The Unpopular Review, Number 19

The invaders have tried to create a Belgian faction in support of their
policy, and have here and there, at different times, organized meetings
and processions of so-called "Activists," or pro-German Belgians. But
these assemblages have never been other than contemptible in size and
composition. They have been hissed and mobbed by vast crowds of
patriotic Belgians, and in Belgium it takes courage to attack a movement
which is protected by German bayonets. On February 9, 1918, the Chief
Justice and two Associate Judges of the Belgian Court of Appeals at
Brussels were arrested for instituting proceedings against the
"Activists," and were ordered to be deported to Germany.

With all their cunning the Germans in Belgium have shown themselves
densely stupid. Their near-sighted pedantry inclines them to put their
trust in formulas, when the thing they are dealing with is life. They
think they can _decree_ an indomitable people into submission. Having
begun with butchery, they declined into robbery, and now they imagine
that because bribery is less rude, it will be regarded as a sort of
mercy. Jealous and quarrelsome at home, fussy and petty in their own
local and domestic affairs, they cannot understand magnanimity in
others. German writers have often admitted and lamented the tendency of
the German people to be parochial (_kleinstaedtisch_) in their outlook,
and stencilled (_schablonenhaft_) in their personality. So they are; and
these bad qualities render them incapable of understanding the spirit of
Belgium, which is independent, individual, far-sighted, and bold. Since
July, 1914, the German heel has stamped its imprint on regions several
times as extensive as the German Empire itself. But a nation of pedants
will never rule the world, and the echo of those iron-bound,
blood-spattered boots will cease to ring when the American people
realize that what the Germans have done in Belgium they will try to do
wherever they find room to tramp.

IMMORTALITY IN LITERATURE

"_Come l'uom s'eterna_"

Now that the immortals in literature have been caught and measured; now
that we know that they fill not more than five feet of shelf room, we
may be pardoned for asking a question or two as to how they "arrived,"
what their chances are for "staying put," and whether the place for
classics is inevitably "upon the shelf." These are of course awkward
questions, but there are other regions beside heaven which one must be
as a little child to enter–the Garden of Understanding among them.

It is in a certain sense a positive relief to find that the really
persistent literature of the past is so compressible, and it is
reassuring as one looks forward to the long future, to think that the
people towards the end of time will not be so unimaginably burdened with
the deathless monuments of their past; although when one multiplies five
feet, the sediment of five millennia, by x, the classic library of the
end of things seems to us of this unheroic age, a trifle depressing. Of
course, the men of the Ultima Thule of time may take their classics less
seriously, and it may be that they will find less of a gap than we
between the thoughts and speech of the immortals and those of daily
intercourse. But since the immortals die not, there is no escaping their
accumulation.

Yet after all, come to think of it, there is a good deal of an
assumption in the assertion that our five feet of immortals are all
going to perch upon that last library shelf. There have been immortals
of the past who failed to reach even our days; had they all fulfilled
their promise and the prophecies of their friends, the publishers would
not be willing to let us buy our modest set of unquestionable classics
on monthly payments without the guarantee of our great grandchildren.
Paradoxical as it may seem, many immortals have proved mortal, and the
deathless have died. We must lay this troublesome fact to the loose
speech of our forefathers. They were hyperbolic now and then, and they
dubbed a volume immortal without stopping to think whether the twentieth
century A. D. would also find it interesting, and so, of course, really
immortal. Humanity has been fallible in the past, and the result is that
we are forced most unscientifically to accept contradictory ideas with
gravity–in short, to speak of "relative immortality." The work that
outlives its contemporaries is, we may admit, relatively deathless. Such
a statement makes no prophecy, however, as to the remote future.
Relative immortality merely means that a work goes on interesting for a
few years, a generation or two, a century or more. It is only the simon
pure immortal who will not have to get up at the sound of Gabriel's
trump. Blessed relief–the final shelf of unforgettable classics may be
only five feet long after all, and may be even shorter!

Naturally, your enduring work must have a strong constitution; it must
have all the characteristics of a live creature except the power of
growth within itself, and, alas, of propagating its kind. Perhaps one
might liken it to the Leyden jar which we of the older generation used
to read of in our physics–I do not know whether it is remembered
now-a-days. It has a charge of electricity of more or less strength, and
it has a retaining capacity of more or less endurance, so that to touch
it as the ages pass, is to receive a spark of life.

Many a work has started out with a tremendous appeal to its first
audience, but has not been able to hold its second or third. The first
night is not always a sure test of the length of a "run." Such a work
had a momentary word to speak which was appropriate, which came as pat
as Vice in the old comedy; but like a jest called out by a passing
event, it raised its crackle of laughter and died. One need not go far
to find examples. Mrs. Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_ is pigeonholed
here; and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and _The Jungle_ are tied by the same
tape, in spite of a certain uncanny habit of reappearance of Mrs.
Stowe's painful tale. Much literature of this sort is, of course,
temporarily valuable; but Time promptly and wisely puts it into the
wallet at his back. Without endurance, fame is as the fire of thorns
under the pot; without vitality, naught can endure.

As a matter of fact a work need not be brutally vital to have a fair
chance at long life. It must interest somebody very much indeed. Of
course, the great immortals start out in life popular in the best sense;
but there are lesser immortals too. One does not have to be Dante or
Shakespeare to win out. So long as the second class passengers persist
in interesting a few hearers on the various stages of the road, they
will not be forgotten. They may be, as they usually are, caviare to the
general, but they find from age to age fit audience. Poets like Horace
and Spenser and Blake, the authors of _Emma_ or _Cranford_ may cross the
final line side by side with their great competitors. And some of us who
venture diffident prophecy, expect greater endurance for Mr. Robert
Frost and his shy _North of Boston_ than for the dramatic anachronisms
of the late Stephen Phillips, or the epic _longueurs_ of Mr. Alfred
Noyes. Long life in literature concerns itself with the length of
Clotho's thread, and not at all with the question as to whether it be
labelled "No. 60" or "No. 90."

But to have transcended its own time by a generation or so is no promise
of immortality. Every work if not hopelessly tangled in the
perishabilities of its own age, is liable to be so tangled in those of
its own century or epoch. How often have men watched with exultation the
endurance of a work, and jumped to conclusions, when wisdom would have
recognized that it could last only while certain ideals or moods
prevailed. Was not Byron a god for a generation? But, alas, as the
waters of time rose, he found himself caught in the eel-grass of
romanticism, and pulled under. And did not the _Romance of the Rose_
hold men bound by its myriad lines for centuries–and where is it now?
Dusty upon dusty shelves. Its voice was that of Mediaevalism, not of
humanity. It perished with the conventions and provincialism of its era.

The time never was when a new work appeared to the world without some
external circumstance to modify for good or ill its early reputation.
Even the "anonymous" early ballads must have depended at first in some
measure upon the impression of "good time" which lingered in the minds
of the junketers among whom they sprang up. Even the _Iliad_ or the
_Song of Roland_ must have gained or lost according to the effectiveness
of the reciter or the social status of the patron. And to-day it is a
thousand times truer than ever before, that at the start the genuine
fame which endures is bound up with much that is purely factitious.

A new book comes to birth and finds a waiting world to welcome, but not
impartial in its attitude. Have not the friends and family announced the
arrival in joyful and ringing tones? Advertiser and advance reviewer
have been busy; the publisher now-a-days is preeminently efficient. The
result is a sort of pre-natal notoriety built up regardless of real
worth. The advertising campaign may be likened to an attack by gas-bombs
on the reading public; but fortunately from long experience a large part
of the public has provided itself with a tolerably good supply of masks
to receive the assault, and–to finish the figure with all possible
despatch–"waits till the clouds roll by."

Then for the first time, the work gradually emerges for what it is
worth. The public reads and judges; recommends it to its friends, or
warns them off; and speaks the fateful word, which if it is favorable,
leads others to read, and at least makes strangers admit that the book
is "well spoken of." Here is real fame, still struggling for existence,
yet independent of the handicaps of early puffing. Yet it must be said
in all fairness that the early puffing, with its manufactured audience,
hastens for the good book the chance for genuine fame; and makes more
decisive the collapse of the poor book, by bringing sooner to proof the
pinchbeck prophecies.

But even then the new book has got to stand up against convictions and
prejudices, conventions and dogmas. The public at large–and
incidentally the professional critic–wants more of "the same thing,"
more like that of its earlier loves and admirations. Figures of previous
experience rise in the readers' minds with malicious menaces against the
upstart–Dickens, Austen or Trollope; Ward, Sinclair or Tarkington;
perhaps Fielding or Goldsmith–figures moribund or vigorous still, all
are alert to impose "has been" upon "to be." Let the new book differ at
its peril; it becomes easily "revolutionary," "decadent," "not art"–is
damned, in short, unless, by a curious freak of the moment, it takes the
world by storm through its very "freshness." And even then Kipling joins
the ring, and henceforth struggles to impose the Kiplingesque. Such
dangers, such threats–mostly unreal when brought to the proof–the new
book must live through. The vigorous and vital book will be unabashed,
for its claims to long life must rest on stronger virtues than
conformity or non-conformity.

The ages confirm with Jovian nod the trite fact that every period has a
general cast of opinion about any literary work. San Francisco may not
accept the same order among "the best sellers" as New York, nor New York
as London; yet we accept the unity of age in our use of older epithets,
such as "Elizabethan" and "Victorian," even while we overlook it in the
hurlyburly of the present. It is a complicated and, perhaps, ultimately,
an inexplicable phenomenon; but strong leadership plays its part in
clarifying and fixing the momentary appraisement. Let Dr. Johnson or the
_Edinburgh Review_ utter a critical judgment, and society follows like
the traditional flock of sheep. If such notorious dictatorship is rare
in our larger world, there are yet many smaller Judges and Prophets
scattered abroad, apparent mouthpieces of the _Zeitgeist_. We are all
familiar with the small theatre party. One or two members have definite
ideas about the play and its presentation, and the rest experience all
the sensations but are more or less neutral. The neutrals inevitably
fall in behind the leaders, and the whole party is easily unanimous.
Such in miniature is the working of the critical leadership at large.
The only requirement is, that the leader must not be too far ahead or
behind his time. Thus it would have taken more than Dryden to make
Whitman a success in the days of the Restoration; and we can hardly
fancy Jeffreys forcing _The Widow in the Bye Street_ upon the Edinburgh
subscribers. But as all real leadership is moderate, neat unity seems to
be fairly easy to the backward look.

Yet the judgment of an age may seem to us the veriest nonsense of
perversity. It irritates us, at the same time that it flatters our sense
of superiority, to see the citizens of the Seventeenth Century tossing
up their caps over Cowley, and proclaiming him celestial; and to see
those of the Eighteenth lose their heads over Pope. We know better.
Cowley and Pope, indeed! Would not any college sophomore place them for
us–Why, of course, Cowley wrote the _Sonnets of Pindar_, and Pope was a
pseudonym. It is pedantic to have read them, and we are proud to know
them only by reputation. Yet we must not blame our unfortunate
ancestors. The old formula reappears:–they clung to what interested
them, and called it deathless. The humor lies rather more in the
inability of the next generation, perhaps our own, to break away from
the stereotyped verdicts of those remote days of questionable authority.
We were all taught that Addison was one of the mighty of earth, and that
his style was the acme of lucidity and charm–"Spend your days and
nights with Addison." But we must admit that this estimate is but the
sluggish echo of auld lang syne. For have you, gentle reader, perused a
single _Spectator_ Paper since you were preparing for your college
examinations? Of course, if Addison really interested his own age by
touching as no one else did its concerns, he deserved the audience he
gathered about him and the fame that transpired; but why should we talk
of him as if he actually interested us profoundly, when no one reads
him? And how about _Tom Jones_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _The Tale of a
Tub_, and _Tristram Shandy_ or _The Vicar of Wakefield_? It is the
tendency of long enduring fame to become sluggish and to sink into
dogmatism.

It is one of the duties lying nearest to the present–wherever that
present may be–to right the wrongs of the weak, and to humble the pride
of usurpers. Distrust of one's own taste and power, whatever may be the
case among individuals, is impossible to a whole generation. To judge
and to accept as final one's own conclusion is the prerequisite for true
results and positive progress. The saints have always been vigorous in
their unshaken conviction of the truth that is in them; it is the
insinuating voice of the devil which doubts. So, without misgiving, the
Eighteenth Century which wrote up Addison, wrote down Shakespeare; and
the Nineteenth Century which wrote up Browning, wrote down Pope. We,
too, are conscious of wise catholicity, and judge with decisive
orthodoxy. We adore the vigorous brutalities of Kipling and Masefield,
we are interested in the formless feebleness of certain new poets; we
scorn Gray and Landor, and overlook the poetry of Arnold. We are
hospitable to the "newer movements," even to the _outre_; we despise the
ways of our parents and our grandparents, though they were men who
walked with God. We cannot help it, to be sure, and are most unconscious
of our little ways; but now and then it is possible for some of us to
transport ourselves in spirit to the higher ground of the next century,
and to look back upon the plain of our own time. Then it is hard to be
convinced that the universe was not devised to furnish laughter for the
gods.

Nothing is harder than for us to laugh at ourselves; we prefer to dwell
upon the seriousness, the impressiveness of lasting fame, as proof of
the unity of the human race. When the world of twenty-five centuries
after Homer can thrill at the twang of the bow of Odysseus, and smile at
the laughter of Nausikaa and her maidens, we are kinsmen of the distant
Greeks. Time and race are annihilated before the mighty genius which
touches the deeps of the heart. Institutions and nations may decay, but
the song of Homer calls us brothers. Impressive, indeed, and yet–how
many really thrill and smile over the Odyssean tale? How many in this
age of broad enlightenment ever read the _Odyssey_ at all, or have
dipped into its pages for love of their pure serene? The candid answer
is: Very few. And yet Homer is one of the two or three who reign
supreme, as we almost all still conventionally admit.

This vaunted proof of racial unity is overworked; Homer has but few
relatives to-day, and they are that select handful who love to widen
their horizons by looking backwards. In spite of our boasted
education–which does not, any more than other panaceas, live up to its
promises–the disciples of the great past will always be few. But since
no age can walk entirely by its lone, there will always be a loyal band
who will spend the best portions of their lives in the great backward
and abysm of time, and will with shining faces bring good tidings to
their fellowmen. How grateful the early Nineteenth Century should have
been to Lamb for his specimens of the well-nigh forgotten Elizabethan
Dramatists; how grateful we should be to Mr. Gilbert Murray for pointing
out to us once more the splendors of Athenian Tragedy! Upon scholars
like these we must rely that too much is not forgotten.

* * * * *

The saying that the greater the fame the fewer the readers, is a random
shot, and yet it hits the target, and not the outermost ring. Every
approving reader gained for a work hands on the word to a dozen who have
not read, nor will ever read it. Fame enlarges its sweep through time
like the surge thrown off the prow of a moving steamship, broadening
over the sea until it stretches beyond all apparent relation to the ship
which first stirred it up. But here the figure breaks: for while in most
cases the waves subside, in others, the commotion bids fair to last to
the end of human history.

The classic once established becomes so sacred to the unthinking public
that to doubt it is _lese majeste_; at least, its fame produces a sort
of hypnotism. No one, for instance, can approach a play of Shakespeare
for the first time unbiassed. He may be actually bored, but he will not
admit it. Perhaps he will make himself believe that he enjoys it, but he
will not be found with it in his hours of honest play. He hardly dares
know what he thinks, lest he should be found heretical, and he feels
safer to swell the lusty chorus of praise. The most influential critics
in such a case get no real hearing. They may capture a few individual
opinions, but the public at large will lend no ear to qualifications.
Only if repetition is carried to the point of damnable iteration, will
modification of appraisal begin slowly to sink down through class after
class; it takes an unconscionable time to reach the bottom, perhaps
centuries. One recalls lesser literature still lingering moribund upon
front parlor tables in village homes–Thomson's _Seasons_ or, perhaps,
Young's _Night Thoughts_. No one reads them; they remain as closely shut
as the parlor doors; but there they lie, the cherished signs of family
respectability, and still accepted unquestioningly as living things.

Literary fame is a slippery and indefinite thing. There are countless
impossible questions one could ask. How many readers must a work have to
be considered alive at all? Is fame to be allowed to some of the obscure
poets like Campion, Traherne, and Shenstone, who are known only to the
specialist? Definiteness and finality are as difficult of attainment as
to tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is northerly. But it is
certain that the immortals are dependent upon an amazingly small set of
followers, which tends to grow smaller as the ages turn. Yet those who
deserve long life will in the long run reach an old age, frosty but
kindly. And we may leave them with confidence in the hands of Time, who,
after all, like Autolycus, pockets only what have come to be
unconsidered trifles.

CARLYLE AND KULTUR

I

The opinions anyone holds in this momentous crisis are largely
determined by those he has imbibed from the thinkers of the past, and it
is interesting to notice how much Carlyle has been brought into the
discussion on both sides. A somewhat systematic consideration of the
bearing of his teachings on the present war may therefore not be
altogether profitless.

For many reasons he is not the sort of man to invite much attention from
journalistic, academic, and dilettante writers. He is unpopular in a
double sense; for he is neither superficial nor facile, and his ideas
are opposed to the optimistic convictions that dominate in this
generation. Some insist that he is responsible for the extravagant
paradox and persistent denial of the obvious and the accepted indulged
in so freely by such journalistic products as Shaw and Chesterton, but
these men only imitate his manner to pervert his meaning. That they
imitate him, however, is proof of his influence; for the popular writer
does not imitate anyone whose repute is not of the highest.

The academic mind is indifferent or hostile to him because the
formlessness of his writings and their abnormal character seem serious
defects to those to whom the formal is more important than the
substantial. His learning, too, while undoubtedly extensive, is not
always accurate or orthodox. The king is not the "cunning or the
kenning" man, and his contempt for "logic-choppers" and "word-mongers"
does not commend him to such as value the theoretical above the
practical.

To the dilettante he is equally repellant. He hated mediocrity and
superficiality, and he had inconveniently high standards. This latter
reason is the openly avowed one for hostility towards him in the case of
an English writer, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, who freely denounces him in
his diffuse discussions of the war, but also cites facts that tend to
disprove his contention that Carlyle is without influence; for he tells
of repeated experiences with British workingmen who were readers of
Carlyle and ardent believers in his gospel.

Carlyle is undoubtedly a strong influence in Great Britain. The
superficial regard him as a reactionary and an obscurantist who believed
in despotism and serfdom, but those who live closer to the realities of
life detect in his writings a passionate sympathy for the humble and the
oppressed. He may not exert much influence in the learned or the
artistic world, but he is certainly a social and a political force.
Writers on British politics constantly refer to his influence over the
more intelligent voters of the working classes, and this demonstrates
power of the most pregnant kind.

Outside of Great Britain, too, there are evidences of his influence. It
is mostly within the English speaking world, but some accuse him of
being the progenitor of Nietzsche and his cult of the superman. This is
only superficially true, however, for Nietzsche was exactly the sort of
person he denounced as "quack" and "simulacrum;" but, as in the case of
Shaw and Chesterton, this proves influence, even though it be of a
negative sort. In the United States his _French Revolution_ has
apparently had much influence in the way of making our attitude towards
the past less formal and academic, and in bringing about a tendency to
look more at the principles than at the facts of history. He has also
given us such familiar expressions as "captains of industry," the
"unspeakable Turk," and many others not generally recognized as his; and
the man who fashions our daily speech gives the strongest possible proof
of influence. Here, too, however, his influence is chiefly in the
political and social world, and we can see the effect of his ideas in
one of our most important pieces of recent legislation, the selective
draft; for this act aims to realize his cardinal principle, that the
necessary work of a nation shall be compulsory and shall be apportioned
equitably and in such a way as to ensure each man getting the task for
which he is fitted.

II

The chief question about Carlyle at present, however, is not the extent
of his influence, but how far his teachings justify the theories and
practices now dominant in Germany. The Germans point to his advocacy of
their cause in 1870, and to his glorification of Frederick the Great, as
proofs that he would approve of, and even exalt, all that they have
done. The kaiser has quoted him in a widely discussed speech about "one
man with God being a majority," while less prominent Germans have freely
appealed to his authority. The English speaking world has seemed, on the
whole, disposed to admit that Carlyle's doctrines justify, or at least
tend to produce, ideas such as those that now obsess Germany. Some
writers, like the Mr. Hueffer already mentioned, have seized the
opportunity to belabor his memory as a traitor; while others have risen
up to defend him, although they seem to do so less from conviction than
a desire to deprive the Germans of support. Anyone who knows Carlyle
more than superficially, however, knows that the present German policy
would earn from him nothing but furious denunciation; and the reason
would not be because the Germans began the war, as D. A. Wilson argues
in _The Fortnightly Review_ for February, 1916, nor because he was
pro-Russian, nor because of any other personal prejudice or
predilection, but because the German nation today exhibits about all the
vices he inveighed against as most dangerous to the peace of the world
and the progress of civilization.

It would be idle to deny that Carlyle did exalt the German nation and
German policies to the English-speaking world, but we shall have to
qualify this exaltation if we accept Dr. Johnson's principle that an
author's works need editing a generation or so after their composition.
This dictum is based on the obvious necessity of recognizing that the
force of what a man says is conditioned by the current opinion of his
time and by his attitude towards it, and it also recognizes the truth of
one of Carlyle's own observations: "It is man's nature to change his
dialect from century to century; he cannot help it though he would." The
dialect of the nineteenth century was not that of the twentieth, and
Carlyle's use of it was affected by several things that still further
obscure his meaning for us. He opposed strongly what he regarded as many
popular fallacies of his time, and in opposing them he overemphasized
things that seemed to him to discredit or to disprove them. To the
undisciplined British populace, impatient of all control and clamoring
for the removal of all restrictions on individual liberty, he extolled
the docile German people; but it was not their absolute so much as their
comparative virtue that he was praising, and he would have recognized
that, under other circumstances, their submissiveness could prove a
vice, as, indeed, it has. Another fact, pointed out by Colonel T. W.
Higginson, a man whose extreme humanitarianism was calculated to make
him unsympathetic towards the eulogist of Dr. Francia, is that Carlyle
was a humorist and a man to whom the humorous attitude was second
nature. It will be necessary, therefore, to discount his praise of the
German people and of German institutions, for two reasons; the first,
because it was heightened to serve as a corrective to the tendency
towards license in his countrymen; and the second, because, as a
humorist, and also because of his ardent temperament, he invariably
indulged in over-statement.

There is much besides this to indicate that Carlyle's praise of Germany
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is anything but
evidence that he would endorse Kultur and Schrecklichkeit. His
fundamental teaching is that we must not be formal, rigidly logical, or
addicted to any fixed method of thinking. The nature of things must be
determined from their effects, and not from any external
characteristics. The national attributes of any people are not
permanent, but they are capable of wide variation, and much of his
invective and striking metaphor was poured forth in an effort to prove
that this variation is very largely a question of good or bad
leadership. In sustaining this thesis he traces the history of Germany
more completely than he does that of any other country; and he indicates
several periods, notably that of the Thirty Years' War, and the reign of
Frederick I, when Prussia, at least, was contemptible in its policies.
France, too, he argues, has not always been the mischief-maker of
Europe; for to him the French Revolution was a salutary outburst of the
native integrity of the French people, to sweep away the intolerable
hypocrisies and injustices of the Old Regime, and to improve not only
French, but human society as well.

* * * * *

It is plain, therefore, that he did not affirm the Germans to be
intrinsically good and the French intrinsically bad. His aim was to show
that nations rise in proportion to the extent to which their purposes
are just and their methods intelligent, and that they invariably fall if
they deal unjustly with their own citizens or their neighbors. Sometimes
he contrasted the French unfavorably with the Germans, as, for instance,
when he says that the martial ardor of the French may be compared to
blazing straw, while that of the Germans is more like the burning of
anthracite coal. This, however, is due to his having, like a great many
other people, an impression that the French are more likely to exhibit
superficial and glittering qualities, while the Germans are conspicuous
for the commonplace virtues of industry and thoroughness. Nothing was
more insidious, in his opinion, than to prefer brilliancy to solid
worth; and it was the danger of this preference he was emphasizing, more
than the native depravity of the French national character, when he
compared the Gallic temperament unfavorably with the Teutonic.

III

His attitude towards efficiency was also the direct opposite of the
present German conception of it. To him efficiency was a matter of
adaptation and improvisation, while the German theory is that it is a
question of fixed method and elaborate mechanism. Nobody ever despised
more than Carlyle the perennial fallacy that things can be done better
by the hocus pocus of procedure than by the intelligent application of
the available means to the end desired. He censured any effort to
achieve things automatically. He was never tired of ridiculing trust in
formulas. He insisted that the intelligence must be unfettered by
preconceptions or by a rigid plan. His hero was a man who had "swallowed
all the formulas," and who proceeded to adapt means to ends in any way
that was effective, passing rough-shod over theory, convention, dogmas,
or any other restrictions on his freedom of action. It is true that he
did insist on the necessity of having accurate and comprehensive
knowledge, and on thoroughness and other essentials of what the Germans
regard as scientific procedure. These things, however, were to him not
major but minor virtues. They were the auxiliaries to success, but they
were never to be considered as sufficient to ensure success, for they
had always to be supplemented by intelligence and insight. This is shown
by his depreciation of mere "beaver" industry, and by his fondness for
satirizing "pipe-clay," by which he meant senseless military routine. No
crime, in his eyes, was worse than a failure to recognize the dominant
importance of the sensibly and intellectually imponderable and
intangible elements that are part of every human problem; so that he
reprehended as vices the very things that have been most characteristic
of the Germans during the present war.

Another thing that Carlyle abused and the Germans display, is
insincerity. Nothing comes in for more invective from him than this, and
to him it meant primarily a subjective attitude. Vanity was its chief
cause, in his opinion. Truth, however unpalatable, must be recognized;
while fiction, however flattering, must be scorned. Personal
relationships must not sway our judgment, and he railed with especial
violence against unwarranted optimism inspired by conceit. He pointed
out, as one of Frederick the Great's chief virtues, the fact that he was
influenced by no delusions created by vanity or sentimentality. He says
Frederick looked facts squarely in the face, and instances his once
offending his brother, the Crown Prince, by telling him that he had
surrounded himself with flatterers, and reminding him that the
Austrians, his enemies in the field, would not flatter him. Carlyle also
points out that Frederick's wars were all conducted on a frank basis, so
far, at least, as acknowledgment to himself of the real situation was
concerned. There was no indulgence in the theatrical or the spectacular,
certainly in none that deceived only himself. Frederick wasted no energy
in striving for apparent triumphs that had no practical worth. He
disregarded purely political or sentimental influences. Berlin was twice
entered by the enemy during the Seven Years War, because Frederick never
paid a military price for a political or a temporary victory, but he
yielded territory whenever strategy demanded it. How different is this
from Germany's present military policy, which sacrifices permanent
advantages for the appearance of victory, and does not succeed in
achieving even a convincing appearance of that? It is plain that the
cheap posturing of the German military policy is just the sort of thing
Carlyle hated and despised, and nobody who has read him more than
casually can have escaped realizing that his insistence on the necessity
of recognizing fact in an honest and unbiased manner is a condemnation
of the delight in conscious and unconscious mendacity displayed by the
present German government.

Stupidity he warned against as one of the chief implements of the devil.
There is no other crime, he often said, for morality is largely a matter
of intelligence. Better be a villain than a fool, he implies, by quoting
approvingly the boast of the Scotch family that it had produced "many a
blackguard but not one blockhead." The mind which cannot or will not
perceive the obvious, or which persists in denying the unflattering, is
not only hopeless but vicious. Preferring to credit their prejudices or
their desires, instead of the lesson of events, was the chief crime he
ascribed to the men he held responsible for the worst catastrophes of
history. For mere density and well-intentioned incompetence, as in the
case of Louis XVI, he had some pity; but for stupidity arising from
wanton obstinacy and arrogance he had nothing but wrath and scorn. It
would be difficult to find in history a parallel for the infatuated
folly of the German military and political policy during this war, but
we find Carlyle reprehending less aggravated and perverse displays of
trust in bombast, brutality, and pretension, in the case of countries
like Spain and Austria; and this is only one of many things that show
how monstrous in his eyes would seem the insensate policy which has made
Germany the shame of civilization, and has alienated from her every
country in the world except a few contiguous ones that tolerate or
assist her through fear or rapacity.

What proves the German policy most at variance with Carlyle's
philosophy, however, is the fact that it is guided by materialistic and
cynical convictions. His basic belief was that the fundamental law of
existence is morality; they jeer at any power that is not material.
Besides this, he believed that reliance on the baser qualities of human
nature can never lead anywhere but to perdition. The leadership which
aims to secure itself by appealing to the selfishness or by satisfying
the folly of mankind, is courting disaster. The German policy boastfully
proceeds on the assumption that the only motives that govern human
action are self interest of some base sort, and it credits humanity with
as little intelligence as morality. It is true that Carlyle had slight
respect for the intelligence or the integrity of the masses, but he
insisted that nobility is inherent in human nature, and that a hero who
knows how to arouse it, invariably appears whenever a government becomes
so unjust or so incompetent as to be intolerable. The German theory is
that the weak have no friends; Carlyle's conviction was that nature
avenges all injustice. The Germans declare that might makes right;
Carlyle preached that right makes might, and on every question of
fundamental morality he was diametrically opposed to them. "Savage
animalism is nothing; inventive spiritualism is all," he writes in one
place, and implies in a thousand. The Germans proceed on exactly the
opposite assumption. They trust in nothing but force, and the
neo-Darwinism that guides their policy is only a combination of the
ideas he denounced in the works of such men as Hume, Bentham, Comte, and
Darwin himself, mixed with a sentimental egoism that he abominated above
everything else.

IV

There is, of course, some reason for believing that Carlyle's ideas
resemble those of which the German policy is the expression, but there
is none if we look beyond his superficial meaning. One reason for
branding him as an advocate of German practices is his exaltation of
Frederick the Great. Frederick began his first war by seizing Silesia,
very much as Wilhelm II began the present war by seizing Belgium. As
Carlyle justified the seizing of Silesia, many people cannot see why
that does not warrant the conclusion that he would also justify the
seizure of Belgium. Such people, however, forget that the Prussia of
1740 was not even the Prussia of 1914, to say nothing of the German
Empire or the Teutonic Alliance. Carlyle would detect in Prussia a
change in spirit, but even if this cannot be established, there is
certainly no parallel between Frederick's seizure of Silesia and
Germany's attack on Belgium. In 1740, Prussia was one of the small
countries of Europe. Its population was about half that of Belgium in
1914, and its political importance was not much greater. It was situated
between militaristic France and imperialistic Austria; and its immediate
neighbors: Saxony, Bavaria, Poland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms, were
ready at any moment to profit by its misfortunes. Prussia's seizure of
Silesia was, therefore, very much as if Belgium, learning in advance of
Germany's plan of invasion, had seized German territory adjacent to its
frontiers, and used it as a buffer to defend itself. It was the case of
a small state preserving itself from the aggressions of a big neighbor
aiming at world dominion. The methods employed may not have been
technically legal, but they were justified; therefore Carlyle endorsed
them. He believed that Frederick, cynic and materialist though he admits
him to have been, nevertheless proved himself the valiant defender of
his country's right to self government. He also regarded Frederick as
the man who did most in the eighteenth century to preserve Europe from
being dominated by a lawless imperialism. The rulers of Austria, because
of their almost uninterrupted possession of the office of Holy Roman
Emperor, openly aimed at universal dominion, and never lost an
opportunity of trying to realize it by force of intrigue. France, too,
was striving for the domination of Europe, and Russia was just becoming
conspicuous for the brutality and unscrupulousness of its political
methods quite as much as for the vastness of the power it had suddenly
developed. When these facts are considered, Frederick's action must be
admitted to have been, if not in the interests of democracy, at least in
support of the principle of self-determination for which the Allies
claim to be fighting against Germany; and Carlyle's endorsement of it at
least creates the presumption that he would not sympathize with Germany,
which today, greatly extended, is playing the part of the bullying
nations he commended Frederick for thwarting.

He seems, however, to advocate autocracy, and to deride democracy, and
this would appear to put him in agreement with the kaiser and his
professorial prompters. It is true that he did deride the notion that
the decision of the majority is always right. He likewise insisted that
all the constitutionality and legality conceivable will not ensure good
government or justify incompetence or unrighteousness in power; and
that, conversely, no formal or technical irregularity disqualifies a
government which is beneficent and capable. He ridiculed the idea that
political equality is synonymous with justice, but this does not mean
that he believed in caste rule. His opposition to political equality was
inspired by no respect for inherited authority or the sanctity of
property, but was the result of a conviction that it is a crude and
materialistic way of trying to solve an immensely complicated problem by
a simple mechanical process. Not external equality, but _equity_, must
be achieved to make government effective and successful, was his
contention. Making men equal in political power, in his opinion, ensured
that the government would be dominated by the ignorance and selfishness
of the mass of men, rather than by the enlightenment and integrity of
the relatively small portion of mankind whom nature fits for leadership
by endowing them with superior moral and intellectual powers. He
believed no man entitled to authority except on the basis of character
and ability, and he was as bitterly opposed to the German scheme of
class rule as he was to the quantitative methods of the radicals. It is
entirely wrong to think that, because he denied that universal suffrage
will guarantee justice and humanity, he endorsed injustice and
oppression. He didn't care how a government was organized or what it
claimed to do, but he only inquired what it had succeeded in doing, and
by this he judged it. The results of the German policy have been
disaster for the world as well as for Germany, and he would condemn the
German government for this, without being at all concerned about its
form. He attached no importance to a government's form; all he judged by
was its spirit. He believed that a government is inevitably the
expression of the intelligence and morality of the people it represents,
and that any form is capable of proving either good or bad in operation.
Germany may be an autocracy in form, but the German people almost
unanimously endorsed the war and its enormities; so what we have is an
exhibition of the fallibility of popular judgment more than a display of
the evils of autocracy. On this point Carlyle's position is clear, while
that of the critics who accuse him of having endorsed German practices,
because he denied that the majority is always right, is much more
susceptible of being considered a justification of Kultur.

According to his interpretation of history, the case of Germany is
perfectly plain. It is simply an instance of the degeneracy that, he
claimed, inevitably follows the adoption of selfish or materialistic
ambitions. The patient industry and the steady pursuit of the practical
instead of the spectacular brought Germany to greatness, and placed vast
power in the hands of her rulers. Then those rulers were tempted to
misuse that power, and they fell. They decided to corrupt the people and
make them the instrument by which world dominion could be achieved. They
therefore cultivated the baser passions of the populace, and with
infinite thoroughness and resource, they used every agency of the
government to secure public endorsement for a policy of aggression, and
for a swash-buckling and bombastic procedure that appealed only to the
shallow and the reckless. They found this the easier because
circumstances worked with them. The Franco-Prussian War inflamed German
chauvinism and inflated German conceit to an incredible extent. The
success of the war was more the result of France's weakness than
Germany's strength, but it filled the German nation with extravagant
enthusiasm, and inspired it with blind faith in its own invincibility.
Then Germany changed from a country largely agricultural to one mainly
industrial, and wealth came to kindle in a naturally gross and sensual
people a passion for luxury, and to impart to a naturally arrogant one
the insolence of material power. The effect of the first of these things
is shown in the famous night-life of Berlin, which, before the war, was
more gross and lavish than that of any other city in the world; while
the overbearing character of the average German abroad shows how general
was the influence of the second. Thus a change has been effected in the
spirit of Germany. From a nation dull but honest, rude but sincere and
kindly, it has been transformed by bad leadership and sudden prosperity
into a people whose dominant characteristics are brutality and
mendacity. Therefore the Germany that Carlyle praised is not the Germany
that perpetrated the present war, and there is no doubt that his
attitude towards the apostles of Kultur would be the direct opposite of
what it was towards Frederick the Great and Bismarck.

THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

"It need not be difficult either to define or to secure the freedom of
the seas if the governments of the world sincerely desire to come to an
agreement concerning it." At first thought, the most striking
characteristic of these words of President Wilson in his address to the
Senate last January is their optimism. Freedom of the seas, according to
German authorities, is to be secured by various agencies, including the
unrestricted use of the submarine and an independent Ireland. Primarily
it is to be secured by the destruction of British naval predominance.
Now British authorities have an inconvenient habit of stating that
freedom of the seas was won long ago by means of the British navy, that
it exists today in time of peace, and that its continuance depends upon
Britannia ruling the waves. Our correspondence with Germany before we
entered the war contains polite references to our cooeperation with that
country to secure freedom of the seas through recognition by treaties
and international agreement of principles such as that of the immunity
of private property, not contraband, from capture at sea. But Germany no
longer thinks it possible to secure the freedom of the seas by the
medium of scraps of paper, and other nations show an unflattering
unanimity on this point, with regard to any scraps of paper to which the
present German government might be a party. As to the submarine as a
means of securing freedom of the seas, our entrance into the war is
perhaps a sufficient indication of our estimate of it. The usefulness of
an independent Ireland toward this end would seem even more likely to be
limited. There remains the British navy, and it promises to remain.

And how are we to define the freedom of the seas? The term has been used
in the past, and examination of our diplomatic correspondence will show
that it has been used in this war, in three different ways. It has been
used in protest against the appropriation by a single nation of definite
areas of the high seas for exclusive uses. The sowing of mines and the
proclamation of danger areas have led to its revival in this sense. It
has been believed to mean the right of private citizens to continue
sea-borne commerce in war time with a minimum of interruption. Our
preoccupation with this usage of the term during the first years of the
war won us a good deal of unpopularity with our present co-belligerents.
It has been used with reference to the safety of human life on the sea.
We are fighting Germany today upon this issue.

Is the problem one of war times only, or is there anything in the
contention that the potential pressure of sea power operates in times of
peace in restraint of commercial development? The question is not a
simple one, and perhaps it will aid us in understanding the seeming
optimism of our historian-president if we try to understand how this
matter has been dealt with in the past. The sailing ship has given way
to the turbine propeller, the galleon to the dreadnaught, the pinnace to
the submarine, but is the freedom of the seas which is being fought for
to-day of a kind different from that which was fought for in the days of
Drake? And is it to be secured by the same or by different means?

* * * * *

We need not dwell upon the recognition by Roman law of the principle of
the right of all to use the seas as a highway, nor upon the claims of
various city-states, notably Venice, to dominate portions of the
Mediterranean. In view of recent pronouncements from the Vatican, it is
interesting to remember that the claim of Venice, picturesquely
symbolized by the annual ceremony of wedding the Adriatic, was based in
part upon the gift of a ring accompanying an alleged papal grant, and
that the struggle for the freedom of the ocean seas began as a challenge
of two actual papal grants of wider significance. In 1454 Nicholas V
rewarded the pertinacity of the Portuguese in pushing their discoveries
southward along the coast of Africa, by granting to the crown of
Portugal exclusive rights of navigation and trade south of Capes Bojador
and Non. In 1493, Alexander VI rewarded the crown of Castile for the
exploit of Columbus, by giving Spain rights similarly exclusive beyond
the meridian one hundred degrees west of the Azores. The details of
these arrangements were later modified by mutual agreement of the powers
concerned, the final understanding being that Portugal had exclusive
rights of trade and navigation by the eastern approach to the Indies,
and Spain in the waters of what was supposed to be the western route
thither.

Both powers stood ready to defend the privileges which the highest
international authority of the period had granted them. They proceeded
to deal summarily with all foreign vessels found in their preserves.
Although the medieval maritime code, the _Consolato del Mare_, provided
for sparing the lives of the crew of a captured vessel, the
humanitarianism of the king of Portugal took a different form. John II
issued orders to his captains to seize all vessels encountered in the
barred zone, and instructed them to cast the crews into the sea, "In
order that they may die a natural death."

* * * * *

It was the mariners of France who most frequently braved this earlier
form of "spurlos versenkt." They persisted in navigating the waters
claimed by Portugal, and established a lucrative trade in Brazil. Their
sovereign, Francis I, seems to have been the earliest champion among
rulers of the freedom of the ocean seas. To the expostulations of the
king of Portugal he maintained, "The act of traffic and exchange of
goods is of all rights one of the most natural and best grounded." To
the remonstrances of the Spanish ruler, the Emperor Charles V, he
replied, "The sun shines for me as well as for others. I should like to
see the clause of Adam's will which excludes me from the partition of
the world." The tales of the exploits of Jean Ango, merchant of Dieppe,
who sank his enormous fortune in his ventures; of his captains, Fleury,
Verrazano, the brothers Parmentier, is an absorbing one. Seeking
fortunes for themselves and revenge for comrades fallen into the hands
of the enemy and treated as pirates; justifying their acts on the
principle that the paths of the sea are free to all; they dared and
suffered, and explored new lands, and brought glory to the maritime
annals of France. They laid the foundations of her overseas commerce and
colonies, but owing to the religious wars at home the superstructure was
not built until a later age.

The exploits of the French sailors against the Spanish monopoly were
succeeded by those of Hawkins and Drake. Elizabeth's dictum that the sea
and the air were common to all was as emphatic as Francis I's utterances
on the subject, and Elizabeth's was the better maintained. The victories
of Drake in the Caribbean Sea in 1586 meant the death blow to Spain's
hopes of effectually barring the western seas. She was felt to be within
her rights, however, in establishing a monopoly of trade with her
colonies in the new world. The English, in their efforts to obtain
trading concessions, or at least a recognition of their right to trade
in regions not actually occupied by Spain, following French precedent,
sedulously avoided making any agreement that might seem to acknowledge
Spain's right to prevent the vessels of other nations from sailing the
American seas.

While England was combating Spain's claims in western waters, a new
maritime power, the Netherlands, was breaking down the monopoly of
Portugal in the east. The ships of the Dutch East India Company won
their way against the Portuguese and made prize of their vessels. It was
apparently to set at rest the consciences of members of the company who
hesitated to pocket profits that had not been won in peaceful trade,
that the Dutchman Grotius wrote his treatise on the law of prize, one
chapter of which, under the title _Mare Liberum_, was published as an
independent work. The book claimed the seas as a free highway for the
ships of all nations, and freedom of trade for all nations on every sea.
That age was not ready to accept either claim in its entirety. Two
Englishmen, Welwod and Selden, wrote books to vindicate England's
traditional sovereignty over the British seas, the limits of which no
one was quite certain about. Even the British admirals who were supposed
to defend British authority there, could never get the Crown lawyers to
pronounce exactly on the point, some holding that British seas extended
to the English settlements in America, others being satisfied with a
line drawn from Norway to Cape Finisterre. Charles I set out, with his
ship money fleets, to supplement the discourses of his subjects by "the
louder language of a powerful navy." But it was left for his great
successor, Cromwell, to use this latter language effectively, and to
wring from the Dutch the concession that their ships should strike flag
and topsail in the narrow seas. They always insisted, however, that this
was done in courtesy, not as a recognition of British sovereignty over
any part of the high seas. International incidents arising from the
refusal of French captains to salute occurred until England relinquished
her claim during the Napoleonic wars.

* * * * *

As to freedom of trade, the English Navigation Laws stood as a witness
that Spain's policy of monopolizing colonial trade was considered worthy
of emulation. Such monopolies were carefully guarded, as in Elizabeth's
day, and as in her day efforts were made to break them down. To
Cromwell's request that Englishmen be allowed liberty of conscience and
of trade in the West Indies, the Spanish ambassador replied that it was
to ask his master's two eyes. Thereupon Cromwell stopped asking, but
despatched a fleet to the West Indies to seize a post which might become
a centre of British trade.

This action of Cromwell links his day to ours. That the keynote of
modern diplomacy and its accompaniment of wars is to be found in rivalry
for the possession of land and markets in the extra-European world, has
been fully pointed out by historians. It is a fact which cannot be
emphasized too strongly. Its significance increases with the study of
the whole modern period.[1] One has only to dip into the pamphlet
literature of the eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries, or to read
a few pages of parliamentary debates, to realize the importance of trade
in the eyes of all men. It becomes apparent that the aim of each
progressive nation was to increase its overseas commerce at the expense
of other nations, and that every new enterprise of foreigners loomed as
a menace to national prosperity. Sea-borne trade was the nursery of
seamen, and commerce must be restricted to nationals by navigation acts,
while commercial ventures of rival states were not alone a menace
because they meant diverting profits to the benefit of a rival, but
dangerous as the possible foundation for hostile naval power. Since
commerce was carried on most successfully by trading companies, it was
good policy to give them governmental countenance, and although
occasional voices were raised in criticism of their monopolies and the
high prices for which they were felt to be responsible, their shares
were popular forms of investment, and many of their shareholders sat in
the seats of the mighty. The English and Dutch East India Companies were
among the first to carry on overseas commerce on a large scale, and much
international history is written between the lines of their annals.

[1] And its illusions were set forth in "The Expansionist
Fallacy," No. 5 of this REVIEW.–ED.

"And you, Belgians, courage, courage! Continue to defend intrepidly your
rights and your freedom, and with them the freedom of the human race!"
It was not in August of 1914 that these words were spoken. They occur in
a pamphlet published in 1727, and the struggle in which they urge the
Belgians to persist was a struggle for the freedom of the seas. The
ruler of the Belgians in those days was popularly called the German
emperor, and though not a Hohenzollern, he was a Hapsburg. The Emperor
Charles VI was pursuing a project which bade fair to give the Hapsburg
lands something they have not attained to this day: importance as a
maritime power. He had issued a charter to a group of Belgian merchants
who were already carrying on a lucrative trade with the far east from
the port of Ostend. The Dutch and English East India companies, seeing
their monopolies endangered, complained to their respective governments,
which immediately set in motion machinery for the suppression of the
Ostend Company. Diplomatic agents busied themselves at Charles' court,
and a flood of pamphlets, in those days of limited newspaper publicity,
did what they could in the manufacturing of public opinion. The Belgian
pamphlets maintained the principle that "the right to trade in any part
of the globe is inherent in all sovereign peoples." The Dutch pamphlets
opposed the company on the ground of alleged infringement of treaty
rights and agreements. The English pamphlets, wisely refraining from
much comment on documents based on papal grants whose authority England
had never recognized, argued that English pocketbooks would suffer if
the Ostend Company continued to do business. Pitt many years later
stated in Parliament that the English government had no right to demand
the suppression of the company. But, as the British ambassador said to
the Emperor, in language strikingly reminiscent of that of the Spanish
ambassador of Cromwell's day, "In attacking our commerce, you fly in the
eyes of the English nation." In the complicated diplomacy of five years,
the question of the Ostend Company held its own, but in 1731 Charles VI
abandoned it, as he had abandoned many other things of value, to obtain
one more ratification of the Pragmatic Sanction.

Eight years later it was England that was carrying on a struggle for the
principle of freedom of the seas. Modern research has established beyond
any reasonable doubt that the immortal Jenkins did actually have an ear
sliced off by a Spaniard who was searching his ship for smuggled goods,
and that the tale was not a fabrication of the Opposition that desired
to force Walpole to plunge England into war. The Opposition certainly
recognized the recruiting value of the incident. "The tale of Jenkins'
ear will raise us troops enough!" exclaimed one member on the floor of
the House of Commons. Whether or not Jenkins commended his soul to God
and his cause to his country, his country embraced his cause as that of
the freedom of British commerce from search by Spaniards in time of
peace. The British vessels searched were usually smugglers, but the
British public was not interested in the right of Spain to safeguard her
monopoly of trade with her colonies; they objected to search and to the
contention that British ships must not be found in American waters
outside the straight path between England and her colonies, and they
besieged the doors of Parliament with the slogan: "A free sea or war!"
And so was fought the war of Jenkins' Ear, which might have been avoided
had it not been for the powerful influence, both with the people and
with Parliament, of the South Sea Company; and which did nothing toward
settling the point in controversy.

Thus far the principle of freedom of the seas had been invoked in
connection with efforts to preserve for the benefit of a whole nation or
of favored groups of nationals, all access to the trade and resources of
certain regions. During the wars for colonies and commerce which arose
from these efforts, the principle was brought forward against
interruption of commerce in time of war. In the days when privateering
was a recognized adjunct of maritime, warfare, commerce-destroying was
reduced to a science that only the last three years have rivalled. The
seizure as contraband of anything which might help the enemy to prolong
the struggle, and the confiscation of cargoes of neutral ships, on the
ground that part of the cargo belonged to the enemy, caused endless
international complications. Treaties of peace began to contain
provisions designed to render less burdensome these rights claimed by
belligerents. The first step toward anything like international
agreement was taken in the treaties of Utrecht in 1713. By these
treaties contraband was limited to articles directly useful in war,
exclusive of foodstuffs; enemy goods on neutral ships were protected on
the principle later reduced to a formula, as "free ships, free goods";
and the method of visit and search was regulated. These arrangements did
not outlast the peace, but many later treaties renewed, and some
developed more fully, these restrictions, which were naturally more
popular with neutral powers and with powers possessing small navies,
than with the power which possessed the command of the sea. As that
enviable position was held practically without interruption by Great
Britain, and as in time of war she used unsparingly the advantages her
position gave her, she gained in the eyes of opponent and neutral the
reputation of being the enemy of freedom of the seas.

At the beginning of the Seven Years' War France, realizing that she
would not be able to control the trade with her colonies, threw it open
to neutrals. Great Britain thereupon laid down her famous "Rule of 1756"
that commerce illegal in time of peace was not legal in time of war, and
attacked neutral ships found trading with French colonies. The answer of
Denmark and Sweden to this policy was the formation of the first league
of neutrals to protect neutral commerce. The French, hoping that the
contrast of their policy with that of Great Britain would help their
cause with neutral powers, were careful not to authorize interference
with neutral trade. It is interesting to find the doctrine of which we
have heard so much of late, of the menace of British "navalism,"
formulated in the eighteenth century by the minister of a state which,
like England's opponent in the twentieth, was stronger on land than on
the sea. It was a French diplomat who expressed the hope that some day a
union of nations would be able to cope with England and "establish
firmly after the peace, or even during the war, a balance of commerce:
for without it no other people will ever enjoy any but a precarious
navigation, which will last only as long as it is to the interest of the
English government not to destroy it." This statement owes its
significance to the fact that it voiced the attitude of a government
which, under stress of circumstances, indeed, and not because it saw a
light, was departing from the prevailing practice of mercantilism, the
reservation for nationals of the benefits of colonial trade.

* * * * *

A British statesman has recently made the assertion that the United
States owes its existence to the struggle for the freedom of the seas.
He was referring to the Elizabethan struggle against Spain's policy of
exclusion, but is not the statement true also in another sense? In so
far as the restrictions laid upon the development of the colonies by the
trade and navigation laws contributed in bringing about the American
Revolution, that movement was a protest against the mercantile system,
under which no freedom of the seas was possible.

The United States early ranged herself, also, on the side of the nations
that championed freedom of the seas for commerce in time of war. Her
treaty with France regulated the right of search, limited contraband to
munitions of war, and proclaimed the principle, "free ships, free
goods." The treaty which Franklin later negotiated with Prussia
established American advocacy of the immunity of private property from
capture at sea. In the meantime, Great Britain's refusal to limit
herself in any interference with commerce which might hinder her victory
over her revolted colonies and France, gave umbrage to the Scandinavian
powers and to Russia, and in 1780 Catherine II proclaimed the Armed
Neutrality of the North. To the principle of "free flag, free goods,"
and the limitation of contraband to actual munitions of war, the Armed
Neutrality joined the principle that a blockade to be binding must be
effectively maintained. Although Catherine jested with the British
ambassador about her armed neutrality, calling it an armed nullity, she
told him that Russian trade and Russian ships were her children, and
that she was determined to protect them. France had favored the
formation of the Armed Neutrality, and Louis XVI improved the occasion
by explaining that his only motive in participating in the war was his
attachment to the principle of the freedom of the seas.

It is difficult for us today to preserve the proper attitude of respect
for the word of a king in this connection, but it is not so difficult
for us to understand what was the real attitude of France. England had
won from France the greater part of her colonies, and with them a
lucrative commerce, and her remaining commerce was being crippled by the
war policy of the mistress of the seas. Behind the England which refused
to limit her power as a belligerent by accepting a revision of maritime
law, stood the England which was the successful commercial rival of
France.

The French Republic inherited this much of the view point of Louis XVI.
The remedy for the situation France saw in an imitation of England's
policy. It enacted a navigation law copied after those of Great Britain,
and while declaring that its war against England was a war to free the
seas, it proclaimed that as a war measure it was abandoning the
principle, "free ships, free goods." Napoleon took up the convenient
formula, writing to the Royal Society on paper decorated by a vignette
representing Liberty sailing in a shell, and bearing the motto, _Liberte
de Mer_. Years later he read the same meaning into the formula;
outlining to Narbonne his idea that England should be attacked through
the Orient; he said that the same blow which destroyed her mercantile
greatness in India, would win independence for the west, and the freedom
of the sea. England's attitude toward sea law gave him a convenient
weapon, and he induced his admirer the Czar to form a new Armed
Neutrality, announcing that France would not make peace until neutral
flags were properly respected, "and until England shall have
acknowledged that the sea belongs to all nations." Whether the device of
a league of neutrals could really be an effective force in protecting
commerce in wartime was not proved in 1800, for after the assassination
of the Czar Paul the coalition went to a pieces. As in the present war,
both belligerents used their naval forces to cut off supplies from the
territories controlled by the enemy, and to ruin her commerce. Napoleon
in his attempt to close the markets of Europe to Great Britain
maintained that he was defending the freedom of the seas against Great
Britain's refusal "to recognize international law as observed by other
nations," while England defended her "paper blockades" and policy toward
neutrals, as necessary, since she must preserve her command of the seas
as an "essential to the protection of independent states, and for the
prosperity and good of the human race."

The damage done to American commerce in the pursuit of these
high-sounding aims precipitated the war of 1812, which was indubitably a
war for the freedom of the seas for neutral commerce in time of war, and
which would probably have been fought with France instead of with Great
Britain had it not been for the question of impressment, and the popular
prejudices which had survived the American Revolution. Our championship
of rules limiting belligerent rights against sea borne commerce, and our
activities in the suppression of the Barbary pirates, have led us into a
rather complacent attitude with regard to our position as to freedom of
the seas. It is salutary therefore for us to remember the Bering Sea
controversy. When, in 1821, Russia claimed sovereignty over Bering Sea,
both the United States and Great Britain protested, and Russia withdrew
her claim. But when in 1886 our activities in connection with pelagic
sealing caused friction with Great Britain, our defense was based in
part upon a claim to have inherited from Russia rights which in 1821 we
had refused to admit that she possessed. And when the case was heard
before an international court, one of our advocates even justified visit
and search in time of peace, regardless of our traditional position on
that subject. However, after a certain amount of journalistic jubilation
when the award went against us, our cousins overseas charitably allowed
the memory of our peccadillo to accumulate dust. That the question of
the right of a nation to protect fisheries in adjacent waters is not a
closed one, was shown by Russia's claim in the White Sea put forward in
1911. That question, as well as the whole matter of the three-mile
limit, is bound to demand further consideration in the near future.

* * * * *

What has been the attitude of Great Britain since 1815, and how far does
it foreshadow her future policy? It must not be forgotten that in the
long struggle to safeguard human life as well as property upon the seas,
the chief burden has been borne by her. In the old days of her proud
claim to a salute in the narrow seas, she felt her responsibility to
police those seas, and this sense of responsibility has widened with the
extension of her commerce, so that she has put the whole world in her
debt by rendering the seven seas a safe highway in time of peace. Her
adoption of the principle of free trade was probably the greatest single
step that has been taken in modern times toward freedom of the seas, in
the sense of breaking down the barriers of trade restriction which
supposed national interest had erected. On the other hand, in the race
for markets and raw materials, she has not escaped the tendency toward
that return to the mercantilistic policy of exclusion in favor of
nationals which is so marked in the whole movement today, and which is
the crux of the problem. In the aspect of the question which has to do
with limitation of belligerent right, she has shown herself responsive
to the tendency, so noticeable from 1815 to 1914, to regard war as
something to be limited so far as possible to the armed forces of the
belligerents. Her substantial concessions in 1856, many of her statesmen
have never ceased to deprecate, and it was the growing feeling that she
could not afford to part with any more of the advantages her command of
the sea gave her, that prevented the ratification of the Declaration of
London. The events of the present war make very vital the question how
far rules of this sort contribute toward the solution of the problem.

The attitude of the English press toward Lord Lansdowne's suggestion
that Great Britain declare her willingness to discuss the problems
connected with the freedom of the seas reflects the shades of British
opinion at present. Certain papers see the problem as one of war times
only, and point out, what American opinion will not fail to echo, that
the submarine question will have to be dealt with first and foremost.
Two writers face the problem squarely as one of commercial policy in
time of peace, and offer solutions according to their creeds. The
_Saturday Review_ expresses the belief that "so far from examining with
other Powers the question of the freedom of the seas, we must re-enact,
without delay, the Navigation Laws, which we foolishly repealed in
1849." On the other hand, the _London Nation_ sees the impartial
distribution of the world's raw materials as one aspect of the real
freedom of the seas, and agrees with the French Socialists that the
mistress of the seas that must secure this freedom for all nations
willing to live by the rule of peace, must be, not Great Britain, but
the future League of Nations. The harmonizing of these two view-points
does not promise to be an easy task, and we may be sure that the whole
question will have full and free discussion in England and throughout
her empire in the months to come. American citizens do not have to
consider the problem of resigning to the keeping of a League of Nations
a proud and long-cherished tradition of wardenship of the seas. But we
are one of the great commercial nations, and no voice will have a more
respectful hearing than ours at the peace settlement. Barere,
phrase-maker of the French Revolution, summed up the foreign policy of
France in 1798 by saying that she had inscribed upon her flags, "Freedom
of the seas, peace to the world, equal rights to all nations." We have
seen how the first of these phrases has been used again and again in the
past to cloak jealousies of the commercial dominance of a rival nation.
We know that one thing that it means today is that never again must the
history of the world be stained by the wanton destruction of the lives
of peaceful travelers upon the world's highway. If it has a meaning also
in relation to the world's commerce, in peace or in war, we must see
that it is a different meaning from that of the past. For we, too, have
inscribed _Freedom of the seas_ upon our battle flags, and it behooves
us to be certain just where our army belongs in the long procession of
armies with banners–just what is the direction in which our standards
point.

THE CONDITIONS OF TOLERANCE

There is one virtue which we implicitly assume when we discuss
philosophy, and usually invoke when we venture to discuss religion. It
is the favorite "intellectual virtue" of our time: for, as the sophists
disquietingly remarked in their day, and as Professor Sumner shows in
_Folkways_, moral touchstones, like clothes, are subject to change of
fashion; those of a former generation, taken for granted in all
soberness, rise out of old books with a quaintness like that of the
"y^e" and the long "s" of our forefathers. The "great, the awful, the
respectable virtues," such as godliness and righteousness, as terms of
approval, are seldom on our lips; the old stalwart, rigid qualities are
less admired today than those which are more gracious and humane–than
flexibility of mind, universal sympathy, open vision.

But these latter in their turn we have now accepted as ideals, with no
warning Socrates at our elbow to demand: "Precisely what do you mean by
these new standards which you take for granted?"

"Toleration is so prodigious an impiety," said a member of the
Westminster Assembly, "that this religious parliament cannot but abhor
the meaning of it." Yet, in that constant gradual "transvaluation of all
values" which humanity performs, tolerance has become the golden word of
modern thought. And, like all popular ideas, it is unthinkingly accepted
and facilely claimed. Even those who admit that they have not attained
full measure of it, hide themselves behind the remark: "I am tolerant of
everything except intolerance," and thereby yield them altogether: for
to be tolerant only of a corresponding tolerance, is like confining your
courtesy to polite people. The only attitude which tests the quality of
tolerance is precisely the intolerant attitude.

But passing by these simple folk, we may yet find in the more
serious-minded the sense of an inconsistency in the very conception,
which puts it forever beyond our reach. We may be undertaking the
difficult experiment of eating our cake and having it too. Yet even so
there may be a refuge: for if paradox should prove to be the final form of
truth–a union of opposites present in all living facts–inconsistency
will have no devastating effect on it. The very fabric of truth may be
woven of just such contradictions; reality may _never_ be consistent.
But whether or no this be the way out, there are plainly difficulties
to be considered, if we are to understand, and at the same time
accept, the ideal of tolerance.

At the outset the distinction must be drawn between outward physical
toleration and the inward spiritual grace of tolerance. In the first
place, tolerance refers to thought, not to conduct. That heretics are no
longer burned at the stake is the outcome of a change in social policy;
in so far as this change is more than the discovery that heretics are
after all not dangerous to the state, it is due to the obvious fact that
where there is no clearly delineated, uniform orthodoxy, there can be no
heresy–the species is extinct. Whenever the government in power
concludes that an idea _is_ dangerous to the state, it does not hesitate
to break through whatever safeguards to individual liberty of opinion
may have been erected in the past. If such action is not legally
justified, it is at once shown that laws are dead things, powerless
against living human fears and needs. The application of the
Defense-of-the-Realm act in England to distributing copies of the
hitherto innocuous Sermon on the Mount, is evidence enough that the
governmental attitude towards the subject has not changed in principle.
And if, in addition to fear, we have a sharply defined orthodox view, we
find that, though ordinary people no longer advocate capital punishment
for doubting the Trinity, they did attempt to lynch Max Eastman for
doubting the righteousness of the war. In other words, we have ceased to
believe that religious opinions matter to social conduct, while still
believing that political opinions do.

The genuine intolerance of the middle ages rested on a different basis.
We say: Think what you please, so long as you act in conformity with
what public opinion pleases. Plenty of anarchists and pacifists and
upholders of the Susan B. Anthony Federal Amendment are still at large
because their actions, though not their thoughts, are orthodox. The
Inquisition struck deeper, because it was convinced of the genuine
importance of thought, in relation to conduct. It was not content with
binding the heretic to hold his peace–he must recant. It was so utterly
convinced that not merely expediency, but final universal truth, lay in
its keeping, that mere error, in the face of this revealed truth, became
the ultimate sin.

The question of the meaning of tolerance, then, if it is not simply a
matter of social usage, becomes the question, How far is it compatible
with conviction? Tolerance may be defined as willingness to sanction the
existence of views at variance with our own. The point at issue is not
the expression of such views; the most intolerant man may egg on his
opponent to complete expression, that he may argue him out of his error.
The real tolerance refers to the relation of thought to thought, not of
thought to speech. The above definition is one which, I believe, the
seeker after tolerance will agree to accept (I have tried it on
several). And yet, though presenting a fair idea of the attitude, it
holds within itself the difficulty which puts the ideal out of reach.

This inherent contradiction may be stated, in the terms of our
definition, thus: we are willing for an opposite view to exist _only_
when we are not entirely convinced that our own view is true. The real
belief in absolute truth is a missionary state of mind, and carries with
it the faith that truth is the one thing worth having. In our day, the
infinite variety of ideas which custom does not stale, has long forced
itself upon our attention. In consequence we no longer share the faith
of Plato that knowledge, as distinct from opinion, can be secured. We
cannot believe anything quite as firmly as the mediaeval Catholic
believed in an eternal church independent of argument, or indeed of
humanity. If we could, we should be as intolerant as Billy Sunday, whom
"the pale cast of thought" has never tinged, and, if we were
metaphysicians, should go up and down the world preaching the dangers of
neo-realism, as the evangelist fulminates against the blasphemy of
biological evolution. But Billy Sunday is an inverted anachronism; it is
not in the power of a modern of the _commencement de siecle_ to
recapture his fine careless rapture.

If this be true, if we have grown too modest to declare the eternal
constitution of the universe, what degree of conviction and what quality
of tolerance are left us?

The first answer is, that we may be willing to admit a view differing
from our own because we realize that both may be right. But such a
realization, if it is to be more than verbal politeness, implies that
the difference is only partial or nominal, and consequently that my
opponent's error does not shut him out from acknowledging my truth. I
may be a woman suffragist, and yet be tolerant of the views of a friend
who opposes suffrage, not on grounds of sex, but because he believes
that the suffrage is already too wide, requiring restriction rather than
enlargement. If I also am in theory an aristocrat, I can admit the
notion that both of us are in a measure right.

But the only real tests of tolerance are the far more common cases, in
which, if I am right, you must be wrong. Present species are or are not
the result of development or special creation; the world is or is not an
intelligible order; our individual personalities do or do not survive
bodily death. We cannot be content here to fall back on a different
statement of the problem. When we say: "Oh, yes, we both believe in God;
to me he is Life Force; to you, Jehovah," we know in our hearts that we
are simply conniving at the draining of all definite meaning from the
word, in order to confuse the issue and keep the peace. The one thing
needful is, not that we should find blanket terms under which we seem to
agree, but that we should drag our disagreement into the clearest
possible light, and so find out what we are talking about. Not only our
language, but our intelligence suffers from preferring vague unity to
distinct differentiation.

Even in such cases there are, however, three conditions which make
tolerance tenable. The first of them is, that we do not really care
about the issue; we have taken sides, but only because it is necessary
to hold some opinion, and so we have no active conviction. We are
tolerant because, after all, we know little about the subject, and are
willing to leave enthusiasm to experts. I have a friend who, even in the
crisis of the present war, keeps critically aloof from questions of
politics, seeming tolerant because his own position is held only
"academically"; he does not care enough about the subject for that
particular truth to seem supremely important. He is tolerant with the
ease of indifference. It is easy to give free play to ideas in which we
have no compelling interest. In consequence, many of us pretend to a
general tolerance, when the fact is, that we carefully choose our
examples from among the issues which least concern us.

Much of the modern religious tolerance is of this type. Our culture is
so predominantly pagan that Christianity has ceased to play more than a
nominal part in our tests of ideas and conduct. This tendency has
infiltrated even those who are unaware of the influence; the saving of
souls according to Christian theology has become less important than the
preservation of good taste, whose standards are set by an unconsciously
pagan public opinion. On the other hand, the prevailing paganism has not
become self-conscious, since it is hidden behind Christian words; and
few have the time or courage to look beneath words to test their
consonance with things. Being the result, not of directed effort, but of
drifting, the pagan element in our civilization is not eager to assert
itself. So the avowed pagans are tolerant of Christianity, saying: "I do
not care for it for myself, but it is good for the masses. As to the
church, for people who like that sort of thing, why, that is the sort of
thing they like." And the Christians are tolerant of pagan ideals of
self-realization, of personal pride and the worldly splendor of luxury
and art, on the ground that some of the ideals which they are supposed
to accept are after all inapplicable to modern life. Since neither cares
to assert itself for what it is, there is the mutual tolerance of
indifference. If these two ideals dared to stand forth and contest the
field, there would be an end of tolerance,–a holy war, and clearing of
the atmosphere.

The second condition of tolerance implies deeper thought on the disputed
subject than does the first. It relates to things, about which we are
not indifferent; but it indicates a mental sophistication which is too
cautious lightly to put Q. E. D. at the close of a demonstration. Our
conviction has, as it were, a string to it. I read once in a novel a
phrase like this: "He was as amazed as a Christian, who, waking after
death, should look round the universe and find that there was no God."
Imagination gives us tolerance by marring every faith with the
suggestion that we may wake up and find ourselves mistaken. And this is
just the faith that cannot remove mountains. The idea that the other
fellow may be right, paralyzes activity. Only bigots and fanatics set
fire to the world without scruple. We sit before the hearth, perhaps,
and argue about the brutality and cowardice of much of our current
morality, and the obstacles which convention often raises against a
sincere and heroic life; and yet, unspoken behind our preaching, is the
haunting fear that the wisdom of the ages may not be the hoary folly it
seems, that the melodramatic novels may be true, that considerations
unguessed may be involved–and we continue to sit before the hearth.

The presence of the little imp of skeptical imagination marks the
difference between philosophical and religious convictions. For good or
ill, the other person's point of view, once seen, cannot cease for us.
Our most ardent idealism is not a belief for which we would willingly be
martyred by the realists: for we might wake and look round the universe
in vain for an Absolute. It may be a good thing that the quality of
religious conviction has died out among us, or it may be a necessary
evil of civilized thinking. But the fact remains that we have no need of
tolerance towards views which, consciously or unconsciously, we admit
may be more nearly true than our own. We are merely not sure enough of
ourselves to risk annihilating the views of our opponents.

The third form of imperfect conviction on which tolerance may rest is
the view of truth as purely personal or relative. Subjectivism has been
used as a bad name in philosophy for so long that the suspicion of it is
usually resented. But it peers out from behind the respectable robe of
many a philosophy which has not learned to call hard names. To reduce
truth to a fact in individual experience, is to destroy the problem.
Genuine conviction, without which tolerance is a mere form devoid of
substance, is impossible if the truth for me and the truth for you are
isolated facts, having and needing no relation to each other. But little
private truths are sufficient only for little private affairs.

All of us want, and most of us take for granted, a real beauty in whose
light it is irrelevant that Longfellow is read by a larger number of
people than is Shelley. If I really love Shelley, I must believe that in
some impersonal sense _Prometheus Unbound_ is superior to _The Psalm of
Life_. This insistence upon a standard is at the root of all our serious
thinking; _de gustibus non disputandum_ is a foolish saying: for nothing
as a matter of fact is more fiercely disputed than questions of taste.
The social character of thought is so firmly rooted that a thought which
is limited to a personal impression ceases to interest us. It has become
a mere fact; and we live in a world not of mere facts but of facts which
gain their importance only through meaning. It is only of the most
trivial acts that we say: This is right for me but wrong for you,
because you think it wrong. We do not really even then put the You and
the I on the same level, but imply that you will, if properly educated,
agree with me. Human nature demands that we habitually will that the
maxim of our thought at least, should become a universal law. Only when
we apply our convictions, aesthetic, ethical, or metaphysical, to others
outside ourselves, do they become more than fancies.

If we go the whole way with Professor Sumner, for example, in the
relativity of morals, we are not really, from the standpoint of modern
Western teaching, looking tolerantly upon other theories which approve,
for instance, the summary extermination of undesirable members of the
family. We are simply refusing to adopt the morality of our own or any
other age, more seriously than as a guide of conduct whereby we avoid
punishment by society. The owning of slaves in the United States, says
Professor Sumner, is no longer expedient; but, under changes of social
and industrial conditions, it may again become so. Morality, that is, is
what its etymology implies–simply custom.

The holder of such a theory has no real conviction of the position
which, by geographical and temporal accidents, he holds. He is really
trying to place himself at the center of indifference, and his one
conviction is that all standards are relative. Of opposition to this, he
is frequently intolerant enough. The man who holds that Buddhism best
meets the religious needs of India, as Christianity satisfies the
conditions of life in the West, thinks himself tolerant of religious
differences, because all the examples are on his side; but he is
intolerant–and on his premises justly so–of missionaries, who are his
real opponents.

Such are the forms of incomplete conviction which make tolerance
plausible. There remain those attitudes which frankly abandon, for both
sides, the claim to truth in any absolute sense. Our opinions in any
case, they maintain, are but aspects of an all-embracing truth which can
be known only to a consciousness of the whole. Your opinion and mine
are, therefore, in the limited sense which is alone applicable, equally
true. But the only ideas which we can admit to have an equal claim to
partial truth, are those which are not mutually exclusive, so that the
different facets of the universal truth shall not interfere with one
another. Unless we mean simply that a variety of opinion makes the world
less dull, in which case conviction does not come in at all, we are
unable to admit that a belief diametrically opposed to our own is "just
as good," not as a foil, or a spur, to our own thinking, but in its own
right. It may be that the Bradleyan Absolute can admit contradictories
as equally true, but such mental acrobatics do not come naturally to
human thinking. Since we cannot view the world as the Absolute sees it,
we cannot, in practice, be guided by the theory that opposite answers to
living problems, set in all their complex conditions, are equally true.

The conviction that is softened by an historic sense or by use of the
terms of biological evolution, meets the same difficulty. In so far as
there is any real demand for tolerance, it must be in the conflict of
present issues. We do not need to be tolerant of the past, unless we
imagine ourselves in that past, and regard its issues as, for the time
being, contemporary with us. Ideas opposing our own may be gently dealt
with, as necessary stages of civilization. But if a stage is now no
longer necessary, the excuse fails. Cannibalism could not be defended as
a civilized practice, simply because it represents a stage of
development. Still less can we tolerate on the same ground what seems to
us wrong in modern life. For we cannot without undue vanity maintain
that the rest of mankind living under our conditions are less highly
developed than we. So the sincere pacifist, for example, cannot properly
be tolerant of war as an expression of prevailing savagery, beyond which
he has himself advanced.

The theory that opinions and institutions are justified as
"stepping-stones," survivals not yet quite outworn, always carries the
presumption that we are the apex–an assumption, of course, which
evolutionary theory does not bear out. It is possible that our seeming
progress may be retrogressive, that the true apex may have been reached
in Greece some two thousand years ago. When we look kindly upon (to us)
impossible views, with some idea of thesis and antithesis in our minds,
we are taking our own position as the synthesis, and, placing ourselves
at the standpoint of the whole, implying knowledge of that far off,
divine event towards which the Tennysonian creation moves. But if we
really think the truth of our vision worth striving for, it is dangerous
to hold our reputation for urbanity to be of more importance than
insight, by smiling down on opponents as on children at play, not worth
fighting. Imperfect as it is, our little truth must seem to us, as it
stands, better than any other, without smoothing away the stark
contradiction between it and its opposite, and without claiming for it a
higher level than for them, if it is to be at once effective and humble.

To all of this it may be answered that our idea of tolerance has been an
impossible ideal; that simply by making the definition unwarrantably
strict, the quality has been pushed out of reach; and that, on these
terms of course it cannot exist. Nevertheless the exact quality of
current attempts at tolerance is made visible in the light of that
extreme form which we have been considering: as Plato judged the success
of actual forms of the state by comparison with that perfect justice
which was to be found in none of them. But if, as the situation
suggests, the degree of tolerance is in inverse ratio to the force of
conviction, we cannot hold both as ideals. The question is, Which is the
more valid?

By assuming tolerance as a possession or even as a goal, we have lost
that driving power of conviction which more primitive, less imaginative
forms of belief still hold. Perfect tolerance would be an anaesthetic
influence; it would militate against that clash of open conflict in
which alone are ideas tested. If tolerance is to be achieved only by
proportionate weakening of conviction, the prevailing acceptance of such
an ideal may be not merely a crying for the moon, but for a burning toy
balloon which would be of no value to us if we had it.

The past few centuries have deepened the conception of tolerance, given
inner meaning as a virtue to what was originally only a convenience of
social conduct. Tolerance in act has been proved practically advisable.
It rests on the recognition that the intolerant Calvin, burning
Servetus, was a more positively objectionable member of society than the
Greek sage whose skepticism was so complete that he would commit himself
to nothing more than the wagging of his finger. But if we are right in
maintaining the incompatibility of tolerance and conviction, each
gaining ground only at the expense of the other, are we not following
the wrong star? Calvin was doubtless less pleasant to live with than the
Greek skeptic; but, since clear definition of issues is the first step
in judgment, the following of the harsher example may clear the way for
those battles of thought which change the boundaries of its territories,
when diplomacies accomplish nothing.

Socrates, according to Plato, must have spent a good many hours and days
in buttonholing young men on the streets of Athens, and pricking the
airy bubbles of the catchwords which they used so glibly. His inveterate
questioning often seemed to lead only to a deadlock. "What _is_ this
justice, this temperance, this courage, of which you seem so sure?"–he
would ask, and, after leading them a merry chase along the mazes of
thought, brought them to the reluctant conclusion that virtue is not so
simple, after all. There was something of the spirit of the detective in
this sleuthing among ideas, this quick recognition and rejection of
clues. What Socrates was chiefly trying to do–and no wonder he was
accused of corrupting the young men!–was to cultivate in his
interlocutors the rare art of questioning, to extirpate in them the
prevalent stupidity of taking things for granted.

But Socrates did not cure the world of using catchwords. In war, in
politics, in religion, even in science, they still pass for the coin of
the realm. They are always dangerous: for they always delude one into
thinking to be easy that which is in truth most difficult. There is
hardly a virtue which we can have without crowding out another virtue.
We of the twentieth century have taken tolerance for granted, as if it
were as much to be expected as good manners. And we have scarcely
thought to ask the price for which it is bought.

If it is only a utilitarian matter of social policy, to be relinquished
when that policy changes, we have done foolishly to exalt it as a moral
virtue. If we must choose between tolerance and our sense of
ascertainable truth in the world, our eyes should be open to the terms
of that choice; if we must have a slogan, shall it be, Live and Let
Live, or The Truth is Mighty and Shall Prevail? If, on the other hand,
the field of tolerance is limited to cases in which we are indifferent
or skeptical, much is to be gained in humility and sincerity by the
frank avowal. We may cut the Gordian knot, and boldly accept the
paradox. In any case, something is gained, if only that we have asked,
What do we mean by tolerance?

THE NEO-PARNASSIANS

"… But I would implore them to abstain from wearing their
knees out before the shrine of the ugly and grotesque when
there is all the beauty of the world for the choosing."–SIR
JOHNSTONE FORBES-ROBERTSON.

Away back in the dark ages, when the kindergarten was still an
experiment, a stern elderly person–doubtless a relic of the yet earlier
age in which children addressed their mother as "Honoured Madam," and
never sat down in their father's presence–a person of far-seeing but
ruthless mind, would every now and then arise to predict that Froebel
and his disciples, by making things too easy for the infant
intelligence, would produce a spineless generation, with the mentality
of rubber dolls. Changing the figure, with apparently an eye upon the
dentist, this pessimist would point out that a pap-fed race could have
occasion for, and therefore would develop, no teeth.

It is far from my purpose to venture, with presumptuous foot, into the
happy fields of pedagogy: it is only that certain straws, gyrating in
the intellectual zephyrs of the moment, have arrested an inquiring eye,
and awakened a mental question as to how far the disaffected prophet may
have been right. Is the multiplication-table set to music, and gayly
sung rather than acquired with labor and sorrow in the dark watches of
the study-hour after school, really responsible for a contemporary
mental condition which seems to demand that even the simplest short
story be expounded by the editor, in type which dwarfs the title, lest
the readers' brains grope vainly for its meaning? Have our early
fumblings with strips of many-colored paper rendered us incapable of
coping with even the most obvious canvas? Were those well-beloved blocks
and cubes the true instigators of Csaky, Brancusi, Delaunay, and the
rest–sculptors who last year set us gasping? Did "Birdie in the
treetop" blaze the trail for the divers exponents of "interpretative
dancing?" Most harrowing of all, have the "finger-plays" of babyhood,
designed for the gradual awakening of the child's consciousness to his
five senses and his little ego, led up to the reverberating chaos of
words which we are now called upon seriously to regard as poetry?

Let the responsibility rest where it may, we have been relentlessly
herded and driven far by those who in this day and generation assume to
mold our opinions for us. We have survived the onslaught of Cubism,
Futurism, St. Vitism and what not, in art: is there anything in stone or
bronze, or on canvas, that can now take us by surprise? We have outlived
the shock, and can even derive pleasure from the spectacle, of our
elders joyously cavorting between the tables when we ask them out to
dine; other times, other manners. We have learned to listen unabashed
and with the proper modicum of concern while Sweet-and-twenty, who has
been to the "movies" and knows whereof she speaks, discourses between
the soup and fish upon themes erstwhile supposed to be undiscussible,
unless by physicians and students of sociology. We can even look without
remonstrance upon our nearest and dearest attired only less frankly than
Josephine when she essayed to convince the world of the superiority of
her challenged charms to those of Madame Tallien. We have had hitherto
one refuge when all this grew too much for us: we could exclaim, if we
still had the hardihood to quote Tennyson, "I will bury myself in my
books"–of course omitting the remainder of the line, which is
"unsocial." Now this stronghold also has been battered down. If we seek
diversion in a story which is really a story, and not a tract–if we
venture still to take pleasure in those who until to-day have been
considered poets–we are upheld to the contumely of our fellows as
"primitive," "elementary," and our beliefs are made a by-word and a
hissing in the public prints. Ours not to reason why, ours not to make
reply: we are expected to go for artistic and literary pabulum where we
are sent–"forty feeding as one," like Wordsworth's cattle; and perhaps,
to borrow once more from the Light Brigade, ours but to do and die,
intellectually, may be the result.

Doubtless most of the "advanced investigators" (inspired circumlocution
of M. Andre Salmon) in both art and literature are sincere; yet it seems
an almost unavoidable conclusion that this epidemic which is upon us in
many forms, all disagreeable and unnecessary, like any other epidemic,
arises from a physiological condition akin to the tarantism which once
swept southern Europe, giving the tarantella its name, and not to be
cured even by the startling method of burying the victim up to the neck
in earth. The mythic spider having bitten him, whirl he must, until he
drop exhausted. Crueler than the earlier spider of whose bite noble Tom
Thumb died, the ferocious arachnid of our day, like the _Lycosa
tarantula_ of the Middle Ages, is ravaging at will, and sparing no age,
sex, or previous condition of activity. The "bite" may not prove fatal:
but while the madness lasts, clarity of vision, calm and coherent
utterance, are not to be expected. The dervish-like frenzy of literary
and artistic production will of course eventually wear itself out; but
until it does, those who by Heaven's mercy have been spared the
infection can only, with what patience the gods vouchsafe, stand out of
the way and look on, deafened by the insistent remedial strains.

Even as heat-waves above the summer fields and sands cause fixed objects
to shimmer and fluctuate before the eyes, sometimes creating actual
mirage, so the extraordinary brain-waves of our day seem to influence
human conduct and, necessarily, its reflex, achievement in art and
letters. It is not that both subject and handling are so often grotesque
or deplorable; it is not–though the spread of any epidemic is
regrettable–that more and more worthy craftsmen fall victims,
hypnotised by others' gyral eccentricities, and by what a recent
promulgator of the cult terms "the strident and colossal song." It is
that these, clamoring for their own prepossession, deny us ours!

"Dolly," besought the heroine of Miss Broughton's first novel, the novel
which created a school of fiction, and which her unsuspecting father
told her was unfit for her, a young woman, to read: "Dolly, am I so very
ugly? Look!" Her sister, thus adjured, surveyed the appealing face. "I
do not admire you," she returned, calmly. "But that is no reason why
some one should not!" Cannot the apostles of the tarantist persuasion,
in its varying manifestations, show us an equal liberality? They do not
admire what one of them has summed up as "the completely solved,
tabulated, indexed problems of the past:" but may not others who do be
permitted to enjoy them in peace, unobjurgated? Those who are labelled
"early-Victorian," "primitive," "elementary," are usually possessed of
the ornament, no less out of date, of a meek and quiet spirit; and, if
let alone, will continue on their unobtrusive way, neither assailing nor
disparaging schools whose inspirations do not attract them. Why may they
not be permitted to adhere to their ideals, unwhipt of neo-justice?–since
the untrammelled tarantist proclaims with no hesitating voice his right
to stand up, naked and unashamed, for his own!

There is one certain result of intellectual or any other sort of
bullying; present forcibly enough to any man that he is merely a worm,
and he is bound in the nature of things to "turn," with what vigor he
may–and as the late Sir William Gilbert well said, "Devil blame the
worms!" Tell a man often enough, and contemptuously enough, that he
doesn't know what he is talking about, and his most cherished beliefs
are only so much junk, and you inevitably goad him into nailing his
colors to the mast. The holy martyrs need not have died for their
convictions if they had not been badgered into, not merely holding, but
flaunting them! Again, to fall back upon my Gilbert, "versifier" and
master of "smart-aleckry" though it seems he was, as measured by a
recent standard–

"I hate to preach, I hate to prate,
I'm no fanatic croaker;"

and I am driven to couch my lance and gallop into the lists chiefly by a
modern form of challenge unrecognized of Chivalry: "My ladye is fairest
because yours is foul and void of grace!" Your lady is fairest?–no man
has a better right than you to think so, or to say so: but it is
unknightly to attempt bolstering up her claims by a personal attack upon
_my_ ladye, whose charms I justifiably hold to be supreme. The glaive
being down, there is nothing for it but the onset–and may the best man
win!

In less archaic phrase, no man who knows his Milton and his Wordsworth
can sit silent and be told that "when a perfect sonnet" (a _perfect_
sonnet, remember!) "is duly whittled out, it is usually found to be
worth about as much as a well-crocheted lambrequin"–whatever that may
be. No man who has delighted in his Praed, his Ingoldsby, his Locker,
Calverley, Lang, Austin Dobson, Owen Seaman and the rest, can see them
all swept into the scrap-heap as "worn out–an exhibition of adroitness
… for impressing a circus audience!" No man can hear with patience the
undoubted fact that the blank verse of Shakspeare and Milton was
"written quite without rhyme," adduced, with an air of giving light to
them that sit in darkness, by way of supporting a hurly-burly of words
which has been well compared to "pumpkins rolling over a barn-floor."
That blank verse does not rhyme is too "elementary" to need discussion:
and the Eocene minds which still read Shakspeare, Milton, and even
Tennyson, are thoroughly aware that the construction of blank verse is
governed by no less rigorous rules than the sonnet or the dainty old
French forms which Austin Dobson and our own Bunner made exquisite in
English. But the foe of rhyme is by no means limited to blank verse in
support of his thesis: experiments in unrhymed metre are by no means
new. Bulwer tamed the Latin verse-forms to eat out of his hand; Ossian
and his collateral descendant, "Fiona Macleod," made chamber music of
the wild harp of the Gael; Aldrich, in his youth, went far toward
establishing his fame with the _Ballad of Baby Bell_: Charles Henry
Lueders, untimely dead a generation ago, achieved a gem in his brief
dirge, _The Four Winds_. One may be a poet without ever having written a
line in metre. It is doubtful whether Mrs. Meynell's well-won
reputation–a reputation which brought her, in a "popular ballot" for
England's laureateship, nearly six thousand votes, and a place second
only to Rudyard Kipling–does not rest quite as much upon the poetic
beauty of her essays as upon her verse. "The mighty engine of English
prose" is always available for the writer with "a message;" Lincoln did
not elect to "sing" his Gettysburg address, which no recent bard whom it
has been my privilege to read has surpassed. If the bearer of the
"message" have not the sense of music which produces that perfection of
rhythm needing no grace of rhyme; if he object to rhyme "because,"
according to a recent candid outburst, "it is so confoundedly hard to
find!" the lyre and even the oaten pipe are not for him. Nothing is
easier to compass, in either prose or metre, than the cryptic, the
portentous; the bellow of the trombone, the thud of the big drum, will
always cause some one to listen, at least long enough to find out what
is causing the disturbance. But neither Vorticist, Polyrhythmicist, nor
any other specialist in Parnassian wares, need flatter himself that
lines of assorted lengths, huddled like jack-straws, make poetry. If any
message be there, it is obscured and marred by its uncouth disguise; if
there be no message, the "work" has even less excuse for being. I am far
from denying the right of every one to express himself in whatever way
he think fit: it is wholly his own affair, and it may be, like
Benedick's hypothetical lady's hair, "of what color it please God." But
if it be neither verse nor honest prose–if it be cacophony for mere
cacophony's sake–he who takes in vain for it the name of poetry, does
it little service.