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CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THE 
 
 Joseph Whitmore Barry 
 dramatic library 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 TWO FRIENDS 
 
 OP Cornell University 
 
 1934 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 3515.E736D4 
 
 Depreciations 
 
 3 1924 022 472 710 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022472710 
 
DEPRECIATIONS 
 
DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 B. RUSSELL HERTS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 ALBERT & CHARLES BONI 
 1914 
 
Copyright, 1914 
 
 By 
 
 Albert & Charles Boni 
 
To Edward Goodman 
 my friend 
 
Certain of the following essays have ap- 
 peared in The Forum, The Independent, The 
 International, Moods, The Book News 
 Monthly, The Medical Review of Reviews, 
 The New Age (Ljondon). 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Explanation 9 
 
 The Import of the Superficial 11 
 
 Little Arnold Bennett 17 
 
 Art and Affectation 27 
 
 The Shadowy Mr. Yeats 33 
 
 George Moore the Mundane 41 
 
 The Fetich of Sincerity 59 
 
 G. K. Chesterton: Defender of the 
 
 Discarded "^ 
 
 A Visit to G. K. C 87 
 
 A Visit to H. G. Wells 93 
 
 The Tragedy of the Finalist 105 
 
 Pinero the Punctilious 109 
 
 Jottings in Europe 115 
 
 The Tired Business Man 151 
 
 The Unmarrying Modern Male 159 
 
 The Kingdom of this World 165 
 
EXPLANATION 
 
 Some of these essays were written before 
 this volume was contemplated, but almost all 
 are aimed at a revision of accepted values. 
 They are given their collective title of Depre- 
 ciations because the people and ideas depre- 
 ciated are all, in my opinion, ones overvalued 
 by our generation. 
 
 I do not imagine that I have cut in pieces 
 either the one or the other. This book is 
 a sword-thrust that may, indeed, be no more 
 than a pen-prick. Moore, Yeats, Bennett, 
 Wells, Chesterton and the rest remain impos- 
 ing, and so I recognize them; marriage, reli- 
 gion, the effort at fundamentalities and finali- 
 ties, these too remain important to humanity. 
 I have merely given expression to my present 
 personal reaction to them; I may feel differ- 
 ently in a year — and then there may be another 
 book for you to read. 
 
 But for the moment I offer only these essays 
 as an offensive and defensive expression of 
 my opinion, and I hope they may provoke a 
 corresponding activity on the part of those who 
 cannot accept them; for by such encounters 
 the truth, or as much of it as is necessary for 
 us at any one time, comes to prevail. 
 
 B. R. H. 
 
 20 West 57th Street, New York. 
 9 
 
THE IMPORT OF THE SUPERFICIAL 
 
 The world has become noisy with f undamen- 
 talities. Everywhere we see little people strut- 
 ting about looking for the bottoms of things. 
 Folk whose fathers were content to dabble 
 around in their own particular set of stupidi- 
 ties without speculating much further than the 
 following Saturday's payroll are now discuss- 
 ing problems and movements and fundamental 
 things generally. 
 
 Dissatisfaction with things as they exist is 
 pretty general and the little people have started 
 out to adjust it and bring to solution the dif- 
 ficulties of the ages. The expense in good 
 black ink and good heavy paper to which the 
 world has been put to publish the panaceas of 
 perplexed nonentities has never been so great 
 as it is to-day. The stage is largely occupied 
 by puerile problem plays while the press is 
 compelled by popular demand to dispense still 
 more puerile propaganda articles. The cults 
 and the isms are thriving and any one can 
 
 11 
 
12 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 start a movement who has six personal friends, 
 a studio and a touch of paranoia. 
 
 So we have all these little people roving the 
 realms of sociology, science, philosophy and 
 morals, with big black spectacles fastened to 
 their craning faces and geological hammers 
 ready to knock off projections everywhere on 
 our later half-petrified formations, and to get 
 down to what they expect will be bed rock. 
 We hear it said that there is no movement 
 that has not its usefulness; and, indeed, the 
 Theosophists, the Single Taxers, the Eugen-' 
 ists and the Cubists, with all the hundred other 
 manifestations of desire for better things in 
 each of their fields, each and all have their 
 degree of merit and worth. They are valu- 
 able for one thing particularly, and that is for 
 showing a tendency of the age. It is a com- 
 plex, disintegrating tendency, for each one 
 drives (or carries, if one feels favorably in- 
 clined) in a different direction. 
 
 There is something, however, that is com- 
 mon to all of them, and that is that they seek 
 the basic fact of existence, the fundamental 
 remedy of error as they see it. The typical 
 Socialist is obsessed with the idea of employing 
 
THE IMPORT; OF THE SUPERFICIAL 13 
 
 economic power; the Christian Scientist is 
 equally obsessed with the use of spiritual pow- 
 er; the Physical Culturist is dominated by the 
 desire to create physical prowess ; the Futurist 
 is determined to discard the conventions of the 
 past; while the thorough-going Anarchist 
 would let everybody do just about as he pleases. 
 One might be a follower of almost all the 
 movements, and then one would be a funda- 
 mentalist with a vengeance. 
 
 That would be the most admirable and de- 
 sirable type of human being were it not for 
 the fact that there are elements in existence of 
 the greatest import that are not within the 
 scope of any labelled movement. There is a 
 certain calm thoughtfulness and generally pro- 
 gressive tendency common to all genuine and 
 intelligent people that is neither dominated nor 
 dominating. It simply persists aside and in 
 spite of the violent outbursts of propagandists. 
 Contemplation is one of its considerable ele- 
 ments and tolerance is one of its chief effects. 
 The lackeys of new creeds look upon it as a 
 superficiality. Its possessors are not spouting 
 such a volume of water as the more radical 
 whales and so they seem to be sailing in shal- 
 
14 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 low seas. Really, it is never lack of courage 
 that keeps them on the surface: it requires 
 sublime courage not to be an intellectual diver 
 to-day — the epithets of the seekers of the bot- 
 tom are so violent. 
 
 What strikes one most forcibly about the 
 habitues of causes is their intellectual ugliness. 
 Generally rasping, their thinking on all sub- 
 jects is crude and perverted. They possess 
 power, but it is the power of a very lumbering 
 elephant who can not manage itself when it 
 gets into steep places. If the road is blocked 
 with petty opposition it can knock its objectors 
 over and proceed ; but on a free yet rocky path 
 it rolls about from side to side and may even 
 turn a few somersaults on the way. 
 
 The man whom the propagandists deem su- 
 perficial is saved from these mildly ungraceful 
 proceedings. He is commonly supposed to do 
 little more than save himself in this fashion. 
 In reality he goes down the ages as the trib- 
 unal before whom all causes and all movements 
 and all propaganda are tried. His is the judg- 
 ment that will not perish. In art he furnishes 
 taste to posterity. In science he supplies the 
 undiscredited facts of the future. He is the 
 
THE IMPORT OF THE SUPERFICIAL 15 
 
 backbone of the generations; and while diffi- 
 cult to characterize, he is thoroughly recog- 
 nizable, and decade after decade he goes on 
 being born, growing in thoughtfulness and tol- 
 erance and reserve force, and coming to act as 
 the great creative modifier of opposed vio- 
 lences. He represents the most attractive type 
 and the most important, and through him 
 man's lasting and permanent progress must 
 come. 
 
LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 Mr. Bennett is always positive and some- 
 times right. And this occasional truthfulness 
 is one of his chief evils, for it bolsters his 
 assurance and makes his positiveness unshrink- 
 ing. He has become an absolutist par excel- 
 lence, and his contradictions are as firm as 
 his original assertions. For example, in 
 How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day, 
 he assures us that "there is no such man as the 
 average man" and that "every man and every 
 man's case is special." Yet on the page be- 
 yond he talks of "his" typical man and to the 
 average he addresses himself constantly. The 
 assumption of mediocrity on the part of all 
 men is the first essential to belief in his preach- 
 ing. In a particularly unpregnant epigram we 
 are exhorted to attempt a petty success because 
 "nothing fails like failure." Yet who but the 
 "average" man regards a small accomplish- 
 ment as worthier than a mighty aspiration ? 
 
 And this is the book of which we learn that 
 "scarcely any of the comment has been ad- 
 verse," excepting some objections to its frivol- 
 ity ! Why, in the name of reason and original- 
 
 17 
 
18 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 ity, has no one objected to its seriousness— 
 the seriousness with which are uttered the 
 platitudes of the ages, uttered with apologies, 
 it is true, but none the less passionately? 
 Here is a man in the twentieth century insen- 
 sible to the fact that positive assertions become 
 untrue the moment they are made, that the ab- 
 solute is unapproachable and that middle-class 
 finalities feed nothing today but our ruinous 
 optimism. 
 
 Of the great gravities of life he is unaware. 
 He is all for the day to day efficiency. He ur- 
 ges men to read imaginative poetry in the same 
 spirit (and paragraph) as he recommends Ep- 
 ictetus. Not a word is there of creative ardor, 
 not a suggestion of those soul-stirring cur- 
 rents that carry men to supreme accomplish- 
 ment. Half an hour of "concentration," 
 ninety minutes every other day of "serious 
 reading" — these are his offerings to spirits 
 speeding toward eternity. We are human ma- 
 chines capable of forming literary taste and 
 mastering mental efficiency. There is the 
 Alpha and Omega of the Bennet doctrine. But 
 some of us are without the taste or the effi- 
 ciency, and these, for some reason, he finds 
 
LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 19 
 
 more interesting to write about; so we have 
 novels and plays of folk not possessed of his 
 "pocket philosophies." 
 
 Imagine if they were! Conceive The Old 
 Wives' Tale told of people who were follow- 
 ing the concentration exhortation ! Fewer con- 
 temporaries would be readers. Yet through- 
 out this best of his books and down from it 
 to his silliest play, We find the same calm in- 
 sistence on monotony. It is all just one thing 
 after another — as someone described life it- 
 self, forgetting the splashes of orange that 
 are thrust in everywhere on the gray-greens 
 and dull-blues of existence. From the pinnacle 
 of our last hour, life may look like an undulat- 
 ing plain, but we experience it as filled with 
 dark caverns and dangerous seas and vast, 
 unassailable mountains. 
 
 And so Arnold Bennett's books are not true 
 for us. We do not learn from their calm ac- 
 ceptance of the bourgeois virtues. Their sin- 
 cerity is obvious, but that does not make them 
 true. Yet they come from a man of undoubted 
 insight and imagination — insight into all but 
 the deep, blinding forces of life, imagination of 
 all but the sweeping passion and the surging 
 
20 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 hates and fears and loves of men. 
 
 The novels are books without fehadows — 
 and therefore without highlights. When 
 anyone dies there is scarcely a ripple of dis- 
 comfort among the living. And thus it is in 
 many of our lives: we lose father and mother 
 and sister and brother and countless friends, 
 and we surmount every loss because we are 
 left dazed. But most of us are almost always 
 dazed. We do not know why we are here, 
 where we are going, or what will happen to 
 us tomorrow, and we have quite forgotten the 
 day before yesterday. It is only in the rarely 
 vivid moments of the usual person that he re- 
 members the past, or senses the present keenly, 
 or imagines or forsees the future. Yet these 
 moments have been the substance of art since 
 writing began, and some great artists have pic- 
 tured them immortally, even when they were 
 happening to every day men and women. So 
 it is not very fairly descriptive to announce 
 Mr. Bennett as a remarkable realist, because 
 he skims over the years instead of dwelling on 
 the quarter hours. The years whirl by in a 
 dream; the minutes are vivid as a lightning 
 flash. Both are real enough indeed; they are 
 
LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 21 
 
 opposite methods of looking at the same mat- 
 ter. In a measure, they represent different 
 ways of accepting experience: the one, the 
 silent soporific method of the mid- Victorian 
 old-maid; the other, the deep-seated, vigorous, 
 fearless method of the creator of all times. 
 From a point of God-like aloofness, neither 
 may be the greater, but art has always con- 
 cerned itself with the latter, and to the pet- 
 ulant spirits of this age, the latter must be 
 vastly more interesting. 
 
 We may not be precisely petulant today. That 
 pictures us of this generation as distinctly dis- 
 agreeble inheritors of this generously amus- 
 ing planet. But we are deeply stirred, we are 
 turbulent, the thoughtful, the sensitive among 
 us. Life appears to us at many points as a 
 greatly wasted treasure, and we hope for ex- 
 tensive readjustments that may bring us down 
 to a better basis so that all may have more of 
 the fundamental values. We are uneasy 
 among the fumblings and futilities of our lead- 
 ers, and most of us are avid for suggestions 
 from that salt of the earth, the writers whom 
 men acclaim great. 
 
 Therefore it is, that when a man so hailed as 
 
22 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 Arnold Bennett appears so puerilely uncogr 
 nizant of the trembling forces of his time, the 
 judicious grieve. 
 
 It is not essential that one should be a pro- 
 mulgator of programs like Wells or Shaw; 
 that is admittedly not the primary function of 
 the novelist. There are greater men who have 
 to offer no solutions, men like Galsworthy and 
 Hardy and gentle tingling Meredith. These 
 are fervent with subtlety and tremulous with 
 suggestion, and that robs them of appeal to a 
 number of thousands. No doubt the man of 
 everyday detests no single factor quite so much 
 as this suggestiveness, accompanied by any- 
 thing that is subtle. He certainly eschews it 
 conversationally and in plays it dances past his 
 ears. It seems untruthful to him, insincere. 
 He must have his laugh and his cry labelled for 
 him — and his lecture, too, which might sen- 
 sibly be marked "Poison — do not touch." 
 When Shaw misleads him he becomes pro- 
 voked; when Galsworthy sets him down in 
 doubt, he is horrified. But with his good 
 ' brother Bennett he can feel at home : when it's 
 a novel he buys he can be positive that he will 
 have simple story from beginning to end ; when 
 
LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 23 
 
 it's a tract, he can settle down, with a smack 
 of the lips, to a solid, self-respect-creating task, 
 at the end of which he can feel quite sure that 
 he possesses all he needs to know about the 
 subject. 
 
 Mr. Bennett knows how to do these things, 
 for he can write. He knows how to ^roup 
 words and to fetch down rapping sentences. 
 He can throw the simple-hearted reader into 
 glorious gusts of easily-explainable laugh- 
 ter, he can produce the tremor, the sigh, the 
 expectant hush, the scurrying ardor to be at 
 the end. That is because he has a great and 
 mighty skill. But he cannot inspire the 
 thoughtful and he cannot enchain the reflec- 
 tive and he cannot lead one to vast heights 
 of emotion. That is because he has not a great 
 and mighty soul. 
 
 The remaining criticisms follow directly 
 from this situation. Mr. Bennett's skillfulness 
 succeeds in massing small detail and still pre- 
 serving an atmosphere throughout the recital. 
 His souUessness succeeds in making that recital 
 a remarkably, flat and uninspiring affair. Even 
 so well executed a piece of humor as Buried 
 Alive is more refreshing ten pages from the 
 
24 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 beginning than as many lines from the end. 
 We are easily sated with monotony, even when 
 it is monotony at an unusually high pitch. And 
 we cannot feed our minds forever on the blood- 
 less characters of an unimpassioned brain. 
 They are actual enough, assuredly, these whim- 
 sical folk of the Bennett books, except for their 
 lack of the sweeping moments that make a 
 commonplace existence endurable, and that 
 arise when passion or ambition or hatred or 
 some other feeling overwhelms the petty man. 
 The Bennett business folk are so unbelievably 
 petty that they are never overwhelmed — or 
 must one say so normal, since a book that de- 
 scribes the ecstasies of life is inevitably erotic 
 or neurotic or something or other that the roy- 
 alty-paying readers do not like ? No, for good 
 substantial returns trust to the clammy desex- 
 ualized character. If you restrain yourself in 
 this regard you may describe the smallest func- 
 tion of your individuals with the most complete 
 waste of time or space or writing materials, 
 and a waiting public will read. But the thor- 
 oughly human is thought degenerate in Eng- 
 land and America and books that deal with it 
 have a sudden sale that dies almost at once. So 
 
LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 25 
 
 if you are an efficient business man of litera- 
 ture, you avoid such disasters by being as true 
 as you can in an adjoining field, out of harm's 
 way. 
 
ART AND AFFECTATION 
 
 All people are endowed by nature with cer- 
 tain methods and mannerisms of speech and 
 movement. The conscious alteration of these 
 attributes is called affectation. The term is 
 used, however, in general as one of reproach 
 and so .when the onlooker approves of the par- 
 ticular method of distorting the observed one's 
 "natural" characteristics, the latter is not said 
 to be affected. Thus, for example, if a man 
 "naturally" had a tendency to suck his thumb 
 continually in public or to scratch the sole of his 
 left foot, or to kick one of his heels high in 
 the air whenever he was pleased, and if this 
 same picturesque individual managed to rid 
 himself of these habits, the average observer 
 would not call such a good riddance an affecta- 
 tion. If, however, a man has a harsh, unpleas- 
 ant voice and he manages to turn it into a 
 modulated tuneful one, or if he finds the move- 
 ments of the average male ungraceful and he 
 manages to make his own more effective, he is 
 immediately liable to be termed an affected 
 person. This generally happens because the 
 other folk in his particular community are un- 
 
 27 
 
28 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 used to the kind of voice in which he speaks 
 or to the type of movements which he has 
 trained his body to perform. 
 
 It is perfectly obvious that all forms of affec- 
 tation are the product of an exercise of will 
 power and their growth must therefore be co- 
 ordinate with the growth of self control. An 
 uncontrolled person cannot be an affected one. 
 Moreover, affectation requires the observation 
 of one's own mannerisms and the comparison 
 of one's own with other people's, together with 
 a wholesome self-disparagement as one of 
 the results of the comparison. If this were 
 not so the person would never be affected, for, 
 failing to observe the superiority of any other 
 form of discourse or motion, it would never oc- 
 cur to him to approximate his own to any ob- 
 served form. We have, then, in affectation also 
 an exhibition of keen desire for self-improve- 
 ment. 
 
 With the practice of affectation bolstered by 
 this tremendous galaxy of excellent qualities 
 essentially connected with it, it seems scarcely 
 necessary to utter any further defense, but 
 when we examine the process a little further 
 we find that it is very closely bound up 
 
ART AND AFFECTATION 29 
 
 with that most valuable asset of human exist- 
 ence, the genuine expression of personality. 
 
 Examine the authors who are supposed to 
 be aflfected: men like Oscar Wilde, Bernard 
 Shaw, Gilbert K. Chesterton and George Mere- 
 dith. They are invariably the writers with a 
 distinctly personal style. They are in each case 
 the men whose work accurately and profoundly 
 reflects their own individuality and whose ex- 
 pression and ideas are in complete accord. The 
 "natural" writers are practically without style 
 and nothing but their supreme genius has been 
 able to succeed in spite of this very serious de- 
 fect — in fact, we never hear of a natural writer 
 unless he happens to be a great genius such as 
 Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Goethe and Homer. The 
 smaller men fall by the wayside unless they 
 turn the expression of their thoughts into an 
 individual form, and to the extent that they do 
 this they are supposed to be affected. The same 
 thing is true in graphic art : Turner, Whistler 
 and Beardsley being affected, and Rembrandt, 
 Hals, and Michael Angelo being supreme 
 enough to have succeeded without a deeply self- 
 expressive style. 
 
 Your typical fat-head is no contemned crea- 
 
30 DEPRECIATION 
 
 ture of affectation. He is far too lazily self- 
 satisfied to tax himself with any alteration in 
 his natural qualities. Likewise your gratified 
 matron, who, having captured her legitimate 
 prey, settles down to a living of scandal-mon- 
 gering, rich food and bridge whist — she is not 
 concerned with the addition to her personality, 
 of the graces and kindlinesses of life. Who, in- 
 deed, are your affected poseurs, but the most 
 talented, the most cultured, sophisticated, 
 thoughtful, brilliant and suggestive members 
 of your acquaintance? 
 
 It requires considerable will power to act out 
 an affectation to its inevitable conclusion of be- 
 coming an authentic piece of self-expression. 
 Persuade a weakling to attempt this and he will 
 generally fail, but his will power will improve 
 under the effort. Induce a thief to affect hon- 
 esty and he will end up as virtuous as you 
 please. "Become what thou art" is an ideal; 
 "become what you affect," a reality. 
 
 One of the iconoclastic onslaughts of this 
 generation must be directed against the preju- 
 dice of the unthinking regarding the valuable 
 and very social art of affectation. Without this 
 we should have no conscious advances in per- 
 
ART AND AFFECTATION 31 
 
 sonality, no growth of self-control. We must 
 not condemn even a poor exhibition, or not any 
 more strongly than we do an inferior work in 
 painting or literature. In such cases our func- 
 tion as appreciative critics is to demand im- 
 provement. We are all in a state of "becom- 
 ing" and only he who stagnates can be com- 
 pletely consistent or supremely sincere. 
 
THE SHADOWY MR. YEATS 
 
 Slow and sure seems the forte — or may one 
 say the piano? — of Mr. Yeats. On the instru- 
 ment of his talent the sonatas he plays are soft 
 and melodious. Compared to the poetic sym- 
 phonies of Masefield, the work of Mr. Yeats 
 is that of a veritable MacDowell. And this is 
 high praise; for MacDowell, despite his cruel 
 suppression by the brutal president of Colum- 
 bia, composed with surety and success — that 
 is, with beauty. 
 
 That Mr. Yeats' poems have something near 
 to beauty in them is almost the first thing one 
 feels the need to say of them ; that this presence 
 is not always that of beauty itself, is the second. 
 So often it is merely the atmosphere of beauty, 
 the hypnotic influence of the expectation of 
 beauty ; for always we are lead by Mr. Yeats 
 to expect, continually and everlastingly, beauty 
 of the first order. In a way, his claim to beauty 
 is like the claim to seriousnesss of a writer of 
 ponderous prose, resounding with profound 
 phrases, some book of pseudo-science by a 
 man who knows not how to be simple: the 
 matter of the book may be the merest bun- 
 
 33 
 
34 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 combe but it persuades us of its seriousness 
 by its size and ponderosity. So Mr. Yeats 
 seems always to be telling us, as we turn his 
 pages, "This poem or this play is going to 
 be beautiful, very, very beautiful," and cer- 
 tainly the atmosphere of the thing invariably 
 calls up beauty; but, examining the lines, we 
 find that those actually of rare and wondrous 
 quality are few. 
 
 Perhaps this is because the work is comatose. 
 It is, at least, unstirring in a high degree. There 
 is something soporific about it, and although 
 we may admit that bed is a beatific place, we 
 do not desire our poets to drive us there. Nor 
 is this sleepyness to be explained by reference 
 to Mr. Yeats' obvious mysticism. Many a mys- 
 tic besides Jesus has been a stirrer up of the 
 spirit. It is, perhaps, because th6 slow-moving 
 calm of religiosity is what his mind requires. 
 He happens to be a Protestant but he has the 
 soul of a Catholic, as Chesterton, who happens 
 to acclaim the Catholic belief, is temperamen- 
 tally a typical Protestant. 
 
 Mr. Yeats' mysticism is unalive. He writes 
 of life as if it were death, and of death 
 also — wherefore these latter descriptions are 
 
THE SHAi'DOWY MR. YEATS 35 
 
 strangely adequate and ghastly. But man 
 does not live by death alone, nor, in- 
 deed, at all, and we cannot dwell indefinitely 
 in a world of ghosts withou,t disturbing our di- 
 gestions. Mr. Wells may tell us all he pleases 
 that stomachic difficulties are essential to good 
 writing; we are not all writers (thank the 
 Lord!) and surely some part of Mr. Yeats' 
 readers still hope for something from him be- 
 sides death-smitten heroes possessed of strange, 
 uncarnal appetites, maids married to the grave 
 before their birth on the scene, old hags step- 
 ping into it, and wandering children adream on 
 eternity. 
 
 Once in my presence, and Mr. Yeats', a min- 
 isterial gentleman expressed this hope in sup- 
 ple, rounded oratory and was verbally trounced 
 for it afterwards in Mr. Yeats' most delicate 
 and biting manner. He admired the Yeats 
 poetry exceedingly but he wished to see its ap- 
 peal widened, and he proceeded to call the poet 
 "onward and upward" to "greater tasks and 
 grander glories," if I recollect his phrasing. 
 Mr. Yeats declined with thanks, and quite 
 rightly. The things of death, the pale purple 
 
36 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 things, are the ones that he is able to do, ex- 
 ceedingly brilliantly able, and he is adequate 
 to nothing else. It is not so very important 
 why this is the case. It may be due to his 
 Irishness, to his deep relation with the saddest 
 people on the globe, who are credited, ridicu- 
 lously, with being a nation of humorists, be- 
 cause they possess Shaw and Moore, the most 
 serious man and the simplest of our time. It 
 may be because he has led a life of poetic soli- 
 tude, as the poets of old are supposed to have 
 done, instead of bowing to the bowl or rah- 
 whooing with the mob. It may be because 
 of a hundred experiences, associations and 
 ties, or lack of them: but aloof from life he 
 is and is destined to remain ; and his public must 
 take him with that understanding. 
 
 That they do take him — a certain public — is 
 very evident. That this public is not so large 
 as that of more human poets, is probable. But 
 shall we not come to realize some time that the 
 size of a poet's public, in the present state of 
 the world, is influential mainly on his royalties, 
 and on very little else? Of poets, as of proph- 
 ets, it may be said that the despised of our 
 time become the darlings of our children's. 
 
THE SHADOWY MR. YEATS 37 
 
 And Mr. Kipling, the peerless clanger of Brit- 
 tania, may be thought cheap and insig- 
 nificant — except as a story writer — ^within 
 fifty years ! 
 
 It is slight condemnation to declare Mr. 
 Yeats a man without a message. His poems 
 are messageless, and in his prose he writes big 
 vaguenesses on little concrete things, as nat- 
 urally as some philosophic spirits of this age 
 are writing tiny thoughts upon the greatest 
 questions in the world. But Mr. Yeats' mind 
 remains at large whether it deals with the Celtic 
 Twilight or the Celtic theatre or the twilight of 
 the theatre — now that Synge is dead and Yeats 
 is over forty! His is a mind that roams the 
 empyrean no matter what it starts for, sprink- 
 ling its path with star-dust as it goes, but never 
 reaching any of the weightier planets. 
 
 Why, indeed, should it be otherwise? He 
 can never conquer the cohorts of the propa- 
 gandists Shaw, Wells and the rest, though he 
 may have a part of the following of the idea- 
 istically elusive Galsworthy. At least he has 
 the pleasure of knowing that many of the thou- 
 sands who read him understand and enjoy; and 
 how many more of the readers of H. G. 
 
38 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 Wells and G. B. S. enter deeply into their 
 ideas, and feel and think and seriously an- 
 alyse? The true public of every man is a 
 petty thing today — though his readers number 
 in the millions. We are not meaningful to the 
 many. Demos remains undaunted, though the 
 first-rate of every generation give their lives up 
 trying to stifle his stupidity. Shaw laughs his 
 truth out, smeared with his heart's blood, and 
 the multitude laughs, too, because it is all so 
 funny. Yeats sadly smiles his ecstacy upon the 
 world and a few quiver while the many yawn. 
 George Moore attempted to do poems like 
 Mr. Yeats and failed, because he was too clever 
 and too — mundane. And so did Lady Greg- 
 ory with the one-act play. These failed in beau- 
 ty, or rather the elusive atmosphere suggesting 
 beauty, that is Mr. Yeats' chief performance. 
 Lady Gregory tells all of a thing, and therefore 
 nothing; Mr. Yeats, saying nought openly or 
 completely, unbares a world to those who carry 
 one in their heads. The great ones have done 
 more than this: they have made a world out 
 of their own minds and left it to us to play 
 with for a thousand years: our Shakespeare 
 and Milton and Balzac and Hugo and Goethe; 
 
THE SHADOWY MR. YEATS 39 
 
 this they have done. Mr. Yeats is leaving us 
 a land of shadows, visible to those who can see 
 in the quickening twilight, a land of sweet, 
 suggestive, figures, and that is all that Mr. 
 Yeats must do. 
 
GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 
 
 A new book from Mr. Moore, and this time 
 — the first, in many years — a book of criticism, 
 as well as a novel, convinces us more firmly 
 than ever that, although a rolling stone gathers 
 no moss it often achieves a most attractive pol- 
 ish. A gossipy subtleness, a refinement of the 
 commonplace is reached in "Hail and Farewell" 
 that is quite beyond anything that even the au- 
 thor of "Memoirs of My Dead Life" has done. 
 
 Once more, as in the work that preceded 
 this, Mr. Moore exhibits himself as the British 
 exemplar of the French realist-esthetes, and 
 once more, like several of them, he is guilty of 
 an ethical affirmation. He has declared for 
 freedom of sex discussion and liberty of sex 
 relation. This is his one departure from es- 
 theticism. This is his one contribution to the 
 attitude of his time. 
 
 Mr. Moore's psychology is simple. Devoid 
 of passion, he makes sex the key-note of his 
 thought and life. Lovers speak not — they 
 have better modes of expression. Only a man 
 of weak desires is qualified to voice the call of 
 
 41 
 
42 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 the body. Admirers of Mr. Moore, visiting 
 Dublin — into which poor, cool city, haunted 
 by both Catholic and Protestant restraint, he 
 has retired from the ravages of London and 
 Paris — are astonished to see his gaunt figure, 
 topped by its unattractive visage and its thin 
 pale hair. They wonder if this is the Lover of 
 Orelay and the confessor of England's most ar- 
 tistic search for lust. Where, then — ^they ask — 
 are the writhing red lips and the fire-flashing 
 eyes and the huge, muscular frame of perfect 
 proportions ? They have never existed for Mr. 
 Moore, any more than for such earlier attend- 
 ants at the literary confessional as Rousseau, 
 Flaubert or Marie Bashkirtseff. Genuine pas- 
 sion does not write about itself. It is only the 
 mild but ever present appetite that goads to 
 self-expression. 
 
 Mr. Moore is a true apostle of sex. His 
 religion, music and the rest are merely con- 
 tributing backgrounds. As far as the expres- 
 sion of ideas is concerned, sex is his one 
 strength, his one originality, his one sincerity. 
 The usual artist has a thousand intellectual an- 
 gles from which emanate as many momentary 
 
GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 43 
 
 sincerities. Every affirmation is a denial of 
 something he has beUeved or something he 
 is later going to believe. A single truth that 
 will cover all things at all times (such as the 
 philosopher seeks and the religious posses- 
 ses) is impossible of retention by the artistic 
 mind. Only the simple can be sincere. And 
 with these Mr. Moore ought always to have 
 been placed. Despite Mr. Huneker, he has 
 changed but little. Sex has been and is his pur- 
 suit, his luxury, his stock in trade. His treat- 
 ment of the topic has the emphasis of the mer- 
 chant who has wares to sell. But all this is the 
 logical result of the self-realization which has 
 been the purpose and indulgence of his life. 
 
 With this exception, George Moore is as bar- 
 ren of ideas as Kipling or Pinero. Only 
 rarely do ripples come to the surface of his 
 muddy pools of thought. For him, sex is the 
 determining factor not only — as for novelists 
 generally — at the supreme crises of life, but at 
 every moment and in every mood. Passion, 
 however, is not his. In Mr. Moore, the con- 
 scious intellect — such as it is — moves in a cir- 
 cle. His mind is the student of his senses and 
 his senses are the motive power of his mind. 
 
44 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 Now it is, ridiculously, for his one unim- 
 peachable contribution to contemporary- 
 thought that Mr. Moore has been most uni- 
 versally condemned: his firm and fearless 
 stand for the only freedom that he values. 
 And surely if there is one condition in the 
 world to-day upon the rectification of which 
 the progress of mankind inevitably and essen- 
 tially depends, it is the vast and definite in- 
 equality between man and woman, with all 
 the palpable insincerities and inconsistencies 
 which this entails. 
 
 Mr, Moore has observed this in the same 
 way that he has noted many elements of mod- 
 ern life. He has not thought about them. 
 He has been too busy getting them to paper. 
 So gathering a host of facts he has attained to 
 only partial truth. Perhaps he has seen, but 
 he has not solved. He has told, not taught. 
 The pages in his books depicting the attractive- 
 ness and, as it were, the morality of vice, are 
 products of neither aspiring art nor salutary 
 science. 
 
 In a contentious "Apologia" published in the 
 American edition of "Memoirs of My Dead 
 
GEORGE MOORE TlHE MUNDANE 45 
 
 Life," Mr. Moore defends all that he has writ- 
 ten on the subject of sex. The argument is 
 twofold : first, that the public is inconsistent and 
 inefficient when it tries to deal with morals, 
 since it determines its position without reason, 
 and learns nothing from experience; and 
 secondly, that such books as his own, however 
 one may disapprove of them, do not incite to 
 imitation in life at all — certainly far less than 
 the tales of Boccaccio, the poems of Byron, or 
 the plays of Shakespeare. 
 
 This contention is curiously unreasonable, 
 for it is certainly untrue that Boccaccio's 
 fanciful episodes of fourteenth century Floren- 
 tine nobility, taking place under conditions 
 never present in contemporary life, or Byron's 
 satiric poetry, or Shakespeare's scenes, sen- 
 sual in expression, but rarely without spirit- 
 ual uplift — it is surely untrue that these are 
 influential over readers' lives. Far more so 
 are the realistic reproductions of George 
 Moore, done with the delicacy of semi-sincer- 
 ity, unhampered by any intensity of feeling. 
 Mr. Moore has learned that to fascinate read- 
 ers, one must not be forceful. 
 
46 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 Yet in spite of his evident influence on the 
 attitude of his pubHc, Mr. Moore is unlikely 
 to tear the world from its Christian virtues, 
 for he is insufficiently positive of his own mor- 
 ality. He flounders irrecoverably in the "Apol- 
 ogia." Of his two logical defenses he employs 
 neither. His contention should naturally and 
 obviously be either that he has created works 
 of art founded on human life as he experienced 
 it, truthful, but altogether free of any propa- 
 gandist intent; or he should argue (and such 
 a course is eminently possible) for the univer- 
 sal adoption of the moral attitude suggested in 
 his stories, on the ground that this represents 
 a distinct improvement on that at present held 
 by a majority of the race. It is certainly more 
 free, more fearless and more frank than the 
 American coglomeration of blank, bungling 
 Comstockery and openly gross physical over- 
 indulgence, Instead of hitching his chariot 
 to such a planet, and making his course 
 plain as the sunlight, Mr. Moore flies away 
 in a cloud of chatter about the impossibility 
 of having one moral code for all people or 
 for all moments; and then, at the suggestion 
 
GEORQE MOORE THE MUNDANE 47 
 
 of a quoted correspondent, makes the sudden 
 discovery that he has been distinctively and 
 powerfully propagandist without knowing it. 
 Such action illustrates a degree of unconscious 
 uncertainty which is not appropriate even in the 
 supposed creative artist. Uncertainty may 
 develop the imagination; but one should 
 always be conscious — especially of the things 
 of which one is not sure. 
 
 George Moore is simply a gunshot at the con- 
 ventions of this century. Quite well he sees 
 that soul is no longer possible in our society; 
 that here is the greatest moral deadness in the 
 world; that neither successful nor unsuccess- 
 ful, rich nor poor, learned nor ignorant, are 
 immune from its devitalizing effects. Only 
 those in revolt can remain spiritually pure. 
 The creature of convention may lead a blame- 
 less life, but he does so by chance or necessity 
 or habit, not by seeking the attainment of his 
 own truth. He lives not by a creed of his mak- 
 ing but by one he has stolen from the multi- 
 tude. 
 
 Beyond these realizations Mr. Moore does 
 not go. Of the particular he has much to say : 
 
48 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 of our whole society, absolutely nothing. Yet 
 his revolt continues, perhaps, as Mr. Chesterton 
 avers, because he has something of the Irish- 
 man in him still. Bernard Shaw's suggestion 
 in the appendix to Man and Superman, of a 
 free society in which parenthood should be sub- 
 sidized by the state, and children nurtured as 
 the saviors of the world is an example of radi- 
 cal yet thoroughly constructive criticism on 
 this subject. In not one of his sex treatments, 
 has Mr. Moore made such a constructive analy- 
 sis. He is interested in intellectual develop- 
 ments, as in emotional, only to estheticize 
 them. Naturally he does not care that thought- 
 ful contemporaries see in the approach of the 
 sexes to-day a solution of the problem. A 
 new universality of spirit and appreciation 
 seems to be the keynote of that 20th century 
 development, the manly woman — she who pos- 
 sesses the historical manly qualities of cour- 
 age, firmness, accomplishment and the rest. 
 The highest types of manhood have never here- 
 tofore been matched in the other sex, largely 
 because woman's appreciation — and there- 
 fore her ability — have been more limited. 
 Nothing common to mankind must be lacking in 
 
GEORQE MOORE T(HE MUNDANE 49 
 
 the leader of men, or in the interpreter of 
 people ; each must be largely a woman, just as 
 each must be much of the student, the hermit, 
 the soldier, the policeman, artist, thief. Being 
 something of all these, he is in no wise depen- 
 dent upon experiencing the situations of any of 
 them. Universality appears, then, as an inher- 
 ent characteristic, developed by all experience, 
 yet subject to no particular experience. It is 
 close to the sympathy of the mother, and to the 
 imagination of the poet. "All great men," said 
 Thoreau, "are essentially feminine." 
 
 The reverse might be said of the opposite 
 sex. 
 
 To-day the old martial conception of manli- 
 ness, tho altered by the commercialism of a 
 hundred years, still holds its place. Yet, in 
 the truest, highest sense of the term, the wom- 
 anly man, having become mentally unsexed, 
 having lost the prejudices and limitations of 
 super-sex-consciousness, attains most nearly 
 to the universal. Indeed, the typical manly 
 man of the day is generally without the 
 greater manly virtues, while our most talked- 
 of American, Colonel Roosevelt, is found to 
 
50 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 possess in large measure the essentially femi- 
 nine characteristics of intuition, certainty and 
 simplicity. That positively feminine qualities 
 were present in Plato, Caesar, Shakespeare, 
 Goethe, Napoleon and Whitman has long been 
 recognized. 
 
 Now woman is soaring toward the universal 
 by seeking manliness. Man has approached 
 the goal more rapidly and prevents her suc- 
 cess by chaining her to the particular. But 
 in woman's present achievement rest many 
 hopes. Ridicule cannot turn her aside; stig- 
 ma is ceasing to attach to her, though it is still 
 as easy to stigmatize to-day as it was to crucify 
 two thousand years ago. Those who are cham- 
 pioning the cause of the sex at the expense of 
 self are scofifed at just as those of long ago 
 were slain who fought men for the sake of 
 man. "It is so easy to scoff." And then those 
 who follow, sorrow for the ignorance of their 
 forbears. We never fail to honor rapt enthu- 
 siasts — of other ages. 
 
 The valid objection to looking to the ap- 
 proach of the sexes for the solution of the tre- 
 mendous sex difficulty of society lies in the 
 
GEORQE MOORE THE MUNDANE 51 
 
 fact that this difficulty depends upon, is bound 
 and covered by, the general economic condition 
 of mankind to-day. It is economic inequality 
 which constitutes the chief difference between 
 the ragged, night-wandering employee of the 
 sweat-shop and the diamond-decked daughter 
 of her employer. The gradually solidifying 
 separation of rich from poor is therefore the 
 all-important problem of this generation, and 
 so on some revision of the economic policy of 
 the past seems to depend the adjustment of sex 
 — as of almost everything else. 
 
 To the constructive writing on this subject 
 Mr. Moore, of course, adds nothing. He is no 
 more constructive than inspired. The crea- 
 tive portions of his latest book are descriptive 
 rather than philosophical; its criticism is dis- 
 cursive, not creative. There is much about 
 Mr. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the Irish Move- 
 ment; about travels on the Continent; and it 
 is replete with the usual affaires. But all of 
 'this is really only a matter of clever talk. Mr. 
 Moore has not, in short, the vision of the pro- 
 phet, the artistry of the poet, or the depth of 
 the philosopher. Upon the unawakened battle- 
 
52 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 field of sex, amid the almost universal silence, 
 he blows a trumpet blast of truth. It is to be 
 hoped some others may begin to think where 
 he has merely shouted. 
 
 Again and again we hear Mr. Moore termed 
 a "realist," but in him we find a realism quite 
 different from that to which we have been ac- 
 customed. We have known the realism of 
 Zola and Brieux, which may be termed "scien- 
 tific." This possesses a distinct intellectual 
 and practical value. It aims fearless and force- 
 ful blows at prejudice and convention. It con- 
 demns the practice of secrecy concerning recog- 
 nized evils. It widens the knowledge of the 
 public on topics of "unmentionable" but su- 
 premely important character. We have seen 
 the realism of Wells and Galsworthy, which 
 aims not only at special cures, but also carries 
 with it an unmistakeable suggestion of general 
 solution which might prompt the use of "spir- 
 itual" in its characterization. Without one or 
 the other element no work of realistic art can 
 be very much more than an art object. This 
 is what Mr. Moore's creations really are. 
 Their realism, being neither scientific nor spir- 
 
GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 53 
 
 itual, is what, for want of a better name, we 
 must call "esthetic." They aim at a candid 
 reproduction of the picturesque. 
 
 In Modern Painting, Mr. Moore's most pop- 
 ular critical work, he pleads guilty to the grave 
 offense of having "suggested that a work of 
 art . . . may influence a man's moral 
 conduct." He then, as in the American preface 
 already mentioned, proceeds upon a forceful 
 denial of this thesis. Such denials constitute 
 one of Mr. Moore's chief critical contentions. 
 They are his only defense of his frank treat- 
 ment of the sex question. Yet, of course, 
 books do influence life — often more than life 
 itself. Reading "The Lovers of Orelay" may 
 have perturbed the charity secretary, whom 
 Mr. Moore quotes, more than meeting with 
 just such an experience in life would have done. 
 Even personally knowing Doris could not have 
 affected this pious man so strongly. Her at- 
 traction would probably have been merely an 
 object of philosophical consideration. 
 
 Mr. Moore is said to have at moments some- 
 what the same directness and virility of attack 
 that have spread the fame of Shaw, but in 
 
54 DEPRECIATION 
 
 "Ave" — ^which deals with some matter also 
 treated by the latter — the onslaughts are only 
 comparable with those of G. B. S. as the ex- 
 ecution of a sheet of sandpaper is comparable 
 with that of a plane; Mr. Shaw shaves his 
 chunk off with the hardest and surest of in- 
 tellectual metal ; Mr. Moore covers the surface 
 more smoothly, but he is wavering and rasping. 
 Only on sex is he sympathetically attuned, 
 only on sex is he temperamentally effective 
 and sincere. 
 
 In the last analysis it makes little difference 
 whether a writer elects to be sincere or make 
 a living. He cannot really put to paper more 
 or less than his own soul. It is by losing his 
 soul, or giving it, that the author achieves him- 
 self ultimately. And this out-pouring of his 
 greatest possession is his one essential ability. 
 Indeed, of what avail is it to him if he gain 
 the whole world, and cannot lose his own 
 soul? 
 
 Mr. Moore has succeeded in serving us his 
 soul, but our appetite remains unsatisfied. It 
 is pleasing food, but slight, sterile, insignifi- 
 cant. It is a soul that becomes finally neither 
 
GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 55 
 
 startling nor shocking. It merely succeeds in 
 telling us the expected in a whisper and shout- 
 ing the subtle into our ear drums. That is what 
 happens in "Hail and Farewell," as in every 
 one of his score of other books. 
 
 From another angle the author may remind 
 us of the chariot-race stage horses, madly dash- 
 ing onward without ever arriving anywhere. 
 Vigor and combativeness we are given in 
 plenty, but when the time comes for the curtain 
 here they are, horses, chariot, and driver, just 
 where they were at the beginning — or a week 
 before that. The rehearsals have been carried 
 to perfection; the scenery flits by, changing 
 momently; but the struggle is stagecraft, even 
 if horses and men are actual. We realize that 
 if we return the following day we shall see pre- 
 cisely the same performance. The scene shifts, 
 but the spirit persists. 
 
 It is in a spirit cooled by artistry and un- 
 warmed by inspiration, that Mr. Moore has 
 done his last and longest work. In a sense, it 
 is nevertheless, adequate, for it is rounded and 
 complete. Serious flaws in taste or construc- 
 tion, such as those of which Shakespeare and 
 
/ 
 
 / 
 
 / 
 
 56 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 Dickens have been guilty, are not for Mr. 
 Moore. Bordering on the unblemishea, he is 
 close to insipidity. For some as yet undis- 
 covered reason, adequacy is seldom inspired, 
 and perfection never sublime. Those who have 
 tortured us with the divine pangs of terrific 
 beauty are often those who, at moments, stir 
 in us a sense of incongruity and sometimes 
 even of disgust. Such is the feeling caused by 
 all the coarser scenes in Shakespeare's sweet- 
 est comedies following close upon episodes 
 fragrant with old-world fancies, or fraught 
 with the shattering glory of immortal lines. 
 No one in England can touch the estheticism 
 of sex with so delicate and yet unswerving a 
 hand as Mr. Moore. Yet are there any who 
 find in his work the towering temperament, 
 the dominating desire or the inexplicable 
 breath-catching beauty of the master crafts- 
 man? 
 
 He has, indeed, led a vivid existence. He 
 has gone ahead, unconquered, undismayed, 
 writing wretched poetry, poor essays, passable 
 novels, puerile plays and now he starts to gos- 
 sip his way faultlessly into oblivion. He has 
 
GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 57 
 
 lived, a varietist, in art as in sex; and in a 
 certain sense, variety is the price of life. But 
 where in all his sure and subtle art, where is 
 the whirl of summitless spirit? Where are 
 the words shall tremble on the lips of time? 
 
THE FETICH OF SINCERITY 
 
 Most sincerity is the supreme form of sel- 
 fishness. It is self culture at the expense of 
 that kindly consideration for others, which is 
 certainly a first principle of civilized beings, 
 and to which occasional lying is essential. The 
 virtue of truth is greatly like that of chastity; 
 either of them, carried to excess, becomes a 
 vice. 
 
 The only person to whom one should be 
 excessively truthful is one's self, and one never 
 accomplishes that because one's self is always 
 the easiest to fool. If Polonius had been 
 really wise he might have advised his son, To 
 thine own self be true — and thou canst then be 
 false to any man with impunity. 
 
 We all lie, but we become weakened and de- 
 bauched in proportion to the extent of our 
 unconscious lying. And the punishment of 
 most liars is not, as G. B. S. avers, that they 
 cannot believe anyone else, but that they come, 
 frequently, to believe themselves. Then they 
 cease being creative artists and must be rele- 
 gated to the region of the vicious. For lying, 
 
 59 
 
60 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 itself, is assuredly, as Oscar Wilde proclaimed, 
 an art, and creative in the highest sense. Only 
 God can control facts, but man becomes God- 
 like in his control of the recital of them. He is 
 free in every case to assert the affirmative or 
 the negative — and how little of such freedom 
 we have on this earth ! 
 
 But we must be brave and hearty in our 
 lying, for this, like other virtues, becomes petty 
 when it is practiced by cowards. Just so a 
 woman must be chaste with an "air" if she is 
 to be respected by the discerning and she may 
 be unchaste like a coward and still be quite 
 ridiculously respectable. 
 
 Either truth or lying must be justified by the 
 circumstances. Both cannot be right for the 
 same case, and we must develop a keen dis- 
 crimination that will tell us which is best on 
 each occasion. 
 
 And insincerity has still another magnificent 
 reason for being, because although it is a fact 
 that very few of us can tell ourselves the truth, 
 we are all madly anxious to obtain the truth 
 from others. This leads us to demand con- 
 fidences to which we are not entitled, and 
 causes us to exact information of no value to 
 
THE FETICH OF SINCERITY 61 
 
 us that we secure for the simple satisfaction 
 of our curiosity . We crave to find out about 
 our friends and their friends and even the peo- 
 ple we do not know, and all their actions and 
 thoughts, collectively or individually; in fact, 
 most of us are immensely curious about nearly 
 everything. 
 
 Now this curiosity is an excellent attribute, 
 from the subjective standpoint; it assures us 
 that we are mentally alive. But from the 
 standpoint of others it is just as certainly a 
 very dangerous and disagreeable matter. So 
 we are forced to get at all the truth we can, 
 while giving out only so much as we please; 
 and there is no way except by being frequently 
 untruthful that we can win at the game. 
 
 All these conditions are extremely obvious. 
 We should every one of us be admitting them 
 every day, were it not that sincerity has be- 
 come one of the most imposing fetiches of the 
 time. It is like the fixed belief that a married 
 woman must be incapable of seriously liking 
 any man but her husband, which persists in 
 spite of the fact that all but the most naive of 
 us know that not one in a hundred is men- 
 tally faithful throughout a lifetime. And how 
 
62 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 disgustingly unimaginative we should become 
 if we were never illicitly attracted, and if we 
 remained continuously sincere! Stupidity 
 would reign supreme and brilliance be no more. 
 
 And if, indeed, despite all arguments, we 
 did determine to be unequivocally truthful, 
 we should immediately find that we had de- 
 cided upon a course impossible of fulfillment. 
 Not only are there a thousand nuances every 
 day, in every mind worthy the name, that can- 
 not be couched in words, but there are com- 
 pletely developed thoughts that thrust them- 
 selves upon one in the midst of talk, the ex- 
 pression of which is rendered inapropriate and 
 misleading by the context of the conversation. 
 There are modifying ideas that come forward 
 while one is phrasing a thought that would 
 occupy countless hours if all of them were 
 handled adequately. The moment we say a 
 thing we begin to alter our viewpoint toward 
 it, and our speech is quite incapable of keeping 
 up with these alterations. 
 
 So there can be no complete sincerity, how- 
 ever we may wish for it, even between two 
 of the most intensely intimate companions. 
 
THE FETICH OF SINCERITY 63 
 
 Some thoughts are carelessly tossed aside, oth- 
 ers are consciously suppressed, still others come 
 forth into words deformed and scarcely to be 
 recognized. And perhaps it is just as well 
 that this is so, for few as there are who can 
 bear the truth from their own minds, still fewer 
 are there who could survive if truth were al- 
 ways thrust upon them by their neighbors. 
 Therefore, all hail to the kindly insincerities 
 consciously chosen by self-reliant spirits for 
 the welfare of their weaker brothers ! 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON: DEFEND- 
 ER OF THE DISCARDED 
 
 It is never too late to mend, but it is very 
 often far too late to break — especially when 
 one is dealing with the reputation of a su- 
 premely successful journalist. This is more 
 or less as it should be, for the fact that a 
 man's work succeeds is not always a reliable 
 evidence of its failure. But neither does it 
 follow that because one has succeeded he has 
 met with genuine success, and no successful 
 man has failed more lamentably at certain 
 points than Mr. G. K. Chesterton. 
 
 Yet in spite of his failures (and of his suc- 
 cess) many things can be said in his favor. 
 His critical works have been justly and, on 
 the whole, adequately praised as masterpieces 
 of suggestive writing, seductive in style and 
 replete with varied and spectacular allusions. 
 That they are only at moments constructive (in 
 the sense of flashing before us living charac- 
 ters) is more than compensated for by their 
 splendor of insinuation. Chesterton was as 
 certain to fail in presenting a complete and 
 inevitable Shaw as was Shaw himself in ex- 
 
 65 
 
66 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 hibiting a true and virile Ibsen. For just as 
 only a very superficial man can be thoroughly 
 conscious of his own depths, so only a man 
 of tremendous depths is able to realize an- 
 other's superficialities. Chesterton writes 
 about Shaw as if every mood and motion in 
 his work could be resolved upon the deepest 
 concepts of the latter's philosophy; and Shaw 
 would have us seriously believe that Ibsen pos- 
 sessed some fundamental faith to which he al- 
 ways bore allegiance. Every great creator is 
 the creature of his fancy and any criticism 
 that attempts to make genius perfectly consis- 
 tent must fail to achieve its aim. Chesterton's 
 own greatest shortcomings might be said to be 
 results of his almost absolute consistency. 
 
 Not that his point of view has been always 
 the same. In The Wild Knight, his early and 
 only book of poems, is found a standpoint ut- 
 terly dissimilar, to that of anything since ex- 
 cept, perhaps, The Defendant, his first volume 
 of essays, which may be regarded as the pro- 
 duction of a transition period. With the pub- 
 lication of Heretics his ideas begin to crystal- 
 lize, and here is illustrated one of his saddest 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 67 
 
 and most signal failures. For as he becomes 
 surer of himself, as the crystalline clearness 
 is achieved, the hardness and just a touch of 
 the coldness of crystal are noticeable. The 
 Defendant is the best of his treatises; 'the 
 Dickens, of his biographies; and The Napoleon 
 of Netting Hill of his novels. His more re- 
 cent writings are all, in the attributes which 
 have won him distinction, inferior. 
 
 Application of Mr. Chesterton's analysis of 
 the Irishman, who, he believes, "could see with 
 one eye that a dream was inspiring, bewitching, 
 or sublime, and with the other eye that after 
 all it was only a dream," might readily be 
 made to himself. It is because Chesterton 
 never utterly loses himself, because his con- 
 sciousness is always perfect, because his dream 
 never for an instant seems to become his re- 
 ality, that he can never meet with wide and 
 vital acceptance. His "mind distinguishes be- 
 tween life and literature," and as a consequence 
 his literature is without influence over others' 
 lives. Mankind is swayed and steadied by the 
 great half-thinkers whose hearts are larger 
 than their heads. Perhaps the greatest of all 
 Mr. Chesterton's faults is the domination of 
 
68 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 his mind. Inspiration and self -consciousness 
 are impossible bed-fellows. 
 
 But self-consciousness, far from being op- 
 posed, is surely essential to the gentle art of 
 making epigrams. Chesterton tells us that 
 Shaw's wit "is never a weakness; therefore 
 it is never a sense of humor." This charac- 
 teristic is the very essence of cleverness, that 
 twentieth century development, mothered by 
 Oscar Wilde, in which Chesterton himself 
 abounds. Cleverness is always fundamentally 
 serious ; it has always a conscious end. Clever- 
 ness is not the external exhibition of a mood; 
 it is intellectually created to produce a mood. 
 This is what serves to differentiate it finally 
 from either wit or humor. 
 
 Both of these latter may be, indeed gener- 
 ally are, a matter of natural instinct. Seldom 
 can they be consciously developed. They burst 
 full-blown, from a page of serious writing, or 
 leap, triumphant and irresistible, into an un- 
 welcoming discourse. Cleverness, on the other 
 hand, is almost altogether a matter of develop- 
 ment, of careful and tireless training, the 
 product of watchful nurture. It depends for 
 its very being upon absolute and unwavering 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 69 
 
 self-consciousness. To be clever one must al- 
 ways be intellectually on the spot. To drift 
 into the realm of contemplation is fatal; to 
 dream is to sign the death-warrant of clever 
 writing or conversation. Cleverness, there- 
 fore, can never partake of either the depths 
 of thought or the heights of inspiration. This 
 is the quality of which Chesterton is the great- 
 est protagonist, and one of the most effective 
 employers, in the world. From this aspect, his 
 work is important, but imperfect; we hear the 
 clanging of his mental machinery on almost 
 every page. Were the product perfect, there 
 would be a running ripple of laughter from 
 beginning to end. 
 
 Realizing cleverness to be a conscious ac- 
 complishment, we naturally tend to expect 
 some ulterior motive for which it exists. As 
 employed by Shaw it persuades an unusually 
 large public to accept for consideration a very 
 serious thinker who, without it, would be re- 
 stricted to the attention of the few. In the 
 work of this writer we find a complete and 
 consistent point of view toward everything in 
 the world, and out of it. It is of the first im- 
 portance to determine whether any such stand- 
 
70 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 point can be found in the work of Mr. Ches- 
 terton. 
 
 A review, read recently, makes the custo- 
 mary assumption and may serve as an illu- 
 minating example. 
 
 "Of course this is much more than a novel"; 
 says the confident reviewer ; "and while we are 
 infinitely amused over the adventures of Mr. 
 Chesterton's characters, at the same time we 
 are aware that the author means to drive home 
 some telling truths in regard to our ideals and 
 practices." 
 
 This is exactly what critics are always say- 
 ing about Mr. Chesterton. They invariably 
 assure us of the depth of meaning underlying 
 his frivolity. What this is, they make not the 
 slightest pretence to tell us. By nature the 
 solemn critic feels it incumbent upon him to 
 apologize for cleverness by reference to some 
 fundamental philosophy. In the case of Mr. 
 Chesterton no commentator (with the excep- 
 tion of his anonymous biographer) has made 
 even the slightest effort to investigate his con- 
 cepts, and when we turn to the writings them- 
 selves we find that he has made his ideas far 
 from evident. 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 71 
 
 One seemingly consistent point of view we 
 do find in all his recent work. This, as has 
 been said, was not in the least apparent in The 
 Wild Knight, but it appears more or less in 
 everything else up to Heretics, and very posi- 
 tively in everything since. This is the spirit 
 of reaction, reaction against everything that 
 is new or modern or "progressive" — he defines 
 the word somewhere to include all those who 
 believe in the possibility of mankind attaining 
 genuine happiness through the spread of edu- 
 cation and reform — but to nothing very def- 
 inite or particular. He evinces, indeed, a lean- 
 ing toward Catholicism, but his standpoint is 
 scarcely that of a Catholic. "Back to re- 
 ligion." cries Chesterton, quite unaffectedly, 
 and with great gusto, not for any especial rea- 
 son, not because it is true, but because religion 
 and humility are good for soul and body. Be- 
 lieve in God, because this will make you fat. 
 Omit modernity from your intellectual diet and 
 you will remain untroubled by mental indiges- 
 tion. "If Christianity makes a man happy 
 while his legs are being eaten by a lion," he 
 speculates, "might it not make me happy while 
 my legs are still attached to me and walking 
 
72 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 down the street?" This is as close to Mr. 
 Chesterton's spiritual standpoint as he has per- 
 mitted us to come. In the same way, he has 
 written many anti-liberal manifestoes, yet his 
 patrio-bellum beliefs bear no direct relation to 
 the creed of either the Socialist or the Tory. 
 Is he, then, what he is continually proclaim- 
 ing himself, an original and constructive phil- 
 osopher? In the preface to Heretics (and in 
 half-a-dozen places besides) he declares: "The 
 most practical and important thing about a man 
 is still his view of the universe." Apparently 
 he either regards the possession of a view as 
 far more essential than the expression of it, 
 or else he considers the declaration that the 
 universe is good or the universe is bad as a 
 fair philosophic statement. To believe that 
 everything is going right, or everything is go- 
 ing wrong, that things have been better than 
 they are, or are bound to be so in the long run 
 — this, if we may judge from the writings of 
 G. K. Chesterton, is to be a philosopher. Any 
 fundamental relation between ideas, any gen- 
 uine system such as can be traced in the work 
 of any of those whom mistaken mankind has 
 in the past regarded as philosophers, seems, so 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 73 
 
 far as can be seen, entirely superfluous to this 
 thinker. He contents himself with stroking the 
 surface of a hundred pools of thought and 
 sending up an occasional jetty of water to an 
 unexpected, if futile height, thus astonishing 
 both those whose intention it is to bathe 
 placidly and those who have come to dive to 
 the depths. Thus he places himself irrevo- 
 cably among the clever critics and luminous 
 litterateurs, and compels all equitable judg- 
 ment of his work to be based upon its imme- 
 diate artistic or utilitarian value. 
 
 A hasty examination of any hundred of the 
 disconnected, unrelated commonplaces which 
 he has so successfully phrased, must prove 
 convincingly that Chesterton is no philosopher. 
 As an artist in journalism his now incisive, 
 and now buffeting style, and his pugnacious 
 and dominating method, are, of course, admir- 
 able. As a moralist, his single interesting con- 
 tribution is his violent and (recently) consis- 
 tent opposition to progress (as defined above) 
 in all its manifestations. This viewpoint, 
 whatever may have been his original reasons 
 for its adoption, seems to have become really 
 his own, and it has brought him the firm and 
 
74 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 genuine suport of very few who really know 
 what it is. That mankind is moving forward 
 to the sound of mighty, ever more inspiring 
 music, is an almost undoubted fact. The ar- 
 guments seem too conclusive to meet with rejec- 
 tion by any one less determined to be different 
 than G. K. Chesterton. 
 
 Mr. Chesterton hails Plato as the most 
 Shawesque of all men, and sees therefore no 
 advance since his time. But there are a mil- 
 lion men closer to Plato in the world to-day 
 than were a thousand in his lifetime. Man- 
 kind has not risen to the spirituality of Jesus, 
 but it can not be doubted that it is nearer to it 
 to-day than ever. He, like every constructive 
 radical, believed in man rather than men. He 
 found himself surrounded by Scribes and 
 Pharisees, but he saw beyond, behind the 
 shadow of the centuries, a race that would be 
 noble and pure and true. This very attitude 
 in "progressives" to-day gives birth to Ches- 
 terton's chief criticism of them. He is that 
 most perfect example of narrow-sightedness, 
 the mystic who attempts to glorify the obvi- 
 ously unsatisfactory past. He imagines him- 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 75 
 
 self (and us) confronted by but one choice: 
 that between the mysticism of religion and the 
 materialism of science — failing to realize that 
 the belief in '"progress" is the most mystic 
 of all religions, quite aside from its appeal to 
 reason. But then, the retention of the reason- 
 ing faculty restrains one's pleasure in reading 
 Chesterton. It is possible to see too clearly. 
 As has been said of Nietzsche, Chesterton 
 understood is less suggestive to thinking than 
 Chesterton misunderstood. To be appreciated, 
 this Rock of Gibraltar against Radicalism 
 must be seen through Mediterranean mists. 
 
 Nothing in life or conduct or in human de- 
 velopment or in art or science appeals to Ches- 
 terton as really worthy of excitement. His 
 fervor is devoted to a defence of the obvious — 
 and the obvious is very seldom the true. His 
 fear is for the failure of the unimportant — ■ 
 from the standpoint of most of mankind. 
 Thinking humanity has become engrossed in 
 what it regards as its real problems — the prob- 
 lems of its regeneration. Mr. Chesterton 
 achieves originality by ignoring these and as- 
 suring us of the extraordinary importance of 
 the simple acts of life: eating, drinking, fight- 
 
7^ DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 ing and marrying; and of the farthest and 
 most futile flights of thinking: the thought of 
 why Ufa exists, of what follows death, of what 
 or who is master over these experiences. In a 
 word, he devotes himself to the glorification of 
 two factors in experience; those things which 
 men do naturally, without thought, and those 
 things which they do naturally without. "I 
 cannot understand the people who take liter- 
 ature seriously," he says in All Things Con- 
 sidered. He might have extended his remark 
 to thinkers in every other department of ac- 
 tivity. 
 
 Mankind has become temporarily passionate 
 for sensationalism. Our journals have sa- 
 tiated us with a certain sort; to be effective 
 to-day one must discover new subjects to sen- 
 sationalize. Chesterton has accomplished this, 
 not only by forcing his way further into the 
 fantastic, but also by returning to the obvious, 
 and therefore most neglected realms. 
 
 Mr. McCabe and others have contended 
 weightily against the Chesterton method, 
 claiming that serious thoughts ought not to be 
 exposed except in solemn raimant; still others, 
 scenting an antagonism to their progressive no- 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 77 
 
 tions, have violently attacked his "theories." 
 We cannot for a moment lend our support 
 to either objection, our contention being sim- 
 ply and solely that in a thoroughly charm- 
 ing and adequate way, Mr. Chesterton gives 
 us (in a philosophical sense) absolutely no 
 theories at all. 
 
 He is unquestionably important in his par- 
 ticular field. As an ethical connoisseur of sug- 
 gestive and thought-provoking power, he is 
 second only to Shaw in present-day England. 
 One man will read his writings with a con- 
 tinually mounting desire to answer back, an- 
 other with a passion to imitate; it is possible 
 a unique third may be moved to equally pas- 
 sionate agreement. He provokes scorn and 
 hatred, love and envy ; but always thought, and 
 almost always pleasure. These are the char- 
 acteristics of a clever, but not of a great writer. 
 He always wounds or delights the mind, but 
 never the heart. He moves one intellectually, 
 but never emotionally or spiritually: and this 
 is the first essential of the authentic artist. 
 Chesterton may tell us that emotion is the only 
 valid guide, but we believe it or not as we 
 please; he does not make us jeel that it is 
 
78 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 so. In this, he again differs radically from 
 Shaw, who, not strictly a philosopher (though 
 he possesses a singularly complete and well- 
 defended standpoint) is, even in his criticism, 
 a superb creative artist. 
 
 In Shaw, constrained as he has forced him- 
 self to be, we feel the surge of almost over- 
 mastering desires, we see the supernal light of 
 utterly unrealizable, and therefore supremely 
 valuable, ideals. In Chesterton we are blinded 
 by a burst of splendid sparks; we are never 
 burned by the fires that should generate them. 
 
 No one need contend that it is harder to be 
 serious than to be clever. It may even be more 
 difficult to be clever than to be humorous or 
 witty. The question is chiefly whether it is 
 more worth while to produce a number of vol- 
 umes of somewhat labored cleverness, lit with 
 an occasional beam of witticism or whimsy, 
 than it is to furnish the world with a bit of 
 actualized soul, a creation brilliant with the 
 superbly vital and yet superhuman flame of 
 inspiration. The former is what Chesterton 
 has done; the latter is literature. The former 
 momentarily delights a large number of peo- 
 ple, just as an effective and original cartoon 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 79 
 
 of our political situation does ; the latter quick- 
 ens the blood and starts a divine passion in 
 the brain of certain men and women as long 
 as life lasts upon earth. 
 
 Now it is in the creative efforts of a writer 
 rather than in his criticism or biographies that 
 we look for those elusive elements which so 
 impress the human spirit with their depth 
 and permanence that we characterize that 
 in which they are contained as literature. 
 In the novels of Mr. Chesterton, if anywhere, 
 we should expect to find the most complete and 
 perfect expression of his ideas, for in them he 
 has given us absolutely nothing else. 
 
 In neither The Napoleon of Notting Hill nor 
 The Man Who Was Thursday, nor in his more 
 recent book, The Ball and the Cross, can he 
 possibly pretend to the drawing of a single 
 character. Their pages are populated with 
 name-bearing progeny whose conversation is 
 very edifying and enjoyable. It would be too 
 much, however, to expect us to regard these 
 cleverly constructed mimes as people. They 
 are wonderfully simple organisms. Intellectu- 
 ally, each is infatuated with some single notion ; 
 and physically, but for the antics we are told of 
 
80 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 their performing, we could be quite sure they 
 did not exist. Each of the books is furnished 
 with a dozen marionettes expressly built for the 
 purpose of tossing ideas at the places where 
 (were they men and women) their brains 
 might be supposed to be. 
 
 In plot, the volumes are ingenious beyond 
 brief description. At the opening of each we 
 find the author inspired by a fanciful (almost 
 imaginative) notion by means iof which he 
 gets his figures moving at lightning speed. 
 They move so rapidly, in fact, that by the end 
 of the third or fourth chapter they have no 
 very particular place left to go to and are 
 forced back to begin the fun over again. This 
 time the journey proceeds with even greater 
 expedition, and the beiwildered reader finds 
 himself ready for a third, then a fourth, and 
 (if a sufficient number of pages are to be cov- 
 ered) for a fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth round 
 of duplication. Finally, the originally inspired 
 writer feels that something must be done to 
 round up the race and so he pulls his crew into 
 a conveniently located lunatic asylum (as in 
 The Ball and the Cross) and the exhausted 
 reader, feeling the divine appropriateness of 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 81 
 
 the end at least, wonders how the maddest 
 mortal could have supposed that because a 
 well-organized adventure delighted him at first 
 perusal, he should be expected to cover the 
 identical ground in an infinite number of repe- 
 titions. 
 
 In all three of the novels we are always 
 hearing what the characters have said and 
 done — ^never what they thought or what they 
 were. They bounce from one pose to another, 
 always doing something, forever talking, but 
 never seeming to accomplish anything. In 
 spite of the number and vivacity of their acts, 
 one feels an utter lack of consistent and neces- 
 sary action. The author seems to think it 
 enough to make his opinionated puppets do — 
 it makes very little diflference what, or how, 
 so long as they keep it up. 
 
 It is not so much a lack of reason as of 
 rhythm. As manipulator, Chesterton is 
 forced continually to recharge the rifle from 
 which he shoots his circumstances, so that we 
 get a rapid-fire succession of disconnected 
 (though not dissimilar) happenings that is ex- 
 tremely disconcerting. The novels are not, like 
 Meredith's, "chaos illumined by flashes of 
 
82 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 lightning," but lightning almost entirely ob- 
 scured in chatoic thunder clouds. Sometimes 
 the blinding flame escapes in a flash ; never for 
 a moment is there the life-warmth of the sun- 
 light. It is much as if a gray mist were torn 
 to shreds of silver by unexpected gleams. At 
 their best, his splendor causes an ecstatic 
 shudder to run down the spine of the 
 reader, which forces upon him a wild but mo- 
 mentary joy. Such flashes burn the mind into 
 shape for future thinking. 
 
 It is not the writer who thrusts upon us 
 totally undreamed ideas, nor is it (as Mr. 
 Chesterton insists) he who tells us what we 
 have always known but never expressed, who 
 usually affords us pleasure ; but it is that man 
 who suggests, as Chesterton frequently 
 does, by an audacious epigram which antag- 
 onizes or captivates us (in the end it makes 
 little difference which), ideas which may carry 
 us on to hours of unconfined contemplation. 
 
 All of the boldest and most personal of 
 Chesterton's characteristics are illustrated by 
 The Ball and the Cross. A brief study of 
 the story, an examination of its participants, 
 and an investigation of its insignificance, re- 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 83 
 
 veal the man at his best and at his worst. 
 
 Two puppets, armed with antagonistic re- 
 ligious views and with no possible opinions on, 
 or connection with, anything else in the uni- 
 verse, but nevertheless characterized with in- 
 explicable bad humor as Scotchmen, disagree- 
 ing about the virginity of the Virgin, deter- 
 mine to fight each other. Both being somewhat 
 more (or less) than lunatics, neither for a 
 moment imagines that any genuine solution of 
 their problem can possibly result from their 
 duel, but their literary creator assures us from 
 behind the stage that duelling is the only nat- 
 ural, logical and necessary exercise for two 
 men in their position to embark upon. A 
 dozen times, under the most varied and cleverly 
 constructed conditions, they begin their com- 
 bat, each time to be interrupted by the impres- 
 sive figure of a British policeman or some 
 other solid representative of respectable so- 
 ciety. Each time they flee and, turning, be- 
 hold the head of said policeman just rising 
 over a mound or wall which always happens 
 to be behind them. 
 
 The caperings of these enthusiasts from one 
 geographical position to another, along with 
 
84 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 some slight drifting from their original emo- 
 tional situation, constitutes the total plot of 
 the novel. Both the men (with such others 
 as appear from time to time — femininity is 
 practically excluded) are simply caustic 
 mouthpieces of the Chestertonian entity. It 
 makes little difference where this entity hap- 
 pens to lodge itself, whether in Professor Lu- 
 cifer, the aeronaut, or Michael, the priest, or 
 Turnbull, the atheist, or Maclan, the High- 
 lander, it is utterly true to its own nature : its 
 expression is always precisely the same. 
 
 The novel contains a possible ethical infer- 
 ence: that men would do better to abandon 
 their philosophical, sociological, ethical or 
 other controversies, and realize at once that 
 the existence of a Deity is the only question of 
 even the slightest importance to the race, and 
 that to the determination of this problem every 
 energy may be most worthily devoted. This 
 is the only possible teaching of the book. 
 There are, as usual, occasional successful epi- 
 grams, a number of suggestive paradoxes, per- 
 haps even a subtly worded truth or two, but 
 this is the sole large affirmative contribution 
 of the volume. 
 
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 85 
 
 In this novel, as in every other work, Ches- 
 terton shows himself as a bit of a moralist and 
 much of a cleverist (to coin a necessary name 
 for those who take their sense of humor seri- 
 ously), but as neither a philosopher nor a 
 creative artist. 
 
 How and where, then, must we classify him? 
 
 If we must do so, let us rank him where he 
 naturally and logically belongs : as a charming 
 charlatan who has captured the reading world 
 by writing stupidity with brilliance. 
 
 What, indeed, are the great Chesterton 
 affirmations ? An approval of drink and meta- 
 physics, of pugnacity and religion, from the 
 pragmatic standpoint that all are healthy. On 
 his negative side may be placed the denial of 
 the progress of mankind toward the most per- 
 fect society that the world has seen, and the 
 denial of the humanitarian insistence upon 
 Man rather than definite men. These are the 
 fundamentals of his attitude; yet, in spite of 
 them, he adores Shaw and worships Christ, 
 the greatest progressive and the greatest hu- 
 manitarian in History. 
 
 Whoever has something really tremendous 
 to say, may possibly be read by some people 
 
86 DEPRECIATION 
 
 even if he be serious; but let him have very- 
 little of any possible consequence to say and 
 yet utter it gloriously, and the public falls pros- 
 trate at his feet. Notwithstanding that he 
 has never created a character, Chesterton 
 proved himself a good psychologist. Instead 
 of wasting years in finding out whether he 
 was really arriving at any ideas, he proceeded 
 with unflinching vigor to the long and arduous, 
 but well-recompensed, task of developing a 
 means of satisfying the great literary demand 
 of the day : cleverness of expression. 
 
 The labors of half a lifetime have met with 
 adequate reward, and we find him who might, 
 after years of striving, have expressed a few 
 trivial additions to the fund of intellectual ma- 
 terial mankind is heir to, roaming the fields of 
 writing, visionless and uncreative, but abun- 
 dantly and brilliantly prolific. Let us furnish 
 this man with an unstinted measure of enthu- 
 siasm, let us be frank and fearless in our ap- 
 preciation of his accomplishment, and do not 
 let us belittle the glory of this by wrongly class- 
 ifying it with the less interesting work of the 
 thinkers and the dreamers. 
 
A VISIT TO G. K. C. 
 
 Beaconsfield is the little village, forty min- 
 utes out of London, where the arch cleverist 
 of his age resides. Coming to it, as I did, at 
 night, I saw only the glimmering station and 
 the stone railway bridges, the houses near and 
 far as I passed in my cab, and finally the ivy- 
 netted cottage approached by stony steps 
 reared beside possibly medieval, but delicate 
 and thriving flower beds, in which dwell both 
 the Chestertons. 
 
 I speak quite justly of the Chestertons, Gil- 
 bert Keith and Frances, his wife. A very 
 famous literary personage in England has 
 told me that without the one there could not 
 have been the other. My visit led me to believe 
 as much. 
 
 I was left by a sprightly, possibly orthodox 
 maid in a parlor hung with prints and water 
 colors — good ones — and dotted with books in 
 revolving cases and pretty little vases partly 
 filled with flowers. But very soon came the 
 tremendous person I was there to visit. 
 
 I had expected a large man. I had been told 
 
 87 
 
88 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 and prepared. But seeing him, I gave a little 
 inward gasp. Chesterton is enormous. His 
 head is massive, his hair thick, his neck fat, 
 his belly capacious, and he must be six feet 
 three in height. I was a pigmy in the left- 
 handed grasp of a giant. I saw the right hand, 
 dangling helplessly in its sling. For only a day 
 or two before, the medieval gardener had left 
 a medieval tub before the medieval door step 
 on which the world's sublimest propagandist 
 of medievalism was forced to march forth, in- 
 to the open and modernity. In this case 
 Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and the 
 broken right arm was a relic. The Weekly 
 Illustrated News still gets its medieval page, 
 but this is now being quite modernly dictated. 
 
 Chesterton I found no heretic in hospitality. 
 I was gathered glowingly into the larger dining 
 room, and there we proceeded at once to feast- 
 ing on appropriately named Benedictine and 
 cigars that were no doubt called Franciscans, 
 tho as they were without wrappers, I cannot 
 be sure. 
 
 We discoursed as we drank our cordial from 
 appropriately capacious tumblers. 
 
A VISIT TO G. K. C. 89 
 
 Shall I truthfully confess to the utterance 
 of ninety words from half-past eight till half- 
 past ten? That surely does not impugn the 
 master conversationalist's abilities. 
 
 Chesterton is a phrase maker of rare, quick 
 wit and jolly humor. You readers of him 
 could have guessed it — that his talk is but a 
 slightly milder literacy just as his writing is 
 but a sublimated conversation. He talks well 
 and much, humorously, sincerely and very tol- 
 erantly. And listening to him, you realize that 
 no one could possibly be a jollier, plesanter com- 
 panion. 
 
 "Even if the majority of people in a gener- 
 ation get away from the normal, as they do to- 
 day, we must not forget the line of conduct 
 that is normal to history and the race. We 
 must not take the exception and try to make the 
 average live up to it." 
 
 This is not exactly what he said — he may 
 have said something clever — but this is what 
 has remained in my memory as the sense of his 
 speech. It struck me as an unusually excellent 
 and brief expression of the real Chesterton, of 
 everything that he stands for and all that he 
 
90 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 means. It could be applied to marriage, to 
 government, to social intercourse and art, and 
 I do not think he has expressed it quite so 
 clearly elsewhere. 
 
 "The difference between man and woman is 
 responsible for almost everything that has ever 
 happened," he said. "We must realize that 
 when we try to make man and woman alike." 
 
 That, again, suggests the value to the pio- 
 neers themselves of Chesterton's eternal ques- 
 tioning of progress. They must answer him 
 before they can sensibly proceed. They must 
 know whether they want things to happen dif- 
 ferently in the future and they must try to 
 know and face the vast effect on all events 
 that sexual equality will have. 
 
 For the first time I learned of Chesterton's 
 expedition into the province of the graphic 
 arts. He had always scribbled hobgoblins and 
 gargoyles and demons on his manuscript. But 
 a few years ago he prepared a bouquet of car- 
 toons, political and otherwise, some of which 
 were used for a tract, Hilaire Belloc's. A 
 few copies of these were issued by a publisher 
 and possibly some sold. He allowed me to 
 
A VISIT TO G. K. C. 91 
 
 take home a few of the unpublished pencil 
 drawings and they are gloriously character- 
 istic of his jollity. Mrs. Chesterton, who was 
 curled up on a stool in the fireplace during 
 our first three glasses, left to fetch the draw- 
 ings, returned, admiring them, medievally 
 wifelike and frowned when I criticised. 
 
 Two hours with the man removes for all 
 time one's allegiance to the current folly that 
 Chesterton's ideas are jokes. His point of 
 view may be riduculed, but his sincerity is 
 anything but ridiculous. "St. Augustine and 
 the rest thought as I do, but then it wasn't 
 customary to write humorously," is his ex- 
 planation. 
 
A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 
 
 Mr. Wells is so conscious of his fame that 
 he frequently fails to sign his letters. I am not 
 an autograph collector, but I was somewhat 
 disturbed when I received a card neatly writ- 
 ten upon and enclosed in an envelope post- 
 marked "Hampstead," with Mr. Wells' ad- 
 dress stamped in raised letters within, and ap- 
 parently written by him but entirely lacking 
 any kind of signature. To make sure, I was 
 forced to communicate with a New Yorker 
 mentioned on the card who was supposed to 
 have received a letter from Mr. Wells at the 
 same time. 
 
 My astonishment was somewhat less when, 
 during my last day in Paris, a telegram came 
 from Ireland inviting me to be at the National 
 Liberal Club in London on Wednesday even- 
 ing. Mrs. Wells had written to me a couple 
 of times regarding the matter and so I felt 
 certain that I should ask for her husband when 
 I found myself under the marble archway of 
 the Liberal Party's London headquarters, at- 
 tacked by gorgeously dressed attendants deter- 
 
 93 
 
94 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 mined to find out the cause of my presence 
 within the sacred portals. 
 
 Of course I started post haste for the Gare 
 du Nord. I passed stormily from Boulogne 
 to Folkstone, arrived wearily at Charing Cross 
 and was driven to a friend's in Bedford Square, 
 who possessed too much old British hospital- 
 ity to hear of my going to a hotel. 
 
 At five minutes before eight I waited in the 
 visitors' room in the Liberal Club's liberal quar- 
 ters in Whitehall, by the side of a heavily 
 whiskered Frenchman to whom I was after- 
 wards introduced. He was Mr. Davray, the 
 translator of all of Mr. Wells' books. Not 
 many minutes had expired, or much patience, 
 when mine host arrived. We wandered up- 
 wards to the dining hall and to melons and 
 hors d'oeuvres and beef and ice cream, all of 
 them mellowed by a sparkling Madeira. 
 
 Wells is a little man. He is thin and so is 
 his hair; his eyes are unimpressive and his 
 moustache is straggly. None of the Parlia- 
 mentarians about us, failing to know him, 
 would have guessed the presence of England's 
 greatest writer, of the one man who is pictur- 
 
A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 95 
 
 ing to this age, and interpreting for all time, the 
 method of thought and the progress of his 
 generation. Wells it is who, better than any- 
 one else, is synthesizing modernity for itself. 
 
 Well, we sat there: Davray with his great, 
 impressive beard, Wells with his measly mous- 
 tache and myself — devouring the good things 
 of this world, and talking of a better world to 
 come. 
 
 We all know well what Mr. Wells believes. 
 He has told us so carefully himself, particu- 
 larly in First and Last Things. But Wells, like 
 all great personalities, is not only a creature 
 of moods but a man made up of several en- 
 tities, of many separate co-ordinately devel- 
 oping characters, all contributing to the great 
 central Liberalism that we have come to know 
 as the keynote of his spirit, as it was of 
 William James' and is of Henri Bergson's. 
 Wells embraces all the tendencies of his time 
 because he tolerates them all. Motivated by a 
 divine curiosity, controlled by an infinite tol- 
 erance, he marches godlike where earthy angels 
 fear to tread. In this, he may be, as the 
 proverb says, a fool, but his foolishness is the 
 foolishness of the all-wise. 
 
96 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 The career of the man represents the prog- 
 ress of a personality. He started telling us 
 stories that were good for us to read. He ends 
 by giving us thoughts that are good for us to 
 know. When Bernard Shaw began to print his 
 ideas there was almost no response. Then he 
 turned to telling stories (in play form) and 
 became the most talked-of figure in the English- 
 speaking world. Now, once more, he is back 
 at the old pedagogic work, but he retains the 
 form with which he made himself the aston- 
 ishment of the age. Wells has grown more 
 gradually from the little man he started to be, 
 up into the great figure that is his present self. 
 
 Wells showed, even as early as 1895, by the 
 production of his Select Conversations with 
 an Uncle, that he had more than an inventive 
 talent. But these little writings upon little 
 themes, though clever and perspicacious, are 
 limited and uncertain. They suggest the affec- 
 tations of Max Beerbohm, without possessing 
 the fineness of his touch ; and affectations, like 
 sweet pickles, should be exquisitely sugared 
 and soured to be in perfect taste. 
 
 There is but one affectation about Wells' "sci- 
 
A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 91 
 
 entific" stories, which he pubHshed before he 
 discovered his capability at characterization, 
 and this is the affectation of imagination. 
 There is no genuine imagination in beating out 
 cleverness of the type of Dr. Moreau's Island 
 or The Time Machine. They are more sub- 
 tle, simpler, and better written than the sto- 
 ries of Jules Verne, but only in this are they 
 superior to them or to the widely circulat- 
 ing tales of Nicholas Carter. The point of 
 view, the inventive quality necessary for their 
 construction is the same. Some people may 
 define imagination so as to include the strange 
 meanderings of this type of story. But such 
 folk are at least compelled to admit that they 
 are lacking in that important element of all 
 great works of the imagination: inspiration. 
 The early Wells stories are not struck forth by 
 a creative hand; they are manufactured prod- 
 ucts, put together piecemeal, none of them writ- 
 ten in any but the calmest and most conscious 
 mood. Inspiration is essentially the soaring 
 of one's soul without the knowledge of one's 
 mind. In the gleaming moment, the mind be- 
 comes the wage-slave of the spirit, receiving in 
 
98 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 return for labor the gratifying hallucination 
 of having itself done the work. 
 
 The Wonderful Visit is the earliest Wells 
 book shot with his satire and suggesting the 
 imagination that is to come. Satire is like 
 smoking: the real craving for it comes only in 
 maturity after the sweet-pickle stage has passed 
 away. Here in this book we have the glim- 
 merings of a mature Wells. Explanations are 
 waived; personality is emphasized. In The 
 Food of the Gods the advance is unmistakable. 
 Neither this nor any of his earlier "scientific" 
 stories are novels in the higher sense, for they 
 are not slices of the meat of life steeped in its 
 warm, red blood, but in them the Wells of 
 Kipps and Love and Mr. Lewisham appears 
 in embryo. 
 
 This Wells of Kipps and Lewisham is one 
 of the rarest spirits of the decade. He is 
 akin to Barrie but mightier and more genuine 
 than Barrie. He is a bit like W. J. Locke but 
 he is deeper, more significant than Locke. In 
 all three there is the same youth and gentleness, 
 for all three are old enough to have learned 
 youth fulness, and strong enough to be kind. 
 
A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 99 
 
 The new Wells that was born with Tono- 
 Bungay is carried to its natural consummation 
 in "The NewMachiavelli." This is the greatest 
 and the least artistic of his books. It is, in fact, 
 abominably inartistic. It is the blood-full mind, 
 the burning intellect prunning riot — magnifi- 
 cently running riot under the influence of an 
 ungovernable mentality. There is no control. 
 There is no attempt at control. The statesman- 
 philosopher who abandons public life because of 
 an extra-marital "aflfaire," is, of course, rem- 
 iniscent of Wells himself. All his books are so. 
 But this, and all the rest of the story, are 
 merely incidental. It is his thoughts in retire- 
 ment that Wells values. The book will stand 
 or fall before posterity on its presentation of 
 the inner consciousness of this age. 
 
 Problems of every sort are given paragraphs 
 — often chapters. Events of every sort, involv- 
 ing all complexities, are dealt with possibly 
 more frankly than in any other book. It is a 
 sombre work but the strain of joy runs deep 
 in its writing. It is the joy of him who realizes 
 all the sorrows of the world. 
 
 Much has been written of The New Machia- 
 velli as a philosophical consideration of the 
 
100 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 liberal movement in contemporary England. 
 But it is not from its acute political discussion 
 that the book gains its most fundamental sig- 
 nificance any more than it is because Tono 
 Bungay brought vividly to light the methods 
 of modern business that it is a book capable of 
 sinking beneath the surface consciousness of 
 its readers. The New Machiavelli is a sig- 
 nificant novel beyond any that have appeared 
 in many years. It is significant because of its 
 absolute reality, of its uncompromising frank- 
 ness, of its fearless truth. As the life of Rem- 
 ington, the hero, progresses, every point, every 
 condition, whether of early training, family re- 
 lationship, scholarship, sex interests, or any- 
 thing else, is discussed, pictured for the reader 
 in unmistakable sincerity. 
 
 This is is what makes The New Machia- 
 velli a great book, and which stamps H. G. 
 Wells as a great man — ^perhaps the greatest 
 man in England today. Neither Thackeray nor 
 Dickens, nor any novelist who has since been 
 given us has been capable of this same fearless 
 truth ; nor has any possessed the same vigorous 
 ability to deal with practically all the questions 
 
A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 101 
 
 of life and conduct in the same intellectually 
 satisfying manner. 
 
 I found myself thinking all these things as 
 I sat looking at the little man — looking him 
 over, one might almost say. 
 
 On our evening together the practical and 
 scientific Wells was uppermost, and, like all 
 frank moderns, being interested in sex, we 
 talked of it, and Wells was matter-of-fact, ex- 
 traordinarily, I thought. It's all very simple 
 after you get over the romance stage," he said. 
 Strange words, they seemed to me, from one 
 who had expressed so often the nuances, the 
 variabilities of this most universal and dom- 
 inant impulse. "Your American women," he 
 continued, "don't seem to know that anything 
 exists below the diaphragm." It was all quite 
 simple to this literateur of biological procliv- 
 ities. 
 
 Afterwards we walked up the yellow marble 
 staircase to the rooms where "the party is held 
 together" — presumably through receptions held 
 by recently created Liberal nobleman who gen- 
 erously shake hands with Commoners and lo- 
 cal representatives from English rural commu- 
 nities. 
 
102 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 It was all very strange: this most revolu- 
 tionary of English novelists attempting to be 
 "constructive" by belonging to the old-fash- 
 ioned finance-dominated National "Liberal" 
 Club. All about were beefy members — the bul- 
 wark of Merrie England — smoking their cigars 
 and guffawing gorgeously. 
 
 We talked of American politics and the in- 
 evitable Roosevelt and both our countries' need 
 of freedom from the professional politician and 
 the legal type of mind "that tries to talk much 
 and do nothing," to win in argument rather 
 than to establish truth. We were both agreed 
 that, Socialism presented the only complete con- 
 structive program in the world today and 
 equally that Socialism was not the property of 
 any party or any group: it might come any- 
 how, in ways unknown or undreamed. Then 
 Davray told us of the new plan of proportional 
 representation in France, ten-thirty struck, and 
 the evening was at an end. Davray and I 
 sauntered out on the square, fronting on 
 Westminster Abbey and the Gothic Towers of 
 the Houses of Parliament, all of them dull and 
 gloomy through a drizzling rain. Wells 
 
A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 103 
 
 went up to the room he had taken for the 
 night, hoping to sleep, as he said, "the jolly 
 sleep of all good Liberals." 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE FINALIST. 
 
 Finality is the goal of the small-spirited. 
 The search for it is unending, since in the 
 things of life that count, it is not to be found. 
 Our present century is teaching us to deal not 
 in absolutes but in relativities. In the relating 
 of one fact to another, in applying this to that, 
 lies the solution of our problems; those ques- 
 tions that require final answers we are pre- 
 pared to hand on to another generation — 
 twenty or a hundred generations hence. 
 
 The small scientist, working over his mi- 
 croscope, perhaps on a specimen of a genus not 
 one man in ten thousand ever sees, demands 
 that his experiment be perfect in result. As 
 the problem enlarges, the exactness of its so- 
 lution becomes less possible. And the prob- 
 lems of our social life are the largest that con- 
 front any of the sciences. 
 
 We are searching in the world for a method 
 of living. For the attainment of this we find it 
 necessary to secure some approximate under- 
 standing of our own character, of that of the 
 people about us, and of the physical and mater- 
 ial world at large. These are our supreme es- 
 
 105 
 
106 DEPRECIATION 
 
 sentials. Our need for them is as self-evident 
 as for anything conceivable by the mind of 
 man. Toward them proceeds the unthinking 
 search of every groping child ; they are the un- 
 realized or the conscious goal of all sane hu- 
 manity. 
 
 Such understanding of one's self and other 
 men and the qualities of the world is known 
 to be in its very nature incomplete and relative, 
 and is accepted as such. With it as a goal man 
 has achieved art and science, comfort, knowl- 
 edge, and all that we think of as civilization. 
 But built up along with this has been the crav- 
 ing for finalities, the seeking for truths that 
 one might think of as essential, for existences 
 that it might be imagined wpuld never die. 
 
 Alas, the appetite for the everlasting' has 
 been the damage of the ages. The effort at its 
 gluttonous satisfaction has left history reeking 
 with carnage, injustice and despair. The tale 
 of its dogmatic onlaughts on the happiness of 
 men is more dire than the combined quintes- 
 sence of all tragedies conceived from "Oedipus" 
 to "Ghosts". 
 
 The genius of each age cried out in protest, 
 but mankind rushed madly on, crushing oppon- 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE FINALIST 107 
 
 ents of the belief in final things. Gradually 
 these grew. Today they are powerful ; and now 
 at last we glimpse the coming of a new mind- 
 fulness for the things of this world. 
 
 Death is the only Finalist who remains a 
 master. The rest of those who assumed to in- 
 form us of the birthplace of the stars and the 
 destiny of oceans are quietly being left to take 
 care of little children on the morning when they 
 are not in school and their parents require an 
 approved, convenient way of being rid of them. 
 It is not a destruction ; Man is merely stepping 
 aside from the fictions created by his fathers, 
 neither denying nor discarding them, but 
 merely concerning himself with his business: 
 the increase of the joy of life for all. This 
 will make use of all the energies and under- 
 standing that the race can bring to it. 
 
 Meanwhile the Finalists are stricken. No 
 more armies go forth under their banners, no 
 governments rise or fall at their dictation and 
 life goes hurryingly forward whether they 
 will or no. It is well that we should travel at 
 nerve-wracking pace: we have centuries of 
 wasted efifort from which to recover. 
 
PINERO THE PUNCTILIOUS 
 
 Neopolitan, although the most varied, is the 
 least imaginative of ices; the drama, most 
 complex of the arts, is also the most capable 
 of exact judgment. Scarcely any angle of at- 
 titude can be assumed which does not find its 
 application in the theatre. 
 
 It depends entirely upon our individual 
 fancy whether we relish the inspired pugnacity 
 of Shaw; the idealistic harmonies of Haupt- 
 mann; the soft, sweet mysteries of the early 
 plays of Maeterlinck or the perfervid power of 
 his later ones; the titanic rapture of Ibsen's po- 
 etic dramas or the vigorous soul-tossing and 
 twisting and tormenting of his social works. 
 
 Something in us establishes inclinatio ns and_ 
 our responses to art are fixed by them. / There 
 are still those who enjoy Pinero. They pretend 
 to admire him: his creation of fine phrases; 
 they talk of him as a sublime technician or 
 struggle to regard him as the moulder of pro- 
 found human destinies. This, they say, is 
 Art ; -QflLpxopagarH^ a^ -r adi ca . U &mrptrrbi'eHrpres- 
 -€Jrtatiort7Dr-any other .sub&titiate,iar.JJie. naive 
 ^^^upacfieiarlities-^hat- delight . them. -'^^•SaGfafalk- 
 
 109 
 
no ,._ DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 ie Sudermann. For this there is, of course, 
 the excuse, that these two writers are of our 
 time. ,^ 'The Zeitgeist grips "them and lis and 
 their petty fumblings^with a prgteliSed infinite 
 tweak some temporarily ^e^ponsive chord in 
 our-souls. 
 
 One cannot quarrel with the worshippers of 
 the mediocre. After all, it is better that they 
 should be given good examples of such theat- 
 ric pabulum as they will swallow. But why not 
 examine the flaws that are measurable by our 
 common, accepted dramatic standards? 
 
 The lines of a Pinero play are clever. Well- 
 wrought spokesmen are thrown before us who 
 speak in "good, set terms." They are never at 
 a loss for a word; -tiieir-etts^tomarry-form_af 
 address is the epigram. Of course in the 
 farces, to achieve an easy laugh, they halt ;~btt-t 
 with- calculation and ' accuracy:" Is wit, bur 
 wondrous heritage from the most serious im- 
 mortals, merely this forced product of trumped 
 up farce, or this equally forced comedic re- 
 partee? When Pinero is not clever he is dull. 
 Once in a while he is saved by the looming of a 
 possible climax, then comes the conscious 
 
PINERO THE PUNCTILIOUS 111 
 
 craftsmanship again, killing the chance of vig- 
 orous, sincere plain dealing. 
 
 As for the folk, a certain clamminess clings 
 to even their liveliest momentg. ,_._ 
 
 Shaw's Mrs. Warren defends her -past ; poor 
 Mrs. Tanqueray is sorry for it. At the 
 thought of her lost innocence she bursts into 
 tears. When her stepdaughter discovers and 
 identifies her she becomes inefifectually frantic. 
 All this is photographic of a certain type of 
 "society" puppet — a type that it is difficult to 
 use for the creation of/sustaining tragedy. 
 
 Mrs. Ebbsmith flashes into the range of /the 
 really interesting and is backed down to the 
 Finer o level by the astounding introduction of 
 the mechanical religious motive. Nerd burned 
 Rome to achieve/a theatric excitement.' Pinero 
 merely kills a character. 
 
 With the help of the thoughtless and vision- 
 less. Iris, Pinero has created his most perfect 
 — and perfectly useless play. /Snatched from 
 the drawing-room, Pinero people embody the/ 
 most disgusting attributeyof those with "ad- 
 vantages," in actual life/ Each year gives us a 
 new play, each with an advance in realit/ and 
 distastefulness. !pnally,^n Mid-Chaniyelraad- 
 
112 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 -The Thunderbolt conventionality has become 
 so even conventionally unattractivcy-one won- 
 ders why such husbands and wiveS'Should ever 
 have had the slightest desire to possess each 
 other. 
 
 What is the depth of distress in these "trag- 
 edies?" Where is the ha,rrowing of spiritual 
 vitals that stirs and strengthens? Overeating 
 at an unvaried meal gives the same mild dis- 
 taste. One need not go to the theatre. 
 
 Of course the characters are "real." That 
 is why they are, hot stirring. They conform 
 to our conventi,c)nal conceptions. They are so 
 actual that they are commonplace, uncreative. 
 Ibsen's people transcend the lifelike. They are 
 all personalities. In their veins courses a su- 
 per-vital fluid. They are not obvioua^Jiutlrue. 
 In Pin^o we feel the actuality and therefore 
 the particularity, by instinct. That is why he 
 does/ not influence us. That is true of every 
 situation. He speaks before us, not to us. 
 Each snatch from life must be judged by the 
 individuality of its own conditions — and it is 
 never exactly us he is picturing. Ibsen's les- 
 sons are special and yet dominantly universal. 
 There theatric conditions are non-essential. A 
 
PINERO THE PUNCTILIOUS 113 
 
 Doll's House is a piece for every wife and every 
 husband; Little Eyolf is a play for the mothers 
 and fathers of the world. Before we are ready 
 for judgment of a Pinero play we must recol- 
 lect the country and caste which he casts. This 
 intellectualizes our interest and we come to 
 view his dramas, not to live them. 
 
 What does it matter that Pinero's latest plays 
 are well don€ in the kind of construction we 
 admire today. The early ones, even as far up 
 as Iris are weak, even in this. The Gay Lord 
 Que?^ is talked of as the perfect comedy, and is 
 refally not particularly comic. It would be a 
 (/drama were it not for its lack of significance 
 
 and weak, ind istinc tly drawn characters. _.,_„ 
 
 (^*'-^IA?'Tiniirthe idea of Mid Channel by devel- 
 oping it in a plot that is not inevitable; by 
 means of characters that are meaningless and , 
 uninspiring, and some of them unnecessary; i(S) 
 distribute^almost no dramatic material through 
 two acts and then crowdAhe remaining part; 
 seetas-searGe-ly^-less-shame f ul Jjian-Mrs r Ebb- 
 sniith^s-bibk -snatching-at' the close of th&.best 
 twe-aets Pinero ever wrote. But if one must 
 have characters whose only concern in life is 
 
114 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 love-making, ideas, of course, must be tossed 
 on the scrap heat. 
 
 Pinero is the Franz Liszt of drama. His 
 keen exposes of the commonplace are as ac- 
 tual as folk songs. However distorted, am- 
 plified, conventionalized, they remain believa- 
 ble demonstrations. We never doubt their 
 factitiousness. But their truth — that is an- 
 other matter. To be true, one must have an 
 idea, a message, a religion. One cannot sim- 
 ply peck at experience. 
 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett talks of ours as an 
 age of realism. But mere reality will 
 never satisfy us. The exposition of actuality is 
 not creative. Zola and his like do not blast the 
 watch towers of the infinite and throw open 
 to our gaze the verity behind them. This inter- 
 pretative demonstration is what man craves; 
 he demands drama that builds as well as ex- 
 poses life. A sophisticated understanding of 
 life is simply a primitive intellectual necessity 
 to the artist; beyond it lies a naivete of soul 
 that has kept all great creators forever child- 
 like and wonder-smitten. 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 
 
 Countries and continents, like colognes, have 
 their essences. They have also their nuances, 
 their vagaries, their illusive qualities and their 
 illusory dreams. But they possess, neverthe- 
 less, certain factors that are fundamental, per- 
 manent and typical. 
 
 America has rendered typical of itself those 
 two useful words that stand so often on 
 either side of swinging doors: "Push" and 
 "Pull." Europe, while subject to character- 
 ization by no pair of monosyllables, is never- 
 theless capable of as precise qualification. It 
 is in the effort to render definite the manifest- 
 ation of "Europeanism," in its various phases, 
 as differentiated from "Americanism" that I 
 have written these thumb-nail sketches. They 
 are slight, suggestive and unelaborate, but 
 there may be some who find in them a measure 
 of truth and they are therefore offered to my 
 fellow Americans without apology. 
 
 I 
 
 Between the Louvre and the Arc de Tri- 
 omphe lies the essence of Paris, for there it is 
 that the kingly gardens of the Tuileries recline, 
 
 115 
 
116 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 there swings from north to south the royal 
 Champs Elysee, and there as well are scattered 
 those haunts of elegance and ugliness and vice, 
 the music halls for which Paris is famed. 
 What could be more grotesque than a five-min- 
 ute walk from the Venus de Milo to the The- 
 atre Marigny — from the contemplation of an- 
 tiquity's ideal of love to modernity's conception 
 of Lust? Yet this is possible in Paris. 
 
 Paris is the most dignified and the most 
 ludicrous, the gayest and the saddest city in the 
 world. Great, immortal buildings; great, im- 
 mortal art ; petty, stupid, ugly waste — all in one 
 seething mass, making a city! It is glorious, 
 beautiful, fruitless and futile, constructed 
 without purpose, tending toward no end and 
 yet fine and rapturous and inspired as nothing 
 in America has ever been ! 
 
 When a friend of mine in Paris was asked 
 some years ago what he thought ought to be 
 done with the old Palais Royale, which all read- 
 ers of Dumas will so well remember, he replied, 
 "Why, keep it as a hospital for the people who 
 are run over every day in front of it at the end 
 of the Avenue de L'Opera. They need never 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 117 
 
 move out of it: they can buy everything they 
 want in the shops underneath and they can 
 live delightfully in the apartments upstairs." 
 Street accidents do not worry Paris, and old 
 buildings are made useful. Watch the melee of 
 cabs and buses, automobiles and business 
 wagons on every avenue and you will stop won- 
 dering why the population is decreasing. 
 
 II 
 
 Really the geographers are wrong. England 
 is in London and London is Boston raised to 
 the nth power. 
 
 Imagine a country full of Bostonians! Of 
 course, there are other types — as there are in 
 Boston. There is Keir Hardie, M. P., for in- 
 stance. There are the Celts, ranging all the 
 way from Bernard Shaw and George Moore to 
 William Butler Yeats. Besides that there are 
 Lord Rothschild, Mrs. Pankhurst and D'Al- 
 bert Chevalier. But Boston, one must not for- 
 get, has its B. O. Flower and Governor Foss. 
 England at heart has become a perfected, 
 standardized New England. I say this advised- 
 ly, for it is only in recent years that the gizzard 
 has gone out of Britain. There was a time 
 
118 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 when its people ate beef, drank small beer 
 (whatever that may be) and knew what they 
 wanted and how to get it — or at least go about 
 getting it. Now it is simply a question of more 
 warships than your neighbor and trust to luck 
 As Mr. Frank Harris put it in speaking of 
 King George's rehearsals, at a festive, con- 
 versational luncheon to which he invited me, 
 "You can't imagine William the Conqueror 
 being taught how he should be crowned." 
 That witty man alleges, moreover, that several 
 coronets threatened to depart from the semi- 
 royal heads on which they were ensconced at 
 the most recent ceremony and had to be manip- 
 ulated to stay on. 
 
 Yet, the English are attractive. They have 
 the attraction for us that a full blooded bull 
 must have for an overworked kyute with a 
 can tied on his tail that he's afraid of banging 
 every time he moves. Englishmen know what 
 to do. More importantly, they know (what 
 few Americans even realize) what not to do. 
 We are brazen in the face of Hell — and 
 Heaven. The Englishman is more critical — 
 of himself. He prefers not to ram his head in- 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 119 
 
 to a wall even if he knows it isn't stone and 
 that he can get through it. First he finds out, if 
 he can, what's on the other side. Englishmen 
 are courteous — even to "foreigners." It was 
 not in England that a hostess, asking her guest 
 at tea to have another cake, and receiving the 
 reply, "No, thanks, I have had two already," 
 answered, "No — you've had five, but take an- 
 other anyway." That could only have hap- 
 pened in New York ! 
 
 Englishmen, like Continentals, know how to 
 live. Just as they seriously attempt to find out 
 what to do and quite as much what not to do, 
 so they determine what they want and as 
 definitely what they do not want. It is not, as 
 with us, continually a case of living up to some- 
 one else's income. 
 
 Englishmen hurry almost as little as Ger- 
 mans. At five they have tea, whether they 
 make a fortune or lose one, and nothing but 
 a theatre engagement (or poverty) prevents 
 their two-hour dinner at eight. 
 
 There is a tale told of an Englishman (and 
 not by an idiot) who, arriving in New York, 
 was taken in the subway by a friend. They 
 
120 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 boarded a local, changed to an express, and re- 
 turned to a local, all on the way to their des- 
 tination. The return trip was made in the same 
 manner, hurrying all the time and running 
 most of it. ""Why," asked the "foreigner," 
 out of breath, "why do you run about this 
 way?" "Come on," cried the New Yorker 
 excitedly, "I save two minutes !" "But what," 
 was the sane reply, "what do you do with the 
 two minutes?" 
 
 Who of us in America knows what he does 
 with the minutes ? We have no more idea what 
 we do with the dollars. We spend them, we 
 waste them, we throw them away on things 
 that tire us. We used to accomplish mighty 
 physical things. We mastered a tontinent. 
 We created greater wealth than had ever been 
 dreamed of in the world. Now that we can- 
 not keep up with the pace in accomplishment, 
 we take it out in hurrying. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Italy is the land of love, listlessness and Last 
 Suppers.' It also possesses excellent patisserie 
 and very poor railways. It has been called, 
 at various times, by folk more or less imagin- 
 ative or given to indigestion, "the'land of art," 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 121 
 
 "the land of history," and "the land of pov- 
 erty." 
 
 Italy has a number of old cathedrals, which 
 are left standing because their steps furnish 
 suitable resting places for venders of postcards, 
 who saunter forth gayly in droves from unde- 
 tected corners as soon as a foreigner is found 
 gazing at "their" building. There are old wom- 
 en whose backs have taken on a picturesque 
 curve that one can conceive being the fashion 
 in a hundred years ; there are middle-aged men 
 who pretend to speak French for the sake of 
 Americans who pretend to understand it ; then 
 occasionally there is a young boy who is still 
 naive enough to hope to sell something because 
 someone wants it. ' Once permit these vampires 
 to come within a dozen yards and they hold 
 you with their cries and vociferations. Escape 
 is never afforded unless one is clever at pre- 
 tending to be insane and then venders will gig- 
 gle, pretend to be frightened and go away sat- 
 isfied. You see it is all a matter of pretense 
 everywhere in Italy. 
 
 In purchasing anything it is necessary to 
 pretend at the same time both that you admire 
 
122 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 it and that you do not wish to buy it. If the 
 salesman believes you do not admire his wares 
 he will never really care to sell them to you — 
 though he may try with what seems to us a 
 good deal of avidity. He is always interested, 
 however, in making you live up to your own 
 better nature (which is favorably impressed 
 with his goods) and if he succeeds he can slap 
 himself on the back ethically as well as artis- 
 tically. 
 
 Love in Italy is like sand in Sahara. The 
 country has been a region of romance for so 
 many years that it takes it as a matter of 
 course. In America we are afraid of love, 
 in England they are ashamed of it, in Germany 
 they are obsessed with it, and in Italy they are 
 tired of it. Of course, the people go right on 
 loving and marrying, cohabiting and procreat- 
 ing, but it is simply a matter of habit. The 
 prostitutes are even more business-like than 
 New York's. As for the listlessness of Italy, 
 that is a matter of genuine intellectual convic- 
 tion. It is not really warm in Italy. Milan 'in 
 summer is considerably cooler than Boston, and 
 even Rome rarely rivals New Orleans in dia- 
 bolic temperatures. It is simply that the Ital- 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 123 
 
 ians do not believe in our methods and -man- 
 ners. They eat fully and so they must give 
 themselves opportunity for digestion. Their 
 cathedrals and mural decorations support 
 many of them and a large number of others 
 make remarkable beverages and foodstuffs 
 with things they pick up in the streets. I think 
 comparatively iew Italians admire great art, 
 though all of them admire other people's admir- 
 ation for it. That is a signal diflference between 
 most Europeans and all Americans, none .of 
 whom ever admire anything that they do not 
 possess or are not on the way to, possessing. 
 
 Italy owns about a thousand "Last Suppers." 
 Some of them are painted on walls^or ceilings 
 while others are chopped up and put 
 into frames. Many of them look far/better on 
 post-cards than in the originals and none of 
 the painters have supplied the divine assem- 
 blage with any dietary superfluities. Holbein, 
 with true German generosity, was quite the first 
 to victual the table as he who allowed his head 
 to be bathed in costly ointment would cer- 
 tainly have had it. 
 
 The great "Last Supper" of Leonardo da 
 
124 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 Vinci, the glorious composition and drawing 
 of which is ardently admired by every one who 
 has not seen it in the original, is in a condition 
 of almost complete dissolution. Strangers 
 still go out to the church of Sta. Maria Delia 
 Grazia, however, and two old women are per- 
 mitted to receive them, and their tips, while 
 white clothed monks wander about interest- 
 ingly whenever there is any excuse for doing 
 so — though the da Vinci section itself is in the 
 control of the Government. 
 
 The poor live very inexpensively in Italy 
 and the rich extravagantly. There are large 
 private dwellings of the character of Carnegie's 
 or the Vanderbilts' in New York (though not 
 generally all of stone) and the best hotels serve 
 perhaps the finest tables d'hote in the world. 
 Life in the larger cities is not unlike that of 
 London and Berlin though there is far less 
 interest in intellectual pursuits. On the other 
 hand, Italians are pious frivolously while Paris- 
 ians and Germans are impious religiously. 
 
 IV 
 
 It may be said that because Germans do not 
 live any longer than Americans they do not 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 125 
 
 live so much. But, after all, one lives only as 
 one is conscious of living, and we Americans 
 hurry about in a condition of semi-conscious- 
 ness that is not life. We have j no repose and 
 therefore little thought. Our working classes 
 are without leisure and our leisure classes are 
 too busy searching for amusement to achieve 
 happiness. 
 
 Life to most people — or happiness in life — 
 signifies simply the going from one agreeable 
 sensation to another in quick and interesting 
 succession. The only desires of the average 
 man are "life" and luxury and love. The Ger- 
 mans satisfy these interests — or lusts, if you 
 must call them so. We do not. It is not that 
 we crave their satisfaction the less. We do 
 not satisfy our desire for life because we do 
 not understand it, nor our desire for luxury 
 because, being ashamed of it, we become crude 
 in seeking its satisfaction, nor our desire for 
 love, because that frightens us out of our wits. 
 
 Most(true Americans are Puritans and all 
 Puritans are perverts. Their perversion con- 
 sists in a super-sex-consciousness turned in 
 and against itself. Just as only those greatly 
 
126 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 and emotionally inclined to ward, sex, adopt that 
 subject as their intellectual specialty, so only 
 those insanely obsessed with sex crusade 
 against it. 
 
 The intelligent German does his work calmly 
 and with precision. He lives in the same man- 
 ner. , He eats sufficiently and well; he rests 
 two hours in the middle of the day; and he 
 drinks his beer, fearlessly, quietly and in- 
 offensively. There are no saloons in Germany, 
 though there are beer gardens everywhere. 
 Whiskey is very unpopular, and drunkenness 
 exceedingly uncommon. 
 
 V 
 
 A glacial scene of snow and ice, stretching 
 above vaporous clouds on every hand, and join- 
 ing below with rocky cliffs and green hillocks 
 with sheep upon them — just such a scene as one 
 sees on any moderately clear day from the 
 Kleine Scheidegg — is as typical of Switzer- 
 land as anything, save one, could be. That one 
 thing is the glass-clad dining porch of any good 
 hotel in Basel or Lucerne or Interlaken, with its 
 tables populated side by side, with a German 
 family of six, a Frenchman and his mistress 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 127 
 
 (or even possibly his wife!), an English bro- 
 ther and sister, Russian girls out for a holiday, 
 American nouveaux riches bent on living up to 
 their incomes, and an Italian laborer or noble- 
 men — it is seldom apparent which. 
 
 Switzerland is the land of inclusiveness and 
 therefore of Democracy. One cannot remain 
 a snob eight thousand feet above sea level, when 
 one's head is buzzing and one's nose threatens 
 a hemorrhage. Just as little can one "slight" 
 one's neighbor when the latter is some sort of 
 European linguist while oneself is struggling 
 with forgotten German genders and a never 
 learned vocabulary of French. English is 
 understood — but vaguely, doubtfully, and quite 
 above all, most expensively. Let anyone be 
 known as an American and his room rent goes 
 up two francs, while tips that would have 
 been accepted smilingly, with thanks, are 
 scornfully pocketed with evident dissatis- 
 faction. 
 
 It is a curse for any but the rich to be Amer- 
 icans in Switzerland. German and French 
 lend themselves to vociferous objection — "Don- 
 nerwetter" or "Fils d'un chien" sound con- 
 
128 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 perate acceptance only. He who rebukes a 
 cabman in New Yorkese is laughed at — or 
 growled upon. A foreign language, well- 
 spoken, deducts twenty per cent from one's ex- 
 penses. 
 
 There are Kursaals in Switzerland that may 
 remind those who have been there of Monte 
 Carlo. For a couple of francs one can see gam- 
 ing tables and listen to mild lewdness and poor 
 music. There are the cries of "Fait le jeu, 
 messieurs," the raking of the spoils; the 
 watchers, bored but slyly observant ; the money 
 changers, the crowds of every sort and nation- 
 ality, the rolling balls, the lights, but none of 
 the sorrow and the tragedy of the great gam- 
 bling centers. One enjoys the ineffable sensa- 
 tion of being wicked for a franc ! Five francs is 
 the limit and few are wild enough to play it. 
 Then for those who prefer to spend, rather 
 than lose, money there are the French musical 
 comedies with their laughable indecency, their 
 picturesque costumes, their golden haired girls 
 and pleasing dearth of chorus men — com- 
 pared • to our New York pandering to the mat- 
 inee girl. Do we not show by the presence of 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 129 
 
 these droves of males upon the American musi- 
 cal comedy stage -more than by anything else, 
 the American's subservience to woman? 
 European men please themselves; they spend 
 their own money with their wives (instead of 
 working I themselves to death for them), they 
 eat well and quietly, smoke when they please 
 and drink in moderation — ^none of which pre- 
 vents a great many of them- from believing in 
 woman's right to equality and none of which 
 prevents them from retaining their women's 
 respect, consideration and love./ 
 
 VI 
 
 Paris and London are cities that have per- 
 sonalities. Berlin would have had if the Kai- 
 ser had not tampered with its development 
 in his attempt to create a second Paris. The 
 "gaiety" of Berlin is a weighty, conscious af- 
 fair like the gaiety of an elephant who has 
 been living with baboons. 
 
 New York, too, may possess its deeply per- 
 sonal factor. The poets have written of its 
 clanging elevated railways, its roaring subways, 
 its dazzling skyscrapers, its dirt, delightful- 
 
130 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 ness, commerce, wealth and poverty. But the 
 European capitals are like the European char- 
 acter: they are established, settled, and un- 
 changing. The German is dull, studious and 
 effective; the Frenchman sprightly, faithless 
 and negligent; the Englishmen courteous, 
 cold and egotistic. London is cold, Paris is 
 hot; London is busy and preoccupied, Paris is 
 lustful, listless and loquacious. 
 
 London streets are a mass of busses ; London 
 theatres a mass of shirt bosoms and London 
 clubs a mass of yawns. Business is more re- 
 poseful in Paris than society is in London. 
 Both are a bore in Berlin. 
 
 It is difficult to describe . what makes the 
 Englishman cry "Dear old London !" when he 
 comes in at Paddington — ^but he means it. If 
 it is evening, he sees the lights, lights, lights 
 on every side along the streets, the moving 
 trams and the dashing busses, the dim, grey, 
 governmental buildings and the respectful 
 poor. In the daylight all is quick with life — 
 and without hurry. 
 
 There are those who dislike the commercial 
 quality of London, who detest the miles of 
 streets lined with small shops. But business 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 131 
 
 in London has an inoffensive air; it does not 
 intrude itself, and there are other things. 
 Every few streets, in the midst of the petty- 
 everyday, is some huge building, redolent with 
 history: Westminster Abbey, the Houses of 
 Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the British 
 Museum and the National Gallery are only the 
 most important and impressive of a hundred. 
 You cannot find such in America. Nor have 
 we the pretty little squares that crop up every- 
 where, with their inevitable trees and grass 
 and flower beds. 
 
 Paris, in sunny France, is not so green. 
 Paris has not the touch of the "Beyond." Like 
 the French themselves it is sprightly and ob- 
 vious, with little reserve power. Shudder once 
 or twice at the impressiveness of the Louvre, 
 give a dozen hours' interest to Notre Dame and 
 the Pantheon, see three pictures in the Lux- 
 embourg, walk in the Bois, the Avenue de 
 rOpera and the Quartier, and Paris is a mys- 
 tery made manifest. There is something of 
 the infinite in London; something of the eter- 
 nal, of the universal and the inexpressible. 
 
 VII 
 
 The churches, like the other amusements of 
 
132 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 Europe, differ considerably one from another. 
 In Paris, they are generally places whither one 
 comes to pray and whence one goes to scoff. 
 
 The small Paris churches have a greater 
 number of grotesque figures of the Virgin than 
 an imaginative American could have conceived 
 existent in the world. Some have blue gowns 
 and red noses, others are clothed in golden 
 raiment fit for the Bal BuUier. 
 
 In London and Berlin, where churches are 
 free and Protestant, the people go in greater 
 numbers to the theatres, operas and concerts. 
 That may be a reason for the excellence of 
 German music and English stage-management. 
 Not that the Munich level is everywhere pre- 
 served in Germany: in Frankfurt one can see 
 as bad a performance of Italian opera as one 
 pleases. Nor are the theatres of London run 
 upon the level of the Kingsway, where that ex- 
 traordinary master of finesse in dialog and in- 
 terpretation, Granville Barker, holds hour- 
 long discussions with his casts during time 
 that is generally spent by directors in howling 
 out commands. Not another manager any- 
 where could have given "Fanny's First Play" 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 133 
 
 as London had it for a year and a half, nor 
 has anyone produced "The Winter's Tale," as 
 it appeared in England a season later. But one 
 can see an average play handled with thor- 
 ough adequacy any night in London, while in 
 New York one must often choose to see a bet- 
 ter play miserably murdered. In Berlin at the 
 Kleines or Deutches Theaters or several others, 
 one sees excellent work excellently done. It 
 is, I suppose, because the middle class, omitting 
 hurry from its program, has time not only to 
 eat and drink beer, but also to think, read and 
 develop good taste. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Abroad vice stalks abroad. Here we sup- 
 pose most other people live quite virtuously. 
 We are perfectly aware that we ourselves have 
 our occasional glasses of beer, that we puff 
 our sustaining pipes, but we don't tell others 
 much about what we do or believe for fear of 
 hurting them and their opinion of us. 
 
 Continental Europe looks at these things 
 quite differently. There it is not considered 
 quite the same offense for a man and a woman 
 to seek happiness together without consulting 
 
134 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 a minister or magistrate, as for a man to stran- 
 gle his brother, poison his mother and shoot 
 the poHceman who comes to arrest him. As 
 Dr. W. J. Robinson put it : "We in America are 
 continually confusing vice with crime." Euro- 
 peans are in advance of us in realizing the dif- 
 ference. 
 
 There is, I suppose, less drunkeness in 
 Switzerland than in any other country on 
 earth. But Switzerland is far from being a 
 Prohibition state, for drinking there is almost 
 universal. The secret is simply that in Swit- 
 zerland light, slight intoxicants are much en- 
 couraged and sparingly taxed, and so the peo- 
 ple feel no need for the expensive, heavily tar- 
 iffed whiskey, brandy and gin. Likewise, in 
 Switzerland, perversions of 'our natural in- 
 stincts exist to but a very limited extent, though 
 of laws against them there are none. 
 
 Our total failure to cope with the drinking 
 problem in the United States, Germany's total 
 failure, by means of barbarous laws, to solve 
 its sex difficulties, must convince us at last that 
 man's most intimate and individual desires 
 cannot be curbed or broken by governmental 
 action. The Germans have learned this and 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 135 
 
 their laws will be repealed. We ourselves must 
 soon view serious public need, as the only jus- 
 tification of state interference with individual 
 freedom. 
 
 IX 
 I sat on the deck of a great German liner, 
 and I was filled with the essence of a hundred 
 colorful experiences in six European countries, 
 and mellowed, perhaps a little saddened, by the 
 perfect calm of the sealife with its lack of let- 
 ters, telephones, subways, clocks, dirt, and 
 business thoughts. There I wrote these rough 
 hewn stanzas: 
 
 We move so tenderly 
 
 Across the sea 
 
 That surely God can scarcely hear. 
 
 Back from our bow 
 
 We toss the great blue ocean 
 
 So calmly, quietly, that now 
 
 With scarce a motion 
 
 The foam becomes a cloud 
 
 Wrapping our stern up in a trembling shroud. 
 
 There is no fear, 
 
136 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 For all is calm, warm blue 
 
 Ensheathed in some 
 
 Strange, warm, yet greying sunlight. 
 
 So little motion is there in the sea 
 
 That from us, too. 
 
 Activity, ambition, hate and passion flee, 
 
 Our spirits soar 
 
 And we become 
 
 Half less than men, half more. 
 
 It had been a fascinating trip and joyfully 
 I recalled the mighty moments of which every 
 fine experience is composed, as I sat in the 
 centre of my three deck-chairs, two of them 
 heaped high with books and manuscript. The 
 homeward travel was contributing its share of 
 pleasure, particularly in its possibilities of ac- 
 quaintance with characters typical, I suppose, 
 of all ocean voyages, but interesting no less.. 
 
 There was quaint young Miss French o.f an 
 exotic type so very different in Americans if.om 
 its evidence in European women. With us it 
 is queerly often chained to Puritanism, and 
 very seldom visualized in vice. Often, in both 
 cases, it is the effect of a too unmixed ancestry. 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 137 
 
 but here it seldom represents an effort at ar- 
 tistic living. 
 
 Americans rarely live literature and that is 
 one of the reasons our books are so bad. We 
 do not believe our authors ; we look to them for 
 amusement or information but never for judg- 
 ments. Therefore it is that our feminine ex- 
 otics, although fine and gentle, are neither sub- 
 tle nor artistic. 
 
 So it was that these primary, appropriate 
 characteristics were not to be found in Ferle 
 French. With an instinct for individuality, 
 she was prevented by fear and training and 
 inheritance from developing more than a sem- 
 blance of it. There were in her consciousness 
 her parents' obviously frequent warnings 
 against "experience"; the training of a "fin- 
 ishing school" — one of those institutions which 
 complete, not the education of their attendants, 
 but their possibility of education — and the in- 
 heritance of a good American ancestry. There 
 is so much of the negative in such a type that 
 it rarely resorts to resistance against environ- 
 ment. Miss French's mind might carry her to 
 pastures new, to fresh associations and ideas 
 and undreamed possibilities, but there would 
 
138 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 always be ttie long arm, not of coincidence, but 
 of convention, to restrain her. American ex- 
 otic girls are almost always so : there is not in 
 them the necessity for self-expression that 
 makes some European women able to establish 
 themselves as imaginative realists in the midst 
 of our world of unimaginative romanticists. 
 Instinct and power are completely dissevered. 
 Among the other passengers I discovered 
 Mrs. Schumann, who appeared morning and 
 evening in another startling gown, but always 
 together with the same well-known and im- 
 pressive German. Knowing that they were not 
 related, all the passengers attended to them 
 and conversed about them. As was proper, 
 Mrs. Schumann proved to be the sublimation 
 of the dilettante: in touch with painting, music 
 and the drama, but deeply touched by none. 
 Her gowns were art objects. Her coiffure 
 was a work of art. Her mind, as I have said 
 of George Moore's, was the student of her 
 senses and her senses were the motive power 
 of her mind. Never commonplace, never fun- 
 damental, always interested, but with a mild 
 skepticism, she cared for beauty without al- 
 lowing it to act quite as a motive power or 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 139 
 
 granting it a prime significance. I asked if she 
 had written anything. "Stories, once or 
 twice," I was informed, "I do not like most 
 poetry; I am too real." But there was in- 
 sufficient power of expression and not the will- 
 ingness to labor. Life was enough, and life 
 to her was clear and clever prose; it was un- 
 necessary for her to write in either form. 
 
 The commonplace types offered themselves 
 for inspection — and attention : teachers out for 
 their first great holiday; business men, always 
 true to their trade, even in a week of enforced 
 idleness; college girls, masculinized and ath- 
 letic, but as ineffectual as the women of earlier 
 generations — all the fatuous world of medioc- 
 rity, unenlivened, uninspired by the vastness, 
 the calmness, the sunniness, the eternal glory 
 of being afloat on a vacant water-world. 
 
 I turned back thoughtfully to my visits to 
 resplendent feminae of the old world. 
 
 There was dark vibrant Hortense, whom I 
 found in Switzerland — a brown bundle of ar- 
 tistic genius wandering across Europe with a 
 kindly old mother, who gave her no chance 
 for activity. Mistress of three languages, she 
 was conversationally starved. Powerful with 
 
140 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 pencil and brush, she had been kept from work 
 to entertain her parent, and confined to the po- 
 Hte, extravagant inanities, first in Berlin, then 
 on the Riviera, now in Switzerland. I came, 
 and we feasted intellectually together for three 
 entire days. I have never talked so much. 
 We played upon each other's mental pianos 
 whole symphonies of chatter about all things 
 imaginable : art and literature and politics and 
 personalities and problems and the inevitable 
 Sex. I think we Americans talk more of sex 
 than any nation on the earth; abroad they are 
 less afraid of it and so they have better means 
 of expression. 
 
 In London, I had left Deidre and Maire, 
 lovely goddesses from over the Irish Sea. 
 Deidre, despite her name with its centuries of 
 sorrowful associations, was a gladsome Irish 
 lassie, sunny and brave, with a bit of religion 
 and traditionalism to mellow her. Maire was 
 a keen mind set behind a rarely lovely physiog- 
 nomy. She thought, quite interestingly, that 
 women often respond to our male emotional 
 demands in order to gain the fruits of men's 
 mentality. Her mind was analytic and she 
 craved men's syntheses so that she could dis- 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE * 141 
 
 sect them. That is why, more than for any 
 other reason, Maire was not great in her art 
 of acting. She understood her parts so well 
 she could never be hypnotized by them. The 
 dramatist's must be a conscious intellect, but 
 the actor fails unless he is much of the mys- 
 tic. 
 
 X 
 
 Because the working class in Germany is 
 without dignity the upper classes are brilliant 
 with formalities. The differentiation is ex- 
 treme. The poor, for example, never hesitate 
 to accept tips. Even conductors are glad to 
 have an extra Pfennig with your fare. The 
 man who enlightens you about locations pock- 
 ets with calmness any little trifle you are good 
 enough to bestow. Only the porters and 
 Gepaecktraeger frown and vociferously remon- 
 strate if you give them too little. 
 
 But the rich — the official classes — they are 
 glorious! When you visit a German govern- 
 ment official, your card is handed through three 
 porters, and you yourself through as many 
 doorways. Finally you come into the benign 
 presence and a portrait of the Emperor glares 
 superciliously at your crude Americanism. 
 
142 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 The Excellens (or perhaps only Regierungs- 
 rat) bows slowly and low, offers you his hand, 
 bows once more, you find yourself seated and 
 the conference begins. At its end there is a 
 mutual bowing, another handshake, still an- 
 other bowing and "Auf Wiedersehen." 
 
 Fortunately, I met my most impressive Ger- 
 man acquaintances under more favorable cir- 
 cumstances. It would have been more than my 
 American simplicity could stand to have been 
 treated ofificially by Count von Bernstorfif only 
 two days from New York, even on a summer 
 sea; and Professor Haeckel, being simple and 
 fine and revolutionary himself, met me as an 
 American comrade who needed no formality. 
 
 Bernstorff is a diplomat of the new sort — 
 school one might say, I suppose. The hour 
 I met him we stood on deck watching the por- 
 poises jump and dive, sail a few feet under 
 water and then cut through to the surface 
 again. "One wonders why they act that way," 
 said Germany's Ambassador, "but then one 
 never can tell why the porpoise jumps without 
 being a porpoise." The political philosophy of 
 the man was there: there must be thorough 
 understanding without recrimination. He was 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 143 
 
 critical of details in the present order, but he 
 scarcely questioned its fundamentals. 
 
 Bristling moustaches, a fine carriage and 
 courtesy, yet a stiffness and brusqueness to 
 some, together with the definiteness of thor- 
 ough masculinity were the major apparent 
 characteristics of the man. A universal kind- 
 liness was not to be looked for, but neither was 
 there the smooth perfection of the Disraeli 
 type. Modern diplomacy is clear cut. It de- 
 pends less on finesse; not so much upon doing 
 things as knowing when not to do them. "Our 
 young men get into trouble by talking too 
 much," he said. "When we are quoted we 
 have to deny everything." 
 
 Vast silences had become the keynote of his 
 conversation; eternal care, eternal vigilance 
 must have been his self imposed rule of con- 
 duct. 
 
 Professor Haeckel was so very different: a 
 gentle, white-bearded radical, odorous with old- 
 worldliness. 
 
 We all have intimates among those pedantic 
 folk who entertain their friends by choosing 
 from the world's great men and women him 
 or her whom they regard as the greatest sci- 
 
144 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 entist, painter, writer or sovereign in any par- 
 ticular period of the world's history. We have 
 probably ourselves, each of us, been asked to 
 name men whom we would place among the 
 unquestionably great. I attempted to do as 
 much not long ago and found it quite impos- 
 sible to omit the name of Haeckel from con- 
 temporary science and philosophy. In the lat- 
 ter field, he surely ranks with James and Berg- 
 son and H. G. Wells, even though he is not so 
 liberally expressive of the special standpoint of 
 our generation; as a biologist he comes close 
 to Darwin and is peerless among the men of 
 his own time. 
 
 One hesitates, very properly, to make affirm- 
 ations of this sort. But those of which I am 
 guilty force themselves upon any of us: they 
 are among those self-evident generalizations 
 which are ripe for acceptance. 
 
 Thus it is that most of us accept Haeckel as 
 a tremendous figure in the modern world, and 
 we accept him silently, knowing little about 
 him, having read little of his work. We learn 
 extensively, each year more and more, of the 
 personality, of the manner of working of the 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 145 
 
 other masters of the century: Rodin, Strauss, 
 Shaw, Maeterlinck, Zuloaga and the rest. But 
 Haeckel has remained deeply obscured and sev- 
 ered from the world in the tiny village of Jena 
 where pilgrims come once, or perhaps twice, a 
 week, from anywhere across the world, to 
 touch hands and consciousness with the mas- 
 ter. 
 
 Jena is a village in which we should nat- 
 urally picture Haeckel: it is too quaintly old 
 for a genuine modern, too filled with age-old 
 atmosphere, too lacking in the obvious im- 
 provements of twenty years. But Jena is a 
 town wherein we can imagine a radical of the 
 last generation growing from boyhood into 
 manhood, marrying, settling down after trav- 
 eling around the world for years, for the last 
 quarter of his century of life, in the unchanged 
 house where he may first have dreamed of the 
 vast and glittering immortalities that have 
 come into his mind and have been given to the 
 world. 
 
 I was thrilled, merely to be in Jena, where 
 strangely colored frame and stucco houses 
 bolstered each other in little narrow streets that 
 had never been altered since their Medieval 
 
146 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 birth. I lived in a hotel that had been the 
 stopping place of Martin Luther, and nearby 
 were the houses where Schiller and Goethe had 
 dwelt. I had come for the purpose of seeing 
 Haeckel; a friend had telegraphed to him and 
 so we determined to go at once. Our car- 
 riage drove through the market-place and 
 passed a picturesque old inn where a dozen stu- 
 dents in variegated caps (according to their 
 fraternities) had appropriated the barmaid and 
 were drinking, singing, and frolicking in the 
 yard. One of them would bawl out a German 
 chorus now and then, but no one minded, it 
 was quite the regular thing. 
 
 When we alighted at the narrow cobbled 
 lane on which Haeckel has lived for half a 
 century, we were unable to find No. 7, so we 
 had to inquire at No. 13. 
 
 "Oh, sie wollen Herrn Professor Haeckel?" 
 exclaimed the woman. Her voice glowed with 
 a warmth that Americans, having no great 
 men, seldom possess. 
 
 Haeckel's little house is not quite altogether 
 without change. Going into the hall one finds 
 a resplendent, black, cast-iron stove that can 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 147 
 
 not date back earlier than 1890, but this has 
 flounced down in the midst of a hallway that 
 surely has not been more than painted in half 
 a century. But one gains something of the 
 ancientness of spirit, to counteract the effect of 
 the stove, from a ten minute walk down the nar- 
 row, pebbly lane on which the house has its 
 only exit. Everything but the stove is gen- 
 uinely old, even to the little waiting maid who 
 tells you "Excellenz wird sofort kommen" and 
 climbs with you into the library where you 
 spend ten minutes looking at a set of Goethe, 
 a hundred or so travel books and the shelf of 
 Haeckel's volumes set between flaming water 
 colors that he made in biological moments in 
 the tropics. There, also, you may see the 
 weird, grey picture, reproduced so often all 
 over the world, of Gabriel Max's missing link 
 family, or whatever it is called. It depends 
 greatly upon your mood whether you take the 
 three figures to be monkeys or men. No one 
 can tell for certain which they more resemble. 
 Haeckel came after a wait of fifteen min- 
 utes. We looked at each other and were 
 friends. Haeckel is seventy-eight. He is 
 white-haired, white-bearded, and his blue eyes 
 
148 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 have the twinkle of one who has worked hard 
 and calmly, keeping his sense of humor and yet 
 not allowing it to interfere with his work. 
 Only the day before he had been visited by 
 an East Indian who asked permission to trans- 
 late The Riddle of the Universe into Hin- 
 doo and who promised the sale of a million 
 copies in India — althought there had been only 
 a hundred thousand sold in England. We 
 talked of art and travel and Monism and "our 
 friends in America who think as we do." Then, 
 with difficulty, Haeckel inscribed for us a pho- 
 tograph of himself standing beside the large 
 orang-outang in his museum and afterwards 
 I visited the museum and photographed the 
 orang-outang alone. I took a few photographs 
 of Haeckel at his table and desk and on his 
 little second-floor piazza, and as we left the 
 house I snatched a spray of elm leaves that I 
 knew would be treasured by one of "our 
 friends in America." 
 
 Haeckel is so sweet, when he hobbles in to 
 meet you, that your admiration melts in 
 wholesome warmth. When he takes your hand 
 you may help him over to the long sofa on 
 which he is forced to recline since his fall from 
 
JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 149 
 
 a bookshelf a few years ago, that has made 
 it impossible for him to walk alone and very 
 difficult for him to work. His fine gray eyes 
 glint expectantly in the center of the great 
 masses of white hair that surround his face; 
 and all is serene and beautiful. 
 
 A labor of love and a love of labor seemed 
 the keynotes of his life and the secret of his 
 accomplishment. The great sorrow of Haeck- 
 el's advancing age is that he cannot work any 
 more. His personal affairs have gone ahead in 
 quietness and calm; his struggle has been on 
 the battlefield of ideas. And, now that the 
 fight is won and he is ready to pass on to fresh 
 conquests, age lays a bare white finger on his 
 arm and says "No, you have done enough. 
 Rest and watch. Sit still and give the world 
 a chance to catch up." 
 
 After an hour of talk about the uni- 
 verse that is still a riddle, a kindly and radiant 
 farewell, you march down the pebbly lane 
 while Haeckel waves from the balcony on 
 which you have taken his picture. 
 
THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN AND THE 
 TIRELESS WOMAN 
 
 Labor is one of the keynotes of American 
 life. Capital is the other. Far more than they 
 do in Europe, these factors create our national 
 characteristics and phenomena. Abroad there 
 is a variety of Social Classes. There are the 
 dukes, marquises, barons and knights. Few 
 of these labor and fewer possess capital. They 
 are a true leisure class. But in America our 
 leisure class is the most busy. 
 
 It is very creditable over here to be busy. 
 Even an artist may be almost respectable if he 
 is thoroughly occupied — this is, if he is with- 
 out time for contemplation or inspiration. The 
 respect in which busyness is held has created 
 a nation-wide competition to accomplish a rep- 
 utation for it. The leisure classes are natur- 
 ally in the lead, because they have the most 
 time in which to become busy. 
 
 A generation ago, before so many men occu- 
 pied themselves with the arduous labors of 
 coupon-clipping and "taking care" of their es- 
 tates, our women were our chief leisure class. 
 
 151 
 
152 DEPREQATIONS 
 
 It is true that some of them darned socks, 
 turned out an occasional dress for their own 
 wear, bore children, did a bit of housework and 
 cooking now and then, but these can scarcely 
 be regarded as adequate occupations in a busy 
 world like ours. They were accomplished eas- 
 ily in the sixteen waking hours and entirely 
 in the home. (One hopes that no more than 
 the necessary eight hours were wasted in 
 sleep.) 
 
 Today this condition is entirely altered. 
 Women have become the busiest, and there- 
 fore, naturally the most respected part of the 
 community. They have added to their for- 
 mer activities the nerve-racking and very tiring 
 work of tri-weekly or often daily shopping 
 tours. In these the not-to-be-overemphasized 
 task of selecting suitable apparel for morning, 
 afternoon, evening and night, with all acces- 
 sories to match, has been thrust upon them in 
 lieu of the simple difficulty of the former gen- 
 eration which merely consisted in suiting the 
 apparel to the pocket-book. Now this mun- 
 dane and disreputable consideration of finances 
 has come to be properly disregarded and only 
 the questions of beauty, style, workmanship. 
 
THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN 153 
 
 color-tone in relation to personality and like 
 high-minded matters come up for debate. 
 
 Similarly we have the substitution of the 
 new type of dance for the old waltz and two- 
 step. A generation ago women regarded danc- 
 ing as a great delight and engaged in it on one 
 evening or two in a week. Now dancing has 
 been established, not only as one of the fine 
 arts, but more especially as an important form 
 of exercise. So we have it engaged in daily, 
 and instead of employing the late evening 
 hours, when the body is supposed to be fa- 
 tigued, we have the fresh luncheon time and 
 afternoon devoted to this excellent occupation. 
 Time is economized by lunching right in the 
 dance-hall and dancing between courses. The 
 drinking of whisky, gin and the like, which is 
 reputed to be an accompaniment of these 
 wholesome athletics, is merely the using of a 
 few slight stimulants or digestives such as are 
 commonly found necessary by very active 
 people. So the the dansant has become an ac- 
 ceptable and revered national institution. It 
 we have seized upon it with an avidity that as- 
 tonishes the French, who first introduced the 
 scheme, that must merely be attributed to our 
 
154 DEPRECIATION 
 
 American ambition to reap the full benefit of 
 an institution as soon as we have discovered 
 it is good. That is what we did with our pro- 
 tective tariff, and it is what we are doing with 
 our "anti-vice" crusades. 
 
 And in this latter connection we must not 
 forget our women. Speaking, agitating, start- 
 ing up societies, offices, newspapers, publishing 
 pamphlets, holding meetings, they have quite 
 revolutionized American life and thought, as it 
 relates to the one great Vice that interests them. 
 Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings 
 Cometh truth — on this subject above all others. 
 Every virgin can discuss venereal diseases and 
 the statistics of prostitution are commonplaces 
 of drawing-room conversation. We can easily 
 imagine what labor had to be put forth to 
 bring this about. 
 
 And so it is with the vote. What men had 
 come to regard as a mere incidental to smooth 
 existence, a means to the end of gaining great- 
 er leisure for other things, women proved to 
 be a wonderful way to extreme and vigorous 
 activity in and for itself. The vote became 
 an end, something to fight for, die for, get 
 
THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN 155 
 
 divorced for. Its significance was immediately 
 felt. 
 
 And so it is all along the line. The unim- 
 portant things have sprung into prominence, 
 the means have become ends, the incidentals 
 are now essentials. All of which has supplied 
 infinite activity to those who were supposed 
 to be leisured, or at least to have no more try- 
 ing tasks than being mothers and teachers, 
 friends, home-makers and the like. 
 
 Now, what has occurred on the other side? 
 Man, who had come to take his vote lightly, 
 to regard dancing as an occasional amusement 
 for leisured evenings, and prostitution as an 
 inheritance of the ages, an inevitable comple- 
 ment and accompaniment of marriage, man has 
 been jerked up suddenly by his supposed lesser, 
 if better, half. His newspapers, his magazines, 
 his drama, his clergymen and lectures all as- 
 sure him that he been wasting his time. To 
 what have his days been given, and his nights ? 
 
 First of all, he has generally been taking his 
 full allotment of slumber. Then, rising to a 
 plentiful breakfast, he has journeyed town- 
 wards at 8.30 or at 9.00 to attend to the rou- 
 tine work of telephone messages, letter dictat- 
 
156 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 ing, personal interviews and the rest, broken 
 conveniently at 12 or 1 by a refreshing hour 
 with a friend or two at lunch. Then followed 
 the more leisurely afternoon, with a pleasant 
 walk, a drink or two, and the return home 
 in time for dinner. Of course, during his 
 busiest season, there may not have been more 
 than half an hour at luncheon, and the wor- 
 ries of the morning may have extended over 
 into the afternoon. But they were usually 
 broken by a variety of activities that rendered 
 even the most irksome, interesting. 
 
 Such is the man's life — corrresponding to 
 the woman's that has been described. Neither 
 is that of the very poor, for the poor of either 
 sex must never be mentioned as typical of our 
 great American commonwealth. They are an 
 unimportant occurence, an incidental to the 
 production of capital — the eighty millions of 
 them — ^what the biologists would call a "sport," 
 or a variation from type, as regards the glori- 
 ous life of our excellent country. 
 
 No, there must be no poor, and if there are 
 poor, we must simply forget it. The middle 
 and upper classes only are representative. 
 
 And in these, the women are carrying the 
 
THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN 157 
 
 burden of activity. They have made them- 
 selves most admirably busy. They have filled 
 the moments to overflowing and have fixed 
 things so that when they too come home at 
 night, the tiredness of their husbands shall be 
 as nought compared with their own. So, very 
 properly, the plays of the tired business man 
 are passing out of our theatres, and we have 
 instead the plays of the tirelessly busy woman', 
 the plays which treat of her and the subjects 
 she agitates, which discuss, condemn and mor- 
 alize as she discusses, condemns and moralizes 
 during the day. We call it a great Jnoral 
 awakening. 
 
 In such an awakening can there fail to be 
 benefit? One never knows. Woman will get 
 the vote, as she certainly should, if it amuses 
 her to have it. Woman is already able to 
 smoke and drink like the veriest male. These 
 habits will harm her little, for she, like her 
 sons and fathers, will learn moderation with 
 practice. Then also, she has achieved the free- 
 dom of the mouth : she may talk as she pleases 
 and be proper none the less. And that is as 
 it should be ; for the cure for the evils of free- 
 dom is still more freedom. It is well that 
 
158 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 woman should be a bit busy, and that man 
 should realize that he doesn't really work him- 
 self to death for the sake of his beloved; it is 
 well that the stage should abandon a few of 
 its musical comedies in favor of even the stu- 
 pidest sex discussion, and that the pulpit should 
 substitute sociology for some of the ethics that 
 have no longer any weight. Whether -the mil- 
 lenium is coming through all of it is another 
 matter. 
 
THE UNMARRYING MODERN MALE 
 
 The "old bachelor" of the last generation is 
 a comtnonplace of second-rate farces and old 
 women's conversations. Mildly expressed, he 
 is unpromising material for either, and impos- 
 sible for literary exploitation. In fact, the 
 clever have given him up even in discourse 
 and so he is gradually passing out of existence. 
 Untalked of types do that; just as the reverse 
 occurs with types that attain widespread dis- 
 cussion. It is possible, for example, that the 
 army of the prostitutes will be inflated by the 
 hundred recent articles and volumes dealing 
 with them. 
 
 But although the no longer interesting bach- 
 elor is ceasing, many men continue to refrain 
 from marriage and the growing group that 
 does so is naturally typified in the few that 
 possess definite characteristics. One realizes, 
 most especially, what these new bachelors are 
 not. Physically they are not large-stomached 
 animals with thick lips, hairless heads, pro- 
 truding eyes, livid complexions, bad digestions 
 and flapping hands. In other words, they have 
 not the easily recognizable qualities of their 
 
 159 
 
160 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 predecessors. Similarly this new clan is not 
 fat-headed, hot-headed or pig-headed ; nor does 
 it snore undtily, finger its female acquaint- 
 ances, nor play cards three evenings a week. 
 
 The motive power of this modern group is 
 at the same time noble and petty, and its at- 
 titude is cowardly and brave. It is fearful of 
 woman and fearless of all else. It is an inter- 
 esting body because it is interested in all 
 things. It fears neither wealth nor poverty, 
 success nor failure, but the men who make it 
 up insist that whatever the result of their as- 
 pirations may be, it shall be for them, for them 
 as free individualities "without obligations save 
 as they choose to assume them and as they are 
 free to discard them again. 
 
 Obviously such men cannot, under the pres- 
 ent customs of society, publicly assume the 
 positions of fathers and husbands. The mo- 
 ment the marriage service is considered there 
 at once looms up the vision of a host of duties 
 and restrictions enforced in each case by its 
 appropriate and dire penalty. Clearly as we 
 may recognize the growing facility with which 
 divorce may be secured and the increasing ease 
 with which liasons may be consummated; 
 
THE UNMARRYING MODERN MALE 161 
 
 readily as we admit the growing independence 
 and individuality of the husband and wife as 
 such; society is still very, very far from pro- 
 viding for the man as mate and father, and 
 for the woman as mate and mother, and for 
 the child also, a position that may be regarded 
 as primary. All are as yet secondary types, 
 types without a recognized, separate, individ- 
 ual purpose in life, and therefore types com- 
 posed of men and (women who, insofar as they 
 are typical, are without encouragement or pro- 
 vision for free and genuine self-expression. 
 
 Against this condition the thoroughly mod- 
 ern male unequivocally rebels. He rebels 
 against the convention that prescribes that if 
 he is rich he shall strive eternally to be richer 
 so that his wife may fulfill each new contri- 
 vance for spending ever more and more. He 
 rebels against the convention which limits his 
 companionship according to the abilities or 
 needs or fancies of his arch companion. 
 Chiefly and most deeply is his rebellion directed 
 against the demand that his method of work, 
 the kind and manner of his amusement, the 
 time of his slumber and the nature of his food 
 be dominated by another human being, no mat- 
 
162 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 ter how intimately connected with him she may 
 be. 
 
 The struggle of the modern man is an ef- 
 fort to reachieve those inherent, natural liber- 
 ties without which life becomes existence and 
 effort turns into the dead pursuit of an un- 
 valued goal. 
 
 These new men realize in themselves the ar- 
 dent need for a freedom that once was man's 
 but that he has allowed to lapse, as woman's 
 position has developed from a secondary into 
 a primary one. For today, however subor- 
 dinate she may be as wife and mother (in that 
 her own personality is not her prime concern 
 in these capacities), woman as woman is rap- 
 idly becoming a first-rate type. As such she 
 is represented typically by the "new woman" 
 who has been so frequently discussed as to 
 be almost understood. 
 
 The new man is the member of society who 
 best understands the new woman. He be- 
 comes her friend and her helper; he encour- 
 ages her in her self-affirmation; he interprets 
 her to the rest of the world and analyses the 
 half -under stood ideals that she is trying to 
 
THE UNMARRYING MODERN MALE 163 
 
 express. Beyond that, his rebellion starts, for 
 he refuses to support her or her children, or 
 to sacrifice to them his primary purposes as a 
 human being. 
 
 As yet the new woman continues to make 
 the demands of the old-fashioned type. She 
 insists that her motherhood shall be clothed 
 with marriage and, in general, that support 
 shall be given and sacrifice made to her. But 
 since the latter demand is already lessening, 
 it is likely that even the former will be some 
 day relinquished, and then a perfectly free and 
 fundamental equality may arise. Until then, 
 the war of the sexes must remain a fact and 
 the woman movement must be partial and in- 
 consistent. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD 
 
 There probably is not a single person in the 
 entire world who, if his time could all be spent 
 in thinking and his mind were adequate to the 
 solution of any problem, would not set him- 
 self, sooner or later, to finding out what ex- 
 pression his personality required and how that 
 could most effectively be accomplished. That 
 is the same as saying that about the most in- 
 teresting question for all the world not ab- 
 sorbed in burrowing for tomorrow's breakfast 
 is what the "world needs, individually and col- 
 lectively, together with information as to how 
 it has been getting at this, and how it can be 
 helped to do so better in the future. 
 
 Some men tell us that our chiefest need is 
 a condition of mind and body presumed to be 
 appropriate for life in a universe other than 
 that of our only assured existence; although 
 the army of these is not so great or stern to- 
 day as in some earlier centuries. These ana- 
 chronistic folk need not concern themselves 
 with the fitness of their plan of living for the 
 conditions of our lifetime since their interests 
 lie confessedly beyond death. To them it is 
 
 165 
 
166 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 rightfully more important to render men 
 kings beyond the Styx than to free them from 
 being slaves beside the Hudson. And so to 
 the teaching of these good men, of whatever 
 faith or creed, belong the modified but still per- 
 sistent moralities of the ages and the handed 
 down conventions that control our lives. 
 
 But although we of the majority adhere to 
 these moralities and bear with these conven- 
 tions, we are not, any longer, concerned im- 
 portantly with the purpose of those who gave 
 these ethics to mankind. The chief intent of 
 us of earthly attitude — the majority — is not 
 a fitting preparation for a kingdom that is 
 not of this world, but a working method for a 
 democracy that is. And so it comes about 
 that we shirkers of activity who devote our 
 energies to thought are realizing that some of 
 man's noblest, most accredited principles are 
 survivals of an earlier time, inspired by a 
 viewpoint totally dissimilar to our own. 
 
 The obvious moralities, all, in fact, upon ob- 
 servation prove to be the product of the early 
 age of faith, when mankind tossed on the bed 
 of infancy — and not a bed of roses was it, with 
 the massacres and incest and the lack of com- 
 
THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD 167 
 
 fort and intelligence that prevailed. Such mod- 
 ifications as exist today were merely grafted on 
 the teachings of the earliest prophets of all 
 countries who all, peculiarly enough, taught 
 quite the same moralities. The age of these 
 dogmatic dictates has, most strangely, been 
 accepted as an argument for their continuance 
 and truth. It is as if we insisted on the pow- 
 ers of the good-luck-giving swastika simply 
 because it has been found everywhere since 
 the dawn of history. Fortunately, however, 
 the unamended acceptance of the principles has 
 been confined in a measure to argument: in 
 practice, an always growing portion of each 
 succeeding generation has dealt with life solely 
 as its own intelligence directed. 
 
 This practice — this revolutionary non-adher- 
 ence to the dogmatism of the dead — appears 
 to have been responsible for every single con- 
 tribution made by advancing civilization. 
 Broadly speaking, the arts and the sciences 
 have alone created the advance ; and these are 
 in their inmost and essential nature totally un- 
 moral. The joining of all portions of man- 
 kind, at first by shipping, then by railroads, 
 then by cables and the telegraph and last of all 
 
168 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 by the telephone, the wireless and the aero- 
 plane, all of this mighty conquest of inimical 
 nature, has come down to us without relation 
 to the principles of the prophets or the fussings 
 of the fathers. Incidentally, certainly, some 
 sciences have helped to bring about more unity 
 among the species — a condition desired by the 
 moralists — but the accomplishments themselves 
 and the true and fundamental viewpoint of 
 those who helped to furnish them was utterly, 
 superbly separated from the wr anglings of the 
 raisonneurs. 
 
 Likewise in the perfection of the machinery 
 that has given us undreamed of comforts, in 
 the home, the street, the warehouse, factory, 
 field and farm — all totally unmoral, all in es- 
 sence quite unethical. And most of all in art ! 
 Pictures, poems, stories, plays, figures in 
 bronze and marble, music of dances, songs and 
 symphonies — every authentic one of them 
 pouring forth with the divine sweat of its crea- 
 tor quite regardless of heaven and hell! Of 
 course the pictures dealt with madonnas and 
 magi and the poems used plentifully the name 
 £>f the Father and the Child, but only for the 
 
THE KINGDOM OF TiHIS WORLD 169 
 
 sake of the Master and the God of all, Art; 
 and because the people of the world could un- 
 derstand and read and see only if art expressed 
 itself in those forms that regrettably obsessed 
 the world. 
 
 What did it matter in the great eternal 
 march of things whether Galileo believed in 
 Purgatory, or Leonardo loved his friend's 
 wife, or Shakespeare was homogenic, or Lin- 
 coln swore? These men had thoughts to give, 
 seeds to sow, creations to hand down, all of 
 them of unquestionable, palpable, self-evident 
 value to the race. Naturally the prejudices 
 and conventions of their times could hamper 
 them, or even, in some terrible periods of his- 
 tory, quite silence them, and so destroy their 
 message or their gift, but fundamentally, es- 
 sentially, is not their just relation to all his- 
 toric faiths and all moralities the same rela- 
 tion as Pegasus might be conceived as bear- 
 ing to his trappings ? They could control him, 
 make him fall or stumble in his flight, but 
 the sublime and glory-smitten impetus came 
 from another source and could not be created 
 by the most elaborate and best fitting livery. 
 
170 DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 So it is that the conventional, unquestioning 
 morality and mental attitude of the majority 
 appears to-day peculiarly unfitted to the solu- 
 tion of the great problem which the majority 
 seem ready to accept as their most urgent care': 
 the finding out of what the worldly purpose of 
 man is and how this may be best fulfilled. It is 
 not a matter of throwing over the vast virtues 
 we are told to-day to value. It is not a simple 
 rejection of religion or of law. Freedom to 
 think is the essential: the clarifying of our 
 mental processes by the removing of impeding 
 prejudices from our minds — then it makes lit- 
 tle difference whether or not we live according 
 to their present dictates. We shall never 
 achieve a world of geniuses. We can, however, 
 spread the attitude of genius, the creative at- 
 titude of the arts and sciences ; we can substi- 
 tute this, and We must, for the conventional 
 negations. Let the minds of the world be free 
 and we may well believe that Life will walk 
 the roads most suited to its welfare. And 
 thought and faith and speculation on the fu- 
 ture and the past, the desirable and the ill, will 
 not be dead, but will be following as servants 
 
THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD 171 
 
 in the train of Life, not clutching at its throat 
 with the fingers of dogma; while on will sweep 
 the army, ever faster, through the slaveless 
 kingdom that, completely and imposingly, is, 
 is of this world. 
 
DEPRECIATIONS 
 
 DEPRECIATIONS. By B. Russell Herts. 
 Tork: Albert anfl Charles Bonl. 41.36. 
 
 THOSE who quote -ttot li»D().9rtal epigram 
 about "the dissiaence of dissent" sel- 
 dom stop to think that It has a possible 
 interpretation uttesrly different ftom that In- 
 tended by its originator. Th^ negation ot 
 negation Is affirmation; the dissldence oE 
 dissent may be (and often is) a;ssent. 
 
 sir. Russell, Herts would probably reject 
 tho worn label " radical," but, he will not 
 object to being called, In the brdadest sig- 
 nificance of the terni, a dissenter. That Is, 
 he is not in agreement with- the generally, 
 received ideas of morality, religion, econom- 
 ics, and- art. He is " deslrbu'iS of new 
 thihga." ■ ' 
 
 "when, however, he turns his attention to 
 some prominent contemporjiry apostles ol 
 novelty he finds himself writing what he 
 justly calls " Depreciations." He has no 
 passionate affectiop (wfe may safely conjees 
 lure) for the romanticism 'of Sir Walter 
 Scott, Yet the realism of Mr. Arnold Ben- 
 nett, as his incisive study of that author 
 shows, does not convince him. The molality | 
 celebrated Jn the novel? of Charles Dickens 
 (it rnay again be sujSposed) touches no re- 
 stPhsive ciiord in Mr. Herts's. heart. Tet In 
 " (Seorge Moore, the Mundane" he seema 
 disinclined to regard this Wild -advertiser ol 
 immorality as the herald of, a splendiji new 
 
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