The "Goldfish" Part 8

Poor old Jane! Alone in an alien land, giving your life and your love to the children of others, only to have them torn from your arms just as the tiny fingers have entwined themselves like tendrils round your heart! We have tossed you the choicest blessings of our lives and shouldered you with the heavy responsibilities that should rightfully have been our load. Your cup has run over with both joy and sorrow but you have drunk of the cup, while we are still thirsty! Our hearts are dry, while yours is green--nourished with the love that should belong to us. Poor old Jane? Lucky old Jane! Anyhow G.o.d bless you!

CHAPTER IV

MY MIND

I come of a family that prides itself on its culture and intellectuality. We have always been professional people, for my grandfather was, as I have said, a clergyman; and among my uncles are a lawyer, a physician and a professor. My sisters, also, have intermarried with professional men. I received a fairly good primary and secondary education, and graduated from my university with honors--whatever that may have meant. I was distinctly of a literary turn of mind; and during my four years of study I imbibed some slight information concerning the English cla.s.sics, music, modern history and metaphysics. I could talk quite wisely about Chaucer, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Love Peac.o.c.k and Ann Radcliffe, or Kant, Fichte and Schopenhauer.

I can see now that my smattering of culture was neither deep nor broad.

I acquired no definite knowledge of underlying principles, of general history, of economics, of languages, of mathematics, of physics or of chemistry. To biology and its allies I paid scarcely any attention at all, except to take a few snap courses. I really secured only a surface acquaintance with polite English literature, mostly very modern. The main part of my time I spent reading Stevenson and Kipling. I did well in English composition and I p.r.o.nounced my words neatly and in a refined manner. At the end of my course, when twenty-two years old, I was handed an imitation-parchment degree and proclaimed by the president of the college as belonging to the Brotherhood of Educated Men.

I did not. I was an imitation educated man; but, though spurious, I was a sufficiently good counterfeit to pa.s.s current for what I had been declared to be. Apart from a little Latin, a considerable training in writing the English language, and a great deal of miscellaneous reading of an extremely light variety, I really had no culture at all. I could not speak an idiomatic sentence in French or German; I had the vaguest ideas about applied mechanics and science; and no thorough knowledge about anything; but I was supposed to be an educated man, and on this stock in trade I have done business ever since--with, to be sure, the added capital of a degree of bachelor of laws.

Now since my graduation, twenty-eight years ago, I have given no time to the systematic study of any subject except law. I have read no serious works dealing with either history, sociology, economics, art or philosophy. I am supposed to know enough about these subjects already. I have rarely read over again any of the masterpieces of English literature with which I had at least a bowing acquaintance when at college. Even this last sentence I must qualify to the extent of admitting that I now see that this acquaintance was largely vicarious, and that I frequently read more criticism than literature.

It is characteristic of modern education that it is satisfied with the semblance and not the substance of learning. I was taught _about_ Shakspere, but not Shakspere. I was instructed in the history of literature, but not in literature itself. I knew the names of the works of numerous English authors and I knew what Taine and others thought about them, but I knew comparatively little of what was between the covers of the books themselves. I was, I find, a student of letters by proxy. As time went on I gradually forgot that I had not, in fact, actually perused these volumes; and to-day I am accustomed to refer familiarly to works I never have read at all--not a difficult task in these days of handbook knowledge and literary varnish.

It is this patent superficiality that so bores me with the affected culture of modern social intercourse. We all constantly attempt to discuss abstruse subjects in philosophy and art, and pretend to a familiarity with minor historical characters and events. Now why try to talk about Bergson's theories if you have not the most elementary knowledge of philosophy or metaphysics? Or why attempt to a.n.a.lyze the success or failure of a modern post-impressionist painter when you are totally ignorant of the principles of perspective or of the complex problems of light and shade? You might as properly presume to discuss a mastoid operation with a surgeon or the doctrine of _cypres_ with a lawyer. You are equally qualified.

I frankly confess that my own ignorance is abysmal. In the last twenty-eight years what information I have acquired has been picked up princ.i.p.ally from newspapers and magazines; yet my library table is littered with books on modern art and philosophy, and with essays on literary and historical subjects. I do not read them. They are my intellectual window dressings. I talk about them with others who, I suspect, have not read them either; and we confine ourselves to generalities, with a careful qualification of all expressed opinions, no matter how vague and elusive. For example--a safe conversational opening:

"Of course there is a great deal to be said in favor of Bergson's general point of view, but to me his reasoning is inconclusive. Don't you feel the same way--somehow?"

You can try this on almost anybody. It will work in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; for, of course, there is a great deal to be said in favor of the views of anybody who is not an absolute fool, and most reasoning is open to attack at least for being inconclusive. It is also inevitable that your cultured friend--or acquaintance--should feel the same way--somehow. Most people do--in a way.

The real truth of the matter is, all I know about Bergson is that he is a Frenchman--is he actually by birth a Frenchman or a Belgian?--who as a philosopher has a great reputation on the Continent, and who recently visited America to deliver some lectures. I have not the faintest idea what his theories are, and I should not if I heard him explain them.

Moreover, I cannot discuss philosophy or metaphysics intelligently, because I have not to-day the rudimentary knowledge necessary to understand what it is all about.

It is the same with art. On the one or two isolated varnishing days when we go to a gallery we criticize the pictures quite fiercely. "We know what we like." Yes, perhaps we do. I am not sure even of that. But in eighty-five cases out of a hundred none of us have any knowledge of the history of painting or any intelligent idea of why Velasquez is regarded as a master; yet we acquire a glib familiarity with the names of half a dozen cubists or futurists, and bandy them about much as my office boy does the names of his favorite pugilists or baseball players.

It is even worse with history and biography. We cannot afford or have not the decency to admit that we are uninformed. We speak casually of, say, Henry of Navarre, or Beatrice D'Este, or Charles the Fifth. I select my names intentionally from among the most celebrated in history; yet how many of us know within two hundred years of when any one of them lived--or much about them? How much definite historical information have we, even about matters of genuine importance?

Let us take a shot at a few dates. I will make it childishly easy. Give me, if you can, _even approximately_, the year of Caesar's Conquest of Gaul; the Invasion of Europe by the Huns; the Sack of Rome; the Battle of Chalons-sur-Marne; the Battle of Tours; the Crowning of Charlemagne; the Great Crusade; the Fall of Constantinople; Magna Charta; the Battle of Crecy; the Field of the Cloth of Gold; the Ma.s.sacre of St.

Bartholomew; the Spanish Armada; the Execution of King Charles I; the Fall of the Bastile; the Inauguration of George Washington; the Battle of Waterloo; the Louisiana Purchase; the Indian Mutiny; the Siege of Paris.

I will look out of the window while you go through the mental agony of trying to remember. It looks easy, does it not? Almost an affront to ask the date of Waterloo! Well, I wanted to be fair and even things up; but, honestly, can you answer correctly five out of these twenty elementary questions? I doubt it. Yet you have, no doubt, lying on your table at the present time, intimate studies of past happenings and persons that presuppose and demand a rough general knowledge of American, French or English history.

The dean of Radcliffe College, who happened to be sitting behind two of her recent graduates while attending a performance of Parker's deservedly popular play "Disraeli" last winter, overheard one of them say to the other: "You know, I couldn't remember whether Disraeli was in the Old or the New Testament; and I looked in both and couldn't find him in either!"

I still pa.s.s socially as an exceptionally cultured man--one who is well up on these things; yet I confess to knowing to-day absolutely nothing of history, either ancient, medieval or modern. It is not a matter of mere dates, by any means, though I believe dates to be of some general importance. My ignorance is deeper than that. I do not remember the events themselves or their significance. I do not now recall any of the facts connected with the great epoch-making events of cla.s.sic times; I cannot tell as I write, for example, who fought in the battle of the Allia; why Caesar crossed the Rubicon, or why Cicero delivered an oration against Catiline.

As to what subsequently happened on the Italian peninsula my mind is a blank until the appearance of Garibaldi during the last century. I really never knew just who Garibaldi was until I read Trevelyan's three books on the Resorgimento last winter, and those I perused because I had taken a motor trip through Italy the summer before. I know practically nothing of Spanish history, and my mind is a blank as to Russia, Poland, Turkey, Sweden, Germany, Austria, and Holland.

Of course I know that the Dutch Republic rose--a.s.sisted by one Motley, of Boston--and that William of Orange was a Hollander--or at least I suppose he was born there. But how Holland came to rise I know not--or whether William was named after an orange or oranges were named after him.

As for central Europe, it is a shocking fact that I never knew there was not some interdependency between Austria and Germany until last summer.

I only found out the contrary when I started to motor through the Austrian Tyrol and was held up by the custom officers on the frontier. I knew that an old emperor named William somehow founded the German Empire out of little states, with the aid of Bismarck and Von Moltke; but that is all I know about it. I do not know when the war between Prussia and Austria took place or what battles were fought in it.

The only battle in the Franco-Prussian War I am sure of is Sedan, which I remember because I was once told that Phil Sheridan was present as a spectator. I know Gustavus Adolphus was a king of Sweden, but I do not know when; and apart from their names I know nothing of Theodoric, Charles Martel, Peter the Hermit, Lodovico Moro, the Emperor Maximilian, Catherine of Aragon, Catherine de' Medici, Richelieu, Frederick Barbarossa, Cardinal Wolsey, Prince Rupert--I do not refer to Anthony Hope's hero, Rupert of Hentzau--Saint Louis, Admiral Coligny, or the thousands of other ill.u.s.trious personages that crowd the pages of history.

I do not know when or why the Seven Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, the Hundred Years' War or the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew took place, why the Edict of Nantes was revoked or what it was, or who fought at Malplaquet, Tours, Soissons, Marengo, Pla.s.sey, Oudenarde, Fontenoy or Borodino--or when they occurred. I probably did know most if not all of these things, but I have entirely forgotten them. Unfortunately I manage to act as if I had not. The result is that, having no foundation to build on, any information I do acquire is immediately swept away. People are constantly giving me books on special topics, such as Horace Walpole and his Friends, France in the Thirteenth Century, The Holland House Circle, or Memoires of Madame du Barry; but of what use can they be to me when I do not know, or at least have forgotten, even the salient facts of French and English history?

We are undoubtedly the most superficial people in the world about matters of this sort. Any bluff goes. I recall being at a dinner not long ago when somebody mentioned Conrad II. One of the guests hazarded the opinion that he had died in the year 1330. This would undoubtedly have pa.s.sed muster but for a learned-looking person farther down the table who deprecatingly remarked: "I do not like to correct you, but I think Conrad the Second died in 1337!" The impression created on the a.s.sembled company cannot be overstated. Later on in the smoking room I ventured to compliment the gentleman on his fund of information, saying:

"Why, I never even _heard_ of Conrad the Second!"

"Nor I either," he answered shamelessly.

It is the same with everything--music, poetry, politics. I go night after night to hear the best music in the world given at fabulous cost in the Metropolitan Opera House and am content to murmur vague ecstasies over Caruso, without being aware of who wrote the opera or what it is all about. Most of us know nothing of orchestration or even the names of the different instruments. We may not even be sure of what is meant by counterpoint or the difference between a fugue and an arpeggio.

A handbook would give us these minor details in an hour's reading; but we prefer to sit vacuously making feeble jokes about the singers or the occupants of the neighboring boxes, without a single intelligent thought as to why the composer attempted to write precisely this sort of an opera, when he did it, or how far he succeeded. We are content to take our opinions and criticisms ready made, no matter from whose mouth they fall; and one hears everywhere phrases that, once let loose from the Pandora's Box of some foolish brain, never cease from troubling.

In science I am in even a more parlous state. I know nothing of applied electricity in its simplest forms. I could not explain the theory of the gas engine, and plumbing is to me one of the great mysteries.

Last, but even more lamentable, I really know nothing about politics, though I am rather a strong party man and my name always appears on important citizens' committees about election time. I do not know anything about the city departments or its fiscal administration. I should not have the remotest idea where to direct a poor person who applied to me for relief. Neither have I ever taken the trouble to familiarize myself with even the more important city buildings.

Of course I know the City Hall by sight, but I have never been inside it; I have never visited the Tombs or any one of our criminal courts; I have never been in a police station, a fire house, or inspected a single one of our prisons or reformatory inst.i.tutions. I do not know whether police magistrates are elected or appointed and I could not tell you in what congressional district I reside. I do not know the name of my alderman, a.s.semblyman, state senator or representative in Congress.

I do not know who is at the head of the Fire Department, the Street Cleaning Department, the Health Department, the Park Department or the Water Department; and I could not tell, except for the Police Department, what other departments there are. Even so, I do not know what police precinct I am living in, the name of the captain in command, or where the nearest fixed post is at which an officer is supposed to be on duty.

As I write I can name only five members of the United States Supreme Court, three members of the Cabinet, and only one of the congressmen from the state of New York. This in cold type seems almost preposterous, but it is, nevertheless, a fact--and I am an active practicing lawyer besides. I am shocked to realize these things. Yet I am supposed to be an exceptionally intelligent member of the community and my opinion is frequently sought on questions of munic.i.p.al politics.

Needless to say, the same indifference has prevented my studying--except in the most superficial manner--the single tax, free trade and protection, the minimum wage, the recall, referendum, or any other of the present much-mooted questions. How is this possible? The only answer I can give is that I have confined my mental activities entirely to making my legal practice as lucrative as possible. I have taken things as I found them and put up with abuses rather than go to the trouble to do away with them. I have no leisure to try to reform the universe. I leave that task to others whose time is less valuable than mine and who have something to gain by getting into the public eye.

The mere fact, however, that I am not interested in local politics would not ordinarily, in a normal state of civilization, explain my ignorance of these things. In most societies they would be the usual subjects of conversation. People naturally discuss what interests them most.

Uneducated people talk about the weather, their work, their ailments and their domestic affairs. With more enlightened folk the conversation turns on broader topics--the state of the country, politics, trade, or art.

It is only among the so-called society people that the subjects selected for discussion do not interest anybody. Usually the talk that goes on at dinners or other entertainments relates only to what plays the conversationalists in question have seen or which of the best sellers they have read. For the rest the conversation is dexterously devoted to the avoidance of the disclosure of ignorance. Even among those who would like to discuss the questions of the day intelligently and to ascertain other people's views pertaining to them, there is such a fundamental lack of elementary information that it is a hopeless undertaking. They are reduced to the commonplaces of vulgar and superficial comment.

"'Tis plain," cry they, "our mayor's a noddy; and as for the corporation--shocking!"

The mayor may be and probably is a noddy, but his critics do not know why. The average woman who dines out hardly knows what she is saying or what is being said to her. She will usually agree with any proposition that is put to her--if she has heard it. Generally she does not listen.

I know a minister's wife who never pays the slightest attention to anything that is being said to her, being engrossed in a torrent of explanation regarding her children's education and minor diseases. Once a bored companion in a momentary pause fixed her sternly with his eye and said distinctly: "But I don't give a --- about your children!" At which the lady smiled brightly and replied: "Yes. Quite so. Exactly! As I was saying, Johnny got a--"

But, apart from such hectic people, who run quite amuck whenever they open their mouths, there are large numbers of men and women of some intelligence who never make the effort to express conscientiously any ideas or opinions. They find it irksome to think. They are completely indifferent as to whether a play is really good or bad or who is elected mayor of the city. In any event they will have their coffee, rolls and honey served in bed the next morning; and they know that, come what will--flood, tempest, fire or famine--there will be forty-six quarts of extra x.x.x milk left at their area door. They are secure. The stock market may rise and fall, presidents come and go, but they will remain safe in the security of fifty thousand a year. And, since they really do not care about anything, they are as likely to praise as to blame, and to agree with everybody about everything. Their world is all cakes and ale--why should they bother as to whether the pothouse beer is bad?

I confess, with something of a shock, that essentially I am like the rest of these people. The reason I am not interested in my country and my city is because, by reason of my financial and social independence, they have ceased to be my city and country. I should be just as comfortable if our Government were a monarchy. It really is nothing to me whether my tax rate is six one-hundredths of one per cent higher or lower, or what mayor rules in City Hall.

So long as Fifth Avenue is decently paved, so that my motor runs smoothly when I go to the opera, I do not care whether we have a Reform, Tammany or Republican administration in the city. So far as I am concerned, my valet will still come into my bedroom at exactly nine o'clock every morning, turn on the heat and pull back the curtains. His low, modulated "Your bath is ready, sir," will steal through my dreams, and he will a.s.sist me to rise and put on my embroidered dressing gown of wadded silk in preparation for another day's hard labor in the service of my fellowmen. Times have changed since my father's frugal college days. Have they changed for better or for worse?

Of one thing I am certain--my father was a better-educated man than I am. I admit that, under the circ.u.mstances, this does not imply very much; but my parent had, at least, some solid ground beneath his intellectual feet on which he could stand. His mind was thoroughly disciplined by rigid application to certain serious studies that were not selected by himself. From the day he entered college he was in active compet.i.tion with his cla.s.smates in all his studies, and if he had been a shirker they would all have known it.

In my own case, after I had once matriculated, the elective system left me free to choose my own subjects and to pursue them faithfully or not, so long as I could manage to squeak through my examinations. My friends were not necessarily among those who elected the same courses, and whether I did well or ill was n.o.body's business but my own and the dean's. It was all very pleasant and exceedingly lackadaisical, and by the time I graduated I had lost whatever power of concentration I had acquired in my preparatory schooling. At the law school I was at an obvious disadvantage with the men from the smaller colleges which still followed the old-fashioned curriculum and insisted on the mental discipline entailed by advanced Greek, Latin, the higher mathematics, science and biology.