Appearances Part 8

"Doggett and Cubs each win shut out."

"Brockett is easy for Detroit Nine."

Glancing at the small type I read:--

"Englewood was the first to tally. This was in the fourth inning. W.

Merritt, the first man up, was safe on Williams' error, and he got round to third on another miscue by Williams. Charley Clough was on deck with a timely single, which scored Merritt. Curran's out at first put Clough on third, from whence he tallied on c.u.ming's single. c.u.ming got to second, when Wiley grounded out along the first base line and scored on Reinmund's single. Every other time Reinmund came to the bat he struck out."

I pa.s.s to the _Magazine Section_.

On the first page is the mysterious heading "E. of K. and E." Several huge portraits of a bald clean-shaven man in shirt sleeves partially explain. E. is Mr. Erlanger, a theatrical impresario, and K. and E.

presumably is his firm. The article describes "the accomplishment of a busy man on one of his ordinary days," and makes one hope no day is ever extraordinary. The interviewer who tells about him is almost speechless with emotion. He searches for a phrase to express his feelings, finds it at last, and comes triumphantly to his close--Mr. Erlanger is a man "with trained arms, trained legs, a trained body and a trained mind."

There follows: "The Story of a Society Girl," in which we are told "there is a confession of love and the startling discovery that Dolly was a professional model"; "The Doctor's Story," with a picture of a corpse, "whose white shapely hands were clasped one over the other"; and "Would you Convict on Circ.u.mstantial Evidence?--A Scaffold Confession. A True Story." I glance at this, and read, "While the crowd watched in strained, breathless silence there came a sharp agonised voice and a commotion near the steps of the scaffold. 'Stop! Stop! The man is not guilty. I mean it. It is I who should stand there. Let me speak.'" You can now reconstruct the story for yourself. Next comes "Get the Man! Craft and courage of old-time and modern express robbers matched by organised secret service and the mandate that makes capture alone the end of an unflagging man-hunt." This is accompanied by portraits of famous detectives and train-robbers.

There follows "_Thrilling Lines_," with a picture of a man who seems to be looping the loop on a bicycle.

And the conclusion of the section is a poem, ent.i.tled "Cynthianna Blythe," with coloured ill.u.s.trations apparently intended for children, and certainly successful in not appealing to adults.

Comment, I suppose, is superfluous. But it is only fair to say that the whole of the press of America is not of this character. Among the thousands of papers daily produced on that continent, it would be possible, I believe, to name ten--I myself could mention five--which contain in almost every issue some piece of information or comment which an intelligent man might care to peruse. There are to be found, now and again, pa.s.sing references to European and even to Asiatic politics; for it cannot be said that the press of America wholly ignored the recent revolutions in Persia and in Turkey. I myself saw a reference to the new Sultan as a man "fat, but not fleshy." England looms big enough on the American horizon to be treated to an occasional gibe; and the doings of fashionable Americans in London are reported somewhat fully. Still, on the whole, the American daily press is typified by the specimen I have a.n.a.lysed. Sensations, personalities and fiction are its stock-in-trade.

Why? The causes are well known, but are worth recapitulating, for they are part of the system of modern civilisation.

The newspaper press is a business intended to make money. This is its primary aim, which may, or may not, include the subordinate purpose of advocating some line of public policy. Now, to make money, it is essential to secure advertis.e.m.e.nts; and to secure advertis.e.m.e.nts it is essential to have a large circulation. But a large circulation can only be obtained by lowering the price of the paper, and adapting it to the leisure mood of the ma.s.s of people. But this leisure mood is usually one of sheer vacuity, incapable of intellectual effort or imaginative response. The man is there, waiting to be filled, and to be filled with the stuff easiest to digest. The rest follows. The newspapers supply the demand and by supplying extend and perpetuate it. Among the possible appeals open to them they deliberately choose the lowest. For people are capable of Good as well as of Bad; and if they cannot get the Bad they will sometimes take the Good. Newspapers, probably, could exist, even under democratic conditions, by maintaining a certain standard of intelligence and morals. But it is easier to exist on melodrama, fatuity and sport. And one or two papers adopting that course force the others into line; for here, as in so many departments of modern life, "The Bad drives out the Good." This process of deterioration of the press is proceeding rapidly in England, with the advent of the halfpenny newspaper. It has not gone so far as in America; but there is no reason why it should not, and every reason why it should; for the same causes are at work.

I have called the process "deterioration," but that, of course, is matter of opinion. A Cabinet Minister, at a recent Conference in London, is reported to have congratulated the press on its progressive improvement during recent years. And Lord Northcliffe is a peer. The more the English press approximates to the American, the more, it would seem, it may hope for public esteem and honour. And that is natural, for the American method pays.

Well, the sun still shines and the sky is still blue. But between it and the American people stretches a veil of printed paper. Curious! the fathers of this nation read nothing but the Bible. That too, it may be said, was a veil; but a veil woven of apocalyptic visions, of lightning and storm, of Leviathan, and the wrath of Jehovah. What is the stuff of the modern veil, we have seen. And surely the contrast is calculated to evoke curious reflections.

V

IN THE ROCKIES

Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly upon the railway.

There was a little shanty of a station 8000 feet above the sea; and, beyond, the great expanse of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, and I determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told me there was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, in vain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by a thin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of recognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness but independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, and resumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I wondered, that were pa.s.sing across the mountains? I connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he has exterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across the mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent.

"Click--click--click--Pick--pick--pick--Pock--pock--pockets." So the west called to the east, and the east to the west, while the winds roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolate iron road.

It was too late now for me to reach my hotel that evening, and I was obliged to beg a night's rest. The yellow youth a.s.sented, with his air of elaborate indifference, and proceeded to make me as comfortable as he could. About sunset, the storm pa.s.sed away over the plains. Behind its flying fringes shot the last rays of the sun; and for a moment the prairie sea was all bared to view, as wide as the sky, as calm and as profound, a thousand miles of gra.s.s where men and cattle crept like flies, and towns and houses were swallowed and lost in the infinite monotony. We had supper and then my host began to talk. He was a democrat, and we discussed the coming presidential election. From one newspaper topic to another we pa.s.sed to the talk about signalling to Mars. Signalling interested the youth; he knew all about that; but he knew nothing about Mars, or the stars. These were now shining bright above us; and I told him what I knew of suns and planets, of double stars, of the moons, of Jupiter, of nebulae and the galaxy, and the infinity of s.p.a.ce, and of worlds. He chewed and meditated, and presently remarked: "Gee! I guess then it doesn't matter two cents after all who gets elected president!" Whereupon we turned in, he to sleep and I to lie awake, for I was disturbed by the mystery of the stars. It is long since the notion of infinite s.p.a.ce and infinite worlds has impressed my imagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic scheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands not only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and s.p.a.ce; but he bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and through,--that vision which, if it contracts s.p.a.ce, expands the fate of man, and relates him to the sun and the moon and the stars. I thought of him as he crossed the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea at sunset the tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest of Ravenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of business, the chances of war, the bitterness of exile, aware of the march of the sun about the earth, of its station in the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricate wheeling of the spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those bright luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow of Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter's intolerable blaze; and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and their order, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate Essence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things and all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tend and in whom they rest.

And I recalled the pa.s.sage:

"Frate, la nostra volonta quieta Virtu di carita, che fa volerne Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci a.s.seta.

Se disia.s.simo esser piu superne, Foran discordi gli nostri disiri Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne;

Che vedrai non capere in questi giri, S'essere in caritate e qui necesse, E se la sua natura ben rimiri;

Anzi e formale ad es...o...b..ato esse Tenersi dentro alia divina voglia, Perch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse.

Si che, come noi siam di soglia in soglia Per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace, Com'allo re, che in suo voler ne invoglia.

E la sua volontade e nostra pace: Ella e quel mare al qual tutto si muove Cio ch' ella crea o che natura face."[3]

And then, with a leap, I was back to what we call reality--to the clicking needle, to the corner in wheat, to Chicago and Pittsburg and New York. In all this continent, I thought, in all the western world, there is not a human soul whose will seeks any peace at all, least of all the peace of G.o.d. All move, but about no centre; they move on, to more power, to more wealth, to more motion. There is not one of them who conceives that he has a place, if only he could find it, a rank and order fitted to his nature, higher than some, lower than others, but right, and the only right for him, his true position in the cosmic scheme, his ultimate relation to the Power whence it proceeds. Life, like astronomy, has become Copernican. It has no centre, no significance, or, if any, one beyond our ken. Gravitation drives us, not love. We are attracted and repelled by a force we cannot control, a force that resides in our muscles and our nerves, not in our will and spirit. "Click--click--click--tick--tick--tick," so goes the economic clock. And that clock, with its silly face, has shut us out from the stars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now for us no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that ultimate point of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." "America is a clock," I said; and then I remembered the phrase, "America is Niagara." And like a flake of foam, dizzy and lost, I was swept away, out into the infinite, out into unconsciousness.

The sun was shining brightly when I woke, and I had slept away my mood of the night. I took leave of my host, and under his directions, after half a mile along the line, plunged down into a gorge, and followed for miles, crossing and re-crossing, a mountain brook, between cliffs of red rocks, by fields of mauve anemones, in the shadow and fragrance of pines; till suddenly, after hours of rough going, I was confronted by a notice, set up, apparently, in the desert:

"Keep out. Avoid trouble. This means you."

I laughed. "Keep out!" I said. "If only there were a chance of my getting in!" "Avoid trouble! Ah, what trouble would I not face, could I but get in!" And I went on, but not in, and met no trouble, and returned to the hotel, and had dinner, and watched for a solitary hour, in the hall, the shifting interminable array of vacant eyes and blank faces, and then retired to write this letter; "and so to bed."

Footnotes:

[Footnote 3:

"Brother, the quality of love stilleth our will, and maketh us long only for what we have, and giveth us no other thirst,

"Did we desire to be more aloft, our longings were discordant from his will who here a.s.sorteth us,

"And for that, thou wilt see, there is no room within these circles, if of necessity we have our being here in love, and if thou think again what is love's nature.

"Nay, 'tis the essence of this blessed being to hold ourselves within the divine will, whereby our own wills are themselves made one.

"So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold, throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm as to the King, who draweth our wills to what he willeth;

"And his will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves that it createth and that nature maketh."

DANTE, _Purgatorio_, iii. 70-87 (trans. by Rev. Philip H.

Wicksteed, in the "Temple Cla.s.sics" edition).]

VI

IN THE ADIRONDACKS

For the last few days I have been living in camp on a mountain lake in the Adirondacks. All about me are mountains and unlumbered forest. The tree lies where it falls; the undergrowth chokes the trails; and on the hottest day it is cool in the green, sun-chequered wilderness. Deer start in the thickets or steal down to drink in the lake. The only sounds are the wood-p.e.c.k.e.r's scream, the song of the hermit-thrush, the thrumming and drumming of bull-frogs in the water. My friend is a sportsman; I am not; and while he catches trout I have been reading Homer and Sh.e.l.ley. Sh.e.l.ley I have always understood; but now, for the first time, I seem to understand Homer. Our guide here, I feel, might have been Homer, if he had had imagination; but he could never have been Sh.e.l.ley. Homer, I conceive, had from the first the normal bent for action. What his fellows did he too wanted to do. He learned to hunt, to sail a boat, to build a house, to use a spear and bow. He had his initiation early, in conflict, in danger, and in death. He loved the feast, the dance, and the song. But also he had dreams. He used to sit alone and think. And, as he grew, these moods grew, till he came to live a second life, a kind of double of the first. The one was direct, unreflective, and purposeful. In it he hunted wild beasts that he might kill them, fought battles that he might win them, sailed boats that he might arrive somewhere. So far, he was like his fellows, and like our guide, with his quick observation, his varied experience, his practical skill. But then, on the other hand, he had imagination. This active life he reproduced; not by recapitulating it--that the guide can do; but by recreating it. He detached it, as it were, from himself as centre; ceased, indeed, to be a self; and became all that he contemplated--the victor and the vanquished, the hunter and the hunted, the house and its builder, Thersites and Achilles. He became the sun and the moon and the stars, the G.o.ds and the laughter of the G.o.ds. He took no sides, p.r.o.nounced no judgment, espoused no cause. He became pure vision; but not pa.s.sive vision. To see, he had to re-create; and the material his observation had ama.s.sed he offered up as a holocaust on the altar of his imagination. Fused in that fierce fire, like drew to like, parts ran together and formed a whole. Did he see a warrior fall? In a moment the image arose of "a stately poplar falling by the axe in a meadow by the riverside." Did a host move out to meet the foe? It recalled the ocean sh.o.r.e where "wave follows wave far out at sea until they break in thunder on the beach." Was battle engaged? "The clash of the weapons rang like the din of woodcutters in the mountain-glades." Did a wounded hero fall? The combatants gathered about him "like flies buzzing round the br.i.m.m.i.n.g milk-pails in the spring." All commonest things, redeemed from isolation and irrelevance, revealed the significance with which they were charged. The result was the actual made real, a reflexion which was a disclosure, a reproduction which was a recreation. And if experience, as we know it, is the last word of life, if there is nothing beyond and nothing behind, if there is no meaning, no explanation, no purpose or end, then the poetry of Homer is the highest reach of human achievement.

For, observe, Homer is not a critic. His vision trans.m.u.tes life, but does not transcend it. Experience is ultimate; all the poet does is to experience fully. Common men live, but do not realise life; he realises it. But he does not question it; it is there and it is final; glorious, lovely, august, terrible, sordid, cruel, unjust. And the partial, smiling, unmoved, unaccountable Olympians are the symbol of its brute actuality. Not only is there no explanation, there is not even a question to be asked. So it is, so it has been, so it will be. Homer's outlook is that of the modern realist. That he wrote an epic, and they novels, is an accident of time and s.p.a.ce. Turgeneff or Balzac writing 1000 years before Christ would have been Homer; and Homer, writing now, would have been Turgeneff or Balzac.

But Sh.e.l.ley could never have been Homer; for he was born a critic and a rebel. From the first dawn of consciousness he challenged and defied the works and ways of men and the apparent order of the universe. Never for a moment anywhere was he at home in the world. There was nothing attainable he cared to pursue, nothing actual he cared to represent. He could no more see what is called fact than he could act upon it. His eyes were dazzled by a different vision. Life and the world not only are intolerable to him, they are unreal. Beyond and behind lies Reality, and it is good. Now it is a Perfectibility lying in the future; now a Perfection existing eternally. In any case, whatever it be, however and wherever to be found, it is the sole object of his quest and of his song. Whatever of good or lovely or pa.s.sionate gleams here and there, on the surface or in the depths of the actual, is a ray of that Sun, an image of that Beauty. His imagination is kindled by Appearance only to soar away from it. The landscape he depicts is all light, all fountains and caverns. The Beings with which it is peopled are discarnate Joys and Hopes; Justice and Liberty, Peace and Love and Truth. Among these only is he at home; in the world of men he is an alien captive; and Human Life presents itself as an "unquiet dream."

"'Tis we that, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings."