MEASURE FOR MEASURE

MEASURE FOR MEASURERichard Butler GlaenzerAnd one answered: Lord,Of a truth, brave Lord,I am all the follies and yetI have sinned not blindly,But bravely, as a man; so letMy punishment be brave,Albeit courage win not Heaven.What hast thou done, brave man?All things that man can do, brave Lord.Whatsoever Hell thou choose,That Hell is thine.And one answered: Lord,Of a truth, kind Lord,I am weak but humble, and yetI have erred not often,And kindly have I been; so letThy judgment be as kind,Howbeit meekness gain not Heaven.What hast thou done, kind man?All things that man would do, kind Lord.Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,That Heaven is thine.And one answered: Lord,Of a truth, O Lord,Who am I to answer?â€¦ And yet â€¦I have lived, Life-Giver,And O, how sweet was life! so letIts sweetness cling and lo,I shall but live again â€¦ in Heaven.What hast thou done, O man?Thou only knowest true, O Lord.Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,That Heaven is Mine.

Richard Butler Glaenzer

And one answered: Lord,Of a truth, brave Lord,I am all the follies and yetI have sinned not blindly,But bravely, as a man; so letMy punishment be brave,Albeit courage win not Heaven.What hast thou done, brave man?All things that man can do, brave Lord.Whatsoever Hell thou choose,That Hell is thine.And one answered: Lord,Of a truth, kind Lord,I am weak but humble, and yetI have erred not often,And kindly have I been; so letThy judgment be as kind,Howbeit meekness gain not Heaven.What hast thou done, kind man?All things that man would do, kind Lord.Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,That Heaven is thine.And one answered: Lord,Of a truth, O Lord,Who am I to answer?â€¦ And yet â€¦I have lived, Life-Giver,And O, how sweet was life! so letIts sweetness cling and lo,I shall but live again â€¦ in Heaven.What hast thou done, O man?Thou only knowest true, O Lord.Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,That Heaven is Mine.

And one answered: Lord,

Of a truth, brave Lord,

I am all the follies and yet

I have sinned not blindly,

But bravely, as a man; so let

My punishment be brave,

Albeit courage win not Heaven.

What hast thou done, brave man?

All things that man can do, brave Lord.

Whatsoever Hell thou choose,

That Hell is thine.

And one answered: Lord,Of a truth, kind Lord,I am weak but humble, and yetI have erred not often,And kindly have I been; so letThy judgment be as kind,Howbeit meekness gain not Heaven.What hast thou done, kind man?All things that man would do, kind Lord.Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,That Heaven is thine.

And one answered: Lord,

Of a truth, kind Lord,

I am weak but humble, and yet

I have erred not often,

And kindly have I been; so let

Thy judgment be as kind,

Howbeit meekness gain not Heaven.

What hast thou done, kind man?

All things that man would do, kind Lord.

Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,

That Heaven is thine.

And one answered: Lord,Of a truth, O Lord,Who am I to answer?â€¦ And yet â€¦I have lived, Life-Giver,And O, how sweet was life! so letIts sweetness cling and lo,I shall but live again â€¦ in Heaven.What hast thou done, O man?Thou only knowest true, O Lord.Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,That Heaven is Mine.

And one answered: Lord,

Of a truth, O Lord,

Who am I to answer?â€¦ And yet â€¦

I have lived, Life-Giver,

And O, how sweet was life! so let

Its sweetness cling and lo,

I shall but live again â€¦ in Heaven.

What hast thou done, O man?

Thou only knowest true, O Lord.

Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,

That Heaven is Mine.

THE AMERICAN FARMER AS A COÃ–PERATORE. E. MillerWhenone speaks or hears of coÃ¶peration among farmers, it seems the natural thing to think first of Denmark or Ireland. These and other European countries have made so much greater progress in the business organization of farmers and farm life than America has, that it is almost inevitable that they should be held up to us as examples of what we might but do not accomplish. Various reasons are advanced for this American backwardness in what is unquestionably one of the great economic movements of our time. The American farmerâ€™s individualism and dislike of restraint is often given as the reason. Professor G. Harold Powell goes so far as to say that â€œthe investment of the farmer must be threatened by existing social and economic conditions before he can overcome his individualism sufficiently and can develop a fraternal spirit strong enough to pull with his neighbors in coÃ¶perative team work.â€ There is no doubt much truth in this, but I am inclined to think that lack of knowledge as to how to coÃ¶perate has been almost as much a hindering factor as has lack of desire to coÃ¶perate. The attempts at coÃ¶peration among farmers have been sufficiently numerous, if they had been successful, to have made coÃ¶perative effort in rural communities a familiar form of activity to us all. As it is, instances of really successful coÃ¶perative ventures among farmers, while rather impressive as an aggregate, amount to very little indeed compared with the vast volume of yet unorganized business carried on by them.Europe seems to have had wiser leaders in the coÃ¶perative work, as well as more docile followers. The American passion for bigness has largely ruled both leaders and followers. Where the Old World peoples were content to begin with small organizations for a definite purpose and let these organizations grow and develop into powerful institutions, the farmers of America have thought in terms of a continent, tried to organize nationwide societies to transact every kind of businessâ€”and failedlamentably. It has been only a few years since a great noise was made by a society which proposed to unite all farmers in one great society which should fix a minimum price on all farm products and so settle matters out of hand. Just a year or two ago Farmersâ€™ Union leaders in the South were telling the cotton farmers that only a great national organization could be of any real help in the marketing of their crop. The disastrous failures of the big organizations which were going to â€œfinance the cotton cropâ€ and the successes along various lines attained by some local and county organizations have discredited these leaders who mistook rhetoric for business sense and possibly also taught them a few things they needed to know.The great trouble with farmersâ€™ coÃ¶perative organizations in this country has been that they were too loosely organized and attempted to do too much. It is just beginning to dawn on the mind of the average farmer that a coÃ¶perative business must be conducted on the same general lines as an individual business and that he cannot secure the benefits of coÃ¶peration without giving up some of the privileges of individual action. He is learning, too, not to despise the day of small things.The lesson has been learned by some, however, in the long years of struggle for fair prices and fair treatment by the commercial world, and here and there all over the country are to be found groups of farmers who have found out the principles of business coÃ¶peration and put them into action to their own decided profit. These organizations are interesting not only for what they have done, but also for what they teach.Take the Southern Produce Company, of Norfolk, Virginia, for example. This association was organized in 1870 and now has 400 members. It handles most of the truck grown in the vicinity of Norfolk, handling for outsidersâ€”at a fixed percentageâ€”as well as for its own members. It not only sells the truck the members grow, but buys their seeds, fertilizers and other supplies. It has bought and equipped an experimental farm near Norfolk, turning it over to the State to run, and lately has erected a six-story office building in the city, building and lot costing $135,000. All this has been done without puttingin a dollar except for the capital stock which is limited to $15,000.Equally notable successes have been attained by the Hood River apple growers and the citrus fruit growers of California. The organization of these growers has not only resulted in better prices to the growers, but in a standard quality of goods and less fluctuation of prices in the retail markets. Since California growers learned to market their oranges and lemons through organization, there has been brought about a uniformity of distribution which â€œhas resulted in a lower retail price to the consumer and gives a larger proportion of the retail price to the producer.â€ These very successful organizations have one definite purposeâ€”to sell the fruit their members grow. They are organized on strictly business principles. Each memberâ€™s crop virtually belongs to the association, and is picked, graded, packed, and sold as the association directs. Details of cultivation and spraying which may affect the quality of the fruit are also looked after by the association, and the grower has no right to sell his fruit except through the association. In the case of the California Fruit Growersâ€™ Exchange this right to the privilege of handling the crop is claimed in the first place by the Local Exchange against the grower, next by the District Exchange against the Local Exchange, and finally by the General Exchange against the District Exchange. It is an up-to-date business organization these men have; the grower belongs to a Local Exchange, the Locals form District Exchanges, and these, in turn, the General Exchange. Each is independent in matters that concern it only, but all must submit to the general voice in matters which may be of concern to all.Fruit and truck crops seem to be especially adapted to coÃ¶perative marketing; or possibly the uncertainty of profit in their production and the big share of the final price absorbed by the middlemen have forced fruit and truck growers to coÃ¶perate to a greater extent than farmers in most other lines. At any rate there are quite a few successful coÃ¶perative associations among these growers. In Texas such an association does a business of $1,500,000 annually. The Grand Junction Fruit Growersâ€™ Association, of Colorado, is another notablesuccess. California nut growers market their product through a coÃ¶perative organization. Florida citrus growers claim to have raised the net price received by growers for oranges from $1.15 in 1909-10 to $1.96 for the season 1912-13. Western North Carolina fruit growers have organized, as have Georgia peach growers, and fruit raisers in many other sections. In an Alabama town a truckersâ€™ association with 190 members has standardized its products until it obtains prices considerably above those secured by individuals, and from a small beginning has grown to be the most important business concern of its town.These stories might be duplicated many times; and it is not too much to say that the fruit growers and truckers are rapidly coming to realize the benefits of coÃ¶perative organization. I do not believe it any wild prophecy to say that within a dozen years the trucker seeking a location will inquire into the marketing organization conducted by his fellow truckers just as he now inquires into the localityâ€™s shipping facilities. And some time all the local coÃ¶perative organizations marketing perishable truck and fruit will unite to conduct a great central marketing exchange. Then the present-day scarcities of certain fruits and vegetables at one town, while in another these same products are decaying and going to waste, will be avoided.Coming back from the things that may be to the things that are, it is worth while to note that in 1911 2,120 out of a total of 6,284 creameries in the United States were conducted on coÃ¶perative lines, and that of 3,846 cheese factories, 349 were coÃ¶perative. In Minnesota 608 out of 838 creameries were coÃ¶perative. In Wisconsin 347 creameries out of 1,000 and 244 cheese factories out of 1,784.In these as in other lines of business coÃ¶perative associations are largely localized. A successful coÃ¶perative creamery in a locality helps to organize other creameries near it on a coÃ¶perative basis, and so on. Similarly, the successful coÃ¶perative rural stores of the country are largely grouped in Minnesota and Wisconsin, having spread from one or two unusually successful ventures in small towns. The coÃ¶perative grain elevators of the country are mostly located in Iowa, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, although Nebraska and Kansas haveover a hundred each. Where one farmersâ€™ telephone line is organized another is likely to follow, and whole counties have been covered in this way.In short, the coÃ¶perative spirit is like the little leaven which spreads and spreads until it leavens the whole lump.It is not only that a successful coÃ¶perative enterprise leads to the establishment of similar enterprises in nearby communities. More notable and striking still is the fact that a successful coÃ¶perative enterprise in a rural community seems often to put new life into the whole community and to give the farmers entirely new conceptions of their own capacities and the possibilities of their vocation.Take, for example, the story of Svea, Minnesota, as told by a recent visitor to that townâ€”a visitor, by the way, who went to Svea simply to see how the farmers there were working together and what profits they had from so doing. I quote:â€œIn Svea they have established and operated thus far without one single failure, a coÃ¶perative creamery, a coÃ¶perative telephone company, a coÃ¶perative grain elevator, a coÃ¶perative stock-shipping association, a coÃ¶perative store, a coÃ¶perative insurance company, a coÃ¶perative bank (now forming). Moreover, they also have as a result of what we may term coÃ¶perative effort, a thoroughly equipped high school with agricultural and domestic science teaching, a consolidated church with a resident pastor, a school library and a State teaching library, neighborhood social meetings three times a month under church influences. They have made their neighborhood a reading neighborhood. Almost every farmer takes two to four farm papers and other reading matter in proportion.â€œIn other words, the Svea farmers have become â€˜business menâ€™ as surely as commercial men in the towns, and are doubling their profits as a result, while they are at the same time developing a high degree of culture and that satisfying social life, without which mere money is valueless, while also maintaining moral and spiritual influences which town life tends to destroy.â€The first enterprise was the creamery which was started in 1896. It paid so well that the coÃ¶perative telephone line came four years later; and, having once learned how much it helpedthem to work together, they have continued all along to find out new ways in which they could coÃ¶perate for the upbuilding of the community. The coÃ¶perative store, strictly on the Rochdale plan, was started in 1909, and to show how coÃ¶peration pays, the experience of the town pastor may be cited. He took $100 stock in the store, giving his note in payment. He then went on for a year buying goods from the store at the usual retail prices. When settlement was made, ten months later, it was found that the dividends due himâ€”the rebate on his purchasesâ€”amounted to $150.60. He had, without spending a cent or paying any extra prices for merchandise, cancelled his note and the interest on it and acquired a balance of $44.60. In other words, if he had bought his goods from a regular merchant, he would have paid that merchant $150.60 in net profits, whereas by coÃ¶perating with his neighbors and trading with himself so to speak, he was enabled to return the whole sum to his own pocket. With such examples of the benefits of coÃ¶peration before their eyes, it seems but natural that the farmers of Svea should be the prosperous, progressive, broad-minded, hopeful folks they are said to beâ€”the sort of folks who are able and willing to vote upon themselves a tax of $1.70 on the hundred dollars of property to build and equip the kind of high school they want.Take, as another example of how the coÃ¶perative leaven works, Catawba County, North Carolina. The farmers and other business men of this county decided some five years ago that they needed a county fair. They got together and had itâ€”a fair with liberal prizes but without entrance or admission fees. Everything was free to all who came, and the authorities saw to it that there was nothing to injure or deceive anyone who came. The fakers and cheap side shows which are the big end of some fairs were not allowed to stop in Hickory where the fair was held. The fair was a success, and has been a success since. Last year the townspeople did not feel inclined to contribute to it, but the farmers had learned how to work with each other in the meanwhile and they went ahead and had a fair just the same, out in an oak grove surrounding a rural high school. Fifty horses and mules on exhibition, 50 pure-bred cattle and other exhibits to match. Those who have attended Southern fairs willknow at once from the livestock entries that this was truly a good county fair. I doubt if these farmers could have held this fair, however, if it had not been for the coÃ¶perative creamery. This institution, established in 1910, when the farmers found themselves developing a dairy industry without a convenient market, has been the coÃ¶perative leaven in Catawba County. It was started with a capital of $1,500, the money being borrowed and the machinery purchased from a creamery â€œpromotedâ€ somewhere in Georgia by the agent of a creamery-selling concern which persuaded the farmers that if they got a creamery outfit the cows would somehow come to it. The creamery was a success from the start; soon it began a new work of service by handling the farmersâ€™ eggs on a coÃ¶perative basis, teaching them how to produce and market eggs of quality while securing more than the regular market price for these eggs. The lesson was quickly learned: it paid farmers to work together. Now they have a farmersâ€™ building and loan association, a â€œSweet Potato Growersâ€™ Association,â€ rural school improvement associations, womenâ€™s clubs, and are preparing for a coÃ¶perative laundry. The women meet and discuss the needs of their schoolsâ€”as many women doâ€”and then lay out a plan of action and go to work to supply the needsâ€”as too many women do not. The Farmersâ€™ Union in one district recently made a complete survey of that district and can now tell just what each farmer reads, what he does for his neighborhood, almost what he thinks, in so far as thoughts may be determined by actions and conditions. In short, â€œCatawba is a live county,â€ as any North Carolinian will tell the inquirer, and coÃ¶peration among the farmers has made it live.At first thought it may seem strange that the intellectual and moral progress of a rural community should be so quickened by business coÃ¶peration among the farmers, but a little thought will show why this must almost necessarily be so. It is beyond question that the lack of organization, of unity of purpose and concert of action, is as great a hindrance to rural progress and development as is the traditional conservatism and inertia of the individual farmer. The farmer has simply not learned how to use all the multitudinous committees and boards and sundrygroup organizations which the city dweller has found so effective in many ways. Once the farmer gets into the habit of working with his neighbor for a common end, he sees all sorts of desirable ends to be worked for, and if a â€œdivine discontentâ€ with existing evils or needs is present in the communityâ€”as it usually isâ€”it is almost certain to be no longer hemmed up in the hearts of two or three persons but set free in the consciousness of the whole community. Then action follows.The man who would improve social and moral conditions in the country districts can make no more effective start than to organize the farmers into coÃ¶perative business associations. The American farmer has, it seems to me, demonstrated himself an efficient and whole-hearted coÃ¶perator, when once he learns the trick and gets the habit.And he is learning rapidly. Before me, as I write, are reports from various Southern States of coÃ¶perative tobacco and cotton warehouses, coÃ¶perative and semi-coÃ¶perative stores, produce-selling exchanges, fertilizer and supply buying associations, cotton marketing associations, coÃ¶perative buying of machinery and livestock, and so on. There is even an account of a coÃ¶perative churchâ€”a whole community uniting to make the church a social centre and a help to all. The work of rural organization, either for business purposes or for intellectual development and social improvement, has just begun; but it is something that a beginning has been made, and I, for one, am not yet willing to admit that the American farmer is inferior to the farmers of any other country in either common sense or neighborly feeling. Unless he is so deficient, he will become as good a coÃ¶perator as any of them, for both his business interests and his sense of neighborliness demand a new organization of country life to fit the new conditions of our time.

E. E. Miller

Whenone speaks or hears of coÃ¶peration among farmers, it seems the natural thing to think first of Denmark or Ireland. These and other European countries have made so much greater progress in the business organization of farmers and farm life than America has, that it is almost inevitable that they should be held up to us as examples of what we might but do not accomplish. Various reasons are advanced for this American backwardness in what is unquestionably one of the great economic movements of our time. The American farmerâ€™s individualism and dislike of restraint is often given as the reason. Professor G. Harold Powell goes so far as to say that â€œthe investment of the farmer must be threatened by existing social and economic conditions before he can overcome his individualism sufficiently and can develop a fraternal spirit strong enough to pull with his neighbors in coÃ¶perative team work.â€ There is no doubt much truth in this, but I am inclined to think that lack of knowledge as to how to coÃ¶perate has been almost as much a hindering factor as has lack of desire to coÃ¶perate. The attempts at coÃ¶peration among farmers have been sufficiently numerous, if they had been successful, to have made coÃ¶perative effort in rural communities a familiar form of activity to us all. As it is, instances of really successful coÃ¶perative ventures among farmers, while rather impressive as an aggregate, amount to very little indeed compared with the vast volume of yet unorganized business carried on by them.

Europe seems to have had wiser leaders in the coÃ¶perative work, as well as more docile followers. The American passion for bigness has largely ruled both leaders and followers. Where the Old World peoples were content to begin with small organizations for a definite purpose and let these organizations grow and develop into powerful institutions, the farmers of America have thought in terms of a continent, tried to organize nationwide societies to transact every kind of businessâ€”and failedlamentably. It has been only a few years since a great noise was made by a society which proposed to unite all farmers in one great society which should fix a minimum price on all farm products and so settle matters out of hand. Just a year or two ago Farmersâ€™ Union leaders in the South were telling the cotton farmers that only a great national organization could be of any real help in the marketing of their crop. The disastrous failures of the big organizations which were going to â€œfinance the cotton cropâ€ and the successes along various lines attained by some local and county organizations have discredited these leaders who mistook rhetoric for business sense and possibly also taught them a few things they needed to know.

The great trouble with farmersâ€™ coÃ¶perative organizations in this country has been that they were too loosely organized and attempted to do too much. It is just beginning to dawn on the mind of the average farmer that a coÃ¶perative business must be conducted on the same general lines as an individual business and that he cannot secure the benefits of coÃ¶peration without giving up some of the privileges of individual action. He is learning, too, not to despise the day of small things.

The lesson has been learned by some, however, in the long years of struggle for fair prices and fair treatment by the commercial world, and here and there all over the country are to be found groups of farmers who have found out the principles of business coÃ¶peration and put them into action to their own decided profit. These organizations are interesting not only for what they have done, but also for what they teach.

Take the Southern Produce Company, of Norfolk, Virginia, for example. This association was organized in 1870 and now has 400 members. It handles most of the truck grown in the vicinity of Norfolk, handling for outsidersâ€”at a fixed percentageâ€”as well as for its own members. It not only sells the truck the members grow, but buys their seeds, fertilizers and other supplies. It has bought and equipped an experimental farm near Norfolk, turning it over to the State to run, and lately has erected a six-story office building in the city, building and lot costing $135,000. All this has been done without puttingin a dollar except for the capital stock which is limited to $15,000.

Equally notable successes have been attained by the Hood River apple growers and the citrus fruit growers of California. The organization of these growers has not only resulted in better prices to the growers, but in a standard quality of goods and less fluctuation of prices in the retail markets. Since California growers learned to market their oranges and lemons through organization, there has been brought about a uniformity of distribution which â€œhas resulted in a lower retail price to the consumer and gives a larger proportion of the retail price to the producer.â€ These very successful organizations have one definite purposeâ€”to sell the fruit their members grow. They are organized on strictly business principles. Each memberâ€™s crop virtually belongs to the association, and is picked, graded, packed, and sold as the association directs. Details of cultivation and spraying which may affect the quality of the fruit are also looked after by the association, and the grower has no right to sell his fruit except through the association. In the case of the California Fruit Growersâ€™ Exchange this right to the privilege of handling the crop is claimed in the first place by the Local Exchange against the grower, next by the District Exchange against the Local Exchange, and finally by the General Exchange against the District Exchange. It is an up-to-date business organization these men have; the grower belongs to a Local Exchange, the Locals form District Exchanges, and these, in turn, the General Exchange. Each is independent in matters that concern it only, but all must submit to the general voice in matters which may be of concern to all.

Fruit and truck crops seem to be especially adapted to coÃ¶perative marketing; or possibly the uncertainty of profit in their production and the big share of the final price absorbed by the middlemen have forced fruit and truck growers to coÃ¶perate to a greater extent than farmers in most other lines. At any rate there are quite a few successful coÃ¶perative associations among these growers. In Texas such an association does a business of $1,500,000 annually. The Grand Junction Fruit Growersâ€™ Association, of Colorado, is another notablesuccess. California nut growers market their product through a coÃ¶perative organization. Florida citrus growers claim to have raised the net price received by growers for oranges from $1.15 in 1909-10 to $1.96 for the season 1912-13. Western North Carolina fruit growers have organized, as have Georgia peach growers, and fruit raisers in many other sections. In an Alabama town a truckersâ€™ association with 190 members has standardized its products until it obtains prices considerably above those secured by individuals, and from a small beginning has grown to be the most important business concern of its town.

These stories might be duplicated many times; and it is not too much to say that the fruit growers and truckers are rapidly coming to realize the benefits of coÃ¶perative organization. I do not believe it any wild prophecy to say that within a dozen years the trucker seeking a location will inquire into the marketing organization conducted by his fellow truckers just as he now inquires into the localityâ€™s shipping facilities. And some time all the local coÃ¶perative organizations marketing perishable truck and fruit will unite to conduct a great central marketing exchange. Then the present-day scarcities of certain fruits and vegetables at one town, while in another these same products are decaying and going to waste, will be avoided.

Coming back from the things that may be to the things that are, it is worth while to note that in 1911 2,120 out of a total of 6,284 creameries in the United States were conducted on coÃ¶perative lines, and that of 3,846 cheese factories, 349 were coÃ¶perative. In Minnesota 608 out of 838 creameries were coÃ¶perative. In Wisconsin 347 creameries out of 1,000 and 244 cheese factories out of 1,784.

In these as in other lines of business coÃ¶perative associations are largely localized. A successful coÃ¶perative creamery in a locality helps to organize other creameries near it on a coÃ¶perative basis, and so on. Similarly, the successful coÃ¶perative rural stores of the country are largely grouped in Minnesota and Wisconsin, having spread from one or two unusually successful ventures in small towns. The coÃ¶perative grain elevators of the country are mostly located in Iowa, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, although Nebraska and Kansas haveover a hundred each. Where one farmersâ€™ telephone line is organized another is likely to follow, and whole counties have been covered in this way.

In short, the coÃ¶perative spirit is like the little leaven which spreads and spreads until it leavens the whole lump.

It is not only that a successful coÃ¶perative enterprise leads to the establishment of similar enterprises in nearby communities. More notable and striking still is the fact that a successful coÃ¶perative enterprise in a rural community seems often to put new life into the whole community and to give the farmers entirely new conceptions of their own capacities and the possibilities of their vocation.

Take, for example, the story of Svea, Minnesota, as told by a recent visitor to that townâ€”a visitor, by the way, who went to Svea simply to see how the farmers there were working together and what profits they had from so doing. I quote:

â€œIn Svea they have established and operated thus far without one single failure, a coÃ¶perative creamery, a coÃ¶perative telephone company, a coÃ¶perative grain elevator, a coÃ¶perative stock-shipping association, a coÃ¶perative store, a coÃ¶perative insurance company, a coÃ¶perative bank (now forming). Moreover, they also have as a result of what we may term coÃ¶perative effort, a thoroughly equipped high school with agricultural and domestic science teaching, a consolidated church with a resident pastor, a school library and a State teaching library, neighborhood social meetings three times a month under church influences. They have made their neighborhood a reading neighborhood. Almost every farmer takes two to four farm papers and other reading matter in proportion.

â€œIn other words, the Svea farmers have become â€˜business menâ€™ as surely as commercial men in the towns, and are doubling their profits as a result, while they are at the same time developing a high degree of culture and that satisfying social life, without which mere money is valueless, while also maintaining moral and spiritual influences which town life tends to destroy.â€

The first enterprise was the creamery which was started in 1896. It paid so well that the coÃ¶perative telephone line came four years later; and, having once learned how much it helpedthem to work together, they have continued all along to find out new ways in which they could coÃ¶perate for the upbuilding of the community. The coÃ¶perative store, strictly on the Rochdale plan, was started in 1909, and to show how coÃ¶peration pays, the experience of the town pastor may be cited. He took $100 stock in the store, giving his note in payment. He then went on for a year buying goods from the store at the usual retail prices. When settlement was made, ten months later, it was found that the dividends due himâ€”the rebate on his purchasesâ€”amounted to $150.60. He had, without spending a cent or paying any extra prices for merchandise, cancelled his note and the interest on it and acquired a balance of $44.60. In other words, if he had bought his goods from a regular merchant, he would have paid that merchant $150.60 in net profits, whereas by coÃ¶perating with his neighbors and trading with himself so to speak, he was enabled to return the whole sum to his own pocket. With such examples of the benefits of coÃ¶peration before their eyes, it seems but natural that the farmers of Svea should be the prosperous, progressive, broad-minded, hopeful folks they are said to beâ€”the sort of folks who are able and willing to vote upon themselves a tax of $1.70 on the hundred dollars of property to build and equip the kind of high school they want.

Take, as another example of how the coÃ¶perative leaven works, Catawba County, North Carolina. The farmers and other business men of this county decided some five years ago that they needed a county fair. They got together and had itâ€”a fair with liberal prizes but without entrance or admission fees. Everything was free to all who came, and the authorities saw to it that there was nothing to injure or deceive anyone who came. The fakers and cheap side shows which are the big end of some fairs were not allowed to stop in Hickory where the fair was held. The fair was a success, and has been a success since. Last year the townspeople did not feel inclined to contribute to it, but the farmers had learned how to work with each other in the meanwhile and they went ahead and had a fair just the same, out in an oak grove surrounding a rural high school. Fifty horses and mules on exhibition, 50 pure-bred cattle and other exhibits to match. Those who have attended Southern fairs willknow at once from the livestock entries that this was truly a good county fair. I doubt if these farmers could have held this fair, however, if it had not been for the coÃ¶perative creamery. This institution, established in 1910, when the farmers found themselves developing a dairy industry without a convenient market, has been the coÃ¶perative leaven in Catawba County. It was started with a capital of $1,500, the money being borrowed and the machinery purchased from a creamery â€œpromotedâ€ somewhere in Georgia by the agent of a creamery-selling concern which persuaded the farmers that if they got a creamery outfit the cows would somehow come to it. The creamery was a success from the start; soon it began a new work of service by handling the farmersâ€™ eggs on a coÃ¶perative basis, teaching them how to produce and market eggs of quality while securing more than the regular market price for these eggs. The lesson was quickly learned: it paid farmers to work together. Now they have a farmersâ€™ building and loan association, a â€œSweet Potato Growersâ€™ Association,â€ rural school improvement associations, womenâ€™s clubs, and are preparing for a coÃ¶perative laundry. The women meet and discuss the needs of their schoolsâ€”as many women doâ€”and then lay out a plan of action and go to work to supply the needsâ€”as too many women do not. The Farmersâ€™ Union in one district recently made a complete survey of that district and can now tell just what each farmer reads, what he does for his neighborhood, almost what he thinks, in so far as thoughts may be determined by actions and conditions. In short, â€œCatawba is a live county,â€ as any North Carolinian will tell the inquirer, and coÃ¶peration among the farmers has made it live.

At first thought it may seem strange that the intellectual and moral progress of a rural community should be so quickened by business coÃ¶peration among the farmers, but a little thought will show why this must almost necessarily be so. It is beyond question that the lack of organization, of unity of purpose and concert of action, is as great a hindrance to rural progress and development as is the traditional conservatism and inertia of the individual farmer. The farmer has simply not learned how to use all the multitudinous committees and boards and sundrygroup organizations which the city dweller has found so effective in many ways. Once the farmer gets into the habit of working with his neighbor for a common end, he sees all sorts of desirable ends to be worked for, and if a â€œdivine discontentâ€ with existing evils or needs is present in the communityâ€”as it usually isâ€”it is almost certain to be no longer hemmed up in the hearts of two or three persons but set free in the consciousness of the whole community. Then action follows.

The man who would improve social and moral conditions in the country districts can make no more effective start than to organize the farmers into coÃ¶perative business associations. The American farmer has, it seems to me, demonstrated himself an efficient and whole-hearted coÃ¶perator, when once he learns the trick and gets the habit.

And he is learning rapidly. Before me, as I write, are reports from various Southern States of coÃ¶perative tobacco and cotton warehouses, coÃ¶perative and semi-coÃ¶perative stores, produce-selling exchanges, fertilizer and supply buying associations, cotton marketing associations, coÃ¶perative buying of machinery and livestock, and so on. There is even an account of a coÃ¶perative churchâ€”a whole community uniting to make the church a social centre and a help to all. The work of rural organization, either for business purposes or for intellectual development and social improvement, has just begun; but it is something that a beginning has been made, and I, for one, am not yet willing to admit that the American farmer is inferior to the farmers of any other country in either common sense or neighborly feeling. Unless he is so deficient, he will become as good a coÃ¶perator as any of them, for both his business interests and his sense of neighborliness demand a new organization of country life to fit the new conditions of our time.

RELIGION IN THE MODERN NOVELLouise Maunsell FieldOfall the many accusations brought against our much abused young twentieth century, there is none more popular than that of materialism. For all its deficiencies, whether artistic, social or ethical, this parrot-cry furnishes a convenient explanation; but unfortunately for those who welcome such catch-phrases as a ready means of avoiding any necessity for trying to exercise their disused and rusty thinking apparatus, convenient and accurate are seldomâ€”perhaps neverâ€”synonymous. If this age of ours really is what it has so frequently been called by capable judges, the Age of the Social Conscience, that fact is in itself ample disproof of materialism; for if conscience in its every manifestation be not spiritual, what is? True, we have done away with the old scorn of the body and of that generality once known as â€œthe world,â€ but this is simply the natural result of an increased knowledge which has compelled an altered point of view, making such contempt appear rather childish. And because the new social conscience has developed so largely outside the orthodox church, it is not therefore any the less religious. Indeed, it is in very great measure the immediate cause of that re-awakened interest in what may for clearnessâ€™ sake be defined as strictly religious ideas which is now showing itself in so many ways and places, and especially in the modern novel.That this new religious interest seldom takes a dogmatic form is probably one reason why the average reader has been and still is so slow to recognize itâ€”of course we are in no way concerned here with those latter-day successors to the Elsie books which provide psychic water-gruel for the senile-minded of all agesâ€”yet in the stirrings of a more or less vague discomfort he has become aware of those electric currents of spiritual unrest which are penetrating down even to the most respectable of the quarter-educated well-to-do. There is something more than a little pathetic in the way these latter welcome such an attempt to manipulate words, to stretch the ancient formulas and renderthem broad enough to contain modern ethics and modern knowledge, as was shown in Mr. Winston Churchillâ€™sThe Inside of The Cupâ€”a novel whose popularity was due at least as much to its discussion of religious as to its treatment of social problems. For there is no class in the community whose size, the multiplicity of books and opportunities for learning taken into consideration, is so astonishingly great as is that of the half and quarter educated well-to-do.The best of those modern novels in which the present-day religious interest reveals itself in its most significant aspect often treat it shyly, almost timidly. For with the crumbling of the ancient cosmogony and its dependent beliefs the old cock-sure attitude became obsolete. The writer no longer says, â€œThis is the truth; no decent or sensible person will deny itâ€; but instead: â€œThis is my opinionâ€”what experience has given me; take it for what it is or may be worth.â€ Very frequently it is only the consciousness of things spiritual which is clearly shown; their nature, with a deeper reverence than that of yore, is left indeterminate. Here and there appears an author whose belief is as detailed as that of Will Levington Comfort: usually, however, it is rather a reaching out, a sense of things unseen, the mental attitude one of obedience to Abt Voglerâ€™s advice: â€œConsider, and bow the head.â€In this as in so many other phases of our modern thought and experience H. G. Wells has succeeded in stating lucidly that of which the majority of people are but more or less dimly aware. It is indeed particularly interesting to note the growth of spiritual and religious interest in Mr. Wells. Decidedly materialistic in much of his earlier work, it is only whenMarriageis reached that we find the hero, Trafford, deploring the fact that his wife and himself have won â€œno religion to give themâ€â€”i. e. their childrenâ€”â€œno sense of a general purpose.â€ And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not untilThe Passionate Friendsof last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is oftenâ€”it might be safe to say, alwaysâ€”the very crux of the religiousspirit as it appears in the modern novel. Stephen Stratton, who relates the experience, has reached the crisis of his life and knows not where to go nor what to do when, as he phrases it: â€œThe great stillness that is behind and above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with me â€¦ commanding me to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind.â€ And having told him what his share in this work is to be, â€œthe stillnessâ€ bids him: â€œMake use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter.â€ And Stephen, though he cries out, â€œBut who are you?â€ obeys.Detailed at greater or less length, it is this occasional awareness of communication with the Power outside and beyond â€œthe world of senseâ€ which is the shape in which religion is most likely to appear in the modern novel. Sometimes, as inJohn Ward, M. D., this awareness, usually touched upon lightly, almost furtively, is clearly and strongly emphasized, but very seldom, and then under a slightly different aspect. The destruction of the old formulas has resulted in an instinctive distrust of creeds, an instinctive shrinking from anything which bears even the least appearance of an attempt to make new ones. The situation portrayed in William Arkwrightâ€™s able, yet curiously uneven book,The Trend, wherein he shows his mystic, purely spiritual singer as escaping, horror-stricken, from an orthodox church service and denouncing it as an insult to God, is typical, though extreme. For the revolt against the materialism of Haeckel and his followersâ€”not of Darwin and Huxley, who were not materialists and repudiated the name with the utmost vigorâ€”has been accompanied by a revolt against the materialism in religion which rendered it vulnerable to the onslaughts of historical and scientific criticism. â€œWe claim and we shall wrest from theology,â€ said John Tyndall, â€œthe entire domain of cosmological theory.â€ The event has proved him a true prophetâ€”and helped men to disentangle religion from theology.The whole movement of the modern novel, indeed, has been toward a spiritualization which embodies within itself an essentially religious feeling; only this spiritualization not being of the monastic and ascetic kind which so long swayed the imaginationsof men, but of a social or humanistic order, has frequently been mistaken for other than its real self. It constitutes, too, a force active in all the affairs of life rather than one principally confined to certain of its details, and this fact can be glimpsed, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another, in the more ephemeral as well as in the best examples of our twentieth century fiction. In an article published in the May issue of The Forum attention was called to the change which has taken place in the character of the fiction hero, who has lost his idle elegance and become a worker. That this work should so often be a part of the struggle for human betterment or a joining in the endeavor to right some especial wrong is both a portion of and a testimony to the idealistic spirit which quickens the modern novel, as is also the companion fact that its drama is in many notable instances mainly a psychic one. More and more is the inward effect thrusting the outward event into a position of subordinate interest; the story of a murder becomes an account not of the efforts to trace the slayer, but of the result of the deed upon his soul. The most interesting and important chapter ofThe Devilâ€™s Gardenis that wherein William Dale reviews the inner life which has been so turbulent, while the outer was so calm;The Debit Accounthas little to say of Jeffriesâ€™s career in the realm of finance but very much about his mental attitude toward himself and that â€œworld without triflesâ€ in which he lived; despite a charming heroine and an absorbing plot it is the influence of failure upon the character of Ralph Lingham which is the matter of supreme importance inWhen Love Flies out oâ€™ the Window.To call this confused mass of struggle and revolt and aspiration â€œreligionâ€ may seem to many persons unjust and perhaps even a trifle shocking; but that is because of the popular confounding of religions which are many with religion, which is one in essence, whether it be manifested under the Buddhistic form of quietism or the social service activities within and without the present-day church. Modern thought has made the old-time easy shifting of responsibility impossible, and the changed belief which this involves, enforcing the conviction that the world is to be saved and the Kingdom of God established on earth not by miraculous intervention but by the earnest labor in well-doingof many generations of devoted men and women, has had even among those who deny it an incalculably powerful effect. It may be too that the new humanitarianism which causes us to view with horror conditions which our forefathers regarded with more or less equanimity and makes reform one of the most familiar of words is to some extent due to the desire to escape from any effort to measure and explain the Infinite with mere finite instruments. Since the days when knowledge destroyed the foundations of that ancient stately tower of faith and authority which men had believed was based on truthâ€™s very rock, this attempt to find a working theory of life which shall not imply any dogmatic response to the riddles of the universe has been made in directions innumerable, and is being so made to-day; only, the way of escape by â€œpracticalâ€ social labor has become more popular than any other and is a road along which travel in divers manners all sorts and conditions of menâ€”among them many who would vehemently and even indignantly deny that religious and spiritual problems had anything whatever to do with their chosen path.In the modern novel as in the modern world religion has come to be more and more a matter of service and aspiration; less and less a matter of accordance with fixed rules and formulas. And upon this, as upon so many other aspects of life, the writer of to-day can express himself with a freedom which only a few years ago would have brought down torrents of wrath upon his head. What in our parentsâ€™ time would have been said ofThe Trend, for example, or even ofA Manâ€™s World?Thus religion in the modern novel evinces itself principally in four distinct ways: in revolt against the worn-out, cramping traditions; in a broad humanitarianism which has increased sympathy and given a fresh and vivid and impelling meaning to the word duty; in a quickened spirituality that has removed punishment and reward from the hereafter and even from the world of matter to the living human soul; and in a reaching out, vaguely, gropingly, but never futilely, toward â€œthe stillness,â€ â€œthe Ultimate Force,â€ â€œthe Unknown Power,â€ or whatever term men prefer to use in their desire to get away from the old anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet express their consciousness of theInfinite and Divine. For â€œthe obstinate questioning of invisible thingsâ€ which began so soon as man developed from the primeval ape-forms and became Man, still goes on and will go on, in all probability, so long as the race endures; only the shape and manner of the questioning has changed as humanity has slowly learned something of its ability to mould its own destiny, the duty and privilege which it possesses of working out its own salvation. There have been many periods in the worldâ€™s history when that questioning found few to voice it aloud, yet always after such a pause it has been renewed with fresh and greater vigor. One of these pauses came in the last century; to-day the questioning resounds all about us, and one of the means through which it is being uttered most clearly is the modern novel.

Louise Maunsell Field

Ofall the many accusations brought against our much abused young twentieth century, there is none more popular than that of materialism. For all its deficiencies, whether artistic, social or ethical, this parrot-cry furnishes a convenient explanation; but unfortunately for those who welcome such catch-phrases as a ready means of avoiding any necessity for trying to exercise their disused and rusty thinking apparatus, convenient and accurate are seldomâ€”perhaps neverâ€”synonymous. If this age of ours really is what it has so frequently been called by capable judges, the Age of the Social Conscience, that fact is in itself ample disproof of materialism; for if conscience in its every manifestation be not spiritual, what is? True, we have done away with the old scorn of the body and of that generality once known as â€œthe world,â€ but this is simply the natural result of an increased knowledge which has compelled an altered point of view, making such contempt appear rather childish. And because the new social conscience has developed so largely outside the orthodox church, it is not therefore any the less religious. Indeed, it is in very great measure the immediate cause of that re-awakened interest in what may for clearnessâ€™ sake be defined as strictly religious ideas which is now showing itself in so many ways and places, and especially in the modern novel.

That this new religious interest seldom takes a dogmatic form is probably one reason why the average reader has been and still is so slow to recognize itâ€”of course we are in no way concerned here with those latter-day successors to the Elsie books which provide psychic water-gruel for the senile-minded of all agesâ€”yet in the stirrings of a more or less vague discomfort he has become aware of those electric currents of spiritual unrest which are penetrating down even to the most respectable of the quarter-educated well-to-do. There is something more than a little pathetic in the way these latter welcome such an attempt to manipulate words, to stretch the ancient formulas and renderthem broad enough to contain modern ethics and modern knowledge, as was shown in Mr. Winston Churchillâ€™sThe Inside of The Cupâ€”a novel whose popularity was due at least as much to its discussion of religious as to its treatment of social problems. For there is no class in the community whose size, the multiplicity of books and opportunities for learning taken into consideration, is so astonishingly great as is that of the half and quarter educated well-to-do.

The best of those modern novels in which the present-day religious interest reveals itself in its most significant aspect often treat it shyly, almost timidly. For with the crumbling of the ancient cosmogony and its dependent beliefs the old cock-sure attitude became obsolete. The writer no longer says, â€œThis is the truth; no decent or sensible person will deny itâ€; but instead: â€œThis is my opinionâ€”what experience has given me; take it for what it is or may be worth.â€ Very frequently it is only the consciousness of things spiritual which is clearly shown; their nature, with a deeper reverence than that of yore, is left indeterminate. Here and there appears an author whose belief is as detailed as that of Will Levington Comfort: usually, however, it is rather a reaching out, a sense of things unseen, the mental attitude one of obedience to Abt Voglerâ€™s advice: â€œConsider, and bow the head.â€

In this as in so many other phases of our modern thought and experience H. G. Wells has succeeded in stating lucidly that of which the majority of people are but more or less dimly aware. It is indeed particularly interesting to note the growth of spiritual and religious interest in Mr. Wells. Decidedly materialistic in much of his earlier work, it is only whenMarriageis reached that we find the hero, Trafford, deploring the fact that his wife and himself have won â€œno religion to give themâ€â€”i. e. their childrenâ€”â€œno sense of a general purpose.â€ And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not untilThe Passionate Friendsof last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is oftenâ€”it might be safe to say, alwaysâ€”the very crux of the religiousspirit as it appears in the modern novel. Stephen Stratton, who relates the experience, has reached the crisis of his life and knows not where to go nor what to do when, as he phrases it: â€œThe great stillness that is behind and above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with me â€¦ commanding me to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind.â€ And having told him what his share in this work is to be, â€œthe stillnessâ€ bids him: â€œMake use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter.â€ And Stephen, though he cries out, â€œBut who are you?â€ obeys.

Detailed at greater or less length, it is this occasional awareness of communication with the Power outside and beyond â€œthe world of senseâ€ which is the shape in which religion is most likely to appear in the modern novel. Sometimes, as inJohn Ward, M. D., this awareness, usually touched upon lightly, almost furtively, is clearly and strongly emphasized, but very seldom, and then under a slightly different aspect. The destruction of the old formulas has resulted in an instinctive distrust of creeds, an instinctive shrinking from anything which bears even the least appearance of an attempt to make new ones. The situation portrayed in William Arkwrightâ€™s able, yet curiously uneven book,The Trend, wherein he shows his mystic, purely spiritual singer as escaping, horror-stricken, from an orthodox church service and denouncing it as an insult to God, is typical, though extreme. For the revolt against the materialism of Haeckel and his followersâ€”not of Darwin and Huxley, who were not materialists and repudiated the name with the utmost vigorâ€”has been accompanied by a revolt against the materialism in religion which rendered it vulnerable to the onslaughts of historical and scientific criticism. â€œWe claim and we shall wrest from theology,â€ said John Tyndall, â€œthe entire domain of cosmological theory.â€ The event has proved him a true prophetâ€”and helped men to disentangle religion from theology.

The whole movement of the modern novel, indeed, has been toward a spiritualization which embodies within itself an essentially religious feeling; only this spiritualization not being of the monastic and ascetic kind which so long swayed the imaginationsof men, but of a social or humanistic order, has frequently been mistaken for other than its real self. It constitutes, too, a force active in all the affairs of life rather than one principally confined to certain of its details, and this fact can be glimpsed, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another, in the more ephemeral as well as in the best examples of our twentieth century fiction. In an article published in the May issue of The Forum attention was called to the change which has taken place in the character of the fiction hero, who has lost his idle elegance and become a worker. That this work should so often be a part of the struggle for human betterment or a joining in the endeavor to right some especial wrong is both a portion of and a testimony to the idealistic spirit which quickens the modern novel, as is also the companion fact that its drama is in many notable instances mainly a psychic one. More and more is the inward effect thrusting the outward event into a position of subordinate interest; the story of a murder becomes an account not of the efforts to trace the slayer, but of the result of the deed upon his soul. The most interesting and important chapter ofThe Devilâ€™s Gardenis that wherein William Dale reviews the inner life which has been so turbulent, while the outer was so calm;The Debit Accounthas little to say of Jeffriesâ€™s career in the realm of finance but very much about his mental attitude toward himself and that â€œworld without triflesâ€ in which he lived; despite a charming heroine and an absorbing plot it is the influence of failure upon the character of Ralph Lingham which is the matter of supreme importance inWhen Love Flies out oâ€™ the Window.

To call this confused mass of struggle and revolt and aspiration â€œreligionâ€ may seem to many persons unjust and perhaps even a trifle shocking; but that is because of the popular confounding of religions which are many with religion, which is one in essence, whether it be manifested under the Buddhistic form of quietism or the social service activities within and without the present-day church. Modern thought has made the old-time easy shifting of responsibility impossible, and the changed belief which this involves, enforcing the conviction that the world is to be saved and the Kingdom of God established on earth not by miraculous intervention but by the earnest labor in well-doingof many generations of devoted men and women, has had even among those who deny it an incalculably powerful effect. It may be too that the new humanitarianism which causes us to view with horror conditions which our forefathers regarded with more or less equanimity and makes reform one of the most familiar of words is to some extent due to the desire to escape from any effort to measure and explain the Infinite with mere finite instruments. Since the days when knowledge destroyed the foundations of that ancient stately tower of faith and authority which men had believed was based on truthâ€™s very rock, this attempt to find a working theory of life which shall not imply any dogmatic response to the riddles of the universe has been made in directions innumerable, and is being so made to-day; only, the way of escape by â€œpracticalâ€ social labor has become more popular than any other and is a road along which travel in divers manners all sorts and conditions of menâ€”among them many who would vehemently and even indignantly deny that religious and spiritual problems had anything whatever to do with their chosen path.

In the modern novel as in the modern world religion has come to be more and more a matter of service and aspiration; less and less a matter of accordance with fixed rules and formulas. And upon this, as upon so many other aspects of life, the writer of to-day can express himself with a freedom which only a few years ago would have brought down torrents of wrath upon his head. What in our parentsâ€™ time would have been said ofThe Trend, for example, or even ofA Manâ€™s World?

Thus religion in the modern novel evinces itself principally in four distinct ways: in revolt against the worn-out, cramping traditions; in a broad humanitarianism which has increased sympathy and given a fresh and vivid and impelling meaning to the word duty; in a quickened spirituality that has removed punishment and reward from the hereafter and even from the world of matter to the living human soul; and in a reaching out, vaguely, gropingly, but never futilely, toward â€œthe stillness,â€ â€œthe Ultimate Force,â€ â€œthe Unknown Power,â€ or whatever term men prefer to use in their desire to get away from the old anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet express their consciousness of theInfinite and Divine. For â€œthe obstinate questioning of invisible thingsâ€ which began so soon as man developed from the primeval ape-forms and became Man, still goes on and will go on, in all probability, so long as the race endures; only the shape and manner of the questioning has changed as humanity has slowly learned something of its ability to mould its own destiny, the duty and privilege which it possesses of working out its own salvation. There have been many periods in the worldâ€™s history when that questioning found few to voice it aloud, yet always after such a pause it has been renewed with fresh and greater vigor. One of these pauses came in the last century; to-day the questioning resounds all about us, and one of the means through which it is being uttered most clearly is the modern novel.

GIOVANNITTIPoet of the WopKenneth MacgowanThereare probably a lot of technical errors in Giovannittiâ€™s poems.[1]I didnâ€™t notice. And perhaps that is one of the tests of great poetry,â€”not the faults that you canâ€™t find because theyâ€™re not there, but the faults that will not be discovered. Something else absorbs you.The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a new sort of song. And doubtless because of this song it will be many years before we see his greatness. For the song that he sings is not a pleasant song. It is the song of the people as he learned it in the Lawrence strike and hummed it over in the jails of Salem. He and his song are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We do not comprehend the labor problem of the unskilled, just as we do not comprehend the I. W. W. that has come out of it. A poet has arisen to explain.Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough. Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of workâ€”you canâ€™t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people behind the workâ€”active or idle, skilled or notâ€”â€œPlebs, Populace, People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.â€ He cries the awakening of that great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common attributeâ€”the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation:Think! If your brain will but extendAs far as what your hands have done,If but your reason will descendAs deep as where your feet have gone,The walls of ignorance shall fallThat stood between you and your world.â€¦Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn,Crouched at your feet the world lies stillâ€”It has no power but your brawn,It knows no wisdom but your will.Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood,Nothing there is to live and do,There is no man, there is no god,There is not anything but you.Against him Giovannitti finds the worldâ€”the world even of his own kind, bound in the chains of the past. The police, the law, the Church, another age shackling this, he has met them all in Massachusetts, arrayed against even the first steps toward his industrial democracy. The business of his verse is to destroy. InThe Cageâ€”the prisonerâ€™s pen in which he stood for murderâ€”he deals with the mummy of authority. InThe Walkerhe has painted the prison as no man, not even Wilde, has done. And the Churchâ€”even the Christ whom so many socialists are confessing that they may be numbered with the sheepâ€”that also he denies. Christ, the heavy-laden carpenter, was still a man of peace. Giovannitti has his own sermon, â€œThe Sermon on the Commonâ€: â€œBlessed are the strong in freedomâ€™s spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of the earth.â€Materialisticâ€”like all these socialists? Giovannitti has his answer ready for you: â€œWhile happiness be not our goal, but simply the way to get there.â€Neither materialism nor happiness is likely to trouble the average American. What bothers him is â€œviolence.â€ And there is no disguising the fact that violence is an essential part of the I. W. W. and its faith. Love is as great a part, of course; but hate must spring just as quickly from the cruelty of the world of the few as love from the brotherhood of the world of the many. Giovannitti and his friends want something and they want it badly. They are ready to take it peaceably: Giovannitti pictures the spirit of Helen Keller as the Christ of loving forgivenessâ€”the only true Christâ€”offering peace to the grinder of the faces of the poor. But, if love and forgiveness fail, there is another savior waiting, and a violent savior:â€¦ The sombre one whose browIs seared by all the fires and neâ€™er will bowShall come forth, both his hands upon the hilt.Whatever its future, the I. W. W. has accomplished one tremendously big thingâ€”a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and violence and sabotage. And that is the individual awakening of â€œilliteratesâ€ and â€œscumâ€ to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and the rights of their part in it. They have learned more thanclass-consciousness; they have learned consciousness of self. The I. W. W. is making the â€œwopâ€ into a thinker. And that is what Giovannitti wrote in hisProemwhen he said of his own verses:They are the blows of my own sledgeAgainst the walls of my own jail.[1]Arrows in the Gale.By Arturo Giovannitti. The Hillacre Book House.

Poet of the Wop

Kenneth Macgowan

Thereare probably a lot of technical errors in Giovannittiâ€™s poems.[1]I didnâ€™t notice. And perhaps that is one of the tests of great poetry,â€”not the faults that you canâ€™t find because theyâ€™re not there, but the faults that will not be discovered. Something else absorbs you.

The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a new sort of song. And doubtless because of this song it will be many years before we see his greatness. For the song that he sings is not a pleasant song. It is the song of the people as he learned it in the Lawrence strike and hummed it over in the jails of Salem. He and his song are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We do not comprehend the labor problem of the unskilled, just as we do not comprehend the I. W. W. that has come out of it. A poet has arisen to explain.

Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough. Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of workâ€”you canâ€™t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people behind the workâ€”active or idle, skilled or notâ€”â€œPlebs, Populace, People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.â€ He cries the awakening of that great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common attributeâ€”the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation:

Think! If your brain will but extendAs far as what your hands have done,If but your reason will descendAs deep as where your feet have gone,The walls of ignorance shall fallThat stood between you and your world.â€¦Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn,Crouched at your feet the world lies stillâ€”It has no power but your brawn,It knows no wisdom but your will.Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood,Nothing there is to live and do,There is no man, there is no god,There is not anything but you.

Think! If your brain will but extendAs far as what your hands have done,If but your reason will descendAs deep as where your feet have gone,

Think! If your brain will but extend

As far as what your hands have done,

If but your reason will descend

As deep as where your feet have gone,

The walls of ignorance shall fallThat stood between you and your world.â€¦

The walls of ignorance shall fall

That stood between you and your world.â€¦

Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn,Crouched at your feet the world lies stillâ€”It has no power but your brawn,It knows no wisdom but your will.

Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn,

Crouched at your feet the world lies stillâ€”

It has no power but your brawn,

It knows no wisdom but your will.

Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood,Nothing there is to live and do,There is no man, there is no god,There is not anything but you.

Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood,

Nothing there is to live and do,

There is no man, there is no god,

There is not anything but you.

Against him Giovannitti finds the worldâ€”the world even of his own kind, bound in the chains of the past. The police, the law, the Church, another age shackling this, he has met them all in Massachusetts, arrayed against even the first steps toward his industrial democracy. The business of his verse is to destroy. InThe Cageâ€”the prisonerâ€™s pen in which he stood for murderâ€”he deals with the mummy of authority. InThe Walkerhe has painted the prison as no man, not even Wilde, has done. And the Churchâ€”even the Christ whom so many socialists are confessing that they may be numbered with the sheepâ€”that also he denies. Christ, the heavy-laden carpenter, was still a man of peace. Giovannitti has his own sermon, â€œThe Sermon on the Commonâ€: â€œBlessed are the strong in freedomâ€™s spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of the earth.â€

Materialisticâ€”like all these socialists? Giovannitti has his answer ready for you: â€œWhile happiness be not our goal, but simply the way to get there.â€

Neither materialism nor happiness is likely to trouble the average American. What bothers him is â€œviolence.â€ And there is no disguising the fact that violence is an essential part of the I. W. W. and its faith. Love is as great a part, of course; but hate must spring just as quickly from the cruelty of the world of the few as love from the brotherhood of the world of the many. Giovannitti and his friends want something and they want it badly. They are ready to take it peaceably: Giovannitti pictures the spirit of Helen Keller as the Christ of loving forgivenessâ€”the only true Christâ€”offering peace to the grinder of the faces of the poor. But, if love and forgiveness fail, there is another savior waiting, and a violent savior:

â€¦ The sombre one whose browIs seared by all the fires and neâ€™er will bowShall come forth, both his hands upon the hilt.

â€¦ The sombre one whose brow

Is seared by all the fires and neâ€™er will bow

Shall come forth, both his hands upon the hilt.

Whatever its future, the I. W. W. has accomplished one tremendously big thingâ€”a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and violence and sabotage. And that is the individual awakening of â€œilliteratesâ€ and â€œscumâ€ to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and the rights of their part in it. They have learned more thanclass-consciousness; they have learned consciousness of self. The I. W. W. is making the â€œwopâ€ into a thinker. And that is what Giovannitti wrote in hisProemwhen he said of his own verses:

They are the blows of my own sledgeAgainst the walls of my own jail.

They are the blows of my own sledge

Against the walls of my own jail.

[1]Arrows in the Gale.By Arturo Giovannitti. The Hillacre Book House.

EMERSONA Mystic Who Lives Again in His Journals[2]Warren Barton BlakeEmersonhas been â€œdiscoveredâ€ againâ€”this time in the France that he tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then, and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning:Good-bye, proud world, Iâ€™m going home.In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century style, with wig and sword:Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer;Tu nâ€™es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tienâ€¦Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907, Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for the French public. I wonder if they have won a readingâ€”outside the university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the â€œbaked-bean side of his geniusâ€? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said, when the French Academy â€œcrownedâ€ the Dugard book:â€œEmersonâ€™s influence in America, like Ruskinâ€™s in England, is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels. Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emersonâ€™s fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was largely without themâ€¦. Emerson, knowing that the great danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience, set himselfto preaching individualismâ€”the necessity of a high culture, the search for an ideal.â€IIEight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugardâ€™s volume, I was youthfulâ€”with all of youthâ€™s intolerance. It seemed no mere coincidence that Emersonâ€™s father recorded his birth in his diary between a dry note on the â€œElection Sermonâ€ and a report of a session of his literary club at Mr. Adamsâ€™s. Cheerful youth, not needing reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers, even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emersonâ€™s essays: â€œTheir lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and hope.â€ I certainly had no conception of Emersonâ€™s influence upon my fatherâ€™s generationâ€”an influence so great that Carlyle called his friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor remarked: â€œIt may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.â€ Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalismâ€”or, partly, on account of themâ€”that he didnâ€™t â€œget anywhere.â€ (I sometimes feel so stillâ€”but the charge is less damnatory. I do not wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his heartâ€”in hisheart, noticeâ€”â€œa winged thought that sang a new song and soaredâ€”whither?â€)Emersonâ€™s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man seemed the less respectable because I hadnâ€™t read Bergsonâ€”who has made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the spirit-worldâ€”a quite different place from any trodden by the student in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the BibliothÃ¨que Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana seems murderous ofâ€œNatureâ€â€”however you define her. Moreover, I know not how to direct my inexorable thoughts, Emerson avows, and scarcely appears to think any direction of them needful. His best thoughts steal upon him in silence, and Truth flies out of the window when Will enters in by the door. â€œThere is never a fine aspiration but is on its way to its body or institution,â€ he confidently asserts. Too confidently, it seemed to me. Emerson, aged thirty, wrote that a system-grinder hates the truth; he loved the truth, and thereforeâ€”therefore?â€”side-stepped system. It was not till much later that he uttered the heartfelt cry: â€œIf Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scrapsâ€¦.â€œâ€˜The AsmodÃ¦an feat be mineTo spin my sand-bags into twine.â€™â€Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life on every side of it, than the Emersonian â€œtrick of solitariness,â€ that he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugardâ€™s book on Emerson was published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critiqueâ€”stored with Roussellian analogies, Ã la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and crushingâ€”not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard, but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear friendâ€”wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:â€œI find your point that Emerson, the preacher of individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a certain kind of individuality might be expressed by impersonality as well as by any other instrument. Iâ€™ve only glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems to be the conventional one that Emersonwas too far removed from the stress and pain of life to touch very closely vibrant, struggling souls. As you translate, â€˜he fills only the full, reassures only the optimists.â€™ I suppose that is true enough. And yetâ€”and yet, is any life so full that it does not need refilling; or any optimism so complete and so unshaken that it does not need reassurance,expression, from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isnâ€™t optimism with many people a religious yearning rather than any truly temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism, wasnâ€™t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic dispositionâ€”to which you try to reduce it. You must not forget that essay of his on Destinyâ€”Destiny, manâ€™s heroic, large-spirited friend, manâ€™s bolster against Fate (discouraging and enervating personage!).â€œI suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off much heat and little lightâ€”to say nothing of â€˜darkness visibleâ€™â€¦. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination of the twoâ€”light and, well, at leastwarmthâ€”is the most remarkable thing about Christ and his system.â€I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now that I have read in President Eliotâ€™s centenary essay on the great New Englander his confession that he too, â€œas a young man,â€ found the writings of Emerson â€œunattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, â€¦ speculative, and visionary.â€ It is only after one has suffered from living that one fully values Emersonâ€”only as one is gradually educated himself, in experienceâ€™s school, that one appreciates his worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot calls â€œnaturalâ€ rather than supernatural religion.IIIFor this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the Tabernacleâ€”So nigh is grandeur to our dustSo nigh is God to man.â€œChristianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system of doctrines,â€ he wrote in his diary as a young manâ€”thereby fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a century later: â€œYou cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a theology out of Emerson.â€ His stress was placedâ€”as he was persuaded Christâ€™s wasâ€”upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: â€œI feel myself pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence.â€ Demonstrate? Emerson never did succeed in â€œdemonstratingâ€ very much. In Dr. Eliotâ€™s words, here was no logician or reasoner, but â€œa poet who wrote chiefly in prose.â€ But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphraseâ€”His every line, of noble origin,Is breathed upon by Hopeâ€™s perpetual breath.Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. â€œI notice that as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.â€[3]Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by living again in his â€œJournalâ€â€”the tenth volume of which has just come to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament. Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (hisspirit, that is); and in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where words likeflow,flee,flux,fugitive,fugacious,current,stream,undulation, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England soil, is good only while he works it. â€œIf I cease to task myself, I have no thoughts.â€ And adds: â€œThis is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and fruits at all seasons.â€ Many of his memoranda he developed later in the essay formâ€”a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries[4]â€”but I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the authorâ€™s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realizedâ€”at fiftyâ€”what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual chiffonier,with a Jewâ€™s rag-bag of brocade remnants and velvets and torn cloth-of-gold. Truth to tell, he is all this no less in his essays than in these Journalsâ€”and is a literary architect no more than his friend Montaigne. As he repeated his lectures, and they gained in polish and conciseness, the defect still sometimes remained: he built more than one excellent house without stairs. It is in momentary flashes of intuitive communication with the great spiritsâ€”lightning flashes that suddenly light up the black night in which we spend most of our timeâ€”that his genius shines. Somewhere in his Journal he writes:â€œOne man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is generated by the revolution of the triangle.â€He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many common facts, and saw what we see thereâ€”and beyond. His first lesson of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal; yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the all-important sense of wonder. â€œNow that man was ready, the horse was brought,â€ he writes; and continues:â€œThe timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a political aid. We could not have held the vast North America together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too, that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific, a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a perfect communication in every manner for all nations,â€”â€™twas strange to see how it was secured.The good World-Soul understands us well.â€Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he saysâ€”â€œlike the courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming: â€˜Let it come in Heavenâ€™s name, I am not afraid onâ€™t.â€™â€ And this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent flashes of his humor.IVWhile an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual books or passages in his own work, he has almost alwaysexpressed somewhere the final criticism of his total. So it is with Emerson. On one page he defines for us the type of idealism of which he was an exponent:â€œWe are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensationâ€¦. Character is more to usâ€¦. Religion makes us idealists.â€On another page, he writes:â€œMalthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen existed to say, â€˜Given the circumstance, the manâ€™s given. I can educate a tigerâ€™: Swedenborg, that inner and outer correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest number.But what do you exist to say?â€It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that, for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots and dashes till the day of judgment. Emersonâ€™s contemporaries greatly needed the man and his serene preachingâ€”so undisturbedâ€”whileTheist, atheist, pantheistDefine and wrangle how they list.To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emersonâ€™s was the empire of the contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day, while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in Emersonâ€™s day, still â€œdevoured by a secret melancholy,â€ disguised in a hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate (with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things are so, democracyâ€™s â€œgreat dangersâ€ may well remain the vulgarizing of the arts, contempt of contemplation, â€œthe atrophy of the individual conscience.â€ Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy,exaggerated individualism: here are counter-irritants for more than one of Timeâ€™s diseases. â€œIf thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.â€ And Emerson did indeed â€œmake freeâ€; he was Emancipator, â€œnot of black bodies, but of the minds of white men.â€[2]Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872.With Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Ten Volumes.[3]â€œEmerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily obscure at present.â€â€”John Albee,Recollections of Emerson. Emerson wrote in his essay onExperience: â€œIn accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, butthe universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.â€ This is not far from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir Oliver Lodge. If Emerson â€œrefused to dogmatizeâ€ about the uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler convictions. He writes in hisJournal: â€œI know my soul is immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in reading these lines of Swedenborg: â€˜The organical body with which the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and casts it away as old clothes (exuviÃ¦), when it emigrates by means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual world.â€™â€[4]InHarperâ€™s New Monthly Magazinefor June, 1870, we read: â€œRumor attributes to Ralph Waldo Emerson a peculiar method of composition. He keeps, it is said, a commonplace book into which go every striking thought, curious metaphor, keen epigram, which his own mind incubates or his various reading discovers. When he is called on for a lecture, he goes to his commonplace book. He culls from its pages enough of its best material for an hourâ€™s instruction or entertainment. Connection is immaterialâ€¦.â€NOTEThe continuation ofThe World of H. G. Wellsseries, by Van Wyck Brooks, is postponed in consequence of the war.

A Mystic Who Lives Again in His Journals[2]

Warren Barton Blake

Emersonhas been â€œdiscoveredâ€ againâ€”this time in the France that he tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then, and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning:

Good-bye, proud world, Iâ€™m going home.

In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century style, with wig and sword:

Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer;Tu nâ€™es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tienâ€¦

Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer;

Tu nâ€™es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tienâ€¦

Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907, Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for the French public. I wonder if they have won a readingâ€”outside the university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the â€œbaked-bean side of his geniusâ€? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said, when the French Academy â€œcrownedâ€ the Dugard book:

â€œEmersonâ€™s influence in America, like Ruskinâ€™s in England, is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels. Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emersonâ€™s fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was largely without themâ€¦. Emerson, knowing that the great danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience, set himselfto preaching individualismâ€”the necessity of a high culture, the search for an ideal.â€

Eight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugardâ€™s volume, I was youthfulâ€”with all of youthâ€™s intolerance. It seemed no mere coincidence that Emersonâ€™s father recorded his birth in his diary between a dry note on the â€œElection Sermonâ€ and a report of a session of his literary club at Mr. Adamsâ€™s. Cheerful youth, not needing reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers, even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emersonâ€™s essays: â€œTheir lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and hope.â€ I certainly had no conception of Emersonâ€™s influence upon my fatherâ€™s generationâ€”an influence so great that Carlyle called his friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor remarked: â€œIt may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.â€ Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalismâ€”or, partly, on account of themâ€”that he didnâ€™t â€œget anywhere.â€ (I sometimes feel so stillâ€”but the charge is less damnatory. I do not wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his heartâ€”in hisheart, noticeâ€”â€œa winged thought that sang a new song and soaredâ€”whither?â€)

Emersonâ€™s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man seemed the less respectable because I hadnâ€™t read Bergsonâ€”who has made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the spirit-worldâ€”a quite different place from any trodden by the student in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the BibliothÃ¨que Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana seems murderous ofâ€œNatureâ€â€”however you define her. Moreover, I know not how to direct my inexorable thoughts, Emerson avows, and scarcely appears to think any direction of them needful. His best thoughts steal upon him in silence, and Truth flies out of the window when Will enters in by the door. â€œThere is never a fine aspiration but is on its way to its body or institution,â€ he confidently asserts. Too confidently, it seemed to me. Emerson, aged thirty, wrote that a system-grinder hates the truth; he loved the truth, and thereforeâ€”therefore?â€”side-stepped system. It was not till much later that he uttered the heartfelt cry: â€œIf Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scrapsâ€¦.

â€œâ€˜The AsmodÃ¦an feat be mineTo spin my sand-bags into twine.â€™â€

â€œâ€˜The AsmodÃ¦an feat be mine

To spin my sand-bags into twine.â€™â€

Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life on every side of it, than the Emersonian â€œtrick of solitariness,â€ that he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugardâ€™s book on Emerson was published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critiqueâ€”stored with Roussellian analogies, Ã la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and crushingâ€”not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard, but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear friendâ€”wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:

â€œI find your point that Emerson, the preacher of individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a certain kind of individuality might be expressed by impersonality as well as by any other instrument. Iâ€™ve only glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems to be the conventional one that Emersonwas too far removed from the stress and pain of life to touch very closely vibrant, struggling souls. As you translate, â€˜he fills only the full, reassures only the optimists.â€™ I suppose that is true enough. And yetâ€”and yet, is any life so full that it does not need refilling; or any optimism so complete and so unshaken that it does not need reassurance,expression, from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isnâ€™t optimism with many people a religious yearning rather than any truly temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism, wasnâ€™t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic dispositionâ€”to which you try to reduce it. You must not forget that essay of his on Destinyâ€”Destiny, manâ€™s heroic, large-spirited friend, manâ€™s bolster against Fate (discouraging and enervating personage!).

â€œI suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off much heat and little lightâ€”to say nothing of â€˜darkness visibleâ€™â€¦. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination of the twoâ€”light and, well, at leastwarmthâ€”is the most remarkable thing about Christ and his system.â€

I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now that I have read in President Eliotâ€™s centenary essay on the great New Englander his confession that he too, â€œas a young man,â€ found the writings of Emerson â€œunattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, â€¦ speculative, and visionary.â€ It is only after one has suffered from living that one fully values Emersonâ€”only as one is gradually educated himself, in experienceâ€™s school, that one appreciates his worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot calls â€œnaturalâ€ rather than supernatural religion.

III

For this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the Tabernacleâ€”

So nigh is grandeur to our dustSo nigh is God to man.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust

So nigh is God to man.

â€œChristianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system of doctrines,â€ he wrote in his diary as a young manâ€”thereby fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a century later: â€œYou cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a theology out of Emerson.â€ His stress was placedâ€”as he was persuaded Christâ€™s wasâ€”upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: â€œI feel myself pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence.â€ Demonstrate? Emerson never did succeed in â€œdemonstratingâ€ very much. In Dr. Eliotâ€™s words, here was no logician or reasoner, but â€œa poet who wrote chiefly in prose.â€ But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphraseâ€”

His every line, of noble origin,Is breathed upon by Hopeâ€™s perpetual breath.

His every line, of noble origin,

Is breathed upon by Hopeâ€™s perpetual breath.

Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. â€œI notice that as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.â€[3]

Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by living again in his â€œJournalâ€â€”the tenth volume of which has just come to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament. Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (hisspirit, that is); and in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where words likeflow,flee,flux,fugitive,fugacious,current,stream,undulation, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England soil, is good only while he works it. â€œIf I cease to task myself, I have no thoughts.â€ And adds: â€œThis is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and fruits at all seasons.â€ Many of his memoranda he developed later in the essay formâ€”a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries[4]â€”but I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the authorâ€™s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realizedâ€”at fiftyâ€”what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual chiffonier,with a Jewâ€™s rag-bag of brocade remnants and velvets and torn cloth-of-gold. Truth to tell, he is all this no less in his essays than in these Journalsâ€”and is a literary architect no more than his friend Montaigne. As he repeated his lectures, and they gained in polish and conciseness, the defect still sometimes remained: he built more than one excellent house without stairs. It is in momentary flashes of intuitive communication with the great spiritsâ€”lightning flashes that suddenly light up the black night in which we spend most of our timeâ€”that his genius shines. Somewhere in his Journal he writes:

â€œOne man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is generated by the revolution of the triangle.â€

He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many common facts, and saw what we see thereâ€”and beyond. His first lesson of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal; yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the all-important sense of wonder. â€œNow that man was ready, the horse was brought,â€ he writes; and continues:

â€œThe timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a political aid. We could not have held the vast North America together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too, that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific, a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a perfect communication in every manner for all nations,â€”â€™twas strange to see how it was secured.The good World-Soul understands us well.â€

Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he saysâ€”â€œlike the courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming: â€˜Let it come in Heavenâ€™s name, I am not afraid onâ€™t.â€™â€ And this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent flashes of his humor.

While an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual books or passages in his own work, he has almost alwaysexpressed somewhere the final criticism of his total. So it is with Emerson. On one page he defines for us the type of idealism of which he was an exponent:

â€œWe are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensationâ€¦. Character is more to usâ€¦. Religion makes us idealists.â€

On another page, he writes:

â€œMalthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen existed to say, â€˜Given the circumstance, the manâ€™s given. I can educate a tigerâ€™: Swedenborg, that inner and outer correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest number.But what do you exist to say?â€

It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that, for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots and dashes till the day of judgment. Emersonâ€™s contemporaries greatly needed the man and his serene preachingâ€”so undisturbedâ€”while

Theist, atheist, pantheistDefine and wrangle how they list.

Theist, atheist, pantheist

Define and wrangle how they list.

To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emersonâ€™s was the empire of the contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day, while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in Emersonâ€™s day, still â€œdevoured by a secret melancholy,â€ disguised in a hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate (with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things are so, democracyâ€™s â€œgreat dangersâ€ may well remain the vulgarizing of the arts, contempt of contemplation, â€œthe atrophy of the individual conscience.â€ Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy,exaggerated individualism: here are counter-irritants for more than one of Timeâ€™s diseases. â€œIf thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.â€ And Emerson did indeed â€œmake freeâ€; he was Emancipator, â€œnot of black bodies, but of the minds of white men.â€

[2]Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872.With Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Ten Volumes.

[3]â€œEmerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily obscure at present.â€â€”John Albee,Recollections of Emerson. Emerson wrote in his essay onExperience: â€œIn accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, butthe universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.â€ This is not far from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir Oliver Lodge. If Emerson â€œrefused to dogmatizeâ€ about the uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler convictions. He writes in hisJournal: â€œI know my soul is immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in reading these lines of Swedenborg: â€˜The organical body with which the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and casts it away as old clothes (exuviÃ¦), when it emigrates by means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual world.â€™â€

[4]InHarperâ€™s New Monthly Magazinefor June, 1870, we read: â€œRumor attributes to Ralph Waldo Emerson a peculiar method of composition. He keeps, it is said, a commonplace book into which go every striking thought, curious metaphor, keen epigram, which his own mind incubates or his various reading discovers. When he is called on for a lecture, he goes to his commonplace book. He culls from its pages enough of its best material for an hourâ€™s instruction or entertainment. Connection is immaterialâ€¦.â€

The continuation ofThe World of H. G. Wellsseries, by Van Wyck Brooks, is postponed in consequence of the war.

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