Chapter VI: Part 6

Mr. Thayer’s “Life of Cavour” is another first-rate example of productive scholarship. It is much more than a mere biography. The three greatest and most influential statesmen, in purpose and achievement, since the close of the Napoleonic epoch were Lincoln, Bismarck, and Cavour; and any account of either of them must necessarily be an account of the most vitally important things that happened to mankind during the period when each was playing his greatest part. An adequate biography of either must therefore be a permanent addition to history; such a biography could be written only by a scholar and writer of altogether exceptional attainments; and such a biography has been furnished by Mr. Thayer. Mr. Thayer is already well known as the author of various volumes dealing with Italy, all of them representing work worth doing, and all of them leading up to and making ready the way for the really notable history which he has now written. There are other books which should be read in connection with it; the younger Trevelyan’s brilliant studies of Garibaldi and the Italian revolutionists of 1848 and the dozen years immediately succeeding, and De La Gorce’s profoundly interesting histories of the Second Empire and the Second Republic in France, which contain the most powerful presentment of the period from the anti-revolutionary standpoint. Cavour not only did more than any other one man for Italian unity and independence, but he symbolized the movement as neither Garibaldi the Paladin, nor Mazzini the Republican, nor even King Victor Emmanuel symbolized it. As Mr. Thayer describes Cavour’s career it is not only of interest in itself, but it is of interest as showing that vast and complex aggregate of contradictory forces through whose warring chaos every great leader who fights for the well-being of mankind must force his way to triumph. Cavour had to contend against foes within just as much as against foes without. He had to hold the balance between the unreasoning reactionary and the unreasoning revolutionist, just exactly as on a larger or smaller scale all leaders in the forward movement of mankind must ever do. Mr. Thayer has set forth in masterly fashion the task to which the great statesman addressed himself and the manner in which that task was performed; his book is absorbingly interesting to the general reader, and should be of profit not merely to the special student but to every active politician who is in politics for any of the reasons which alone render it really worth while to be a politician at all. Mr. Thayer is devoted to his hero, as he ought to be; and he is a stanch partisan; but his obvious purpose is to be fair, and the principles of liberty to which he pins his faith are those upon which American governmental policy must always rest--although it is not necessary to follow him in all his views, as when he suddenly treats free trade from the fetichistic standpoint instead of as an economic expedient to be judged on its merits in any given case. Every man interested not only in the realities but in the possibilities of political advance should study this book; and, in addition to its intrinsic worth and interest, it is an example of the kind of productive scholarship which adds to the sum of American achievement.

* * * * *

Anything that Professor Lounsbury writes is certain to be interesting. Any collection by him of the writings of others is also certain to be interesting. Probably when Mr. Lounsbury is doing what he himself is willing to accept as work, it is both so profound and so erudite that we laymen can do little but admire it from a distance. Fortunately, however, he is also willing to do what he regards as play, such as a Life of Fenimore Cooper, or a study of English adapted to the needs of those who are not scholars; and all of his writing of this lighter kind adds markedly to the sum of enjoyment of laymen who are fond of reading.

The two volumes before me illustrate the good that can be done by people of cultivation who at our different universities provide the means needed to foster productive scholarship--for, unfortunately, productive scholarship in this country is apt to be unremunerative. The slender volume on the early literary career of Robert Browning[6] is based on four lectures delivered at the University of Virginia under the terms of the Barbour-Page Foundation, a foundation due to the wisdom and generosity of Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page. The “Yale Book of American Verse”[7] is published by the Yale University Press under the auspices of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, a club founded by Mr. Alexander Smith Cochran. It is the kind of club the possession of which every real university in the country must envy Yale.

[6] “The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning.” By Thomas
R. Lounsbury.

[7] “Yale Book of American Verse.” Collected by Thomas R.
Lounsbury.

This study of Browning particularly appeals to any man who, although devoted to Browning, yet does not care for the pieces that some of the Browning clubs especially delight in. Browning’s great poems, those which will last as long as English literature lasts, are given their full meed of praise by Professor Lounsbury. The other poems, those which especially excite the interest of the average Browning society, are treated very amusingly and on the whole very justly. Professor Lounsbury insists that these “poems” will not permanently last, because they are essentially formless, and therefore not poetry at all, and indeed not literature. He holds that the attraction such poems exercise on certain people is the attraction of the unintelligible. Mr. Lounsbury’s writings are always full of delicious touches, and he is sometimes at his best in this little volume, as, for instance, where he says: “In fact, commentaries on Browning generally bear a close resemblance to fog-horns. They proclaim the existence of fog, but they do not disperse it.” One of his main contentions is that fundamentally the interest in those poems of Browning which are both very long and very obscure does not differ in kind from that displayed in guessing the answers to riddles or, to use a more dignified comparison, from that employed in the solution of difficult mathematical problems.

I think, however, that for the admiration of these rather obscure philosophical poems of Browning there is a reason upon which Mr. Lounsbury has not touched. He says truly that the men who admire Browning are very apt to be men not especially drawn to writers in whom lofty speculations have found their fitting counterpart in clearness and beauty of expression; and he instances Wordsworth and Tennyson as poets to be enjoyed only by men and women who have a certain degree of fondness for literature as literature. Now, I think it is true of Browning (as it is true of Walt Whitman) that many of the people who labor longest and hardest to master his meaning are entirely mistaken in thinking that they enjoy him as a poet. But I do not think that Mr. Lounsbury’s explanation that they prize him only as a puzzle fully accounts for the enjoyment of many of these men or the profit they derive from their study. The fact is that Browning does represent very deep thought, very real philosophy--mixed, of course, with much thought that is not deep at all but only obscure, and much would-be philosophy that has no meaning whatsoever. In an instance that came to my own knowledge, a class of college boys in a course of literature, after carefully studying Browning for a couple of months, and after then taking up Tennyson, unanimously abandoned Tennyson and insisted on returning to the study of Browning. These hard-working, intelligent boys were not all of them merely interested in puzzles. They were not all of them blind to poetry as such. They did care to a certain extent for form, but primarily they were interested in the great problems of life, they were interested in great and noble thoughts. Doubtless many of them rather enjoyed having to dig out the thought from involved language. But probably a greater number felt a larger enjoyment in finding lofty thought expressed in language which was even more lofty than obscure.

It is true that as a poet Browning is formless. But the poets who are great philosophers are few in number, and great philosophers who have any gift of expression whatever or any sense of form, or whose writings so much as approach the outer hem of literature, are even fewer in number. Browning the philosopher is not more deep than many other philosophers, and in form and expression he is inferior to many poets. But he is a philosopher, and he has form and expression. The philosophy he writes is literature, even though hardly in the highest sense poetic literature. Therefore he appeals to men who are primarily interested in his writings as philosophy, but who do derive a certain pleasure from form or expression; who, without being conscious of it, do like to have the writings they read resemble literature. These men are given by Browning something that no other poet and no other philosopher can give them; and I do not think that these men receive full justice at Mr. Lounsbury’s hands. Moreover, as compared to Tennyson or Longfellow, or any other of the more conventional poets--and I am extremely fond of these conventional poets--there is far more in Browning, even in Browning’s simpler and more understandable and formal poems, that gives expression to certain deep and complex emotions. There are many poets whom we habitually read far more often than Browning, and who minister better to our more primitive needs and emotions. There are very few whose lines come so naturally to us in certain great crises of the soul which are also crises of the intellect.

* * * * *

“The Yale Book of American Verse” is an excellent anthology, and the preface is one of the best things about it. In this preface Mr. Lounsbury quite unconsciously shows why he appeals to so many men to whom a college professor who is nothing more than a college professor does not readily appeal. He mentions that on the march to Gettysburg he picked up a torn piece of newspaper containing certain verses which have always remained in his mind, and which he includes in this collection of verse. This is the only hint in Professor Lounsbury’s writings that he fought in the Civil War. A professor of English literature in a great university who in his youth fought at Gettysburg must necessarily have something in him that speaks not only to scholars but to men.

This anthology includes hymns as well as secular poems. The collection is good in itself, as I have already said, and, moreover, to all real lovers of anthologies it will also seem good because each of them will take much satisfaction in wondering why certain of his or her favorite poems have been left out and why certain other poems have been put in. I suppose every man who cares for poetry at all at times wishes that he could compile an anthology for his own purposes. I certainly so feel. I would like to compile two anthologies, one of hymns and one of those poems which our ancestors designated quite ruthlessly as “profane,” in opposition to sacred. I should not expect any one else to read either of my collections. I should not wish the edition to consist of more than one copy. But I would like, purely for my own use, to own that copy! In the anthology of hymns, for instance, besides all the great hymns, from Bernard of Morlais to Cowper and Wesley and Bishop Heber, I would like to put in some hymns as to which I know nothing except that I like them. Every Christmas Eve in our own church at Oyster Bay, for instance, the children sing a hymn beginning “It’s Christmas Eve on the River, it’s Christmas Eve on the Bay.” Of course the hymn has come to us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our own soil--which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.

As for the “profane” anthology, I think I should like to make one consisting of several volumes. Even Mr. Lounsbury’s volume of American verse, though it contains some specimens of verse I would not have included, omits others which I certainly should put in. And then, think of the many, many volumes that would be needed to include the English poems, and the French poems, and the German poems from the Bard of the Dimbovitza, and all the other poems which no human being could make up his mind to see any anthology leave out! I fear that a perfect anthology of the kind that fills my dreams would be as large as the various rather dismal series of volumes which contain, as we are told, “the world’s best literature”--and doubtless would be as unsatisfactory.

Meanwhile, as all this represents an unattainable dream, we have reason to be glad that Mr. Lounsbury’s particular anthology has been published.

DANTE AND THE BOWERY

DANTE AND THE BOWERY

It is the conventional thing to praise Dante because he of set purpose “used the language of the market-place,” so as to be understanded of the common people; but we do not in practice either admire or understand a man who writes in the language of our own market-place. It must be the Florentine market-place of the thirteenth century--not Fulton Market of to-day. What infinite use Dante would have made of the Bowery! Of course, he could have done it only because not merely he himself, the great poet, but his audience also, would have accepted it as natural. The nineteenth century was more apt than the thirteenth to boast of itself as being the greatest of the centuries; but, save as regards purely material objects, ranging from locomotives to bank buildings, it did not wholly believe in its boasting. A nineteenth-century poet, when trying to illustrate some point he was making, obviously felt uncomfortable in mentioning nineteenth-century heroes if he also referred to those of classic times, lest he should be suspected of instituting comparisons between them. A thirteenth-century poet was not in the least troubled by any such misgivings, and quite simply illustrated his point by allusions to any character in history or romance, ancient or contemporary, that happened to occur to him.

Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was the only one who dared use the Bowery--that is, use anything that was striking and vividly typical of the humanity around him--as Dante used the ordinary humanity of his day; and even Whitman was not quite natural in doing so, for he always felt that he was defying the conventions and prejudices of his neighbors, and his self-consciousness made him a little defiant. Dante was not defiant of conventions: the conventions of his day did not forbid him to use human nature just as he saw it, no less than human nature as he read about it. The Bowery is one of the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the “Inferno.” But no man of Dante’s art and with Dante’s soul would write of it nowadays; and he would hardly be understood if he did. Whitman wrote of homely things and every-day men, and of their greatness, but his art was not equal to his power and his purpose; and, even as it was, he, the poet, by set intention, of the democracy, is not known to the people as widely as he should be known; and it is only the few--the men like Edward FitzGerald, John Burroughs, and W. E. Henley--who prize him as he ought to be prized.

Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century, cultivated people would ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental truths, as Dante did six hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike from human nature as he saw it around him and from human nature as he read of it. I suppose that this must be partly because we are so self-conscious as always to read a comparison into any illustration, forgetting the fact that no comparison is implied between two men, in the sense of estimating their relative greatness or importance, when the career of each of them is chosen merely to illustrate some given quality that both possess. It is also probably due to the fact that an age in which the critical faculty is greatly developed often tends to develop a certain querulous inability to understand the fundamental truths which less critical ages accept as a matter of course. To such critics it seems improper, and indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human nature by examples chosen alike from the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle Garden and the Piræus, alike from Tammany and from the Roman mob organized by the foes or friends of Cæsar. To Dante such feeling itself would have been inexplicable.

Dante dealt with those tremendous qualities of the human soul which dwarf all differences in outward and visible form and station, and therefore he illustrated what he meant by any example that seemed to him apt. Only the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and so, when he spoke of pride or violence or flattery, and wished to illustrate his thesis by an appeal to the past, he could speak only of great and prominent characters; but in the present of his day most of the men he knew, or knew of, were naturally people of no permanent importance--just as is the case in the present of our own day. Yet the passions of these men were the same as those of the heroes of old, godlike or demoniac; and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries, or his immediate predecessors, to illustrate his points, without regard to their prominence or lack of prominence. He was not concerned with the differences in their fortunes and careers, with their heroic proportions or lack of such proportions; he was a mystic whose imagination soared so high and whose thoughts plumbed so deeply the far depths of our being that he was also quite simply a realist; for the eternal mysteries were ever before his mind, and, compared to them, the differences between the careers of the mighty masters of mankind and the careers of even very humble people seemed trivial. If we translate his comparisons into the terms of our day, we are apt to feel amused over this trait of his, until we go a little deeper and understand that we are ourselves to blame, because we have lost the faculty simply and naturally to recognize that the essential traits of humanity are shown alike by big men and by little men, in the lives that are now being lived and in those that are long ended.

Probably no two characters in Dante impress the ordinary reader more than Farinata and Capaneus: the man who raises himself waist-high from out his burning sepulchre, unshaken by torment, and the man who, with scornful disdain, refuses to brush from his body the falling flames; the great souls--magnanimous, Dante calls them--whom no torture, no disaster, no failure of the most absolute kind could force to yield or to bow before the dread powers that had mastered them. Dante has created these men, has made them permanent additions to the great figures of the world; they are imaginary only in the sense that Achilles and Ulysses are imaginary--that is, they are now as real as the figures of any men that ever lived. One of them was a mythical hero in a mythical feat, the other a second-rate faction leader in a faction-ridden Italian city of the thirteenth century, whose deeds have not the slightest importance aside from what Dante’s mention gives. Yet the two men are mentioned as naturally as Alexander and Cæsar are mentioned. Evidently they are dwelt upon at length because Dante felt it his duty to express a peculiar horror for that fierce pride which could defy its overlord, while at the same time, and perhaps unwillingly, he could not conceal a certain shuddering admiration for the lofty courage on which this evil pride was based.

The point I wish to make is the simplicity with which Dante illustrated one of the principles on which he lays most stress, by the example of a man who was of consequence only in the history of the parochial politics of Florence. Farinata will now live forever as a symbol of the soul; yet as an historical figure he is dwarfed beside any one of hundreds of the leaders in our own Revolution and Civil War. Tom Benton, of Missouri, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, were opposed to one another with a bitterness which surpassed that which rived asunder Guelph from Ghibellin, or black Guelph from white Guelph. They played mighty parts in a tragedy more tremendous than any which any mediæval city ever witnessed or could have witnessed. Each possessed an iron will and undaunted courage, physical and moral; each led a life of varied interest and danger, and exercised a power not possible in the career of the Florentine. One, the champion of the Union, fought for his principles as unyieldingly as the other fought for what he deemed right in trying to break up the Union. Each was a colossal figure. Each, when the forces against which he fought overcame him--for in his latter years Benton saw the cause of disunion triumph in Missouri, just as Jefferson Davis lived to see the cause of union triumph in the Nation--fronted an adverse fate with the frowning defiance, the high heart, and the stubborn will which Dante has commemorated for all time in his hero who “held hell in great scorn.” Yet a modern poet who endeavored to illustrate such a point by reference to Benton and Davis would be uncomfortably conscious that his audience would laugh at him. He would feel ill at ease, and therefore would convey the impression of being ill at ease, exactly as he would feel that he was posing, was forced and unnatural, if he referred to the deeds of the evil heroes of the Paris Commune as he would without hesitation refer to the many similar but smaller leaders of riots in the Roman forum.

Dante speaks of a couple of French troubadours, or of a local Sicilian poet, just as he speaks of Euripides; and quite properly, for they illustrate as well what he has to teach; but we of to-day could not possibly speak of a couple of recent French poets or German novelists in the same connection without having an uncomfortable feeling that we ought to defend ourselves from possible misapprehension; and therefore we could not speak of them naturally. When Dante wishes to assail those guilty of crimes of violence, he in one stanza speaks of the torments inflicted by divine justice on Attila (coupling him with Pyrrhus and Sextus Pompey--a sufficiently odd conjunction in itself, by the way), and in the next stanza mentions the names of a couple of local highwaymen who had made travel unsafe in particular neighborhoods. The two highwaymen in question were by no means as important as Jesse James and Billy the Kid; doubtless they were far less formidable fighting men, and their adventures were less striking and varied. Yet think of the way we should feel if a great poet should now arise who would incidentally illustrate the ferocity of the human heart by allusions both to the terrible Hunnish “scourge of God” and to the outlaws who in our own times defied justice in Missouri and New Mexico!

When Dante wishes to illustrate the fierce passions of the human heart, he may speak of Lycurgus, or of Saul; or he may speak of two local contemporary captains, victor or vanquished in obscure struggles between Guelph and Ghibellin; men like Jacopo del Cassero or Buonconte, whom he mentions as naturally as he does Cyrus or Rehoboam. He is entirely right! What one among our own writers, however, would be able simply and naturally to mention Ulrich Dahlgren, or Custer, or Morgan, or Raphael Semmes, or Marion, or Sumter, as illustrating the qualities shown by Hannibal, or Rameses, or William the Conqueror, or by Moses or Hercules? Yet the Guelph and Ghibellin captains of whom Dante speaks were in no way as important as these American soldiers of the second or third rank. Dante saw nothing incongruous in treating at length of the qualities of all of them; he was not thinking of comparing the genius of the unimportant local leader with the genius of the great sovereign conquerors of the past--he was thinking only of the qualities of courage and daring and of the awful horror of death; and when we deal with what is elemental in the human soul it matters but little whose soul we take. In the same way he mentions a couple of spendthrifts of Padua and Siena, who come to violent ends, just as in the preceding canto he had dwelt upon the tortures undergone by Dionysius and Simon de Montfort, guarded by Nessus and his fellow centaurs. For some reason he hated the spendthrifts in question as the Whigs of Revolutionary South Carolina and New York hated Tarleton, Kruger, Saint Leger, and De Lancey; and to him there was nothing incongruous in drawing a lesson from one couple of offenders more than from another. (It would, by the way, be outside my present purpose to speak of the rather puzzling manner in which Dante confounds his own hatreds with those of heaven, and, for instance, shows a vindictive enjoyment in putting his personal opponent Filippo Argenti in hell, for no clearly adequate reason.)

When he turns from those whom he is glad to see in hell toward those for whom he cares, he shows the same delightful power of penetrating through the externals into the essentials. Cato and Manfred illustrate his point no better than Belacqua, a contemporary Florentine maker of citherns. Alas! what poet to-day would dare to illustrate his argument by introducing Steinway in company with Cato and Manfred! Yet again, when examples of love are needed, he draws them from the wedding-feast at Cana, from the actions of Pylades and Orestes, and from the life of a kindly, honest comb-dealer of Siena who had just died. Could we now link together Peter Cooper and Pylades, without feeling a sense of incongruity? He couples Priscian with a politician of local note who had written an encyclopædia and a lawyer of distinction who had lectured at Bologna and Oxford; we could not now with such fine unconsciousness bring Evarts and one of the compilers of the Encyclopædia Britannica into a like comparison.

When Dante deals with the crimes which he most abhorred, simony and barratry, he flails offenders of his age who were of the same type as those who in our days flourish by political or commercial corruption; and he names his offenders, both those just dead and those still living, and puts them, popes and politicians alike, in hell. There have been trust magnates and politicians and editors and magazine-writers in our own country whose lives and deeds were no more edifying than those of the men who lie in the third and the fifth chasm of the eighth circle of the Inferno; yet for a poet to name those men would be condemned as an instance of shocking taste.

One age expresses itself naturally in a form that would be unnatural, and therefore undesirable, in another age. We do not express ourselves nowadays in epics at all; and we keep the emotions aroused in us by what is good or evil in the men of the present in a totally different compartment from that which holds our emotions concerning what was good or evil in the men of the past. An imitation of the letter of the times past, when the spirit has wholly altered, would be worse than useless; and the very qualities that help to make Dante’s poem immortal would, if copied nowadays, make the copyist ridiculous. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing if we could, in some measure, achieve the mighty Florentine’s high simplicity of soul, at least to the extent of recognizing in those around us the eternal qualities which we admire or condemn in the men who wrought good or evil at any stage in the world’s previous history. Dante’s masterpiece is one of the supreme works of art that the ages have witnessed; but he would have been the last to wish that it should be treated only as a work of art, or worshipped only for art’s sake, without reference to the dread lessons it teaches mankind.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[8]

Mr. H. S. Chamberlain’s work on “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” is a noteworthy book in more ways than one. It is written by an Englishman who has been educated on the Continent, and has lived there until he is much more German than English. Previously he had written a book in French, while this particular book was written in German, and has only recently been translated into English. Adequately to review the book, or rather to write an adequate essay suggested by it, would need the space that would have been taken by an old-time Quarterly or Edinburgh Reviewer a century or fourscore years ago. I have called the book “noteworthy,” and this it certainly is. It ranks with Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” and still more with Gobineau’s “Inégalité des Races Humaines,” for its brilliancy and suggestiveness and also for its startling inaccuracies and lack of judgment. A witty English critic once remarked of Mitford that he had all the qualifications of an historian--violent partiality and extreme wrath. Mr. Chamberlain certainly possesses these qualifications in excess, and, combined with a queer vein of the erratic in his temperament, they almost completely offset the value of his extraordinary erudition, extending into widely varied fields, and of his occasionally really brilliant inspiration. He is, however, always entertaining; which is of itself no mean merit, in view of the fact that most serious writers seem unable to regard themselves as serious unless they are also dull.

[8] “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.” By Houston
Stewart Chamberlain. A translation from the German, by
John Lees. With an introduction by Lord Redesdale. In two
volumes.

Mr. Chamberlain’s thesis is that the nineteenth century, and therefore the twentieth and all future centuries, depend for everything in them worth mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic branch of the Aryan race. He holds that there is no such thing as a general progress of mankind, that progress is only for those whom he calls the Teutons, and that when they mix with or are intruded upon by alien and, as he regards them, lower races, the result is fatal. Much that he says regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like, is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth considering by a generation accustomed, as its forefathers for the preceding generations were accustomed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious doctrines taught by well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists; but Mr. Chamberlain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of those whom he derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish hatred is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain’s hatreds cover a wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church, the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety of literary men and historians.[9] To this sufficiently incongruous collection of antipathies he adds a much smaller selection of violent attachments, ranging from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans to Immanuel Kant, and Indian theology, metaphysics, and philosophy--he draws sharp distinctions between all three, and I merely use them to indicate his admiration for the Indian habit of thought, an admiration which goes hand in hand with and accentuates his violent hatred for what most sane people regard as the far nobler thought contained, for instance, in the Old Testament. He continually contradicts himself, or at least uses words in such diametrically opposite senses as to convey the effect of contradiction; and so it would be possible to choose phrases of his which contradict what is here said; but I think that I give a correct impression of his teaching as a whole.

[9] Some of his antipathies appeal to the present writer;
I much enjoy his irrelevant and hearty denunciation of
the folly of treating the comparatively trivial Latin
literature as of such peculiar importance as to entitle it
to be grouped in grotesque association with the magnificent
Greek literature under the unmeaning title of “classic.”

As he touches lightly on an infinitely varied range of subjects, it would be possible to choose almost at random passages to justify what is said above. Take, for instance, his dogmatic assertions concerning faith and works. He frantically condemns the doctrine of salvation by works and frantically exalts the doctrine of salvation by faith. Much that he says about both doctrines must be taken in so mystical and involved a sense that it contains little real meaning to ordinary men. Yet he is also capable of expressing, on this very subject, noble thought in a lofty manner. In one of his sudden lapses into brilliant sanity he emphasizes the fact that Saint Francis of Assisi was faith incorporate and yet the special apostle of good works; and that Martin Luther, the advocate of redemption by faith, consecrated his life and revealed to others the secret of good works--“free works done only to please God, not for the sake of piety.”

Unfortunately, these brilliant lapses into sanity are fixed in a matrix of fairly bedlamite passion and non-sanity. Mr. Chamberlain jeers with reason at the Roman Curia because until 1822 it kept on the Index all books which taught that the earth went round the sun; but really such action is not much worse than that of a man professing to write a book like this at the outset of the twentieth century who takes the attitude Mr. Chamberlain does toward the teaching of Darwin. The acceptance of the fundamental truths of evolution are quite as necessary to sound scientific thought as the acceptance of the fundamental truths concerning the solar system; and the attempt that Mr. Chamberlain in one place makes to draw a distinction between them is fantastic. Again, take what Mr. Chamberlain says of Aryans and Teutons. He bursts the flood-gates of scorn when he deals with persons who idealize humanity, or, as he styles it, “so-called humanity”; and he says: “For this humanity about which man has philosophized to such an extent suffers from the serious defect that it does not exist at all. History reveals to us a great number of various human beings, but no such thing as humanity”; yet on this very page he attributes the history of the growth of our civilization to its “Teutonic” character, and he uses the word “Teuton” as well as the word “Aryan” with as utter a looseness and vagueness as ever any philanthropist or revolutionist used the word “humanity.” All that he says in derision of such a forced use of the word “humanity” could with a much greater percentage of truthfulness be said as regards the words and ideas symbolized by Teutonism and Aryanism as Mr. Chamberlain uses these terms. Indeed, as he uses them they amount to little more than expressions of his personal likes and dislikes. His statement of the raceless chaos into which the Roman Empire finally lapsed is, on the whole, just, and, to use the words continually coming to one’s mind in dealing with him, both brilliant and suggestive. But in his anxiety to claim everything good for Aryans and Teutons he finally reduces himself to the position of insisting that wherever he sees a man whom he admires he must postulate for him Aryan, and, better still, Teutonic blood. He likes David, so he promptly makes him an Aryan Amorite. He likes Michael Angelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and he instantly says that they are Teutons; but he does not like Napoleon, and so he says that Napoleon is a true representative of the raceless chaos. The noted Italians in question, he states, were all of German origin, descended from the Germans who had conquered Italy in the sixth century. Now, of course, if Mr. Chamberlain is willing to be serious with himself, he must know perfectly well that even by the time of Dante seven or eight centuries had passed, and by the time of the other great Italians he mentions eight or ten centuries had passed, since the Germanic invasion. In other words, these great Italians were separated from the days of the Gothic and Lombard invasions by the distance which separates modern England from the Norman invasion; and his thesis has just about as much substance as would be contained in the statement that Wellington, Nelson, Turner, Wordsworth, and Tennyson excelled in their several spheres because they were all pure-blood descendants of the motley crew that came in with William the Conqueror. The different ethnic elements which entered into the Italy of the seventh century were in complete solution by the thirteenth, and it would have been quite as impossible to trace them to their several original strains as nowadays to trace in the average Englishman the various strains of blood from his Norman, Saxon, Celtic, and Scandinavian ancestors. Nor does Mr. Chamberlain mind believing two incompatible things in the quickest possible succession if they happen to suit his philosophy of the moment. Generally, when he speaks of the Teuton he thinks of the tall, long-headed man of the north; although, because of some crank in his mind, he puts in the proviso that he may have black as well as blond hair. The round-skulled man of middle Europe he usually condemns; but if his mind happens to run with approbation toward the Tyrolese, for instance, he at once forgets what ethnic division of Europeans it is to which they belong, and accepts them as typical Teutons. He greatly admires the teaching of the Apostle Paul, and so he endeavors to persuade himself that the Apostle Paul was not really a Jew; but he does not like the teachings of the Epistle of James on the subject of good works (teachings for which I have a peculiar sympathy, by the way), and accordingly he says that James was a pure Jew.

Fundamentally, very many of Mr. Chamberlain’s ideas are true and noble. I admire the morality with which he condemns the intolerance of Calvin and Luther no less strongly than the intolerance of their Roman opponents, and yet his acceptance of the fact that they could not have done their great work if there had not been in their characters an alloy which made it possible for actual humanity to accept their teaching. But even his sense of morality is as curiously capricious as that of Carlyle himself, and as little trustworthy. He glories in the pointless and wanton barbarity of the destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War as saving Europe from the Afro-Asiatic peril--pure nonsense, of course, for Carthage was then no more dangerous to Rome than Corinth was, and the sacks of the two cities stand on a par as regards any importance in their after effects. Perhaps his attitude toward Byron is more practically mischievous, or at least shows a much less desirable trait of character. He says that the personality of Byron “has something repulsive in it for every thorough Teuton, because we nowhere encounter in it the idea of duty,” which makes him “unsympathetic, un-Teutonic”; but he adds that Teutons do not object in the least to his licentiousness, and, on the contrary, see in it “a proof of genuine race”! Really, this reconciliation of a high ideal of duty with gross licentiousness would be infamous if it were not so unspeakably comic. On the next page, by the way, Mr. Chamberlain says that Louis XIV was anti-Teutonic in his persecution of the Protestants, but a thorough Teuton when he defended the liberties of the Gallican church against Rome! Now such intellectual antics as these, and the haphazard use of any kind of a name (without the least reference to its ordinary use, provided Mr. Chamberlain has taken a fancy to it) to represent or symbolize any individual or attribute of which he approves, makes it very difficult to accept the book as having any serious merit whatever. Yet interspersed with innumerable pages which at best are those of an able man whose mind is not quite sound, and at worst lose their brilliancy without their irrationality, there are many pages of deep thought and lofty morality based upon wide learning and wide literary and even scientific knowledge. There could be no more unsafe book to follow implicitly, and few books of such pretensions more ludicrously unsound; and yet it is a book which students and scholars, and men who, though neither students nor scholars, are yet deeply interested in life, must have on their book-shelves. Much the same criticism should be passed upon him that he himself passes upon John Fiske, to whose great work, “The History of the Discovery of America,” he gives deserved and unstinted praise, but at whom he rails for solemnly, and, as Mr. Chamberlain says, with more than Papal pretensions to infallibility, setting forth complete patent solutions for all the problems connected not merely with the origin but with the destiny of man. Mr. Chamberlain differentiates sharply between the admirable work Fiske did in such a book as that treating of the discovery of America and the work he did when he ventured to dogmatize loosely, after the manner of Darwin’s successors in the ’70s and ’80s, upon a scanty collection of facts very imperfectly understood. But Mr. Chamberlain himself would have done far better if in his book he had copied the methods and modesty of Fiske at his best--the methods and modesty of such books as Sutherland’s “Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct”--and had refrained from taking an attitude of cock-sureness concerning problems which at present no one can more than imperfectly understand. He is unwise to follow Brougham’s example and make omniscience his foible.

Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a really beautiful and solemn appreciation of true Christianity, of true acceptance of Christ’s teachings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain has done, a man who can sketch as vividly as he has sketched the fundamental facts of the Roman empire in the first three centuries of our era, a man who can warn us as clearly as he has warned about some of the pressing dangers which threaten our social fabric because of indulgence in a morbid and false sentimentality, a man, in short, who has produced in this one book materials for half a dozen excellent books on utterly diverse subjects, represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to be taken into account.

THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT

THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT

There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.

This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackled materialism is helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of political and clerical absolutism. The first of the books mentioned below[10] is written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. Under the rather fanciful title of “The Death of the Swan” it deals with the shortcomings of Latin civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the doctrines of pure materialism as a remedy for these shortcomings, and draws lessons from the success of the Northern races, and especially of our own countrymen, which I, for one, am unwilling to have drawn. The author feels that the civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is going down, and that it owes its decadence to submission to an outworn governmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, and especially to the futility of its ideals in government, religion, and the whole art of living, a futility so wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned aside the people from all that makes for real efficiency and success. In his revolt against sentimentality, mock humanitarianism, and hypocrisy the author advocates frank egotism and brutality as rules of conduct for both individuals and nations; and in his revolt against the theological tyranny and superstition from which the Spanish peoples in the Old and New Worlds have suffered so much in the past he advocates implicit obedience to the revolting creed which would treat gold and force as the true and only gods for human guidance; and this he does in the name of science and enlightenment and of exact and correct thinking. He speaks with admiration of certain American qualities, confounding in curious fashion the use and abuse of great but dangerous traits. He fails to see that the line of separation between the school of Washington and of Lincoln and the school of the prophets of brutal force, as expressed in the deification of either Mars or Mammon, is as sharp as that which distinguishes both of these schools from the apostles of the silly sentimentalism which he justly condemns. He sees that the really great Americans were thoroughly practical men; but he is blind to the fact that they were also lofty idealists. It was precisely because they were both idealists and practical men that they made their mark deep in history. He sees that they abhorred bigotry and superstition; he does not see that they were sundered as far from the men who attack all religion and all order as from the men who uphold either governmental or religious tyranny. It was the fact that Washington and Lincoln refused to carry good policies to bad extremes, and at the same time refused to be frightened out of supporting good policies because they might lead to bad extremes, that made them of such far-reaching usefulness.

[10] “La Mort du Cygne.” By Carlos Reyles. Translation from
Spanish into French by Alfred de Bengoechea.

“Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist.” By Thomas Dwight, M.D.

“The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.” By Henry Osborn
Taylor.

“Some Neglected Factors in Evolution.” By Henry M. Bernard.

“The World of Life.” By Alfred Russel Wallace.

“William James.” By Émile Boutroux.

“Science et Religion.” By Émile Boutroux.

“Science and Religion.” By Émile Boutroux. Translation into
English by Jonathan Nield.

“Creative Evolution.” By Henri Bergson. Authorized translation
by Arthur Mitchell.

“The Varieties of Religious Experience.” By William James.

“Time and Free Will.” By Henri Bergson. Translation by F. L.
Pogson.

“From Epicurus to Christ.” By William De Witt Hyde.

“The Sixth Sense.” By Bishop Charles H. Brent.

I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review these
books in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use
them only to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the
search for truth; as, for instance, the harm that comes from
seeking to apply, universally, truth as apprehended by the
mere materialist, the futility of trying to check this harm
by invoking the spirit of reactionary mediævalism, and the
fundamental agreement reached by truth-seekers of the highest
type, both scientific and religious.

Dr. Dwight’s book is very largely a protest against the materialistic philosophy which has produced such conceptions of life, and against these conceptions of life themselves. With this protest we must all heartily sympathize; unfortunately, it is impossible to have such sympathy with the reactionary spirit in which he makes his protest. There is much that is true in the assault he makes; but in his zeal to show where the leaders of the modern advance have been guilty of shortcomings he tends to assume positions which would put an instant stop to any honest effort to advance at all, and would plunge us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages. Apparently the ideal after which Dr. Dwight strives is that embodied in the man of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry Osborn Taylor in one of his profound and able studies has said: “The mediæval man was not spiritually self-reliant, his character was not consciously wrought by its own strength of mind and purpose. Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”

Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous parallelism between the lines of thought of the materialistic scientists of to-day and those of the French Revolution. Strongly though he disapproves of much of the thought of modern science, he disapproves even more strongly of the Revolution. In speaking of the similarities between them he says:

“Among the characters of the Revolution we meet all kinds of company. There are the honest men anxious for reform, the protesters against what they conceived to be religious oppression, the dreamy idealists without definite plan, the ranting orators of the ‘mountain,’ fanatics and demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a living from the more or less sincere promulgation of revolutionary doctrines and who find legalized plunder very profitable, the army of those who for fear or for favor prefer to be on the winning side and follow the fashionable doctrines without an examination which most of them are incompetent to make, and finally the mob of the _sans-culottes_ rejoicing in the overthrow of law, order, and decency.”