Humanly Speaking Part 11

He compares, for example, Christianity as an ideal with Christianity as an actual achievement. He places in parallel columns the maxims of Jesus, and the policies of Christian nations and the actual state of Christian churches. The discrepancy is obvious enough. But it does not prove that Christianity is a failure; it only proves that its work is unfinished.

A political party may adopt a platform filled with excellent proposals which if thoroughly carried out would bring in the millennium. But it is too much to expect that it would all be accomplished in four years. At the end of that period we should not be surprised if the reformers should ask for a further extension of time.

The spoiled children of civilization eliminate from their problem the one element which is constant and significant--human effort. They forget that from the beginning human life has been a tremendous struggle against great odds. Nothing has come without labor, no advance has been without daring leadership. New fortunes have always had their hazards.

Forgetting all this, and accepting whatever comforts may have come to them as their right, they are depressed and discouraged by their vision of the future with its dangers and its difficulties. They habitually talk of the civilized world as on the brink of some great catastrophe which it is impossible to avoid. This gloomy foreboding is looked upon as an indication of wisdom.

It should be dismissed, I think, as an indication of childish unreason, unworthy of any one who faces realities. It is still true that "the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

The notion that coming events cast shadows before is a superst.i.tion. How can they? A shadow must be the shadow of something. The only events that can cast a shadow are those which have already taken place. Behind them is the light of experience, shining upon actualities which intercept its rays.

The shadows which affright us are of our own making. They are projections into the future of our own experiences. They are sharply denned silhouettes, rather than vague omens. When we look at them closely we can recognize familiar features. We are dealing with cause and effect. What is done foreshadows what remains to be done. Every act implies some further acts as its results. When a principle is recognized its practical applications must follow. When men begin to reason from new premises they are bound to come to new conclusions.

It is evident that in the last half-century enough discoveries have been made to keep us busy for a long time. Every scientific advance upsets some custom and interferes with some vested interest. You cannot discover the truth about tuberculosis without causing a great deal of trouble to the owners of unsanitary dwellings. Some of them are widows whose little all is invested in this kind of property. The health inspectors make life more difficult for them.

Scholarly research among ancient ma.n.u.scripts is the cause of destructive criticism. The scholar with the most peaceable intentions in the world disturbs some one's faith. His discovery perhaps involves the reconstruction of a whole system of philosophy.

A law is pa.s.sed. The people are pleased with it, and then forget all about it. But by and by a conscientious executive comes into office who thinks it his duty to enforce the law. Such accidents are liable to happen in the most good-humored democracy. When he tries to enforce it there is a burst of angry surprise. He is treated as a revolutionist who is attacking the established order. And yet to the moderately philosophic observer the making of the law and its enforcement belong to the same process. The difficulty is that though united logically they are often widely separated chronologically.

The adjustment to a new theory involves changes in practice. But the practical man who has usually little interest in new theories is surprised and angry when the changes come. He looks upon them as arbitrary interferences with his rights.

Even when it is admitted that when considered in a large way the change is for the better, the question arises, Who is to pay for it? The discussion on this point is bound to be acrimonious, as we are not saints and n.o.body wants to pay more than his share of the costs of progress. Even the price of liberty is something which we grumble over.

You have noticed how it is when a new boulevard is laid in any part of the city. There is always a dispute between the munic.i.p.ality and the ab.u.t.ters. Should the ab.u.t.ters be a.s.sessed for betterments or should they sue for damages? Usually both actions are inst.i.tuted. The cost of such litigation should be included in the price which the community pays for the improvement.

If people always knew what was good for them and acted accordingly, this would be a very different world, though not nearly so interesting. But we do not know what is good for us till we try; and human life is spent in a series of experiments. The experiments are costly, but there is no other way of getting results. All that we can say to a person who refuses to interest himself in these experiments, or who looks upon all experiments as futile which do not turn out as he wished, is that his att.i.tude is childish. The great commandment to the worker or thinker is,--Thou shalt not sulk.

Sulking is no more admirable in those of great reputation than it is in the nursery. Thackeray declared that, in his opinion, "love is a higher intellectual exercise than hate." And looked at as an exercise of mental power courage must always be greater than the most highly intellectualized form of fear or despair.

I cannot take with perfect seriousness Matthew Arnold's oft-quoted lines:--

"Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb.

Silent they are, though not content, And wait to see the future come.

They have the grief men had of yore, But they contend and cry no more."

If that is ever the att.i.tude of the best minds, it is only a momentary one of which they are quickly ashamed. Achilles sulked in his tent when he was pondering not a big problem, but a small grievance. The kings of modern thought who are described seem like kings out of a job. We are inclined to turn from them to the intellectual monarchs _de facto_. They are the ones who take up the hard job which the representatives of the old regime give up as hopeless. For when the king has abdicated and contends no more--Long live the King!

The real thinkers of any age do not remain long in a blue funk. They always find something important to think about. They always point out something worth doing. They cannot pa.s.sively wait to see the future come. They are too busy making it.

Matthew Arnold struck a truer note in Rugby Chapel. The true leaders of mankind can never be mere intellectualists. There must be a union of intellectual and moral energy like that which he recognized in his father. To the fainting, dispirited race,--

"Ye like angels appear, Radiant with ardour divine, Beacons of hope, ye appear!

Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow; Ye alight in our van: at your voice Panic, despair, flee away."

When those whom we have looked upon as our intellectual leaders grow disheartened, we must remember that a lost leader does not necessarily mean a lost cause. When those whom we had called the kings of modern thought are dumb, we can find new leadership. "Change kings with us,"

replied an Irish officer after the panic of the Boyne; "change kings with us, and we will fight you again."

ON REALISM AS AN INVESTMENT

_From a Real-Estate Dealer to a Realistic Novelist_

Dear Sir:--

I have been for some time interested in your projects for the improvement of literature. When I saw your name in the newspapers, I looked you up in "Who's Who," and found that your rating is excellent What pleased me was the bold way you attacked the old firms which have been living on their reputations. The way you showed up d.i.c.kens, Thackeray & Co. showed that you know a thing or two. As for W. Scott and the other speculators who have been preying on the credulity of the public, you gave them something to think about. You showed conclusively that instead of dealing in hard facts, they have been handing out fiction under the guise of novels.

Our minds run in the same channel: you deal in reality and I deal in realty, but the principle is the same. I inclose some of the literature which I am sending out. You see, I warn people against investing in stocks and bonds. These are mere paper securities, which take to themselves wings and fly away. But if you can get hold of a few acres of dirt, there you are. When a panic comes along, and Wall Street goes to smash, you can sit on your front porch in South Canaan without a care.

You have your little all in something real.

You followed the same line of argumentation. You showed that there was nothing imaginative about your work. You could give a warranty deed for every fact which you put on the market. I was so pleased with your method that I bought a job lot of your books, so that I could see for myself how you conducted your business. Will you allow me, as one in the same line, to indulge in a little criticism? I am afraid that you are making the same mistake I made when I first went into real estate. I was so possessed with the idea of the value of land that I became "land poor." It strikes me that a novelist may become reality poor in the same way; that is, by investing in a great many realities that are not worth what he pays for them.

You see, there is a fact which we do not mention in our circulars. There is a great deal of land lying out of doors. _Some_ land is in great demand, and the real trick is to find out what that land is. You can't go out on the plains of Wyoming and give an acre of land the same value which an acre has in the Wall Street district. I speak from experience, having tried to convince the public that if the acres are real, the values I suggested must be real also. People wouldn't believe me, and I lost money.

And the same thing is true about improvements. They must be related to the market value of the land on which they are placed. A forty-story building at Goshenville Corners would be a mistake. There is no call for it.

This is the mistake which I fear you have been making. Your novel is a carefully prepared structure, and must have cost a great deal, but it is built on ground which is not worth enough to justify the investment. It has not what we call "site value." You yourself declare that you have no particular interest in the characters you describe at such length. All that you have to say for them is that they are real. It is as if I were to put up an expensive apartment-house on a vacant lot I have at North Ovid. North Ovid is real, and so would be the apartment-house; but what of it?

There are ninety millions of people in this country, all with characters which might be carefully studied, if we had time. But we haven't the time. So we have to choose our intimates. We prefer to know those who seem to us most worth knowing. You should remember that the novelist has no monopoly on realism. The newspapers are full of all sorts of realities. The historian is a keen compet.i.tor.

Do you know that when I went to the bookstore to get your works I fell in with a book on Garibaldi by a man named Trevelyan. When I got home I sat down with it and couldn't let it go. Garibaldi was all the time doing things, which you never allow your characters to do because you think they would not be real. He was acting in the most romantic and heroic manner possible. And his Thousand trooped after him as gayly as if they were in a melodrama. And yet I understand that Garibaldi was a real person, and that his exploits can be authenticated.

The compet.i.tion in your line of business is fierce. You try to hold the reader's attention to the states of mind of a few futile persons who never did anything in particular that would make people want to know them exhaustively. And then along comes the historian who tells all about some one who does things they are interested in.

You can't wonder at the result. People who ought to be interested in fiction are carried away by biography, and the chances are that some of them will never come back. When they once get a taste for highly spiced intellectual victuals, you can't get them to relish the breakfast food you set before them. It seems to them insipid.

I know what you will say about Garibaldi. He was not your kind. You wouldn't touch such a character if it was offered to you at a bargain.

After looking over that expedition to Sicily you would say that there was nothing in it for you. The motives weren't complicated enough. It was just plain heroics. You don't care so much for pa.s.sions as for problems. You want something to a.n.a.lyze.

Well, what do you say to Cavour? When I was deep in Garibaldi I found I couldn't understand what he was driving at without knowing something about Cavour who was always mixed up with what was going on in that section of the world.

So I took up a Life of Cavour by a man named Thayer. It's the way I have; one thing suggests another. Once I went up to Duluth and invested in some corner lots on Superior Street. That suggested Superior City, just across the river. The two towns were running each other down at a great rate just then, so I stopped at West Superior to see what it had to say for itself. The upshot of the matter was that I sized up the situation about like this. A big city has _got_ to grow up at the head of Lake Superior. If Duluth grows as much as it thinks it will, it's bound to take in Superior. And if Superior grows as much as it thinks it will, it can't help taking in Duluth. So I concluded that the best thing for me was to take a flier in both.

When I saw what a big proposition the Unification of Italy was, I knew that there was room for the development of some mighty interesting characters before they got through with the business. So I plunged into the Life of Cavour, and I've never regretted it.

Talk about problems! That hero of yours in your last book--I know you don't believe in heroes,--at any rate, the leading man--was an innocent child walking with his nurse along Easy Street, when compared with Cavour. Cavour had fifty problems at the same time, and all of them were insoluble to every one except himself.

His project, as I have just told you, was the unification of Italy. But he hadn't any regulated monopoly in the business. A whole bunch of unifiers were ahead of him; each one of them was trying to unify Italy in his own way. They were all working at cross-purposes.

Now Cavour didn't try, as you might have expected, to reconcile these people. He saw that it couldn't be done. He didn't mind their hating one another; when they got too peaceable he would make an occasion for them to hate him. He kept them all irreconcilably at work, till, in spite of themselves, they got to working together. And when they began to do that, Cavour would encourage them in it. As long as they were all working for Italy he didn't care what they thought of each other or of him. He had his eye on the main chance--for Italy.

I notice that in your novel, when your man got into trouble he threw up the sponge. That rather turned me against him and I wished I hadn't wasted so much time on his affairs. That wasn't the way with Thayer's hero. One of the largest deals Cavour ever made was with Napoleon III, who at that time had the reputation of being the biggest promoter of free inst.i.tutions in Europe. He was a regular wizard in diplomacy.

Whatever he said went. You see they hadn't realized then that he was doing business on borrowed capital.

Well, Napoleon agreed to underwrite, for Cavour, the whole project of Italian Unity. Everybody thought it was going through all right, when suddenly Napoleon, from a place called Villafranca, wired that the deal was off.