Part 4

Our health, our pride, our every breath Of leisure--do not these suffice? Ah, tell me not you're also death On vice.

Ah, tell me not yon gilded hell That has from boyhood soothed my grief Must fall into the sere and yellow leaf;

That dens my wayward comrades know Must also share this cruel lot: That every haunt of sin must go To pot.

I who have seen your roaring marts Engulf our aristocracy, Our poets, all who love the arts But me:

I who have watched your bounteous purse Seduce, I say, the world's elect-- I, in my clear and ringing verse, Object.

You've stripped existence to the bone; You see us of all else bereft; You know quite well that vice alone Is left.

You claim our every thought and prayer, Nor do we grudge the sacrifice. But worms will turn! You've got to spare Us vice

[Illustration]

Objections to Reading

When I was a child of tender years--about five tender years, I think--I felt I couldn't wait any longer: I wanted to read. My parents had gone along supposing that there was no hurry; and they were quite right; there wasn't. But I was impatient. I couldn't wait for people to read to me--they so often were busy, or they insisted on reading the wrong thing, or stopping too soon. I had an immense curiosity to explore the book-universe, and the only way to do it satisfactorily was to do it myself.

Consequently I got hold of a reader, which said, "See the Dog Run!" It added, "The Dog Can Run and Leap," and stated other curious facts. "The Apple is Red," was one of them, I remember, and "The Round Ball Can Roll."

There was certainly nothing thrilling about the exclamation, "See the Dog Run!" Dogs run all the time. The performance was too common to speak of. Nevertheless, it did thrill me to spell it out for myself in a book. "The Round Ball Can Roll," said my book. Well, I knew that already. But it was wonderful to have a book say it. It was having books talk to me.

Years went on, and I read more and more. Sometimes, deep in Scott, before dinner, I did not hear the bell, and had to be hunted up by some one and roused from my trance. I hardly knew where I was, when they called me. I got up from my chair not knowing whether it was for dinner or breakfast or for school in the morning. Sometimes, late at night, even after a long day of play--those violent and never-pausing exertions that we call play, in boyhood--I would still try to read, hiding the light, until my eyes closed in spite of me. So far as I knew, there were not many books in the world; but nevertheless I was in a hurry to read all there were.

In this way, I ignorantly fastened a habit upon me. I got like an alcoholic, I could let no day go by without reading. As I grew older, I couldn't pass a book-shop without going in. And in libraries, where reading was free, I always read to excess. The people around me glorified the habit (just as old songs praise drinking). I never had the slightest suspicion that it might be a vice. I was as complacent over my book totals as six bottle men over theirs.

[Illustration: Ak and the striped Wumpit--]

Can there ever have been a race of beings on some other star, so fascinated as we are by reading? It is a remarkable appetite. It seems to me that it must be peculiar to simians. Would you find the old folks of any other species, with tired old brains, feeling vexed if they didn't get a whole newspaper fresh every morning? Back in primitive times, when men had nothing to read but knots in a string, or painful little pictures on birch bark--was it the same even then? Probably Mrs. Flint-Arrow, 'way back in the Stone Age pored over letters from her son, as intensely as any one. "Only two knots in it this time," you can almost hear her say to her husband. "Really I think Ak might be a little more frank with his mother. Does it mean he has killed that striped Wumpit in Double Rock Valley, or that the Gouly family where you told him to visit has twins?"

[Illustration: maiden in distress]

There are one or two primitive ideas we still have about reading. I remember in a boarding-house in Tucson, I once met a young clergyman, who exemplified the belief many have in the power of books. "Here are you," he would say to me, "and here is your brain. What are you going to put into it? That is the question." I could make myself almost as good as a bishop, he intimated, by choosing the noblest and best books, instead of mere novels. One had only to choose the right sort of reading to be the right sort of man.

[Illustration: Scenes of Horror]

He seemed to think I had only to read Socrates to make myself wise, or G. Bernard Shaw to be witty.

Cannibals eat the hearts of dead enemy chieftains, to acquire their courage; and this clergyman entered a library with the same simple notion.

But though books are weak implements for implanting good qualities in us, they do color our minds, fill them with pictures and sometimes ideas. There are scenes of horror in my mind to-day that were put there by Poe, or Ambrose Bierce or somebody, years ago, which I cannot put out. No maiden in distress would bother me nowadays, I have read of too many, but some of those first ones I read of still make me feel cold. Yes, a book can leave indelible pictures .... And it can introduce wild ideas. Take a nice old lady for instance, at ease on her porch, and set the ballads of Villon to grinning at her over the hedge, or a deep-growling Veblen to creeping on her, right down the rail,--it's no wonder they frighten her. She doesn't want books to show her the underworld and blacken her life.

[Illustration: Dastardly attack by Veblen's latest.]

It's not surprising that some books are censored and forbidden to circulate. The surprising thing is that in this illiberal world they travel so freely. But they usually aren't taken seriously; I suppose that's the answer. It's odd. Many countries that won't admit even the quietest living man without passports will let in the most active, dangerous thoughts in book form.

The habit of reading increases. How far can it go? The innate capacity of our species for it is plainly enormous. Are we building a race of men who will read several books every day, not counting a dozen newspapers at breakfast, and magazines in between? It sounds like a lot, but our own record would have astonished our ancestors. Our descendants are likely to read more and faster than we.

[Illustration: The Underworld]

People used to read chiefly for knowledge or to pursue lines of thought. There wasn't so much fiction as now. These proportions have changed. We read some books to feed our curiosity but more to feed our emotions. In other words, we moderns are substituting reading for living.

When our ancestors felt restless they burst out of their poor bookless homes, and roamed around looking for adventure. We read some one else's. The only adventures they could find were often unsatisfactory, and the people they met in the course of them were hard to put up with. We can choose just the people and adventures we like in our books. But our ancestors got real emotions, where we live on canned.

[Illustration: Volume of morbid Geography attempting to enter Lone Gulch]

Of course canned emotions are thrilling at times, in their way, and wonderful genius has gone into putting them up. But a man going home from a library where he has read of some battle, has not the sensations of a soldier returning from war.

[Illustration: This book tells you all about how fighting feels]

Still--for us--reading is natural. If we were more robust, as a race, or if earth-ways were kinder, we should not turn so often to books when we wanted more life. But a fragile yet aspiring species on a stormy old star--why, a substitute for living is the very thing such beings need.

On Authors

The Enjoyment of Gloom

[Illustration]

There used to be a poem--I wish I could find it again--about a man in a wild, lonely place who had a child and a dog. One day he had to go somewhere So he left the dog home to protect the child until he came back. The dog was a strong, faithful animal, with large, loving eyes.

Something terrible happened soon after the man had gone off. I find I'm rather hazy about it, but I think it was wolves. The faithful dog had an awful time of it. He fought and he fought. He was pitifully cut up and bitten. In the end, though, he won.

The man came back when it was night. The dog was lying on the bed with the child he had saved. There was blood on the bed. The man's heart stood still. "This blood is my child's," he thought hastily, "and this dog, which I trusted, has killed it." The dog feebly wagged his tail. The man sprang upon him and slew him.

He saw his mistake immediately afterward, but--it was too late.

When I first read this I was a boy of perhaps ten or twelve. It darn near made me cry. There was one line especially--the poor dog's dying howl of reproach. I think it did make me cry.

I at once took the book--a large, blue one--and hunted up my younger brothers. I made them sit one on each side of the nursery fire. "I'm going to read you something," I said.

[Illustration: "Keep all the wolves out now."]

They looked up at me trustfully. I remember their soft, chubby faces.

[Illustration: Reading about the poor dog.]

I began the poem, very much moved; and they too, soon grew agitated. They had a complete confidence, however, that it would come out all right. When it didn't, when the dog's dying howl came, they burst into tears. We all sobbed together.

This session was such a success that I read it to them several times afterward. I didn't get quite so much poignancy out of these encores myself but my little brothers cried every time, and that, somehow, gave me pleasure. It gave no pleasure to them. They earnestly begged me not to keep reading it. I was the eldest, however, and paid little attention, of course, to their wishes. They'd be playing some game, perhaps. I would stalk into the room, book in hand, and sit them down by the fire. "You're going to read us about the dog again?" they would wail. "Well, not right away," I'd say. "I'll read something funny to start with." This didn't much cheer them. "Oh, please don't read us about the dog, please don't," they'd beg, "we're playing run-around." When I opened the book they'd begin crying 'way in advance, long before that stanza came describing his last dying howl.

It was kind of mean of me.

There's a famous old author, though, who's been doing just that all his life. He's eighty years old, and still at it. I mean Thomas Hardy. Dying howls, of all kinds, are his specialty.

His critics have assumed that from this they can infer his philosophy. They say he believes that "sorrow is the rule and joy the exception," and that "good-will and courage and honesty are brittle weapons" for us to use in our defense as we pass through such a world.

I'm not sure that I agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards it at heart as so black.

He has written--how many books? twenty odd?--novels and poems. They make quite an edifice. They represent long years of work. Could he have been so industrious if he had found the world a chamber of horrors? He might have done one or two novels or poems about it, but how could he have kept on if he had truly felt the whole thing was hopeless? He kept on, because although sorrows move him he does not feel their weight. He found he could have a good time painting the world's tragic aspects. He is somehow or other so constituted that that's been his pleasure. And he has wanted his own kind of pleasure, just as you and I want our kinds. That's fair.

I like to think that the good old soul has had a lot of fun all his life, describing all the gloomiest episodes a person could think of. If a good, gloomy episode comes into his mind while he's shaving, it brightens the whole day, and he bustles off to set it down, whistling.

Somebody once asked him if he were as pessimistic as his writings would indicate, and he replied that it wasn't safe to judge a man's thoughts by his writings. His writings showed only what kind of things he liked to describe. "Some authors become vocal before one aspect of life, some another." (Perhaps not his exact words but close to it.) One aspect of life may impress you, yet leave you in silence; another may stimulate you into saying something; but what does that prove? It merely shows what you like best to talk about, not your philosophy. A cat whose life is principally peace and good food and warm fires makes hardly any noise about those things--at most a mere purr. But she does become vocal and wildly so, over midnight encounters. If another cat so much as disputes her way on a fence-top, her tragic shrieks of anguish will sound like the end of the world. Well, Hardy has spent his life in what was chiefly a peaceful era of history, in a liberal and prosperous country; and he personally, too, has had blessings--the blessing of being able, for instance, to write really good books, and the blessing of finding a public to read and admire them. Is any of this reflected in his themes, though? Does he purr? Mighty little. No, he prefers looking around for trouble in this old world's backyards; he prowls about at night till he comes upon some good hunk of bleakness, and then he sits down, like the cat, to utter long-drawn-out wails, which give him strange, poignant sensations of deep satisfaction. They give us quite other sensations but he doesn't care. In the morning he canters back in, pleased and happy, for breakfast, and he basks in the sun, blinking sagely, the rest of the day. And we say, with respect, "A great pessimist; he thinks life is all sorrow."

The principal objection to pessimists is they sap a man's hope. As some English writer has said, there are two kinds of hope. First, the hope of success, which gives men daring, and helps them win against odds. That isn't the best sort of hope. Many deliberately cultivate it because it makes for success, but that is an insincere habit; it's really self-hypnotism. It may help us to win in some particular enterprise, yes; but it's dangerous, like drug-taking. You must keep on increasing the dose, and blind-folding your reason. Men who do it are buoyant, self-confident, but some of their integrity is lost.

The best kind of hope is not about success in this or that undertaking. It's far deeper; hence when things go against you, it isn't destroyed. It is hope about the nature and future of man and the universe. It is this hope the pessimists would disallow. That's why they repel us. Some lessen our hope in the universe; others, in man.

Buffoon Fate

Suppose that a lot of us were living aboard a huge ship. Suppose the ship didn't rock much, or require any urgent attention, but kept along on an even keel and left us free to do as we liked. And suppose we got into the habit of staying below more and more, never coming up on deck or regarding the sea or the sky. Just played around below, working at little jobs; eating, starving, quarreling, and arguing in the hold of that ship.

And then, maybe, something would happen to call us on deck. Some peril, some storm. And we'd suddenly realize that our life between decks wasn't all. We'd run up and rub our eyes, and stare around at the black waters, the vast, heaving waves; and a gale from far spaces would strike us, and chill us like ice. And we'd think, "By Jove, we're on a ship! And where is our ship sailing?"

Wars, plagues and famines are the storms that make us run up on deck. They snatch us up, out of our buying and selling and studying, and show us our whole human enterprise as a ship, in great danger.

We want to scurry back below, where it's lighted and smaller. Down below where our toys are. On deck it's too vast, too tremendous....

We want to forget that the human race is on an adventure, sailing no one knows where, on a magical, treacherous sea.

We have fought our way up from being wild, houseless lemurs, or lower, and little by little we have built up our curious structure--of learning, of art, of discovery--a wonderful structure: at least for us monkey-men. It has been a long struggle. We can guess, looking backward, what our ancestors had to contend with--how the cavemen fought mammoths, and their tough sons and daughters fought barbarism. But we want to forget it. We wish every one now to be genial. We pretend that this isn't the same earth that our ancestors lived on, but quite a different planet, where roughness is kept within bounds and where persons wear gloves and have neat wooden doors they can lock.

But it's the very same earth that old Grandpa Caveman once wrestled with, and where old Grandma Cavewoman ran for her life twice a week.

We've varnished the surface.

But it's still wild and strange just beneath.

In a book called "The War in the Air," by H. G. Wells (1907) he pictures the world swimming along quietly, when bang! a war starts! And it spreads, and takes in East and West, smashes cities, stops everything. And one of the young men in the story looks around rather dazed, and says in a low voice: "I've always thought life was a lark. It isn't. This sort of thing has always been happening, I suppose--these things, wars and earthquakes, that sweep across all the decency of life. It's just as though I had woke up to it all for the first time.... And it's always been so--it's the way of life."

So that's what we need to get used to, that it's _that_ kind of a ship. We ought to have a sense of the adventure on which we're all bound.

* * * * *

It's not only war--not by a long shot--that gives men that sense. Great scientists have it. Great sailors. You can sort out the statesmen around you, the writers, the poets, according to whether or not they ever have been up on deck.

Theodore Dreiser has, for instance; Arnold Bennett has not. Charles Dickens did not, and that's why he is ranked below Thackeray. Compare James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist" with George Moore's "Confessions," and if you apply this criterion, Moore takes a back seat.

* * * * *

There's one great man now living, however, who has almost too much of this sense: this cosmic adventure emotion. And that man's Joseph Conrad. Perhaps in his youth the sea came upon him too suddenly, or his boyhood sea-dreams awed too deeply his then unformed mind. At all events, the men in his stories are like lonely spirits, sailing, spellbound, through the immense forces surrounding the world. "There they are," one of them says, as he stands at the rail, "stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which man seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed."

We all have that mood. But Conrad, he's given to brooding. And his habit at night when he stands staring up at the stars is to see (or conjure up rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at heart,--because of his surety that Fate is ignoble, and blind.

It's as though the man told himself ghost stories about this great universe. He feels that it ought to have a gracious and powerful master, leading men along fiery highways to test but not crush them, and marching them firm-eyed and glorious toward high goals. But instead there is nothing. The gray, empty wastes of the skies beyond starland are silent. Or, worse, their one sound is the footfall of that buffoon Fate.

The way to meet this black situation, according to Conrad, is to face it with grim steady courage. And that's what he does. It's stirring to discover the fineness of this man's tragic bravery. But when I get loose from his spell, and reflect, independently, I ask myself, "After all, is this performance so brave?"

We must all weigh the universe, each in his own penny-scales, and decide for ourselves whether to regard it as inspiring or hollow. But letting our penny-scales frighten us isn't stout-hearted.

If I were to tell myself ghost stories until I was trembling, and then, with my heart turning cold, firmly walk through the dark, my courage would be splendid, no doubt, but not finely applied. Conrad's courage is splendid--it is as great as almost any modern's--but it isn't courageous of him to busy it with self-conjured dreads.

The Wrong Lampman

It is odd, or no, it's not, but it's note-worthy, that Shaw has had few disciples. Here is a witty, vivacious man, successful and keen: why isn't he the head of a school of other keen, witty writers? He has provided an attractive form--the play with an essay as preface. He has provided stock characters, such as the handsome-hero male-moth, who protests so indignantly at the fatal attraction of candles. He has developed above all that useful formula which has served many a dramatist--the comic confrontation of reason and instinct in man. Yet this whole apparatus lies idle, except for the use that Shaw makes of it. It is as though Henry Ford had perfected an automobile, and then no one had taken a drive in it, ever, but Henry.

The explanation that Shaw's is too good a machine, or that it takes a genius to run it, is not sufficiently plausible. The truth probably is that his shiny car has some bad defect.