare it to the poetry of any other race is whollyimpossible; it stands completely above all the rest; it is as far beyondthe next best as German music is beyond French music, or French paintingbeyond English painting, or the English drama beyond the Italian drama. There are single chapters in the Old Testament that are worth all thepoetry ever written in the New World and nine-tenths of that written inthe Old. The Jews of those ancient days had imagination, they haddignity, they had ears for sweet sound, they had, above all, the facultyof grandeur. The stupendous music that issued from them has swept theirbarbaric demonology along with it, setting at naught the collectiveintelligence of the human species; they embalmed their idiotic taboosand fetishes in undying strains, and so gave them some measure of thesame immortality. A race of lawgivers? Bosh! Leviticus is as archaic asthe Code of Manu, and the Decalogue is a fossil. A race of seers? Boshagain! The God they saw survives only as a bogey-man, a theory, anuneasy and vexatious ghost. A race of traders and sharpers? Bosh a thirdtime! The Jews are as poor as the Spaniards. But a race of poets, mylords, a race of poets! It is a vision of beauty that has ever hauntedthem. And it has been their destiny to transmit that vision, enfeebled, perhaps, but still distinct, to other and lesser peoples, that lifemight be made softer for the sons of men, and the goodness of the LordGod--whoever He may be--might not be forgotten. 

IX

THE COMSTOCKIAN PREMISS

It is argued against certain books, by virtuosi of moral alarm, thatthey depict vice as attractive. This recalls the king who hanged a judgefor deciding that an archbishop was a mammal. 

X

THE LABIAL INFAMY

After five years of search I have been able to discover but one book inEnglish upon the art of kissing, and that is a very feeble treatise by asavant of York, Pa. , Dr. R. McCormick Sturgeon. There may be others, butI have been quite unable to find them. Kissing, for all one hears of it, has not attracted the scientists and literati; one compares its meagreliterature with the endless books upon the other phenomena of love, especially divorce and obstetrics. Even Dr. Sturgeon, pioneeringbravely, is unable to get beyond a sentimental and trivial view of thething he vivisects, and so his book is no more than a compendium ofmush. His very description of the act of kissing is made up of sonorousgabble about heaving bosoms, red lips, electric sparks and such-likeimaginings. What reason have we for believing, as he says, that thelungs are "strongly expanded" during the act? My own casual observationinclines me to hold that the opposite is true, that the lungs areactually collapsed in a pseudo-asthmatic spasm. Again, what is theground for arguing that the lips are "full, ripe and red?" The realeffect of the emotions that accompany kissing is to empty thesuperficial capillaries and so produce a leaden pallor. As for suchsalient symptoms as the temperature, the pulse and the rate ofrespiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accuratetreatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The Family" and "Fear andConventionality" indicate her possession of the right sort of learning. Even better would be a work by Havelock Ellis, say, in three or fourvolumes. Ellis has devoted his whole life to illuminating the mysteriesof sex, and his collection of materials is unsurpassed in the world. Surely there must be an enormous mass of instructive stuff about kissingin his card indexes, letter files, book presses and archives. 

Just why the kiss as we know it should have attained to its presentpopularity in Christendom is probably one of the things past findingout. The Japanese, a very affectionate and sentimental people, do notpractise kissing in any form; they regard the act, in fact, with anaversion matching our own aversion to the rubbing of noses. Nor is it invogue among the Moslems, nor among the Chinese, who countenance it onlyas between mother and child. Even in parts of Christendom it is girtabout by rigid taboos, so that its practise tends to be restricted to afew occasions. Two Frenchmen or Italians, when they meet, kiss eachother on both cheeks. One used to see, indeed, many pictures of GeneralJoffre thus bussing the heroes of Verdun; there even appeared in print astory to the effect that one of them objected to the scratching of hismoustache. But imagine two Englishmen kissing! Or two Germans! As wellimagined the former kissing the latter! Such a display of affection issimply impossible to men of Northern blood; they would die with shame ifcaught at it. The Englishman, like the American, never kisses if he canhelp it. He even regards it as bad form to kiss his wife in a railwaystation, or, in fact, anywhere in sight of a third party. The Latin hasno such compunctions. He leaps to the business regardless of place ortime; his sole concern is with the lady. Once, in driving from Nice toMonte Carlo along the lower Corniche road, I passed a hundred or so opentaxicabs containing man and woman, and fully 75 per cent. Of the men hadtheir arms around their companions, and were kissing them. These werenot peasants, remember, but well-to-do persons. In England such a scenewould have caused a great scandal; in most American States the policewould have charged the offenders with drawn revolvers. 

The charm of kissing is one of the things I have always wondered at. Ido not pretend, of course, that I have never done it; mere politenessforces one to it; there are women who sulk and grow bellicose unless oneat least makes the motions of kissing them. But what I mean is that Ihave never found the act a tenth part as agreeable as poets, the authorsof musical comedy librettos, and (on the contrary side) chaperones andthe _gendarmerie_ make it out. The physical sensation, far from beingpleasant, is intensely uncomfortable--the suspension of respiration, indeed, quickly resolves itself into a feeling of suffocation--and theposture necessitated by the approximation of lips and lips isunfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one. Theoretically, a mankisses a woman perpendicularly, with their eyes, those "windows of thesoul, " synchronizing exactly. But actually, on account of theincompressibility of the nasal cartilages, he has to incline either hisor her head to an angle of at least 60 degrees, and the result is thathis right eye gazes insanely at the space between her eyebrows, whilehis left eye is fixed upon some vague spot behind her. An instantaneousphotograph of such a maneuvre, taken at the moment of incidence, wouldprobably turn the stomach of even the most romantic man, and force him, in sheer self-respect, to renounce kissing as he has renounced leap-frogand walking on stilts. Only a woman (for women are quite devoid ofaesthetic feeling) could survive so damning a picture. 

But the most embarrassing moment, in kissing, does not come during theactual kiss (for at that time the sensation of suffocation drives outall purely psychical feelings), but immediately afterward. What is oneto say to the woman then? The occasion obviously demands some sort ofremark. One has just received (in theory) a great boon; the silencebegins to make itself felt; there stands the fair one, obviouslywaiting. Is one to thank her? Certainly that would be too transparent apiece of hypocrisy, too flaccid a banality. Is one to tell her that oneloves her? Obviously, there is danger in such assurances, and beside, one usually doesn't, and a lie is a lie. Or is one to descend to chattycommonplaces--about the weather, literature, politics, the war? Thepractical impossibility of solving the problem leads almost inevitablyto a blunder far worse than any merely verbal one: one kisses her again, and then again, and so on, and so on. The ultimate result is satiety, repugnance, disgust; even the girl herself gets enough. 

XI

A TRUE ASCETIC

Herbert Spencer's objection to swearing, of which so much has been madeby moralists, was not an objection to its sinfulness but an objection toits charm. In brief, he feared comfort, satisfaction, joy. The boardinghouses in which he dragged out his gray years were as bare and cheerlessas so many piano boxes. He avoided all the little vices and dissipationswhich make human existence bearable: good eating, good drinking, dancing, tobacco, poker, poetry, the theatre, personal adornment, philandering, adultery. He was insanely suspicious of everything thatthreatened to interfere with his work. Even when that work halted him bythe sheer agony of its monotony, and it became necessary for him to findrecreation, he sought out some recreation that was as unattractive aspossible, in the hope that it would quickly drive him back to workagain. Having to choose between methods of locomotion on his holidays, he chose going afoot, the most laborious and least satisfying available. Brought to bay by his human need for a woman, he directed his fancytoward George Eliot, probably the most unappetizing woman of his raceand time. Drawn irresistibly to music, he avoided the Fifth Symphony and"Tristan und Isolde, " and joined a crowd of old maids singing part songsaround a cottage piano. John Tyndall saw clearly the effect of all thisand protested against it, saying, "He'd be a much nicer fellow if he hada good swear now and then"--_i. E. _, if he let go now and then, if heyielded to his healthy human instincts now and then, if he went on somesort of debauch now and then. But what Tyndall overlooked was the factthat the meagreness of his recreations was the very element thatattracted Spencer to them. Obsessed by the fear--and it turned out to bewell-grounded--that he would not live long enough to complete his work, he regarded all joy as a temptation, a corruption, a sin of scarlet. Hewas a true ascetic. He could sacrifice all things of the present for onething of the future, all things real for one thing ideal. 

XII

ON LYING

Lying stands on a different plane from all other moral offenses, notbecause it is intrinsically more heinous or less heinous, but simplybecause it is the only one that may be accurately measured. Forgettingunwitting error, which has nothing to do with morals, a statement iseither true or not true. This is a simple distinction and relativelyeasy to establish. But when one comes to other derelictions the thinggrows more complicated. The line between stealing and not stealing isbeautifully vague; whether or not one has crossed it is not determinedby the objective act, but by such delicate things as motive and purpose. So again, with assault, sex offenses, and even murder; there may besurrounding circumstances which greatly condition the moral quality ofthe actual act. But lying is specific, exact, scientific. Its capacityfor precise determination, indeed, makes its presence or non-presencethe only accurate gauge of other immoral acts. Murder, for example, isnowhere regarded as immoral save it involve some repudiation of a socialcompact, of a tacit promise to refrain from it--in brief, some deceit, some perfidy, some lie. One may kill freely when the pact is formallybroken, as in war. One may kill equally freely when it is broken by thevictim, as in an assault by a highwayman. But one may not kill so longas it is not broken, and one may not break it to clear the way. Someform of lie is at the bottom of all other recognized crimes, fromseduction to embezzlement. Curiously enough, this master immorality ofthem all is not prohibited by the Ten Commandments, nor is it penalized, in its pure form, by the code of any civilized nation. Only savages havelaws against lying _per se_. 

XIII

HISTORY

It is the misfortune of humanity that its history is chiefly written bythird-rate men. The first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record andphilosophise; his impulse is to act; life, to him, is an adventure, nota syllogism or an autopsy. Thus the writing of history is left tocollege professors, moralists, theorists, dunder-heads. Few historians, great or small, have shown any capacity for the affairs they presume todescribe and interpret. Gibbon was an inglorious failure as a member ofParliament. Thycydides made such a mess of his military (or, rather, naval) command that he was exiled from Athens for twenty years andfinally assassinated. Flavius Josephus, serving as governor of Galilee, lost the whole province to the Romans, and had to flee for his life. Momssen, elected to the Prussian Landtag, flirted with the Socialists. How much better we would understand the habits and nature of man ifthere were more historians like Julius Caesar, or even like NiccoloMachiavelli! Remembering the sharp and devastating character of theirrough notes, think what marvelous histories Bismarck, Washington andFrederick the Great might have written! Such men are privy to the facts;the usual historians have to depend on deductions, rumors, guesses. Again, such men know how to tell the truth, however unpleasant; theyare wholly free of that puerile moral obsession which marks theprofessor.... But they so seldom tell it! Well, perhaps some of themhave--and their penalty is that they are damned and forgotten. 

XIV

THE CURSE OF CIVILIZATION

A civilized man's worst curse is social obligation. The most unpleasantact imaginable is to go to a dinner party. One could get far betterfood, taking one day with another, at Childs', or even in a PennsylvaniaRailroad dining-car; one could find far more amusing society in abar-room or a bordello, or even at the Y. M. C. A. No hostess inChristendom ever arranged a dinner party of any pretensions withoutincluding at least one intensely disagreeable person--a vain and vapidgirl, a hideous woman, a follower of baseball, a stock-broker, a veteranof some war or other, a gabbler of politics. And one is enough to do thebusiness. 

XV

EUGENICS

The error of the eugenists lies in the assumption that a physicallyhealthy man is the best fitted to survive. This is true of rats and the_pediculae_, but not of the higher animals, _e. G. _, horses, dogs andmen. In these higher animals one looks for more subtle qualities, chiefly of the spirit. Imagine estimating philosophers by their chestexpansions, their blood pressures, their Wassermann reactions!

The so-called social diseases, over which eugenists raise such a pother, are surely not the worst curses that mankind has to bear. Some of thegreatest men in history have had them; whole nations have had them andsurvived. The truth about them is that, save in relatively rare cases, they do very little damage. The horror in which they are held is chieflya moral horror, and its roots lie in the assumption that they cannot becontracted without sin. Nothing could be more false. Many greatmoralists have suffered from them: the gods are always up to suchsardonic waggeries. 

Moreover, only one of them is actually inheritable, and that one istransmitted relatively seldom. But among psychic characters one findsthat practically all are inheritable. For example, stupidity, credulity, avarice, pecksniffery, lack of imagination, hatred of beauty, meanness, poltroonry, petty brutality, smallness of soul.... I here present, ofcourse, the Puritan complex; there flashes up the image of the "goodman, " that libel on God and the devil. Consider him well. If you had tochoose a sire for a first-rate son, would you choose a consumptive Jewwith the fires of eternity in his eyes, or an Iowa right-thinker withhis hold full of Bibles and breakfast food?

XVI

THE JOCOSE GODS

What humor could be wilder than that of life itself? Franz Schubert, onhis deathbed, read the complete works of J. Fenimore Cooper. JohnMillington Synge wrote "Riders to the Sea" on a second-hand $40typewriter, and wore a celluloid collar. Richard Wagner made a living, during four lean years, arranging Italian opera arias for the cornet. Herbert Spencer sang bass in a barber-shop quartette and was in lovewith George Eliot. William Shakespeare was a social pusher and boughthim a bogus coat-of-arms. Martin Luther suffered from the jim-jams. Oneof the greatest soldiers in Hungarian history was named HunjadiJanos.... 

XVII

WAR

Superficially, war seems inordinately cruel and wasteful, and yet itmust be plain on reflection that the natural evolutionary process isquite as cruel and even more wasteful. Man's chief efforts in times ofpeace are devoted to making that process less violent and sanguinary. Civilization, indeed, may be defined as a constructive criticism ofnature, and Huxley even called it a conspiracy against nature. Man triesto remedy what must inevitably seem the mistakes and to check what mustinevitably seem the wanton cruelty of the Creator. In war man abandonsthese efforts, and so becomes more jovian. The Greeks never representedthe inhabitants of Olympus as succoring and protecting one another, butalways as fighting and attempting to destroy one another. 

No form of death inflicted by war is one-half so cruel as certain formsof death that are seen in hospitals every day. Besides, these forms ofdeath have the further disadvantage of being inglorious. The averageman, dying in bed, not only has to stand the pains and terrors of death;he must also, if he can bring himself to think of it at all, stand thenotion that he is ridiculous.... The soldier is at least not laughed at. Even his enemies treat his agonies with respect. 

XVIII

MORALIST AND ARTIST

I dredge up the following from an essay on George Bernard Shaw by RobertBlatchford, the English Socialist: "Shaw is something much better than awit, much better than an artist, much better than a politician or adramatist; he is a moralist, a teacher of ethics, austere, relentless, fiercely earnest. "

What could be more idiotic? Then Cotton Mather was a greater man thanJohann Sebastian Bach. Then the average college critic of the arts, withhis balderdash about inspiration and moral purpose, is greater thanGeorg Brandes or Saint-Beuve. Then Éugene Brieux, with his Y. M. C. A. Platitudinizing, is greater than Molière, with his ethical agnosticism, his ironical determinism. 

This childish respect for moralizing runs through the whole ofcontemporary criticism--at least in England and America. Blatchforddiffers from the professorial critics only in the detail that he canactually write. What he says about Shaw has been said, in heavy andsuffocating words, by almost all of them. And yet nothing could be moreuntrue. The moralist, at his best, can never be anything save a sort ofjournalist. Moral values change too often to have any serious validityor interest; what is a virtue today is a sin tomorrow. But the man whocreates a thing of beauty creates something that lasts. 

XIX

ACTORS

"In France they call an actor a _m'as-tu-vu_, which, anglicised, means ahave-you-seen-me?... The average actor holds the mirror up to nature andsees in it only the reflection of himself. " I take the words from a latebook on the so-called art of the mime by the editor of a magazinedevoted to the stage. The learned author evades plumbing thepsychological springs of this astounding and almost invariable vanity, this endless bumptiousness of the _cabotin_ in all climes and all ages. His one attempt is banal: "a foolish public makes much of him. " With alldue respect, Nonsense! The larval actor is full of hot and rancid gaseslong before a foolish public has had a fair chance to make anything ofhim at all, and he continues to emit them long after it has tried him, condemned him and bidden him be damned. There is, indeed, little choicein the virulence of their self-respect between a Broadway star who isslobbered over by press agents and fat women, and the poor ham who playsthinking parts in a No. 7 road company. The two are alike charged to thelimit; one more ohm, or molecule, and they would burst. Actors beginwhere militia colonels, Fifth avenue rectors and Chautauqua oratorsleave off. The most modest of them (barring, perhaps, a few unearthlytraitors to the craft) matches the conceit of the solitary pretty girlon a slow ship. In their lofty eminence of pomposity they are challengedonly by Anglican bishops and grand opera tenors. I have spoken of thedanger they run of bursting. In the case of tenors it must sometimesactually happen; even the least of them swells visibly as he sings, andpermanently as he grows older.... 

But why are actors, in general, such blatant and obnoxious asses, sucharrant posturers and wind-bags? Why is it as surprising to find anunassuming and likable fellow among them as to find a Greek withoutfleas? The answer is quite simple. To reach it one needs but considerthe type of young man who normally gets stage-struck. Is he, takingaverages, the intelligent, alert, ingenious, ambitious young fellow? Ishe the young fellow with ideas in him, and a yearning for hard anddifficult work? Is he the diligent reader, the hard student, the eagerinquirer? No. He is, in the overwhelming main, the neighborhood fop andbeau, the human clothes-horse, the nimble squire of dames. The youths ofmore active mind, emerging from adolescence, turn to business and theprofessions; the men that they admire and seek to follow are men ofgenuine distinction, men who have actually done difficult and valuablethings, men who have fought good (if often dishonest) fights and arerespected and envied by other men. The stage-struck youth is of a softerand more shallow sort. He seeks, not a chance to test his mettle by hardand useful work, but an easy chance to shine. He craves the regard, notof men, but of women. He is, in brief, a hollow and incompetentcreature, a strutter and poseur, a popinjay, a pretty one.... 

I thus beg the question, but explain the actor. He is this sillyyoungster grown older, but otherwise unchanged. An initiate of aprofession requiring little more information, culture or capacity forratiocination than that of the lady of joy, and surrounded in hiswork-shop by men who are as stupid, as vain and as empty as he himselfwill be in the years to come, he suffers an arrest of development, andthe little intelligence that may happen to be in him gets no chance toshow itself. The result, in its usual manifestation, is the average badactor--a man with the cerebrum of a floor-walker and the vanity of afashionable clergyman. The result, in its highest and holiest form isthe actor-manager, with his retinue of press-agents, parasites andworshipping wenches--perhaps the most preposterous and awe-inspiringdonkey that civilization has yet produced. To look for sense in a fellowof such equipment and such a history would be like looking forserviettes in a sailors' boarding-house. 

By the same token, the relatively greater intelligence of actresses isexplained. They are, at their worst, quite as bad as the generality ofactors. There are she-stars who are all temperament andbalderdash--intellectually speaking, beggars on horseback, servant girlswell washed. But no one who knows anything about the stage need be toldthat it can show a great many more quick-minded and self-respectingwomen than intelligent men. And why? Simply because its women arerecruited, in the main, from a class much above that which furnishes itsmen. It is, after all, not unnatural for a woman of considerableintelligence to aspire to the stage. It offers her, indeed, one of themost tempting careers that is open to her. She cannot hope to succeed inbusiness, and in the other professions she is an unwelcome andmuch-scoffed-at intruder, but on the boards she can meet men on an equalfooting. It is, therefore, no wonder that women of a relatively superiorclass often take to the business.... Once they embrace it, theirsuperiority to their male colleagues is quickly manifest. All movementsagainst puerility and imbecility in the drama have originated, not withactors, but with actresses--that is, in so far as they have originatedamong stage folks at all. The Ibsen pioneers were such women as HelenaModjeska, Agnes Sorma and Janet Achurch; the men all hung back. Ibsen, it would appear, was aware of this superior alertness and took shrewdadvantage of it. At all events, his most tempting acting parts arefeminine ones. 

The girls of the stage demonstrate this tendency against greatdifficulties. They have to carry a heavy handicap in the enormous numberof women who seek the footlights merely to advertise their realprofession, but despite all this, anyone who has the slightestacquaintance with stagefolk will testify that, taking one with another, the women have vastly more brains than the men and are appreciably lessvain and idiotic. Relatively few actresses of any rank marry actors. They find close communion with the strutting brethren psychologicallyimpossible. Stock-brokers, dramatists and even theatrical managers aregreatly to be preferred. 

XX

THE CROWD

Gustave Le Bon and his school, in their discussions of the psychology ofcrowds, have put forward the doctrine that the individual man, cheek byjowl with the multitude, drops down an intellectual peg or two, and sotends to show the mental and emotional reactions of his inferiors. It isthus that they explain the well-known violence and imbecility of crowds. The crowd, as a crowd, performs acts that many of its members, asindividuals, would never be guilty of. Its average intelligence is verylow; it is inflammatory, vicious, idiotic, almost simian. Crowds, properly worked up by skilful demagogues, are ready to believe anything, and to do anything. 

Le Bon, I daresay, is partly right, but also partly wrong. His theory isprobably too flattering to the average numskull. He accounts for theextravagance of crowds on the assumption that the numskull, along withthe superior man, is knocked out of his wits by suggestion--that he, too, does things in association that he would never think of doingsingly. The fact may be accepted, but the reasoning raises a doubt. Thenumskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated withnew rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because hishabitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely. In otherwords, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon. He refrains from allattempts at lynching _a cappella_, not because it takes suggestion tomake him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowdto make him brave enough to try it. 

What happens when a crowd cuts loose is not quite what Le Bon and hisfollowers describe. The few superior men in it are not straightwayreduced to the level of the underlying stoneheads. On the contrary, theyusually keep their heads, and often make efforts to combat the crowdaction. But the stoneheads are too many for them; the fence is torn downor the blackamoor is lynched. And why? Not because the stoneheads, normally virtuous, are suddenly criminally insane. Nay, but because theyare suddenly conscious of the power lying in their numbers--because theysuddenly realize that their natural viciousness and insanity may besafely permitted to function. 

In other words, the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanentlyresident in the majority of its members--in all those members, that is, who are naturally ignorant and vicious--perhaps 95 per cent. All studiesof mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate thisviciousness. They are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lowerorders of men are angels. This is nonsense. The lower orders of men areincurable rascals, either individually or collectively. Decency, self-restraint, the sense of justice, courage--these virtues belongonly to a small minority of men. This minority never runs amuck. Itsmost distinguishing character, in truth, is its resistance to allrunning amuck. The third-rate man, though he may wear the false whiskersof a first-rate man, may always be detected by his inability to keep hishead in the face of an appeal to his emotions. A whoop strips off hisdisguise. 

XXI

AN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER

As for William Jennings Bryan, of whom so much piffle, pro and con, hasbeen written, the whole of his political philosophy may be reduced totwo propositions, neither of which is true. The first is the propositionthat the common people are wise and honest, and the second is theproposition that all persons who refuse to believe it are scoundrels. Take away the two, and all that would remain of Jennings would be asomewhat greasy bald-headed man with his mouth open. 

XXII

CLUBS

Men's clubs have but one intelligible purpose: to afford asylum tofellows who haven't any girls. Hence their general gloom, their air oflost causes, their prevailing acrimony. No man would ever enter a clubif he had an agreeable woman to talk to. This is particularly true ofmarried men. Those of them that one finds in clubs answer to a generaldescription: they have wives too unattractive to entertain them, and yettoo watchful to allow them to seek entertainment elsewhere. Thebachelors, in the main, belong to two classes: (a) those who have beenunfortunate in amour, and are still too sore to show any new enterprise, and (b) those so lacking in charm that no woman will pay any attentionto them. Is it any wonder that the men one thus encounters in clubs arestupid and miserable creatures, and that they find their pleasure insuch banal sports as playing cards, drinking highballs, shooting pool, and reading the barber-shop weeklies?... The day a man's mistress ismarried one always finds him at his club. 

XXIII

FIDELIS AD URNUM

Despite the common belief of women to the contrary, fully 95 per cent. Of all married men, at least in America, are faithful to their wives. This, however, is not due to virtue, but chiefly to lack of courage. Ittakes more initiative and daring to start up an extra-legal affair thanmost men are capable of. They look and they make plans, but that is asfar as they get. Another salient cause of connubial rectitude is lack ofmeans. A mistress costs a great deal more than a wife; in the openmarket of the world she can get more. It is only the rare man who canconceal enough of his income from his wife to pay for a morganaticaffair. And most of the men clever enough to do this are too clever tobe intrigued. 

I have said that 95 per cent. Of married men are faithful. I believe thereal proportion is nearer 99 per cent. What women mistake for infidelityis usually no more than vanity. Every man likes to be regarded as adevil of a fellow, and particularly by his wife. On the one hand, itdiverts her attention from his more genuine shortcomings, and on theother hand it increases her respect for him. Moreover, it gives her achance to win the sympathy of other women, and so satisfies that cravingfor martyrdom which is perhaps woman's strongest characteristic. Awoman who never has any chance to suspect her husband feels cheated andhumiliated. She is in the position of those patriots who are induced toenlist for a war by pictures of cavalry charges, and then findthemselves told off to wash the general's underwear. 

XXIV

A THEOLOGICAL MYSTERY

The moral order of the world runs aground on hay fever. Of what use isit? Why was it invented? Cancer and hydrophobia, at least, may bedefended on the ground that they kill. Killing may have some benignpurpose, some esoteric significance, some cosmic use. But hay fevernever kills; it merely tortures. No man ever died of it. Is the torture, then, an end in itself? Does it break the pride of strutting, snortingman, and turn his heart to the things of the spirit? Nonsense! A manwith hay fever is a natural criminal. He curses the gods, and defiesthem to kill him. He even curses the devil. Is its use, then, to preparehim for happiness to come--for the vast ease and comfort ofconvalescence? Nonsense again! The one thing he is sure of, the onething he never forgets for a moment, is that it will come back againnext year. 

XXV

THE TEST OF TRUTH

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few religious dogmas have everfaced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadareneswine. Dowie's whiskers broke the back of Dowieism. Not the laws of theUnited States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons tocompromise and surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of itkilled the doctrine of infant damnation.... But the razor edge ofridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly thebarber-surgeons laughed at Harvey--and how vainly! What clown everbrought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Jenner? Or Lincoln?Or Darwin?... They are laughing at Nietzsche yet.... 

XXVI

LITERARY INDECENCIES

The low, graceless humor of names! On my shelf of poetry, arranged bythe alphabet, Coleridge and J. Gordon Cooglar are next-door neighbors!Mrs. Hemans is beside Laurence Hope! Walt Whitman rubs elbows with EllaWheeler Wilcox; Robert Browning with Richard Burton; Rossetti with CaleYoung Rice; Shelly with Clinton Scollard; Wordsworth with George E. Woodberry; John Keats with Herbert Kaufman!

Ibsen, on the shelf of dramatists, is between Victor Hugo and Jerome K. Jerome. Sudermann follows Harriet Beecher Stowe. Maeterlinck shouldersPercy Mackaye. Shakespeare is between Sardou and Shaw. Euripides andClyde Fitch! Upton Sinclair and Sophocles! Aeschylus and F. Anstey!D'Annunzio and Richard Harding Davis! Augustus Thomas and Tolstoi!

More alphabetical humor. Gerhart Hauptmann and Robert Hichens; Voltaireand Henry Van Dyke; Flaubert and John Fox, Jr. ; Balzac and John KendrickBangs; Ostrovsky and E. Phillips Oppenheim; Elinor Glyn and ThéophileGautier; Joseph Conrad and Robert W. Chambers; Zola and Zangwill!... 

Midway on my scant shelf of novels, between George Moore and FrankNorris, there is just room enough for the two volumes of "Derringforth, "by Frank A. Munsey. 

XXVII

VIRTUOUS VANDALISM

A hearing of Schumann's B flat symphony of late, otherwise a verycaressing experience, was corrupted by the thought that music would bemuch the gainer if musicians could get over their superstitiousreverence for the mere text of the musical classics. That reverence, indeed, is already subject to certain limitations; hands have been laid, at one time or another, upon most of the immortal oratorios, and eventhe awful name of Bach has not dissuaded certain German editors. But itstill swathes the standard symphonies like some vast armor of rubber andangel food, and so imagination has to come to the aid of the flutes andfiddles when the band plays Schumann, Mozart, and even parts ofBeethoven. One discerns, often quite clearly, what the reverend Masterwas aiming at, but just as often one fails to hear it in precise tones. 

This is particularly true of Schumann, whose deficiency in instrumentalcunning has passed into proverb. And in the B flat symphony, his firstventure into the epic form, his failures are most numerous. More thanonce, obviously attempting to roll up tone into a moving climax, hesucceeds only in muddling his colors. I remember one place--at themoment I can't recall where it is--where the strings and the brass stormat one another in furious figures. The blast of the brass, as thevaudevillains say, gets across--but the fiddles merely scream absurdly. The whole passage suggests the bleating of sheep in the midst of a vastbellowing of bulls. Schumann overestimated the horsepower of fiddlemusic so far up the E string--or underestimated the full kick of thetrumpets.... Other such soft spots are well known. 

Why, then, go on parroting _gaucheries_ that Schumann himself, were healive today, would have long since corrected? Why not call an ecumenicalcouncil, appoint a commission to see to such things, and then forget thesacrilege? As a self-elected delegate from heathendom, I nominate Dr. Richard Strauss as chairman. When all is said and done, Strauss probablyknows more about writing for orchestra than any other two men that everlived, not excluding Wagner. Surely no living rival, as Dr. Sunday wouldsay, has anything on him. If, after hearing a new composition byStrauss, one turns to the music, one is invariably surprised to find howsimple it is. The performance reveals so many purple moments, sostaggering an array of lusciousness, that the ear is bemused intodetecting scales and chords that never were on land or sea. What theexploratory eye subsequently discovers, perhaps, is no more than ourstout and comfortable old friend, the highly well-born _hausfrau_, Mme. C Dur--with a vine leaf or two of C sharp minor or F major in her hair. The trick lies in the tone-color--in the flabbergasting magic of theorchestration. There are some moments in "Elektra" when sounds come outof the orchestra that tug at the very roots of the hair, sounds sounearthly that they suggest a caroling of dragons or _bierfisch_--andyet they are made by the same old fiddles that play the Kaiser Quartet, and by the same old trombones that the Valkyrie ride like witch'sbroomsticks, and by the same old flutes that sob and snuffle in Tit'l'sSerenade. And in parts of "Feuersnot"--but Roget must be rewritten byStrauss before "Feuersnot" is described. There is one place where theharps, taking a running start from the scrolls of the violins, leapslambang through (or is it into?) the firmament of Heaven. Once, when Iheard this passage played at a concert, a woman sitting beside me rolledover like a log, and had to be hauled out by the ushers. 

Yes; Strauss is the man to reorchestrate the symphonies of Schumann, particularly the B flat, the Rhenish and the Fourth. I doubt that hecould do much with Schubert, for Schubert, though he is dead nearly ahundred years, yet remains curiously modern. The Unfinished symphony isfull of exquisite color effects--consider, for example, the rustlingfigure for the strings in the first movement--and as for the C major, itis so stupendous a debauch of melodic and harmonic beauty that onescarcely notices the colors at all. In its slow movement mereloveliness in music probably says all that will ever be said.... Butwhat of old Ludwig? Har, har; here we begin pulling the whiskers of BaalHimself. Nevertheless, I am vandal enough to wonder, on sad Sundaymornings, what Strauss could do with the first movement of the C minor. More, if Strauss ever does it and lets me hear the result just once, I'll be glad to serve six months in jail with him.... But in Munich, ofcourse! And with a daily visitor's pass for Cousin Pschorr!... 

The conservatism which shrinks at such barbarities is the sameconservatism which demands that the very typographical errors in theBible be swallowed without salt, and that has thus made a pueriledream-book of parts of Holy Writ. If you want to see how far this lastmadness has led Christendom astray, take a look at an article by AbrahamMitrie Rihbany, an intelligent Syrian, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of acouple of years ago. The title of the article is "The Oriental Manner ofSpeech, " and in it Rihbany shows how much of mere Oriental extravaganceof metaphor is to be found in many celebrated passages, and how littleof literal significance. This Oriental extravagance, of course, makesfor beauty, but as interpreted by pundits of no imagination it surelydoesn't make for understanding. What the Western World needs is a Biblein which the idioms of the Aramaic of thousands of years ago aretranslated into the idioms of today. The man who undertook such atranslation, to be sure, would be uproariously denounced, just as Lutherand Wycliffe were denounced, but he could well afford to face the storm. The various Revised Versions, including the Modern Speech New Testamentof Richard Francis Weymouth, leave much to be desired. They rectify manynaif blunders and so make the whole narrative more intelligible, butthey still render most of the tropes of the original literally. 

These tropes are not the substance of Holy Writ; they are simply itscolor. In the same way mere tone-color is not the substance of a musicalcomposition. Beethoven's Eighth Symphony is just as great a work, in allits essentials, in a four-hand piano arrangement as in the originalscore. Every harmonic and melodic idea of the composer is there; one cantrace just as clearly the subtle processes of his mind; every step inthe working out of the materials is just as plain. True enough, thereare orchestral compositions of which this cannot be reasonably said;their color is so much more important than their form that when onetakes away the former the latter almost ceases to exist. But I doubtthat many competent critics would argue that they belong to the firstrank. Form, after all, is the important thing. It is design that counts, not decoration--design and organization. The pillars of a musicalmasterpiece are like the pillars of the Parthenon; they are almost asbeautiful bleached white as they were in all their original hues. 

XXVIII

A FOOTNOTE ON THE DUEL OF SEX

If I were a woman I should want to be a blonde, with golden, silky hair, pink cheeks and sky-blue eyes. It would not bother me to think that thiscolor scheme was mistaken by the world for a flaunting badge ofstupidity; I would have a better arm in my arsenal than mereintelligence; I would get a husband by easy surrender while thebrunettes attempted it vainly by frontal assault. 

Men are not easily taken by frontal assault; it is only strategem thatcan quickly knock them down. To be a blonde, pink, soft and delicate, isto be a strategem. It is to be a ruse, a feint, an ambush. It is tofight under the Red Cross flag. A man sees nothing alert and designingin those pale, crystalline eyes; he sees only something helpless, childish, weak; something that calls to his compassion; something thatappeals powerfully to his conceit in his own strength. And so he istaken before he knows that there is a war. He lifts his portcullis inChristian charity--and the enemy is in his citadel. 

The brunette can make no such stealthy and sure attack. No matter howsubtle her art, she can never hope to quite conceal her intent. Her eyesgive her away. They flash and glitter. They have depths. They draw themale gaze into mysterious and sinister recesses. And so the male behindthe gaze flies to arms. He may be taken in the end--indeed, he usuallyis--but he is not taken by surprise; he is not taken without a fight. Abrunette has to battle for every inch of her advance. She is confrontedby an endless succession of Dead Man's Hills, each equipped withtelescopes, semaphores, alarm gongs, wireless. The male sees her clearlythrough her densest smoke-clouds.... But the blonde captures him under aflag of truce. He regards her tenderly, kindly, almost pityingly, untilthe moment the gyves are upon his wrists. 

It is all an optical matter, a question of color. The pastel shadesdeceive him; the louder hues send him to his artillery. God help, I say, the red-haired girl! She goes into action with warning pennants flying. The dullest, blindest man can see her a mile away; he can catch thealarming flash of her hair long before he can see the whites, or eventhe terrible red-browns, of her eyes. She has a long field to cross, heavily under defensive fire, before she can get into rifle range. Herquarry has a chance to throw up redoubts, to dig himself in, to call forreinforcements, to elude her by ignominious flight. She must win, if sheis to win at all, by an unparalleled combination of craft andresolution. She must be swift, daring, merciless. Even the brunette ofblack and penetrating eye has great advantages over her. No wonder shenever lets go, once her arms are around her antagonist's neck! Nowonder she is, of all women, the hardest to shake off!

All nature works in circles. Causes become effects; effects develop intocauses. The red-haired girl's dire need of courage and cunning hasaugmented her store of those qualities by the law of natural selection. She is, by long odds, the most intelligent and bemusing of women. Sheshows cunning, foresight, technique, variety. She always fails a dozentimes before she succeeds; but she brings to the final business theabominable expertness of a Ludendorff; she has learnt painfully by theprocess of trial and error. Red-haired girls are intellectualstimulants. They know all the tricks. They are so clever that they haveeven cast a false glamour of beauty about their worst defect--theirharsh and gaudy hair. They give it euphemistic and deceitfulnames--auburn, bronze, Titian. They overcome by their hellish arts thatdeep-seated dread of red which is inborn in all of God's creatures. Theycharm men with what would even alarm bulls. 

And the blondes, by following the law of least resistance, have gone inthe other direction. The great majority of them--I speak, of course, ofnatural blondes; not of the immoral wenches who work their atrocitiesunder cover of a synthetic blondeness--are quite as shallow and stupidas they look. One seldom hears a blonde say anything worth hearing; themost they commonly achieve is a specious, baby-like prattling, aninfantile artlessness. But let us not blame them for nature's work. Why, after all, be intelligent? It is, at best, no more than a capacity forunhappiness. The blonde not only doesn't miss it; she is even better offwithout it. What imaginable intelligence could compensate her for theflat blueness of her eyes, the xanthous pallor of her hair, thedoll-like pink of her cheeks? What conceivable cunning could do suchexecution as her stupendous appeal to masculine vanity, sentimentality, egoism?

If I were a woman I should want to be a blonde. My blondeness might behideous, but it would get me a husband, and it would make him cherish meand love me. 

XXIX

ALCOHOL

Envy, as I have said, is at the heart of the messianic delusion, themania to convert the happy sinner into a "good" man, and so make himmiserable. And at the heart of that envy is fear--the fear to sin, totake a chance, to monkey with the buzzsaw. This ineradicable fear is theoutstanding mark of the fifth-rate man, at all times and everywhere. Itdominates his politics, his theology, his whole thinking. He is a moralfellow because he is afraid to venture over the fence--and he hates theman who is not. 

The solemn proofs, so laboriously deduced from life insurancestatistics, that the man who uses alcohol, even moderately, diesslightly sooner than the teetotaler--these proofs merely show that thisman is one who leads an active and vigorous life, and so faces hazardsand uses himself up--in brief, one who lives at high tempo and with fulljoy, what Nietzsche used to call the _ja-sager_, or yes-sayer. He may, in fact, die slightly sooner than the teetotaler, but he livesinfinitely longer. Moreover, his life, humanly speaking, is much moreworth while, to himself and to the race. He does the hard and dangerouswork of the world, he takes the chances, he makes the experiments. He isthe soldier, the artist, the innovator, the lover. All the great worksof man have been done by men who thus lived joyously, strenuously, andperhaps a bit dangerously. They have never been concerned aboutstretching life for two or three more years; they have been concernedabout making life engrossing and stimulating and a high adventure whileit lasts. Teetotalism is as impossible to such men as any othermanifestation of cowardice, and, if it were possible, it would destroytheir utility and significance just as certainly. 

A man who shrinks from a cocktail before dinner on the ground that itmay flabbergast his hormones, and so make him die at 69 years, tenmonths and five days instead of at 69 years, eleven months and sevendays--such a man is as absurd a poltroon as the fellow who shrinks fromkissing a woman on the ground that she may floor him with a chair leg. Each flees from a purely theoretical risk. Each is a useless encumbererof the earth, and the sooner dead the better. Each is a discredit to thehuman race, already discreditable enough, God knows. 

Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionallyincapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safelife, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in acage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee fromshadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort ofman it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is alwaysscared. 

No wonder the Rockefellers and their like are hot for saving theworkingman from John Barleycorn! Imagine the advantage to them ofoperating upon a flabby horde of timorous and joyless slaves, afraid ofall fun and kicking up, horribly moral, eager only to live as long aspossible! What mule-like fidelity and efficiency could be got out ofsuch a rabble! But how many Lincolns would you get out of it, and howmany Jacksons, and how many Grants?

XXX

THOUGHTS ON THE VOLUPTUOUS

Why has no publisher ever thought of perfuming his novels? The finalrefinement of publishing, already bedizened by every other art! Barabbasturned Petronius! For instance, consider the bucolic romances of thehyphenated Mrs. Porter. They have a subtle flavor of new-mown hay anddaffodils already; why not add the actual essence, or at all events somesafe coal-tar substitute, and so help imagination to spread its wings?For Hall Caine, musk and synthetic bergamot. For Mrs. Glyn and herneighbors on the tiger-skin, the fragrant blood of the red, red rose. For the ruffianish pages of Jack London, the pungent, hospitable smellof a first-class bar-room--that indescribable mingling of Maryland rye, cigar smoke, stale malt liquor, radishes, potato salad and _blutwurst_. For the Dartmoor sagas of the interminable Phillpotts, the warmammoniacal bouquet of cows, poultry and yokels. For the "Dodo" school, violets and Russian cigarettes. For the venerable Howells, lavender andmignonette. For Zola, Rochefort and wet leather. For Mrs. Humphrey Ward, lilies of the valley. For Marie Corelli, tuberoses and embalming fluid. For Chambers, sachet and lip paint. For----

But I leave you to make your own choices. All I offer is the generalidea. It has been tried in the theatre. Well do I remember the firstweeks of "Florodora" at the old Casino, with a mannikin in the lobbysquirting "La Flor de Florodora" upon all us Florodorans.... I was puton trial for my life when I got home!

XXXI

THE HOLY ESTATE

Marriage is always a man's second choice. It is entered upon, more oftenthan not, as the safest form of intrigue. The caitiff yields quickest;the man who loves danger and adventure holds out longest. Behind it onefrequently finds, not that lofty romantic passion which poets hymn, buta mere yearning for peace and security. The abominable hazards of thehigh seas, the rough humors and pestilences of the forecastle--thesedrive the timid mariner ashore.... The authentic Cupid, at least inChristendom, was discovered by the late Albert Ludwig Siegmund Neisserin 1879. 

XXXII

DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT

Deponent, being duly sworn, saith: My taste in poetry is for delicateand fragile things--to be honest, for artificial things. I like a frailbut perfectly articulated stanza, a sonnet wrought like ivory, a songfull of glowing nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions and participles, but without too much hardsense to it. Poetry, to me, has but two meanings. On the one hand, it isa magical escape from the sordidness of metabolism and the class war, and on the other hand it is a subtle, very difficult and hence verycharming art, like writing fugues or mixing mayonnaise. I do not go topoets to be taught anything, or to be heated up to indignation, or tohave my conscience blasted out of its torpor, but to be soothed andcaressed, to be lulled with sweet sounds, to be wooed intoforgetfulness, to be tickled under the metaphysical chin. My favoritepoem is Lizette Woodworth Reese's "Tears, " which, as a statement offact, seems to me to be as idiotic as the Book of Revelation. The poetryI regard least is such stuff as that of Robert Browning and MatthewArnold, which argues and illuminates. I dislike poetry of intellectualcontent as much as I dislike women of intellectual content--and for thesame reason. 

XXXIII

WILD SHOTS

If I had the time, and there were no sweeter follies offering, I shouldlike to write an essay on the books that have quite failed of achievingtheir original purposes, and are yet of respectable use and potency forother purposes. For example, the Book of Revelation. The obvious aim ofthe learned author of this work was to bring the early Christians intoaccord by telling them authoritatively what to expect and hope for; itsactual effect during eighteen hundred years has been to split them intoa multitude of camps, and so set them to denouncing, damning, jailingand murdering one another. Again, consider the autobiography ofBenvenuto Cellini. Ben wrote it to prove that he was an honest man, amirror of all the virtues, an injured innocent; the world, reading it, hails him respectfully as the noblest, the boldest, the gaudiest liarthat ever lived. Again, turn to "Gulliver's Travels. " The thing wasplanned by its rev. Author as a devastating satire, a terrible piece ofcynicism; it survives as a story-book for sucklings. Yet again, there is"Hamlet. " Shakespeare wrote it frankly to make money for a theatricalmanager; it has lost money for theatrical managers ever since. Yetagain, there is Caesar's "De Bello Gallico. " Julius composed it tothrill and arouse the Romans; its sole use today is to stupefy andsicken schoolboys. Finally, there is the celebrated book of General F. Von Bernhardi. He wrote it to inflame Germany; its effect was to inflameEngland.... 

The list might be lengthened almost _ad infinitum_. When a man writes abook he fires a machine gun into a wood. The game he brings down oftenastonishes him, and sometimes horrifies him. Consider the case ofIbsen.... After my book on Nietzsche I was actually invited to lectureat Princeton. 

XXXIV

BEETHOVEN

Romain Rolland's "Beethoven, " one of the cornerstones of his celebrityas a critic, is based upon a thesis that is of almost inconceivableinaccuracy, to wit, the thesis that old Ludwig was an apostle of joy, and that his music reveals his determination to experience and utter itin spite of all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Nothingcould be more absurd. Joy, in truth, was precisely the emotion thatBeethoven could never conjure up; it simply was not in him. Turn to the_scherzo_ of any of his trios, quartets, sonatas or symphonies. Asardonic waggishness is there, and sometimes even a wistful sort ofmerriment, but joy in the real sense--a kicking up of legs, alight-heartedness, a complete freedom from care--is not to be found. Itis in Haydn, it is in Schubert and it is often in Mozart, but it is nomore in Beethoven than it is in Tschaikovsky. Even the hymn to joy atthe end of the Ninth symphony narrowly escapes being a gruesome parodyon the thing itself; a conscious effort is in every note of it; it isalmost as lacking in spontaneity as (if it were imaginable at all) apiece of _vers libre_ by Augustus Montague Toplady. 

Nay; Ludwig was no leaping buck. Nor was it his deafness, nor poverty, nor the crimes of his rascally nephew that pumped joy out of him. Thetruth is that he lacked it from birth; he was born a Puritan--andthough a Puritan may also become a great man (as witness Herbert Spencerand Beelzebub), he can never throw off being a Puritan. Beethovenstemmed from the Low Countries, and the Low Countries, in those days, were full of Puritan refugees; the very name, in its first incarnation, may have been Barebones. If you want to comprehend the authentic man, don't linger over Rolland's fancies but go to his own philosophizings, as garnered in "Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, " by Friedrich Kerst, Englished by Krehbiel. Here you will find a collection of moralbanalities that would have delighted Jonathan Edwards--a collection thatmight well be emblazoned on gilt cards and hung in Sunday schools. Hebegins with a naif anthropomorphism that is now almost perished from theworld; he ends with a solemn repudiation of adultery.... But a greatman, my masters, a great man! We have enough biographies of him, andtalmuds upon his works. Who will do a full-length psychological study ofhim?

XXXV

THE TONE ART

The notion that the aim of art is to fix the shifting aspects of nature, that all art is primarily representative--this notion is as unsound asthe theory that Friday is an unlucky day, and is dying as hard. One evenfinds some trace of it in Anatole France, surely a man who should knowbetter. The true function of art is to criticise, embellish and editnature--particularly to edit it, and so make it coherent and lovely. Theartist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue-pencilling the_lapsus calami_ of God. The sounds in a Beethoven symphony, even thePastoral, are infinitely more orderly, varied and beautiful than thoseof the woods. The worst flute is never as bad as the worst soprano. Thebest violoncello is immeasurably better than the best tenor. 

All first-rate music suffers by the fact that it has to be performed byhuman beings--that is, that nature must be permitted to corrupt it. Theperformance one hears in a concert hall or opera house is no more than abaroque parody upon the thing the composer imagined. In an orchestra ofeighty men there is inevitably at least one man with a sore thumb, orbad kidneys, or a brutal wife, or _katzenjammer_--and one is enough. Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips andlarynxes will be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall haveBeethoven and Mozart and Schubert in such wonderful and perfect beautythat it will be almost unbearable. If half as much ingenuity had beenlavished upon music machines as has been lavished upon the telephone andthe steam engine, we would have had mechanical orchestras long ago. Mechanical pianos are already here. Piano-players, bound to put somevalue on the tortures of Czerny, affect to laugh at all suchcontrivances, but that is no more than a pale phosphorescence of anoutraged _wille zur macht_. Setting aside half a dozen--perhaps adozen--great masters of a moribund craft, who will say that the averagemechanical piano is not as competent as the average pianist?

When the human performer of music goes the way of the galley-slave, thecharm of personality, of course, will be pumped out of the performanceof music. But the charm of personality does not help music; it hindersit. It is not a reinforcement to music; it is a rival. When a beautifulsinger comes upon the stage, two shows, as it were, go on at once: firstthe music show, and then the arms, shoulders, neck, nose, ankles, eyes, hips, calves and ruby lips--in brief, the sex-show. The second of theseshows, to the majority of persons present, is more interesting than thefirst--to the men because of the sex interest, and to the women becauseof the professional or technical interest--and so music is forced intothe background. What it becomes, indeed, is no more than a half-heardaccompaniment to an imagined anecdote, just as color, line and massbecome mere accomplishments to an anecdote in a picture by an Englishacademician, or by a sentimental German of the Boecklin school. 

The purified and dephlogisticated music of the future, to be sure, willnever appeal to the mob, which will keep on demanding its chance togloat over gaudy, voluptuous women, and fat, scandalous tenors. The mob, even disregarding its insatiable appetite for the improper, is a naturalhero worshiper. It loves, not the beautiful, but the strange, theunprecedented, the astounding; it suffers from an incurable_héliogabalisme_. A soprano who can gargle her way up to G sharp inaltissimo interests it almost as much as a contralto who has sleptpublicly with a grand duke. If it cannot get the tenor who receives$3, 000 a night, it will take the tenor who fought the manager withbung-starters last Tuesday. But this is merely saying that the tastesand desires of the mob have nothing to do with music as an art. For itsears, as for its eyes, it demands anecdotes--on the one hand the Suicidesymphony, "The Forge in the Forest, " and the general run of Italianopera, and on the other hand such things as "The Angelus, " "PlayingGrandpa" and the so-called "Mona Lisa. " It cannot imagine art as devoidof moral content, as beauty pure and simple. It always demandssomething to edify it, or, failing that, to shock it. 

These concepts, of the edifying and the shocking, are closer together inthe psyche than most persons imagine. The one, in fact, depends upon theother: without some definite notion of the improving it is almostimpossible to conjure up an active notion of the improper. All salaciousart is addressed, not to the damned, but to the consciously saved; it isSunday-school superintendents, not bartenders, who chiefly patronizepeep-shows, and know the dirty books, and have a high artisticadmiration for sopranos of superior gluteal development. The man who hasrisen above the petty ethical superstitions of Christendom gets littlepleasure out of impropriety, for very few ordinary phenomena seem to himto be improper. Thus a Frenchman, viewing the undraped statues whichbedizen his native galleries of art, either enjoys them in a purelyaesthetic fashion--which is seldom possible save when he is inliquor--or confesses frankly that he doesn't like them at all; whereasthe visiting Americano is so powerfully shocked and fascinated by themthat one finds him, the same evening, in places where no respectable manought to go. All art, to this fellow, must have a certain bawdiness, orhe cannot abide it. His favorite soprano, in the opera house, is not thefat and middle-aged lady who can actually sing, but the girl with thebare back and translucent drawers. Condescending to the concert hall, he is bored by the posse of enemy aliens in funereal black, and sodemands a vocal soloist--that is, a gaudy creature of such advancedcorsetting that she can make him forget Bach for a while, and turn histhoughts pleasantly to amorous intrigue. 

In all this, of course, there is nothing new. Other and better men havenoted the damage that the personal equation does to music, and some ofthem have even sought ways out. For example, Richard Strauss. Hisso-called ballet, "Josefs Legend, " produced in Paris just before thewar, is an attempt to write an opera without singers. All of the musicis in the orchestra; the folks on the stage merely go through apointless pantomime; their main function is to entertain the eye withshifting colors. Thus, the romantic sentiments of Joseph are announced, not by some eye-rolling tenor, but by the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth violins (it is a Strauss score!), withthe incidental aid of the wood-wind, the brass, the percussion and therest of the strings. And the heroine's reply is made, not by a sopranowith a cold, but by an honest man playing a flute. The next step will bethe substitution of marionettes for actors. The removal of the orchestrato a sort of trench, out of sight of the audience, is already anaccomplished fact at Munich. The end, perhaps, will be music purged ofits current ptomaines. In brief, music. 

XXXVI

ZOOS

I often wonder how much sound and nourishing food is fed to the animalsin the zoological gardens of America every week, and try to figure outwhat the public gets in return for the cost thereof. The annual billmust surely run into millions; one is constantly hearing how much beef alion downs at a meal, and how many tons of hay an elephant dispatches ina month. And to what end? To the end, principally, that a horde ofsuperintendents and keepers may be kept in easy jobs. To the end, secondarily, that the least intelligent minority of the population mayhave an idiotic show to gape at on Sunday afternoons, and that the youngof the species may be instructed in the methods of amour prevailingamong chimpanzees and become privy to the technic employed by jaguars, hyenas and polar bears in ridding themselves of lice. 

So far as I can make out, after laborious visits to all the chief zoosof the nation, no other imaginable purpose is served by their existence. One hears constantly, true enough (mainly from the gentlemen theysupport) that they are educational. But how? Just what sort ofinstruction do they radiate, and what is its value? I have never beenable to find out. The sober truth is that they are no more educationalthan so many firemen's parades or displays of sky-rockets, and that allthey actually offer to the public in return for the taxes wasted uponthem is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visitto a penitentiary, or even to Congress or a state legislature insession, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. 

Education your grandmother! Show me a schoolboy who has ever learnedanything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring awayin its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get anyuseful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible; noteven a college professor is improved by it. The most it can imaginablyimpart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way andthe stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polecatssmell worse than Greek 'bus boys, that the Latin name of the raccoon(who was unheard of by the Romans) is _Procyon lotor_. For thedissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly emitted and defectivelytaken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mulcted in hundreds ofthousands of dollars a year. As well make them pay for teachingpolicemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters inthe laying of eggs. 

But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned mento study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientificdiscovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, hasever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actuallearning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the lateCamille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jesterand reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some newpearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the newsthat Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teethplugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, theman-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, thegrizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear. 

Science, of course, has its uses for the lower animals. A diligent studyof their livers and lights helps to an understanding of the anatomy andphysiology, and particularly of the pathology, of man. They arenecessary aids in devising and manufacturing many remedial agents, andin testing the virtues of those already devised; out of the mute agoniesof a rabbit or a calf may come relief for a baby with diphtheria, ormeans for an archdeacon to escape the consequences of his youthfulfollies. Moreover, something valuable is to be got out of a mere studyof their habits, instincts and ways of mind--knowledge that, by analogy, may illuminate the parallel doings of the _genus homo_, and so enable usto comprehend the primitive mental processes of Congressmen, morons andthe rev. Clergy. 

But it must be obvious that none of these studies can be made in a zoo. The zoo animals, to begin with, provide no material for the biologist;he can find out no more about their insides than what he discerns from asafe distance and through the bars. He is not allowed to try his germsand specifics upon them; he is not allowed to vivisect them. If he wouldfind out what goes on in the animal body under this condition or that, he must turn from the inhabitants of the zoo to the customary guineapigs and street dogs, and buy or steal them for himself. Nor does he getany chance for profitable inquiry when zoo animals die (usually of lackof exercise or ignorant doctoring), for their carcasses are not handedto him for autopsy, but at once stuffed with gypsum and excelsior andplaced in some museum. 

Least of all do zoos produce any new knowledge about animal behavior. Such knowledge must be got, not from animals penned up and tortured, butfrom animals in a state of nature. A college professor studying thehabits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations tospecimens in zoos, would inevitably come to the conclusion that thegiraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing immovable forhours at a time and employing an Italian to feed him hay and cabbages. As well proceed to a study of the psychology of a juris-consult byfirst immersing him in Sing Sing, or of a juggler by first cutting offhis hands. Knowledge so gained is inaccurate and imbecile knowledge. Noteven a college professor, if sober, would give it any faith and credit. 

There remains, then, the only true utility of a zoo: it is a childishand pointless show for the unintelligent, in brief, for children, nursemaids, visiting yokels and the generality of the defective. Shouldthe taxpayers be forced to sweat millions for such a purpose? I thinknot. The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage ofmonkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catchflies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should becombatted at the public expense, and not fostered. He is a publicliability and a public menace, and society should seek to improve him. Instead of that, we spend a lot of money to feed his degrading appetiteand further paralyze his mind. It is precisely as if the communityprovided free champagne for dipsomaniacs, or hired lecturers to convertthe army to the doctrines of the Bolsheviki. 

Of the abominable cruelties practised in zoos it is unnecessary to makemention. Even assuming that all the keepers are men of delicate naturesand ardent zoophiles (which is about as safe as assuming that thekeepers of a prison are all sentimentalists, and weep for the sorrows oftheir charges), it must be plain that the work they do involves anendless war upon the native instincts of the animals, and that theymust thus inflict the most abominable tortures every day. What could bea sadder sight than a tiger in a cage, save it be a forest monkeyclimbing dispairingly up a barked stump, or an eagle chained to itsroost? How can man be benefitted and made better by robbing the seal ofits arctic ice, the hippopotamus of its soft wallow, the buffalo of itsopen range, the lion of its kingship, the birds of their air?

I am no sentimentalist, God knows. I am in favor of vivisectionunrestrained, so long as the vivisectionist knows what he is about. Iadvocate clubbing a dog that barks unnecessarily, which all dogs do. Ienjoy hangings, particularly of converts to the evangelical faiths. Thecrunch of a cockroach is music to my ears. But when the day comes toturn the prisoners of the zoo out of their cages, if it is only to leadthem to the swifter, kinder knife of the _schochet_, I shall be presentand rejoicing, and if any one present thinks to suggest that it would bea good plan to celebrate the day by shooting the whole zoo faculty, Ishall have a revolver in my pocket and a sound eye in my head. 

XXXVII

ON HEARING MOZART

The only permanent values in the world are truth and beauty, and ofthese it is probable that truth is lasting only in so far as it is afunction and manifestation of beauty--a projection of feeling in termsof idea. The world is a charnel house of dead religions. Where are allthe faiths of the middle ages, so complex and yet so precise? But allthat was essential in the beauty of the middle ages still lives.... 

This is the heritage of man, but not of men. The great majority of menare not even aware of it. Their participation in the progress of theworld, and even in the history of the world, is infinitely remote andtrivial. They live and die, at bottom, as animals live and die. Thehuman race, as a race, is scarcely cognizant of their existence; theyhaven't even definite number, but stand grouped together as _x_, thequantity unknown ... And not worth knowing. 

XXXVIII

THE ROAD TO DOUBT

The first effect of what used to be called natural philosophy is to fillits devotee with wonder at the marvels of God. This explains why thepursuit of science, so long as it remains superficial, is notincompatible with the most naif sort of religious faith. But the momentthe student of the sciences passes this stage of childlike amazement andbegins to investigate the inner workings of natural phenomena, he beginsto see how ineptly many of them are managed, and so he tends to passfrom awe of the Creator to criticism of the Creator, and once he hascrossed that bridge he has ceased to be a believer. One finds plenty ofneighborhood physicians, amateur botanists, high-school physics teachersand other such quasi-scientists in the pews on Sunday, but one neversees a Huxley there, or a Darwin, or an Ehrlich. 

XXXIX

A NEW USE FOR CHURCHES

The argument by design, it may be granted, establishes a reasonableground for accepting the existence of God. It makes belief, at allevents, quite as intelligible as unbelief. But when the theologians taketheir step from the existence of God to the goodness of God they treadupon much less firm earth. How can one see any proof of that goodness inthe senseless and intolerable sufferings of man--his helplessness, thebrief and troubled span of his life, the inexplicable disproportionbetween his deserts and his rewards, the tragedy of his soaringaspiration, the worse tragedy of his dumb questioning? Granting theexistence of God, a house dedicated to Him naturally follows. He isall-important; it is fit that man should take some notice of Him. Butwhy praise and flatter Him for His unspeakable cruelties? Why forget sosupinely His failures to remedy the easily remediable? Why, indeed, devote the churches exclusively to worship? Why not give them over, nowand then, to justifiable indignation meetings?

Perhaps men will incline to this idea later on. It is not inconceivable, indeed, that religion will one day cease to be a poltroonishacquiescence and become a vigorous and insistent criticism. If God canhear a petition, what ground is there for holding that He would not heara complaint? It might, indeed, please Him to find His creatures grownso self-reliant and reflective. More, it might even help Him to getthrough His infinitely complex and difficult work. Theology has alreadymoved toward such notions. It has abandoned the primitive doctrine ofGod's arbitrariness and indifference, and substituted the doctrine thatHe is willing, and even eager, to hear the desires of His creatures--_i. E. _, their private notions, born of experience, as to what would be bestfor them. Why assume that those notions would be any the less worthhearing and heeding if they were cast in the form of criticism, and evenof denunciation? Why hold that the God who can understand and forgiveeven treason could not understand and forgive remonstrance?

XL

THE ROOT OF RELIGION

The idea of literal truth crept into religion relatively late: it is theinvention of lawyers, priests and cheese-mongers. The idea of mysterylong preceded it, and at the heart of that idea of mystery was an ideaof beauty--that is, an idea that this or that view of the celestial andinfernal process presented a satisfying picture of form, rhythm andorganization. Once this view was adopted as satisfying, its professionalinterpreters and their dupes sought to reinforce it by declaring ittrue. The same flow of reasoning is familiar on lower planes. Theaverage man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it istrue; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it. 

XLI

FREE WILL

Free will, it appears, is still a Christian dogma. Without it thecruelties of God would strain faith to the breaking-point. But outsidethe fold it is gradually falling into decay. Such men of science asGeorge W. Crile and Jacques Loeb have dealt it staggering blows, andamong laymen of inquiring mind it seems to be giving way to anapologetic sort of determinism--a determinism, one may say, tempered bydefective observation. The late Mark Twain, in his secret heart, wassuch a determinist. In his "What Is Man?" you will find him at hisfarewells to libertarianism. The vast majority of our acts, he argues, are determined, but there remains a residuum of free choices. Here westand free of compulsion and face a pair or more of alternatives, andare free to go this way or that. 

A pillow for free will to fall upon--but one loaded with disconcertingbrickbats. Where the occupants of this last trench of libertarianism erris in their assumption that the pulls of their antagonistic impulses areexactly equal--that the individual is absolutely free to choose whichone he will yield to. Such freedom, in practise, is never encountered. When an individual confronts alternatives, it is not alone his volitionthat chooses between them, but also his environment, his inheritedprejudices, his race, his color, his condition of servitude. I may kissa girl or I may not kiss her, but surely it would be absurd to say thatI am, in any true sense, a free agent in the matter. The world has evenput my helplessness into a proverb. It says that my decision and actdepend upon the time, the place--and even to some extent, upon the girl. 

Examples might be multiplied _ad infinitum_. I can scarcely rememberperforming a wholly voluntary act. My whole life, as I look back uponit, seems to be a long series of inexplicable accidents, not only quiteunavoidable, but even quite unintelligible. Its history is the historyof the reactions of my personality to my environment, of my behaviorbefore external stimuli. I have been no more responsible for thatpersonality than I have been for that environment. To say that I canchange the former by a voluntary effort is as ridiculous as to say thatI can modify the curvature of the lenses of my eyes. I know, because Ihave often tried to change it, and always failed. Nevertheless, it haschanged. I am not the same man I was in the last century. But thegratifying improvements so plainly visible are surely not to be creditedto me. All of them came from without--or from unplumbable anduncontrollable depths within. 

The more the matter is examined the more the residuum of free willshrinks and shrinks, until in the end it is almost impossible to findit. A great many men, of course, looking at themselves, see it assomething very large; they slap their chests and call themselves freeagents, and demand that God reward them for their virtue. But thesefellows are simply idiotic egoists, devoid of a critical sense. Theymistake the acts of God for their own acts. Of such sort are thecoxcombs who boast about wooing and winning their wives. They arebrothers to the fox who boasted that he had made the hounds run.... 

The throwing overboard of free will is commonly denounced on the groundthat it subverts morality and makes of religion a mocking. Such piousobjections, of course, are foreign to logic, but nevertheless it may bewell to give a glance to this one. It is based upon the fallacioushypothesis that the determinist escapes, or hopes to escape, theconsequences of his acts. Nothing could be more untrue. Consequencesfollow acts just as relentlessly if the latter be involuntary as if theybe voluntary. If I rob a bank of my free choice or in response to someunfathomable inner necessity, it is all one; I will go to the same jail. Conscripts in war are killed just as often as volunteers. Men who aretracked down and shanghaied by their wives have just as hard a time ofit as men who walk fatuously into the trap by formally proposing. 

Even on the ghostly side, determinism does not do much damage totheology. It is no harder to believe that a man will be damned for hisinvoluntary acts than it is to believe that he will be damned for hisvoluntary acts, for even the supposition that he is wholly free does notdispose of the massive fact that God made him as he is, and that Godcould have made him a saint if He had so desired. To deny this is toflout omnipotence--a crime at which, as I have often said, I balk. Buthere I begin to fear that I wade too far into the hot waters of thesacred sciences, and that I had better retire before I lose my hide. This prudent retirement is purely deterministic. I do not ascribe it tomy own sagacity; I ascribe it wholly to that singular kindness whichfate always shows me. If I were free I'd probably keep on, and thenregret it afterward. 

XLII

QUID EST VERITAS?

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit adilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the Africanbush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will andintent of God exactly and completely. "For who hath known the mind ofthe Lord?" asked Paul of the Romans. "How unsearchable are hisjudgments, and his ways past finding out!" "It is the glory of God, "said Solomon, "to conceal a thing. " "Clouds and darkness, " said David, "are around him. " "No man, " said the Preacher, "can find out the work ofGod. " ... The difference between religions is a difference in theirrelative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic faithis almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing toknow at all. 

XLIII

THE DOUBTER'S REWARD

Despite the common delusion to the contrary the philosophy of doubt isfar more comforting than that of hope. The doubter escapes the worstpenalty of the man of hope; he is never disappointed, and hence neverindignant. The inexplicable and irremediable may interest him, but theydo not enrage him, or, I may add, fool him. This immunity is worth allthe dubious assurances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmaticallyimpregnable.... Moreover, it makes for tolerance and sympathy. Thedoubter does not hate his opponents; he sympathizes with them. In theend, he may even come to sympathize with God.... The old idea offatherhood here submerges in a new idea of brotherhood. God, too, isbeset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting tothink of Him thus? Well, is it any the less disconcerting to think ofHim as able to ease and answer, and yet failing?... 

But he that doubteth--_damnatus est_. At once the penalty of doubt--andits proof, excuse and genesis. 

XLIV

BEFORE THE ALTAR

A salient objection to the prevailing religious ceremonial lies in theattitudes of abasement that it enforces upon the faithful. A man wouldbe thought a slimy and knavish fellow if he approached any human judgeor potentate in the manner provided for approaching the Lord God. It isan etiquette that involves loss of self-respect, and hence it cannot bepleasing to its object, for one cannot think of the Lord God assacrificing decent feelings to mere vanity. This notion of abasement, like most of the other ideas that are general in the world, is obviouslythe invention of small and ignoble men. It is the pollution of theologyby the _sklavmoral_. 

XLV

THE MASK

Ritual is to religion what the music of an opera is to the libretto:ostensibly a means of interpretation, but actually a means ofconcealment. The Presbyterians made the mistake of keeping the doctrineof infant damnation in plain words. As enlightenment grew in theworld, intelligence and prudery revolted against it, and so it hadto be abandoned. Had it been set to music it would havesurvived--uncomprehended, unsuspected and unchallenged. 

XLVI

PIA VENEZIANI, POI CRISTIANI

I have spoken of the possibility that God, too, may suffer from a finiteintelligence, and so know the bitter sting of disappointment and defeat. Here I yielded something to politeness; the thing is not only possible, but obvious. Like man, God is deceived by appearances and probabilities;He makes calculations that do not work out; He falls into speciousassumptions. For example, He assumed that Adam and Eve would obey thelaw in the Garden. Again, He assumed that the appalling lesson of theFlood would make men better. Yet again, He assumed that men would alwaysput religion in first place among their concerns--that it would beeternally possible to reach and influence them through it. This lastassumption was the most erroneous of them all. The truth is that thegenerality of men have long since ceased to take religion seriously. When we encounter one who still does so, he seems eccentric, almostfeeble-minded--or, more commonly, a rogue who has been deluded by hisown hypocrisy. Even men who are professionally religious, and who thushave far more incentive to stick to religion than the rest of us, nearlyalways throw it overboard at the first serious temptation. During thepast four years, for example, Christianity has been in combat withpatriotism all over Christendom. Which has prevailed? How many gentlemenof God, having to choose between Christ and Patrie, have actually chosenChrist?

XLVII

OFF AGAIN, ON AGAIN

The ostensible object of the Reformation, which lately reached itsfourth centenary, was to purge the Church of imbecilities. That objectwas accomplished; the Church shook them off. But imbecilities make anirresistible appeal to man; he inevitably tries to preserve them bycloaking them with religious sanctions. The result is Protestantism. 

XLVIII

THEOLOGY

The notion that theology is a dull subject is one of the strangestdelusions of a stupid and uncritical age. The truth is that some of themost engrossing books ever written in the world are full of it. Forexample, the Gospel according to St. Luke. For example, Nietzsche's "DerAntichrist. " For example, Mark Twain's "What Is Man?", St. Augustine'sConfessions, Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe, " and Huxley'sEssays. How, indeed, could a thing be dull that has sent hundreds ofthousands of men--the very best and the very worst of the race--to thegallows and the stake, and made and broken dynasties, and inspired thegreatest of human hopes and enterprises, and embroiled whole continentsin war? No, theology is not a soporific. The reason it so often seems sois that its public exposition has chiefly fallen, in these later days, into the hands of a sect of intellectual castrati, who begin bymistaking it for a sub-department of etiquette, and then proceed toanoint it with butter, rose water and talcum powder. Whenever afirst-rate intellect tackles it, as in the case of Huxley, or in that ofLeo XIII. , it at once takes on all the sinister fascination it had inLuther's day. 

XLIX

EXEMPLI GRATIA

Do I let the poor suffer, and consign them, as old Friedrich used tosay, to statistics and the devil? Well, so does God.