Part 17 (1/2)
Millions of persons have also lived without suspecting the pull of the sun and moon upon us; or that the pressure of the atmosphere upon our bodies is fifteen pounds to the square inch; or that the coast of this part of the continent is slowly subsiding (the oscillations of the earth's crust); or without suspecting the incredible speed of the stars in the midnight sky; or that the earth is turning under our feet; or that electrons are shooting off from the candle or lamp by the light of which we are reading. There are a.s.suredly more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, many of which we shall doubtless yet find out, and many more of which we shall never find out. Wireless messages may be continually going through our houses and our bodies, and through the air we breathe, and we never suspect them. Shall we, then, infer that the air around us is full of spirits of our departed friends? I hope it is, but I fail to see any warrant for the belief in this kind of reasoning. It does not lend color even to the probability, any more than it does to the probability that we shall yet be able to read one another's thoughts and become expert mind-readers. Mind-reading seems to be a reality with a few persons, with one in many millions. But I cannot therefore believe in spiritualism as I believe in the ”defeat of the Invincible Armada.” Fleets have been defeated in all ages. Facts are amenable to observation and experiment, but merely alleged facts do not stand the laboratory tests.
If memory is not a function of the brain, of what is it a function? If ”judgment, reasoning, or any other act of thought” are not functions of the brain, of what are they the functions? The scientific method is adequate to deal with all questions capable of proof or disproof. If we apply the scientific or experimental method to miracles, where does it leave them? Ask Huxley. Thought-transference is possible, but does this prove spiritualism to be true?
I know of a man who can answer your questions if you know the answers yourself, even without reading them or hearing you ask them. He once read a chemical formula for Edison which n.o.body but Edison had ever seen. I am glad that such things are possible. They confirm our faith in the reality of the unseen. They show us in what a world of occult laws and influences we live, but they tell us nothing of any other world.
METEORIC MEN AND PLANETARY MEN
There are meteoric men and there are planetary men. The men who now and then flash across our intellectual heavens, drawing all eyes for the moment, these I call meteoric men. What a contrast they present to the planetary men, who are slow to attract our attention, but who abide, and do not grow dim! Poets like Emerson, Whitman, and Wordsworth were slow to gain recognition, but the radiance of their names grows. I call such a poet as Swinburne meteoric, a poet of a certain kind of brilliant power, but who reads him now? Stephen Phillips with his ”Marpessa” had a brief vogue, and then disappeared in the darkness. When I was a young man, I remember, a Scottish poet, Alexander Smith, published a ”Life Drama,” which dazzled the literary world for a brief period, but it is forgotten now. What attention Kidd's ”Social Evolution” attracted a generation or more ago! But it is now quite neglected. It was not sound. When he died a few years ago there was barely an allusion to it in the public press. The same fate befell that talented man, Buckle, with his ”Civilization in England.”
Delia Bacon held the ear of the public for a time with the Bacon-Shakespeare theory. Pulpit men like Joseph Cook and Adirondack Murray blazed out, and then were gone. Half a century ago or more an Englishman by the name of M. F. Tupper published a book called ”Proverbial Philosophy” which had a brief season of popularity, and then went out like a rush-light, or a blaze of tissue paper. Novels like Miss Sprague's ”Earnest Trifler,” Du Maurier's ”Trilby,” and Wallace's ”Ben Hur” have had their little day, and been forgotten. In the art world the Cubists' crazy work drew the attention of the public long enough for it to be seen how spurious and absurd it was.
Brownell's war poems turned out to be little more than brief fireworks. Joaquin Miller, where is he? Fifty years ago Gail Hamilton was much in the public eye, and Grace Greenwood, and f.a.n.n.y Fern; and in Bohemian circles, there were Agnes Franz and Ada Clare, but they are all quite forgotten now.
The meteoric men would not appreciate President Wilson's wise saying that he would rather fail in a cause that in time is bound to succeed than to succeed in a cause that in time is bound to fail. Such men cannot wait for success. Meteoric men in politics, like Elaine and Conkling, were brilliant men, but were politicians merely. What fruitful or constructive ideas did they leave us? Could they forget party in the good of the whole country? Are not the opponents of the League of Nations of our own day in the same case--without, however, s.h.i.+ning with the same degree of brilliancy? To some of our Presidents--Polk, Pierce, Buchanan--we owe little or nothing.
Roosevelt's career, though meteoric in its sudden brilliancy, will s.h.i.+ne with a steady light down the ages. He left lasting results. He raised permanently the standard of morality in politics and business in this country by the gospel of the square deal. Woodrow Wilson, after the mists and clouds are all dispelled, will s.h.i.+ne serenely on.
He is one of the few men of the ages.
THE DAILY PAPERS
Probably the worst feature of our civilization is the daily paper. It scatters crime, bad manners, and a pernicious levity as a wind scatters fire. Crime feeds upon crime, and the newspapers make sure that every criminally inclined reader shall have enough to feed upon, shall have his vicious nature aroused and stimulated. Is it probable that a second and a third President of the United States would ever have been a.s.sa.s.sinated by shooting, had not such notoriety been given to the first crime? Murder, arson, theft, peculation, are as contagious as smallpox.
Who can help a pitying or a scornful smile when he hears of a school of journalism, a school for promoting crime and debauching the manners and the conscience of the people?--for teaching the gentle art of lying, for manufacturing news when there is no news? The pupils are taught, I suppose, how to serve up the sweepings from the streets and the gutters and the bar-rooms in the most engaging manner. They are taught how to give the great Public what it wants, and the one thing the great Public wants, and can never get enough of is any form of sensationalism. It clearly loves scandals about the rich, or anything about the rich, because we all want and expect to be rich, to out-s.h.i.+ne our neighbors, to cut a wide swath in society. Give us anything about the rich, the Public says; we will take the mud from their shoes; if we can't get that, give us the parings of their finger-nails.
The inelastic character of the newspaper is a hampering factor--so many columns must be filled, news or no news. And when there is a great amount of important news, see how much is suppressed that but for this inelasticity would have been printed!
The professor at the school of journalism says: ”I try to hammer it into them day after day that they have got to learn to get the news--that, whatever else a reporter can or cannot do, he isn't a reporter till he has learned to get the news.” Hence the invasion of private houses, the bribery, the stealing of letters, the listening at key-holes, the craze for photographing the most sacred episodes, the betrayals of confidence, that the newspapers are responsible for.
They must get what the dear Public most likes to hear, if they have to scale a man's housetop, and come down his chimney. And if they cannot get the true story, they must invent one. The idle curiosity of the Public must be satisfied.
Now the real news, the news the Public is ent.i.tled to, is always easy to get. It grows by the wayside. The Public is ent.i.tled to public news, not to family secrets; to the life of the street and the mart, not to life behind closed doors. In the dearth of real news, the paper is filled with the dust and sweepings from the public highways and byways, from saloons, police courts, political halls--sordid, ephemeral, and worthless, because it would never get into print if there were real news to serve up.
Then the advertising. The items of news now peep out at us from between flaming advertis.e.m.e.nts of the shopmen's goods, like men on the street hawking their wares, each trying to out-scream the other and making such a Bedlam that our ears are stunned.[6]
[Footnote 6: This fragment is hardly representative of the att.i.tude of Mr. Burroughs toward our worthy dailies, and, could he have expanded the article, it would have had in its entirety a different tone. He lived on the breath of the newspapers; was always eager for legitimate news; and was especially outspoken in admiration of the superb work done by many newspaper correspondents during the World War.
Furthermore, he was himself always most approachable and friendly to the reporters, complaining, however, that they often failed to quote him when he took real pains to help them get things straight; while they often insisted on emphasizing sensational aspects, and even put words in his mouth which he never uttered. But the truth is, he valued the high-cla.s.s newspapers, though regarding even them as a two-edged sword, since their praiseworthy efforts are so vitiated by craze for the sensational.--C. B.]
THE ALPHABET
Until we have stopped to think about it, few of us realize what it means to have an alphabet--the combination of a few straight lines and curves which form our letters. When you have learned these, and how to arrange them into words, you have the key that unlocks all the libraries in the world. An a.s.sortment and arrangement of black lines on a white surface! These lines mean nothing in themselves; they are not symbols, nor pictures, nor hieroglyphics, yet the mastery of them is one of the touchstones of civilization. The progress of the race since the dawn of history, or since the art of writing has been invented, has gone forward with leaps and bounds. The prehistoric races, and the barbarous races of our own times, had and have only picture language.
The Chinese have no alphabet. It is said that they are now accepting a phonetic alphabet. The Chinese system of writing comprises more than forty thousand separate symbols, each a different word. It requires the memorizing of at least three thousand word-signs to read and write their language. The national phonetic script is made up of sixty distinct characters that answer to our twenty-four. These characters embrace every verbal sound of the language, and in combination make up every word. The progress of China has been greatly hampered by this want of an alphabet.
Coleridge says about the primary art of writing: ”First, there is mere gesticulation, then rosaries, or wampum, then picture language, then hieroglyphics, and finally alphabetic letters,”--the last an evolution from all that went before. But there is no more suggestion of an alphabet in the sign language of the North American Indian than there is of man in a crinoid.
THE REDS OF LITERATURE
A cla.s.s of young men who seem to look upon themselves as revolutionary poets has arisen, chiefly in Chicago; and they are putting forth the most astonis.h.i.+ng stuff in the name of free verse that has probably ever appeared anywhere. In a late number of ”Current Opinion,” Carl Sandburg, who, I am told, is their chosen leader, waves his dirty s.h.i.+rt in the face of the public in this fas.h.i.+on:
”My s.h.i.+rt is a token and a symbol more than a cover from sun and rain, My s.h.i.+rt is a signal and a teller of souls, I can take off my s.h.i.+rt and tear it, and so make a ripping razzly noise, and the people will say, 'Look at him tear his s.h.i.+rt!'
”I can keep my s.h.i.+rt on, I can stick around and sing like a little bird, and look 'em all in the eye and never be fazed, I can keep my s.h.i.+rt on.”
Does not this resemble poetry about as much as a pile of dirty rags resembles silk or broadcloth? The trick of it seems to be to take flat, unimaginative prose and cut it up in lines of varying length, and often omit the capitals at the beginning of the lines--”shredded prose,” with no ”kick” in it at all. These men are the ”Reds” of literature. They would reverse or destroy all the recognized rules and standards upon which literature is founded. They show what Bolshevism carried out in the field of poetry, would lead to. One of them who signs himself H. D. writes thus in the ”Dial” on ”Helios”: