Page images
PDF
EPUB

earth where there is no solitude and no privacy. Perhaps we shall overdo it. Meanwhile we might as well give thanks.

Especially for the radio. Its usefulness is obvious for all the nations, but chiefly for us. We are only beginning to profit by it as we alone can. Its voice will carry as far in Europe as in America, but all our States can listen to it in the same language. No credit to us; luck again. More than the movies, it will increase a national consciousness in us. And if you say that we don't, after all, speak the same language, not even in the United States, then the radio will do more than any other agency to spread standards of excellent speech. We speak as we hear; now our millions will hear the same voice. In another sense, we shall tune in. Not a bad phrase, that, for world-wide communication and understanding.

22

THE INTELLECTUAL PLENTY:-We might be thankful also for the increase in the use of books, for the attendance on lectures, for the disposition to live more in the realm of ideas. To say this is not to boast. Many of the books are pretty bad; many of the garden clubs throughout the land, having met at regular intervals during the summer to listen to twaddle, will now meet for the same result during the winter, though in the cold season the name changes, and they are woman's clubs. However that may be, it now occurs that a history of philosophy has the success of a best seller; and other books, which presuppose training and intelligence in the reader, find large

audiences. This comes about quite naturally from the fact that we read so much. I speak now of quantity, without blushing. Of course we have often been told to form our tastes on the best books, and only the best. If our taste is already formed, so that we can enjoy the best, then of course it is silly to waste time on lesser stuff; let us get at the masterpiece and make the most of time. But as a teacher of literature, now becoming a veteran in the service, I should say that such selected taste as Matthew Arnold, for instance, urged on us, is the end rather than the beginning of reading, for most people. Confine yourself to the best that has been said and thought in the world, if you are so well read as to know what it is, not taking some one's word for it, and if you really enjoy the best. If you don't, you ought to educate yourself up to it. The way to begin is to read all you can lay your hands on of the best you can enjoy. If you like detective stories, and nothing more profound, then satiate yourself with that kind of spiced adventure. The day will come when you will guess the end of the plot from the first chapter; there won't be an author in that sort ingenious enough to fool you. You will then be ready for a more subtle kind of story. Experience makes us connoisseurs.

This is the long way around, I admit, but for a whole people it is probably the only way. We ought to be thankful that for excellent books there is a constantly growing audience; and at the same time we ought not to say, with a British author the other day, that too many books are published. So long as

they are read, there could not be too many. We ought to give thanks that the millions who attend the movies are ready now, after much practice, for better films than they are getting. No doubt we catch the happy significance when our neighbor in the country, who perhaps never saw a great orchestra, tells us his radio set begins to bore him; for the last months he has tuned in for nothing but the Philharmonic concerts at the Stadium.

I should not like to say a word which might break down a fastidious taste in reading. The truth is, my own standards of criticism are strict -narrow, some of my friends call them; moreover, I have the academic love of old books, which have weathered the storms of opinion. Yet we all are likely to become snobs when we judge another man's reading. We ought to be thankful he reads at all. We say, "But that isn't imaginative literature, that isn't art, that isn't true, that isn't uplifting!" But if our neighbor reads anything, he is for the moment taken out of his immediate self; some uplift, some imagination, some art, must be involved. A great cure for snobbishness toward the kind of book your neighbor likes is to try to write one yourself which any human being will listen to. Most of what is now printed will soon be forgotten. The paper is not very good; the volumes will literally disintegrate. But we shall have outlived the poor taste also, if we keep on reading the best we are able honestly to love. That is why we have occasion for thanksgiving in the throngs pouring in and out of the public libraries which have become necessary to American life.

THE FULL HEART:-The proclamations setting the day of our national feast usually suggest that we should give thanks humbly, though they are rarely so discouraging as to add anything to take down our pride. Yet if we have advanced so far toward a true culture that we can give thanks for higher forms of prosperity than mere food, if, especially, we have now the right to be thankful for plenty in the realm of intelligent ideas, it would be honest of us, as well as humble, to acknowledge our continued poverty in the realm of feeling; that is, in the highest region, where culture begins. We invent or develop ways of communicating our words and our thoughts; we have made no progress in communicating emotion, probably because we have little to communicate. We have good nature, and let us hope we have kind hearts. Mr. Santayana wrote once that if he could look into the depths of a man's heart, and did not find good-will there, he would say without any hesitation, "You are not an American." But he would probably say the same thing if he saw there an overflowing passion.

Some of us would pardon a great deal of recklessness or radicalism or unconventionalism if with it there entered into American life deep and convinced feeling. What little wildness we have is calculated and comparatively cold-blooded. The dithyrambic is decidedly lacking. You may say if you wish that we are better off with our feelings under control, that passionate peoples waste themselves in a fume, whereas common sense, like meekness, inherits the earth. But it is not clear that our coolness is the result of any self

control, or of any common sense; our feelings simply are not strong.

To press the question home, let us ask whether this country could produce a Goethe, or a Byron, or a Victor Hugo-three quite different types of passion, held in different degrees of control. It will not help us to say we should rather not produce them, for one reason or another; the fact is, they could not grow in our present soil. We have many "strong" novelists, particularly among the women, who are known to be the emotional sex, but we have no one with the passion which produced "Wuthering Heights." I have just been reading a novel by a nice woman of my acquaintance, in which every character except the young children commits adultery-practically nothing else. The story moves with the cool ease of a cook-book, setting forth simple hints for a Sunday evening supper. Emotionally, at least, the lady does not seem to know what she is talking about.

If a nation has only good nature, but no strong feelings, we need not be surprised if it often gives offense. The merely good-natured are rarely sensitive. In our handling of the immigrant as he arrives, in the jocular questions often put to him by the really well-meaning official, who thinks the ordeal of inquisition can be made delectable by the light touch, there is often cause for heartburning and resentment. The official probably avoids emotion, in selfdefense; if he felt the importance of each case as the immigrant feels for himself, his spirit would be torn to shreds by the end of a busy day. He therefore falls back on an impervious good nature. In more subtle social

relations we Americans prize frankness. We really do prize it. We have friends who pass on to us the uncomplimentary remark of So-andso, assured that we will enjoy the humor of an opinion so obviously incompetent. We tell each other our faults, all with the best intention to be helpful. But if we were in the habit of feeling deeply, we should hate or love, and in both extremes we should be more sensitive and more imaginative than we now are.

Of course, crude love and hate are not the goal of civilized man, seeking to improve himself. The climax of a life of feeling comes when that delicacy, that discrimination is reached which can live passionately in the minute differences good nature would overlook. In that sense the quietseeming Emerson was passionate, and so was Emily Dickinson. Emerson is hard to imitate. Miss Dickinson had tricks of style which many poets now capture, more or less, but there is no danger of confusing their verses with hers; hers have passion. There was strong passion in the best work of Mark Twain, as there was in Fenimore Cooper, though Mark Twain would hardly admit it. There the list perhaps comes to an end. Whitman seems to me a great poet on the intellectual side; I get new ideas from him, but not new feelings. He is typically American.

What I am saying about the one side of us which is not yet so far developed that we have the right to give thanks for it, would be clear if we had side by side a Puritan table loaded down for the stupendous Thanksgiving gorge, and the fragile bit of furniture which would hold the exquisite meal which Milton de

scribed in the sonnet inviting his friend to lunch. Milton is often called a Puritan, but the name does not fit him. He was in the most civilized sense a passionate nature, and he may have had in mind when he wrote the sonnet, for all we know, some intention to criticize the strong and indiscriminate meats and drinks on which the Cromwellian saints fed. For himself, he wishes a light repast, a meat and a salad fit for a gourmet, every flavor delicate and pure, and a very little wine, old and rare. It must have been a passionate meal.

22

AND THE WEATHER:-An ideal Thanksgiving proclamation would remind us of some benefit which others enjoy and which we cannotpreferably a benefit unearned, corresponding to our own good luck. With the exercise of perfect gratitude there ought to be some practice in the restraint of envy. My own suggestion for this year would be that we consider the superiority of European weather, a weather more perfectly adapted than ours to the develop ment of civilization.

The early settlers who inaugurated our Thanksgiving feast were optimistic in their first impressions of the American climate, and we have handed on a traditional praise of what we should never like if we met it in another country. Our changes of temperature are frequent and violent at all seasons, our rainfall comes often in fierce storms, and we suffer from inconvenient winds. A certain grandeur of effect goes with all this,

a certain sharp invigoration, which excites us if it does not kill us. But a weather favorable to culture and civilization would be moderate and friendly, an atmosphere to immerse yourself in, a drama of the elements not so violent as to seem foreign to human interests. We have made a conquest of the American climatewitness steam heat and electric fans --but we are on no better terms with it than with a volcano.

It would be well to remember those lands where you can eat out of doors without having the table blown away, and without getting dust in the food. And the avenues where you can stop to look in the shopwindows, without feeling the tug of the wind. And the rain which "droppeth gently," in a kind mist. And the snow that is little more than a picturesque frost. And the long, long spring. Where you find the year delaying over the most beautiful season, you suspect that the weather, in those parts, is favorable to good taste.

But the greatest advantage which our climate usually denies us is the opportunity to eat out of doors. I know some of us go camping and like it-the caveman coming out in usand some of us like to go on picnics and eat ant-flavored sandwiches, a predilection which the theory of evolution does not explain. do not normally, in our moods, eat in the open air. with us is much too open. What we miss is that harmony between man and his natural world, which is necessary to a complete culture.

But we civilized The air

[graphic][subsumed]

ANOTHER APOLLO:-One of the acutest scholars in America, after a lifetime spent in the study of many literatures, not long ago sat down to find what he could make out of the New Testament. He soon gave up, baffled. The book had, he discovered, neither head nor tail. The story was so confused that the career of even the principal personage could not be distinctly traced. The chronology was mixed; the topography was misty. The episodes had apparently been pitchforked together from various folk-lores. The teachings were less a body of doctrine than an anthology of proverbs and parables which, the investigator knew, had many of them long been current among the Jews and Greeks of the first century. Both the writing and the compiling seemed to have been done by thoroughly uncritical men, working so long after the facts that they had to depend, as they were indeed quite willing to do, upon any legend which would help to round out the history. The American scholar gave the problem up as not worth the difficulties it presented.

Georg Brandes, attacking the same problem in much the same spirit, has not given it up but has put his conclusions into a small book which he calls "Jesus: A Myth" (A. & C.

Boni). His conclusion is not new, for he holds, with others before him, that Jesus never actually existed, any more than did William Tell or any such popular hero. Mr. Brandes's argument is not overwhelming, for it is only a substantial sketch, and he now and then reaches further than his evidence will carry him. Nevertheless the book has the value of courage and lucidity, and the authority of a great critic to back it. "Jesus: A Myth" ought to worry those of the Fundamentalists who read. This is as good a service as any argumentative work, at the moment, can perform.

Stated briefly, Mr. Brandes's contention is simple. He contends that the starting-point of the myth was the book of Revelation, composed between the death of Nero in the year 68 and the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in 70. The author, familiar with the Messianic prophecies of the book of Daniel, and terrified by the advance of Vespasian upon Jerusalem, burst into a luxuriant apocalypse proclaiming the redeemer who was soon to come, as a high priest, as a lamb brought to the slaughter, as the newly begotten son of the Lord, as a rider on a white horse. Nothing of the sort happened, and the Temple

« PreviousContinue »