|
GARRULITIES OF AN OCTOGENARIAN EDITOR BY HENRY HOLT HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1923 |
CHAPTER II THE EDITOR The Unpartisan Review, April, 1920 As already said in the preface, which, as also already said, nobody reads, this chapter recounts the principal influences which shaped the editor of the Review in which the publication of the Garrulities was begun, and consequently of that Review itself. It seems best to retain the allusions to it, and the direct words to the subscribers, as originally written. Probably such of my remaining reminiscences as have the best chance of interesting you are those which bear most directly upon the character of this Review. The fact that I am editing it at eighty is counter to a widespread supersitition that precocious development is short-lived. I have no distinct recollection of a time when I could not read. I remember my third birthday, and with it is associated a book where I met the unknown word “vex,” and asked what it meant. I remember a dame school at four, and at about six I was sent to a boarding-school, but within sight of the house of an aunt. At that stage of my career I was often lifted onto a chair or table to “speak a piece.” I knew several, but the only ones I can recall are The Battle of Hohenlinden, which greatly attracted me when my father recited it, and Marco Bozzaris. I do remember, however, telling an aunt that my favorite author was Anonymous, and asking her to tell me about him. At eight, I was studying Latin, and at eleven, I took a prize in Greek. Excessive discipline provokes rebellion 33 Most of my fitting for college, with three short intervals near home in Baltimore, was at General Russell’s in New Haven. He had been brought up at the Norwich Military Academy in Vermont, under Captain Partridge, and his ideal of education was Military Discipline. He was at heart a kindly man, but I never suspected it before a talk we had shortly before I entered college, when he came to visit me while I was ill at an aunt’s in the neighborhood. At school he was little more than a soulless machine— Discipline, Discipline, Discipline. Another exception was in a Sunday evening class of the older boys which he took thru one or two of Paley’s books, giving us a good deal of friendly but sadly-biased and rigidly puritanical instruction. He made me a thorough rebel against nearly everything he tried to instil. The ground had been pretty well prepared for that when I was ten, by the Westminster Catechism, where they tried to teach me that a person is bound by promises made without his knowledge or consent by his sponsors in baptism. I had even then a pretty strong tendency to judge things for myself, and that doctrine was too much for me. So was being forced, at home and at school, to go to church. Some of my readers may be amused to know that a part of my musical education came from blowing the organ at St. Timothy school: it increased my intimacy with the music teacher. At Yale I was the solo first-bass in the choir. But notwithstanding these religious functions, the influences I have mentioned, backed by some discussion with a radical tinker in my father’s employ, made me a thoroughgoing skeptic in my boyhood. When about half way through my eighteenth year, I entered Yale with the class of 1861. I had, of course, a colossal constitution: otherwise, with the tendency to gout, and the other troubles I have already mentioned, I should not now be writing these lines. 34 Puritan Yale. Compulsory chapel Well, that constitution of mine often wouldn’t let me sit still and study, but would insist and insist and insist on indulging in ebullitions—on rushing me off on some wild quest or other—oftenest perhaps, to walk the three miles to Beacon Hill, and making me lie there to rest before one of the loveliest scenes I know, and think of everything—or nothing. The constitution wouldn’t even let me stay in nights. What were moon and stars made for? Tho when I went out, it was not always for the moon and stars. Late Spring, when the examinations were coming, was the time when the constitution would interfere with my studies most. The elm And there was nothing but puritanism to keep that constitution in order, and puritanism was not content to say: “Control it,” but insisted on saying: “Mortify it,” which of course I wouldn’t do: so I let it have its own way. The principle of moral education prevailing in New Haven at that time was well illustrated in a story told me of a much admired woman who let her daughters dress for a party one night, and then told them they couldn’t go, to teach them to bear disappointment. The comparative freedom of college, coming after the excessive restraints at school, was of course peculiarly dangerous for such a boy, and the puritan atmosphere then prevalent there by no means mitigated the dangers. Among its features were compulsory chapel attendance twice a day and three times on Sunday, the earliest before daylight, in winter. The Yale of today is far different from the Yale of my time. Then it was probably at its very worst, in mind, body and estate. In mind it dated back centuries, in body it was the old brick row, and in estate it was squalidly poor. The general attitude of the faculty was the puritanical mistrust of anything that had an element of pleasure in it. To be a member of the Yale faculty up to the late sixties, a man had to be orthodox, and before those times thinking men had begun to lose their orthodoxy. Stupid religion with Sound economics 35 The result was that while the Yale faculty were generally good scholars and men of strong and high character, they were to but a small degree thinking men. One with whom I ever became very intimate, and that after graduation, was William D. Whitney, who was, with the possible exception of Dana, the greatest of them all; and at college he kept the widest of his thinking to himself. In after years he made it plain to me that his staying at Yale, in spite of brilliant offers where the atmosphere was more liberal, was a piece of noble self-sacrifice for the sake of his family, whose roots were deep in New Haven soil. He considered it a stupid place, and astonished me by calling several of its most eminent men stupid. The teaching profession was then, is now, and is to be for a long time to come, overcrowded and consequently underpaid. But certainly those men did not bear their sacrifices less heroically than their successors, and unlike so many present-day teachers, they did not permit their self-inflicted poverty to warp their judgment and turn them into Bolsheviks. But their air was not as full of that epidemic as our air. Perhaps the most glaring instance of the prevailing “stupidity” was the “matriculation.” Some time after entrance, such freshmen as had not been caught in any peccadillos were given a pamflet of “Laws of Yale College” and called upon to sign a declaration that they would obey them. Among these laws were some against smoking on the campus and sailing in the harbor—both of which acts had long been recognized habits. This in- consistency was one of our lessons in the sanctity of law. Most of the students of course thought little about it, or about anything else. Equally of course a few criticized it, and a smaller few despised it. Yale has changed greatly, but within a dozen years, when Dr. Slosson wrote his book on the universities, there prevailed enough of the spirit or lack of spirit which promulgated those dead laws and ignored breaking them, to make the frequent answer to Dr. Slosson’s inquiries into apparent incongruities: “It has always been so.” 36 Difficulties deliberately imposed. The revival of 1858 Those belated Puritans, with all their sturdy virtues, were not the men to have much influence on boys. I can recall but one of the faculty who appeared ever to have been young, and if any other one ever had been, the standard was against his showing it. Outside the classrooms, we saw very little of them, especially those of us who were not religiously inclined, and needed guidance most. They were good and learned men, but most of them being “stupid,” not only inspired us with little interest in our studies, and made faithfulness to routine the main test of merit, but being Puritans, they actually, for the sake of “discipline,” deliberately threw obstacles in our way. The training in the classics was almost all in the grammar, and while we were studying Chemistry, they actually gave us a pamphlet of chemical formulas to learn by heart. of course most of the boys of any spirit flunked it. In short, the most diabolical ingenuity could hardly have done more to make both religion and scholarship repulsive. One morning on the chapel steps Bill Gandy remarked: “Yale would be a very excellent institution if only the religious and literary exercises were omitted.” In the Spring and early Summer of my freshman year (1857) the country was swept by a religious “revival.” They had it strong in New Haven. The churches were open and full every day, the congregational singing being noticeable for the preponderance of female voices. The Yale faculty, of course, went in strong to convert the students, and all but half a dozen succumbed. Among the half-dozen were myself and the two leading boys (men we called them then) in my class, Edward Rowland Sill, afterwards the well-known poet, and Sextus Shearer, whose early death perhaps prevented his becoming better known than Sill. By the following Fall, the dissipation at Yale was probably greater than ever before or since. Is precocity evanescent? Sill and Shearer 37 You will probably be glad to know that we have now reached the point where I can begin to tell you of the interesting men and books that were influential in making this Review what, for good or ill, it is. But first perhaps I ought to revert for a moment to its editor’s precocity. After all that I have said against the wide impression that precocity is evanescent, I must confess that in some respects mine was. Learning came to me so easily that, in my boyhood, to make a good recitation I hardly needed to study at all, and when at Yale I found the faculty making the most of the men endowed with little more than memory, I conceived a sadly mistaken contempt for the whole business, and neglected my studies, and my powers of acquisition sank to the average. Since I have incurred the editor’s necessity of knowing everything, I have had a bitter realization of my early errors in this regard. What may be of value in this Review is largely due to my classmates Shearer and Sill. of Sill’s character and talents the world knows a good deal. Shearer’s were as remarkable. The two were the closest of friends, and their united influence on the whole class was an intellectual and moral stimulus vastly greater than all else that the college provided. They were unanimously elected class poet and class valedictorian, and when we survivors meet as old men, we like to tell each other of what we still owe to Sill and Shearer. We soon dubbed Shearer Senex. Not that there was anything senile about him, but on the contrary, he was a splendid gymnast, and alas! killed himself early by constant fatigue at gymnastics. But he was so gentle and temperate and wise! He was splendidly talented too, and far beyond his years. 38 Sartor Resartus. Flounderings in skepticism It would pay you now, if you have the leisure, to hunt up his papers in the old Lits. While the rest of us, even sometimes including Sill, were raising the devil, Shearer pursued his quiet way, and we all loved him and, to our salvation, went out of our ways to seek him. In my long life, I’ve met only one influence quite like his. That was John Bigelow’s. Those that knew it will know what I mean. Shearer’s two gospels were Dickens and Carlyle. Altho Dickens’ greatest works had not been written when we were in college, Shearer taught us sympathy with the broad humanity of the early ones. But he made Sartor Resartus the strongest literary influence that then entered the lives of some of us. For me, it filled the greatest need that up to that time I had ever known—a need that, in the transition from traditional faiths to rational ones, was then to some young men very sore. Shearer was naturally conservative; Sill, radical; and I think he and I were pretty well agreed that whatever is is wrong, and proved to be by all experience: for, in the long run, everything that has been, has been substituted by something better. Like all half-baked radicals, we failed to suspect that our proposed substitutes would probably not be as good as what they might replace. The idea of Evolution had then hardly entered anybody’s bead. Even Darwin’s contribution appeared but a little while before we graduated, and Spencer’s realization of it in ideas and institutions not tifi later still. Our formative years were years of terrible floixnderings. We despised and hated the dogmas around us, and were sadly put to it to find faith in anything. In seeking it among the beliefs that chilled us, we were like babies sucking the breasts of dead mothers. We soon abandoned the dogmas, and I, at least, many of the truths that they illustrated. Shearer had the genius to shed the dogmas and retain the truths, and he kept some consciousness of them in us. Sill helped me to come much under the influence of Tennyson, especially of the scientific and philosophic flashes in In Memoriam, and the social and political speculations in Locksley Hall. Yale and her poets. Henry VIII and Francis 39 My first recollections regarding Sill are when Delta Kappa, a freshman society, offered prizes for three songs. The successful ones were read at a meeting, and Sill was announced as the author of two that struck me as immensely above the college average. Sill had just been sent away from New Haven, for answering a tutor’s request to scan some Latin verses with: “I don’t scan, sir.” A boy could then be sent away from Yale for almost any peccadillo. The atmosphere of the Yale of that day does not seem to have been congenial with poets. The only other eminent one she ever had was Stedman. He was there some eight years before us. Yale’s management of both of them was so ineffective that it did not save her from the necessity, under her rules, of sending them away. Stedman’s peccadillo was getting married. Each class elects a poet, and as I did not graduate till the year after Sill (which will be explained later), and as Bobbie Weeks had not then matured into the poet beloved by Stedman and Stoddard, my class elected me. I mention the circumstance only because I shared with my illustrious predecessors, the honor of being bounced by Alma Mater. One night not long after Sifi’s songs were read, in a rush of enthusiasm over them and something else be had written, I went to his room to tell him we were kindred souls—a very cheeky assumption on my part, and yet with enough foundation to make us very close friends thru his life. I found him in bed, but made him get up and go for supper to Eli Hill’s, then the restaurant of all our Symposia. Sifi, I think it was, got off something about Henry VIII getting Francis I out of bed at the Field of Cloth of Gold. 40 Secret societies at Yale I remember being impressed as he got out of bed by the extraordinary slightness of his build. Yet he could give me, who weighed a third more than he did, more than I wanted with the gloves. And he was a very handsome fellow, looked the poet more than any other man I have ever known, and had a beautiful bass voice. All the New Haven girls wanted to know him, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Yet in after life his friendships with women were many and close. In the class too, it may be remarked episodically, was Frank Kernochan, and two classes later was his brother Fred, the two being virtually the founders of the University Club in New York, with its multiple progeny. They were ideal men for such a function, and had much to do with whatever claims their friends have had to “the fine old name of gentleman.” Whatever hatred of shams may characterize this Review was largely ministered to at Yale by the sham secrecy of the student societies. They were part of the medheval ways then prevalent, and they would not have been possible in an institution more abreast of the world. There was nothing like them at Harvard. The example was set by the chief senior society. When its members were about to graduate, they selected as successors the fifteen men they considered the best in the junior class. Those, in their deepest interest, were then torn away from the rest of their class. They became absorbed in their society, but never mentioned it to an outsider, and if its name was mentioned by an outsider before one of them, he left the room. On going to visit him, one was greeted in the room by a genuine skull and cross-bones over the door, and somewhere on the wall was a photograph of Ed Sifi and Bill Fuller sitting at the respective ends of a small table on which were another skull and cross-bones, and looking more serious than they ever looked anywhere else in their lives— all this to excite the awe and curiosity of the younger undergraduates, and it did it with a vengeance! It backed up the dominant theological notions, with their hopes of Hell, in making the college more serious and stupid still. It could never have flourished in a healthier atmosphere. Their superstitions and evils 41 I’m told the secrecy and death’s head mummery have been dying out, but the procrustean numbers of the chief society have prevented more than one man of the earlier time keeping a live interest in the college. In universities generally, and especially at Yale and Harvard, the chief bond between the alumni is their senior societies, and the alumni influence in university control largely proceeds from them. Therefore they should be elastic enough to include all who ever prove themselves the best. The leading society at Harvard takes in a few at a time, and has them participate in selecting the rest from their class. They take those they want without unyielding rigidity regarding number, and they have even elected honorary members. The chief influence at Yale in my time alienated some of the ablest alumni, and so must inevitably have been something of a handicap in the fierce competition which began about then, and which, in the days of modern efficiency, even Yale with her staunch Puritan independence and her traditional leisureness, could not escape. To give my personal experiences of the sham would probably add force to what has been said, but I hesitate to do it, because some of those experiences are not creditable to the boy I was sixty-odd years ago, and tho I don’t altogether admire him, I can’t suppress a certain tenderness and pity for him; and, as already intimated, I trust I am not as shameless as Rousseau. This is not to intimate, however, that I had as much to be ashamed of. Moreover, the experiences reflect a little unfavorably upon some dear friends who are dead, and giving the experiences may tend to alienate some of the few who are still living; moreover my giving them not only may be set down to personal pique, but my judgment may be regarded as biased by it. 42 Despised honors. A cruel superstition On the other hand, however, my experiences could not have been unique; and they bear upon what many unprejudiced judges, including at least one supremely eminent member of the chief senior society, have regarded, however much it may have changed since their opinion was formed, as a great curse to the University; and as, after all, those reminiscences belong with my others affecting the character of this Review, it seems, on the whole, somewhat in the nature of a duty to give them. To do so, I must go back a little. By the end of Sophomore year, the ebullitions of the aforesaid constitution, my rebellious spirit, many of the university’s peculiarities alredy described, and the indifference to the curriculum fostered by them, sent me down very deservedly to the next class. This experience led me to turn over, at least partly, a new leaf, and study a little until I was awarded one of the honors which I despised. When one of the tutors told me of it as almost a joke, I said, “I’ll soon fix that,” and I slacked up studying so that my name did not appear in the next honor list. But I took the leading essay prize in the University, and with Sill, Shearer, and my other intimate friends in the leading senior society, my election to it was generally regarded as a matter of course. The conservative element, however, very justly regarded me askance, and I failed of election. Now here comes the point. At that time, instead of the class, under the uncanny influences of the societies, submitting itself to the infamies of “tap day,” those with any chances of election stayed in their rooms the night when elections were given out, and were visited under the symbolic cover of the darkness, by delegates of the societies. I waited with pleasant anticipations for Sifi and Shearer, and waited all night without their coming. What was more, they did not come near me for weeks. The absurd secrecy prevented my closest friends from preparing me for the blow, or say- ing anything about it after it fell. Some frank confessions. An antidote to shams 43 Instead of coming to me with assurances of the sympathy and loyalty they really felt, they stayed away. Nor did I go near them: I have seldom suffered as during those weeks. I was not entirely devoid of pride, but in time it did give out, and I went and asked Shearer if, as it seemed, I had lost my dearest friends; and so blinded was even he by the habits the society had imposed upon him, that he was surprised at the question. A fine influence that, in moulding young men! It amounts to a superstition, and could not have flourished in any atmosphere but one of superstition. I have since told the chief of the opposition to me (Such things will come out) that he was right, and he has told me that he was wrong, and tried in many ways to make up for what he considers the injustice done me. But it could not be made up: the procrustean number of the society prevents it, as it has prevented the inclusion of many men who have proved themselves more desirable than I, in the organization that, whatever its shortcomings, is very properly the chief of the alumni influences that affect Yale. Yet to me the curse was like those alluded to in my previous paper which turned out to be blessings. For like boys generally, I had accepted what the other boys regarded as the proper thing, including the absurdities of those societies. I had even advanced the money for one of the junior “tombs,” (halls without windows) and written for its initiates a blood-curdling oath of secrecy—over nothing at all; and if I had belonged to the chief senior society, probably I never should have known any better. As it was, my failure of election knocked out of me that nonsense and a good deal more; it saved me from the mental twist which made even Sill and Shearer cruel to me; it was a great incitement to the hatred of shams, and it enabled me to give my feeble testimony regarding a great evil in my university. 44 Sends younger sons to Harvard. Under-estimated politics Well, all my life has been a reaction against my education. In college I rebelled against it from my innermost soul to the ends of my finger-tips; but in my old age I see much good in it that I did not see before. For a long time the reaction against the humbug and stupidity involved a reaction against the cultural side, and I failed to appreciate a classical education—until my younger sons came from Harvard without one. I loyally sent my eldest to Yale, where that valuable article was insisted upon in his time; but when, at a class reunion some forty years after graduation, I found a brand new marble “tomb” conspicuous near the college, I said: “Well, if they haven’t got over this nonsense yet, my wife may have her way, and send the little chaps to Harvard.” The last time I was at Yale, I saw they had got over the nonsense far enough to put some windows in the enlarged Skull-and-Bones “tomb,” but they were of ground glass. Whatever may have been the effect of later study and later sorrows, being sent to boarding school in my babyhood, and kept there nearly all the time since, bad not developed in me a very sympathetic nature. And the atmosphere of home, whenever I was there, did not contain much interest in social subjects. My earliest recollections regarding politics and politicians are of objurgations of the municipal corruption in my native city, and I grew up with the idea that an interest in politics was sympathy with chicane. Under the leadership of Sill and Shearer, the class of ‘61, which I entered, took vastly less interest in social and political questions than did the class of ‘62, in which I graduated, under the leadership of Chamberlain and Mac Veagh. Chamberlain, after leading a regiment in the Civil War, became the carpet-bag governor of South Carolina, and MacVeagh became Taft’s Secretary of the Treasury. Political education from the Civil War 45 A few days after the Civil War broke out, MacVeagh told me that he had been in grave doubt of the government’s right to coerce the South, and bad been studying the question hard, and found, with great relief and delight, that he could support his government. That was one of my earliest lessons that such questions are not to be decided by the pure light of Nature—a fundamental principle in my editorship. There was Tony Higgins, too, in the class of ‘61, who became Senator from Delaware, and who had some influence in correcting my distorted views of politics and politicians. But notwithstanding the influence of these friends, what interest this Review shows in social and political questions was not engendered in me until later. The first things to develop it were the financial and economic questions raised by the Civil War, tho I had rather taken to “Political Economy” (as the whole range of economic topics was called then) in the little dabs we had of it at school and college. The dabs were mighty small: for in the Yale of that day there was not a professor of one of the subjects, or even of history. A Greek tutor did examine us on a little pamphlet syllabus of the history of Greece and Rome, and President Woolsey gave a brief but admirable course of lectures on European history, and put us thru his book on International Law, which was absurd at our stage of development. An equal absurdity was Governor Dutton’s course of lectures on Constitutional Law: what we needed was Municipal Law. President Woolsey also did bear us recite from the worst book on Political Economy that I ever saw. In the little reading I did on my own hook, Carlyle had attracted me only outside of his political work, and the same was true of my part in the reading which we all did of Macaulay’s essays. 46 John Stuart Mill, Godkin on him But the Civil War forced on us some interest in politics, and the character of Lincoln, of course, did an immense deal to quicken the appreciation of his young contemporaries of what a politician might be. Yet I left college with only spasmodic ideas of making over the universe and suppressing such small portions of it as would not readily yield to being made over. But despite all my boyish radicalism, and tho, like the rest of the new grad- ‘ uates of my time who didn’t know what to do with themselves, soon after leaving college I entered a law school (They go into Architecture now), I don’t remember taking any intelligent interest in public questions before reading Mifi’s Liberty in 1863. That led me soon to read the big Political Economy. Neither book has the relative standing that it then had. Although Mill had more to say about “thinkers” than anybody else had, he was not as much of a thinker as his broad culture and literary powers led his contemporaries to regard him. Soon after I published his Autobiography and Essays on Religion, Godkin said to me: “Never before was so great a reputation so suddenly and terribly demolished.” I think Godkin’s feeling was due as much to the shallowness of Mill’s defense for robbing another man of his wife, as to any other point. Rather an inconsistent proceeding anyhow, for a man who in his Malthusianism was constantly insisting that the procreative impulse could and should be controled by men in general. But before Spencer took the place, Mill, succeeding Carlyle, was the leading influence among men reading English. Mill never had much of an idea of Evolution: he was born too early; but I have seen the note he wrote Spencer (the original, if my memory doesn’t trick me, shown me by Youmans) offering to assume the burden (or share it, I forget which) of publishing Spencer’s philosophical series. Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, E. L. Youmans 47 And now we have come to immeasurably the strongest influence which has determined the character of this Review and, although the fact is little appreciated, of the age in which it is publisht. About 1865 I got hold of a copy of Spencer’s First Principles, and had my eyes opened to a new heaven and a new earth. Spencer’s first and chief apostles here were John Fiske and Edward L. Youmans. Everybody knows about John. Little is now known about Youmais, altho Fiske did write a very interesting biography of him; but few men have done as much to diffuse science and philosophy in America. He was one of the noblest of men—no great creator, but of an intellect that made him the intimate of Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and other leaders of that wondrous Victorian Age which our popinjays are now chattering against. Youmans’ character was even rarer than his intellect. He seemed never to have a selfish feeling, and regardless of any danger to himself, burned constantly with enthusiasm for the right education of mankind. He was one of the dozen men I have known, hardly more, who had a fair conception, humanly speaking, of the reach of the Evolution Philosophy. And yet now every newspaper is full of little dabs of it, and has hardly a paragraph without some of its terminology— most of it unrealized by those who write it and those who read it. Youmans was a big fellow with a big voice, and so full of enthusiasms that those who didn’t understand him were in danger of considering him a bore. My erliest recollection of him is of his coming into my office when I had introduced myself to him by a letter in the interest of Spencer, whose admirers here were getting up a testimonial for him. Youmans advised me (who was then a very poor young man) “not to take counsel of my enthusiasms”; yet he himself would have sold the shirt off his back for the cause. I was a very poor young man because I had lately sunk my available patrimony in the newly discovered Pennsylvania oil wells. This was another of my blessings in disguise: for it set me to work like a tiger. 48 The fight for Evolution, Appleton’s generosity Another recollection of Youmans goes back to a night at the Century, when he was descanting on Evolution to half a dozen or more of us who had gathered around him. Evolution was a new and strange idea in those days: people preferred to regard themselves as degenerate rather than as at the highest point in an advance. Some of us put in questions, and some dissented, I perhaps occasionally piping up a word of slender support, and Mayor Hewitt—probably, next to Younians, far the most intelligent man in the group—listening intently, and not uttering a syllable. All of us were absorbed, but, as I have already said, men outside of the group probably considered Youmans a bore. Youmans occupied a position peculiarly favorable for his propaganda. Years before, his sight had become so impaired that he had to depend for his reading upon a devoted sister. He could not buy all the books he needed, and trustees of libraries were not then hospitable to books containing the new heretical doctrine. One day his sister led him into Appleton’s, which then included a bookstore well supplied with English publications, and “Bill Appleton,” as the head of the house was then generally known among the trade which his membership honored, told Youmans to take and read any books he wanted at any time he wanted. Mr. Appleton’s generosity met a deserved reward. Youinans became the scientific adviser of the house, and brought to it so many of the important books on the great questions of that, epoch, as to place the house first on those subjects, and the rest nowhere. Thru him were secured the works of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall and most of their coworkers. Youmans founded the International Scientific Series, and the Popular Science Monthly as a vehicle for Spencer’s Sociology, of which the English edition then was appearing in periodical parts. Mill’s generosity. Fiske’s early lectures 49 He collected a fund of seven or eight thousand dollars to support the publication in England of Spencer’s philosophy. Spencer refused it, as he had refused the generous offer of Mill, but Yo”mns invested it somewhere in Spencer’s name. Spencer’s works took better in America than in England, and it was probably the American royalties that enabled Spencer to continue their publication until in time they made him comfortably off. In those days John Fiske frequently came down from Cambridge, and was always the centre of a group at the Century. He lectured there once on The Composition of Mind, treating it in its evolutionary aspect. That gave me my first idea of the evolution of intellect and emotion. The notices for the lecture were in my care, and I did not detect that the printer had left out the first i, and announced John, in capitals, as lecturing on “Tn C0M- POSTION of MIND.” I never was a good proof reader, especially of what I had written myself, but often mistakingly assumed a word to be what I expected it to be. The first batch of these Garrulities [when printed in The Review], tho read by three other people, suffered so much from that defect of mine, that some important passages were made nonsense. Fiske also lectured in one of the smaller rooms at the Cooper Union on biological evolution. Half a dozen years before, be had narrowly escaped expulsion from Harvard for supporting it. Within half a dozen years, after Eliot had taken the presidency, Fiske was invited to expound Evolution there, which be did in a series of lectures that were later published in two volumes as The Cosmic Philosophy. The fight for Evolution was probably the greatest one that has taken place in religious and philosophical circles since the Reformation. Among intelligent people, the Spencerian philosophy was debated almost as much as the League of Nations is now. Dear good old Noah Porter took a volunteer class thru the First Principles with a view to refuting them, and turned out every man- jack of the class an evolutionist—so far as his mind could go, which is seldom very far. 50 More on the fight for Evolution The fight of course was fiercest from the pulpits. The celebrated passage at arms between Bishop Wilberforce and Huxley is probably so far unknown to present-day readers as to justify my copying here from the account I gave of it in the paper on John Fiske in Number 19 of the Unpartizan. For reasons given in the preface (which nobody reads?), that paper is included, later, in this volume; but it is better to duplicate a short passage here than to send the reader hunting for it. The conflict was probably the greatest of all between truth and superstition. The temper of it was perhaps most strikingly illustrated when, at the meeting of the British Association in 1860, Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was “through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey,” and Huxley answered: “I asserted—and I repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashanled of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which h has no real acquaintance, only to obscure by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from, the real point at isue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.” A witness says: “The effect was tremendous. One lady fainted aid had to be carried out; I, for one jumped from my seat.” Another witness says: “I never saw such a display of fierce party spirit,” and speaks of “the looks of bitter hatred” cast upon those who were on Huxley’s side. Probably there never was anywhere before or since as widespread an interest in a philosophy as the American interest at that time in Spencer’s. He came here in the eighties, and was given, of course at Youmans’ initiative, a great public dinner at Delmonico’s—probably an experience unprecedented in the life of any other philosopher. The Spencer dinner 51 Evarts presided, and among the speakers were Beecher, Youmans and Fiske. Evarts was then probably the man most sought for such functions. He was no student of philosophy, but Appleton sent him Spencer’s books, and with a great lawyer’s power of getting up a strange subject, he pulled it off very handsomely, of course with a slip here and there, much to the amusement of those “inside.” Beecher’s speech, as I said in a previous paper, impressed me most. One passage was: It is not in my nature to derive benefit from any mortal soul and forget that obligation. I feel in my pulse a longing that goes back to the early days, to Homer, and comes down thru the whole catalog of noble writers who have written that which the world has thought worth preserving, and every man that comes up in our day, and whose writings fortify me and strengthen me—I would fain carry some tribute of affection to him. I began to read Mr. Spencer’s works more than twenty years ago. They have helped me thru a great many difficulties. I desire to own my obligation personally to him, and to say that if I had the fortune of a millionaire and should pour all my gold at his feet, it would be no sort of compensation compared to that which I believe I owe him; for whoever gives me a thought that dispels the darkness that hangs over the most precious secrets of life, whoever gives me confidence in the destiny of my fellow-men, whoever gives me a clearer standpoint from which I can look to the great silent One, and hear him even in half, and believe in him, not by the tests of physical science, but by moral intuition—whoever gives that power is more to me than even my father and my mother; they gave me an outward and physical life, but these others emancipated that life from superstition, from fears, and from thralls, and made me a citizen of the universe. Next day the Tribune gave a whole page to reporting the dinner; and sometime before, the World had reported in full Fiske’s lectures at Harvard on The Cosmic Philosophy. Imagine, if you can, the dailies, even with their enormously increased bulk, doing such things in this flibbertigibbit age! True, they have lately been occupied with other terribly serious things, but I was led to that deprecatory adjective by the fact that even those great . 52 Godkin XXX XXX matters are matters of the moment, while the public has no interest in the eternal laws of the Universe which include all the questions of any moment—those of war and peace, of world federation, and of the greatest good of the greatest number. Yet there are some hopeful signs of that revival of the broader interests which has generally been called spiritual awakening. Spencer was the first maxi to demonstrate Evolution in mind, morals and society. As already said, nearly every editorial now contains things that he taught—without the writer’s having the slightest idea where he got them. The reaction from the greatest age the world ever saw (unless Shakespeare was tremendous enough to make his age the greatest) has included a reaction against the greatest philosopher the world ever saw. But that is hardly to be wondered at when men can advertise themselves by making faces at Shakespeare. High priori has been in the blood and the literature of too many milIeniums, for experience effectively to overpower it in a generation. The sympathetic reader (and I suppose he is to be found arnortg the dientage of this RevieW * if anywhere) will now have got some idea of the fundamental influences which shaped it, but there were others nearly as strong. The earliest, perhaps a little earlier than even Spencer, was Godkin, from the time he founded the Nation until he left it. The influence on me was by no means confined to his paper. That was not many years old before he honored me with a personal relation which, coupled with the fact that we were much of the time near neighbors, made him my chief adviser. At first we were at loggerheads about Evolution. He was considerably older than I, and more suspicious of novelties. I quote from an article which I contributed to the semi- The Unpartisan, in which most of this chapter originally appeared. 53 centennial edition of the Nation. That paper also, like the one on Fiske, is given in this volume. Some time about the late sixties, the Nation, in criticising somebody, said, substantially: “It’s Herbert Spencer’s reputation over again: each authority considers him an authority on all subjects but the authority’s own”—[As if a philosopher were to grub his own facts, any more thaia a cook to grub his own potatoes!] After being well crammed by Youmans, I wrote the Nation a letter giving testimony from several great specialists (Hooker is the only one I remember) virtually declaring Spencer one of themselves. Later, by the way, Darwin was quoted, in the Life and Letters, as saying: “We all bow the knee to Spencer.” Well! The Nation and I had quite a nice little shindy, and some time later, Godkin came to me one night at the Century with: “You remember your controversy with the Nation over Spencer’s reputation? Well, I’ve just read his Philosophy of ,Style. I don’t know anything about the topics in dispute between you and my contributor, but I do profess to know something about English style. Spencer’s work on it is a masterpiece, and, judging what I don’t know by what I now do know, I am ready to presume that all you claim for him is well founded.” I of course had left college a rebel against such theology and scraps of metaphysics as had been taught there. Very little bad been taught about the social order, and my circumstances were such as not to lead me to bother about it. I odied the profanum vulgus et arceod them, and left it at that. It was pretty plain to me, as I think it must be to every sane mind, that, since the earliest records, things had improved, steadily by jerks, and tended to improve, and that therefore at any given time, compared with the future; they must be bad. But Spencer taught me that, roughly speaking, what is, is the best possible at the moment, and can be made better only by Evolution, which can be promoted by gradual and experimental supercession, but not by blind destruction. Social questions are very complicated, and can be wisely settled only by the slow methods of trial and error. The fundamental principle in the experiments, as in all experiments, is to conform them, as far as wisdom can, with the law of Evolution. 54 Pumpelly, Newcomb, Remsen, Wm. James, F. Walker The next prominent experience that affected the character of this Review was my founding of the American Science Series, about 1876. In it I selected Pumpelly for the Geology. Circumstances prevented his doing it, and twenty years or more intervened before it was done by Chamberlain and Salisbury; but a close friendship of over fifty years has made Pumpelly a strong influence on the character of my work. For the Astronomy, I selected Newcomb, who was also an economist of no mean order, and much intimacy with him was likewise effective. As everybody knows, Remsen did the Chemistry, and his friendship has been among my best influences. James did the Psychology, as the world knows to its great advantage. For years I was greatly influenced, especially regarding Psychical Research, by a close friendship with him, which, I grieve to say, was somewhat clouded toward his end, by misunderstandings which were largely due to outside influences. I vividly remember standing with Godkin one night on a street corner where our ways home from the Century diverged, when he recommended me to ask Frank Walker to do the Economics. That led to one of the dearest and most influential friendships of my life. Frank was not only probably the first economist of his time (Despite his being an American, some of his books were used at Oxford), but one of the most widely effective of men, and one of the most widely beloved. At the time of the Memorial meeting in Boston, the list of organizations for the betterment of man’s estate over which he had presided or otherwise promoted, took up over a column in the papers. He had been a general in the Civil War, taken two United States Censuses, making the wonderful 55 With Spencer and Fiske in London 55 revolutionary graphic atlas; was Commissioner of Indian affairs, Commissioner of Awards at the Philadelphia Centennial, and as President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was probably the peer of any head of an educational institution who ever lived. His great influence survives in many important places, and probably nowhere more effectively than in this humble Review and, I can’t help adding, in its editor’s heart. Godkin was to do for the series a treatise on Government, but about that time he left the Nation for the Post, and subordinated the book, only for a time, be thought, to his new job. But it waited for years, until he told me that after honest efforts he had found that daily journalism had rendered him incapable of any considerable organic work. In the early Summer of 1879, John Fiske and I occupied rooms together in London. John was delivering a course of lectures which were attended by many leading people. He was generally detained or captured by his admirers, but a considerable part of my way home was also Herbert Spencer’s, and we often walked together. Moreover, John and I bad a blissful long June day wandering and lunching with Spencer, as our guest, at Richmond. I think Spencer must have enjoyed it too: for he proposed another day at Windsor, to which we others gladly acceded. I have told something about those days in Number 16. [The paper is included in this volume, as already explained, and there is a,n entertaining mention of them in Clark’s Life of Fiske.1 The days were forty years ago, but this Review is full of their effects. Somewhere about the later eighties, I struck up a friendship with Richard Hodgson, then head of the American branch of the English Society for Psychical Research; and in the late nineties spent a wonderful week at Mr. Dorr’s lovely home in Mount Desert, in intimate companionship 56 56 Unappreciated opportunities with him and Hodgson and Frederic Myers and William James and Royce. The effects on this Review have been greater than some of its subscribers have entirely enjoyed. If this batch is equally fortunate, it may be followed by details of the inside, so to speak, of the Review, and some fuller accounts of such men and experiences as have interested me, and as I can hope may interest you. There has not been space to linger, as I have been tempted to, over those mentioned here; and I have already given many of my reminiscences of Spencer in No. 16, of Fiske in No. 19 and of Godkin, as already said, in the special semi-centennial issue of the Nation. [All these articles are included in this volume, as previously explaind.] As I have been writing this, I have been impressed for the mfflionth time in my long experience, that one of the worst defects in life is our failure to appreciate its best when we have it, especially if it has, so to speak, grown up with us. I think I did appreciate my privileges with Spencer and Godkin and Whitney: for when I met them they were older than I, and already famous. But Fiske and James and Walker and I grew up together, and it is proverbial to what extremes familiarity can debase appreciation. It did not go its length with me regarding them, of course, but it was not until the world talked of them after they were dead, that I fully realized the stupendous privilege that intimacy with them had been. The same failure of appreciation at the time is apt to hold in regard to all life’s best elements. Watch out for it, and may all good agencies help you! Another man whose greatness I didn’t recognize early was Walter H. Page. True, I never wa’s really intimate with him, as with the others, but I saw him several times and had several articles in The Forum when he edited it, and regarding them he was most kind—so kind on one occasion that I doubted his greatness, at least as a critic. I did realize that he was the best editor that, up to that 57 Walter H. Page. Law and Providence 57 time, America had had—I mean periodical editor: he was not a Godkin. In fact, I’m not sure, aSter all, that he was the sort of man we usually call “great.” I even doubt whether, if he had been, he could have made his wonderful success with his delicate job in London. The men we call great are built of too unyielding material— are too fond of their own wa’y, to get along with everybody as he did—to be everybody’s friend, and in that way to make a big job, and earn a big place, from which no just characterization can detract. I never saw him a5ter the send-off dinner in New York. Even in his speech then, there was nothing to make me reaiize what a wonderful ambassador we were sending forth, and I doubt if his greatness ws realized by anybody present that night, or even by the president who selected him. In fact, I doubt whether any such man went, but suspect that he did not exist until the occasion developed him. What would Washington have been without our revolution, or Napoleon without the French one, or Lincoln without our civil war? But at least the stuff was in all of them. And it was in Page—great stuff and fine stuff and brave stuff. He did great and fine work, and what a noble and pathetic ending he made of it! I have been impressed, too, with the number of misfortunes that have turned out good fortunes, and more and more confirmed in my belief that natural law is more like the old-fashioned anthropomorphic “Providence,” and goes much farther down into the details of our lives, than is generally realized. This is an entirely healthy attitude of mind, but there is some danger that it may lead to fatalism and dearth of effort. Surely it is only after doing our best according to our lights, that we have a right to leave the rest to Divine Law. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
|---|