Belated Feudalism in America

II.

IT has always been the obvious duty of the American citizen to make his way in the world, but for a long time the slaveholders avoided this duty successfully, and set a fashion in social morality which was cheerfully followed by the gentlemen of property and standing in the North. In negro slavery we kept alive an old and damaging superstition, which prevented us from becoming a nation, and held us back as much as if the slave States had kept up an hereditary nobility. Part of the country escaped its worst evils, but that laughable tradition, standing effective among us, destroyed our integrity, made our professions a farce, and prevented us from finding our equilibrium. Since the war, we stand on a consistent footing, where there is no class of men exempt from the necessity of taking care of themselves. Since the war, the man who does not work has ceased to set the fashion in living. At this moment the ascendency of the commercial example is complete.

At the bottom of the scale lies the need of bread and butter, next comes the wish to gain wealth, lastly the desire to keep together what has been won, — possibly to accumulate and enjoy a great fortune. All these require work. Even the millionaire is seldom an idle man. Rich and poor, barring our men of science and a few other notable exceptions, we fall into line, and feel that we are doing the proper thing. We get as much cultivation as we can, and do not by any means neglect the humanities, though we may prefer to have our education of a kind that will help us later to deal with the affairs of practical life. In this way we follow first the requirements of necessity, and afterwards the possibilities of wealth.

“Yes,” says the Academy of Pessimism, “ and do not even ask whether you might not be happier with less money and other employment. You are content to devote yourselves to the making of money, and to leave the affairs of art, letters, music, and philosophy to Europe. You have made no great contributions to intellectual progress, and there seems no likelihood of your doing so.”

I can only ask these critics to make out the facts to be as bad as they can ; for in so doing they will lay the foundation for an interpretation so distasteful to them that they could never have thought of it, and one which, when it is called to their attention, they will probably deny.

If we really exhibit the condition they describe, what is the cause of it ? Which of the ingredients of art do we lack ? Do we still lack sufficient wealth ? Let us compare New York, in this respect, — for in no other are the conditions comparable, — with Florence, the richest of the Italian states, and the most prodigal of genius. “ In Florence,” says Macaulay, who had a fine eye for coincidence, “ the progress of elegant literature and the fine arts was proportionate to that of the public prosperity.” We are therefore in a position, other things being equal, to estimate the monetary value of Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ghiberti, Machiavelli, and Michael Angelo, or, at all events, to know the scale of opulence which was necessary to produce them. Macaulay, in his essay on Machiavelli, draws from Villani a picture of Florence in the early part of the fourteenth century, and any distrust of either historian may be offset by the knowledge that in this case both were desirous of making out the grandeur and resources of the state to be as large and magnificent as possible : “ With peculiar pleasure every cultivated mind must repose on the fair, the happy, the glorious Florence, the halls of which rang with the mirth of Pulci, the cell where twinkled the midnight lamp of Politian, the statues on which the young eye of Michael Angelo glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration, the gardens where Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the May-day dance of the Etrurian virgins.”

Yet the city, with its environs, counted only one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants, and the town itself never more than seventy thousand. In the various schools, ten thousand children were taught to read, twelve hundred only studied arithmetic, and six hundred received a learned education. Macaulay estimates the revenue of the republic at six hundred thousand pounds sterling of his time (1827), and the annual production of cloth, one of the most important industries, at two millions and a half of English money. If these magnitudes in material prosperity are proportional to the intellectual and artistic achievements of the Florentines whose statues stand in the streets of their native city, what should the city of New York have to show ?

But art, you say, needs more than wealth : it demands fire and energy. Can it be that these have flagged and died ? Hardly, for we see them at work in other shapes. It requires imagination. Can it be that this has failed us ? No, for we see that, too, engaged in other ways. Science has an imagination as well as art, and commerce cannot be without it. It may require as much imagination to draw pleasure out of an unspent dollar as it does to get it from an unsmelt flower, or an unkissed love, or any of the unexisting realities that poets deal in.

Many a laborious and ascetic financier must live in a world of imagination, a commercial dream, as little tangible as that of the poet. “ My food and lodging are all I get for my wealth,” said the elder Rothschild. He was mistaken ; he forgot his dream of wealth. He was one of the poets of a financial age. Nor, lastly, can it be that the delight of giving one’s self up to an impassioned thought, of which one is as sure as death, and for which one is willing to die, is not still, as it always has been, the keenest pleasure of a human soul.

Where, then, is our great art ? The cheerful optimists have advanced a claim in this matter which they, too, will find it difficult to make good. They say to foreigners that we are now engaged in subduing a continent, and that when this work is done we shall turn to other things. This appears to be a sort of application of the theory of the conservation of energy to affairs of sentiment and emotion. It has a plausible sound, but there is much more hope in it than there is reason. In fact, it is an empty boast, without foundation or meaning, — unless, indeed, we take it as a fable. No practical work ever stood in the way of art, at a time when art was in men’s souls, nor did any man or any people ever say, “ I will first set my house in order, and then will I sit down and paint you a picture and write you poetry.” Had this been the history of art, we should still be waiting for Homer and the Parthenon.

To give an unbiased answer to the question why we have so little art in this country, we must remember that the making of money is the safest vocation a man can follow. To be filled with the desire to make money is one of the surest inspirations a man can have. All other doings are dangerous. The poet, the artist, and the musician take their lives in their hands when they trust to art for a living. They stand a good chance of starving to death. Wise business men look upon them as foolhardy people ; and so they are. Now, as ever, young and foolish persons become possessed with a desire to give themselves up to art, but fathers and mothers are quick to dissuade. They know there is no art that is worth the risk of poverty; they have worked, and they want no poor relations. Ask any man who in this country has taken up music as a profession, how much encouragement he had from his family and friends. The elders counsel wisely, and the children do not have it in them to resist the wise counsel. Artists throw the halo of disinterestedness around their vocation. They call themselves devotees. They have to do this to hide their true nature ; for in reality poets and painters and the like are the most selfish and egotistical class of men that exists. A man can always live by writing, in these days, if he goes about it in the proper way, and writers do not any longer consider themselves devotees.

said Horace. “ A bad business,” we reply, “ for a sensible man to be in.”

“ Worse still,” we answer. “ If you must scribble, why not write something that will sell well, and plenty of it? Who would put up with a Sabine farm?”

says Aldrich, if he wants the Muse to visit him ; but not if we can avoid it will we put up with any such mode of life. We will not with incessant care tend the homely shepherd’s trade, which we know to be slighted. We will not strictly meditate a Muse whom we know to be thankless. If, like St. Gaudens, a man takes his time to produce a masterpiece, he is accused of being dilatory. To Milton’s rhetorical “ Alas! what boots it?” most artists have returned a decided and practical “ Nothing ! ”

It appears, then, that if nothing more can be said for ns, we are, at all events, eminently sensible, splendidly wise. We see what we must do to be safe, and, unlike many other people, we do it. But how comes it that we find a whole nation so unanimous in its wisdom ? How does it happen that we command so much foresight, so much caution, and that what de Tocqueville said of us is as true now as it was in his day ? — “ Non seulement on voit aux États-Unis, comme dans touts les autres pays, des classes industrielles et commercantes ; mais, ce qui ne s’était jamais rencontré, tous les homines s’y occupent à la fois d’industrie et de commerce.” How comes it that this caution extends not only to the man who has nothing, but to the man who has a good deal, and could get on with less ; and not to these alone, but to those who write, and draw, and model ? In a country where there are so many men of intelligence and imagination, would it be too much to expect to find, not half a dozen, but hundreds, who, in spite of wisdom, in spite of the unfashionableness of their behavior and the immanent risk of discomfort and starvation, would be led astray into the doing of some fine thing for the love of it ?

There is but one answer. All the forces that can influence a man in the choice of a calling — the pressure of necessity, the desire for wealth, position, power, even the love of knowledge and the imagination of science — are pitted against the power of art in an unequal contest for the possession of each new votary, and the only thing that can turn the tide and give art the victory over so many antagonists is a great conviction, a profound belief, and the joy of saying it in words or sound, in form or color. When this belief is lacking the present has its sway, and if we are a people who are afraid of art, and can only be timorously coaxed into its neighborhood, it is because this nation, in a time of peace, has no idealized convictions and no inspired beliefs that are strong enough to carry us away from the wise and respectable occupation of making money. All the old traditions that bewitched the past have lost the power to court us into the dangerous paths of art and letters. They furnish no fire for a great inspiration, nor even the enthusiasm for a stirring protest.

The apostle of traditional faith will deny that what I say is true in his province. It is true, nevertheless, for his province cannot be divided from any other. All go together to make a world, and the expression of a world is art.

When this generation of ours stops for a moment in its work, and looks out upon that permanent nature which has seemed so different to different eyes, it does not know what sort of a place it imagines this universe, in which it finds itself, to be. This was not the case with the men of Homer, nor with the men of the crusades, nor even with the infidels of the Renaissance. They all had faith. They all took some universe for granted, and reproduced it lightheartedly. We accept none, and we cannot therefore express any, even with tribulation.

We look at our churches with their congregations, growing in numbers and dwindling in faith, and we ask ourselves : In all these buildings, cheap or costly, what real prayers rise; and of those that rise, do any get above the roof ? What God hears them, and has there ever been an answered prayer? We look at the face of the dead and repeat a burial service: “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?” And as we say the words we ask ourselves, “ Do the dead rise ? ” If any one is found who believes these things, he knows that there is another at his elbow who believes them not a whit or an atom, and these two can hit on no universe that shall satisfy both, nor can either be poet to the other.

We drink in the new learning thirstily and apply it to our needs, but the Bible still stands as the formal code, and as a history of the dealings between man and a Creator. We see that we can no longer accept its morality, and that we must abandon many of its facts, yet we do not discard the book, nor define its position. We let it stand. We ignore all discrepancies and form no convictions. Some make an arbitrary halt at one point, some at another, but there is no thinking man whose childhood’s faith has not been shaken. Finally, there are those who question the value of knowing the truth at all. They hold that opinions were made for man, not man for opinions, and that if a knowledge of the truth be what they call disastrous, it is better that the truth should be dropped and a lie put in its place.

These hesitations and doubts, from which no one is free, kill art in the womb, or if they let it come to a birth, it comes deformed, unfinished, sent before its time into this breathing world, with a mind scarce half made up. So the safest course is to avoid great subjects and appeal to the passing taste and fancy of the generation.

If we turn from our beliefs to our morality, we shall find a corresponding chaos. We have no trouble with our behavior, for we act on the plain principles of egotism, but we have the humor to see that we should stultify ourselves in an attempt to justify our conduct on traditional lines. As for our own system we have accepted it only tacitly. It is not fit as yet to carry a great unconscious work of art.

We have two systems running side by side: the code of practice, which is a rational and proper egotism ; and the code of theology, which is altruistic and impractical. We follow the first, but, like Peter, we deny it. The second we try to use on paper, but in practice it is ignored. Besides these we have a scientific morality to which we appeal when we fall out with the other two. We get, therefore, in our discussion of affairs, a mixture of common sense, scientific theory, and theological rules of thumb, out of which an ingenious mind can make an ethical purée compared with which the thick slab gruel of Macbeth’s witches is a watery soup. So many criteria have we of right and wrong, so many inconsistent methods of determining how a man should act and what he should do in a critical place, that we can argue the simplest question of ethics for a whole day without coming to a verbal settlement. We know very well all the while what would be done in actual practice and what would be approved, but when any one undertakes to champion the practical code in good set terms, we protest that it is most shocking and very wicked indeed. We are getting over this Old World hypocrisy in daily conversation, and it is becoming more and more difficult to weave it into literature.

It is the same with our political and social theories. We do not take them for granted nor accept them as matters of course. The most loyal of us are willing to discuss value of pure democracy. Little as we may like the ideas of socialists and populists, we nevertheless ask ourselves whether there is not a note of truth in their complaints. Is unrestricted competition the last word human intelligence has to say on the relations between human beings ? May we not have to put brains and industry more nearly on a par, as we have put strength and soundness on a par, and do it on the ground that the keen and astute person is no better than his hardworking but duller neighbor, except by virtue of that very trick of intellect which enables the one to beat the other ? This idea strikes at the root of democracy as we now conceive it, and yet we are not only willing to discuss the point, but we have actually let in the edge of it in the shape of laws restricting the right to contract.

This art-destroying doubt seems dreadful to the man of cultivation who hunts for genius, and denounces the times because he finds none to his liking, but it is wholly admirable for mankind at large. It means that we are gone to school with a new master. It does not mean that there can be found among us a few thinkers who have shaken themselves loose from the ordinary prejudices of their time, for that would be no more than any country in any age could show. It means that there are in this country great numbers of people who are without settled convictions on what have all along been considered the most important matters of life, and that if any new ideas exist with regard to those matters they are going to get a hearing. It means that the power of traditional beliefs is overthrown, and that we are getting, every day, new freedom in dealing with the affairs of life on a rational basis of natural knowledge.

Literary and artistic people may feel sorry that the work of America has not fallen along the line of art and letters, particularly as these are the things that get labels and are handed down to posterity marked “important.” They are important, but there are other things which are essential, and these from time to time will have their day. Worshipers of individual artistic genius, who bemoan the condition of this country because it has not been conspicuously productive in that line, must understand that the only value of a man of genius lies in the happiness he adds to the lives of the multitude. He is not a prince, balancing or outweighing his retainers. Except as a minister of the multitude he is no more valuable than any one else. The chief value of Greece and Rome was not embodied in Euripides and Phidias and Horace ; it lay in the thousands of Greek and Roman citizens who lived and were happy. The evils of the Dark Ages did not lie in their lack of artists, but in the fact that there were thousands of citizens who were unjustly miserable. Therefore if this country had done or were to do nothing more than produce a hundred or two millions of people, most of whom have been well-to-do, self-reliant, self-respecting, and comparatively happy, it would have done enough, even if it had never given birth to a single genius or added a new idea. But America will do more than that.

There is no objection to taking art and letters as an index of the condition of an energetic civilized people, so long as we remember that their absence may be significant of good rather than of evil. Art and literature cannot flourish when the mind and the heart are at odds, and they must be at odds where an old tradition is mouldering in the bosom of a new activity. That was the condition of Europe throughout the Middle Ages, a time so well despised by reason of its lack of decoration that we forget that man went into it a barbarian or an ancient, and came out a modern. And that is our condition to-day. We have entered on a second Middle Age, into which, whether it be short or long, we went as feudal creatures, and out of which we shall come with a sense of that natural aristocracy which marks the unspoilt animal.

For the man of European taste and culture, the environment is disagreeable, but the trouble lies in him. What he wants for the world is brilliance, variety, genius, great individualities, great events. What the world wants for itself is that evil and wrong should decrease, and that men’s lives should become safer, more comfortable and more content. This contentment, this decline of evil, depend upon a sure and certain handling of the affairs of life, and this in turn depends upon a thorough understanding of the place in which we live. All knowledge, all reform, all advance, consist in the revision and perfecting of this understanding. If we insist that very many of the troubles and sorrows through which mankind has gone have been due to real defects in the make-up of the universe as a home for sensitive creatures, we shall have to admit that at least half of them have been due to our mistaken notions concerning the true nature of it.

It is a characteristic of the human mind that it clings to its errors till they are positively torn away. The thing that really teaches lessons is force, and the thing that drives the truth home is the pressure of natural conditions. Here, for the first time, the universe has got a large number of intelligent human beings into a predicament where, willy-nilly, it is going to teach them what kind of a place it really is, and it is going to teach them its lessons direct, and not out of the mouths of priests and thinkers. We have let nature into our counsels, and she is going to make us understand that we are a part of her, and that we must fit our ideas and our actions to her requirements. Imaginary evils, imaginary terrors, imaginary values, and imaginary facts of all kinds, whether of religion or of society, will be ruthlessly destroyed. It will not be optional with us whether we shall retain them or let them go. They will simply disappear. Good and evil conduct, true and false beliefs, have been taken out of the hands of the priest and the moralist to determine in advance, and that function has been assumed by the multitude, which now says to the thinker, “ Let us have the facts and we will define the duty ; give us the facts and we will fix the faith. Watch us and set down for your study what we do, for we do what we must, and what a man must do is as near as he can come to the right. Ask us what we believe, for we believe what we must, and what a man must believe is as near as he can come to the truth.”

It is pleasant to be released from the authority of great thinkers, of whom it has been said that they always think wrong. It is pleasant, also, to feel that man should be released from the responsibility of teaching his fellow men how to live, and should be able to turn the matter over to nature. Conscience and greed and ambition have hitherto prevented this. If mankind has often slain its teachers and stoned its prophets, it has been because those teachers and prophets usurped the office of nature, or had it thrust upon them to play the part of Providence. With us, I dare say Providence itself is upon us, and will determine any further action.

“ Here we are, then, once more,” as says Professor Sumner, “ back at the old doctrine, Laissez faire.” Let us translate it into blunt English : it will read, “ Mind your own business.”

That the doctrine should be so old and so true, and yet so little recognized by the “social architects” and “ meddlers " of whom Professor Sumner is speaking, goes to show that mere advice counts for nothing. You can follow a phrase-hunt after laissez faire back into the seventeenth century, but the man who first enlarged the doctrine from commerce and made it include the sentiment and character of a nation was Montesquieu ; and Mill, a hundred years later, had not got so far. The fifth and sixth chapters of the nineteenth book of the Esprit des Loix are among those which impelled their author to label his work prolem sine matre creatam, and emboldened him to say of himself, “ Cependant je ne crois pas avoir totalement manqué de génie.”

He says, “ S’il y avait dans le monde une nation qui eût humeur sociable, une ouverture de cœur, une joie dans la vie, un goût, une facilité à communiquer ses pensées ; qui fût vive, agréable, enjouée, quelquefois imprudente, souvent indiscrète, et qui eût avec cela du courage, de la générosité, de la franchise, un certain point d’honneur, il ne faudrait point chercher à gêner par des loix ses manières, pour ne point gêner ses vertus. Si en général le caractère est bon, qu’importe de quelques défauts qui s’y trouvent ? . . . Laissez-lui faire les choses frivoles sérieusement, et gaiement les choses sérieuse.” And again, “ Qu’on nous laisse tels que nous sommes.” And again, “ Qu’on nous laisse comme nous sommes.”

Whatever sort of a nation we are, we should do well to say to any one who could interfere with us, “ Laissez-nous faire,” and “Mind your own business ; ” but if our immunity from interference depended simply on the propriety of the request we should probably ask in vain. The great beauty of our situation is that neither the request of Montesquieu nor the command of Sumner owes its force among us to its mere wisdom. Their strength with us lies in the fact that we have got ourselves into a position where we cannot escape them if we would. They are executing themselves upon us whether we or our teachers will or no, and we shall get the benefits. To tell people in this country to mind their own business is to tell the man who has fallen into the water to swim ashore. If he can swim he will do it without advice.

The same is true of our religious beliefs. The “dreadful consequence argufier ” is still among ns, and asks us to test opinions by the standard of the Index; that is, by their possible effect on men’s minds. This is ecclesiasticism with a vengeance, but ecclesiasticism shorn of all power to make or enforce even an opinion.

Less here than in any other country can such a suggestion find means to get a trial, for it is the wish to legislate facts out of existence, and we are perforce learning the lesson that it is well to know facts and to allow for them. We are not trying to discover what any one thinks will be good or bad for human beings to believe. We find ourselves compelled to be engaged in quite another direction, — in discovering what views of the universe are correct and what are incorrect; and the truth, whatever it is, will come out, for there is little or nothing to prevent it, and we find it useful,

“ See the ingenuity of Truth,” says Milton, “ who, when she gets a free and willing hand, opens herself faster than the pace of method and discourse can overtake her.” If a belief in the Bible is unfounded, if dogmatic beliefs of any sort are unfounded, our task is going to be to get along without them, whether they are now considered beneficial or not. In the face of our situation it is not going to be possible to keep them alive if they are not true. An established and subsidized church may teach what it chooses, and it cannot get away from itself; but where religion is supported by voluntary contributions the ministers and clergy must keep up with the times, and must not stultify themselves too much in the eyes of their parishioners. Already many of them recognize that in their congregations the truth has met a free and willing hand, and they have begun to quicken the pace and method of their discourse to overtake her. They are telling their hearers that they need no longer believe Hebraic legends, poems, and fables, which those hearers had ceased to believe years ago. The shepherd is off after his flock, and shouts to them as they gallop ahead of him that they are in the right way. Once begun, this stern chase of the leaders bids fair to be a long one ; nor can anything stop it, nor will the leaders ever win to the fore again.

Such are some of the conditions under which the people of this country are contributing to the stock of human experience. If, because we do not commit to paper the various steps of our proceedings, any one shall say that we are adding nothing to the affairs of intellect and philosophy, he will make a vast mistake. So far as future generations are concerned, this country is nothing more or less than a great mill of philosophy; and one, too, the wheels of which cannot be stopped or clogged, as were the fine minds of Descartes, Pascal, and even Kant, by the overpowering force of superstition. When some day the results of our grinding shall be put into presentable shape, it will be found that human knowledge and human nature have made a stride.

It is not possible, in these days, to separate the countries of the world from one another by an impassable gulf. The bulk of one people may be in advance of the bulk of another, and this is true as between America and Europe ; but the men who furnish literature and science and art are all subject to the same influences, and one ought to find that they are affected by them in substantially the same way. This is, in fact, the case. The most important influence in our day has been the acceptance of the theory of evolution. The Origin of Species gave a straight answer to definite questions which had exercised the minds of men for sixty years. It found the intellect of Europe ready, but the sentiment unprepared, and it laid a cold hand on every form of imagination except that of pure science.

Poets were the first to feel the chill. There was enough warmth in the traditional sentiment to furnish uninterrupted inspiration to a Browning, a Tennyson, or a Hugo, but not enough to supply a new generation. Swinburne, Rossetti, Gautier, turned to classical and mediæval passion as a makeshift, and tried to satisfy themselves with a mystic paganism. Their work is a tour de force of no particular human value, an attempt to supply the place of a lost God with a dozen resurrected divinities. They have had imitators, but no successors.

It seems to-day that the power of the older beliefs to inspire anybody has quite died out. With regard to great poetry, we are in no worse case than the rest of the world. It looks as if to most men of poetic genius “ this goodly frame, the earth, seems a sterile promontory ” for the purposes of their vocation.

In prose the result was different. In England, for example, the theory of natural selection found a hierarchy, half human, half divine, the lower end of which rested on the earth and struck a blow at its very foundation. To secure a hearing for Darwinism in the face of an established church and of an hereditary nobility, a Huxley was necessary, and a splendid polemical literature sprang up along new lines. Fiction followed on both sides of the battle.

Nothing of the sort could happen here. In the first place, we had been living for many years in strict accordance with the most important principles of the struggle for existence. In our own actions we had anticipated their discovery. None of our institutions were disturbed by them. They were corroborated and confirmed. We understood that the fittest would survive, for we saw a thousand examples of it every day, and we tried to fit ourselves for survival. The new natural knowledge was welcomed more heartily, spread more rapidly, and was better understood in this country than in its home. It could not meet here any organized spiritual or temporal power with which to engage in trial by battle. Gray championed it from the start, and Agassiz opposed; but what they really did was to join in the European contest, and that chiefly on scientific grounds.

The religious aspects of the English fight now look to us like a mediæval tournament, if not, as Dr. Zahm calls it, a battle with windmills. To the English it was a very serious matter. The devils in which Huxley refused to believe were very real devils to him. Dr. Wace, Mr. Gladstone, and the Duke of Argyll seemed very formidable opponents. They did not really represent either science or religion, but they did represent a power to oppose science with a weighty terrestrial influence, and they had to be beaten.

There is another reason why we have done less in letters since the war than we did before it. The war of the Rebellion made us a united and consistent nation, and gave us a new individuality. It separated us definitely from Europe. With slavery fell the last feudal institution to which we gave a legal sanction. From that moment we began to rely upon ourselves. Foreign traditions and foreign praises ceased to inspire us, and we stopped imitation. When we had done that, our old literary occupation was gone, but we were at least free to make a beginning. Through the gateway of two events — the firing on Fort Sumter and the publication of Darwin’s book, the greatest practical and the greatest intellectual facts of the century, which stand like the piers of an arch at the beginning of the seventh decade—we entered upon the second stage of our national life. It has already proved to be a period of great material and scientific activity, but if we look for art or letters it is a desert.

There is little hope that this generation will raise a great shrine to Art. Forty years in the wilderness is the only argument that will teach us that we are not the people who are to build that temple. All we can expect to be is hewers of wood and drawers of water for posterity. Sixty, eighty, a hundred years hence, when we, the last generation born into the darkness of mediæal superstition, are dead and gone, some poet will arise who will embody the new beliefs and find a way to make them beautiful. To-day we have only enough faith to speculate, and only enough conviction to know that we are uncertain. How poetry could spring out of such theories as we have we cannot see, and no poet who attempts to soar can satisfy an audience of twenty men. No matter which way his soul is inclined, there is no market for it. We do not believe what we were brought up to love, and we do not like what we have lived to accept. The old is puerile from a modern pen, and the new is repulsive.

Let us he selfishly glad that we shall not live to hear the rhapsody of the future poet. Taste broadens only into the past, never into the future ; for we dominate the past, but the future is full of terrors. No one can admire what is beyond him, and we should not love the poet of the future. We should abominate him as Homer would have abominated Virgil; and Virgil, Dante ; and Dante, Milton; and Milton, Wordsworth.

We need not fear that there will be no more poetry. This world is a place about which convictions can be had and will be had again. Those who come after us will laugh at our superstitions as we laugh at those of our grandfathers. They will find strength in what we shun as disaster, and hope where we can see only blank despair. When we shrink from a fact, the weakness is in us, and not in it, and man’s greatness lies in the number of facts he can face. The advance from barbarism to enlightenment is the stamping out of fear. If there is anything for which we dare not find a place in our philosophy, we may be sure that we are still barbarous. There can be a man who will be strong enough to live with that fact, and to love it and make it poetry.

Henry G. Chapman.