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Title: Six Major Prophets

Author: Edwin Emery Slosson

Release Date: September 8, 2014 [EBook #46809]

Language: English

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SIX MAJOR PROPHETS

BY

EDWIN E. SLOSSON, M.S., Ph.D.

LITERARY EDITOR OF "THE INDEPENDENT"

ASSOCIATE IN THE COLUMBIA SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

AUTHOR OF "MAJOR PROPHETS OF TO-DAY," ETC.

Whoever dies without recognizing the prophet of his time
dies the death of a pagan. — Mohammedan proverb.

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1917

TO MY SON
PRESTON WILLIAM SLOSSON
WHOSE THOUGHTS AND PHRASES
I HAVE MORE FREELY INCORPORATED
THAN I AM WILLING TO ACKNOWLEDGE
ELSEWHERE THAN ON THIS PAGE,
THIS VOLUME
IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED

PREFACE

A few years ago it occurred to me that there were living on the same planet and at the same time as myself some interesting people whom I had never seen and did not know so much about as I should. Since they or I might die at any moment, I determined not to delay longer. So I prepared a list of twelve men who seemed to me most worth knowing, and then I set out to see them; not with the hope of becoming personally acquainted with them or even with the object of interviewing them, but chiefly to satisfy myself that they really existed. One does not go to Switzerland to find out how high the Alps are or how they look. The traveler can get their altitude from Baedeker and their appearance from photographs, but if he is to talk about them with any sense of self-confidence he must have come within hailing distance of the mountains themselves. It is sufficient to say that I got close enough to the Alps I had chosen to be able to vouch for their actuality.

The men I selected for study were those who, whether they called themselves philosophers or not, seemed to me to have a definite philosophy of life, those who had a message for their own times of sufficient importance and distinctiveness to merit public attention. It is my purpose in these sketches to show the trend and importance of these diverse theories, so that a reader who had not had the opportunity to range over the complete works of a dozen authors might find which of them was best adapted to serve him as "guide, philosopher, and friend." In a word, my part is merely to act as the host at a reception who introduces his guests and then leaves them to follow up such acquaintanceships as seem profitable. My aim is exposition rather than criticism. Although I have not thought it necessary absolutely to suppress my own opinions, I trust this has not prevented me from giving a fair and sufficiently sympathetic presentation of each man's views in turn.

My list of the "Twelve Major Prophets of Today" consisted of the following names: Maurice Maeterlinck, Henri Bergson, Henri Poincaré, Elie Metchnikoff, Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Haeckel, George Bernard Shaw, Herbert George Wells, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, F. C. S. Schiller, John Dewey, and Rudolf Eucken. I had not taken nationality into consideration, but I found that I had chosen four from England, three from Germany, two from France, and one each from Belgium, Russia, and the United States of America. Four of the twelve were professors of philosophy; four were men of science, one of these a mathematician, one a physician, one a zoologist, one a chemist; and four were men of letters, authors of novels, dramas, or essays. The twelve sketches appeared in The Independent during the last few years, but they have been considerably extended for book publication. The first six named above were published in the volume "Major Prophets of To-day." The other six are given in the following pages.

EDWIN E. SLOSSON

CONTENTS

Preface

LIST OF PORTRAITS
George Bernard Shaw
H. G. Wells
G. K. Chesterton
F. C. S. Schiller
John Dewey
Rudolf Eucken

To write a book about a man who has written books about himself is an impertinence which only an irresistible charm of manner can carry off. The unpardonable way of doing it, and the commonest, is to undertake to tell the public what a writer has already told them himself, and tell it worse or tell it wrong.

G.B. SHAW.

SIX MAJOR PROPHETS

CHAPTER I

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Dramatic Critic of Life

I am a journalist, proud of it, deliberately cutting out of my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing that is not journalism will live long as literature, or be of any use whilst it does live. I deal with all periods, but I never study any period but the present; and as a dramatist I have no clue to any historical or other personage save that part of him which is also myself.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.—G. B. S., in "The Sanity of Art."

August 4, 1914, cuts time in two like a knife. The continuity of human progress in science, arts, letters, commerce, philosophy, everything, was broken off at that point—to be taken up again, who knows when? Nothing in the world can remain quite the same as before. Everything is seen in a new light. All our old ideas, even the most ancient and most reverenced, will have to be taken out and looked over to see how many of them remain intact and useful, just as after an earthquake one overhauls the china closet. "The transvaluation of all values", which Nietzsche looked for, has come to pass sooner than he expected, although the results of this reëstimation are not likely to be what he anticipated. It is not merely that the geographies will have to be revised and the histories rewritten, but all books will be classified as antebellum or postbellum literature. It will, however, not be necessary to mark them A. B. or P. B., for they will by their style of thought and language bear an indelible though invisible date with reference to this line of demarcation.

We are already beginning to look back upon the antebellum days as a closed period, and those who were conspicuous in it are being seen in an historical perspective such as the lapse of a generation of ordinary times is needed to produce. Some reputations are shrinking, others are rising, as mountains seem from a departing train to rearrange themselves according to their true height. The true prophets are becoming distinguishable from the false.

Among those who have taken the test and stand higher than before is George Bernard Shaw. Whether he will write better plays than before remains to be seen. Perhaps he will write no more of any kind. But those he has written will be regarded with more respect because we can see their essential truth, whereas before we feared lest we might be merely fascinated by their glitter. Warnings which the world took for jokes because of their fantastic guise now turn out too terribly real, and advice which the world ignored would better have been heeded.

Few writers have as little to take back on account of the war as Shaw, although few have expressed such decided opinions in such extreme language on so many topics. For instance, Kipling's "The Bear that Walks Like a Man" makes queer reading now that England is fighting to give Russia what then she was ready to fight to prevent her getting. But the full significance of Shaw's fable farce of "Androcles and the Lion" is now for the first time being realized. The philosophy of this, his most frivolous and serious play, is summed up by Ferrovius, a converted giant of the Ursus type, who finds it impossible to keep to his Christian principle of nonresistance when brought into the arena. The natural man rises in him and he slays six gladiators single-handed. This delights the emperor, who thereupon offers him a post in the Pretorian Guards which he had formerly refused. The fallen and victorious Ferrovius accepts, saying:

In my youth I worshiped Mars, the god of war. I turned from him to serve the Christian God; but to-day the Christian God forsook me; and Mars overcame me and took back his own. The Christian God is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the God that will be. Until then I accept service in the Guard, Caesar.

The great cataclysm does not seem to have changed Shaw's opinions one iota, but all England is changed, and so he appears in a different light. More of his countrymen agree with what he used to preach to them than ever before, yet he was never so disliked as he is to-day—which is saying a great deal. The British press has boycotted him. His letters, once so sought after by the most dignified journals, now no longer appear except in The New Statesman. His speeches, be they never so witty and timely, are not reported or even announced.

Consequently those who wish to hear him have to resort to the advertising expedients of the era before printing. A friend of mine just back from London tells me that he saw chalked on the side-walk a notice of a meeting to be addressed by Shaw in some out-of-the-way hall. Going there, he found it packed with an enthusiastic crowd gathered to hear Shaw discuss the questions of the day. The anti-Shavian press said that he had to keep to his house, that he was afraid to stir abroad for fear of a mob, that his career was over, that he was exploded, repudiated, disgraced, boycotted, dead and done for. At the very time when we were reading things like this, he was, as we since have learned, addressing weekly meetings in one of the largest halls in London. Reporters who were sent to see him hounded off the platform witnessed an ovation instead. The audience at his invitation asked him many questions, but not of a hostile character.

Shaw thrives on unpopularity or at least on public disapproval, which is not quite the same thing. It is not only that Shaw would rather be right than Prime Minister; he would rather be leader of the Opposition than Prime Minister. He would be "in the right with two or three"; in fact, if his followers increased much beyond the poet's minimum, he would begin to feel uneasy and suspect that he was wrong.

When Shaw sees a lonely mistreated kitten or a lonely mistreated theory, his tender heart yearns over it. For instance, when all his set started sneering at "natural rights" as eighteenth-century pedantry, he appeared as their champion, and, practically alone among modern radicals and art lovers, he has dared to commend the Puritans. The iconoclastic views which he expressed as dramatic and musical critic in the nineties have been vindicated by events, and now when a young reader opens for the first time "The Quintessence of Ibsenism", "The Perfect Wagnerite", and the collection of "Dramatic Opinions and Essays", he wonders only why Shaw should get so excited about such conventional and undisputed things. It is no wonder Shaw is "the most hated man in England." Nothing is more irritating than to say "I told you so", and he can—and does—ay it oftener than anybody else, unless it is Doctor Dillon.

Shaw's brain secretes automatically the particular antitoxin needed to counteract whatever disease may be epidemic in the community at the time. This injected with some vigor into the veins of thought may not effect a cure, but always excites a feverish state in the organism. It is his habit of seeing that there is another side to a question and calling attention to it at inconvenient times that makes him so irritating to the public. His opponents tried to intern him in Coventry as a pro-German on account of his pamphlet, "Commonsense about the War." But this is almost the only thing produced in England during the first weeks of the war that reads well now. Compare it with its numerous replies and see which seems absurd. Doubtless it was not tactful, it might have been called treasonable, but it certainly was sensible. Shaw kept his head level when others lost theirs. That was because he had thought out things in advance and so did not have to make up his mind in a hurry with the great probability of making it up wrong. In that pamphlet he presented the case for the Allies in a way much more convincing to the American mind than many that came to us in the early days of the war, and his arguments have been strengthened by the course of events, while others advanced at that time have been weakened. Shaw was arguing before a neutral and international jury, and so he did not rest his case on the specious and patriotic pleas that passed muster at that time with the British public.

As for the charge of pro-Germanism, that may best be met by quoting from a letter written by him to a friend in Vienna early in 1915. The language is evidently not pure Shavian. It has been translated into Austrian-German and thence retranslated into British journalese.

As regards myself, I am not what is called a pro-German. The Germans would not respect me, were I at such a time as this, when all thoughts of culture have vanished, not to stand by my people. But also, I am not an anti-German. The war brings us all on to the same plane of savagery. Every London coster can stick his bayonet deeper into the stomach of Richard Strauss than Richard Strauss would care to do to him.

Militarism has just now compelled me to pay a thousand pounds war taxation in order that some "brave little Servian" may be facilitated in cutting your throat or, that a Russian mujik may cleave your skull in twain, although I would gladly pay twice that sum to save your life, or to buy some beautiful picture in Vienna for our National Gallery.

Shaw has always condemned militarism because of the type of mind it engenders in officers and men. But he has never been opposed to preparedness or to the use of force. In the London Daily News of January 1, 1914,—note the date,—he said:

I like courage (like most constitutionally timid civilians) and the active use of strength for the salvation of the world. It is good to have a giant's strength and it is not at all tyrannous to use it like a giant provided you are a decent sort of giant. What on earth is strength for but to be used and will any reasonable man tell me that we are using our strength now to any purpose?

Let us get the value of our money in strength and influence instead of casting every new cannon in an ecstasy of terror and then being afraid to aim it at anybody.

At that time, seven months before the storm burst, he not only anticipated the war, but said that it might be averted,

By politely announcing that war between France and Germany would be so inconvenient to England that the latter country is prepared to pledge herself to defend either country if attacked by the other.

If we are asked how we are to decide which nation is really the aggressor we can reply that we shall take our choice, or when the problem is unsolvable we shall toss up, but that we will take a hand in the war anyhow.

International warfare is an unmitigated nuisance. Have as much character-building civil war as you like, but there must be no sowing of dragon's teeth like the Franco-Prussian War. England can put a stop to such a crime single-handed easily enough if she can keep her knees from knocking together in her present militarist fashion.

Of course Shaw may have been wrong in supposing that an open announcement of Great Britain's determination to enter the war would have deterred Germany, but as we now know from the White Paper this same opinion was held by the governments of both France and Russia. On July 30 the President of France said to the British Ambassador at Paris that

If His Majesty's Government announced that England would come to the aid of France in the event of a conflict between France and Germany as a result of the present differences between Austria and Servia, there would be no war, for Germany would at once modify her attitude.

And on July 25, M. Sazonof, the Russian Foreign Minister, said to the British Ambassador at Petrograd that

He did not believe that Germany really wanted war, but her attitude was decided by ours. If we took our stand firmly with France and Russia, there would be no war. If we failed her now, rivers of blood would flow, and we would in the end be dragged into war.

Shaw now gives the same advice to the United States that he gave to his own country before the war, that is, to increase its armament and not be afraid to use it. In a recent letter to the American Intercollegiate Socialist he said:

I should strenuously recommend the United States to build thirty-two new dreadnoughts instead of sixteen, and to spend two billion dollars on its armament program instead of one. This would cost only a fraction of the money you are wasting every year in demoralizing luxury, a good deal of it having been in the past scattered over the continental countries which are now using what they saved out of it to slaughter one another.

If the United States wishes to stop war as an institution, that is, to undertake the policing of the world, it will need a very big club for the purpose.

If I were an American statesman I should tell the country flatly that it should maintain a Pacific navy capable of resisting an attack from Japan and an Atlantic navy capable of resisting an attack from England, with Zeppelins on the same scale, a proportionate land equipment of siege guns, and so forth. And until the nations see the suicidal folly of staking everything in the last instance on the ordeal of battle, no other advice will be honest advice.

In "Major Barbara" Cusins abandons the teaching of Greek to take up the manufacture of munitions because he has the courage "to make war on war." It is in this play that is expounded the theory on which President Wilson based his policy. Lady Britomart tells Cusins: "You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals." But Undershaft, the munition-maker, replies: "No; none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don't come in here." And when Cusins asks: "What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?" he answers:

To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles; to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.... I will take an order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the rascals, don't blame me. I can make cannons; I cannot make courage and conviction.

In this same conversation Shaw also gives a hint of his theology, when Cusins says to Undershaft: "You have no power. You do not drive this place; it drives you. And what drives this place?" Undershaft answers, enigmatically, "A will of which I am a part." This doctrine of an immanent God working through nature and man to higher things was developed more definitely in an address which Mr. Shaw delivered some years ago in the City Temple at the invitation of the Reverend R. J. Campbell. Here he argued that God created human beings to be "his helpers and servers, not his sycophants and apologists." Shaw continues:

If my actions are God's nobody can fairly hold me responsible for them; my conscience is mere lunacy.... But if I am a part of God, if my eyes are God's eyes, my hands God's hands, and my conscience God's conscience then also I share his responsibility for the world; and wo is me if the world goes wrong!

This position enables him to explain evil on evolutionary principles as "the Method of Trial and Error." When Blake asks of the tiger, "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Shaw conceives the Life-Force as replying:

Yes, it was the best I could devise at the time; but now that I have evolved something better, part of the work of that something better, Man, to wit, is to kill out my earlier attempt. And in due time I hope to evolve Superman, who will in his turn kill out and supersede Man, whose abominable cruelties, stupidities and follies have utterly disappointed me.

In the unactable third act of his "Man and Superman",[1] this theology is put into the mouths of two most unpromising preachers, Don Juan and the Devil. Here is found one of the most eloquent arraignments of war in all literature. It is, remember, the Devil who is speaking:

I tell you that in the arts of life Man invests nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles; they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth. His heart is in his weapons.... Man measures his force by his destructiveness.... In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence in which they themselves daily walk.... The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and the crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough; something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows and the executioner; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by which even those clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all destroyers.

Three years before the war Shaw wrote a little satirical skit, "Press Cuttings",[2] which was deemed so dangerous to both Britain and Germany that the censors of both countries agreed in prohibiting its production on the stage. Since the British censor seemed to fear that the principal characters, "Balsquith" and "Mitchener", might be taken by the public as referring to certain well-known statesmen, Shaw offered to change the names to "Bones" and "Johnson." But even that concession would not satisfy the censor's scruples, so the play was never publicly put on the stage, though, since there was then no censorship of literature, it was published as a book. Here is a bit of the dialogue:

Balsquith—The Germans have laid down four more Dreadnoughts.

Mitchener—Then you must lay down twelve.

Balsquith—Oh, yes; it's easy to say that; but think of what they'll cost.

Mitchener—Think of what it would cost to be invaded by Germany and forced to pay an indemnity of five hundred millions....

Balsquith—After all, why should the Germans invade us?

Mitchener—Why shouldn't they? What else have their army to do? What else are they building a navy for?

Balsquith—Well, we never think of invading Germany.

Mitchener—Yes, we do. I have thought of nothing else for the last ten years. Say what you will, Balsquith, the Germans have never recognized, and until they get a stern lesson, they never will recognize, the plain fact that the interests of the British Empire are paramount, and that the command of the sea belongs by nature to England.

Balsquith—But if they wont recognize it, what can I do?

Mitchener—Shoot them down.

Balsquith—I cant shoot them down.

Mitchener—Yes, you can. You dont realize it; but if you fire a rifle into a German he drops just as surely as a rabbit does.

Balsquith—But dash it all, man, a rabbit hasn't got a rifle and a German has. Suppose he shoots you down.

Mitchener—Excuse me, Balsquith; but that consideration is what we call cowardice in the army. A soldier always assumes that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.

Balsquith—Oh, come! I like to hear you military people talking of cowardice. Why, you spend your lives in an ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. I don't believe you ever go to bed without looking under it for a burglar.

Mitchener—A very sensible precaution,

Balsquith. I always take it. And in consequence I've never been burgled.

Balsquith—Neither have I. Anyhow dont you taunt me with cowardice. I never look under my bed for a burglar. I'm not always looking under the nation's bed for an invader. And if it comes to fighting, Im quite willing to fight without being three to one.

Mitchener—These are the romantic ravings of a Jingo civilian, Balsquith. At least you'll not deny that the absolute command of the sea is essential to our security.

Balsquith—The absolute command of the sea is essential to the security of the principality of Monaco. But Monaco isn't going to get it.

Mitchener—And consequently Monaco enjoys no security. What a frightful thing! How do the inhabitants sleep with the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually present to their minds? Would you have our English slumbers broken in this way? Are we also to live without security?

Balsquith—Yes. Theres no such thing as security in the world; and there never can be as long as men are mortal. England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there is no longer a man in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him. When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for the moon.

Mitchener—Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships, the question of the moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. It will be reached at no very distant date. Can you as an Englishman tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live under a German moon? The British flag must be planted there at all hazards.

The play ends with the establishment of universal military training and equal suffrage, thus doing away with a militarism that was both timorous and tyrannical, snobbish and inefficient, and at the same time making the nation truly democratic. It is characteristic of Shaw that recently, when the papers were discussing what sort of a monument should commemorate Edith Cavell, he interjected the unwelcome suggestion that the country could honor her best by enfranchising her sex.

There is ever something in Bernard Shaw that suggests the eighteenth century, the age of Swift and Voltaire and Doctor Johnson. On the credit side we must reckon lucidity, incisive wit, cleareyed logic, unashamed common sense, love of discussion and openness to new ideas, freedom from prejudice of race or class, humanitarian aspiration —in a word the Aufklärung. On the debit side some items must unhappily be listed also: doctrinaire intellectualism, inability to see either the limits of one's own doctrines or the point in other people's, inadequate appreciation of historic institutions and popular sentiments, contempt for romance, intolerance for science, and incapacity for poetry.

Shaw seems to have inherited the famous saeva indignatio of his great countryman, Swift. For all his simple diet he is not so eupeptic as Chesterton. Chesterton is most closely akin to Dickens, as may be seen from his sympathetic appreciations of Dickens's works. If I may be permitted to express the relationship of the four in a mathematical formula, I should put it:

Shaw: Chesterton = Swift: Dickens.

The mordant wit of the two Irishmen is a very different thing from the genial humor of the two Englishmen. Chesterton as usual makes a theological issue out of it. He says of Shaw:

He is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humor is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees consistency in things is a wit—and a Calvinist. The man who sees inconsistency in things is a humorist—and a Catholic. However this may be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is purest in the Puritan; the desire to see truth face to face even if it slay us, the high impatience with irrelevant sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep the soul at its highest pressure and speed. His instincts upon all social customs and questions are Puritan. His favorite author is Bunyan. But along with what was inspiring and direct in Puritanism, Bernard Shaw has inherited also some of the things that were cumbersome and traditional. If ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice it is a Puritan prejudice.

When Shaw in the preface of his "Plays for Puritans" declared himself "a Puritan in art" it was regarded as one of his jokes. So it was, but, as the world has found out since, his jokes are not nonsense. The main reason why the assumption and ascription of the term "Puritan" to Shaw was thought absurd was because of the prevalent misconception of what sort of people the Puritans were. The word in its common acceptance implies orthodoxy, conventionality, prudishness, asceticism. Now the real Puritan was a revolutionary of the most radical type. Of all the socialists, anarchists, and extremists of various views with whom I am acquainted, there is not one who lives in antagonism to his conventional contemporaries on so many points as did the Puritan in his day. Milton's pamphlets in favor of republicanism, free speech, divorce, and new theology were as scandalous to the seventeenth century as Shaw's "Revolutionist's Handbook" to the nineteenth. The Puritans insisted that marriage was a purely civil contract to be made and annulled by the State, and they even forbade ministers to perform the ceremony, while Catholics, Roman and Anglican, hold the contrary theory, that marriage is a religious rite, only performed by priests and indissoluble. The Pilgrim Fathers who had a dozen children and two or three wives apiece—consecutive, of course—are not to be classed as ascetics; and if any one thinks them prudish, he has not read their literature.

Of course Shaw's opinions are different from those of the Puritans, indeed quite the opposite on some points. The Puritans, for example, were not averse to blood, either in their food, their politics, or their theology, while Shaw is almost Buddhistic in his tender-heartedness. Androcles is his caricature of himself. But still we may say that Shaw is puritanical in his type of mind, his attitude toward the established institutions and moral codes of his time, and even in his faults.

Consider for instance his intolerance. No, I do not mean dogmatism. That he comes to emphatic conclusions is much to his credit and differentiates him from the colloidal-minded mass of modern writers who hold no convictions to have the courage of. But he does not, for instance, content himself with the attitude: "For the life of me I can't see what you find to admire in that absurd, romantic, weak-minded, sentimental, butcherly Scott." He would be quite justified in expressing his opinion thus-wise. He must add: "There's nothing to him and if you say there is, you are deceiving me or—what is wickeder—yourself. In either case you are an Idealist, which in my unique vocabulary means liar." To which we might return an answer of the Quaker sort: "Friend, thee has two eyes and the usual number of brains and so a right to thine opinion. But it need not follow that because thee sees not a merit in a writer that it does in nowise exist." Every one of Shaw's early heroes and heroines, from the Unsocial Socialist and the daughter of Mrs. Warren to Undershaft and Larry Doyle, admires himself or herself immensely for saying to every upholder of supposedly current morality: "Bah! Humbug! Hypocrite!" To which again the gentle reply should come: "Friend, I be not an Humbug, nor yet an Hypocrite, nor even a Bah. A man may differ from thee and yet be sincere in his views, although this fact be dreamed not in thy philosophy. I may be right or I may be wrong, but if thee call me an Idealist yet again, lo, I will lift this brick and cast it at thee."

Wells and Shaw are quite commonly bracketed like Scylla and Charybdis, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and the Royal Bloodsweating Chesterbelloc of Holy Writ. These couplings are often absurd but rarely arbitrary. Some likeness of thought or mood or some contrast of viewpoint usually accounts for if not justifies such literary mésalliances. Wells and Shaw are both socialists, but this is not the tie, for, as the English aristocrat said: "We are all socialists now." The real likeness is that each is an intellectual anarchist, although a political Socialist. Shaw is an isolated, not to say eccentric, figure even for a Socialist. Wells has gone further yet in his self-isolation by leaving the Fabian movement. But the unlikeness between the two men lies in the motive driving them to their respective hermitages. Shaw may often change his point of view, but at any given moment it is almost brutally clear and detailed, and he insists upon the fullest conformity on the part of his would-be followers. If they fall a step short of his iron boundary they are mere Philistines and bourgeois, if they go a step beyond they are inefficient and contemptible sentimental revolutionists. Shaw always has "doots o' Jamie's orthodoxy." But Wells seeks a Socialism without boundaries. Marxian Socialism, Fabian Socialism, State Socialism are all too narrow and dogmatic for his taste as he has said time and time again. Finding no true all-inclusive, universe-wide Socialism he erects his own banner for the nations to rally to and as a result suffers the universal fate of those who try to found Churches of Humanity and World Languages, that is, merely succeeding in founding a new sect and a new dialect.

Shaw has two defects which militate against his popularity; first, he is too conventional, and, second, his conventions are peculiarly his own. "There is," says his Undershaft, "only one true morality for every man, but not every man has the same morality." Shaw is easily shocked, but never by the same things that shock other people.

He himself ascribes his inability to see the same as others to his sight being abnormally normal. The oculist who examined them said they were the only pair of absolutely correct eyes he had ever come across.

Of course this illusion of possessing perfect mental vision is common to everybody. All the opinions I hold at this moment are, I believe, absolutely correct; otherwise I should change them instanter, though I must admit, seeing how often I have erred in the past, that a priori the chances are against my being altogether right now. But what Shaw means by his normality of vision is not merely common confidence in one's own orthodoxy, but has reference to his fanatical efforts to tear away all the illusions of life and see things as they are. I do not think that he often succeeds. Isis has many veils, and those who have torn away the first and the second are all the more likely to be deceived in mistaking the third for the naked truth.

There is no doubting Shaw's intent to undeceive the world or his willingness to undeceive himself. "My way of joking is to tell the truth," says his Father Keegan in "John Bull's Other Island." But when he strains his eyes to see something clearly he sees only that one thing. By following consistently one line of logic—instead of several as he should—he gets tangled up in illogicalities. His mode of reasoning is often the reductio ad absurdum of his own theories, and this is not a persuasive way of argumentation.

By temperament Shaw is a mystic, but his conscience compels him to assume the method of cold intellectualism. He is an artist in the disguise of a scientist, not an uncommon thing to see in this so-called age of science.

Probably Shaw is not more inconsistent than any man of agile mind who is capable of seeing in succession different sides of a thing, but he is franker in expressing the point of view he holds at the time. Consequently he has many admirers but few followers. They can't keep up. The only possible Shavian is Shaw.

As somebody has remarked there are two ways of saying a thing; there are writers who provoke thought and writers who provoke thinkers. Shaw does both. This is intentional, and he defends it on the ground that; "If you don't say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as well not say it at all—since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them." In short Shaw first got the ear of the public by pulling it, and he does not know how to let go. Shaw's argument is a wedge, but it is driven in blunt end first. A startling statement, some monstrous paradox, is presented to the reader and rouses his antagonism, then it is gradually qualified and whittled down, or wittily diverted, so that it seems, in contrast to its first form, quite innocuous and acceptable, and the reader is so relieved at not having to swallow the dose first presented to him that he willingly takes more than he otherwise would. Shaw has not the judicial mind and does not want to have. "The way to get at the merits of a case," he says "is not to listen to a fool who imagines himself impartial, but to get it argued with reckless bias for and against." Put this on your bookmark when you read Shaw.

George Bernard Shaw's collection of opinions is unique. Perhaps no single view of his is quite original, but the combination certainly is. He belongs to no type and has founded no school. This makes Shaw an exasperating person for some people to read and causes them to set him down as frivolous or inconsistent. They find, for instance, from "The Revolutionist's Handbook" that Shaw believes in eugenics and the importance of natural science. "Good!" people say, "now we can classify him." They read "The Doctor's Dilemma" and find him a rabid antivivisectionist and filled with a profound contempt for modern medicine in general. Or they find out that he is a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and a Puritan, and classify him as some nonconformist minister of a pallid and overconscientious type. When they read what he actually has to say about marriage in "Misalliance", about popular religion and salvation by money and gunpowder in "Major Barbara", they rush to the opposite conclusion that he is constitutionally an unconstitutional rebel with a fondness for aimless violence such as appears in "Fanny's First Play." Reading "The Conversion of Blanco Bosnet" they discover that he is a devout Theist. Reading the preface to "Androcles" they find him a higher critic. As a Fabian pamphleteer he is in favor of abolishing all individual property of a productive sort and has no use for laissez faire. But when it comes to children (see "Misalliance") there cannot be too much laissez faire. He appears as an ultramodernist, a universal cynic, a disillusioned Ibsenite, and a disbeliever in the very existence of progress. (Preface to "Man and Superman".) He offended half the radicals by his "Impossibilities of Anarchism" and the other half by his "Illusions of Socialism", and the conservatives by both.

But those who will take the trouble to compare these apparent antinomies will find that the contradictions are not so great as they seem from their paradoxical and partisan form, and that Shaw has preserved his intellectual consistency to a remarkable degree.

When Shaw first burst into London, a young, red-haired Irishman, he announced himself as an atheist, an anarchist, and a vegetarian, these heresies being arranged in crescendo fashion, putting last what was most calculated to shock the British public. Now when we look back over his career we find that he has not been any more successful in sticking to his youthful heresy than others are in sticking to their youthful orthodoxy. Whether he has ever violated his vegetarian faith by eating a beefsteak on the sly I do not know, but he has drifted far from orthodox anarchism, for Socialism is, in theory at least, at the opposite pole from anarchy. Once when Shaw was talking Socialism in Hyde Park, he was much annoyed by the anarchists who circulated through the crowd, selling copies of an early pamphlet of his on "The Illusions of Socialism." As for his atheism he seems to have left that still farther behind, for his present theological views, if expressed in less provocative language, would pass muster in many a pulpit to-day. In fact, they have as it is.

In a recent letter to me, Mr. Shaw refers to the cordial reception he always received when Reverend Reginald Campbell invited him to occupy the pulpit of City Temple,[3] and adds:

My greatest and surest successes as a public speaker have been on religious subjects to religious audiences; but this is the common experience of all speakers. People are still more concerned about religion than anything else, and any reasonably good preacher can easily leave the best political spellbinder behind.

Shaw as a Socialist differs from others who bear that name. He is too intense an individualist to be a good party man. He puts no faith in Marx as the prophet of the millennium, and he has no Utopian vision of his own. But what chiefly distinguishes him as a reformer is his power of penetrating through shams to fundamental realities and his ability to do original constructive thinking.[4] All of us can find fault with the existing order of things, and most of us do. But to point out just "what's wrong with the world" and to suggest a practical line of improvement is not so easy. The Fabian Society has done more than set off fireworks and stir up mud. The Minority Report on the reform of the Poor Law is a fine piece of constructive statesmanship. This Minority Report was largely the work of the Fabian Society, though how much Shaw had to do with it personally I do not know. We now know, however, that he was the author of Fabian Tract Number 2 of 1884 that startled the conservative classes of England, including the orthodox Marxians. Here are a few of the "Opinions Held by the Fabians" set forth in this famous tract:

That since competition among producers admittedly secures to the public the most satisfactory products, the state should compete with all its might in every department of production.

That no branch of industry should be carried on at a profit by the central administration.

That men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against women, and that the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal political rights.

That the established government has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the weather.

Shaw also wrote Fabian Tract Number 45 on "The Impossibilities of Anarchism", in which he pointed out what was not so clear in 1888 as it is to-day, that society was rapidly becoming communistic through the efforts of those who were most opposed to communism as a theory:

Most people will tell you that communism is known in this country only as a visionary project advocated by a handful of amiable cranks. Then they will stroll across a common bridge, along the common embankment, by the light of the common street lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the common street and into the common Trafalgar Square where on the smallest hint that communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by a common policeman and hauled off to the common gaol.

Shaw's latest contribution to Fabian literature, the appendix to Pease's "History of the Fabian Society", seems to me one of the most important, for in the final paragraphs he points out clearly a defect in our democracy that is rarely recognized and altogether unremedied:

Another subject which has hardly yet been touched, and which also must begin with deductive treatment, is what may be called the democratization of democracy, and its extension from mere negative and very uncertain check on tyranny to a positive organizing force. No experienced Fabian believes that society can be reconstructed (or rather constructed, for the difficulty is that society is as yet only half removed from chaos) by men of the type produced by popular election under existing circumstances likely to be achieved before the reconstruction. The fact that a hawker cannot ply his trade without a license whilst a man may sit in Parliament without any relevant qualifications is a typical and significant anomaly which will certainly not be removed by allowing everybody to be a hawker at will. Sooner or later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy will demand that only such men should be presented to its choice as have proved themselves qualified for more serious and disinterested work than "stoking up" election meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. Without qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible; and it must not be forgotten (though the reminder is as old as Plato) that the qualified men may be very reluctant men instead of very ambitious ones.

It is this doubt, more or less clearly felt, lest a genuinely democratic society will fail to secure able and qualified leaders, that lies at the bottom of the prevalent distrust of popular government and causes many persons to cling to antiquated and irrational institutions like aristocracy and even monarchy.

I sent Mr. Shaw a copy of an editorial entitled, "And There Shall Be No More Kings", in The Independent of March 22, 1915, and the following, penned on the margin of the clipping in his careful handwriting, is his comment on what he calls "a wise and timely article."

This war raises in an acute form the whole question of republicanism versus German dynasticism. After the mischief done by Franz Josef's second childhood as displayed in his launching the forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia before the Kaiser could return from Stockholm, the world has the right—indeed the duty—to demand that monarchies shall at least be subject to superannuation as well as to constitutional limitation.

All recent historical research has shown that the position of a king, even in a jealously limited monarchy like the British, makes him so strong that George III, who was childish when he was not under restraint as an admitted lunatic, was uncontrollable by the strongest body of statesmen the eighteenth century produced. It is undoubtedly inconvenient that the head of the state should be selected at short intervals; but it does not follow that he (or she) should be an unqualified person or hold office for life or be a member of a dynasty.

I may add that if the policy of dismembering the Central Empires by making separate national states of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, and making Serbia include Bosnia and Herzegovina, is seriously put forward, it would involve making them republics; for if they were kingdoms their thrones would be occupied by cousins of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanoffs, strengthening the German hegemony instead of restraining it.

Perhaps the reader will think that I am rather too presumptuous in professing to know just what Shaw means and believes, when most people are puzzled by him. So I should explain that I have the advantage of a personal acquaintance with Shaw. I may say without boasting—or at least without lying—that at one period of his life I was nearer to him than any other human being. The distance between us was in fact the diameter of one of those round tables in the A. B. C. restaurants, and the period was confined to the time it took to consume a penny bun and a cup of tea, both being paid for by him. I resorted to thorough Fletchering for the purpose of prolonging the interview, and I wished that either he or I had been a smoker. But although a vegetarian, he eschews the weed, and smoking did not seem to be in accordance with Fabian tactics.

The occasion was a recess in a Fabian Society conference. I did not suppose that anything could shut off Socialists in the midst of debate. The theme of discussion was the House of Lords, which the Fabians unanimously agreed ought to be abolished, though no two of them agreed on the substitute. But while they were iconoclasts as to one British institution, they rendered homage to another by stopping to take tea in the midst of a lovely scrap.

The Fabian Society was indirectly the fruit of one of the seeds which Thomas Davidson scattered in many lands. You can track this peripatetic philosopher through life, as you can Johnny Appleseed, by the societies that sprung up along his pathway. In the Adirondacks he founded the Glenmore School of Philosophy. In the Jewish quarter of New York City another of his schools still thrives and is enthused with something of his zeal for learning. The circle of earnest young men and women whom he gathered about him in London were the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, the Fellowship of the New Life, and the Fabian Society. Yet Davidson himself was neither a spiritualist nor a Socialist.[5]

At the Fabian Society one sees Shaw in his element. Every creature, says Browning, like the moon,

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.

The Fabian Society is Shaw's own true love, and to her he turns a different face than to the outside world. As I watched him during the afternoon—preceding and following the brief period of personal contact of which I have been bragging—I was struck by the tact and kindliness which he showed in the course of the discussion. There was in his occasional remarks no trace of the caustic and dogmatic tone which one gets from his writings. He has been not so much the "shining light" or "presiding genius" of the society, as one of the "wheel horses", and devoted himself diligently to the detailed and inconspicuous work of the organization. He had for twenty-seven years served on the Executive Committee of the society when in 1911 he resigned to make way for the younger generation.

The question under discussion was, as I have said, that of the reconstruction of the House of Lords. This was shortly before the war, when such questions were regarded as important. Various plans were proposed in order to secure the election of the fittest, when Shaw took the floor in defense of genuine democracy. His argument ran like this, as I remember it:

Our idea is that any 670 people is as good as any other for governing, just as any twelve chosen by chance on the jury have our lives and property in their hands.

Now if I and Mr. Sydney Webb here were sent to the House of Commons it should be with unlimited opportunity to talk but not to vote. To give us a vote would be to permit the violation of the fundamental principle of democracy that people should never be governed better than they want to be. If you had a government of saints and philosophers the people would be miserable. For instance, I would want to stop all smoking and meat-eating and liquor drinking, but like all superior persons now I have to convince other people because I cannot compel them.

No elected body can possibly be representative, because no man is elected as a normal man, but as an exceptional one. The House of Lords is more representative than the House of Commons, because a man in the House of Commons is there because he has uncommon abilities, high or low. Representatives ought to be, like jurymen, samples of the commonalty picked at random and compelled to serve. Their function is to explain where the shoe pinches. But the shoe must be made by skilled legislators and statesmen, and these should be eligible only when they have satisfied a very high standard of qualification, and should sit without votes though with unlimited powers of explanation and criticism.

These remarks, delivered in a musical and sympathetic voice with frequent flashes of a broad row of white teeth, sounded very different from the way they read in cold type. I do hope the phonograph will be perfected before Shaw dies or his voice goes cracked, so posterity can have a vocal version of his plays and prefaces. Otherwise his personality stands little chance of being understood.

Shaw is tall and uses his eyeglasses for gesticulating as an orchestra leader uses a baton. His hair was once a fiery red, but is now tempered into gray. His eyes are light blue. Between his brows there are three perpendicular wrinkles, but not of the cross and fretful type. His face is long and pointed, but he looks not in the least Mephistophelian as the caricaturists represent him. In short, Shaw is not so black as he is painted by himself and others.

It is not necessary in this chapter, as it was in the case of some of my "Twelve Major Prophets of To-day", for me to give biographical details at any length, for these are easily accessible. Shaw has not been reticent in talking about himself in various books and prefaces, and he is fortunate in having in Professor Henderson of the University of North Carolina a biographer of the Boswell kind—probably the best kind there is. His big volume contains as much about Shaw's life and words up to the time it was published, 1911, as any one needs to know. Chesterton's book on Shaw is an impressionistic sketch rather than a portrait, giving the author an opportunity of saying "what's wrong with the world", including Shaw. Other lives of Shaw are mentioned in the appendix of this chapter.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, July 25, 1856. His father was an Irish gentleman, Protestant, improvident and respectable, a wholesale dealer in corn, with a profound contempt for all retail tradesmen. His mother was a musician, and it was to her that Mr. Shaw owed his own moderate talent and remarkable knowledge of music. When he went to London at the age of twenty, with artistic, musical and literary ambitions, his mother practically supported the family by teaching music there. As Shaw says in one of his autobiographical fragments:

I did not throw myself into the struggle for life. I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old age. I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own, prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this is a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid trade.

His only schooling was at Dublin, where he says he learned little, and this is confirmed by the school records which place him near the bottom of his class. His opinion of the sort of education he got he has expressed in several places, especially in the preface to "Misalliance."

My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything but Greek and Latin.... To this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short I am, as to classical education, another Shakespeare. I can read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity, I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these three were never taught at school. Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards.

Why is it that British authors give us such horrible pictures of their school days? They usually look back upon them as a most unpleasant and unprofitable period of their lives, and when they attempt to eulogize it they make it all the more shocking. Kipling in "Stalky and Company" reveals an even more detestable state of affairs than Dickens does of "Dotheboys Hall." Shaw takes the American view of it and condemns with horror the "flagellomania" of the British schoolmaster. It is curious to observe that in Great Britain the schoolmasters have weapons, and the policemen have none. In America clubs have been given to the police, and the canes taken away from the teachers. The New York school-teachers are not allowed to deliver even a casual box on the ear or a friendly shaking, yet they are making very decent citizens out of most unpromising material, and the policemen's clubs are mostly used on the immigrants who have been trained in the flagellant schools of Europe.

It is doubtless a good thing that Shaw did not go through Oxford, but he should have had a course in biology under Huxley such as Wells had. This would have given him an acquaintance with the aims and methods of modern science and freed him from such prejudice as he displayed, for instance, in "The Doctor's Dilemma" and "The Philanderer."

Shaw's early efforts at authorship did not meet with encouragement. If we may take his word for it, he earned six pounds in nine years by his pen, and five of those came from writing a patent medicine advertisement. He wrote five novels in five years, all at first rejected by the book publishers. Four of them, "The Unsocial Socialist", "The Irrational Knot", "Cashel Byron's Profession", and "Love Among the Artists" have since been reprinted from the short-lived Socialist periodicals in which they originally appeared. The first novel he wrote, "Immaturity", has never been printed.

William Archer sent these novels to Robert Louis Stevenson, then trying to recover his health at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Stevenson's letters refer to them as "blooming gaseous folly", "horrid fun", "a fever dream of the most feverish",

"I say, Archer, my God, what women!" "If Mr. Shaw is below five and twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic and pursue romance with his eyes opened; perhaps he knows it; God knows!—my brain is softened."

A plan to relieve struggling authors and secure the earlier recognition of genius by means of an endowment fund and a system of substantial prizes was once proposed by Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle", who wrote to a number of authors, asking their opinion of the scheme. Among those who responded were Wells, Bennett, De Morgan, Philpotts, Galsworthy, London, and Shaw.[6] I quote part of what Shaw said about it because of its biographical interest:

There is only one serious and effective way of helping young men of the kind in view, and that is by providing everybody with enough leisure in the intervals of well-paid and not excessive work to enable them to write books in their spare time and pay for the printing of them. Nothing else seems to me to be really hopeful. I myself seem an example of a man who achieved literary eminence without assistance; but as a matter of fact certain remnants of family property made all the difference. For fully nine years I had to sponge shamelessly on my father and mother; but even at that we only squeezed through because my mother's grandfather had been a rich man. In fact, I was just the man for whom Upton wants to establish his fund. Yet for the life of me I cannot see how any committee in the world could have given me a farthing. All I had to show was five big novels which nobody would publish, and as the publishers' readers by whose advice they were rejected included Lord Morley and George Meredith, it cannot be said that I was in any worse hands than those of any committee likely to be appointed. Of course Sinclair may say to this that if Morley and Meredith, instead of having to advise a publisher as to the prospects of a business speculation, had only had to consider how to help a struggling talent without reference to commercial consideration, they might have come to my rescue. Unfortunately, I have seen both their verdicts; and I can assure Sinclair that I produced on both of them exactly the impression that is inevitably produced in every such case: that is, that I was a young man with more cleverness than was good for me and that what I needed was snubbing and not encouraging. No doubt there are talents which are not aggressive and do not smell of brimstone; but these are precisely the talents which are marketable, except, of course, in the case of the highest poetry, which, however, is out of the question anyhow as a means of livelihood. William Morris, when he was at the height of his fame as a poet, long after the publication of his popular poem, "The Earthly Paradise", told me that his income from his poems was about a hundred a year; and I happen to know that Robert Browning threatened to leave the country because the Income Tax Commissioners assessed him with a modest but wholly imaginary income on the strength of his reputation. Poetry is thus frankly a matter of endowment, but for the rest I think a writer's chance of being helped by the fund would be in inverse ratio to his qualifications as conceived by Upton Sinclair.

Shaw's first essays in the field where he was to attain his greatest success were as discouraging as his efforts at novel writing. His first play, "Widower's Houses", dealing with tainted money, shocked but did not attract the public. His "The Philanderer" was published before a theater would accept it. His third play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession", was prohibited by the censor. Of the seven that followed only one could be called a decided success on its first presentation in London. But in book form, with attractively written stage directions and argumentative prefaces, they found a host of readers who wanted to see them in the theater. "Candida" was not presented in London till 1904, nearly ten years after it was written. It was with "Candida" that Arnold Daly introduced Shaw to the theater-going public of America, and for the last few years there have often been three Shaw plays running at the same time in New York.

Shaw's plays were popular in America when they were tabooed or pooh-poohed in England. His "Pygmalion" had its première in the Hofburg-theater in Vienna instead of London. I saw it, or rather heard it, since it is a phonetic instead of a spectacular play, at the Deutsches Theater of Irving Place, New York, in March, 1914, six months before Mrs. Patrick Campbell gave it here in English. In spite of the fact that the play depends upon variations in English dialects, it was given better in the German than in the English.

Shaw is in fact an internationalist, much more honored in America, Russia, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Japan than in his own country, that is, Ireland. It must be interesting to see "You Never Can Tell" or "Man and Superman" on the Tokyo stage. The Kobe Herald says: "He appeals to the Japanese of progressive ideas because he prefers potatoes, cabbages and beans to porter-house steak and lamb chops."

The reason why Shaw's prefaces read so well and his plays go better on the stage than would be anticipated is because they are composed by ear. Since reading aloud has gone out of fashion, there has arisen a generation of young writers who do not realize that language is intended to be spoken. Consequently one has to read them by eye only, switching off for the time the internal auditory apparatus so as to avoid their discords and dull rhythm. A little girl who was trying to read to herself a story by one of our pyrotechnic authors suddenly threw down the magazine with the cry: "I can't read this any more! It dazzles my ears."

Shaw is a musician, and he writes musical prose. He uses shorthand in composing, which is the next best thing to dictating to a phonograph. Naturally he resents the established spelling of English which preserves the form of words while allowing the words themselves to decay, thus sacrificing speech to print. He has often argued for phonetic spelling,[7] and has used as much of it in his works as his publisher would permit. The point he makes in the following passage is undeniably proving true:

All that the conventional spelling has done is to conceal the one change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the half-rural cockney of Sam Weller and the modern metropolitan cockney of Drinkwater in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion."... Refuse to teach the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you right.

Shaw's treatment of the Salvation Army in "Major Barbara" showed that he knew more about religion than some of his churchly critics. So, too, his defense of the Salvation Army music in the London Standard in 1905 proved that he knew more about music than those who sneered at the Army bands. The Germans, who are now fond of analyzing the English character, have discussed at length the question of why such an unmusical people should have good music in the Salvation Army.[8]

The 125-page preface to "Androcles and the Lion" is devoted to a rereading of the Gospels and a rewriting of the life of Christ. Shaw interprets the New Testament like a higher critic but applies it like an early Christian. He rejects the resurrection but accepts the communism. He believes in the Life Force and Its Superman as others do in God and His Messiah. Shaw's Superman obviously belongs to another genus from Nietzsche's Uebermensch. He says in the preface to "Misalliance":

The precise formula for the Superman, ci-devant The Just Made Perfect, has not yet been discovered. Until it is, every birth is an experiment in a Great Research which is being conducted by the Life Force to discover that formula.

This eugenical and well meaning, but far from omnipotent creator, bears a strong resemblance to Bergson's Elan vital, but Shaw was writing about the Life Force long before Bergson wrote his "Creative Evolution." If there was any borrowing about it, both borrowed from Schopenhauer. But Shaw and Bergson, being kindly men and no pessimists, have put a kind heart into Schopenhauer's ruthless Will.

If I were to sum up Shaw in two words it would be that his distinguishing characteristics are courage and kind-heartedness. The sight of suffering and injustice drives him mad, and then he runs amuck, slashing right and left, without much regard to whom he hits and no regard at all as to who hits him. He is, like Swift, a cruel satirist through excess of sympathy. If Ibsen is right, that "the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone", then George Bernard Shaw is not to be ignored.

HOW TO READ SHAW

It does not matter much which of Shaw's books you read first, for after reading it, whichever it is, you will probably read all the others that you can get your hands on. If I must be more specific in recommending a book to begin on, I would suggest that "Major Barbara", "Man and Superman", and "Androcles and the Lion" will give you an idea of what Shaw is like; then, if you are interested, you can pick out others from the following chronological list in which I have indicated by a few words the theme, scene, or argument of the play and its preface. All Shaw's works are published by Brentano's, New York, three plays in one volume, or separately.

"Widowers' Houses", 1892 (tainted money).
"The Philanderer", 1893 (Ibsenites and esthetes).
"Mrs. Warren's Profession", 1893 (prostitution).
"Arms and the Man", 1894 (Serbian and Bulgarian war; anti-militarism).
"Candida", 1894 (triangle).
"You Never Can Tell", 1895 (farce comedy; the most popular of Shaw's plays on the stage).
"The Man of Destiny", 1895 (one act, Napoleon in an unconventional aspect).
"The Devil's Disciple", 1896 (American revolution).
"Caesar and Cleopatra", 1898 (Egypt Anglicized).
"Captain Brassbound's Conversion", 1899 (Morocco; Raisuli, Perdicaris, et al.)
"The Admirable Bashville or Constancy Unrewarded", 1902 (His novel: "Cashel Byron's Profession" put into blank verse "because it is easier to write than prose").
"Man and Superman", 1903 (romance topsy-turvey; marriage by conquest on the part of the woman; containing "The Revolutionist's Handbook" and interlude on heaven and hell).
"John Bull's Other Island", 1904 (Irish and English temperament contrasted, Home Rule question).
"Passion, Poison and Petrification", 1905 (burlesque extravaganza).
"Major Barbara", 1905 (Salvation Army and munition manufacture; problem of poverty).
"How He Lied to her Husband", 1905 (parody on "Candida").
"The Doctor's Dilemma", 1906 (satire on medical professor and attack on vivisection).
"Getting Married", 1908 (absurdities of marriage laws).
"The Showing-up of Blanco Bosnet", 1909 (Wild West; psychology of conversion; prohibited by censor).
"Press Cuttings", 1909 (anti-militarism).
"Misalliance", 1909 ("a debate in one sitting"; preface on parents and children).
"The Dark Lady of the Sonnets", 1910 (showing how Shakespeare got his phrases).
"Fanny's First Play", 1911 (satire of dramatic critics and middle-class morality).
"Androcles and the Lion", 1911 (early Christians; lion from Oz; disquisition on the canon of the
New Testament and the possibility of living Christianity).
"Overruled", 1912 (philandering again).
"Pygmalion", 1913 (phonetics and class prejudice, with a postscript proving that you never can tell how a Shaw play will come out).
"Great Catherine", 1913 (boisterous farce of Catherine II; contrast of Russian and British temperament).
"The Music Cure", 1914 (Marconi scandal; used as curtain raiser for Chesterton's "Magic", unpublished).

"Three Plays by Brieux", (Brentano's, 1911; contain "Damaged Goods" and other plays in which the French playwright attacks social evils as vigorously and outspokenly though not so wittily as Shaw. They are translated by Mrs. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Shaw provides a preface).

Two farcical plays of the war, "The Inca of Perusalem" and "Augustus does his Bit", produced by the London Stage Society and the former also in New York, are ascribed to Shaw though unacknowledged by him.

Of Shaw's critical work we have in book form "The Perfect Wagnerite", 1895, and "The Quintessence of Ibsen", 1890, which championed two unpopular causes; "The Sanity of Art", 1908, attacking Nordau's theory of the degeneracy of artists; and two volumes of "Dramatic Opinions and Essays", which, although reviews of current plays of the nineties, retain a permanent value. Shaw's four early novels "Cashel Byron's Profession", "An Unsocial Socialist", "Love Among the Artists", and "The Irrational Knot" are of less interest than his plays.

His socialism has found expression in "The Common Sense of Municipal Trading" and "Fabian Essays in Socialism", and numerous other tracts and articles as well as most of his plays and prefaces.

Shaw's fugitive contributions to journalism are too numerous and scattered to be cited here, but I will mention a few of them that are of special interest: "The Case Against Chesterton" (Metropolitan, 1916); "The Case for Equality" (Metropolitan, 1913); "The German Case Against Germany" (New York Times, April 16, 1916).

More has been written about Shaw's personality than about all the rest of my "Twelve Major Prophets" put together. The chief and authorized biography is "George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Work" by Professor Archibald Henderson of the University of North Carolina. (Cincinnati: Stewart and Kidd, 1911.) It contains a full bibliography up to its date and some twenty portraits as well as much inaccessible and unpublished material. Besides this we have:

"George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study" by Joseph McCabe (London: Paul, French, Trubner, 1914); "Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study" by Percival P. Howe (Dodd, Mead, 1915); "George Bernard Shaw" by G. K. Chesterton (John Lane, 1909); "Bernard Shaw as Artist-Philosopher", an exposition of Shavianism, by Renée M. Deacon (John Lane, 1910); "George Bernard Shaw: His Plays" by H. L. Mencken (Luce, 1909); "Bernard Shaw" by Holbrook Jackson (Jacobs, 1907); and "The Innocence of Bernard Shaw" by D. Scott (Doran, 1914).

Latest of all is "Bernard Shaw: The Man and the Mask" by Richard Burton, a study of his plays in chronological order by the ex-president of the Drama League of America (Henry Holt, November, 1916).

"Bernard Shaw: An Epitaph" by John Palmer (London: Richards, 1915), "Harlequin or Patriot" (Century). Mr. Palmer comes to bury Shaw, not to praise him, yet gives him more credit than many of his admirers.

Biographical data and criticism are also to be found in Archibald Henderson's "European Dramatists" (Stewart and Kidd) and his "Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit" (Kennerley); Ford Madox Hueffer's "Memories and Impressions"; R. A. Scott-James's "Personality in Literature" which also contains sketches of Wells and Chesterton (London: Seeker, 1913); E. E. Hale's "Dramatists of To-day" (Holt, 1911); J. G. Huneker's "Iconoclasts" (Scribner, 1905); Cyril Maude's "The Haymarket Theater"; Edward Pease's "History of the Fabian Society" (London, 1916); Herman Bernstein's "With Master Minds" (Universal Series Co., New York, 1913); and "Bernard Shaw et son oeuvre" by Professor Cestre of the University of Bordeaux (Mercure de France, 1912).

Augustine F. Hamon, who has translated many of Shaw's plays into French, has published the lectures he gave on them at the Sorbonne in the volume "Le Molière du XXe siècle" (Paris: Figuière, 1913) which has been translated "The Twentieth Century Molière" (Stokes, 1915), and a separate chapter of it as "The Technique of Bernard Shaw's Plays" (London: Daniel, 1912).

The following articles on Shaw are noteworthy for one reason or another:

"Shaw Contra Mundum" by C. B. Chilton in The Independent, March 8, 1906, with a sharp retort by Shaw; Personal reminiscences by Frank Harris in Pearson's, 1916; Controversies of Shaw with Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in The New Witness, 1916; "Bernard Shaw, Musician" by Florence Boylston Pelo in The Bookman, March, 1916; "Shaw in Portrait and Caricature" by H. Jackson in The Idler, 1908; "Shavian Religion" by the Rev. P. Gavan Duffy in The Century, vol. 87, p. 908; "Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy" by A. K. Rogers in Hibbert Journal, 1910; "George Bernard Shaw" by D. A. Lord in Catholic World, March and April, 1916; "Bernard Shaw et la guerre" by Christabel Pankhurst in La Revue, 1915; "The Philosophy of Shaw" by Archibald Henderson in Atlantic, vol. 103, p. 227; "Die Quintessenz des Shawismus" by Helene Richter (Leipzig, 1913); "Bernard Shaw" by Julius Bab (Berlin: Fischer).

The ingenious Allen Upward has written a futuristic satire on Shaw in the form of a play: "Paradise Found or the Superman Found Out" (Houghton Mifflin, 1915). In Act I The Sleeper Wakes, à la Wells, two hundred years hence, finding himself in the Shaw Memorial Hall in the custody of the Most Noble Order of Hereditary Fabians, chief of whom are the Lady Wells and the Lord Keir-Hardie. The second act is set in the Headquarters of the Anti-Shavian League, which the awakened and disillusionized Shaw joins. The third act is in the Cabinet of H. V. M. Maharajah Sri Singh Bahadar, for of course India outvoted England as soon as universal suffrage was introduced into the British Empire.

CHAPTER II

H. G. WELLS

Scientific Futurist

We are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There is no shock, no epoch-making incident—but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say, "Here it commences, now; last minute was night and this is morning." But insensibly we are in the day. If we care to look, we can foresee growing knowledge, growing order, and presently a deliberate improvement of the blood and character of the race. And what we can see and imagine gives us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses the imagination.

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. We cannot see, there is no need for us to see, what this world will be like when the day has fully come. We are creatures of the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats our eyes. All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars.—"The Discovery of the Future" (1902).

Is Wells also among the prophets? Surely, and none with better right, even though we use the word "prophet" in its narrowest and most ordinary sense as one who foretells the future. He has foretold many futures for us, some utterly abhorrent, others more or less attractive. If we shudder at the thought of humanity on a freezing world fighting a losing battle with gigantic crustaceans as in "The Time Machine", or being suffocated on a blazing world as in "The Star", or being crushed under the tyranny of an omnipotent trust as in "When the Sleeper Wakes"—if none of these please us, then we have the option of a businesslike and efficient organization of society under the domination of the engineer as in "Anticipations", or a socialistic state under the beneficent sway of the Samurai as in "A Modern Utopia," or an instantaneous amelioration of human nature as "In the Days of the Comet." In thus presenting various solutions to the world problem Wells is not inconsistent. Every complicated equation has several roots, some of them imaginary. In solving a physical problem the scientist begins by disentangling the forces involved and then, taking them one at a time, calculates what would be the effect if the other forces did not act. So Wells is applying the scientific method to sociology when he attempts to isolate social forces and deal with them singly. If nothing intervenes to divert it, says the hydraulic engineer, the water of this mountain stream will develop such a momentum on reaching the valley. If no limitations are placed upon the consolidation of capital, says Mr. Wells, we may have a handful of directors ruling the world, as depicted in "When the Sleeper Wakes."

In its power to forecast the future science finds both its validation and justification. By this alone it tests its conclusions and demonstrates its usefulness. In fact, the sole object of science is prophecy, as Ostwald and Poincaré make plain. The mind of the scientific man is directed forward and he has no use for history except as it gives him data by which to draw a curve that he may project into the future. It is, therefore, not a chance direction of his fancy that so many of Wells's books, both romances and studies, deal with the future. It is the natural result of his scientific training, which not only led him to a rich unworked field of fictional motives, but made him consider the problems of life from a novel and very illuminative point of view. He gave definite expression to this philosophy in a remarkable address on "The Discovery of the Future", delivered at the Royal Institution of London, January 24, 1902. Here he shows that there is a growing tendency in modern times to shift the center of gravity from the past to the future and to determine the moral value of an act by its consequences rather than by its relation to some precedent. The justification of a war, for instance, may either be by reference to the past or to the future; that is, it may be based either upon some supposititious claim and violated treaty, or upon the assumed advantage to one or both parties. This idea, that in the moral evaluation of an act its results should be taken into consideration, has been popularly ascribed to the Jesuits, but since they have repeatedly and indignantly denied that it ever formed part of their teaching, it is questionable whether they could claim it now when it is becoming fashionable. At any rate, it is interesting to note that Wells gave very clear expression to this pragmatic principle five years before the publication of "Pragmatism" by James.

I hope that Mr. Wells will work out in detail his theory of prevision as a motive for morality. We cannot have too many such motives, and it is quite possible that this factor has not been fully recognized in our ethical systems, though I have no doubt that, as is usually the case with discoveries, especially in ethics, the theory is not quite so novel as it seems to him. In the meantime, I would call his attention to two weak points in argument, as he has sketched it in this lecture. He gives as an example of the two ways of looking at a problem the old question of whether a bad promise is better broken or kept. The "legal mind" would regard the promise as inviolable; the "creative mind" would say that in view of future consequences it should be disregarded. But I would suggest that, if morality is, as he defines it, "an overriding of immediate and personal considerations out of regard to something to be attained in the future", the one who viewed the act most clearly in the light of the future would keep the promise even at the cost of some suffering to himself and others rather than bring the lack of confidence which results from a violated oath.

I would also point out that the followers of dogma are not to be classed so positively with those who look only on the past. Certainly those whose morality is based on the hope of heaven and the fear of hell—and this is too numerous a class to be ignored—are as truly guided by their ideas of the future as are those who are working for the prosperity of the "Beyond-Man" some thousand years hence. Jonathan Edwards's first resolution was typical. It reads:

I. Resolved, That I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory and my own good, profit and pleasure, on THE WHOLE; without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriads of ages hence; to do whatever I think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general—whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.

The highest morality is attained, in my opinion, by the class which Mr. Wells despises—namely, those who disregard neither causes nor effects, but consider every act in the light of both the past and the future. For this reason we are grateful to Mr. Wells for the light he is giving us on the future by his efforts in scientific prophecy.

Wells defines two divergent types of mind by the relative importance they attach to things past or things to come. The former type he calls the legal or submissive mind, "because the business, the practice and the training of a lawyer dispose him toward it; he of all men must most constantly refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself." In opposition to this is "the legislative, creative, organizing, masterful type", which is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things; it is constructive and "interprets the present and gives value to this or that entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen." The use of the term "legislative" for this latter type is confusing, at least to an American, because unfortunately most of our legislators are lawyers and have minds of the legal or conventional type. "Scientific" would be a better term than "legislative", because most of our real revolutions in thought and industry originate in the laboratory.

In his "Modern Utopia" Wells introduces a more complete classification of mankind into (1) the Poietic, that is, the creative and original genius, often erratic or abnormal; (2) the Kinetic, that is, the efficient, energetic, "business man" type; (3) the Dull, "the people who never seem to learn thoroughly or hear distinctly or think clearly", and (4) the Base, those deficient in moral sense. The first two categories of Wells, the Poietic and Kinetic, correspond roughly to Ostwald's Romanticist and Classicist types of scientific men.[1] I have laid stress upon Wells's point of view and classification of temperaments because it seems to me that it gives the clue to his literary work. This is voluminous and remarkably varied, yet through all its forms can be traced certain simple leading motives. Indeed I am unable to resist the temptation to formulate his favorite theme as: The reaction of society against a disturbing force.

This certainly is the basic idea of much of his work and most of the best of it. He hit upon it early and he has repeated it in endless variations since. The disturbing force may be an individual of the creative or poietic type, an overpowering passion, a new idea, a social organization or a material change in the conditions of life. Whatever it may be, the natural inertia of society causes it to resist the foreign influence, to enforce compliance upon the aberrant individual, or to meet the new conditions by as little readjustment as possible. Usually the social organism is successful in overpowering the intruder or rebel, and on the whole we must admit that this is advantageous, even though it sometimes does involve the sacrifice of genius and the retardation of progress. Certainly no one is good enough or wise enough to be trusted with irresponsible power.

This is the lesson of "The Invisible Man." We all have been struck, probably, by a thought of the advantages which personal invisibility would confer. It is one of the most valued of fairy gifts. But perhaps only Wells has thought of the disadvantages of invisibility, how demoralizing such a condition would be to the individual, and yet how powerless he would be against the mass of ordinary people. Assuming that a man had discovered a way to become invisible by altering the refractive power of his body, as broken glass becomes invisible in water, in what situation would he be? He would be naked, of course, and he could not carry anything in his hands or eat in public. If it were winter he would leave tracks and would catch cold and sneeze. So the invisible man who starts to rob and murder at his own sweet will is soon run down by boys, dogs, and villagers as ignominiously as any common thief.

A more artistic expression to the same theme is given in "The Country of the Blind." A young man tumbled into an isolated valley of the Andes where lived a community which had through some hereditary disease lost many generations ago the power of sight. The stranger first thought of the proverb, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king", but when he tried to demonstrate his superiority he found it impossible. His talk about "seeing" the natives held to be the ravings of a madman and his clumsiness in their dark houses as proof of defective senses. He was as much at a disadvantage in a community where everything is adapted to the sightless as a blind man is in ours. He falls in love with a girl, but before he is allowed to marry her he must be cured of his hallucinations; a simple surgical operation, the removal of the two irritable bodies protuberant from his brain, will restore him to normality, say the blind surgeons, and make a sane and useful citizen of him. The entreaties of his lady love are added to the coercion of public opinion to induce him to consent. The exceptional man is beaten, he must either conform to the community or leave it. No matter how the story ends. The true novelist and dramatist, like the true mathematician, finds his satisfaction in correctly stating a problem, not in working it out.

The theme of these parables, the comparative powerlessness of the individual, however exceptionally endowed, against the coercive force of environment, Wells has developed at length in his novels; in "The New Machiavelli", for instance, where a statesman at the height of his public usefulness is overthrown and banished because he had succumbed to selfish passion and violated the moral code. Parnell is popularly supposed to be the model for this character rather more than the original Machiavelli, but it is, unfortunately, a type not rare either in history or fiction. Indeed this may be called the common plot of tragedy from the time when it began to be written, the vulnerable heel of Achilles, the little defect of character or ability that precipitates the catastrophe.

In Wells's hands this motive takes most fantastic forms. There was, for example, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"; "his name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at Gomshott's"; "he was a little man and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a mustache with ends he twisted up, and freckles." This unpromising looking individual, and he was a blatant skeptic, too, becomes suddenly possessed of the power to make anything happen that he wills, but he finds the use of this mysterious gift by no means to his advantage. It brings him and others into all sorts of trouble, and only his renunciation of it saves the world from destruction. Mr. Fotheringay lived in Church Row, and since Mr. Wells lives in the same street he perhaps knew him personally.

In "The War of Worlds" the earth is invaded by Martians, who are not in the least like those of Du Maurier or Professor Flournoy, but octopus-like creatures as far above mankind in intellect and command of machinery as we are above the animals, supermen surpassing the imagination of Nietzsche. They stride over the earth in machines of impregnable armor and devastate town and country with searchlights projecting rays more destructive than those of radium and much like Bulwer-Lytton's "vril." They feed on human blood and, if humanity is not to perish or become as sheep to these invaders, men and women must take to sewers and such like hiding places and wage incessant warfare against overwhelming odds.

In a passage that is to me the most gripping of anything Wells has written, a few unconquerable spirits plan the life that mankind must lead under these terrible conditions, but they are relieved from the necessity of putting it into execution by the interposition of an unexpected ally in the form of the most minute of creatures, the microbe. The men from Mars, not being immune to terrestrial diseases, are annihilated by one of them.

The formula remains the same although conditions are reversed in "The First Men in the Moon", for men, being naturally larger than the lunar people, might be supposed to dominate them, but, on the contrary, the ant-like inhabitants of the moon conquer the earthly invaders.

In "The Wonderful Visit" a curate goes out hunting for rare birds and shoots an angel on the wing. But the heavenly visitant does not play the rôle of the angel in Jerome's "The Passing of the Third Floor Back" and transform the character of all he meets. Wells's angel does not fit into the parish life, and everybody is relieved when he disappears. The same idea, the reaction of conventional society toward the unusual, is illustrated by "The Sea-Lady", where, instead of an angel from the sky, we have a mermaid from the ocean brought into the circle of a summer resort. Mr. Wells has said that by the sea-lady he meant to symbolize "love as a disturbing passion", the same theme as "The New Machiavelli." It may be taken to mean that, of course, or half a dozen other things as well. We are at liberty to disregard Mr. Wells's interpretation if we like. It is not an author's business to explain what his works mean. In fact it seems a bit officious and impertinent for him to attempt it. How little would there be left of the great literature of the world if it were reduced to what the author literally and consciously had in mind when he wrote. The value of any work of art depends upon what may be got out of it, not what was put into it.

"The Food of the Gods" is a case in point. These children who are fed on "boom-food" (presumably an extract from the pituitary body of the brain) and grow to gianthood may be taken to represent any new transforming force. If the story was conceived in Wells's earlier days he may have meant by it the power of science. If in the days of "Anticipations" he more likely had in mind efficiency or "scientific management." If when he was a member of the Fabian Society it doubtless stood for Socialism. Such questions may well be left to the future biographer who will take an interest in tracing out the genesis of his thought. Really it makes no difference to the reader, for the essential thing is to note that the reaction of society toward any unprecedented factor is the same. That in various parts of the country a new and gigantic race was growing up aroused at first a certain sensational interest, but this soon died down. People became accustomed to seeing the giant boys and girls and even set them at work. Later as it was realized that the giants could not be adapted to the existing social structure, but meant its overthrow, the government attempted to segregate and limit them, and at length, finding no compromise possible, determined to exterminate them. This brings about a duel to the death between the little race and the big, and there could be no doubt as to the issue.

Chesterton says[2]:

"The Food of the Gods" is the tale of "Jack the Giant-Killer" told from the point of view of the giant. This has not, I think, been done before in literature; but I have little doubt that the psychological substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubt that the giant whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not infrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head, and one man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant was a particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was whether he was a good giant—that is, a giant who was any good to us. What were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics and the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children—or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense? To use a fine phrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out.

Nothing could better illustrate the difference in standpoint between Chesterton and Wells than this. The sympathies of Wells are undoubtedly with the giants, with the new forces that aim to transform the world, though he is not always confident of their ultimate triumph. Being a man of scientific training, he is a determinist but not a fatalist. All his prophecies are conditional. If the gulf between industrial and parasitic classes keeps on widening there will eventually be two races, and the former will be master; this is the lesson of "The Time Machine." If the engineer and business manager get control we shall have the well ordered prosperity of "Anticipations." If Socialism prevails we shall have the Great State. His stories of the future are about equally divided between optimistic and pessimistic prophecy, between allurements and warnings.

"In the Days of the Comet"[3] he uses again the mechanism of the most artistic of his earlier short stories, "The Star", which is a little gem in its way without a superfluous word or a false tone. But those were the days when Mr. Wells was writing for pleasure; now he writes for a purpose, so the two stories resemble each other only in their common theme, the swishing across the earth of a comet's tail. In the former tale the event was viewed by a man in Mars who reported to his fellow scientists that the earth was little damaged, for the destruction of all life on it was too insignificant an event to be noticed at that distance. In the present book the earth was decidedly benefited, and the history is told by a man more foreign to us than the Martian, for he is a citizen of the new civilization that followed the "Great Change." A wonderful transformation had been effected in our atmosphere by its mingling with the cometary gases. The inert nitrogen of the air had been changed to some life-giving, clarifying, and stimulating gas; it would be unfair to the author to infer that this was nitrous oxid, more familiarly known as "laughing gas." Under its influence the inhabitants of the earth perceive the evils of our present régime and realize that they are mostly avoidable if everybody had good intentions and good sense. As an argument for Socialism it is a very weak one, for it gives away the case by conceding, at the outset, the main objection of the conservative, that you will have to change human nature before Socialism becomes possible. Of course, if all men were well-meaning and wise Socialism would be practical. It would also be unnecessary, because any social machinery, or, indeed, none at all, would work well enough under these conditions. The difficulty is to devise any changes that will make it work better with people as they are. That better people than we would be able to make for themselves better ways of living, nobody denies. That social, institutions influence the character of individuals, and that individuals influence the character of institutions, are correlative truths, but it is difficult for most people to keep them both in mind. Mr. Wells's collectivist conversion by a "green gas" is much the same thing as individualist conversion by religious influence, but we know of instances of the latter, while the former is purely hypothetical.

But, of course, the object of the book is not to show how Socialism can come about, but to assist in making it come about by acting on readers as a dose of the "green gas" and opening our eyes to the vulgarity, silliness, squalor, and wastefulness of our daily life. Mr. Wells is an artist by nature and a scientist by training, and ugliness and stupidity worry him more than wickedness and injustice. In fact, he would probably class all the evils of civilization under stupidity. But long ago it was said that against stupidity even the gods fight in vain, and it remains to be seen whether Socialists will succeed better.

The most attractive pages of the book to me are those that describe "the festival of the rubbish burnings", though Wells does not improve upon Washington Irving's treatment of the same theme. There are several things owned by our neighbors, even by relatives, which we should like to cast upon the flames. But we are afraid to light the bonfire lest the neighbors should burn up some of our treasures. That war is also an example of human stupidity, we agree, but just how to prevent it altogether until the rest of the world comes to our opinion, we do not understand. It takes two to stop a quarrel. The fleets of England and Germany were engaged in bombarding each other when the renovating comet struck the earth, but as soon as the eyes of the combatants and the "statesmen" who had instigated it were opened, and their anger quenched, it seemed incredible to them that they should have sought to kill each other for such trivial and remote causes. Jules Verne has a similar scene in "Dr. Ox's Experiment", but in that case the gas acts in the opposite way to excite the sluggish inhabitants of a peaceful Flemish village to make war against the neighboring village, and as soon as they are out of the contaminated atmosphere they look in bewilderment at the deadly weapons in their hands. Eight years later Wells's worst forebodings came to pass, but no "green gas" came to clear the air of hate.

But the particular passion that Wells would sweep away by the breath of his comet is one which, in the opinion of most people, is necessary to the maintenance of morality, that is, jealousy. The young English workingman who tells the story is infuriated against the young aristocrat who had seduced his sweetheart and is pursuing them with a revolver when the "Great Change" comes. Then he is content to share her affections with his former rival, and they all lived together happily ever after. In his works on Socialism Wells gives his reasons for thinking that, whether we wish it or not, the family is disintegrating, and that only under Socialism, which will insure a support sufficient for independence to both men and women, can better relations be established.

We might have known that as soon as science discovered the new world inside the atom the story-writer would follow close behind. We might also have known that H. G. Wells would be the first to exploit this new territory annexed to human knowledge, for he has always kept an eye on scientific progress even while seemingly engrossed in British politics and marriage problems. So he wrote a romance of the atom, "The World Set Free", describing the Great War months before it happened.

Our sleepy earth has been caught napping by every great change that has thus far reached humanity, and probably Mr. Wells is quite right in supposing that a sudden release of the vast stores of energy hidden in the atom would find civilization as unprepared for the social, economic, political, and intellectual results of the new energies in industry as it was for the effects of the great industrial revolution which followed the introduction of steam power not much more than a century ago.

But Mr. Wells has the alertest literary imagination of any modern writer; the significance of the new physics has not escaped him as it has the common run of novelists intently searching for good plots and neglecting entirely the rich ore awaiting any writer who happened to have an elementary knowledge of modern science. Many short stories and one or two novels have introduced more or less accurate accounts of radium as a side-show to a love story or an incident in a detective tale. But it required the boldness of Mr. Wells to throw overboard entirely the conventional novel plot and make a hero of the cosmic energies. "The World Set Free" resembles "The War in the Air" in its vivid account of world-wide war, nations armed with novel weapons and forces, appalling power for destruction and attack in the hands of every nation, together with complete incapacity for defense by any nation, the resulting collapse of credit, panic, starvation, anarchy and a general social débâcle. But while the "war in the air" meant the end of civilization, the war with "atomic bombs" in the present book results in a general treaty of peace, the foundation of a world state under a provisional government, and a successful reorganization of society in which the forces which had been used by nations and empires to conquer each other are directed to the task of subduing nature to human aims.

Like the reconstructed world of "In the Days of the Comet" the future state is very faintly depicted, hinted at rather than described, in "The World Set Free." It differs from the numerous other Utopias of Mr. Wells in that, whereas the world states of "Anticipations", "A Modern Utopia", "In the Days of the Comet", etc., could be brought about by nothing more than taking the author's advice on politics, law, economics, and social customs, "The World Set Free" depends upon scientific discovery. A new hypothesis, in short, has given the inhabitants of this Utopia an advantage over all previous Utopias. They have energy at their command almost as freely accessible as water or air, and so the labor question is annihilated, the whole world becomes a leisure class, and everybody is free to devote his life to gardening, artistic decoration, and scientific research. Country life becomes a constant delight. The agriculturist shrinks to less than one per cent of the population. The lawyer follows the warrior into extinction. "Contentious professions cease to be an honorable employment for men."

The Parliament of the World, which came into existence after the atomic explosions of 1950, was simple and sensible; fifty new representatives elected every five years; proportional representation; every man and woman with an equal vote; election for life subject to recall; each voter putting on his ballot the names of those he wishes elected and those he wishes recalled; a representative recallable by as many votes as the quota that elected him. But political machinery does not count for much in this most modern of Utopias. A scrap of the conversation between the President of the United States and King Egbert, "the young king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe", will illustrate the point of view:

"Science," the King cried presently, "is the new king of the world."

"Our view," said the President, "is that sovereignty resides with the people."

"No," said the King, "the sovereign is a being more subtle than that, and less arithmetical; neither my family nor your emancipated people. It is something that floats about us and above us and through us. It is that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which science is the best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race. It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its demands."

The agency which effects this transformation is the discovery of how to release the internal energy of the atom, which we now know exists, although we do not know how to get at it. Since wealth is essentially nothing but energy this means that we have within reach enough to make multi-millionaires of all of us; a tantalizing thought. The new disintegrating element, according to Mr. Wells, is carolinum, an element that Professor Baskerville also discovered on paper a few years ago. This exhaustless supply of energy being utilized in machinery sets free the laborer and swells the army of the unemployed; and since, incidentally, one of the by-products of its decomposition is gold, the financial systems of the world go to smash. But naturally carolinum finds speedy employment in war. A bomb of it buried in the soil becomes a perpetual volcano, half of it exploding every seventeen days. A few bombs of this radioactive element dropped from aeroplanes demolish Paris and Berlin and throw the world into a chaos of confusion, which Wells's characteristic style, with its flashlight visions, its tumultuous phrases, and its shifting points of view, its alternations of generalization and detail, is particularly adapted to depict.

The value of this romance, aside from its interest, lies in the emphatic way in which it teaches the lesson that civilization is primarily a matter of the utilization of natural energy and is measurable in horse power. Unfortunately we have to depend upon the sunshine, either that of the present or of the carboniferous era; we have no key to the treasure-house of the atom. Radium gives out its energy without haste or rest, just as fast at the temperature of liquid air as at the temperature of liquid iron, always keeping itself a little hotter than its surroundings, however hot these may be. If only we could get at this source of exhaustless energy—but let Wells say what that would mean:

Not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force.

It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day toward radio-activity exactly as our ancestor stood toward fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that we know radio-activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At the climax of that civilization which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilization. The energy we need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but....

Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the next.[4]

Wells is a futurist in the true sense of the word, appraising all things by what shall come out of them. This led him to a realization of the importance of eugenics long before the fad came in. In "Mankind in the Making" he formulated his test of civilization in these words:

Any collective human enterprise, institution, party, or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births and according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence toward a higher and ampler standard of life.

But when it comes to practical measures for securing these advantages, Wells shows a characteristic timidity. He condemns certain obvious dysgenic measures, such as the action of school boards in imposing celibacy upon women teachers, but in several respects legislation in America has already gone beyond what he ten years ago considered possible. So, too, in his "Anticipations" he suggested as future possibilities inventions and practices that were then familiar to us in this country. It is hard for a man nowadays to be a prophet. If he doesn't look sharp he will find himself an historian instead.

When H. G. Wells in 1902 essayed the rôle of prophet and in his volume entitled "Anticipations" tried to forecast the future of the world on scientific principles, he excited the same popular interest that any guess at coming events arouses, but there were few who took him seriously. Now, however, "Anticipations" makes very interesting reading. Much of it has already come to pass, and we see that Wells's chief mistake lay in putting his forecast too far ahead; for instance, when he says that he is "inclined to believe.... that very probably before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound."

The chapter on war in "Anticipations" shows astonishing power of prescience in what he says of the use of the submarine and armored automobile, the development of trench warfare, the substitution of the machine gun for the rifle, and the abolition of the distinction between military and civilian parts of a nation. His discussion of the new forms of warfare and the inadequacy of the old methods of management and training is full of warnings which it were well for his country to have heeded. This is shown if we compare that feeling passage in which he describes a future British army setting out to meet a scientifically organized foe with an actual battle on the Artois field as seen from the German side. The first column is quoted from "Anticipations", published fifteen years ago. The second column is taken from Kellermann's picture of the battle of Loos, September 22, 1915, published in the Continental Times of Berlin. Bernard Kellermann, one of the most brilliant of the younger writers of Germany, is well known in America through his novel, "The Tunnel", dealing with a submarine passage to Europe.

THE PROPHECY, 1902

I seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the gray old general—the general who learned his art of war away in the vanished nineteenth century, the altogether too elderly general with his epaulettes and decorations, his uniform that has still its historical value, his spurs and his sword—riding along on his obsolete horse, by the side of his doomed column. Above all things he is a gentleman. And the column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and the boys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the old time. They will believe in him to the end. They have been brought up in their schools to believe in him and his class, their mothers have mingled respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of their faith, their first lesson on entering the army was the salute. The "smart" helmets His Majesty, or some such unqualified person, chose for them lie hotly on their young brows, and over their shoulders slope their obsolete, carelessly-sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doing what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they have not been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds and disease, hunger, hardship, and death. They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; religion and the rate-payer and the rights of the parent working through the instrumentality of the best club in the world have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an absolute stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and at any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches the sub­altern—the son of the school-burking, share-holding class—a slightly taller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality with the men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical head­master to use a crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens, believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop."

So the gentlemanly old general—the polished drover to the shambles—rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that haunts my mind.

I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do against modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry battalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, whenever they come against a sanely organized army. There is nowhere they can come in; there is nothing they can do.

The scattered, invisible marks­men with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them off individually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale surrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yet the bitterest and crudest things will have to happen, thousands and thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and given over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful disease before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and men of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon very carefully educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical recognition.[5]

---

THE FULFILLMENT, 1915

They made the essay with absolutely new, absolutely antiquated tactics—tactics which are no longer recognized in this war. It was something really un­heard of! Our staff officers stood and regarded it—their mouths open in astonishment. It was observed, shortly before noon, that the English were advancing toward our positions in dense masses, eight lines deep in echelon—from Loos. A hail of shells that churned up the ground was supposed to smooth the way for the storming columns. At the same time, to the east of Loos (there is a bit of rising ground there scarcely noticeable as you drive over it in a wagon, called Hill 70), we saw English artillery come riding up—quite open—in the broad of day—under the naked heavens! These batteries carried bridge materials with them for the crossing of trenches and natural obstacles. The English general we caught describes this action as one that was especially "sporting." There can be no doubt about its dashing quality. But there was more to come. In the distance, on the level plain, one or two English cavalry regiments were visible—Dragoons of the Guard. Eight lines of infantry? Artillery driving across the open? Cavalry in the background? It was really unbelievable! It was the plan of a veritable pitched battle from a forgotten age, the masterly idea of a senile brain, which had come limping along fifty years behind the times! Generals in our day grow obsolete as rapidly as inventions and sciences. The war has taught us that the blood of nations, the incalculably precious blood, is to be entrusted only to the freshest, the most elastic, the most gifted of military spirits, the very cream of the crop. Those old celebrities of theirs, staggering under their orders, should have been consigned to relay stations by the English. The English troops carried out their attack with a splendid gesture, with admirable bravoure. They were young and they bore no orders on their uniforms. They carried out the commands of their celebrated and senile authorities, carried them out with a blind courage—in this day of mortars, telephones and machine-guns. As magnificent as was their bearing, even so pitiful was the collapse of their onslaught. Before the eightfold storming columns had been able to make ten steps, they came under our combined fire-rifles, machine-guns, cannon. The batteries were lying in wait and they obeyed the telephone. The English knights and baronets had not reckoned with this. Fresh reserves came running up and were mown down in the cross-fire of our machine-guns. Those riding batteries came to a miserable end. They too came within the zone of the machine-guns, and our heavy mortars, notified by telephone, got hold of them so swiftly and so thoroughly, that they were not even given time to unlimber. The regiments of cavalry that were waiting in the background, ready to come dashing through, got salvoes of the heaviest shells full in their faces, and drew back without having drawn a blade from the scabbard. That finished the pitched battle. And the attack broke to pieces in front of our wire entanglements. A prodigious number of their dead lay before our trenches. We had made 800 prisoners, among them a colonel, four majors, and fifteen officers. At a conservative estimate, the losses of the English in this single section of the division, may be fixed in dead and wounded as at least 20,000. It was clear that, apart from a small local success, it had been a disastrous job for the Britishers. Never before has it been so clearly proved that war is not a sport for a dozen or two of privileged dilettantes.[6]

Wells made his first hit with "The Time Machine", written under high pressure of the idea within a fortnight by keeping at his desk almost continuously from nine in the morning to eleven at night. It is based upon the theory that time is a fourth dimension of space,[7] and by a suitable invention one may travel back and forth along that line. Having once got his seat in his time-machine Wells has never abandoned it. He uses it still in his novels, in "Tono-Bungay," "The New Machiavelli", and "The Passionate Friends", telling the story partly in retrospect, partly in prospect, flying back and forth in the most mystifying manner, producing thereby a remarkable effect of the perpetual contemporaneity of existence, though some readers are dizzied by it.

The charm of a masked ball is that it enables people to do and say what they please, in short to reveal themselves because their faces are concealed. Anonymity has the same effect, as many a name from "Currer Bell" to "Fiona McLeod" attests. So it is not surprising that the book[8] which purports to have been written by one "George Boon" and compiled by one "Reginald Bliss" shows Wellsian characteristics more pronounced than any of the volumes of which H. G. Wells owns authorship.

For one thing Wells obviously likes to start things better than to finish them. He is apt to run out of breath before he comes to the end of a novel, and if he gets his second wind it is likely to be some other kind of wind. In most of his books except the short stories the reader feels that the author is saying to himself, "I wish I had this thing off my hands so I could get at that new idea of mine."

Then, too, Wells is fond of putting a story inside of a story, like the Arabian Nights, and it often happens that the "flash-backs", to borrow a cinema phrase, are confusing. The framework of "The Modern Utopia" is an instance of this. It is sometimes hard to tell in this where we are or who is speaking.

Wells is inimitable in his ability to sketch a character in a few swift strokes, but he does not care much for the character afterward. He delights in taking such snapshots, but he hates to develop them. His mind is quick to change. He is liable to be disconcerted by a sudden vision of an opposing view. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he will be seized with a doubt of what he is saying, and being an honest man, he leaves it in air rather than finish it after he has lost confidence. He may double on his track like a hunted fox within the compass of a single volume.

Finally, Wells is fond of satirizing his contemporaries, including his best friends and his former selves. He is given to mixing realistic description with recondite symbolism, desultory argumentation with extraneous personalities, and other incongruous combinations of style and thought.

Now all these peculiarities, call them faults or merits as you like, are to be found intensified in "Boon" Etc. First Mr. Wells introduces Mr. Bliss, who then introduces Mr. Boon, a famous author deceased, and tells how they together invented Mr. Hallery, who introduces a host of living writers, big and little, known and unknown, at the World Conference on the Mind of the Race. He has given me the honor of a seat on a special committee of Section S, devoted to Poiometry, the scientific measurement of literary greatness.

The volume is illustrated by the author—whoever he may be—but the best caricatures are not the graphic but the verbal ones with their amusing parodies of style. Perhaps the best of these is an imaginary conversation between Henry James and George Moore, in which both gentlemen pursue entirely independent trains of thought.

Here's the sketch of "Dodd." We recognize him, although we do not know who Dodd is:

Dodd is a leading member of the Rationalist Press Association, a militant agnostic, and a dear compact man, one of those Middle Victorians who go about with a preoccupied, caulking air, as though, having been at great cost and pains to banish God from the Universe, they were resolved not to permit Him back on any terms whatever. He has constituted himself a sort of alert customs officer of a materialistic age, saying suspiciously: "Here, now, what's this rapping under the table here?" and examining every proposition to see that the Creator wasn't being smuggled back under some specious new generalization. Boon used to declare that every night Dodd looked under his bed for the Deity, and slept with a large revolver under his pillow for fear of a revelation.

One advantage of anonymity is that Wells can contradict himself with even more freedom than usual. For instance, he expresses great contempt for Bergson and his "Pragmatism for Ladies." But not long ago, in "Marriage", he was contemptuous of "Doctor Quiller [Schiller] of Oxford," for "ignoring Bergson and fulminating a preposterous insular Pragmatism."

Much of the volume was manifestly written in the calm days before the war, but the fragment entitled "The Wild Asses of the Devil" expresses in fantastic guise his—and the world's—confusion and despair at the catastrophe which has overwhelmed the human race. "It is like a dying man strangling a robber in his death grip. We shall beat them, but we shall be dead beat in doing it," says Boon, and he rejects all suggestions that it may be a good thing in the end:

No! War is just the killing of things and the smashing of things. And when it is all over, then civilization will have to begin all over again. They will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load and the days of our jesting are done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose and there is no restraining them. What is the good of pretending that the Wild Asses are the instruments of Providence kicking better than we know? It is all evil. Evil.

There are many different Wellses. Probably nobody likes all of them. He does not like all of himselves. In writing a preface or otherwise referring to an earlier work he is, after the manner of Maeterlinck, almost apologetic, and looks back upon the author with a curious wonder as to how he came to hold such opinions and express them in such a way. Those of us who have grown up with him, so to speak, and followed his mind through all its metamorphoses in their natural order can understand him better, I believe, than those of the younger generation who begin with the current serial and read his works backward. Mr. Wells is just about my age. We were in the laboratory together and breathed the same atmosphere, although five thousand miles apart. When he began to write I was ready to read and to admire the skill with which he utilized for literary purposes the wealth of material to be found in the laboratory. Jules Verne had worked the same rich vein, clumsily but with great success. Poe had done marvels in the short story with such scanty science as he had at his command. But Wells, trained under Huxley in biology at the University of London, had all this new knowledge to draw upon. He could handle technicalities with a far defter touch than Verne and almost rivaled Poe in the evocation of emotions of horror and mystery. Besides this he possessed what both these authors lacked, a sense of humor, a keen appreciation of the whimsicalities of human nature. So he was enabled to throw off in the early nineties a swift succession of short stories astonishingly varied in style and theme. As he became more experienced in the art of writing, or rather of marketing manuscripts, he seems to have regretted this youthful prodigality of bright ideas. Many of them he later worked over on a more extensive scale as the metallurgist goes back to a mine and with an improved process extracts more gold from the tailings and dump than the miner got out of the ore originally.

"The Star" was the first of these I came across, clipping it for my scrap book from Harper's Weekly, I believe. First loves in literature make an indelible impression, so I will always hold that nothing Wells has done since can equal it. Certainly it was not improved by expanding it to "In the Days of the Comet." The germ of that creepy tale of advanced vivisection, "The Island of Dr. Moreau", appeared first in the Saturday Review, January, 1895, as a brief sketch, "Doctor Moreau Explains." "The Dream of Armageddon", vivid and swift as a landscape under a flash of lightning, served in large part for two later volumes, "When the Sleeper Wakes" and "The New Machiavelli."

It was, as I have said, "The Star" that first attracted me to Wells. It was "The Sea-Lady" who introduced me to him personally. It was in the back room of a little Italian restaurant in New York, one of those sixty-cent table d'hôtes where rich soup and huge haystacks of spaghetti serve to conceal the meagerness of the other five courses. Here foregathered for years a group of Socialists, near-Socialists, and others of less definable types, alike in holding the belief that the world could be moved and ought to be, but disagreeing agreeably as to where the fulcrum could be placed and what power should move the lever. We called ourselves the "X Club", partly because the outcome of such a combination of diverse factors was highly problematical, partly perhaps in emulation of the celebrated London X. One evening some ten years ago, as I came late to the dinner, I noticed that the members were not all talking at once, as usual, but concentrated their attention upon a guest, a quiet, unassuming individual, rather short, with a sunbrowned face, tired eyes, and a pessimistic mustache—a Londoner, I judged from his accent. Then I was introduced to him as "The man who knows all your works by heart, Mr. Wells." This disconcerting introduction was their revenge for my too frequent quotation in debate. The reason, I suppose, for the old saying, "Beware the man of one book", is because he is such a bore.

Mr. Wells appeared to take the introduction literally and began to examine me on the subject. "Did you ever read 'The Sea-Lady'?" I happily was able to say I had, and was let off from any further questions, for he said that he had never met but two persons before who admitted having read the book. I am glad he did not ask me what it meant, for while I had an opinion on the subject, it might not have agreed with his.

Then we turned the tables on Mr. Wells and for the rest of the evening asked him questions and criticized his views; all of which he took very good-naturedly and was apparently not displeased thereby, since in the book about his trip, "The Future in America", he expressed disappointment at not finding in Washington any "such mentally vigorous discussion centers as the New York X Club."

Five years later I had another glimpse of Mr. Wells, this time a jolly evening at his home, where he kept his guests, a dozen young men and women, entertained, first by playing on the pianola, which he bought at the suggestion of Mr. Shaw; afterward by improvising a drama for the occasion, the star rôle being taken by his wife, whom I had seen a few days before marching in the great London suffrage procession. Mr. Wells's home differs from most London houses in having a view and a park. The back windows look over all the sea of houses, the shipping in the Thames, and, smoke permitting, the Surrey hills beyond. On the other side of the house five minutes' walk uphill brings one to Hampstead Heath, the largest of London's public places, which serves Mr. Wells for his long walks.

Mr. Wells perhaps got his love of outdoor life from his father, Joseph Wells, who was a professional cricketer and the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penhurst Castle, in Kent. His mother was the daughter of an innkeeper at Midhurst. Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, September 21, 1866, and his childhood impressions of his mother's kitchen and his father's garden and shop he has described in "First and Last Things" and in "Tono-Bungay." In this novel, the first, perhaps, to be devoted to that conspicuous feature of modern life, the patent medicine, he has utilized his brief experience as a chemist's apprentice, or, as we would say, a drug clerk. Next an unsuccessful attempt was made to train him as a draper's assistant—a dry goods clerk, in our language, though we have fortunately nothing that exactly corresponds. The hardships and humiliations of this experience seem to have cut deep into his soul, for he recurs to it again and again, always with bitterness, as in "Mr. Polly", "Kipps", and "The Wheels of Chance", for example. But to untangle the autobiographical threads from the purely fictional in Wells's novels would be to cheat some future candidate for a Ph. D. in English literature of his thesis.

The interesting point to observe is that temperament and training have combined to give him on the one hand a hatred of this muddled, blind, and inefficient state of society in which we live, and on the other a distrust of the orderly, logical, and perfected civilization usually suggested as a possible substitute. He detests chaos, but is skeptical of cosmos. Set between these antipathetic poles, he vibrates continually like an electrified pith ball. He has a horror of waste, war, dirt, cruelty, cowardice, incompetency, vagueness of mind, dissipation of energy, inconvenience of households, and all friction, mental or physical. But yet his ineradicable realization of the concrete will not allow him to escape from these disagreeables by taking refuge in such artificial paradises as Fourier's phalanx or Morris' idyllic anarchism. Wells is a Socialist, yet he finds not merely the Marxians, but even the Fabians, too dogmatic and strait-laced for him. His "Modern Utopia" is, I think, the first to mar the perfection of its picture by admitting a rebel, a permanently irreconcilable, antagonistic individuality, a spirit that continually denies. Yet we know that if a utopia is to come on earth it must have room for such.

Wells would never make a leader in any popular movement. He has the zeal of the reformer, but he has his doubts, and, what's worse, he admits them. In the midst of his most eloquent passages he stops, shakes his head, runs in a row of dots, and adds a few words, hinting at another point of view. He has what James defined as the scientific temperament, an intense desire to prove himself right coupled with an equally intense fear lest he may be wrong.

Your true party man must be quite color blind. He must see the world in black and white; must ignore tints and intermediate shades. Wells as Socialist could not help seeing—and saying—that there were many likable things about the Liberals. As a Liberal he must admit that the Tories have the advantage in several respects. He professes to view religion rationalistically, yet there are outbursts of true mysticism to be found in his books, passages which prove that he has experienced the emotion of personal religion more clearly than many a church member.

He has the courage of his convictions, but it does not extend much beyond putting them into print. I doubt whether, if he were given autocratic power, he would inaugurate his "Modern Utopia" or any other of his visions. At least he has hitherto resisted all efforts to induce him to carry them into effect.

For instance, one of the most original and interesting features of his "Modern Utopia" was the Samurai, the ruling caste, an order of voluntary noblemen; submitting to a peculiar discipline; wearing a distinctive dress; having a bible of their own selected from the inspiring literature of all ages; spending at least a week of every year in absolute solitude in the wilderness as a sort of spiritual retreat and restorative of self-reliance. A curious conception it was, a combination of Puritanism and Bushido, of Fourier and St. Francis, of Bacon's Salomon's House, Plato's philosophers ruling the republic, and Cecil Rhodes's secret order of millionaires ruling the world.

One day a group of ardent young men and women, inspired by this ideal, came to Wells and announced that they had established the order, they had become Samurai, and expected him to become their leader, or at least to give them his blessing; instead of which Wells gave them a lecture on the sin of priggishness and sent them about their business. I have no doubt he was right about it, nor does his disapproval of this premature attempt to incorporate the Samurai in London prove that there was not something worth while in the idea. But it shows that Wells knew what his work was in the world and proposed to stick to it, differing therein from other Utopians: Edward Bellamy, who because his fantastic romance, "Looking Backward", happened to strike fire, spent the rest of his life in trying to bring about the coöperative commonwealth by means of clubs, papers, and parties; Dr. Hertzka, who wasted his substance in efforts to found a real Freeland on the steppes of Kilimanjaro, Africa.

Perhaps the matter with Wells is simply that he cannot find his proper pigeon-hole. Perhaps I can find it. Wells has little sympathy with any political grouping or ideal regnant to-day. The orthodox Tory is in his view simply a man without imagination. The orthodox Liberal is a mere sentimentalist substituting democratic phrases for science and discipline. The Imperialist, though touching Wells at some points, repels him by his mania for military expenditure and his ignorant race prejudice. The Socialist or Labor Party man is appallingly narrow and totally unimpressed with the need for intelligence to rule the State. In "The New Machiavelli" the hero hovers distressfully over the entire field of modern politics, finding as little rest for his soul as Noah's dove on the first trip from the ark found for its feet. Once and once only has Wells's ideal found even partial embodiment, and that was in the best days of the Roman Empire.

There was the Great State (in the familiar capital letters); a world state so far as the world was known and civilized. There was a universal language, exact and lucid. There was freedom and security of travel, at least as great as in those same countries to-day. True, Wells would have disapproved of slavery. But so did the Stoics of the Empire disapprove of slavery, at least in theory. Their ideal was a universal citizenship. In the later Empire every freeman in the Roman Empire was called a citizen. There was tolerance, not only of religion but of manners, such as the narrow and parochial States of Western Europe which succeeded its fall have never known till within a hundred years. Statecraft was a science; devotion to the State a cult. There were the legions, examples of duty and discipline and scientific warfare, and yet a few thousands of troops sufficed to police and guard a whole civilized, wealthy, complex world state.

But most important of all was the Roman Law. Based on logical principles; divested of superstitious accessories and irrational taboos; universal and in the main equitable; raised above the Empire and the muddy immediacies of politics till it seemed the voice of nature itself; flexible and changing, but by growth rather than whim, it was the intellectual fabric of the Empire. It so happened that a despotic Emperor wielded the power of state, but still it was the State and not the mere person of the Emperor that was really reverenced. It was certainly not the man or the artist that was divine in Nero, but the office. Even in its decadent and Byzantine days traces of the old ideal remained, and it was not "Charles Richard Henry Etcetera, by the Grace of God King of Anyland, Duke of Somewherelse, Knight of the Golden Spur, Most Reverend Lord of the Free Cities of Lower Ruritania" in the silly medieval (and modern) style, but "Senatus Populusque Romani" and "Res Publica." The medieval Papacy was as universal in structure, but was obscurantist in basis, and left behind it as a legacy the memory of the crusades and the monasteries and great cathedrals as its monuments. The Roman Empire was rationalist in basis, and left behind it laws, straight roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters, libraries, and municipal organizations. Chesterton is a romantic and rather likes than otherwise the whimsical eccentricities of modern national institutions. But Wells, though he loves to play with science, takes statecraft as seriously as Marcus Aurelius, and, like him, he is a citizen of the Great State, the Cosmopolis. The "Modern Utopia" might have grown out of the actual Roman Empire had the right turnings been taken from that time to this; no other state or civilization would have formed its basis.

The significance of Wells's advocacy of Socialism lies in the fact that it is addressed to the middle classes. He might be called "The Apostle to the Genteels." He took part for a time in the aggressive socialistic campaign led by the Fabian Society on lines distinct from but parallel to the Marxian working class propaganda. The orthodox Marxian has little use for middle-class people. He expects them to become extinct so shortly that it is no use trying to convert them. He takes no more interest in them than missionaries do in the Tasmanians. They will be ground fine between the upper and nether millstones of the trusts and the unions. Such individuals who survive will be able to do so only by becoming retainers of the capitalists, and as such will be engulfed with them in the revolutionary cataclysm which will end the present era.

With a firm faith in this theory, it is no wonder that he often manifests annoyance at the slowness of the bourgeoisie in carrying out the part assigned them in the Marxian program. They do not disappear fast enough, nor do they show any eagerness to take sides either with the proletariat or with the capitalists. On the contrary, they view both with a certain distrust and antipathy, and maintain a curious confidence in their ability to manage both factions in the future as they have in the past. In short, they are not a negligible quantity, but hold the balance of power, at least for the present, and can retard or accelerate the progress of Socialism to a considerable though an indefinite extent.

Obviously, if the middle class as a whole is to be converted to Socialism, it must be by different arguments than those found effective with the proletariat. The Manifesto does not appeal to them, because they have more to lose than their "chains." There must be something more alluring than a universal competency and a steady job to arouse them to the need of radical changes.

The sight of capitalists excites emulation and ambition rather than hatred and despair. A man is not inclined to vote millionaires out of existence so long as he cherishes a secret hope of becoming one. They do not see the proletarian papers and would be repelled by them if they did.

Wells's outline of the form that middle-class propaganda should take presents several novel and interesting points, but the most conspicuous is his discussion of the effect of Socialism on family relations. His frankness and honesty in bringing that question into the open is in commendable contrast with the tendency of most advocates of Socialism to conceal or minimize the fact that any such profound rearrangement of economic relations as is involved in Socialism must inevitably affect the family, because the economic factor in this institution is undeniably great, although how great is a matter of dispute.

Wells boldly attempts to convert a prejudice into an argument by appealing to the very classes which, it is generally supposed, would be repelled by the bare mention of the subject, to save the family from its impending disintegration by adopting Socialism.

That Wells is right in thinking that the problem of the family is a serious one at the present time is clearly shown by the statistics collected by Sidney Webb for the Fabian Society. He proves:

That the decline in the birthrate which is depriving England and Wales of at least one-fifth of every year's normal crop of babies is not accounted for by any alteration in the age, sex or marital condition of the population, by any refusal or postponement of marriage, or by any of the effects of "urbanization" or physical deterioration of sections of the community. The statistical evidence points, in fact, unmistakably to the existence of a volitional regulation of the marriage state that is now ubiquitous throughout England and Wales, among, apparently, a large majority of the population.

So much other statisticians have deduced, but Mr. Webb went farther and obtained a direct proof of his conclusion by the circulation of several hundred question blanks among middle-class families. The results are startling. Out of a total of one hundred and twenty families reporting in one category, there were only seven in which the number of children was not intentionally limited. The average number of children in such limited families is one and a half, which is only one third what it was twenty-five years ago. In about sixty per cent of the cases "the poverty of the parents in relation to their standard of comfort" was a cause in the limitation of the family.

This shows how important a factor the increased expense of raising children has become in well-to-do families, and unless the population of the future is to be recruited very largely by the improvident, ignorant, and debased, it points toward some form of state encouragement of the production of well-born children. Wells suggested a differential income tax. Doctor Galton advocated the endowment of gifted parents. The war has brought this question out of the realm of speculative controversy into that of practical necessity. Some of the remedies proposed now make the measures suggested by Wells ten years before seem timid and conservative.

His early training in dynamical physics and evolutionary biology furnished him with the modern scientific point of view when he entered upon the old battlegrounds of sociology and metaphysics. He therefore never could believe in a static state, socialistic or other, and he saw clearly that much of what passes for sound philosophical reasoning is fallacious, because the world cannot be divided up into distinct things of convenient size for handling, each done up in a neat package and plainly labeled as formal logic requires. Here he is extremely radical, going quite as far as Bergson in his anti-intellectualism though attacking the subject in a very different way. He denies the categories, the possibility of number, definition, and classification.[9] He brings three charges against our Instrument of Knowledge: first, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that; and, second, that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were positive; and, third, that the sort of reasoning which is valid for one level of human thought may not work at another. No two things are exactly alike, and when we try to define a class of varied objects we get a term which represents none of them exactly and may therefore lead to an erroneous conclusion when brought back again to a concrete case. Or, as Wells puts it in his laboratory language: "The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it." "Of everything we need to say this is true, but it is not quite true."

What the artist long ago taught us, that there are no lines in nature, the scientist has come to believe, and perhaps in time the logicians will come to see it too. At present, however, they are, as Wells says, in that stage of infantile intelligence that cannot count above two. This is amusingly illustrated in a defense of logic by Mr. Jourdain in which he says:[10]

To these strictures of Mr. Wells on logic we may reply, it seems to me, that either they are psychological—in which case they are irrelevant to logic—or they are false. Thus the principle that "no truth is quite true", implying as it does that itself is quite true, implies its own falsehood, and is therefore false.

This sort of thing might have passed as a good joke in the days of Epimenides, the Cretan, when logic was a novelty, and people amused themselves, like boys learning to lasso, in tripping each other up with it. But it is funny to see this ancient weapon of scholasticism brought out to ward off the attacks of modernism, such attacks from without the ramparts as Wells's essay and from within as F. C. S. Schiller's big volume, "Formal Logic."

Wells has not only the sense of continuity in space, but, what is rarer, the sense of continuity in time. "The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement: it is a statement of fact." "We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves." There is a desperate sincerity about the man that I like. He seems always to be struggling to express himself with more exactness than language allows, to say neither more nor less than he really believes at the time. I do not think that he takes delight in shocking the bourgeoisie as Shaw does. Wells would rather, I believe, agree with other people than disagree. He is not a congenital and inveterate nonconformist. But he insists always on "painting the thing as he sees it." His later novels have come under the ban of the British public libraries because, conceiving sex as a disturbing element in life, he put it into his novels as a disturbing element, thus offending both sides, those of puritanical temperament who wanted it left out altogether and those of profligate temperament who wanted to read of amorous adventure with no unpleasant facts obtruded. His sociological works, in which, while insisting on permanent monogamy as the ideal, he prophesied that the future would show greater toleration toward other forms of marital relationship, aroused less criticism than the frank portrayal of existing conditions in his novels.

All his longer novels are largely concerned with the problem of marital life but the only one of them that comes near to a solution is that entitled "Marriage." The couple in this case, the Traffords, are exceptionally decent people for characters in a modern novel, and if their marriage is not a success it is not on account of any interference from a third party, but rather because of the cares and complications that come from family life and financial prosperity. The heroine is a charming specimen of the modern young woman, educated at "Oxbridge", whose chief fault is a constitutional inability to keep her accounts straight. She spends money with excellent taste, but without regard to her husband's bank balance. Consequently Trafford has to lay aside his researches in molecular physics to work out a successful process for synthetic rubber—easy to a man of his ability.

Mr. Wells apparently adopts the theory formulated by Professor Devine, of Columbia, as to the normal division of labor between husband and wife, that men should be experts in the art of getting money and women experts in the art of spending it. Where both parties fail is in regarding these duties as ends in themselves, the men getting absorbed in business and the women buying things that they do not want, that nobody needs, just for the sake of buying. Apparently Mr. Wells has hope of curing the men, but none of curing the women.

Premature attempts at realization, the demand for immediate results, the disregard of purely scientific research, the swamping of life by restless activity and futile efforts at reform, these are the ailments of the modern world, according to our author. His satire spares neither conservatives nor radicals. The following passage would apply to New York as well as London:

London, of course, is always full of Movements. Essentially they are absorbents of superfluous feminine energy. They have a common flavor of progress and revolutionary purpose, and common features in abundant meetings, officials, and organization generally. Few are expensive and still fewer produce any tangible results in the world. They direct themselves at the most various ends: the poor, that favorite butt, either as a whole or in such typical sections as the indigent invalid or the indigent aged, the young, public health, the woman's cause, the prevention of animal food, anti-vivisection, the gratuitous advertisement of Shakespeare (that neglected poet), novel but genteel modifications of medical or religious practice, dress reform, the politer aspects of socialism, the encouragement of aeronautics, universal military service, garden suburbs, domestic arts, proportional representation, duodecimal arithmetic, and the liberation of the drama. They range in size and importance from campaigns on a Plessingtonian scale to sober little intellectual Beckingham things that arrange to meet half yearly and die quietly before the second assembly. If Heaven by some miracle suddenly gave every Movement in London all it professed to want, our world would be standing on its head and everything would be extremely unfamiliar and disconcerting. But, as Mr. Roosevelt once remarked, the justifying thing about life is the effort and not the goal, and few Movements involve any real and impassioned struggle to get to the ostensible object. They exist as an occupation; they exercise the intellectual and moral activities without undue disturbance of the normal routines of life. In the days when everybody was bicycling an ingenious mechanism called Hacker's home bicycle used to be advertised. Hacker's home bicycle was a stand bearing small rubber wheels, upon which one placed one's bicycle (properly equipped with a cyclometer) in such a way that it could be mounted and ridden without any sensible forward movement whatever. In bad weather, or when the state of the roads made cycling abroad disagreeable, Hacker's home bicycle could be placed in front of an open window and ridden furiously for any length of time. Whenever the rider tired, he could descend—comfortably at home again—and examine the cyclometer to see how far he had been. In exactly the same way the ordinary London Movement gives scope for the restless and progressive impulse in human nature without the risk of personal entanglements or any inconvenient disturbance of the milieu.[11]

To accomplish a cure, or at least to obtain a diagnosis of the evil, Mr. Wells resorts to a curious expedient which he suggested first in his "Modern Utopia", where he laid down as one of the rules of his new order of Samurai that a man who aspired to be a leader of men should for a week every year go off into the desert and live absolutely alone, without books or other distractions to keep him from thinking. But in "Marriage" Mr. Wells improves upon this plan, for Trafford and his wife go into the wilds of Labrador together. "How sweet is solitude," as the Irishman said, "when you have your sweetheart with you." So, indeed, they found it, and in their fight with cold, starvation, and wild beasts they learned how to found their love upon mutual comprehension and respect, and made of their marriage a true union. The change of heart which Trafford experiences is not altogether unlike what Christians call conversion. His line of argument, or, more properly speaking, development of thought, finds expression in fragmentary sentences muttered in the delirium of fever, a Freudian emergence of fundamental feelings, as in the following passage:

"Of course," he said, "I said it—or somebody said it—about this collective mind being mixed with other things. It's something arising out of life—not the common stuff of life. An exhalation. ... It's like the little tongues of fire that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes drifting back to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet.... The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I saying?... It's what I reach up to, what I desire shall pervade me, not what I am. Just as far as I give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I achieve salvation.... Salvation!...

"I wonder is salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for one man salvation is research and thought, and for another expression in art, and for another nursing lepers. Provided he does it in the spirit. He has to do it in the spirit....

"This flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from purposeless triviality, isn't life. Let me get hold of that. That's a point. That's a very important point."

This passage from "Marriage" showed that in 1912 Wells's thought was entering upon a new phase, considerably in advance of that revealed in his "First and Last Things." He seemed to be working toward some sort of belief in God, a Bergsonian God, struggling upward in spite of and by means of inert matter and recalcitrant humanity. It would indeed be queer to find Wells not only among the prophets, but among the Christian prophets, and, as he intimates, some of the other Christians would not like it.

Wells's catholicity of sympathy recognizes no limitations of race. He has an abhorrence for race prejudice of every kind. The greatest blot he found upon American civilization was our ill treatment of the negro.[12]

In his article on "Race Prejudice" he puts it foremost among the evils of the age but even his "anticipations" could not conceive of such an insensate revival of racial animosity between civilized nations as the Great War has, brought about:

Knight errantry is as much a part of a wholesome human being as falling in love or self-assertion, and therein lies one's hope for mankind. Nearly every one, I believe—I've detected the tendency in old cheats even and disreputable people of all sorts—is ready to put in a little time and effort in dragon-slaying now and then, and if any one wants a creditable dragon to write against, talk against, study against, subscribe against, work against, I am convinced they can find no better one—that is to say, no worse one—than Race Prejudice. I am convinced myself that there is no more evil thing in this present world than Race Prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately—it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul. It is this much like the dragons of old, that it devours youth, spoils life, holds beautiful people in shame and servitude, and desolates wide regions. It is a monster begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our own dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable share.

The abolition of hatred between castes and classes and countries, the growth of toleration and extension of coöperation, the improvement of education, and the advancement of science, are what will lead toward his ideal. And his ideal is that of an evolutionist, the opportunity for continuous growth. He has exp rest it best, perhaps, in "The Food of the Gods," in the speech of one of the new race of giants, of supermen, to his fellows as they are about to give battle to the community of ordinary people determined to destroy them:

It is not that we would oust the little people from the world in order that we, who are no more than one step upward from their littleness, may hold their world forever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves.... We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves—for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the World. Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word and birth and act it must pass—to still greater lives. This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to live than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on forever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit forevermore. To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater, he said, speaking with slow deliberation, greater, my Brothers! And then—still greater. To grow and again—to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God.

The Great War has inspired or at least instigated many works of fiction already, but the best of these, in my opinion, is Wells's "Mr. Britling Sees It Through." It does not deal much with the fighting at the front. The author is chiefly concerned with another aspect of the war, its effect upon the psychology of the Englishman. The book is divided into two parts; the first half is light, carefree and amusing after the manner of Wells's earlier romances; the other half is darkened by the war cloud and is written with more emotional power than he has hitherto shown.

Knowing Wells's habit of introducing autobiographical details into his romances, we inevitably surmise that Mr. Britling is himself. Mr. Britling is a writer whom "lots of people found interesting and stimulating, and a few found seriously exasperating." "He had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of India and China and esthetics and America and the education of mankind in general.... And all that sort of thing."

This certainly reads like Wells's repertory of ideas. And to make the resemblance closer Mr. Britling writes a pamphlet, "And Now War Ends", shortly after the war began—just as Mr. Wells wrote "The War That Will End War." Several of the characters are recognizable as Mr. Wells' neighbors. At any rate we may be sure that the book reveals the changing moods not only of the author but of every thinking Englishman as the enormity, the awfulness, the all-pervasiveness of the war became slowly realized in the course of many months.

As a contrast to his typical Englishman Mr. Wells brings in an American, handled with more skill than British writers usually show in dealing with American psychology. The delight of his Mr. Direck at the recognition of the scenes and customs he had known from history and novels is well presented:

The Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passerby with the question, "Say! But is this little wet ditch here the Historical River Thames?" In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke a very good and careful English indeed, but he now found the utmost difficulty in controlling his impulse to use a high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in dry Americanisms and poker metaphors upon all occasions. When people asked him questions he wanted to say "Yep" or "Sure", words he would no more have used in America than he could have used a bowie knife. But he had a sense of rôle. He wanted to be just exactly what he supposed an Englishman would expect him to be.

Every American tourist in England has felt this temptation. He also has the experience ascribed by Mr. Wells to his American of finding that England on closer acquaintance is not so antiquated as she looks. When asked what his impression of England is Mr. Direck answers:

That it looks and feels more like the traditional Old England than any one could possibly have believed, and that in reality it is less like the traditional Old England than any one would ever possibly have imagined. I thought when I looked out of the train this morning that I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find that it is not even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

To complete this study of national psychology there is also a German in the family circle at first, a tutor whose hobbies are Ido and internationalism and a universal index, traits drawn from Professor Ostwald apparently. He is not caricatured but we suspect that like Mr. Direck, the American, Herr Heinrich is affected by British expectations and appears more German than he is.

The book reëchoes all the passions of the war,—love, hatred, courage, despair, meanness, sacrifice, heroism, selfishness, stoicism and mad wrath,—but ends upon a clear religious tone such as has been heard but faintly in any work of Mr. Wells before. What Mr. Britling sees through is not the war, for nobody can yet see so far as that, but he sees through the doubt and turmoil of his own mind and finds internal peace in the midst of warfare. When he sits down to write a letter to the parents of Heinrich, who like his own son had fallen in France, his mind is torn by conflicting emotions, but finally these are resolved into one common chord and he writes:

Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end. He may have his friendships, his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these things fall into place and life falls into place only with God. Only with God. God, who fights through men against Blind Force and Night and Non-Existence; who is the end, who is the meaning. He is the only King.... Of course I must write about Him. I must tell all my world of Him. And before the coming of the true King, the inevitable King, the King who is present whenever just men foregather, this bloodstained rubbish of the ancient world, these puny kings and tawdry emperors, these wily politicians and artful lawyers, these men who claim and grab and trick and compel, these war makers and oppressors, will presently shrivel and pass—like paper thrust into a flame. Our sons have shown us God.

HOW TO READ WELLS

The curious thing about H. G. Wells is his diversity. For a person of any intellectual consistency it is impossible thoroughly to appreciate him in certain moods without disliking him in others. He is the stern moralist of "The Sleeper Awakes", the detached and exquisite artist of "Thirty Strange Stories" and "Tales of Space and Time", the genial and conciliatory sociologist of "New Worlds for Old", the intolerant Imperialist of "Anticipations", the subtle anti-moralist of "The New Machiavelli" and "Ann Veronica", the sympathetic if somewhat cynical portrayer of the shop-keeping classes of "Mr. Polly" and "The Wheels of Chance", the vague philosopher at large of "First and Last Things", the imaginative rationalist of "A Modern Utopia", the Jules-Vernish romancer of "The War of Worlds" and "The First Men in the Moon", the scientific transcendentalist of "The Food of the Gods", and in addition he seriously chronicles "Floor Games" with his boys and takes interest in fugitive essays on modern warfare and "The Misery of Boots." Unless one is alien to everything human (and superhuman), it is impossible to escape being interested in at least some of these.

Wells's philosophy is, as I have said, expressed symbolically in many of his stories. It is most fully explained in "First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life" (Putnam), and in the two essays previously referred to, "Scepticism of the Instrument" (in "A Modern Utopia") and "The Discovery of the Future", first published in Nature, February 6, 1902, and in the "Report of the Smithsonian Institution", 1902, and later in book form (Huebsch, New York, 1913).

His sociological studies comprise the following volumes: "Anticipations" (1901, Harper), "Mankind in the Making" (1903, Scribner), "A Modern Utopia" (1904, Scribner), "The Future in America" (1906, Harper), "New Worlds for Old" (1908, Macmillan), "Socialism and the Great State", with the collaboration of fourteen other authors (1911, Harper), "Social Forces in England and America" (1914, Harper), published in England under the title "An Englishman Looks at the World" (Cassell), "The War That Will End War" (1915), "What Is Coming?" (1916, Macmillan), "Italy, France and Britain at War" (1917, Macmillan), and "God the Invisible King" (1917, Macmillan).

His short stories have been collected in several different volumes, in part overlapping: "Thirty Strange Stories" (1898, Harper), "Tales of Time and Space" (1899, Doubleday), "Twelve Stories and a Dream" (1903, Scribner), "The Plattner Story and Others" (1897, Macmillan), "The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents" (1895, Macmillan).

Eight of the best of his short stories (including "The Star", "Armageddon" and "The Country of the Blind") are published in a sumptuous edition with Coburn's photographic illustrations by Mitchell Kennerley ("The Door in the Wall and Other Stories", 1911).

His romances include: "The Time Machine" (1895, Holt), "The Wonderful Visit" (1895), "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896, Duffield), "The War of the Worlds" (1898, Harper), "The Invisible Man" (1897, Harper), "The Sea-Lady" (1902) "The First Men in the Moon" (1901), "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899, Harper), rewritten (1911) as "The Sleeper Awakes" (Nelson, London), "In the Days of the Comet" (1906, Century), "The Food of the Gods" (1904, Scribner), "The War in the Air" (1908, Macmillan), "The World Set Free" (1914, Macmillan).

His novels fall naturally into two classes: first those of a lighter and humorous character: "The Wheels of Chance" (1896, Macmillan), "Love and Mr. Lewisham" (1900, Stokes), "Kipps" (1906, Scribner), "The History of Mr. Polly" (1910, Duffield), "Bealby" (1915, Macmillan), "Boon" etc. (1915, Doran).

His longer and more serious novels are: "Ann Veronica" (1909, Harper), "The New Machiavelli" (1910, Duffield), "Tono-Bungay" (1908, Duffield), "Marriage" (Duffield), "The Passionate Friends" (1913, Harper), "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon" (1914, Macmillan), "The Research Magnificent" (1915, Macmillan), "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" (1916, Macmillan).

To these we must add some early works: a "Textbook on Biology" in two volumes (1892) and two volumes of essays, "Select Conversations with an Uncle" (1895, Saalfield) and "Certain Personal Matters" (1897). He has, like Stevenson, devoted much attention to devising floor games for children and has published two books upon it: "Floor Games" and "Little Wars" (Small, Maynard).

Wells still awaits his Boswell, but we have "The World of H. G. Wells" by Van Wyck-Brooks (1915, Kennerley), a lively and appreciative critique, and "H. G. Wells, A Biography and a Critical Estimate of his Work" by J. D. Beresford (1915, Holt), still briefer, equally interesting, and containing a list of his writings to date. An autobiographical sketch was written for the Russian edition of his works (1909) and published in T. P.'s Magazine (1912).

Of magazine articles and critiques the following have for one reason or another special interest:

"Les Idées de Wells sur l'Humanité future" by Charles Duguet in Revue des Idées, 1908.

"Wells" by Chesterton in American Magazine, vol. 71, p. 32 (1910).

"Wells and his Point of View" in Catholic World, vol. 91 (four articles, 1910).

"Wells and Bergson" by P. E. B. Jourdain in Hibbert Journal, vol. 10, p. 835, July, 1912. "H. G. Wells et la Pensée contemporaine" by René Leguy in Mercure de France (1912).

The contributions of Mr. Wells to current magazines and newspapers are too numerous to enumerate, but I must not omit the two articles on Socialism which he contributed to The Independent, October 25 and November 3, 1906, and an article on "The Nature of Love" (The Independent, August 13, 1908).

CHAPTER III

G. K. CHESTERTON

Knight Errant of Orthodoxy

The central truth to be uttered about Mr. Chesterton is that he is the greatest prophet of our generation. He is as great as Tolstoy or Ibsen. It may seem rash to set him beside these great prophets, but time will ratify my rashness. A prophet is a man of genius with a spiritual message for his age.

The spiritual message delivered by Mr. Chesterton is mightier than any other sounding in our ears. He is a bigger man than Maeterlinck or Bergson, though we know it not. As a prophet he is larger in every way than Mr. Shaw or Mr. Wells or Mr. Arnold Bennett, because he deals with the soul, whereas they deal with the soul's environment. They deal with man as a social animal. He deals with man as a spiritual being.

Our failure to salute the prophet is complete, and it is emphasized by our failure to perceive that he is the authentic voice of that English soul which is now wrestling with the Teutonic soul for the soul of the world. He is the soul of England.—James Douglas in the Observer, 1916.

Can a journalist have a philosophy of life, and if so would it be worth talking about? In answer to the first question I shall quote Chesterton to the effect that everybody has a philosophy, even generals and journalists. To prove the affirmative of the second I shall present, as Exhibit B, the whole body of Chesterton's works. Perhaps the most heretical passage of his book on "Heretics" was that which begins:

But there are some people, nevertheless—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.

Like many other things in Chesterton's works this does not sound so heretical now as when it was written, about the time when the weary old world had finished Chapter XIX of the second volume of his history and had turned over the page in hopes of finding something new and exciting in Chapter XX—and found it. Chesterton's countrymen then were keeping careful count of Germany's soldiers and ships, but they were contentedly ignorant of German philosophy. But as soon as the war broke out they began with feverish haste to translate and study Treitschke, Nietzsche, Bernhardi, and any other books which might throw light upon the German Weltanschauung, but which in the leisurely days of peace they had no time to read.

It is convenient to compare Shaw and Chesterton because they are antithetic in temperament and opinion and represent two opposite currents of modern thought. Shaw stands for the earlier rationalistic, socialistic revolt against the conventions of society. Chesterton stands for the later conservative reaction to all this, for ecclesiasticism, nationalism, and traditionalism. Shaw is a vegetarian and teetotaler. Chesterton is quite the opposite; he champions the public house as a good old English institution. Shaw is a suffragist; Chesterton is dead set against anything of the kind. Shaw came from the most pronounced Protestant stock, the Ulster kind, and, as we can see from his introduction to "Androcles and the Lion", he has constructed a sort of religion for himself, though he could hardly be accounted orthodox. Chesterton is a Catholic, though of the Anglican rather than the Roman variety, a champion of orthodoxy, and a defender of all forms of ritualism and medievalism. Chesterton makes it his business to find a logical basis for popular traditions, customs, and superstitions which have always been regarded as purely irrational and arbitrary even by those who liked them and defended them as poetic and conforming to a deeper reality than that of reason. Shaw is always showing how absurd and illogical are the soundest axioms and the most unquestioned platitudes, whether of orthodox conservative or orthodox revolutionary thought. Chesterton discovers new reasons in things; Shaw discovers new unreasons in things.

Chesterton appears in the capacity of permanent minority leader. But this is in respect to that really small minority of professional writers, speakers, and agitators who set the fashions for the Zeitgeist. Actually he has the backing of the great inarticulate immobile mass of the people.

Chesterton has discovered how to be witty though orthodox. But his orthodoxy is so extreme that it seems heterodoxy to most of us. Perhaps that accounts for his success in making it sound paradoxical. As Wesley determined that the devil had no right to all the pretty music, so Chesterton determined that the iconoclasts should not monopolize all the cleverness. His originality consists in his genius for turning platitudes into epigrams. He can put the most unquestioned axiom in a way to shock the world. If he is right in what he says in his books on Watts that "there is only one thing that requires real courage to say and that is a truism", Chesterton must be the bravest man alive. But even he finds it necessary to promulgate his truisms in the disguise of sensational novelties.

Chesterton's ideal is a complete democracy, not merely democracy in politics but democracy in science, religion, literature, sport, and art. If you say this is impracticable he doubtless would retort that it was the essence of an ideal to be impracticable, otherwise it would be confounded with dull reality. He always champions the opinion of the many against that of the few, the laymen against the expert.

Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh because he can laugh better than the rest.—"Heretics."

It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket fields. But it might have fairly been said that Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket.

... It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them and that the nation is merely looking on.—"All Things Considered."

On this ground he hated Germany even before the war, as a nation ruled by experts. He denounced its workingmen's insurance, its governmental efficiency, its higher criticism, and the like. "I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it if I knew what it was."[1]

It is on the basis of democracy that he defends religion:

That Christianity is identical with democracy is the hardest of gospels: there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as that they are all sons of God.—"Twelve Types."

It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated and ought to be treated more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in a village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.... If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.... Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom: tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.—"Orthodoxy."

I expect some time to find Chesterton defending the Trinity on the ground that it is more democratic than Mohammedan monotheism, a sort of commission government extended to the universe.

Chesterton has the true artist's love for the individual and the concrete. He delights in clear outlines and bright colors. He thinks in pictures. I have never seen any of his painting, but he must have the color sense strongly developed. He will halt in a stern chase or in the height of an argument to describe a sunset with the most chromatic language at his command. He studied art at the Slade School in London, and although he was soon switched off into journalism he still reverts to the pencil on occasion. He has supplied the illustrations to three of Belloc's books; "The Great Enquiry", "The Green Overcoat", and "Emmanuel Burden."[2] The last, a satire on imperialistic financiering, is one of the cleverest pieces of irony to be found in all literature, but it raises the question of whether the ironical tone can be sustained through a whole volume without a decline of interest. When the question of illustration arose Chesterton sent out for a bundle of wrapping paper, and in the course of one evening drew all of the portraits in the book as well as a lot that were not used.

For the understanding of Chesterton's romances it is necessary to remember that the more non-sensical they seem, the more sense they have in them. This is because when he gets blinded by a big idea he sees men as concepts walking. He is too much of a Platonist to be a good novelist. He admires Dickens but never imitates him, for Chesterton's stories are singularly devoid of individuals. All the little variations and accidental peculiarities that make a type into a person in the great novels of the world are lacking. In "The Ball and the Cross" Mac Ian is simply the archetype of the Catholic Romanticist and Turnbull of the Revolutionary Rationalist. Neither of them ever does anything out of character, but then neither of them has any character outside of the Idea that made them what they are. Each falls in love with a girl of the opposite type, drawn to scale. This is carried farther yet by the introduction of an incredibly consistent Tolstoyan and a Nietzschean beside whom Nietzsche would seem all too human. Thus the whole book is balanced and matched like old-fashioned wall paper or an Italian garden.

Manalive comes closer to being real. He certainly is alive, but he is not a man; he is an ideal, Chesterton's superman. "All habits are bad habits" is the text of G. K. Chesterton's "Manalive", which proved as delightful to his admirers and distasteful to his antipathists as any of his former productions. In his essays Mr. Chesterton's method is first to set down something that sounds like a wild absurdity and then to argue the reader into the admission—cheerful or indignant, according to his temperament—that it is a very sensible thing after all. In his romances his method is essentially the same. Nobody could act crazier than Mr. Innocent Smith in the first chapters of this volume, but in the end he is proved, by a long legal process, to be the only really sane man of the lot. He is accused of about as many crimes as the hero of Jokai's tale, "The Death's Head", confessed to, but he turns out to be quite as guiltless. Charges of murder, burglary, bigamy, and kidnaping, amply certificated, slip off him like water off a duck's back. Neither prison nor asylum can hold Manalive. Smith's theory is that if you keep the commandments, you may violate the conventions; which, being the reverse of the ordinary rule of procedure, gets him into all sorts of misunderstandings. He had evidently read Schopenhauer's theory that the only happiness is the pursuit of happiness, and, what is more, he acts upon it by letting go what he most delights in that he may recapture it. He goes round the world in search of his own home, and his series of amorous adventures are conducted in strict accord with monogamous morality. By getting outside of himself he can gain the joy of coveting his own possessions. The economic law of diminishing returns applies to all our habitual pleasures, and to escape it we must be continually seeking new investments.

So Manalive is distinguished from ordinary men in that he has legs that he uses. He is not rooted. He breaks out and runs around and discovers the most novel and wonderful things in the most commonplace environment.

Mr. Chesterton is as fond of a chase as a fox hunter or a kinetoscope man. We have it in "Manalive" as we have it in "The Man Who Was Thursday" and "The Ball and the Cross." As usual he stops every little while and paints a cloudscape to rest our eyes; and all along he enlivens the way by epigrams and inverted proverbs. Here are a few:

When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but when they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist until it is declared by authority.

For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.

Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute. Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.

All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been or ever will be.

The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

With our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity, if we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers.

The most fantastic and therefore characteristic of Chesterton's romances is "The Man Who Was Thursday" which the French are able more concisely to entitle Nommé Jeudi. The author calls it "A Nightmare", and it is. The only books to compare with it are George Macdonald's "Lilith", Strindberg's "Dream Plays", and Andreyev's "Masked Ball"; but for wild imagining, grotesquerie, farcicality, and swift transformations it cannot be matched. It is a detective story, a motion-picture chase, and a system of theology, all in one. Like all dreams, according to Freud, it is symbolic, but the symbolism is not to be interpreted in the usual Freudian way, for Chesterton is clean-minded. The clue to it is to be found in his earliest book of essays, "The Defendant", when he argues for the moral value of the detective story in the following fashion: "By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war upon a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but traitors within our gates."

The detective, he says, who stands alone and fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, is the original and poetic figure, and the criminals surrounding him represent cosmic conservatism. But in "The Man Who Was Thursday" each one of the six detectives, separately commissioned by the mysterious head of the secret police to enter the inner circle of seven anarchists, believes himself to be fighting single-handed for law and order against a criminal conspiracy to destroy civilization. The seven pseudo-anarchists go through all sorts of perilous and absurd adventures in the course of which they are metamorphosed successively into the seven days of the week, the seven days of creation, the seven orders of created things, and the seven angels of heaven. Finally seated upon seven thrones, robed in state, blazoned—of course, since it is Chesterton—with heraldic devices, they recognize one another as friends and allies through all their strange strife. It reminds one of Emerson's Brahma: "If the red slayer thinks he slays." But Chesterton is too much of a Manichean to let it go at that. One of the anarchists turns out to be genuine, the only real one in the world, the irreconcilable rebel, the Eternal Anarchist, the spirit that continually denies, the leader of His Majesty's Opposition. In some ways Chesterton's conception of the devil reminds one of Andreyev's "Anathema" or perhaps rather of the Satan whom Dostoievsky introduces into his "Brothers Karamazarov." Chesterton's mind seems to have a curious affinity to the Russian, though so far as I remember his writings show no evidence of being influenced by Russian literature.

"The Man Who Was Thursday" affects readers variously. To some it seems ridiculous; to others blasphemous. Julius West, usually sympathetic, dismisses it in his biography of Chesterton as incomprehensible and tiresome. Yet three people I know—a man, a woman, and a child—consider it one of the most wonderful books in the world, and know it almost by heart.

My own opinion is that it shows that Chesterton has not yet found the true medium for the expression of his genius. Drawing and writing are too slow and cold to give scope to his pictorial imagination. He should, like D'Annunzio, take to the screen. "The Man Who Was Thursday" would make a magnificent scenario as it stands, and Chesterton could then add all of the things he thought of or saw while composing it but could not put into words.

Blake, too, was a man who would have done wonders with the cinematograph if it had only been invented sooner. Chesterton, in his sketch of Blake, explains his difficulties of expression by word and picture:

How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words: they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech: it is actually too obvious for human speech.

Chesterton's theory of the use of symbolism, even absurd symbolism, is given in his "Defense of Nonsense".

Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle....

Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.

Chesterton at the beginning of his career wrote "A Defense of Detective Stories"[3] and he has since shown that he knows how to write them, in the collections entitled "The Club of Queer Trades", "The Innocence of Father Brown", and "The Wisdom of Father Brown." But they are different from ordinary detective stories not merely because a mild-mannered priest takes the place of Sherlock Holmes but more because they frequently have nothing to do with crime and all parties turn out, as in "Thursday", to have the best of intentions, whatever their actions. Chesterton's method in these stories is much the same as he employs in his essays; that is, he piles up paradoxical impossibilities, and then by some simple expedient resolves them into apparent reasonableness. The author's obvious enjoyment of his own ingenuity adds to the reader's delight. It would be interesting to know whether he has in mind the solution when he lays out the plot or whether he is not playing a game with himself like jackstraws, pitting his skill as a disentangler against a muddle of his own making.

As an artist Chesterton has always been attracted by the Orient, with its mystical fanaticisms, its cruel colors, and its unfamiliar habits of thought. But while Turkey is all very well at a distance, Turkey in Europe is to him a distinct and horrible menace. In "The Flying Inn" we have a story of Mohammedan influence not only in Europe but in England itself. This novel is an allegory of the war between the sacred symbol of the cross and the sacred symbol of the crescent, as Chesterton has similarly related the struggle of the Ball and the Cross in his book of that name.

The champions of the crescent are Misysra Ammon, the Prophet of the Moon, and Lord Ivywood, an eccentric nobleman, a fanatic against the liquor traffic as the embodiment of Christian custom as opposed to Moslem. Misysra, who is as fertile with impossible theories as with plausible arguments to support them, maintains that England is Mohammedan at heart and proves it in a hundred ways from the contempt with which the pig is popularly spoken of to the absence of any "idolatrous" animal or vegetable forms in modern cubist painting. Lord Ivywood's persecution of the inn-keepers sends one of them adrift throughout the country carrying his inn-sign with him and accompanied by Captain Dalroy, an athletic Irishman who champions the cause of the cross.

So far we have a straight Chesterton novel, a symbolic theme variegated by satires on modern life. But Chesterton really seems uncertain that he aimed to write a prose novel at all, for the book is plentifully interspersed with verses, serious, comic, ironical, militant, in good meter and in bad, till the novel takes on the not unpleasant appearance of a Chesterton anthology of songs.

Everybody who likes G. K. Chesterton has wished that he might be induced to follow the example of Charles Dickens and write a Child's History of England. When a literary man of wayward genius undertakes to interpret and record the story of his country the result is almost always worth while. We do not get the white sunlight of impartiality, but we get a beautiful rainbow of prejudices, personal opinions, and mystical insight. Chesterton has still to write us a complete English history, but he has dealt faithfully with about a century and a half of it in "The Crimes of England." It is due to him to say that the unhistorical character of the work is caused rather by partisan emphasis than by any inaccuracy of detail. Rarely if ever has Chesterton written with such care for his facts, and, as for his transcendental interpretation of them, he has as much warrant to philosophize as Carlyle or Taine or any other literary historian. But one does tend to get the impression from the book that only Prussians had ever incurred the scriptural curse on him who removes his neighbor's landmark.

For the "crimes of England" are really the crimes of Prussia, and England's guilt is summed up in the phrase that English politics has been devoted ever since the time of Frederick the Great to "the belittlement of France and the gross exaggeration of Germany." Chesterton denounces the part played by his country in the wars of Frederick the Great, in the Napoleonic struggles, in the repression of Ireland, in tolerating Bismarck's schemes of aggrandizement, only to bring into darker relief the wickedness of the state which used England throughout all these years as a catspaw. Yet the indictment of England as Prussia's accomplice is delivered in very sharp terms; so far as Chesterton shows bias it is pro-French or pro-Irish rather than pro-British. He really believes that the war is an epic struggle between the old soul of Christendom, most clearly incarnated in the Catholic nations, and a blast of sinister materialism from the wastes and forests of Brandenburg. In this belief he writes not only seriously, but soberly, as befits the great hour, and concludes his book with a vivid and moving description of the Battle of the Marne which has in it a world of eloquence and no "cleverness" at all.

The large volume of "Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens" is composed of his prefaces to the separate books of Dickens. Although not so important a piece of work as Chesterton's biography of Dickens, they are well worth bringing together in this way, because they form not only a brilliant piece of literary interpretation, but because they show that it is possible to write prefaces to the classics which will increase the desire to read the book instead of dampening one's ardor at the start with a mass of dry and trivial details of the author's life and environment. Chesterton has the first requisite of a good introducer, an enthusiasm for his subject and a belief in the importance of his message for the times in which we live. His comparison of Dickens and Thackeray, if not quite fair, has at least sufficient point to suggest thought.

Thackeray has become classical; but Dickens has done more; he has remained modern. There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin to realize that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar—all that is itself—breaking up like a cloud-land. And only the caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone.

But whether his medium is fiction, criticism, or editorial, Chesterton is always a moralist, differing, however, from most moralists in that he is never prosy and never directs his preachments at obsolete evils and deceased sinners.

Prose and poetry are such widely sundered fields that a reputation made in one does not carry over into the other. When Scott dropped poetry to take up novel writing he found it expedient to leave his name behind. When Kipling passed in the reverse direction from prose to poetry he had to cultivate a new clientèle. It is very amusing to hear two lovers of Hardy or of Meredith sing peans of praise to their favorite author in strophe and antistrophe until on descending from the general to the particular they discover that one was extolling the poet and the other the novelist and that each had never read, or but lightly esteemed what the other most admired.

So while the essays and romances of Gilbert Keith Chesterton reach thousands of readers week by week through the journals, and are bought with avidity in volume form, his poems are but little known to readers of his prose, although they have, I fancy, a circle of their own. Yet no one can understand Chesterton fully who ignores his verse, for his thought, expressed through this medium, is seen from another angle and so gains solidity to the view.

Chesterton, like Tennyson, has taken one of England's legendary heroes as the theme of an epic by which to express his philosophy of life and his message to his age. The stories of Alfred he accepts as uncritically and handles as freely as Tennyson did those of Arthur, but the poems resultant show not merely the difference between the authors, but also, in a way, the difference between the past century and the present one, the contrast between a faintly hopeful agnosticism and a robustious affirmation of faith.

In his "Alarms and Discursions" he has told us in prose of the impressions made upon him by his visit to the Vale of the White Horse and Ethandune. These he transmutes into poetry in "The Ballad of the White Horse."[4] In the beautiful dedication to his wife he gives her credit for having opened his eyes to the Christian significance of the wars of Alfred against the Danes. Miss Frances Blogg, whom he married in 1900, was described by one who knew her then as "a conservative rebel against the conventions of the unconventional." We may assume that it was largely through her influence that he was converted from youthful atheism to extremest orthodoxy. I can quote only a few stanzas from this dedication although such fragments are distressing to those who know the whole and aggravating to those who do not.

Lady, by one light only
We look from Alfred's eyes,
We know he saw athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchizedek
Is dead and never dies.

Therefore I bring these rimes to you,
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe,
And laid peace upon the sea.

Do you remember when we went
Under a dragon moon,
And 'mid volcanic tints of night
Walked where they fought the unknown fight
And saw black trees on the battle-height,
Black thorn on Ethandune?

And I thought "I will go with you,
As man with God has gone,
And wander with a wandering star,
The wandering heart of things that are,
The fiery cross of love and war
That like your self goes on."

O go you onward, where you are
Shall honor and laughter be,
Past purpled forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home to me.
  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Up through an empty house of stars
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace,
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.

It is hard to carry the ballad meter through a whole volume without its growing monotonous. Chesterton's poetry, like his prose, should be taken in small doses. "The Ballad of the White Horse" contains some wearisome stretches, particularly in the most exciting parts, the fights. When I want real zest in blood letting and the enjoyment of hand to hand combat I should turn to Percy's Reliques, or to Homer. My volume of the "Ballad" opens easiest, as it has opened oftenest, at three passages. The first is that where King Alfred as a fugitive in the forest is set to mind the cakes and gets to musing, not, as we children used to be told, about how to beat the Danes, but, according to the Chestertonian version, about the Christian view of the labor question. As the old, bent woman leaves the hut Alfred wonders what shall become of such as she.

And well may God with the serving-folk
Cast in His dreadful lot:
Is not He too a servant
And is not He forgot?

For was not God my gardener
And silent like a slave:
That opened oaks on the uplands
Or thicket in graveyard grave?

And was not God my armorer,
All patient and unpaid,
That sealed my skull as a helmet
And ribs for hauberk made?
  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
For God is a great servant
And rose before the day,
From some primordial slumber torn;
But all things living later born
Sleep on, and rise after the morn,
And the Lord has gone away.

On things half sprung from sleeping,
All sleepy suns have shone;
They stretch stiff arms, the yawning trees,
The beasts blink upon hands and knees,
Man is awake and does and sees—
But Heaven has done and gone.
  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
But some see God like Guthrum
Crowned, with a great beard curled,
But I see God like a good giant,
That, laboring, lifts the world.

Wherefore was God in Golgotha,
Slain as a serf is slain:
And hate He had of prince and peer,
And love He had and made good cheer
Of them that, like this woman here,
Go powerfully in pain.

But whether Alfred pondered problems of war or labor the cakes got burnt just the same.

Next I turn to the page where men come to Alfred on the island of Athelney and beg him to become the ruler of all England. This gives Chesterton a chance to expound his anti-imperialism.

And Alfred in the orchard,
Among apples green and red,
With the little book in his bosom,
Looked at green leaves and said:

"When all philosophies shall fail,
This word alone shall fit;
That a sage feels too small for life,
And a fool too large for it.

"Asia and all imperial plains
Are all too little for a fool:
But for one man whose eyes can see,
The little island of Athelney
Is too large a land to rule.
  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
"An island like a little book,
Full of a hundred tales,
Like the gilt page the good monks pen
That is all smaller than a wren,
Yet hath high towers, meteors and" men,
And suns and spouting whales.

"A land having a light in it,
In a river dark and fast,
An isle with utter, clearness lit,
Because a saint has stood in it,
Where flowers are flowers indeed and fit,
And trees are trees at last."

As his men clear the weeds from the White Horse that had ages before been cut upon the chalk bluff, Alfred has a vision of the day when the ancient symbol shall be again overgrown and forgotten and when a new and less manly kind of heathen than the Danes shall overrun England:

I know that weeds shall grow in it
Faster than man can burn:
And though they scatter now and go,
In some far century, sad and slow,
I have a vision, and I know
The heathen shall return.

They shall not come with war-ships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands.
  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
The dear sun dwarfed of dreadful suns,
Like fiercer flowers on stalk,
Earth lost and little like a pea,
In high heaven's towering forestry
—These be the small weeds ye shall see
Crawl, covering the chalk.
  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
By terror and the cruel tales
Of curse in bone and kin,
By weird and weakness winning,
Accursed from the beginning,
By detail of the sinning,
And denial of the sin:

By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire:

By God and man dishonored,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old barbarian,
The barbarian come again.

When is great talk of trend and tide,
And wisdom and destiny,
Hail that undying heathen
That is sadder than the sea.

In this specification of "the marks of the Beast" we may recognize Chesterton's antipathies; materialism, commercialism, Darwinism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, pacifism, and Socialism. He is haunted by the same nightmare as Samuel Butler, that the day may come when machines will master the world and men be merely their slaves. For relief he looks to a revolution like the French Revolution, only worse. Chesterton is like the Eton boys who, after a debate over woman suffrage, passed a unanimous resolution disapproving of the aim of the suffragettes but approving of their methods. The socialists say we must have a revolution, peaceful if possible. Chesterton would say, "we must have a revolution, bloody if possible." The guillotine, he says somewhere, had many sins to answer for, but, at least, there was nothing evolutionary about it. And he makes the English people say:

It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first.
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.

Like Hilaire Belloc and other Neo-Catholics, he manages somehow to combine an admiration for the French Revolution with a devotion to Catholicism. They are ardent advocates of democracy notwithstanding the very explicit condemnations of popular government by the Popes. They are more inclined toward syndicalism than Socialism and place their hopes in the peasant proprietorship instead of in the nationalized trust. It is an interesting novelty in the labor problem, for it cuts across the old classifications, and I hope it will have a chance to develop into something concrete. The similar movement in France, the Sillon of Marc Sangnier, was crushed out by a papal encyclical in 1912. Chesterton might be called an English Sillonist, and in a literal sense if we recall his essay on The Furrows in "Alarms and Discursions." Chesterton sometimes praises the achievements of modern science and industry, but always as ingenious toys. He is convinced that mankind in the mass will never take the city seriously.

When the rest of the world was looking for the advent of cosmopolitanism and the reign of peace, the earth lapped in universal law and all the local idiosyncrasies ironed out, wherein all obstacles to freedom of movement had been crushed out and one could buy a tourist ticket to Timbuktu with the same accommodation all along the route, Chesterton set his bugle to his lips and blew a fanfare of audacious challenge to the spirit of the times in the form of a nonsensical romance, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." In this he carries particularism to an extreme, breaking up London again into warring wards, each with its own banner and livery, its gilds and folk ways. The book is inscribed, as we might expect, to his friend, Hilaire Belloc, and I quote part of the dedication as it sums up the message of the volume and is strangely prophetic:

For every tiny town or place
God made the stars especially:
Babies look up with owlish face
And see them tangled in a tree;
You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
A Sussex moon, untraveled still.
I saw a moon that was the town's,
The largest lamp on Campden Hill.

Yes, Heaven is everywhere at home,
The big blue cap that always fits,
And so it is (be calm; they come
To goal at last, my wandering wits),
So it is with the heroic thing
This shall not end for the world's end,
And though the sullen engines swing,
Be you not much afraid, my friend.

This did not end by Nelson's urn
Where an immortal England sits—
Nor where your tall young men in turn
Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.
And when the pedants bade us mark
What cold mechanic happenings
Must come; our souls said in the dark,
"Belike; but there are likelier things."

Likelier across these flats afar,
These sulky levels smooth and free,
The drums shall crash a waltz of war
And Death shall dance with Liberty!
Likelier the barricades shall flare
Slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare
That men have found a thing to love.[5]

Remember this was written in 1904, at a time when it was commonly thought that the last of the wars had been fought and the nations might disarm, for henceforth the Hague Court would hold sway; when the socialists were becoming opportunists and the anarchists had laid aside their bombs; when such scientists as Metchnikoff were saying that self-sacrifice and heroism of the fighting sort were antiquated virtues for which the peaceful and sanitary world of the future would have little use. Chesterton was wrong about the nature of the catastrophe. He was looking and, I fear, hoping for a social revolution, and that has not yet come although it seems now less improbable than it did then.

But the Great War has given an irresistible impulse to the movement toward particularism as against cosmopolitanism. Whether we like it or not, we must admit that the tide has turned in the other direction and that it will be many years, perhaps more than one generation, before there will be the freedom of trade, intercourse, and migration that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even England has abandoned free trade, and every country will hereafter strive to secure economic independence by developing its own resources. Even before the war there was a tendency toward the sort of local differentiation of which Chesterton gave a fantastic forecast in "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." This tendency manifested itself in a variety of ways; in the cultivation of local industries, the revival of folk dances and historic costumes, in pageantry and community celebrations, in the interest in town history and in the struggle to reëstablish disappearing languages, like Gaelic, Czech, and Ruthenian.

From Chesterton's latest book devoted to the crimes of Germany, and characteristically entitled "The Crimes of England",[6] we can see that it is the primitive little peasant kingdom of Montenegro that he most admires and the machine-like efficiency of the German empire that he most abhors. Montenegro, since he wrote this volume, has been overwhelmed by the tide of war, but probably Chesterton has faith to believe that it will reappear like Ararat when the waters subside. This faith he expressed in the poem, "The March of the Black Mountain", written during the Balkan war which Montenegro initiated by a single-handed attack upon the Turk:

But men shall remember the Mountain,
Though it fall down like a tree,
They shall see the sign of the Mountain
Faith cast into the sea;
Though the crooked swords overcome it
And the Crooked Moon ride free,
When the Mountain comes to Mahomet
It has more life than he.

Chesterton has a better right to appear now as the champion of small nationalities than some other English authors we could name, for he first entered the lists of public life to break a lance in defense of the Boers at a time when it was most unpopular if not dangerous to say a word in their favor. He refers to these youthful days in his "Song of Defeat", published some ten years afterward. I quote part of one stanza:

I dream of the days when work was scrappy,
And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint:
When we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
For so they conquered and-so we scattered,
When the Devil rode and his dogs smelt gold,
And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered,
When I was twenty and odd years old.
When mongrel men that the market classes,
Had slimy hands on England's rod
And sword in hand upon Afric's passes
Her last Republic cried to God![7]

One of his youthful dreams was to see a reunion of the United States and England which he imagined would come about in some great foreign war. But by 1905, when he included the poem on "The Anglo-Saxon Alliance" in a volume,[8] he had lost faith in such ethnic generalities as the Anglo-Saxon race, so he explains in his preface:

I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the American nation, which-is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.

But the poem, both because he wrote it and because he repudiated it, has an especial interest now when American sympathy with England is stronger than ever before, the traditional hostility has been largely swept away, and there is talk of joining England in this bloodiest of all wars.

This is the weird of a world-old folk,
That not till the last link breaks
Not till the night is blackest,
The blood of Hengist wakes.
When the sun is black in heaven,
The moon as blood above,
And the earth is full of hatred,
This people tells its love.

In change, eclipse and peril,
Under the whole world's scorn,
By blood and death and darkness
The Saxon peace is sworn;
That all our fruit be gathered,
And all our race take hands,
And the sea be a Saxon river
That runs through Saxon lands.
  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Deep grows the hate of kindred.
Its roots take hold on hell;
No peace or praise can heal it,
But a stranger heals it well.
Seas shall be red as sunsets,
And kings' bones float as foam,
And heaven be dark with vultures,
The night our son comes home.

In some respects we should expect Chesterton to go better in verse than in prose. He thinks in metaphors and pictures, vivid, fantastic, and colorful. The peculiarities of his prose style that grate upon the taste of some readers, such as the repetition of the same words, the alliteration, the unqualified assertion of half truths, the queer rhythms, the verbal tricks, and the superabundance of tropes, are by tradition permissible in poetry and so arouse no resentment.

On the other hand, poetry is a painstaking art, and Chesterton does not like to take pains. He is too indolent or too indifferent to hunt for the best possible word or rime. Consequently we find in his verse many a perfect line, rarely a perfect stanza, and never a perfect poem. But scattered all through his verse, even in the most nonsensical, we happen upon curious cadences that linger in the memory like the chant of some strange ritual. His ballads abound in unconventional rhythms that haunt one like those of Lanier's "Ballad of the Trees and the Master."

Although Chesterton often seems to disregard the canons of versification from carelessness or caprice, yet at other times he takes delight in subjecting himself to the most rigid of models, as, for instance, the old French ballade, which, he says, is "the easiest because it is the most restricted." He shows us how he constructs one in "The Ballade of a Strange Town."[9] The strange town into which he was shunted by the accident of taking the wrong tramcar one rainy day while "fooling about Flanders" was Lierre, an unknown and uninteresting way station then, but now one of the famous places of world history, for it stood for days the shock of the German attack on Antwerp. While waiting for the next car to take him away Chesterton scribbled on the back of an envelope with an aniline pencil a poem which begins in nonsense but ends with as good an expression of his creed as he has given anywhere:

Happy is he and more than wise
Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
This world through all the gray disguise
Of sleep and custom in between.
Yes: we may pass the heavenly screen,
But shall we know when we are there?
Who know not what these dead stones mean,
The lovely city of Lierre.

Chesterton is so fond of the ballade that I must quote one specimen complete.[10] For the benefit of those who have taken no interest in versification I may call attention to the technical difficulties of the form of the ballade that he has chosen. It consists of three octaves and a quatrain all ending in the same refrain and using only two rimes. The first rime is used in the first and third lines of the first quatrain and in the second and fourth of the second quatrain. The second rime is used in the second and fourth lines of the first quatrain and in the first and third of the second quatrain. The closing quatrain or l'envoi is in the ballade addressed to a prince or other royal personage. Since Chesterton hates princes his apostrophe to the prince in this ballade is not in the usual sycophantic style.

A BALLADE OF SUICIDE

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbors—on the wall—
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me... After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

To-morrow is the time I get my pay—
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall—
I see a little cloud all pink and grey—
Perhaps the rector's mother will not call—
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way—
I never read the works of Juvenal—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The world will have another washing day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H. G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational—
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seems small—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

L'ENVOI

Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

Those who assisted—with more or less enthusiasm—in the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebration will appreciate Chesterton's verses about a similar commemoration decreed by the calendar.

THE SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL

Lord Lilac thought it rather rotten
That Shakespeare should be quite forgotten,
And therefore got on a Committee
With several chaps out of the city,
And Shorter and Sir Herbert Tree,
Lord Rothschild and Lord Rosebery,
And F. C. G. and Comyns Carr,
Two dukes and a dramatic star,
Also a clergyman now dead;
And while the vain world careless sped
Unheeding the heroic name—
The souls most fed with Shakespeare's flame
Still sat unconquered in a ring,
Remembering him like anything.

Lord Lilac did not long remain,
Lord Lilac did not come again,
He softly lit a cigarette
And sought some other social set
Where, in some other knots or rings,
People were doing cultured things,
—Miss Zwilt's Humane Vivarium
—The little men who paint on gum
—The exquisite Gorilla Girl....
He sometimes in the giddy whirl
(Not being really bad at heart),
Remembered Shakespeare with a start—
But not with that grand constancy
Of Clement Shorter, Herbert Tree,
Lord Rosebery, and Comyns Carr
And all the other names there are;
Who stuck like limpets to the spot,
Lest they forgot, lest they forgot.

Lord Lilac was of slighter stuff;
Lord Lilac had had quite enough.[11]

Chesterton's poetic versatility range may be inferred from the fact that he has written a drinking song that is used as a whisky advertisement and a devotional song that has been incorporated into the hymn book. The former may be found in "The Flying Inn", the latter in the "English Hymnal", also in "Poems." The hymn is as follows, omitting, as the preachers always say,[12] the third stanza. Sing it to the tune of "Webb."

O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die.

The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us
But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,

From sale and profanation
Of honor and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation
Deliver us, good Lord!

But I know of some people—and more sensible people than you would suppose—who say that they like "Quoodle" the best of Chesterton's poetry. Since there is no accounting for taste and some of my readers may have taste, I must also quote this:

SONG OF THE DOG NAMED QUOODLE

They haven't got no noses,
The fallen sons of Eve.
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes,
But more than mind discloses,
And more than men believe.

They haven't got no noses,
They cannot even tell
When door and darkness closes
The park old Gluck encloses,
Where even the Law of Moses
Will let you steal a smell.

The brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder,
And old bones buried under
Are things in which they blunder
And err, if left alone.

The wind from winter forests,
The scent of scentless flowers,
The breath of bride's adorning
The smell of snare and warning,
The smell of Sunday morning,
God gave to us for ours.
  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
And Quoodle here discloses
All things that Quoodle can;
They haven't got no noses,
They haven't got no noses,
And goodness only knowses
The Noselessness of Man.[13]

According to Mendelism new species are most apt to come from the crossing of diverse forms. We should then naturally expect Chesterton's verse to be original, since it is the result of a cross between Whitman and Swinburne. At any rate these were the poets who most influenced Chesterton when in his teens he began to write poetry. In philosophy of life Whitman and Swinburne were not so far apart, since they were both pagans and democrats, but in form they are antipodes. Whitman was the father or the grandfather of the vers-librists. He cultivated the unconventional and introduced the most unpoetic and uncouth words. Swinburne, on the other hand, sought his themes in the classics and sacrificed anything to the music of his lines.

The early poetry of Chesterton shows traces of both influences. One very interesting instance of this is found in a poem that he wrote at school, when he was about sixteen. It is an Ave Maria in the Swinburnian meter. That is, he has borrowed the weapon of the atheist and used it in defense of Catholicism—a trick that he has been playing ever since. The poem begins:

Hail Mary! Thou blest among women; generations
shall rise up to greet,
After ages of wrangle and dogma, I come with a
prayer to thy feet.
Where Gabriel's red plumes are a wind in the lanes
of thy lilies at eve
We pray, who have done with the churches; we
worship, who may not believe.

From his twelfth to his seventeenth year he went to St. Paul's school, where, as he says, "I did no work but wrote a lot of bad poetry which fortunately perished with the almost equally bad exercises. I got a prize for one of these poems—Golly, what a bad poem it was!"

The prize was known as the Milton Prize and the subject assigned to the pupils competing for it was St. Francis Xavier. A soliloquy of Danton on the scaffold, written at the age of sixteen, shows how early began his fascination for the French Revolution. His fondness for discussion was cultivated at the St. Paul's school in the Junior Debating Club, of which he was chairman, and the monthly periodical of the society, The Debater, contains many essays and poems signed "G. K. C." His first contribution to the outside press was a Socialist poem appearing in The Clarion, but a few years later he was busy trying to puncture the balloon of Socialism with his sharp-pointed pen.

After leaving St. Paul's he studied art at the Slade School in London and has illustrated half a dozen books with cartoons, for he draws as readily as he writes. His first book was a volume of jingles and sketches entitled "Gray-Beards at Play; Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen."

His propensity for dropping into nonsense rhymes and sketches may be ascribed to heredity, for his father, Edward Chesterton, though a respectable real estate agent by profession, was responsible for a slim volume of child verse and drawings, "The Wonderful Story of Dunder van Haeden and His Seven Little Daughters."

G. K. Chesterton was born in Kensington, London, May 29, 1874. There is nothing in his heredity or early training to account for his conservative and High Church tendencies, for his father was a liberal in politics and religion and attended Bedford Chapel where the Reverend Stopford Brooke was preaching what was then called "the new theology." Although educated as an artist, G. K. Chesterton soon passed from sketching through art criticism to journalism. He began by writing pro-Boer articles for The Speaker, a Liberal weekly. The originality of his thought and the vigor of his style attracted public attention, and The Daily News took him over to write a weekly article in spite of the fact that he differed in opinion from the editors and readers on certain points. As his anonymous biographer says:

"Thousands of peaceful semi-Tolstoyan non-conformists have for years been compelled to listen every Saturday morning to a fiery apostle preaching consistently the praise of three things which seem to them most obviously the sign-manuals of Hell—War, Drink, and Catholicism."

But more recently his antagonism to "cocoa"—extended symbolically to the politics as well as to the beverage of Cadbury—became so great as to break this incongruous alliance and he has found in his brother's weekly The New Witness a more congenial although a smaller audience. He has also contributed for many years a weekly page to The Illustrated London News, which is under entirely different management from The Daily News. Besides these and frequent contributions to other periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, he manages to turn out a volume or two of stories every year as well as poetry and criticism, an amazing output considering that there is hardly a dull page in it. To keep it up so long and steadily must be a strain upon one of his easy-going temperament. Fleet Street men tell me that it is hard to get his copy on time. As press day draws near runners are sent around to his clubs and other London haunts to tell him that the editor must have his article immediately. Once caught Chesterton surrenders good-naturedly and taking any paper handy will dash off his essay, carrying on a lively conversation at the same time.

Producing under such pressure or at least under the compulsion of filling a certain number of columns every week with witty comment on current events inevitably tends to careless writing. Chesterton's work is all equally readable, but not all equally worth reading. He is an inspired writer, but he goes on writing quite as brilliantly after the inspiration has given out, just as a man writing in the dark goes on after his fountain pen has run dry and is only making meaningless scratches on the paper. His display of gems of thought is hardly to be matched by any other show window, but there are so many paste diamonds among them of equal brilliancy that the half of the world which does not like Chesterton takes it for granted that they are all paste. They may even quote Chesterton in support of their view for he says: "All is gold that glitters for the glitter is the gold."

When ex-President Roosevelt, on his return from Africa, was given a dinner by the journalists of London, he was asked by the committee on arrangements whom he would like to have placed by his side to talk with during the meal, and he promptly chose Chesterton. I was of much the same mind when I went to England, but not being in a position to summon him to my side I sought him out in his home, Overroads. This is a little way out of London, near the town of Beaconsfield from which Disraeli took his title,—uncomfortable quarters, I should say, for Chesterton, considering his antipathy for Disraeli and his race.

Arriving at Beaconsfield by the tea-time train I walked up the hill to where I saw a big man sitting on the little porch of a little house. He impressed me as Sunday impressed Symes. I do not mean Billy Sunday, but quite a different personage, the Sunday of "The Man Who Was Thursday." Great men are apt to shrink when you get too close to them. Mr. Chesterton did not. He was too big to fit his environment. The house was what we should call a bungalow; I don't know what they call it in England. It was on a little triangular lot set with trees half his height and a rustic arbor patiently awaiting vines. Afterward I saw in the paper that Mr. Chesterton broke a leg on that arbor. I suppose he must have tripped over it like a croquet wicket.

Mr. Chesterton has a big head covered with curly locks, two of them gray. He is gifted with a Taft-like smile, and talks in a deep-toned, wheezy voice, punctuating his remarks with an engaging chuckle. It is no trouble to interview him. I never met a man who talked more easily or more interestingly. "There are no uninteresting subjects," he says, "there are only uninterested persons." Start any idea you please as unexpectedly as a rabbit from its lair, and he will after it in a second and follow all its turns and windings until he runs it down. His mind is as agile as a movie actor. Epigrams, paradoxes, puns, anecdotes, characterizations, metaphors, fell from his lips in such profusion that I, who knew the market value of such verbal gems, felt as nervous as a jeweler who sees a lady break her necklace. I wanted him to stop while I got down on my knees and picked them up. But he did not mind wasting clever things on me, for there were so many more where those came from. Besides they were not so completely lost as I feared. I recognized some of them a few weeks later in his causerie page of The Illustrated London News.

But when you visit Mr. Chesterton don't make the mistake that I did and attempt to please him by telling him how much he reminds you of Doctor Johnson. He admitted to me that he had "paged a bit" in that rôle, but I judge from what he says in "The Mystery of a Pageant"[14] he does not regard his selection for the part as altogether complimentary to his personal appearance.

Perhaps he would not like it any better to be told that the resemblance was more psychical than physical. Chesterton is doubtless the most dogmatic man England has seen since Doctor Johnson died. He has equally violent prejudices, and he expresses them with equal wit. Unfortunately he has no Boswell. Chesterton has written a book about Shaw, but so far Shaw has shown no disposition to return the compliment.

Shaw, in speaking of Coburn's portrait of Chesterton says: "He is our Quinbus Flestrin, the young Man Mountain, a large abounding gigantically cherubic person."

It is Shaw's theory that G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are not two persons, but one mythological monster to be known as "The Chesterbelloc."

Chesterton's ideals are large and generous and very solid: A divinely ordered church, a really democratic state, and a life of that hopeful and humble wonder that men call romance. But his usefulness as a moral philosopher is impaired by the possession of a number of blind spots or inveterate prejudices that prevent him from seeing clearly. He is like the tenor who had aelurophobia and was upset whenever a cat came into the room. So whenever one of these phobias comes into his mind Chesterton loses his poise and sings false. Some of the things for which he has a particular abhorrence are: cocoa, colonies, divorce, equal suffrage, Esperanto, eugenics, large scale production, latitudinarianism, Lloyd George, official sanitation, organized charity, peace movement, pragmatism, prohibition, public schools, simplified spelling, vaccination, vivisection, and workingmen's insurance, all of which some of the rest of us look upon with favor. His inability to see any good in these and a score of other modern movements brings him into curious inconsistencies. For instance, he is an enthusiast for universal manhood suffrage. But any mention of woman suffrage is like waving a red coat before an Irish bull. His statement that there are three things which women can never understand, liberty, equality, and fraternity, is as brutal and untrue as anything Nietzsche or Strindberg has said.

In his essay on William James he says "pragmatism is bosh", yet his whole system of apologetics is based upon the pragmatic argument; religion is true because it works. "If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten off by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the street?" In order to make due allowance for Chesterton's class and race prejudices while reading his works, it is convenient to keep a list like this as a bookmark:

TABLE OF CHESTERTON'S AFFECTIONS AND AVERSIONS

                      CLASSES

    He likes most: 1. Children
                   2. Peasants
                   3. Domestic women
                   4. Artisans and laborers
                   5. Priests and soldiers
                   6. Poets and adventurers
                   7. Shopkeepers
                      (hereabouts is a great gulf fixed)
                   8. Business and professional men
                   9. Criminals (including politicians)
                  10. The conceited professional classes (the intellectuals)
                  11. Landlords
                  12. Millionaires

He dislikes most: 13. Multimillionaires

                      RACES

    He likes most: 1. Irish
                   2. French
                   3. English
                   4. Russians
                   5. Turks
                   6. Jews
                   7. Germans
 He dislikes most: 8. Cosmopolites

In his youth Chesterton wrote a poem in defense of Dreyfus, "To A Certain Nation", but by the time he came to publish it in his first volume, "The Wild Knight", he had so changed his opinion that he makes a partial apology for it in the preface. Since then he has, in connection with his brother Cecil and Mr. Belloc, introduced into British journalism a foreign element from which it had formerly been free, the political anti-Semitism which has been the cause of so much disturbance in France, Russia, and Germany. Almost every number of The New Witness, edited by Cecil Chesterton, contains sneers at Jewish financiers and politicians, and in 1912 he went so far that he was fined five hundred dollars and costs for defamatory libel of Godfrey Isaacs, director of the Marconi Company. The prosecution significantly was conducted by Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith.

It is greatly to be hoped that The New Witness group may get rid of their race prejudice and cut down on their muckraking, which, though often necessary, is never nice, and bring forward the constructive part of their program, for this is the time when there is a chance to do something. For instance, the British Party system against which they so long clamored without effect has now broken down under stress of the war, but there is nothing in sight to take its place. G. K. Chesterton was quite right when he said that "the party system of England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing political conflicts",[15] and that what party politics had done was to turn Balfour from the analysis of the doubtful to the defense of the dubious and Morley from writing on compromise to practicing it. And again, "I think the cabinet minister should be taken a little less seriously and the cabinet maker a little more."[16]

Chesterton protests against being regarded as a mere obstructionist and reactionary in such language as the following:

I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up the churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper.[17]

Man has always believed in a paradise, but he has never been certain whether to look for it in the past or the future, or both. We have very detailed descriptions of Atlantis, Valhalla, the Golden Age, Utopia, and the like, but the tense of the verb is indeterminable. Chesterton is equally uncertain as to whether to look forward or backward for his ideal state. His "Christmas Song for Three Gilds" is headed "To be sung a long time ago—or hence." He has not yet favored us with a blueprint of his Utopia, so we are left to surmise what he likes from the very plain indications he has given us of what he does not like. Chesterton seems to obey a negative magnetism and orients himself by his antipathies.

We may infer that his ideal would be a self-governing community of equally well-to-do, leisurely, patriotic, domestic, religious, jolly, beer-drinking, pork-eating, art-loving, freehold farmers and gild craftsmen, clustered about the village inn and church. They would all be of one race and creed, healthy without doctors, wealthy without financiers, governed without politicians. He believes with Belloc that the nearest historical approach to this ideal was Western Europe about 1200-1500. He probably would agree with Doctor James J. Walsh in calling the thirteenth "the greatest of all centuries." Among contemporary communities I should say that the mujiks of the Russian mir come the nearest to complying with his specifications, although he has not, to my knowledge, shown any disposition to leave London and take to the steppes in order to live the simple life in these communities of pure democracy. But perhaps this is because women vote in the mir. Of the made-to-order utopias I presume that of William Morris's "News from Nowhere" would suit him better than the Socialists for whom it was written.

To sum up Chesterton in a sentence, I must borrow the words of the Forum article of O. W. Firkins:

A man who preaches an impassioned and romantic Christianity, and who adds to that the Jeffersonian doctrine of democracy, the Wordsworthian and Tolstoyan doctrine of the majesty of the untutored man, the Carlylean doctrine of wonder, the Emersonian doctrine of the spirituality latent in all objects, the Dickensian faith in the worth and wisdom of the feeble-minded, the Browningesque standard of optimism, affects us as a man with whom, whatever his vagaries and harlequinries, it would be wholesome and inspiriting to live.

HOW TO READ CHESTERTON

Read whatever is handiest, for there is no order and sequence is not important. Chesterton expresses much the same philosophy of life in essays, stories, and poems and there has been little change in his opinions or style in the sixteen years he has been writing.

Nowhere has he given a complete and orderly presentation of his views. He is a born journalist and prefers to fire at a moving target. About once a year he gathers up a sheaf of his contributions to the press and puts them out under as general and indefinite a title as he can think up, but he never can think up a title broad enough to cover the variety of topics he treats. The heading to a chapter gives no clue to the theme or its importance. One is apt to find his deepest philosophy tucked away in some corner of a discourse on cheese or mumming or penny dreadfuls. He is like a submarine; when he goes under you never can tell where he will come out. Consequently, as I say, it does not matter much which volume you pick up; they are equally brilliant and inconsequential.

His views on religion and society are expounded most thoroughly in "Orthodoxy" (1908), "Heretics" (1905) both published by John Lane Company, and "What's Wrong With the World" (1910, published by Dodd, Mead & Company). Somewhat briefer, more varied, and trivial in topic are "All Things Considered" (1908, Lane), "Tremendous Trifles" (1909, Dodd), "Alarms and Discursions" (1910, Dodd), "A Miscellany of Men" (1912, Dodd).

Since the war began he has published "The Barbarism of Berlin" (1914), "The Appetite of Tyranny" including "Letters to an Old Garibaldian" (1915, Dodd), and "The Crimes of England" (1916, Lane). To this we should add his first work, "The Defendant" (1901, Dodd). In The New Witness he has been running a weekly page under the head of "At the Sign of the World's End", and when his brother, Cecil Chesterton, enlisted as a private in October, 1916, he assumed the editorship of that lively journal.

His youthful poetry is in "The Wild Knight and Other Poems" (1900, Dutton). "The Ballad of the White Horse" (1911, Lane) contains his epic of King Alfred, and "Poems" (1915, Lane) contains all the rest of his poetry except what still remains buried in "the files." Of these I must mention "The Wife of Flanders", which may be found in the Literary Digest, Current Opinion, or Living Age of 1914.

Chesterton has written one play, "Magic: A Fantastic Comedy" (1913, Putnam), which was a success on the London and New York stage.

Of his allegorical fantasias I have discussed at some length "The Man Who Was Thursday" (1908, Dodd). "The Ball and the Cross" (1910, Lane) describes the conflict between a religious fanatic and an equally intolerant atheist. "Manalive" (1912, Lane) deals with domesticity, and "The Flying Inn" (1915, Lane) is a defense of the public house. In "Napoleon of Notting Hill" (1908, Lane), his first romance, he preaches parochialism.

His detective or rather mystery stories are: "The Club of Queer Trades" (1905, Harper); "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911, Lane); and "The Wisdom of Father Brown" (1914, Lane).

His literary criticism, mostly written as prefaces to standard reprints, makes delightful reading, although sometimes he uses his author merely as a point of departure. Of Dickens he has written most and best in the prefaces to Everyman's Library edition (collected in "Appreciations and Criticism of Dickens", Dutton) and "Charles Dickens; A Critical Study" (1906, Dodd). His "Victorian Age in Literature" (1913, Home University Library, Holt) is not quite so interesting because he does not have room to ramble. His "George Bernard Shaw" (1910, Lane) is not much of a biography, but it is valuable as bringing into close contrast these representatives of opposing points of view. His "Robert Browning" forms an admirable volume of the English Men of Letters series (1908, Macmillan). Besides these he has written many biographical sketches and critiques, among which may be mentioned: "Five Types" (1911, Holt); "Varied Types" (1902, Dodd); "G. F. Watts" (1902, Dutton); "William Blake" (1910, Dutton); "Samuel Johnson" (1903, and 1911); "Carlyle" (1902 and 1904) and "R. L. Stevenson" (Pott).

Chesterton is eminently quotable, and the pocket volume of "Wit and Wisdom of Chesterton" (1911, Dodd) will afford plenty of food for thought for any one.

There are two biographies of Chesterton. One published anonymously in 1908 gives the best account of his early life; the other by Julius West (1916, Dodd) gives the most complete criticism of his work up to date, with a bibliography.

His picturesque personality and peculiar views have supplied innumerable journalists with material for articles. Specially noteworthy for one reason or another are: the excellent piece of criticism by O. W. Firkins in The Forum (vol. 48,. p. 597). "The Defender of the Discarded", The Forum (vol. 44, p. 707), is harsh and unsympathetic. "Chesterton as an Artist" by Joseph B. Gilder (Bookman, vol. 39, p. 468, see also vol. 34, p. 117), containing his sketches, a sketch by Henry Murray, with sixteen portraits from childhood up, in the London Bookman, May, 1910. Wells, in his "Social Forces in England and America" (p. 205), discusses Chesterton and Belloc. "A Visit to G. K. C." by B. Russell Herts in The Independent, November 7, 1912, contains some of Chesterton's sketches; reprinted with other interviews in Herts's "Depreciations" (1915, Boni). Chesterton wrote on "Shall the United States Fight?" in The Independent, January 12, 1916.

CHAPTER IV

F. C. S. SCHILLER

A BRITISH PRAGMATIST

The world knows nothing of its greatest men, because by the time it knows something about them they have ceased to be the greatest. F. C. S. Schiller.

A dozen years ago I happened upon the word "pragmatism", as it was printed, rather inappropriately,[1] upon the slip cover of Santayana's "Life of Reason." Being a queer looking word and unknown to me, I started to find out what it meant and that led me on a long chase. The farther I went the more interested I became, for I soon discovered that I had been a pragmatist all my life without knowing it. I was as delighted as M. Jourdain when he was told that he had been unconsciously talking prose all his life. I felt as relieved as Huxley when he invented "agnostic" as a tag for himself.

I had come by my pragmatism honestly enough, for I had got my training as a journalist through the study of chemistry, and in science the pragmatic mode of thinking is universal and unquestioned. So when I went to writing about other things,—politics, law, ethics, history, religion, and the like,—I naturally used my brains in the same way as in science, that is, I persisted in the valuation of all acts by their consequences instead of their causes and in the validation of all truths by practicality instead of precedent. But when I found how this way of thinking shocked, annoyed, or amused people I began to fear that I should have to drop it as I had other evidences of my buried past, such as the habit of using words like "catalysis" and "parachlorbenzamidine" in casual conversation.

But when I heard of the pragmatists I knew that I was no longer alone in the world. There were others, it seemed, even men of standing in philosophical circles, whose minds ran in this way and who were not ashamed to own it. I got their names and started to find them wherever they might be. I ran down Dewey in the Adirondacks and Bergson in the Alps. Poincaré I unearthed in a Paris flat, James I heard in a Columbia lecture room; Ostwald I found in a Saxon village; Schiller I caught in an Oxford quad. I was thinking of going to China to see Wang Yang-ming, but fortunately before I had bought my steamer ticket or learned Chinese I discovered that he had been dead for three centuries.[2]

Some who have read or tried to read what I said about Bergson and Poincaré[3] have complained that I used too many big words, and one man wrote me to say that if I would define pragmatism in words of one syllable perhaps he might understand what I was talking about. I could not guarantee that, of course, but I had no hesitation about complying with his request. Confucius wrote his immortal works in words of one syllable, and I would not be beaten by a Chinaman. Even Herbert Spencer once condescended to translate his famous definition of evolution into Anglo-Saxon. Since I am obliged to use the word "pragmatism" more than once in this book I may forestall criticism by putting here my

Monosyllabic Definition of Pragmatism

The one way to find out if a thing is true is to try it and see how it works. If it works well for a long time and for all folks, it must have some truth in it. If it works wrong it is false, at least in part. If there is no way to test it, then it has no sense. It means naught to us when we cannot tell what odds it makes if we hold to it or not. A creed is just a guide to life. We must live to learn. If a man would know what is right he must try to do what is right. Then he can find out. Prove all things and hold fast to that which is good. The will to have faith in a thing oft makes the faith come true. So it can be said in a way that we make truth for our own use. What we think must be of use to us in some way, else why should we think it? The truth is what is good for us, what helps us, what gives us joy and strength, what shows us how to act, what ties up fact to fact, so the chain will hold, what makes us see all things clear and straight, and what keeps us from stray paths that turn out wrong in the end. Thought is a tool, a means to an end. Man has to act, and so he must think. In this way he asks the world what it means to him. The need for thought first comes when man asks "Why?" or "Which?" so that he may know what to do to gain his end. The mind as it thinks makes such facts as it can to best serve its use. Out of the facts so come by is made a law, and this law in turn serves as a rule to guide one's acts.

But the reader should be warned that no two pragmatists can be got to agree upon any definition of pragmatism, and that the opponents of pragmatism differ still more widely in their conception of it. Schiller says that the most serious drawback in the name is that "it condemns every exponent of pragmatism to consume at least half an hour of his limited time in explaining the word." Schiller himself employs the term "humanism" instead which being less novel is less disturbing to the conventional mind but on the other hand has the serious disadvantage of having been applied to a very different thing, namely, the spirit of the Renaissance. Since C. S. Peirce who invented the term "pragmatism" and William James who popularized it are both dead, the word finds few defenders, although the mode of reasoning it tried to stand for is obviously permeating all fields of thought. Like many other things pragmatism seems likely to conquer the world incognito.[4]

A man in the act of dismounting from a bicycle is temporarily incapacitated from the effective use of either mode of locomotion, and it was at this psychological moment that I caught Doctor Schiller at the gate of Corpus Christi College. Otherwise I might have missed him, for he is as alert and agile physically as he is mentally. He usually spends his summers mountain climbing in the Alps, though I suppose he has suspended this pastime during the last three years while the Tyrolean Alps are being used for other purposes than tourism.

Mr. Schiller wears the pointed beard that was the distinguishing mark of the radical of the nineties. He has a Shakespearean-shaped forehead, but wears un-Shakespearean glasses. He is as interesting to converse with as he is to read, which is more than you can say of many authors. He talks best while in motion, a real peripatetic philosopher. I wondered why he did not take his students out of the old gloomy lecture room and walk with them as he did with me, up and down the lawn between the trees and the ivy-clad walls of the college garden. Curious turf it was, close-cut and springy; I never felt anything like it under my feet except an asphalt pavement on a hot summer day.

But I suppose it would be against the Oxford customs to adopt the Greek method in teaching Greek philosophy. At any rate when I went to Mr. Schiller's lecture on logic I found it as conventional in form as it was revolutionary in spirit. One would have thought that printing had never been invented, nor even the mimeograph. The lecture was delivered slowly, and necessarily without feeling, clause by clause, with frequent repetitions, so every word could be taken down. It was really a brilliant lecture as I discovered afterwards when I read over my notes, but at the time it sounded as dull as proof-reading, for the lecturer dictated even the punctuation marks, as he went along: "colon", "Italics", "inverted commas", etc. The English leave out the punctuation marks in legal documents where they are needed and put them into lectures where they do not belong.

The students, in short black gowns, were seated uncomfortably on benches carved with the names of many generations, and were writing awkwardly on long boards. These were furnished with ink-wells and quill pens, although the students sensibly used fountain pens. I suppose it is somebody's perquisite to supply such things as quills and snuff to the college even if nobody uses them. An American college president told me that he thought there was more graft at Oxford than anywhere else in the world.

If Mr. Schiller had remained in America he would now be lecturing to one or two hundred at a time, largely teachers who had come from all parts of the country expressly to hear his ideas and who would in turn transmit them to their students. But in that room there were only these fifteen boys, many of whom doubtless had no special interest in logic or in Schiller's views of logic and who took his lectures simply because they were required for examination, after which they could be forgotten. I could not help contrasting this scene with the big lecture room at Jena, modern yet satisfying to the esthetic and historic taste, where Eucken's fiery eloquence held men and women gathered from five continents, or with the Collège de France, where Bergson had attracted an even larger and equally cosmopolitan audience. A man in Schiller's position must gain his disciples chiefly through his books, and for a man of Schiller's attractive personality this is a great disadvantage. Print can never take the place of "the spoken word", but to have its effect the spoken word must be widely heard.

The American visitor to Oxford meets a double mystery: how it is that Oxford accomplishes so much with a poor and antiquated plant and how it is that American universities do not accomplish more with their modern and convenient plants. One hates to conclude that plumbing and ventilation are incompatible with high thinking. But if Spencer is right in defining life as the power of adaptation to environment, the Oxford dons are most alive of any human beings. They have shown the adaptability of hermit crabs in fitting themselves into their awkward environment. They somehow manage to make themselves comfortable in buildings that a New York tenement house inspector—who is never regarded as unduly particular—would order torn down. They work contentedly under conditions that would cause a strike in any well-regulated union.

Oxford is the favorite resort of American tourists because it is the most satisfactory of all the sights of Great Britain. The Tower of London and Stratford-on-Avon do not compare with it. They are as disappointing as an extinct volcano. But Oxford is an antiquity in action. Our common feeling in regard to it was best expressed by a lady tourist who was being personally conducted through one of the college quadrangles when a student stuck his head out of a dormer window. "Oh, my! Are these ruins inhabited?" was her delighted exclamation.

That is a characteristic trait of the English, the economical utilization of antiquated buildings and institutions. The House of Lords actually does something, even though what it does is wrong. Westminster Abbey is not a mere mausoleum, like the Paris Panthéon. It is a church where one may worship and hear sermons of decidedly modernistic tone. The French, when they made up their minds that they did not need a King any longer, cut his head off, which was a waste. The English keep their King and make use of him for spectacular and advertising purposes. Oxford is Cluny and Sorbonne in one, a curious combination of old and new, useful and superfluous, progress and reaction, that puzzles and fascinates every American visitor.

Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, M.A., D. Sc., Fellow and Senior Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford—to give for once his full name and titles—was born in 1864. While at Rugby he showed decided symptoms of intelligence, so he was picked as a probable winner in the scholastic race and put in training for the classical scholarships. The British turn all things into sport, even war and education, and since public opinion does not allow headmasters to keep racehorses they indulge their sporting instincts by backing their boys for the Blue Ribbon, the Balliol Scholarships. These boys are then given daily doses of classical verse competition; I infer for the same reason that jockeys are fed on gin.

It is curious to see how widely educators differ as to the fundamental principles of their business. The British system is built upon competitions, prizes, and examinations. The American state universities in the days of their pristine purity—I mean by that of course, when I was a student—regarded competition as vicious, prizes as demoralizing, and examinations as an evil to be eliminated if possible. But it ill becomes a pragmatist to condemn a system that works so well as the British, whatever theoretical objections may occur.

Much as Schiller detested making verses in a dead language, he did it so well that he got a Major Exhibition. This gave him three hundred and fifty dollars for five years as well as four hundred and fifty dollars in Exhibitions from Rugby. But it also meant that he had sold himself to run in harness for another four years at Balliol and was obliged to master a philosophy which he already felt to be a fraud. T. H. Green had died just before Schiller came up and had been sainted for the greater glory of Balliol, and it seemed to the tutors good pedagogy to set their pupils to begin the study of philosophy with Green's "Prolegomena to Ethics." Most of the boys confronted with this abstruse introduction came to the conclusion that it was wonderful, but that they had no head for metaphysics because they could not see any sense in it. Schiller very curiously came to the opposite conclusion from the same premise.

Orthodox Oxford was at that time under the sway of the great philosophic Trinity of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, which was supposed somehow to be concordant with or at least allied to the theological Trinity, and therefore fit food for the souls of innocent young men. The third person of the philosophic Trinity was kept much in the dark, because the tutors generally were not fond of reading German. They knew still less of science and apparently did not suspect that Darwin and his evolution might prove to have some bearing upon philosophy.

Schiller took his First Classes at Oxford, although he was given to asking awkward questions and was known to be reading "out of bounds." One of his examiners complained that he used such queer terms in his papers, "solipsism" and "epistemology" for instance.

The years 1893-1897 Schiller spent as instructor at Cornell University, and at the end of that period an amusing incident occurred, though what it was and how it came about I don't know; possibly because I never thought it best to inquire of any of the few who were in the room at the time. The bare fact is interesting enough, that a young man who had written one of the most brilliant volumes of the times on metaphysics, "Riddles of the Sphinx", and who carried in his pocket a call to teach philosophy at a leading college of Oxford, was flunked in Cornell on his oral examination for Ph.D. in philosophy! Anybody who is curious can pick up half a dozen inconsistent versions of this famous episode on almost any campus. One is, that being fortified by the crinkle of the above mentioned letter over his heart and knowing that an American degree would have no value in England, Schiller did not take the examination seriously and neglected the necessary cramming. Another version of the story is that he turned tables upon his examiners by bringing into action for the first time the pragmatic arguments so much to their discomfiture and bewilderment that he was penalized for these foul blows. But probably the details, if one knew them, would prove to be quite commonplace compared with either of these versions or the more picturesque legends that are in circulation, so it is better to remain in ignorance and file it in the envelope with such cases as John Henry Newman, who got only a Third Class; F. H. Bradley, who got a Second; Gustave Doré, who failed in drawing; Darwin who was called a stupid student, Grant who was graduated in the lower half of his class, Mendel who was never allowed to graduate at Vienna, and the like, good material all for some one who wants to investigate the psychology of students—and examiners.

The chief benefit that Schiller got out of his American sojourn was an acquaintance with William James. It was a case of love at first sight and of lifelong devotion. Schiller dedicated his "Humanism" "To my dear friend, the humanest of philosophers, William James, without whose example and unfailing encouragement this book would never have been written."

In 1897 Schiller was called back to England to become tutor in Corpus Christi College. The president of that college, the late Thomas Fowler, belonged rather to the pre-Hegelian Oxford generation of the Mill-British-empiricism school of thought: He liked things to be made intelligible, and he was so much struck by the lucidity of Schiller's "Riddles of the Sphinx" that he called him from Cornell to Oxford.

Here then he has for twenty years lived the quiet, sheltered, contemplative life of the Oxford don, varied only by such daring adventures as his hunt for the hidden fallacies of formal logic, his single combats with Mr. Bradley, and his ascent of the bleak heights of speculative philosophy, where the Absolute is supposed to dwell in solitude. Our American universities are putting up some very fair imitations of Oxford architecture now. Some have transplanted ivy and it is growing. Some have transplanted tutors and they are growing. But one Oxford custom has not yet been introduced into our universities, the custom of giving the professors time to think. In Oxford all the men have time to think and some of them do. In America if a man shows a tendency to become absorbed in thought he is made a dean or put on the committee of accredited high schools, which cures him.

In the British "Who's Who" Mr. Schiller's recreations are ordinarily put down as "mountaineering, golf, etc." But in one edition of that handy volume of contemporary autobiography it is stated that his chief recreation is "editing Mind!" Thus was revealed the secret of the mysterious appearance at Christmas, 1901, of a periodical which in looks resembled one of the regular numbers of that staid blue-covered review of philosophy, Mind, but with most startling contents. The frontispiece is a "Portrait of Its Immanence, the Absolute." This is followed by an article on "The Place of Humour in the Absolute, by F. H. Badley"; "The Critique of Pure Rot, by I. Cant"; "A Commentary on the Snark"; "More Riddles from Worse Sphinxes", and the like. The advertisements were likewise unusual—"A Dictionary of Oxford Mythology, in six volumes, containing a complete account of the stories told in the Common Rooms and the men to whom they have from time to time been attached"; "A fine consignment of assorted Weltanschauungen just received from Germany"; phonograms of all the lectures, jokes extra, with colored cinematographs of the most famous professors in action, for armchair study, etc. The history of philosophy in fifty-one limericks, covering all systems from Thales to Nietzsche, would be useful on examination time by students of "Philosophy Four."

We hedonists, said Aristippus,
Discomforts detest when they grip us,
So wealth we adore,
The moment live for
And take what the rich 'Arries tip us.

The infinite self-absorbed Brahma
Was dreaming the World-Panorama:
He groaned and he snored,
Till at length he grew bored,
And woke up, and broke up the Drama.

"To multiply beings", said Occam,
"Is needless, 'tis better to dock 'em."
So he seized on his razor,
This pestilent phraser,
And ran out to bloodily block 'em.

A pessimist, great Schopenhauer,
Found living exceedingly sour,
At Hegel he cursed,
His grievances nursed,
And poured forth his wrath by the hour.

As will be seen from the above, Mind! reads much like the Junior Annual of an American college, but at Oxford the students are deficient in journalistic enterprise, so the duty of keeping things cheerful devolves upon their betters. According to its cover Mind! was "edited by a Troglodyte" but as there was only one philosopher in England who would have the cheek to do it and who could parody the style and expose the weak points of the regular contributors to Mind, the troglodyte was soon tracked to his cave. The author of a similar jeu d'esprit, "The Joysome History of Education", which surreptitiously circulates about Columbia University, has so far as I know never been disclosed to the public.

But Schiller has not been able to confine his humor to that uniquity, Mind! He allows it to creep into his contributions to Mind-without-the-exclamation-point and other serious journals. He is a keen debater and does not follow the ordinary rules of fencing, but frequently disconcerts his antagonists by parrying their thrusts with a pun or a personality. He is, so far as I know, the first philosopher to find room for jokes in his formal philosophy, as the following passage shows:

When we map out the whole region of Truth-claim or Formal Truth, we find that it contains (1) lies, (2) errors, (3) methodological fictions, (4) methodological assumptions, (5) postulates, (6) validated truths, (7) axioms, and (8) jokes.

Most philosophers in fact would not only ignore his eighth category, but would neglect his first and second, accepting any statement that claimed to be true and devoting themselves to the study of its logical implications. But the pragmatist is more interested in finding out how and in what way an assertion comes to be called true and how it makes good its claim after it has been asserted. As Schiller puts it:[5]

What then is common to all sorts of Truth and Error, and renders them species of a common genus? Nothing but their psychological side; "truth" is the proper term for what satisfies, "error" for what thwarts, a human purpose in cognitive activity.

The difference between Truth and Error, therefore, is ultimately one in value. The "true" way of conceiving an object or judging a situation is simply the way most valuable for our purpose; the "false" way is one which is, at least relatively, worthless. "Truth" is a eulogistic, "error" a dyslogistic, way of valuing a cognitive situation.

Truth and Error therefore are continuous, as history shows. Either may develop out of the other, and both are rooted in the same problems of knowing, which are ultimately problems of living. The "truths" of one generation become the "errors" of the next, when it has achieved more valuable and efficient modes of interpreting and manipulating the apparent "facts", which the new "truths" are continuously transforming. And conversely, what is now scouted as "error" may hereafter become the fruitful parent of a long progeny of "truths."

It follows also that (as every examiner who marks a paper knows) Truth and Error admit of quantitative differences. Both can vary in importance, and can attain (or fail of) their purpose to a greater or a less degree. But neither is absolute. An answer to a question is in general called true, if it is true enough for the purpose in hand. But this does not preclude a greater exactitude if (for a different purpose) it should be required. It is a true answer to the question—"when do you leave?" to reply "to-morrow"; but if necessary I can specify the train I go by. Thus the demand for absolute exactness is both humanly unnecessary and scientifically unmeaning. Indeed a degree of accuracy higher than the situation demands would be irrational. No one wants to know the height of a mountain in millimeters, and if he did, he could not ascertain it, because his methods would not measure fine enough. Scientific truths are infinitely perfectible, but never absolute.[6]

Now if philosophers are wise, they will accept this sort of truth, and admit that any truth is "absolute" enough so soon as it is equal to the demands made upon it, while none must ever be so absolute as to become incorrigible and incapable of further growth.

A human factor, an element of personal desire, enters into all our thinking; otherwise why should we bother to think? Even our most abstract and general theorems have a hidden Hinterland of subconscious motives, limitations, and conditions.

The abstract statement that "two and two make four" is always incomplete. We need to know to what "twos" and "fours" the dictum is applied. It would not be true of lions and lambs, nor of drops of water, nor of pleasures and pains.[7]

This suppressed context of thought is of course largely personal, and with it is suppressed the human interest of philosophy. Hence the endeavor to drag it to light was very properly called Humanism. Schiller conceives every thought as some one's experiment for which he is responsible.

"Every thought", he says, "is an act and even the most 'theoretical' assertions are made to gratify an interest." He finds in the present war a most unpleasant confirmation of his theory that thought is subordinate to action and never free from human volitional influence:[8]

If only philosophers could be got to face the facts of actual life, could any of them fail to observe the enormous object-lesson in the truth of pragmatism which the world has been exhibiting in the present crisis? Everywhere the "truths" believed in are relative to the nationality and sympathies of their believers. It is, indeed, lamentable that such an orgy of the will to believe should have been needed to illustrate the pragmatic nature of truth, but who will dispute that for months say 999 persons out of 1000 have been believing what they please, and consciously or unconsciously making it "true" with a fervor rarely bestowed even by the most ardent philosophers on the most self-evident truths? No improbability, no absurdity, no atrocity has been too great to win credence, and the uniformity of human nature has been signally attested by the way in which the same stories (mutatis mutandis) have been credited on both sides.

Since the controversy over pragmatism hinges on this theory of truth, I will quote in condensed form what Schiller says in his discussion with Miss Stebbing:[9]

It is an inevitable corollary of the belief in absolute truth that absolute truth cannot find lodgment in human mind, nor be attained by way of human science. We were led, therefore, to examine how in fact belief in the accepted "truths" grew up. We found that every thought was essentially a personal experiment that might succeed or fail, and that whether it did or not depended on its consequences. But it seemed clear that "true" was the term appropriated by language to the success, as false was to failure, of such experiments. Of course both "success" and "truth" are relative terms. Absolute "success" is found as little as absolute "truth" and for the same reason. All "truths" remain (preferred) truth-claims and retain an infinite appetite for assimilating further confirmation.

But there does come a point, alike in the individual's experience and in social opinion at any time, at which it seems that certain truth-claims have received confirmation enough to make them pragmatically certain. These form the reigning truths. But they never form a closed oligarchy or an immutable system. Merit can force its way into their ranks, and inefficiency entails degradation. Thus, though their position is (psychologically) unchallenged, it is never (logically) unchallenged. So it can not be said that because they work they are absolutely true. They are called true because they work, and there is no sense in calling anything true for any other reason; but the progress of knowledge may nevertheless supersede them at the next step.

Since Schiller indignantly repudiates the formula often ascribed to pragmatism that "All that works is true", and since Mr. Bradley has come to say[10] "I agree that any idea which in any way 'works' has in some degree truth", it would seem that these old antagonists are really not so far apart in their opinions as their words would indicate.

For classical authority for his Humanism Schiller goes back to the famous dictum of Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things." In Plato's "Dialogues", Protagoras is represented as having been argued quite out of court by Socrates, but Schiller appeals to posterity against this decision, and he has written several supplemental dialogues of his own to prove that Protagoras was really in the right.[11]

Schiller's most serious work so far is his destructive criticism of the Aristotelian logic. Since my own study of logic came to an abrupt end as soon as I had secured a passing mark on Jevons, I shall not attempt to express an opinion upon the value of Schiller's "Formal Logic", but will instead quote from the review of the volume by Professor Dewey of Columbia.[12]

In substance, the volume (a large octavo of about four hundred pages) is an unrelenting, dogged pursuit of the traditional logic, chapter by chapter, section by section. Not a single doctrine, nor, I think, a single distinction of the official textbooks escapes Schiller's demolishing hand.... A vital and wholesome sense of the realities of actual thinking pervades the whole book; it supplies the background against which the criticisms of formal doctrine are projected. Mr. Schiller brings out, in case after case, with a cumulative effect which is fairly deadly, that at the crucial point each formal distinction is saved from complete meaninglessness only by an unacknowledged and surreptitious appeal to some matter of context, need, aim, and use. Why not, then, frankly recognize the indispensableness of such volitional and emotional factors, and instead of pretending to a logic that excludes them, build up a logic that corresponds to human intellectual endeavor and achievement. It is difficult to see how even the most hardened devotee of a purely theoretical intellectualism can lay down the book without such questions haunting him....

While traditional logic has much to say about truth, the truth it talks about is mere formal consistency, since it declines to consider the material application of its premises. Relevance—a fundamental conception of concrete thought—is excluded because it goes with selection, with selection of the part that is useful, while formal logic professes an all-inclusive ideal. Selection, moreover, is a voluntary and hence arbitrary act, and so is shut out from a doctrine that acknowledges only what is purely theoretical. Finally, formal logic, with its creed of absolute certitude, abhors the very mention of adventure and risk, the life blood of actual human thinking, which is aroused by doubts and questions, and proceeds by guesses, hypotheses, and experiments, to a decision which is always somewhat arbitrary and subject to the risk of later revision.

Much of the criticism of "Formal Logic" contained in this large volume is too technical for any save professionals to follow, but at my request Mr. Schiller was kind enough to write an article for The Independent putting the main points of it in a form "understanded of the common people." From this I quote the passage in which he shows that the syllogism cannot lead unerringly to new truth:

The peculiar aim of logic hitherto has been to discover a form of "valid inference." By this was meant a form of words so fool-proof that it could not be misapplied, and that the use of it would absolutely guarantee the soundness of the conclusion if only the reasoning had been fortunate enough to start from true premises. In the syllogism it was supposed that such a form had been found. From all swans are white and this bird is a swan it was to follow inevitably that this bird is white, and the course of nature would eternally conform to the prophetic demonstrations of logic.

Yet logicians also had soon to note that even formally there was something wrong about this syllogistic form. It seemed to "prove" what was either nothing new or nothing known. To justify the "major premise" "all swans are white", must not its assert or have already seen this swan and know that it is white? Or, if he did not know this, is he not risking an assertion about some "swans" on the strength of what he knows about others? And what right had he thus to argue from the known to the unknown? Can an "inference" be "valid" if it involves a risk?

When therefore black swans arrive from Australia to upset his dogmatizing, what is he to do? Will he say his major premise was a definition, and no bird, however swan-like, shall be called a "swan" if it cannot pass his color-test? If so, his reasoning is still caught in the old dilemma, that he either "proves" nothing new or begs the question in another way. For he then had no right to assert his "minor premise", this bird is a swan, if he knew not it was white. Or will he, desperately, say "in both of these interpretations the syllogistic form is fatuous; but kindly understand it as asserting a law of nature which is immutable, and applied to the particular case in the minor premise." But, if so, how does he know that his "law" applies to the "case"? that the "case" is such as he takes it to be? that he has picked out the right "law" to deal with the case and formulated it correctly? If it is quite certain that the "law" applies to the "case", his conclusion proves nothing new; if it is not, he runs the risk that the case of which he is trying to predict the behavior may be so exceptional as to break or modify his law. And if he runs that risk, is he not renouncing his ideal of reaching fool-proof certainty?

There seems to be no way, therefore, of saving "valid inference", of so interpreting the syllogism that it is both formally valid and humanly instructive. If it is to be instructive, it can only enlighten human ignorance, and then its premises cannot be certainly true.[13]

Some critics, having in mind how little attention is paid to formal logic in American schools, have expressed the opinion that Schiller was wasting his powder on dead game. But however little it may be used in reasoning, formal logic is still the object of formal reverence everywhere, and in Oxford it is strongly entrenched and heavily subsidized as Schiller says in the passage:

That the same doctrine, in perfect verbal continuity, should have been taught and examined on for over two thousand years would be the most stupendous fact in education, were it not surpassed by the still more surprising fact that during all this time no one has arisen to call it nonsense through and through, and that every would-be improvement has been countered by the retort that it was "not in Aristotle." ... The great mass of logicians have always been true to their salt. For Aristotle is still very heavily endowed.

In the University of Oxford alone three philosophy professors, twenty-eight literae humaniores tutors, and about 460 classical scholars and exhibitioners are paid, at an annual cost of over £50,000, to believe that the theory of thought has stood still, or stumbled into error when it tried to move, ever since the composition of the "Organon", and that all modern science may be read into and out of the obscurities of the "Posterior Analytics." The Secret Doctrine in which this is taught has never been divulged in print, but examiners know that there are passages in the ordinary Oxford Logic Lecture which must have been copied down by two hundred generations of students ever since the twelfth century.

Like James and Bergson and unlike Dewey, Schiller has interested himself in psychical research as a possible way of proving personal immortality.[14] He does not seem from his published work to have yet obtained any satisfactory experimental evidence of a future life, but he regards immortality as an ethical postulate, necessary to the conceptions of a moral universe, for if we reject it "we should be plunged in that unfathomable abyss where Scepticism fraternizes with Pessimism and they hug their miseries in chaos undisguised."

But in his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx" he expressed the opinion that nowadays few people took a real interest in the question of immortality and that it had little influence upon conduct. This unconventional opinion was confirmed many years later when the Society for Psychical Research conducted a questionnaire on the subject and found that of the many thousand persons interrogated a large proportion did not regard a future life as of practical importance to them.[15]

Within the last few years Schiller has entered a new field, the eugenics movement, where his keen wit and power of analysis are doing good service. In his review of Nietzsche's work[16] he recognizes that Nietzsche is not without reason when he asserts that the moral qualities he dislikes, such as pity and sympathy, may lead to decadence, for, as Schiller elsewhere shows, social reform, unless it is eugenically directed, may lead to the growth of the evils it aims to alleviate. In a very remarkable article published shortly before the outbreak of the war,[17] he foretold the collapse of European civilization and suggested that the Japanese or Chinese, through the greater importance they attach to the family, might be found more worthy of preeminence.

If the ancestor-worship of the animist can be developed into the descendant-worship of the eugenist, I can see no reason why one should not prognosticate for both of them a rosier future and a more assured continuance than for our European societies, if these latter yield to the pressure of those, whether called individualists, socialists, or militarists, who tempt them to destruction.

The danger to European culture lies, he says, in that "our Hellenistic political philosophy exhibits all the marks of senile dementia and progressive paranoia."

The evidence goes to show that throughout the most valuable part of the nation, not only in the upper classes but also in the middle classes and in the best parts of the working classes, the birth-rate per marriage has in a generation sunk from four and a half to two, and is now only half the size required to keep up the numbers in those classes. In other words, society is now so ordered that in every generation it sheds one-half of the classes it itself values most highly, and supplies their places with the offspring of the feeble-minded and casual-labourer classes, whose families still average more than seven. What seriously aggravates the evil is the whole trend of social legislation. Social reform costs money, and the money is raised by taxation, which bears very hardly on the middle classes, who cannot curtail luxuries like the rich, and will not lower their standard of comfort. They meet the extra expense, therefore, by further postponing the age of marriage, and further reducing their output of children. One of the chief effects, therefore, of our present methods of improving social conditions is to deteriorate the race. And this in a twofold manner: they eliminate the middle class, and they promote the survival of the unfit and defective.

It is perfectly possible, therefore, to tax the middle classes out of existence. Indeed, it has been done. History exhibits a great object-lesson in the decline of the Roman empire. This appears to have been mainly due to an unscientific system of taxation which crushed the middle class and left no breeding ground for ability and ambition between the millionaire nobles, who had nothing to rise to, and the pauperised masses, who had no chance of rising. Consequently, the empire had to take from without its borders the men it needed to conduct its military and civil administration. The barbarians alone could furnish the men to run the empire, and consequently the barbarians inevitably came to overrun the empire.

The Great War which he could not foresee has immeasurably accelerated the degenerative process which he foretold. The death roll of university students and graduates, representing, however inadequate the examination system, a selected class of young men of superior intellectual ability, is probably higher than in any other class. When I visited Oxford a few years before the war the students were already drilling for the impending conflict and practically all who were eligible enlisted at the first call. Raising an army by appeals to patriotism as was done in England means sending to the front to bear the brunt of battle longest those who are most energetic, self-sacrificing, and intelligent, while the slackers, the incompetent, the weaklings, the selfish, and the dull were left to the last or not taken at all.

Besides this the burden of taxation resting upon the middle classes that Schiller thought unbearable in 1914 has been multiplied and will act as a deterrent to large families more strongly than ever in the future. A Royal Commission has been appointed to consider methods for checking the alarming decline in the birth-rate.

One anti-eugenic agency which Schiller fails to mention but which strikes an outsider as very serious is Labanism. It was formerly the custom to require all Oxford fellows to remain celibate. Later they were allowed to marry after serving seven years, whence the name. Recently this prohibition has been removed, but the antiquated social organization of the colleges acts as a practical deterrent of marriage. So by this elaborate and expensive system of examination, competitions, and promotions—which unfortunately is not so inefficient as its occasional mistakes might lead us to think—the university prevents those whom it deems to have the brightest minds from transmitting their mental endowments to posterity. The devil could not have devised a more ingenious scheme for the promotion of mediocrity. Since Oxford has been in existence for about eight hundred years it must have had a considerable influence on the reduction of British genius.

As Schiller points out, any measures to be eugenically effective must apply to the young. The rewards bestowed upon ability are not only frequently misapplied but they are invariably too long delayed. The youthful genius is too often forced to give up having a family or compelled to support it on faith, hope and charity. To this defect in our civilization Schiller has given the apt name of "social hysteresis."[18]

In all the professions (except, perhaps, that of the actress) the young are underpaid, and established reputations are overpaid. It would be eugenically preferable to do the opposite. Yet the existing practice is largely due to unintentional stupidity, and failure to discover ability soon enough. Now to the individual this system brings compensation, if he lives long enough, because he continues to be rewarded for work he has done long ago, and even is no longer capable of doing, and is eventually raised to the status of a "grand old man" whom ancient institutions delight to honour, by dint of sheer longevity. But eugenically this social hysteresis, this delay in recompensing merit, has a fatal effect. It renders the capable, ambitious and rising members of the professional classes unduly sterile, owing to compulsory celibacy, postponement of marriage, overwork, etc. Thus a large proportion of the ability which rises to the top of the social ladder lasts only for one generation, and does not permanently benefit the race.

From this passage it will be seen that Schiller does not fall into the common fallacy of unconsciously assuming that the upper classes of our present social system necessarily consist of superior individuals. But he does lay stress upon something often overlooked, that this assumption is more justified as society becomes more democratic:

Precisely in proportion as a society improves the opportunities of the able to rise, it must accelerate the elimination of fitness in the racial stock. So long as a relatively rigid social order rendered it almost impossible for ability to rise from the ranks, reservoirs of ability could accumulate unseen in the lower social strata, and burst forth in times of need, as in the French Revolution: but the more successfully a carrière ouverte aux talents is instituted, the more surely are these strata kept drained, and incapacitated from retrieving the waste of ability in the upper layers of society. Now it is doubtless true that the primary need of society is to find persons capable of conducting its affairs ably, and that a social order which does not allow ability to rise is therefore bad: but nations cannot with impunity so order themselves as to eliminate the very qualities they most admire and desire, and must husband their resources in men as in the other sources of their wealth and welfare.[19]

That is to say, it did not matter much if in former times the nobility did tend to die out in a few generations, for in hereditable ability they were not much above the average. But in the more just regime that we are trying to introduce, especially in America, when the opportunities for higher education and advancement are extended to the gifted of all classes, it will be disastrous if the professional and well-to-do classes fail to contribute their share to the future population, for it means a continuous reversal of the method of the survival of the fittest by which evolution has been accomplished. This is not a law that man can repeal however he may disregard it. So it happens that civilized societies tend to die at the top and the human race makes little or no progress in native ability. As Schiller says:

The inventor of the wheel or even of a new mode of chipping flints may well have been as great a genius as the human race has produced, and it accords well with this that the early paleolithic races seem to have possessed a cranial capacity, not less, but greater than our own. For in the dim red dawn of man the fool-killing apparatus of nature was terribly effective, and society could do little to mitigate its horrors and to protect its inefficient members.

The injustice, and what is more important, the injurious effects of the present distribution of honors and emoluments he exposes in his article on "National Self-Selection":

Is it not nonsense to say that the Archbishop of Canterbury is paid £15,000 a year and Prof. J. J. Thomson seven or eight hundred, because the persons fitted to perform the latter's functions are twenty times as common as those suited to the former's? Is not the real reason plainly that the former is the beneficiary of a long social development which has liberally endowed the Church, while the social appreciation of the value of science is only just beginning, and has not yet raised the makers of new truths to a par with the custodians of time-honoured revelations? Our example, however, draws attention to a very general fact, viz., that the social position of various functions is very largely the product of past valuations which have persisted from mere habit. Hence their present salaries do not really prove that an Archbishop is twenty times as valuable to a nation as a scientific genius, or thrice as precious as a Premier, nor even that men now think so. How many of us, for example, really now believe that mere descent from an illiterate medieval baron attests sufficient merit to entitle a man to a hereditary seat in the House of Lords? If we continued to value fighting qualities as highly as of yore, we should promote our actual fighting men. When we want really to defend the House of Lords, we point to its sagacity in gauging the will of the people and to the economic value of its attractiveness for foreign heiresses.

Hence one of the chief needs of a society which desires to reconstitute itself on eugenical principles is a thorough revision of social status. It must bring the social position of various services into closer agreement with their present value. And it must induce a greater feeling of responsibility about the popular valuations and transvaluations of functions, which are constantly exalting the position of the caterers to individual pleasures above the consolidators of man's permanent welfare. It is not good for a society that a cricketer or a prize-fighter or a dancer should be esteemed and rewarded more highly than the man who discovers a cure for malaria or cancer.[20]

The humanistic view of metaphysics Schiller expresses in the preface to the 1910 edition of his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx."

Practically a system of metaphysics, with whatever pretensions to pure thought and absolute rationality it may start is always in the end one man's personal vision about the universe, and the "metaphysical craving" often so strong in the young is nothing but the desire to tell the universe what one thinks of it. Of course, the tale may be worth telling if told well.

This describes the "Riddles of the Sphinx" exactly. In it the youthful Schiller tells the universe what he thinks of it and it is told well. But his thoughts have changed in the twenty-five years since this volume was published so that even in its revised form it does not so well express his views as do his later volumes, "Humanism" and "Studies in Humanism", of which revised editions were brought out in 1912.

The doctrine known as Absolute Idealism was, Schiller explains, imported from Germany, "soon after its demise in its native country", for the purpose of counteracting the anti-religious developments of science. But the abstract conception of the Absolute is, in his opinion, of no value to religion or anything else. The pragmatic demand for God is, first, as "a human moral principle of help and justice", and second, as "an aid to the intellectual comprehension of the universe", but the metaphysical Absolute satisfies neither of these cravings, for it is too impersonal to help anybody and too general to explain anything.

In his chapter on "Absolutism and the Dissociation of Personality"[21] he generously offers his aid to the idealistic monists who have difficulty in conceiving how the One became the Many and why the individualistic minds included in the Universal Mind should be so antagonistic. Schiller suggests that it is an analogous case to the dissociation of that celebrated Boston lady "Miss Beauchamp" into several secondary personalities. But he admits that it is "a little startling at first to think of the Absolute as morbidly dissociated or even as downright mad", especially since in the case of the Absolute there is no outsider, like Doctor Morton Prince, to put the parts together again.

Many years before he had said[22]

The conception of a Deity absorbed in perfect, unchanging and eternal bliss is a blasphemy upon the Divine energy which might be permitted to the heathen ignorance of Aristotle, but which should be abhorred by all who have learnt the lesson of the Crucifixion. A theology which denies that the imperfection of the world must be reflected in the sorrows of the Deity simply shows itself blind to the deepest and truest meaning of the figure of Him that was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" and deaf to the gospel of Divine sympathy with the world. Thus the world-process is the process of the redemption alike of God, of the world and of our own selves.

The conception of a struggling and self-developing God which Schiller adduced from Christian principles is remarkably like that to which Bergson was led by other lines of reasoning.[23]

The value of the pragmatic method to religion is discussed by Schiller in his article on "Faith, Reason and Religion",[24] where he shows that even the most rigorous scientific reasoning involves the element of faith, and on the other hand that faith is devoid of value unless it is verified in the only way by which anything can be verified, that is, by works. He says:

Christianity is an essentially human and thoroughly pragmatic religion, hampered throughout its history and at times almost strangled by an alien theology, based upon the intellectualistic speculations of Greek philosophers. Fortunately the Greek metaphysic embodied (mainly) in the "Athanasian" creed is too obscure to have ever been really functional; its chief mischief has always been to give theological support to "philosophic" criticisms, which by identifying God with "the One" have aimed at eliminating the human elements from the Christian religion. As against all such attempts, however, we must hold fast to the principle that the truest religion is that which issues in and fosters the best life.

The pragmatic criterion of truth, that all truths must work, is not a lax one as its opponents assert but the most stringent that can be applied. It means—"You shall back your beliefs with your acts and shall not assert the truth of whatever suits you without any testing at all." It eliminates as meaningless all theories that make no difference whether they are believed or disbelieved. It demands constant confirmation of all beliefs by their consequences. It insists upon the unity of theory and practice, of faith and works. This point was plainly put by Schiller in his address before the Pan-Anglican Church Congress of 1908:

For any theory to work, it must be believed in, e.g., believed to be true. It is impossible, e.g., to practice prayer merely as a piece of spiritual hygiene, and in order to get the strengthening which is said to result from the practice. The practice need not, of course, start with a firm belief in the reality of its object. But unless it engenders a real belief, it will become inefficacious. Hence, to conceive of Pragmatism as ultimately sanctioning an "act-as-if" attitude of religious make-believe is a misapprehension; it is to confound it with the discredited and ineffectual dualism of Kant's antithesis of practical and theoretic "reason." Lastly, it should be noted that any theory which works must evoke some response from the objective nature of things. If there were no "God", i.e., nothing that could afford any satisfaction to any religious emotion, the whole religious attitude would be futile. If it is not, it must contain essential truth, though it may remain to be determined what is the objective fact corresponding to the postulate.

HOW TO READ SCHILLER

"Humanism" (1903, new edition 1912) and "Studies in Humanism" (1907, new edition 1912) are both collections of papers presenting various phases of Schiller's philosophy. Either one may serve as an introduction to the author. "Riddles of the Sphinx" (1891), though also revised (1910), represents an earlier mode of thought. "Formal Logic" (1912) is too technical for any but well prepared students. All Schiller's works are published by The Macmillan Company.

The reader who loves a fight and does not faint at the sight of inkshed will find what he wants in almost any volume of the Oxford Mind or the Columbia Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. Where the conflict rages most fiercely there Schiller will be seen in the midst of the combatants, thrusting in all directions at the weak points in their armor. To enumerate all of his controversial and fugitive writings would be impossible here, but the following articles at least must be mentioned:

"Do Men Desire Immortality?" (Fortnightly, vol. 76, p. 430).

"The Desire for a Future Life" (Independent, September 15, 1904).

"Psychical Research" (Fortnightly, vol. 83, p. 60). Presidential Address (Proceedings Society for Psychical Research, 1914-1915).

Miss Beauchamp (Journal Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 4, p. 20; and Mind, No. 70, p. 183).

"The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche" (Quarterly Review, 1913).

"Choice" and "Infallibility" (Hibbert Journal, 1909).

"Plato" (Quarterly Review, vol. 204, p. 62). "Pluralism" (Proceedings of Aristotelian Society, 1908-1909).

"The Rational Conception of Truth" (Proceedings Aristotelian Society, 1906).

"Oxford of the Workingman" (Fortnightly, February, 1913).

"Cosmopolitan Oxford" (Fortnightly, May, 1902). "War Prophecies" (Journal Society Psychical Research, June, 1916).

"Criticism of Perry's Realism" (Mind, 1914).

Discussions of pragmatism (Mind, 1913, 1915). "New Developments of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy" (Mind, 1915).

"Present Phase of Idealistic Philosophy" (Mind, January and October, 1910).

"Realism, Pragmatism, and William James" (Mind, 1915)

"The Humanism of Protagoras" (Mind, April, 1911).

"Logic versus Life" (Independent, vol. 73, p. 375). "Aristotle's Refutation of the Aristotelian Logic" (Mind, vol. 23, pp. 1, 395, 558).

"The Working of Truths and Their Criterion" (Mind, vol. 22, No. 88).

"Error" (IV Congresso internazionale di filosofia, Bologna, 1911).

"Relevance" (Mind, vol. 21, No. 82).

"The Working of Truths" (Mind, vol. 21, No. 84). "National Self-Selection" (Eugenics Review, April, 1914)

"Our Critic Criticized" (Eugenics Review, January, 1914). Criticism of Schiller and other pragmatists may be found in the controversies referred to, but I may also add the following references:

"Vital Lies" by Vernon Lee (John Lane Company, 1913).

"Pragmatism" (Quarterly Review, April, 1909).

"British Exponents of Pragmatism" by Professor M'Gilvary (Hibbert Journal, April, 1908).

"Der Pragmatismus von James und Schiller," by Doctor Werner Bloch (1913).

CHAPTER V

JOHN DEWEY

Teacher of Teachers

If some historian should construct an intellectual weather map of the United States he would find that in the eighties the little arrows that show which way the wind blows were pointing in toward Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the nineties toward Chicago, Illinois, and in the nineteen hundreds toward New York City, indicating that at these points there was a rising current of thought. And if he went so far as to investigate the cause of these local upheavals of the academic atmosphere he would discover that John Dewey had moved from one place to the other. It might be a long time before the psychometeorologist would trace these thought currents spreading over the continent back to their origin, a secluded classroom where the most modest man imaginable was seated and talking in a low voice for an hour or two a day. John Dewey is not famous like W. J. Bryan or Charlie Chaplin. He is not even known by name to most of the millions whose thought he is guiding and whose characters he is forming. This is because his influence has been indirect. He has inspired individuals and instigated reforms in educational methods which have reached the remotest schoolhouses of the land. The first of the Dewey cyclones revolved about psychology, the second about pedagogy, and the third about philosophy.

I was a thousand miles away from the first storm center, yet I distinctly felt the vibrations. That was in the University of Kansas when the psychology class was put in charge of a young man named Templin just back from his Wanderjahr in Germany. This study had hitherto belonged ex officio to the Chancellor of the university who put the finishing touch on the seniors' brains with aid of McCosh. But the queer looking brown book stamped "Psychology—John Dewey" that was put into our hands in 1887 relegated the Princeton philosopher to the footnotes and instead told about Helmholtz, Weber, Wundt and a lot of other foreigners who, it seemed, were not content to sit down quietly and search their own minds—surely as good as anybody's—but went about watching the behavior of children, animals, and crazy folks and spent their time in a laboratory—the idea!—measuring the speed of thought and dissecting brains. This young man in Michigan made bold to claim psychology as a natural science instead of a minor branch of metaphysics, and he did the best he could to prove it with such meager materials as were available at the time. His "Psychology" appeared, as should be remembered, three years before the epoch-making work of James and before any permanent psychological laboratory had been opened in the United States. In taking down again my battered brown copy of Dewey's "Psychology" I am surprised to find how trite and old-fashioned some of it sounds. Although Dewey thought he had thrown overboard all metaphysics it is evident that he was then carrying quite a cargo of it unconsciously.

But the commotion started by Dewey's "Psychology" was a tempest in an inkpot compared with the cyclone that swept over the country when he began to put his theories into practice at the University of Chicago in 1894. I heard echoes of it as far west as Wyoming. The teachers who went to the summer session of the University of Chicago came back shocked, fascinated, inspired, or appalled, according to their temperaments. The very idea of an "experimental school" was disconcerting, suggesting that the poor children were being subjected to some sort of vivisection or—what was worse—implying that the established educational methods were all wrong. "He lets the children do whatever they want to do," whispered the teachers to their stay-at-home colleagues, who, like themselves, were spending their time in keeping the children from doing what they wanted to do and in making them do what they did not want to do. "He lets the children talk and run around and help one another with their lessons!" and all the teachers looked at each other with a wild surmise silent on the school-room platform. Could it be that there was a better way, that this task on which they were wearing out their nerves, trying to reduce to rigidity for five hours a roomful of wriggling children, was no less harmful to the children than to themselves? "I'd like to see John Dewey try to manage my sixty," remarks the presiding teacher as she suppresses a little girl on the front seat with a smile and a big boy on the back seat with a tap of her pencil.

As a matter of fact, the children neither studied nor did what they pleased, but the idea was that if children had a sufficient variety of activities provided they would like what they did and their activities could be so arranged as to result in getting knowledge and in forming good habits of thought. The common assumption that the main idea was to have the children do and study what they liked was a complete missing of the intellectual idea or philosophy of the school, which was an attempt to work out the theory that knowledge, with respect to both sense observation and general principles, is an offshoot of activities, and that the practical problems arising in connection with consecutive occupations afford the means for a development of interest in scientific problems for their own sake. The social grouping of children, and the attempt to get coöperative group work, was always just as important a phase as individual freedom—not only on moral grounds, but because of the theoretical conception that human intelligence developed under social conditions and for social purposes—in other words, "mind" has developed not only with respect to activity having purpose, but also social activity. These same notions of the central place of intelligence in action and the social nature of intelligence are fundamental in Dewey's "Ethics."

The real distinguishing characteristic of schools of the Dewey type is not absence of discipline but a new ideal of discipline. This is most clearly stated in one of his more recent works:

Discipline of mind is in truth a result rather than a cause. Any mind is disciplined in a subject in which independent intellectual initiative and control have been achieved. Discipline represents original native endowment turned through gradual exercise into effective power.... Discipline is positive and constructive. Discipline, however, is frequently regarded as something negative—as a painfully disagreeable forcing of mind away from channels congenial to it into channels of constraint, a process grievous at the time, but necessary as preparation for a more or less remote future. Discipline is then generally identified with drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy of driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into a resistant material; or is imaged after the analogy of the mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to a soldierly bearing and habits that are naturally wholly foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort, whether it be called discipline or not, is not mental discipline. Its aim and result are not habits of thinking but uniform external habits of action. By failing to ask what he means by discipline, many a teacher is misled into supposing that he is developing mental force and efficiency by methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual activity, and which tend to create mechanical routine, or mental passivity and servility.—"How We Think", p. 63.

But even more revolutionary than Dewey's rejection of the strict discipline then prevailing in the schools was his introduction of industrial training as an integral part of education, not merely for the purpose of giving the pupils greater manual skill, still less with the object of improving their chances of getting a job or of making them more efficient for the benefit of the employer, but chiefly because it is only through participation in industry that one can get an understanding of the meaning of science and the constitution of the social organism. In the old days when most industries were carried on in the household or the neighborhood children learned them by observation and participation. School was then a place where this very effective form of home education could be supplemented by "book learning."

But Dewey faced frankly the fact that the house-hold arts and handicrafts had passed away for keeps, and he refused to join in the pretense that they could be profitably "revived" by the various esthetic and socialist movements of the William Morris and Ruskin type. He recognized that the machine and the factory had come to stay, and if the worker is not to become a factory machine himself he must receive in school such a broad and diversified training as will make him realize the significance of the work he does. Or as Dewey said in "School and Society" in 1899:

We sometimes hear the introduction of manual training, art and science into the elementary, and even into the secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend toward the production of specialists—that they detract from our present system of generous, liberal culture. The point to this objection would be ludicrous if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present education which is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or art.

Mere "manual training", then all the rage, has failed, as Dewey said it would, because of its fictitious and adventitious character. His method was as different from the ordinary kind of "manual training" as hay-making is from dumb-bell exercise.

We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving, sewing and cooking, as methods of living and learning, not as distinct studies. We must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and ingenuity of man; in short as instrumentalities through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.

So Dewey set the children to solving the problems of primitive man and retracing for themselves the steps in the evolution of industrial processes. They picked the cotton from the boll, carded, spun it into thread and wove it into cloth on machines of their own making and for the most part of their own devising. This gave opportunity for personal experimenting and taught them history by repeating history, not repeating a verbal version of history. And the history they thus learnt was the history of the human race, not the history of some chosen people.

This recapitulation theory, like all others, has since been carried to an extreme. Acting on the idea that children normally pass through the same stages as European civilization some teachers seem to think it necessary to keep them to the chronological curriculum. So they cultivate a pseudo-savagery for a year or two, then make them pagans and later teach the ideals of the age of chivalry which are hardly less repugnant to the modern mind. So careful are they to avoid anachronism that if a boy should by any accident behave like a Christian before he reached the grade corresponding to A.D. 28 he would be likely to get a bad mark for it. So, too, I have known teachers of mathematics who would not allow their pupils to take a short cut to the answer by way of algebra unless it was in the algebra class and teachers of chemistry who would not permit the word "atom" to be mentioned in classroom until the term was half through. But such extravagances find no countenance in Dewey's writings or the examples he cites.

In the laboratory school of the University of Chicago Professor and Mrs. Dewey had for several years a free hand in developing and trying out their theories. Their aim was to utilize instead of to suppress the fourfold impulses of childhood; the interest in conversation, the interest in inquiry, the interest in construction and the interest in artistic expression. The volume in which Professor Dewey explained what he was trying to do and why, "School and Society", was first published in 1899 and has been reprinted almost every year up to the present.[1] It might well have borne the same title as Benjamin Tucker's volume on anarchism: "Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One." It consists of the stenographic reports of three informal talks by Professor Dewey to the parents of his pupils and the friends of his school, supplemented by some fugitive papers. Yet it has an influence comparable to no other modern book of its size unless perhaps Herbert Spencer's tract on "Education."

How far the seed was sown is shown by "Schools of To-morrow",[2] which tells of a dozen places where the ideas that were so novel and startling in the nineties are in practical operation. But it is characteristic of Dewey's self-effacement that he makes no claim for priority, and there is no hint anywhere in the volume that many of the methods described were first devised and tried out in the Dewey school at Chicago nearly twenty years ago. He gives the credit for the theory to Rousseau and the credit for the practice to Mr. Wirt of Gary, Mrs. Johnson of Fairhope, Mr. Valentine of Indianapolis, Professor Merriam of Missouri, and others.

Mr. Wirt who organized the school system of the steel city of Gary, Indiana, and who is now employed in remodeling some of the schools of New York City, owes his inspiration and ideas, as I have heard him say, very largely to Dewey.[3] The Gary system differs from the trade schools in that the industries are used for their educative value. The pupils are shifted around from one shop to another three times a year. Their tasks are artificial, symbolic or imitative, but from the fifth grade up real constructive work, for the boys making school furniture, iron castings, laying concrete, and printing; and for the girls, sewing, cooking, marketing, millinery, and laundry, and for both, gardening, pottery, designing, bookbinding and bookkeeping. Arithmetic, writing, history, and geography come in necessarily and naturally in connection with their work. Under this régime the pupils make better progress in the traditional subjects than those who devote their whole time to books. That it does not divert them from higher education is shown by the fact that one third of all the pupils who have left the Gary schools in the eight years of their existence are now in the state university, an engineering school, or a business college, a remarkable record for a population mostly composed of foreign-born steel mill laborers. All the schoolrooms are in use for something all day long, so the "peak load" is avoided and a great economy effected. The grounds and buildings also serve as community centers and the last trace of the ancient feud between "town and gown" has been wiped out.

The chief advantage which these "schools of tomorrow" have over those of the past is, in Dewey's opinion, that they come a step nearer toward giving the type of training necessary to prepare citizens for democracy. In this new book, then, he is working toward the ideal he promulgated at the beginning of his career when he entered the faculty of the University of Michigan as the youngest man ever appointed to a professorship in that institution. He sounded the note of his philosophy thirty years ago in a paper on "The Ethics of Democracy",[4] and he has never faltered in his allegiance to the high ideal he there set forth, although he has broken away from the Hegelian mode of thought he then used. The paper was written to confute Sir Henry Maine who, in his "Popular Government", argued that democracy was an historical accident and the most fragile, insecure, and unprogressive form of government. Dewey objects to his mechanical and mathematical conception of democratic government and sets forth a very different conception as the following quotations will show:

The majority have a right to "rule" because their majority is not the mere sign of a surplus in numbers, but is the manifestation of the purpose of the social organism.

Government is to the state what language is to the thought: it not only communicates the purposes of the state, but in so doing gives them for the first time articulation and generality.

A vote is not the impersonal counting of one; it is a manifestation of some tendency of the social organism through a member of that organism.

The democratic formula that government derives its powers from the consent of the governed ... means that in democracy the governors and the governed are not of two classes, but two aspects of the same fact—the fact of the possession by society of a unified and articulate will.

The aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into their proper positions in the social organism....

Democracy means that personality is the first and final reality.... It holds that the spirit of personality indwells in every individual, and that the choice to develop it must proceed from that individual. From this central position of democracy result the other notes of democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity—words which are not mere words to catch a mob, but symbols of the highest ethical idea which humanity has yet reached—the idea that personality is the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that in every human individual there lies personality.... It means that in every individual there lives an infinite and universal possibility: that of being a king or priest. Aristocracy is blasphemy against personality.

Even in those days when socialism had hardly begun to be whispered, at least in academic circles, Dewey was not afraid to say that: "Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political.... A democracy of wealth is a necessity." Twenty-five years later I saw Professor Dewey giving a public demonstration of his faith in democracy when I found him marching with a small body of men at the tail end of a suffrage procession while the crowds that lined Fifth Avenue jeered and hissed at us. Who would then have thought that five years later all parties would be committed to equal suffrage and four presidential candidates would be bidding against one another for the privilege of giving the women the vote!

Education for democracy is the burden of Dewey's message to the world, and I must give one more quotation on this point:

Democracy, the crucial expression of modern life, is not so much an addition to the scientific and industrial tendencies as it is the perception of their social or spiritual meaning. Democracy is an absurdity where faith in the individual as individual is impossible; and this faith is impossible where intelligence is regarded as a cosmic power, not an adjustment and application of individual tendencies.

... Democracy is estimable only through the changed conception of intelligence that forms modern science, and of want, that forms modern industry. It is essentially a changed psychology. The conventional type of education which trains children in docility and obedience, to the careful performance of imposed tasks because they are imposed, regardless of where they lead, is suited to an autocratic society. These are the traits needed in a state where there is one head to plan and care for the lives and institutions of the people. But in a democracy they interfere with the successful conduct of society and government.... If we train our children to take orders, to do things simply because they are told to, and fail to give them confidence to act and think for themselves, we are putting an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcoming the present defects of our system and of establishing the truth of democratic ideals.

Children in school must be allowed freedom so that they will know what its use means when they become the controlling body, and they must be allowed to develop active qualities of initiative, independence, and resourcefulness, before the abuses and failures will disappear.—"School and Society", p. 304.

The old theory of education has been most pungently put by "Mr. Dooley", the saloon-keeper of Archey Road, in one of his monologues with Mr. Hennessy: "It don't matter much what you study—so long as you don't like it." Professor Dewey takes almost the opposite ground when he says:[5] "Interest ought to be the basis for selection because children are interested in the things they need to learn."

This, as he shows, does not mean that in the new schools things are "made easy"; on the contrary the pupils work harder because things are made interesting.

The range of the material is not in any way limited by making interest a standard of selection. Work that appeals to pupils as worth while, that holds out the promise of resulting in something to their own interests, involves just as much persistence and concentration as the work that is given by the sternest advocate of disciplinary drill. The latter requires the pupil to strive for ends which he cannot see, so that he has to be kept at the task by means of offering artificial ends, marks, and promotions, and by isolating him in an atmosphere where his mind and senses are not being constantly besieged by the call of life which appeals so strongly to him. But the pupil presented with a problem, the solution of which will give him an immediate sense of accomplishment and satisfied curiosity, will bend all his powers to the work: the end itself will furnish the stimulus necessary to carry him through the drudgery.... Since the children are no longer working for rewards, the temptation to cheat is reduced to a minimum. There is no motive for doing dishonest acts, since the result shows whether the child has done the work, the only end recognized.—"School and Society."

We have then two fundamentally different theories of training, the Dooley versus the Dewey system. They are now on trial in some degree all the way up from the beginning of the primary to the end of the college.[6] One is authoritarian; the other libertarian. One cultivates obedience; the other initiative. One strives for uniformity; the other diversity. In one the impelling motive is duty; in the other desire. In one the attitude of the student is receptivity; in the other activity. In one there is compulsory coördination; in the other voluntary coöperation.

Obviously neither could be carried to an exclusive extreme, and in practice we find each more or less unconsciously borrowing methods from the others. Doubtless the optima for different temperaments, ages, and studies will be found at different points along the line connecting the two extremes. How far one may safely go in either direction is to be determined by the pragmatic test of experiment. But at present it is safe to say that the tide of reform is running in the direction Dewey pointed out a quarter of a century before, though recently a strong counter-current of militarism has set in. That Dewey is a true prophet is proved by the extent to which his ideas are being carried out in these "schools of tomorrow" that are already in existence to-day.

The third period in Dewey's life began with his appointment to the chair of philosophy at Columbia University in 1905. This relieved him of the burden of responsibility for the conduct of the laboratory school at Chicago and enabled him to concentrate his thought upon the fundamental problems of knowledge. It was then perceived that he belonged on the left or radical wing of that movement to which James applied Peirce's name of "pragmatism." But Dewey is reluctant to call himself a pragmatist, partly because of his constitutional dislike to wearing a tag of any kind, partly, I surmise, because he has an aversion to the spiritualistic tendencies of the two men who are usually classed with him as the leaders of the pragmatic movement—James of Harvard and Schiller of Oxford.

Dewey's doctrine of cognition, the theory of instrumentalism, is now to be found in two recent volumes, one technical and the other popular. The ordinary skimming reader will find the "Essays in Experimental Logic" rather hard sledding, so he will be relieved to find that it has been translated by the author into ordinary English in the little volume entitled "How We Think." This is intended primarily for teachers whose business is supposed to be that of teaching their youngsters how to think, though in reality most of their time has to be taken up with the imparting of information.

The "Ethics" of John Dewey and James H. Tufts (1908) is not only a practical textbook admirably clear in expounding the conflicting theories and eminently fair in criticizing them, but it would be useful to any reader for broadening the mind and pointing the proper way of approach to modern problems. Professor Tawney of the University of Cincinnati in reviewing it for the American Journal of Sociology says: "Probably no more convincing effort to construct a system of moral philosophy by a strictly scientific method has ever been carried out."

Moral philosophers are generally disposed to keep their carefully constructed systems of ethics under a glass bell jar rather than risk the hard knocks they must receive if taken into the street and marketplace. But Dewey as a professed experimentalist could not consistently adopt this cautious method. His is no cloistered morality but a doctrine reduced from practical life and referable to the same authority for the validification of its influences. An interesting instance of the practical application of his principles is found in his essay on "Force and Coercion."[7] Here he discusses chiefly the question of the allowability of the use of force by a government as in war or by a class as in a strike and repudiates the Tolstoyan view that all use of force is wrong. On such a delicate question it would be improper for me to paraphrase his argument, so I quote instead his own summary of his conclusions:

First, since the attainment of ends requires the use of means, law is essentially a formulation of the use of force. Secondly, the only question which can be raised about the justification of force is that of comparative efficiency and economy in its use. Thirdly, what is justly objected to as violence or undue coercion is a reliance upon wasteful and destructive means of accomplishing results. Fourthly, there is always a possibility that what passes as a legitimate use of force may be so wasteful as to be really a use of violence; and per contra that measures condemned as recourse to mere violence may, under the given circumstances, represent an intelligent utilization of energy. In no case, can antecedents or a priori principles be appealed to as more than presumptive: The point at issue is concrete utilization of means for ends.

In this essay Dewey inclines to the view that "all political questions are simply questions of the extension and restriction of exercise of power on the part of specific groups in the community", and says further that: "With a few notable exceptions, the doctrine that the state rests upon or is common will seems to turn out but a piece of phraseology to justify the uses actually made of force. Practices of coercion and constraint which would become intolerable if frankly labelled Force seem to become laudable when baptized with the name of Will, although they otherwise remain the same."

I trust that Dewey is one of "the few notable exceptions", for the quotations from his paper on the "Ethics of Democracy" which I have given on a previous page show that Dewey in his earlier years went as far as Fichte in his later years toward identifying government—and a bare majority at that—with the common will of the social organism. Such a Germanic doctrine of the power of the State could be used to justify worse things than the German Government has ever done, and it is perhaps a realization of this that has led Dewey latterly to look with more favor upon the use of force by the minority.

The proper use of force is, in Dewey's opinion, "the acute question of social philosophy in the world to-day", and "a generation which has beheld the most stupendous manifestation of force in all history is not going to be content unless it has found some answer to the question." In an article on "Force, Violence and Law"[8] he discusses the possibilities of the peace movement in the following fashion:

At various times of my life I have, with other wearied souls, assisted at discussions between those who were Tolstoyans and—well, those who weren't. In reply to the agitated protests of the former against war and the police and penal measures, I have listened to the time-honored queries about what you should do when the criminal attacked your friend or child. I have rarely heard it stated that since one cannot even walk the street without using force, the only question which persons can discuss with one another concerns the most effective use of force in gaining ends in specific situations. If one's end is the saving of one's soul immaculate, or maintaining a certain emotion unimpaired, doubtless force should be used to inhibit natural muscular reactions. If the end is something else, a hearty fisticuff may be the means of realizing it. What is intolerable is that men should condemn or eulogize force at large, irrespective of its use as a means of getting results. To be interested in ends and to have contempt for the means which alone secure them is the last stage of intellectual demoralization.

It is hostility to force as force, to force intrinsically, which has rendered the peace movement so largely an anti-movement, with all the weaknesses which appertain to everything that is primarily anti-anything. Unable to conceive the task of organizing the existing forces so they may achieve their greatest efficiency, pacifists have had little recourse save to decry evil emotions and evil-minded men as the causes of war.... And no league to enforce peace will fare prosperously save as it is the natural accompaniment of a constructive adjustment of the concrete interests which are already at work.... The passage of force under law occurs only when all the cards are on the table, when the objective facts which bring conflicts in their train are acknowledged, and when intelligence is used to devise mechanisms which will afford to the forces at work all the satisfaction that conditions permit.

Dewey's primary purpose has always been the development of a type of ethical thinking and a method of school training suited to the democratic and industrial society of modern America. Speaking of the mental revolution that has been effected by the advance of science he says:

Whether the consequent revolution in moral philosophy be termed pragmatism or be given the happier title of the applied and experimental habit of mind is of little account. What is of moment is that intelligence has descended from its lonely isolation at the remote edge of things, whence it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good, to take its seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory may therefore become responsible to the practices that have generated it; the good be connected with nature, but with nature naturally, not metaphysically conceived, and social life be cherished in behalf of its own immediate possibilities, not on the ground of its remote connections with a cosmic reason and absolute end.—"Influence of Darwin", p. 55.

In the preface to the "Influence of Darwin" he quotes a German definition of pragmatism:[9]

Epistemologically, nominalism; psychologically, voluntarism; cosmologically, energism; metaphysically, agnosticism; ethically, meliorism on the basis of the Bentham-Mill-utilitarianism.

Dewey, who dislikes to wear even one tag—and that a nice new clean one—naturally resents having these five old ones tied to him, so he says:

It may be that pragmatism will turn out to be all of this formidable array, but even should it the one who thus defines it has hardly come within earshot of it. For whatever else pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spirit is primarily a revolt against that habit of mind which disposes of anything whatever—even so humble an affair as a new method in philosophy—by tucking it away, after this fashion, in the pigeon-holes of a filing cabinet....

It is better to view pragmatism quite vaguely as part and parcel of a general movement of intellectual reconstruction. For otherwise we seem to have no recourse save to define pragmatism—as does our German author—in terms of the very past systems against which it is a reaction; or, in escaping that alternative, to regard it as a fixed rival system making like claim to completeness and finality. And if, as I believe, one of the marked traits of the pragmatic movement is just the surrender of every such claim, how have we furthered our understanding of pragmatism?

In one of his Socratic dialogues[10] Dewey brings in at the close Chesterton's flip refutation of pragmatism:

Pupil. What you say calls to mind something of Chesterton's that I read recently: "I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist."

You would say, if I understand you aright, that to fall back upon the necessity of the "human mind" to believe in certain absolute truths, is to evade a proper demand for testing the human mind and all its works.

Teacher. My son, I am glad to leave the last word with you. This enfant terrible of intellectualism has revealed that the chief objection of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or "subjective") factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the absolutist's coconut.

It is curious to see how many different classes are now holding up Germany as a horrible example of the dangers of the theories they oppose. The Anglican Catholics blame Luther for the war and look upon the prospective triumph of the Allies as the final destruction of Protestantism in the world. The orthodox believe that Germany got into trouble through higher criticism. The classicists say that she is suffering from an overdose of science. The Absolute Idealists ascribe the bad conduct of Germany to her desertion of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte to follow after the new gods—or no gods—of Haeckel and Nietzsche. But Dewey, on the contrary, holds Kant, Hegel, and Fichte responsible for it all. "That philosophical absolutism may be practically as dangerous as matter-of-fact political absolutism history testifies." This is no new notion cooked up for the occasion, like so many of them, but one which Dewey plainly stated six years before the outbreak of the war in his address on Ethics at Columbia University. In speaking of Kant's denudation of Pure Reason of all concrete attributes he said:

Reason became a mere voice, which having nothing particular to say, said Law, Duty, in general, leaving to the existing social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great the congenial task of declaring just what was obligatory in the concrete. The marriage of freedom and authority was thus celebrated with the understanding that sentimental primacy went to the former and practical control to the latter.—"Influence of Darwin", p. 65.

After the war began he expanded this idea in his McNair lectures at the University of North Carolina.[11] Because Germany has developed continuously without any decided break with its past like the French Revolution or the transplanting of Europeans to America, German thinkers have come to declare all progress as the unfolding of national life and to declare impossible the construction of constitutions such as we have in the New World. Dewey traces the intellectual process by which the German people have reached the very startling opinions they now hold as to their mission in the world as follows:

The premises of the historic syllogism are plain. First, the German Luther who saved for mankind the principle of spiritual freedom against Latin externalism; then Kant and Fichte, who wrought out the principle into a final philosophy of science, morals and the State; as conclusion, the German nation organized in order to win the world to a recognition of the principle, and thereby to establish the rule of freedom and science in humanity as a whole.... In the grosser sense of the words, Germany has not held that might makes right. But it has been instructed by a long line of philosophers that it is the business of ideal right to gather might to itself in order that it may cease to be merely ideal. The State represents exactly this incarnation of ideal law and right in effective might.

A hundred years ago Fichte in his "Addresses to the German Nation" roused his countrymen to make a stand against Napoleon and fulfill their mission to "elevate the German name to that of the most glorious of all peoples, making this Nation the regenerator and restorer of the world." "There is no middle ground: If you sink, so sinks humanity entire with you, without hope of future restoration."

This sounds very much like what we hear in Germany to-day, although the present German Empire differs markedly in some respects from the ideal State that Fichte foresaw. It is also the same sort of language as is being used in England and the other allied countries. In fact every nation has the same sense of its historic divine mission and unique importance to the world's civilization. Certainly we cannot deny the existence of that feeling among Americans. To quote again from Fichte: "While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over the entire race."

This might seem a harmless and indeed inspiring conception of patriotism, but when the Fichtean idea of a particular State as the incarnation of the divine will is combined with the Hegelian idea of progress through conflict, it makes a fatal mixture, as Dewey shows:

Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms. History is the movement, the march of God on earth through time. Only one nation at a time can be the latest and hence the fullest realization of God. The movement of God in history is thus particularly manifest in those changes by which unique place passes from one nation to another. War is the signally visible occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in its onward movement.

This fallacious line of argument is, in Dewey's opinion, the logical outcome of the a priori and absolutist metaphysics which has prevailed in Europe during the last century, and for which he would substitute the method of intelligent experimentation. He says, "The present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural," and he urges as a substitute the promotion of "the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of class, racial, geographical and national limits." When we see the appalling results to which the doctrine of Nationalism has led, we may indeed regard it with Dewey as a logical breakdown, but I fear that actually it has become more powerful, pervading, and firmly fixed than ever through the psychological and economic experiences of the war.[12]

Doctor F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford calls Dewey's "German Philosophy and Politics" "an entirely admirable book; clear, calm, cogent, and popular without being shallow" and he further says:

Professor Dewey was assuredly the ideal person to handle the subject. For though he had made a deep and sympathetic study of German philosophy, he had in the end turned away from it to become a leader in the movement which is most antithetical to the traditionally German type of philosophizing. It must not indeed be alleged that the Anglo-Saxon world has a monopoly of the pragmatic habit of mind; for all men have to act and pragmatism is only the theoretic apprehension of the attitude which imposes itself on every agent everywhere. But it is probably right to regard this habit of mind as characteristically congenial to Anglo-Saxon life, and it was a perception of this that so infuriated our germanized professors who prided themselves on their superiority to the vulgar practicality of the national bent.[13]

A stranger who drops into one of Professor Dewey's classes is at first apt to be puzzled to account for the extent of his influence and the devotion of his disciples. There is nothing in his manner of delivery to indicate that he is saying anything of importance, and it takes some time to realize that he is. He talks along in a casual sort of way with a low and uneventful voice and his eyes mostly directed toward the bare desk or out of the window. Occasionally he wakes up to the fact that the students in the back seats are having difficulty in hearing him, and then he comes down with explosive stress on the next word, a preposition as like as not. His lectures are punctuated by pauses but not in a way to facilitate their comprehension. Sometimes in the midst of a sentence, perhaps between an adjective and its noun, his train of thought will be shunted off on to another line, and the class has to sit patiently at the junction station until it comes back, as it always does eventually. The difficulty of utterance in his lectures, like the tortuous style of his technical writings, results from overconscientiousness. When he misses the right word he does not pick any one at hand and go on but stops talking until he finds the one he wants, and he is so anxious to avoid a misunderstanding that he sometimes fails to insure an understanding. Talking has never become a reflex action with Dewey. He has to think before he speaks. Few professors and almost no instructors are bothered that way.

In profile Professor Dewey looks something like Robert Louis Stevenson, the same long lean face and neck and nose. From the front one would take him to be a Kentucky colonel disguised in spectacles. His long straight black hair, parted in the middle, is now getting gray, but his drooping mustaches, being twenty years younger, are still dark. His eyes are black and keen, and one can catch a twinkle in them if the lids do not drop too quick. His neck-tie is usually awry, and several thousands of orderly schoolma'ams have felt their hands itch to jerk it straight. His drawling careless tone and hesitant manner quite disguise the boldness of his thought and the logical order of its wording. Questions from the class never disconcert him, however inopportune, and the more he is heckled the better he talks.

One of his former students at Columbia, Randolph S. Bourne, gives this pen sketch of Professor Dewey:[14]

Nothing is more symbolic of Professor Dewey's democratic attitude towards life than the disintegrated array of his published writings. Where the neatly uniform works of William James are to be found in every public library, you must hunt long and far for the best things of the man who, since the other's death, is the most significant thinker in America. Pamphlets and reports of obscure educational societies; school journals, university monographs, and philosophical journals, limited to the pedant few; these are the burial-places of much of this intensely alive, futuristic philosophy.... No man, I think, with such universally important things to say on almost every social and intellectual activity of the day, was ever published in forms more ingeniously contrived to thwart the interest of the prospective public.

Professor Dewey's thought is inaccessible because he has always carried his simplicity of manner, his dread of show or self-advertisement, almost to the point of extravagance. In all his psychology there is no place for the psychology of prestige. His democracy seems almost to take that extreme form of refusing to bring one's self or one's ideas to the attention of others. On the college campus or in the lecture-room he seems positively to efface himself. The uncertainty of his silver-gray hair and drooping mustache, of his voice, of his clothes, suggests that he has almost studied the technique of protective coloration. It will do you no good to hear him lecture. His sentences, flowing and exact and lucid when read, you will find strung in long festoons of obscurity between pauses for the awaited right word. The whole business of impressing yourself on other people, of getting yourself over to the people who want to and ought to have you, has simply never come into his ultra-democratic mind.

A prophet dressed in the clothes of a professor of logic, he seems almost to feel shame that he has seen the implications of democracy more clearly than anybody else in the great would-be democratic society about him, and so been forced into the unwelcome task of teaching it.

Knowing that every biographer is expected to show that the subject of his sketch got his peculiar talents by honest inheritance, I wrote to Professor Dewey to inquire what there was in his genealogy to account for his becoming a philosopher. His ancestry is discouraging to those who would find an explanation for all things in heredity.

My ancestry, particularly on my father's side, is free from all blemish. All my forefathers earned an honest living as farmers, wheelwrights, coopers. I was absolutely the first one in seven generations to fall from grace. In the last few years atavism has set in and I have raised enough vegetables and fruit really to pay for my own keep.

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, October 20, 1859, the son of Archibald S. and Lucina A. (Rich) Dewey. His elder brother, Davis Rich Dewey, is professor of economics and statistics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the Special Report on Employees and Wages in the 12th Census as well as of many other works on finance and industry.

John Dewey went to the State University in his native town and received his A. B. degree at twenty. Being then uncertain whether his liking for philosophical studies was sufficient to be taken as a call to that calling he applied to the one man in America most competent and willing to decide such a question, W. T. Harris, afterward United States Commissioner for Education, but then superintendent of schools in St. Louis. Think of the courage and enterprise of a man who while filling this busy position and when the war was barely over started a Journal of Speculative Philosophy and founded a Philosophical Society and produced a series of translations of Hegel, Fichte, and other German metaphysicians. It would be hard to estimate the influence of Doctor Harris in raising the standards of American schools and in arousing an interest in intellectual problems. When young Dewey sent him a brief article with a request for personal advice he returned so encouraging a reply that Dewey decided to devote himself to philosophy. So, after a year spent at home reading under the direction of Professor Torrey of the University of Vermont, one of the old type of scholarly gentleman, Dewey went to Johns Hopkins University, the first American university to make graduate and research work its main object. Here he studied under George S. Morris and followed him to the University of Michigan as Instructor in Philosophy after receiving his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1884. Two years later he married Alice Chipman of Fenton, Michigan, who has been ever since an effective collaborator in his educational and social work. In 1888 he went to the University of Minnesota as Professor of Philosophy but was called back to Michigan at the end of one year.

When President Harper went through the country picking up brilliant and promising young men for the new University of Chicago, Dewey was his choice for the chair of philosopher. During the ten years Dewey spent on the Midway Plaisance he had the opportunity to try out the radical ideas of education of which I have spoken. In 1904 Dewey was called to Columbia University, where he has since remained. Besides his classwork he has always been active though rarely conspicuous in many educational and social movements. One of the latest of these is the formation of the Association of University Professors, of which he was the first president.

The title of his latest volume, "Democracy and Education", gives the keynote of his philosophy and the aim of his life. In a recent article[15] he puts it in these words:

I am one of those who think that the only test and justification of any form of political and economic society is its contribution to art and science—to what may roundly be called culture. That America has not yet so justified itself is too obvious for even lament.. .. Since we can neither beg nor borrow a culture without betraying both it and ourselves, nothing remains save to produce one.. .. Our culture must be consonant with realistic science and with machine industry, instead of a refuge from them.... It is for education to bring the light of science and the power of work to the aid of every soul that it may discover its quality. For in a spiritually democratic society every individual would realize distinction. Culture would then be for the first time in human history an individual achievement and not a class possession.

HOW TO READ DEWEY

As has been said previously, Dewey's writings are scattered far and wide in various periodicals and educational series. He has never been able to say "no" to any struggling journal of socialism or school reform that begged him for an article although it meant no pay, little influence, and speedy oblivion for his contribution. The graduate student of twenty-five years hence who undertakes to get a Ph.D. by making a complete collection of Dewey's works will earn his degree. The main principles of Dewey's philosophy, imparted viva voce to successive generations of students, have never been printed in a complete and systematic form, though his ideas have interfused the schools of the country through the teachers he has trained and the educational books he has written.

The nearest thing to a short cut to Dewey's philosophy that he has given us is "How We Think" (Heath, 1910), and with this the reader may well begin. "Essays in Experimental Logic" (University of Chicago Press, 1916) requires for its complete comprehension some knowledge of current controversies in philosophy. But the review of James's "Pragmatism", contained in the chapter "What Pragmatism Means", will be of interest to any reader seeking an answer to that question.

His epoch-making work, "The School and Society" (University of Chicago Press, first edition 1899, second edition 1915), has by no means lost its value although much that was prophecy then is now fulfilled. Most readers will be more interested in the fulfillments as described in "Schools of Tomorrow" (Dutton, 1915). This contains, besides the description of the new schools by his daughter, Evelyn Dewey, several chapters by Professor Dewey on the theory and aims of the educational movement they represent. A more complete and systematic exposition of the principles of education under modern conditions is to be found in his most recent book, "Democracy and Education" (Macmillan, 1916). Professor Moore of Chicago who reviews this volume in the International Journal of Ethics (1916, p. 547) says of it: "The thinking world has long since learned to expect from Professor Dewey matters of prime importance. Of the general significance of this, volume it is perhaps enough to say that, in the reviewer's opinion, it is the most important of Professor Dewey's productions thus far. In defiance of possible imputations of chauvinism, the reviewer will also say that it would be difficult to overstate its import and value for all students of education, philosophy, and society."

The volume clumsily entitled "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought" (Holt, 1910) contains, besides the anniversary address which gives it its title, ten essays chiefly concerned with the exposition and defense of Dewey's form of pragmatism, "immediate empiricism." "German Philosophy and Politics" (Holt, 1915) is discussed in the preceding pages. Dewey's "Psychology" (Harper, 1886) has largely lost its interest through the rapid advance of the science and the altered viewpoint of the author. The "Ethics" which he wrote in collaboration with Professor Tufts I have previously mentioned (Holt, 1908).

The practical applications of Dewey's philosophy to current educational and public questions may best be found in the brief and popular articles that he contributed frequently to The New Republic (New York) in 1915-1916. His professional contributions to logical theory and epistemology appear mostly in the fortnightly organ of the philosophical department of Columbia University, the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods.

A volume of eight essays on the pragmatic attitude was published in January 1917 by Henry Holt under the title of "Creative Intelligence." The leading essay on "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" is by John Dewey.

Besides the articles to which reference has been made in the footnotes of the preceding pages the following writings of Dewey should be mentioned: "Science as Subject-matter and as Method", the vice presidential address of the section on education of the Boston meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1909, (in Science, January 28, 1910); "The Problem of Truth", George Leib Harrison lectures before the University of Pennsylvania, 1911 (in Old Penn Weekly Review), "Maeterlinck" (Hibbert Journal, vol. 9, p. 765) and "Is Nature Good?" (Hibbert Journal, vol. 7, p. 827); "The Existence of the World as a Problem" (Philosophical Review, vol. 24, p. 357); "Darwin's Influence upon Philosophy" (Popular Science Monthly, vol. 75, p. 90); Presidential address to the American Association of University Professors (Science, January 29, 1915); "Professional Spirit Among Teachers" (American Teacher, New York, October, 1913); The International Journal of Ethics published "Force and Coercion" (vol. 26, p. 359); "Progress" (vol. 26, p. 311); "Nature and Reason in Law" (vol. 25, p. 25); "History for the Educator" and other articles appeared in Progressive Journal of Education, Chicago, 1909; "Voluntarism in the Roycean Philosophy" in the Philosophical Review, May, 1916; "Logical Foundations of The Scientific Treatment of Morality" in the Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago.

A criticism of Bergson by Dewey under the title of "Perception and Organic Action" may be found in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, November 21, 1912. Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, who, as I said in my chapter on him, has devoted much attention to educational reforms, includes a sketch of Dewey by Franz Ludwig in the series on Moderne Schulreforme in Das Monistische Jahrhundert of May 31, 191-5. For a criticism of Dewey's social philosophy see the articles by Lester Lee Bernhard of the University of Chicago in American Journal of Sociology.

No biography of Dewey has yet been written and none ever will be if he can prevent it. H. W. Schneider of Columbia University has prepared a complete bibliography of Dewey's writings, not yet published.

CHAPTER VI

RUDOLF EUCKEN

APOSTLE OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

To the history of and criticism of these conceptions and their terminology Professor Eucken has brought thorough and careful reading, acute and candid criticism, and a clear and solid style. While he is at home among the systems of the past, he seems equally familiar with the controversies of the present. Above all, he has studied brevity, and has mastered the art of expressing in a few words the results of patient research and critical discrimination.

The writer of this notice was constrained to recommend the work for translation to his friend and former pupil by his estimate of the intrinsic value of the treatise and the desire that it might be brought within reach of English readers as eminently suited to the times. He can say with assured confidence that there are few books within his knowledge which are better fitted to aid the student who wishes to acquaint himself with the course of superlative and scientific thinking and to form an intelligent estimate of most of the current theories.[1]

These were the words with which Professor Eucken was introduced to the American public in 1880 by one who was a good judge of men and books, the primary qualification of a college president. Thirty-two years later Professor Eucken came to America; this time in person, but under the auspices of Harvard and the University of New York, instead of Yale. This time he reached a larger audience; partly owing to his greater fame, partly to a change in the popular attitude toward the views he presents. In 1908, when Eucken received the Nobel prize for the greatest work of idealistic literature, there was no book of his accessible to the English reader, for the translation instigated by President Porter was out of print. Since then all his important works have been brought out in England and America; and the periodical indexes record a growing interest in his thought, corresponding to that which is manifested in Germany.

The Nobel prizes have failed to carry out the intention of their founder, which was to place $100,000 or so immediately into the hands of a man who had made a signal contribution to science, literature, or peace. Instead of this, the Nobel committees absorb a liberal moiety of the income of the fund in local "administrative expenses" and usually give the residue, now amounting to some $37,000, to men whose reputations have long been established; for example, in literature, Sully-Prudhomme, Mommsen, Björnson, Mistral, Kipling, and Heyse. But in so interpreting their mandate the Nobel committees have fulfilled another useful function, possibly as much needed as that conceived by Alfred Nobel. If they have not discovered original genius, they have at least pointed it out to the world at large. The men thus distinguished as having contributed to human progress have extended their influence over their contemporaries, as well as received a due appreciation of their efforts. The Nobel prize does not add to the stature of a man, but it does elevate him to a pulpit.

In the case of Eucken the value of this is evident. He did not need the assistance of the Nobel fund in order to prosecute his researches, for the laboratory expenses of a metaphysician are but slight, and Jena is as cheap a place to live as can nowadays be found in civilized lands. The award of the prize did not, of course, add to his reputation in philosophical circles, but Eucken does not believe that the influence of a philosopher should be confined to philosophical circles. He repudiates entirely the aloof, impartial, disinterested spectator attitude which philosophers in general have thought it necessary to pretend to assume. The question is, in short, what kind of a scientist the philosopher should imitate: the chemist who transforms the world in which he lives, or the meteorologist who merely records the atmospheric currents without attempting to guide them? Eucken is not only a teacher; he is a preacher. He has a message which he believes of vital importance to his contemporaries, so it cannot be a matter of indifference to him that he is, in his later years, gaining a wider audience, that his works are the most widely current philosophical writings of the present day in Germany,[2] and are being extensively translated into other languages.

This growing popularity is all the more noteworthy since it is not attained by any novelty of form, or even brilliancy of style. Eucken never tries to stimulate thought by shocking the reader with audacious paradoxes, as did Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as do Shaw and Chesterton. He has none of the freshness of phraseology and wealth of novel illustrations which attract to James and Bergson their wide circle of admirers. He does not, like Ostwald and Haeckel, make use of the direct and concrete mode of expression which has been introduced into literature by modern science. Eucken always writes in a serious and methodical style, elaborating his line of thought as he goes along with exactness and just proportion; expressing himself in general and abstract terms, rarely making use of imagery or concrete illustrations, never introducing personalities. A sweeter-tempered philosopher never lived. He speaks no evil, even of the dead. He indulges in no polemics with his contemporaries. In his historical works he passes through all fields of thought, gleaning good grain wherever he goes, and saying as little as possible about the tares and brambles that he finds with it.

Very curiously, it has been Eucken's lot to have been closely associated, on the faculties of small universities, with the two men whose views are most antagonistic to his: at Basel with Nietzsche and at Jena with Haeckel, and he has been on the best of terms with both of them. I was particularly interested in what Professor Eucken told me of Nietzsche, whose personality and philosophy were in such violent contradiction. This advocate of ruthless brutality, this scorner of sympathy and compassion, was in reality a most tender-hearted man, but too shy and sensitive to be popular; and when his feelings were hurt he wrote down in a passion what he felt at the moment.

At the University of Basel Professor Eucken often served with Nietzsche on the examining committee of candidates for the doctorate in classical philology. On such occasions, if the student appeared to be getting the worst of it in the verbal contest, Nietzsche would be observed to become more and more nervous until, finally, he could contain himself no longer and would break in with leading questions: "I suppose you mean so-and-so?" or "Do you not believe this or that?" until he got the student to say just about what he should have said in the first place. Professor Eucken does not regard the widespread influence of Nietzsche as altogether evil, believing he should not be held responsible for all the vagaries and extravagances of his devotees. The reason of Nietzsche's popularity, according to Eucken, is his strong individualism; for the Germans, in spite of governmental control and the Social Democracy, are pronounced individualists in character. The German will insist upon having his own house, his own seat, his own opinion. This sounded strange to the American, accustomed to have Germany referred to as the most regimented of nations.

But modern Germany is a land of incongruities and contradictions, a wild confusion of swirling cross-currents. The increase of population, the checking of emigration, the amazing prosperity, the extension of commerce, the demand for territorial expansion, would indicate a sound physical constitution and a healthful growth. The immense sale of serious works on religion and philosophy shows a revival of interest in spiritual affairs. Yet, if we were to judge of the character of the people by the most conspicuous of its achievements in art and literature, we should say that modern Germany is hopelessly decadent and corrupt. In drama and fiction Gallic license is allied with Gothic coarseness. In pictorial art hideousness and viciousness are depicted by means of strange and violent methods. Germany of to-day, as seen by the tourist, is a land of spotted painting, spotted literature, and spotted faces.[3] In the little university town of Jena the incongruities of modern Germany are curiously conspicuous. In this historic stronghold of Protestantism, this leader in the Enlightenment, the home of Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, the Humboldts, Hegel, Schelling, and Wieland, the barbarous customs of the past have the strongest hold. A student is likely to miss his seven o'clock Wednesday lecture on the spiritual life because he sat up till two o'clock drinking compulsory beer with his corps brothers in the middle of the marketplace. And he may cut out his eight o'clock Saturday lecture because he has an imperative engagement to cut off the nose or the ear of a fellow student at the Mensurort of Döllnitz.

Among the nobler manifestations of the spirit of new Germany the tourist is likely to take most interest in the architecture. Here, indeed, he will find much that is displeasing and eccentric, but that in itself is encouraging, for it shows that we are in the presence of a living art which is not content to keep to the safe and beaten paths, but would strike out new ways for itself. In city and country unexpected forms and colors delight the eye on villa, monument, and public building; new and ingenious solutions of problems as old as man. The modern German architect is not the imitator, but the rival, of the master builders of the past. He knows how to harmonize the old with the new, utilizing the old to give him inspiration, but not permitting it to hamper him. A striking example of this is the new university buildings of Jena, erected on the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the university in 1908. The whole group cost only three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, not so much as some single buildings in our leading universities, yet I know of none more satisfactory from both the utilitarian and the esthetic point of view. Here the problem of harmonization was particularly difficult; not only must the new buildings fit into the picture of old Jena, but a tower of the ancient ducal castle was actually to be incorporated. Yet the architect, Theodor Fischer, has made no sacrifices to the spirit of antiquity. At Oxford the newer buildings either clash violently with their elders or imitate them so closely as to be almost equally inconvenient and uncomfortable. The Jena buildings look as though they might well have been built by Kurfürst Johann Friedrich der Grossmütige in 1558, but are up to date, commodious, hygienic, well ventilated, steam heated, equipped with electric lights and clocks, and electric vacuum cleaners.

There are no superfluous statues stuck around in niches and on pedestals. The adornment, plastic and polychromatic, is strictly structural. It is put where it belongs. With the possible exception of a Rodin bust of Minerva in the vestibule, I did not see any "objects of art" that I could have carried off without tearing down the building. On the stone of the north façade are roughly chiseled the Ephesian Diana in the gable, and, beneath, four Egyptian-like figures representing the four faculties. That of Philosophie, with solemn and inscrutable face, is very appropriately nearest to the lecture room of Professor Eucken. As we enter we see opposite the portal to the Aula, the university hall of state, on either side of which are gigantic paintings emblematic of the transmission of culture, a grown man on one side holding out his torch to a young man, that he may light his torch by it. The most important picture at the Jena University is the Auszug deutscher Studenten im Jahre 1815 by Hodler, who used as a model for the middle figure the youngest son of Professor Eucken.

Auditorium Number 1, the largest classroom of the new building, is assigned to Eucken, and we find it already about half filled, although it is not yet seven o'clock in the morning. Some seventy students I count, and among them about a dozen women, not segregated, but scattered here and there, for Jena is coeducational now, and masculine resentment at the intrusion of women has quite died out. The students may seat themselves wherever they choose, affixing a card with name and hour if they want to hold a particular place. These cards and even the desks are scrawled with automatic writing and sketches by the inattentive hands of students. The seats, long benches with a fixed desk and book rack in front, are better than those found in English universities, but not so good as the American individual seats. There are plenty of windows along one side of the room, and the walls—white above, light green below—diffuse the rays agreeably. The floor slants down to a plain pine desk and a small blackboard. On the wall is a mosaic portrait of the late Professor Abbé, the real patron of the University, for a prosperous optician is of much more use to a modern university than a needy Gross-Herzog.

Promptly on the hour a vigorous shuffling and stamping of feet announces the arrival of the professor, who begins with "Mein' Herren und Damen" as his first foot steps upon the platform. A German professor always gives good measure, a full hourful, pressed down, shaken together, and running over; no period of preliminary meditation on what he shall say and of casual conversation at the end, as often in America. Nor do the German professors find it necessary to adopt the low voice, indifferent air and hesitating utterance regarded at Oxford and Harvard as the mark of the gentleman and the scholar. In fact I find, in roaming about our universities, that so many of our younger men have adopted this pitch and tempo, being often inaudible and never impressive to the back seats, that I am tempted to lay down the law that the younger the instructor the poorer the voice. When I complain of it they reply coldly: "One can never shout and tell the truth." But Eucken is evidently not afraid that being heard will impair his veracity. You might take him for a revivalist. You would not be wrong if you did. His voice rings out loud and clear. He is tremendously in earnest. Occasionally, when he thinks of it, he sits down. But not for long. He springs to his feet and throws himself forward on the reading-desk in the effort to really reach his audience. He clasps his hands to his breast and then throws his arms out wide, as though to seize the Geistesleben with which his heart is overflowing and spread it far over a materialistic and indifferent generation. Who can doubt the reality of "the spiritual life" after he has seen Eucken? It shines in his face. We do not need to be told that Activism is his philosophy. It shows in his movements. He lives his theories. Few philosophers do, luckily for most of them.

"Happiness" is the subject of this lecture. The spiritual life is the theme of it, as always. The spiritual life, he says, goes out from within and transforms the world, thus giving true happiness. We must work with the world movement if we would partake of its divine purpose. And here he quotes Plotinus, the first religious philosopher, for whom he has as high regard as have Maeterlinck and Bergson. We must utilize the force of faith; must bring this Christian power into modern life. True ability is moral ability. Labor is not merely activity; it has a purpose; it is directed against opposition. By strife and striving we must reach the reality of the spiritual life. Through labor and love we attain our true selves. The fulfilling of duty is inner freedom. The unrest and stress of the present day are the signs of a new spiritual birth. The function of philosophy is not to afford intellectual or esthetic gratification, but it is to deepen and enrich life. To the fine old German saying, "A man is more than his work", Eucken added "Mankind is more than his culture." It is a Lebensanschauung rather than a Weltanschauung that he teaches, for to him a theory of life is more important than a theory of the cosmos.

These are merely a few fragmentary thoughts that I gathered in that memorable hour. Of no value in themselves, I give them merely to prove that I got something out of the lecture, for I never understood spoken German until I heard Eucken. But even a deaf man would have found it profitable to be there. A second lecture followed immediately, on "Pessimism and Optimism", delivered with the same vigor and listened to with the same interest. Professor Eucken was then sixty-seven years old, and would have been Carnegied if he were in an American university, instead of giving lectures from seven to nine. His hair and beard are pure white, but set off handsomely his pink cheeks and his bright blue eyes still unspectacled.

And when he leaves the lecture room he does not leave his work, but goes to more of it at home. On one wall of his study is a photograph of Michael Angelo's "Creation", from the Sistine Chapel, and on the opposite a cast of a section of the Parthenon frieze. Between these is the desk of the man who has brought together the highest aspirations of Greek and Christian culture; a table stacked high with papers and manuscripts.

His correspondence is now voluminous, but he answers all letters promptly and carefully, writing his replies in the old-fashioned way, with a pen. He receives all visitors and will talk of his philosophy to a single auditor with the same unwearied enthusiasm as to an audience. Even those who are repelled by the severity of his literary style are attracted by the charm of his personality, and this accounts in large part for his devoted following in all parts of the world.

After granting me an interview which took the heart out of his afternoon, Professor Eucken returned good for evil by inviting me to dinner in the evening, when I found that the lady on my right was from Nebraska and the one on my left from Switzerland, while around the table I saw a young Boer from the Transvaal, a don from Oxford, a professor from Tokyo, and representatives of I don't know how many other nationalities.

The extension of the influence of Professor Eucken through this hearty hospitality is due largely to his wife. Frau Eucken has happily not confined herself to the duties which the Kaiser prescribes as woman's only sphere, Kirche, Kueche und Kinder[4] She is not only wife, mother and housekeeper, but artist and musician as well. Her success in managing what might be called an international salon of philosophy is facilitated by her ability to converse in many languages. On account of the generous hospitality extended to students and strangers by the Eucken household a removal was made last year to a new villa in the suburbs. Professor Eucken's wife and daughter came with him on his visit to America.

Eucken's philosophy of life is dramatic. His life has been undramatic; the even, ordered course of the typical German professor, made even more uneventful by reason of his mastery of the gentle art of not making enemies. Born in Aurich, East Friesland, January 5, 1846, he studied at Göttingen under Lotze, and at Berlin under Trendelenburg; taught for four years in a gymnasium; then for three years in the University of Basel; in 1874 was called to the University of Jena, where he has ever since remained, in spite of calls to larger institutions. His inner life has been as uneventful as its external aspects; a continuous, methodical, logical development of thought, without leaps or backslidings.

First, in 1878, he laid the foundations in the study of the concepts of philosophy which attracted the attention of President Porter. Seven years later he was ready to outline his own guiding theory in a volume bearing the characteristically Germanic title of "A Prolegomena for the Investigation of the Unity of the Spiritual Life in the Consciousness and Acts of Mankind." From this standpoint of the unique significance of the spiritual life he then reviewed the whole history of the evolution of philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche. His purpose in this work, known in English as "The Problem of Human Life", was, as he explains, "to afford historical confirmation of the view that conceptions are determined by life, not life by conceptions", and "that human destinies are not decided by mere opinions and whims, either of individuals or of masses of individuals, but rather that they are ruled by spiritual necessities with a spiritual aim and purport, and that for man a new world dawns, transcending the merely natural domain—the world, namely, of the spiritual life."

The sentences quoted are alone enough to show that Eucken's "history of philosophy" is a very different thing from what usually goes by that name, that is the chronicling of the speculations of successive generations of metaphysicians, each one wiping clean the slate before he began to write. Eucken sees an aim and purpose in philosophic thought. He does not regard it as a mere amusement or as an intellectual exercise, but rather as a method by which humanity may grow into a higher sphere of existence. The vital need of the day, then, is to awaken the present indifferent and busy generation to a realization of the supreme importance of spiritual things and to the necessity of bringing the Christian religion into vital connection with modern thought.

This is the task to which Eucken devoted his energies when by the close of the nineteenth century he had fully matured his views, and the rapid succession of volumes which have since come from his pen are concerned with the moral and intellectual difficulties which nowadays impede religious progress.

The development of natural science and especially the theory of evolution have led to the identification of man with nature. Yet the very fact that we have come to know that we belong to nature shows that we are more than nature.

A transcendence of nature is already accomplished in the process of thought. A consideration of all the facts leads us to the result that a life consisting solely of nature and intelligence involves an intolerable inconsistency; form and content are sharply separated from each other; thought is strong enough to disturb the sense of satisfaction with nature, but is too weak to construct a new world in opposition to it. Life is in a state of painful uncertainty and man is a Prometheus bound in that he must experience all the constraint and meaninglessness of the life of nature, and must suffer therefrom an increasing pain without being able to change this state in any way.[5]

From time to time in the course of history, spiritual impulses arise which are fundamentally different from physical self-preservation. "They force human activity into particular channels; they speak to us with a tone of command and require absolute obedience. Neither the interests of individuals nor those of whole classes prevail against them; every consideration of utility vanishes before their inner necessity." Religious movements show life in a particular form; something emerges in it which, unconcerned with the weal and the woe of man, follows its own course and makes absolute demands. Man is not altogether the creature of his environment, nor are his moral standards determined by society. The individual is able in the light of his own conscience to approve and value something which all around him reject; and conversely to condemn and reject something which all around him esteem and respect. This opposition of individuals to the condition of things in the social environment has been the main source of all inner progress in matters of morality.

This line of thought leads Eucken to the conclusion that a new life distinct from that of nature arises in our soul. The spiritual life is not the product of a gradual development from the life of nature, but has an independent origin and evolves new powers and standards. We must recognize in the spiritual life a universal life which transcends man, is shared by him and raises him to itself. The philosophical treatment of history ought first of all to trace the liberation of life from the mere human; the inner elevation of our being to a more than human.

In discussing the question of how man attains the spiritual life, Eucken steers carefully between the position of Buddhism, that each man must work out his own salvation without any aid from above, and the extreme Calvinistic position, that man is purely passive and altogether undeserving. Or to quote his own words:

It is necessary to acknowledge that in all the spiritual movement which appears in the domain of man, there is a revelation of the spiritual world; as merely human power cannot lead the whole to new heights, in all development of the spiritual life the communication of the new world must precede the activity of man. At the same time, where we are concerned with a life that is independent, and of which the activity is conscious and self-determined, the change cannot possibly merely happen to man; it must be taken up by his own activity; it needs his own decision and acceptance.

Only through ceaseless activity can life remain at the height to which it has attained.

This leads to the distinctive form of Eucken's philosophy of life, known as Activism. This is like Pragmatism in its rejection of the mere intellectualistic view of life and in basing truth upon a more spontaneous and essential activity. But Eucken's objection to Pragmatism is stated in the following language:

Pragmatism, which has recently made so much headway among English-speaking peoples and beyond them, is more inclined to shape the world and life in accordance with human conditions and needs than to invest spiritual activity with an independence in relation to these, and apply its standards to the testing and sifting of the whole content of human life.

At its highest, religion has always been concerned with winning a new world and a new humanity, not with the achievement of something within the old world and for the old humanity.

It will be seen that Eucken does not fall in with the tendency of the times to subordinate the individual to society. The spiritual life springs up, not in the "social consciousness", but in the soul of the individual, elevating his spiritual nature above all environment. But such a person is guarded against the arrogance of a superman by realizing that this superiority is not due to personal merit, but solely to the presence of the spiritual world.

This, as Eucken recognizes, may be called a form of mysticism, but it differs decidedly from the older mysticism in some important respects. It is not Quietism, but its opposite, Activism. Eucken does not regard the individual as seeking a peaceful haven by absorption into the infinite; on the contrary, the infinite enters the individual and rouses him to intensest and creative activity.

Here Eucken shows a striking similarity to Bergson. The Geistesleben might be regarded as a higher development or manifestation of the élan vital. Both involve the conception of an upward impulse acting at individual points which thus become centers of spontaneous vital activity. It is curious that this view, so characteristically modern and as novel as anything can be in the realm of metaphysical speculation, should have simultaneously and independently been made a fundamental doctrine by two philosophers so unlike in temperament and training, the French philosopher starting from the standpoint of mathematical physics and Spencerian evolution, and the German from academic metaphysics and Christian theology. Such a coincidence, as well as the reception which the teachings of Bergson and Eucken have received in many lands, show that their common principle is in harmony with the spirit of the age. Eucken and Bergson met for the first time at Columbia University in 1912.

It might be feared that Eucken, emphasizing as he does the individualistic origin of religious inspiration and realizing as he does the injury done to the Christian cause by clinging to antiquated formulas and medieval conceptions, would be inclined to undervalue ecclesiastical institutions and to advocate too violent a break with historic Christianity. But here again his moderation and sanity are manifest. He cannot be called orthodox from the standpoint of the established Lutheran Church. He agrees entirely with his colleague Haeckel in condemning the union of Church and State, but for opposite reasons; Haeckel because the Church receives thereby artificial support; Eucken because the Church is thereby hampered in its freedom of development.

He never, however, falls into the error of thinking that a "new" religion can be made to order to suit the times, or even the needs of any one person. He finds in historic Christianity all the essentials of a permanent and universal religion, capable, when properly understood and presented, of satisfying the severe requirements of modern thought and feeling. But this is not to be accomplished by merely eliminating whatever the modern mind finds objectionable.

A religion is not primarily a mere theory concerning things human and divine—such a theory can, of course, be quite easily put together with a little ingenuity—it discloses ultimate revelations of the spiritual life, further developments of reality, great organizations of living energy, movements, in a word, which have convulsed the age in which they came victoriously to birth, and have subsequently proved themselves strong enough to attract large portions of mankind, weld each of these inwardly together, and set an invisible world before it as the main basis of life. In such upheavals of the life of the people there is opened a rich mine of fact which becomes the property of all men, and includes valuable experiences of humanity as a whole. He who would cut himself off from this great stream of experience, inward as well as outward, will soon find out how little the isolated individual can do in matters of this kind. It is easy to find fault with what tradition hands down, no less easy to draw up vague views of one's own, but how immense is the distance which separates procedure such as this from the creative effort which urges its sure way forward, from the synthesis which embraces all men's lives and exercises an elemental compulsion upon them.[6]

Eucken's clairvoyant faith sees through the present anti-religious atmosphere the dawning of a new era in which the spiritual life shall again be dominant. Yet no one has recognized more clearly the alienation of the Church from the cultural and the practical life of the day. This chasm is no doubt greater in Germany, where the Catholic and Protestant churches are State institutions and identified with reactionary elements, than it is in our own country, where there is fortunately no Church, but many churches, all equally free to adapt themselves to changing conditions and to prove themselves useful to society in their own way. But it must be admitted that our churches are not availing themselves of this exceptional freedom and do not show the originality and diversity which is characteristic of life and growth.

Eucken is conciliatory, but no compromiser. He does not solicit for religion a humble place in modern life by using arguments like those employed in the sale of "patent medicines", that it is innocuous at the least and may somehow do some good. He meets modern science upon her own ground. He claims for religion an equal practicality and efficiency; he demands for it a greater certitude, and he is willing, as Jesus was willing, to put it to the pragmatic test.

Since we have found that religion is linked thus closely with the whole, we need not make any timid compromise with certain superficial contemporary movements and content ourselves with a lower degree of certainty, saying, for instance, that we can never altogether eliminate the subjective element, and that religious truths can never have the certainty of such formulae as 2 x 2 = 4. On the contrary, we maintain that it is a very poor conception of religion which deems any certainty superior to hers, and does not claim for her truth a far more primary certainty than that of the formula 2 x 2 = 4. Only a shallow and perverse conception of truth can allow the certainty of the part to exceed the certainty of the whole.[7]

Either religion is merely a product of human wishes and ideas under the sanction of tradition and social convention—and then neither art nor might nor cunning can prevent so frail a fabrication from being whelmed by the advancing spiritual tide—or else religion is based on facts of a suprahuman order, and in that case the most violent onslaught cannot shake her; rather will it help her in the end, through all the stress and toil of human circumstance, to discover where her true strength lies, and to express in purer ways the eternal truth that is in her.[8]

POSTSCRIPT, 1917

I have thought best to leave the article on Eucken just as I published it in The Independent of February 27, 1913, with only a few slight changes in tense and time references. It presents a picture of German life and thought as I saw it shortly before the war, and it would be impossible for me to bring it up to date now when the British censorship prevents German books and papers from reaching America. I can only add some quotations from Eucken's recent writings to show his attitude toward the war.

In the fall of 1914, Eucken joined with his colleague in the university and his opponent in philosophy, Professor Ernst Haeckel, in a public statement charging that British greed and egotism had caused the Great War.[9] In the following spring Eucken sent an appeal to the American people in the form of eight questions which I quote entire.

You say that we are a nation militarist and greedy for conquest. Permit us a few questions with regard to that rash statement.

First.—How do you explain that in times gone by Germany did not take advantage of the difficulties of her present opponents—as, for instance, England's difficulty during the Boer war or Russia's difficulty during the Japanese war? If we had meant conquest should we have chosen the very moment when half the world was against us, and we were numerically in the minority? Do you really think that we are as stupid as all that?

Second.—Next, how do you explain that all parties in Germany approve of the policy of the government and loyally hold together, including the Social Democrats? Yesterday they were our decided opponents. Do you believe that the Socialists have overnight, as it were, become changed from decided opponents to adherents of militarism?

Third.—How do you explain the fact that the Americans who were in Germany at the outbreak of the war in an overwhelming majority sided with us? Does not the opinion of those who see events quite near—nay, who live through them—carry greater weight than the view of such as observe occurrences from a remote distance?

Fourth.—You believe that the Germans are oppressed and narrowed down by the rule of militarism. How do you explain that education and technical and scientific research are so highly developed and universally esteemed in Germany and that for this reason so many Americans come to Germany in order to study sciences and arts?

Fifth.—You always discuss war with regard to Belgium, France and England only. Have you forgotten Russia, with her one hundred and fifty million inhabitants and her army, which is by far the largest in the whole world? Russia is a danger to Germany and to the whole of Europe and just now insists on the possession of Constantinople. Have you forgotten that Russia, by interfering with the Servian murder case, began the war, and that England, according to the parliamentary statement made by Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, was determined, even before the German invasion of Belgium, to abandon her neutrality in favor of France?

Sixth.—You generally argue that all Europe was in profound peace and that only the greed of Germany disturbed that peace. Have you forgotten that long before the war there was a triple entente which was directed against Germany and that the entente newspapers openly discussed the war plans hatched against Germany and even recommended 1916 as a suitable year for commencing hostilities?

Seventh.—You want to be good Christians and as such work for peace among the nations. Can you reconcile such Christianity with the fact that your country sends huge consignments of arms and ammunition to our opponents and thus intensifies and lengthens the war? Can you further reconcile that with neutrality, a neutrality in spirit and not merely in the letter?

Eighth.—Do not you think that a great nation with a glorious past should see the events of the day with its own eyes and that such independence of thought is the highest test of true liberty? But you contemplate present history more or less through English spectacles, as if your country were still a British colony and not an independent empire with its own goals and standards. In such a passion-stirred age as ours neutrals have the lofty duty to keep out of party strife and to endeavor to be just and impartial to both sides. This endeavor is lacking in Germany's American opponents.

That even the antagonisms aroused by the war have not shaken Eucken's faith in the power of religion and philosophy to heal the wounds of humanity is shown by a recent article on "The International Character of Modern Philosophy" in the Homiletic Review of New York. In this he discusses with great impartiality the contributions which England, France, Germany, and Italy have made to philosophy and concludes as follows:

After all, philosophy is summoned to proclaim the unity of mankind over against the present split among the peoples. To be sure, this does not mean that individual philosophers are less earnest to put forward the claims of their own people than the claims of others; for they are not mere scholars, they are also living men and citizens of their own nation. When they see this assaulted and its existence put in peril, it is for them a holy duty to come to the defense of the fatherland—if not with the weapons of war, at least to do their best with the weapons of the intellect. Meanwhile, the belief is entirely proper that the intellectual gains which are the result of philosophical labor remain unharmed by war, that a realm of intellectual creation will retain full recognition beyond the enmities of man. Keenest blame is deserved by the attempt to array against each other the intellectual leaders of a people which is for the moment a foe, or to disparage the entire mental character of the opponent. That is the stamp of a small and vengeful disposition—he who aims to depreciate others to whom great thanks are due dishonors himself. Let each, therefore, remain true to his own people, but never forget the task and aim of philosophy—to consider things under the form of perpetuity, maintaining for humanity in the present a world superior to all the littlenesses of human action.

A further and much more weighty task is from this arising for philosophy—to work mightily for the inner unity of human life and endeavor; the lack of such a unity has contributed not a little to whet the antagonisms of the nations.... Only when we are convinced that we belong together essentially, that we have a great work to accomplish in common and have to raise mankind from the stage of nature to that of intellect—that we have to carry on unitedly a fight against the manifold unreason of life—only by the strengthening and operation of such convictions can the division of humanity into hostile nationalities be successfully withstood. Not through elegant addresses and articles, only by means of a dynamic deepening of life and the introduction of new power can we progress in the solution of these problems.[10]

HOW TO READ EUCKEN

Eucken is not a man of one book. He has put forth his ideas in many different forms; large volumes and little, works historical, expository, argumentative, theoretical and practical, but his point of view has remained throughout his long productive career essentially unchanged, and is so clearly indicated in all his works that one may be sure of obtaining the fundamental principles of his philosophy from whatever volume he selects. If, however, I am expected to prescribe a particular book as an introduction to Eucken, I should say that the general reader who is interested in the relation of philosophy to religion—and one who is not interested in that would not care to read Eucken anyway—would find "Christianity and the New Idealism" (translated by Lucy Judge Gibson and W. R. Boyce Gibson, Harper) most suitable for the purpose. It is a small volume, as easy reading as anything of Eucken's, and discusses frankly the present crisis in religious thought and indicates what he believes the churches ought to discard and what they must maintain of their inherited doctrines and forms. "The Truth of Religion" (translated by W. Tudor Jones, Putnam) covers similar ground, but in a more thorough and theoretical manner.

The volumes entitled in their English version "The Meaning and Value of Life" (Gibson translation, Macmillan); "The Life of the Spirit" (translated by F. L. Pogson, Putnam), are intended for the non-philosophical reader; while "Life's Basis and Life's Ideals" (translated by Alban G. Widgery, Macmillan); "Main Currents of Modern Thought: A Study of the Spiritual and Intellectual Movements of the Present Day" (translated by Meyrick Booth, Scribner); and "The Contest for the Spiritual Life" (Putnam) are of a more technical character.

"The Problem of Human Life as Viewed by Great Thinkers from Plato to the Present Time" (translated by Williston S. Hough and W. R. Boyce Gibson, Scribner) differs decidedly from the ordinary history of philosophy in that the author is not trying to set at odds and overthrow the successive philosophers, but is seeking for whatever in them is good and permanent, finally coming to "see them linked together as workers in one common task: the task of building up a spiritual world within the realm of human life, of proving our existence to be both spiritual and natural."

Single lectures and articles by Eucken readily accessible in English are: "Religion and Life" (Putnam); "Back to Religion" (Pilgrim Press); "Can We Still Be Christians?" (Macmillan); "Naturalism or Idealism" (the Nobel Lecture). Twenty of his papers are included in "Collected Essays of Rudolf Eucken" (Scribner, 1914).

The titles of Eucken's chief works in German and in the English versions are as follows: "Die Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart" (The Main Currents of Modern Thought), 1878; "Die Einheit des Geisteslebens in Bewusstsein und Tat der Menschheit", 1888; "Die Lebensanschauungen der Grossen Denker" (The Problem of Human Life), 1890; "Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt", 1896; "Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion" (The Truth of Religion), 1901; "Grundlinien einer neuen Lebensanschauung" (Life's Basis and Life's Ideal), 1907; "Hauptprobleme der Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart" (Christianity and the New Idealism), 1907; "Sinn und Wert des Lebens" (The Meaning and Value of Life), 1905; "Einführung in eine Philosophie des Geisteslebens" (The Life of the Spirit), 1908; "Erkennen und Leben" (Knowledge and Life, 1912).

Of the numerous books and articles about Eucken which have appeared in Europe, it will be sufficient to mention: "Rudolf Eucken. Die Erneuerer des deutschen Idealismus", by Theodor Kappstein (Berlin-Schöneberg: Bucherlag der "Hilfe"); "Rudolf Eucken's Werk, Eine neue idealistische Lösung des Lebensproblems", by Kurt Kesseler (Bunzlau: Kreuschmer, 1911); "Eucken's dramatische Lebensphilosophie", by Otto Braun (Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik, 1909); "Rudolf Eucken's Christenthum", by Ludwig von Gerdtell (Verlag von Becker). On Eucken's seventieth birthday, January 5, 1916, the Zeitschrift für Philosophie published a Festschrift devoted to his work. "La philosophie de M. Rudolph Eucken", by Emile Boutroux (Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, 1910).

It is unnecessary to give a list of articles about Eucken in American magazines because any library that contains the files will have a periodical index, but a few references may be given: "Religious Philosophy of Eucken", Harvard Theological Review (vol. 2, p. 465, 1909); "Eucken and St. Paul", by Richard Roberts, Contemporary Review (vol. 97, p. 71); "Religious Philosophy of Eucken", by Baron F. von Hügel, Hibbert Journal (vol. 10, p. 660); "Eucken's Philosophy of Life", by W. Fite, The Nation (vol. 95, p. 29); "Eucken's New Gospel of Activism", Current Literature (vol. 53, p. 67); "Idealism of Rudolf Eucken", by S. H. Mellone, International Journal of Ethics (vol. 21, p. 15).

There are two excellent expositions of Eucken's philosophy in English, by his students and translators: "Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life", by W. R. Boyce Gibson (Macmillan), and "An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy", by W. Tudor Jones (Putnam). A briefer compendium, "Eucken: A Philosophy of Life", by A. J. Jones, has appeared in a series of handy volumes known as "The People's Books" (New York: Dodge Publishing Company). Meyrick Booth (Ph.D. of Jena) has published "Rudolf Eucken: His Philosophy and Influence," London (Unwin, 1913).

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