Modern Laodicea
By
Norman Hapgood
MODERN LAODICEA
FOR centuries the word Laodicean was a reproach; to-day it is beginning to carry with it a suggestion of nobility. It was Saint John who, in making the unknown city famous, covered it with obloquy:
“And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: …
“‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.
“‘So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’”
Among the moderns who have suggested that to be neither hot nor cold is to be well, Mr. Thomas Hardy is prominent, as he gave the title of “A Laodicean” to a novel of which the heroine is attractive. She is a girl who loves both the old and the new where they are most in conflict. She liked ruins and she liked restorations. She had half a mind to marry a picturesque noble, De Stancy, with no brains, no character, and an atmosphere of old-world romance, and she did marry a hard-headed modern. At the end of the book, she remarks: “‘We’ll build a new house beside the ruin, and show the modern spirit forevermore … but, George, I wish – ’ And Paula repressed a sigh.
“‘Well?’
“‘I wish my castle was not burned; and I wish you were a De Stancy.’”
At Harvard University, a few years ago, there was started a society intended to represent the true spirit of the Neo-Laodiceans. It held that lukewarmness was the most admirable condition obtainable by man. Moral heat or cold in the heart of any applicant for election was reason for his rejection. “Nothing in excess” was suggested as a motto, but the word “but” was thought to be a more subtle suggestion that something could always be said on either side. In the end no motto was chosen, because this matter, like all other matters, was not pressed. For refreshments, lukewarm tea and sweet California wine were served. Conversation was neither encouraged nor discouraged. Serious argument was as freely tolerated as genuine trifling. A well-known man in college, who thought himself worthy of the club, was rejected because he was believed to be hostile to seriousness. Another was kept out because, although he said nothing against frivolity, it bored him.
The society had no secrets. The members sought no proselytes, but gave full answers to all inquiries. The Harvard students smiled and were interested. The young women at the Harvard Annex tried to laugh, but thought it wasn’t right. They said the young men were posing. The most magnanimous said that under the seemingly erroneous spirit was a really ardent search for truth. The Annex held but one girl who was ever mentioned for membership, and she was defeated by a close vote on the ground that, although her Laodiceanism seemed perfect, as she was a woman it was axiomatic that a thorough knowledge of her would reveal some ethical prejudice.
The founder of the society, naturally enough, was the most imperfect member. At one time there was serious thought of accepting his resignation. Instead of being lukewarm he was alternately hot and cold, being one of the ablest moral speakers as well as one of the most inspired jesters at morality. He himself did not know whether reverence or blasphemy was strongest in him. It was the perfection of this doubt about himself which induced the club to forgive his unstable equilibrium.
“Doing is a deadly thing; doing ends in death.” One member was expelled because he quoted with approval this Antinomian hymn. That statement is as far from improved Laodiceanism as is the fury for doing things. Action is well enough if it be within bounds, as is rest. The Laodicean must see the advantages of all opposites, else he is unworthy of his name.
In contrast to the founder was the elected head of the society, the most fully developed specimen, a model of intellectual and temperamental moderation. He was mild in study, in exercise, in personal relations. He had more wisdom than most men and more knowledge, but he had acquired his knowledge, not by effort, but by putting his attention, when he chose to give attention to the acquisition of facts, to those of permanent importance. He had never wasted any strength on hobbies; he had never been enthusiastic. Yet he had always been interested. He knew nothing that was not worth knowing. His easy intellectual spirit was combined with æsthetic fineness and sensuous delicacy. He spent much of his time in the sunshine, amusing himself with the passing events of the hour. His friends were chosen for their dispositions, not for their acquirements. He preferred a small mind, simple and harmonious, to a large one distorted or turbulent. He spent a few hours of the day in severe study, a few in strolling in the air, a few in chatting and drinking tea, a few in reading poetry or other imaginative literature. He was fond of conversation, but not of dispute. He was loyal to reason and cared little for reasoning.
Between these two types lay the other five members, Laodiceans of varying degrees. One was looked upon as of doubtful standing on account of his temperament, which seemed to belong to the land of Far Niente, with which we had no desire to be allied. He was lazy, and he kept his membership only because of his intellectual fairness. His organs were partial to rest, but his mind was judicial and regretted the defect of his temperament. As his approval was distributed impartially among the alert and the sleepy, the faithful and the unbelieving, we let his ideas atone for his instincts.
The others, who were not especially distinct types, were good average examples of the species. In addition, we had seven honorary members. There was a rule that no man in his lifetime could be an honorary member, but there was one living man so deserving of the honor that we did all we could within the letter of the rule: we voted that Arthur James Balfour should acquire a membership immediately upon his death. He was the only man who received this tribute. Among the dead, Omar Khayyam was elected, with one dissent, on the ground that the Persian poet was injudiciously opposed to virtue; and Socrates, Lucretius, Horace, Goethe, and Molière passed without challenge. Over Lucretia Borgia, who was proposed by the founder, there was a long fight, with the same objections that had been made against him. On the plea that she was as fond of virtue as of vice we admitted her, though with regret.
Since the second gathering, though two years have passed, the club has not met, simply because no one has suggested a meeting. This is thought to be in keeping with its principles. I have gone thus fully into its history because it is the only organized representation of the principles of the new sect. These principles, though not yet exactly defined, are shadowed forth in the belief of these seven youths. They were confident, at the time, that the true Laodicea would grow in size and in respect. It could never number many, because by the nature of its creed it was an intellectual aristocracy; but it would grow slowly larger as the course of evolution brought the world gradually nearer to the summit of development. Whether most of us persist in this belief, I do not know. Nor do I know whether most of us believe still that in a world where almost everybody is vociferously supporting one side of every question it is a pleasant thing to sit in the shade, to drink lukewarm nourishment, and to say sweetly that there is some good on either side. There may be a better course than this – and there may not.
The Intellectual Parvenu
By
Norman Hapgood
THE INTELLECTUAL PARVENU
AT a time when so many new ideas about the humanities are flooding America it is not surprising that among our ambitious and intelligent young men of the first generation of culture are many whose intellectual methods show more eagerness than measure. With no traditions behind them they do not realize how necessary are humility, repose, and care to sound ripening of the perceptions and the judgment. As their fathers struggled for academic education and for material ease, the sons make a struggle and an excitement of ideas on art. They over-emphasize what they get hold of, from a deficient sense of permanent values. Though this spectacle has been seen at other times, probably never before was so large a mass of new ideas thrown to so hungry a public.
The men of whom I speak are more occupied with the idea of enlightenment than with the things which give light. Americans give too much importance to intellectual things, it is frequently said. Riper intelligence puts less emphasis on itself. When we first see beyond others about us we are dazzled by the idea of our own advancement. Because we have discarded some errors or removed some ignorance we rejoice in our grasp of truth. This often makes us set ourselves up as enemies of the Philistines and of all their ways. Seeing the futility of their labor we assume opinions on subjects over which we have not labored. Seeing the uselessness of much acquired fact we are content with superficial knowledge. We smile in satisfaction over the radicalness of our point of view, and because we know the deadness of some conventions we think that a thing is true because it is new. The established is commonplace. What is known to all or felt by all is unimportant. Distinction consists in seeing and believing novel things.
“I the heir of all the ages
In the foremost files of time.”
Most often these victims of their own progress are our college men. Indeed in a confused way the mass of our half-educated people who distrust the influences of our colleges have such products in their minds. Of course, however, the fault is not with our institutions, but with a hasty civilization. In an American college to-day altogether too much interest is taken in shallow modernity, but our colleges, on the whole, send their students away with less of the bigotry of new knowledge than they had on entrance. Steadily assertion of intellectual heterodoxy, contempt for the conventional, is becoming less a source of general interest in our educational institution; steadily it is coming to be seen as a crudity. So many youths have flaunted end-of-the-century banners that the device is already almost worthless, and it is not so much the graduate of to-morrow as the graduate of ten years ago, who is the centre of the admiring little circle which pins its faith in an enlightened life on some arbitrary and confident preacher of new things. The gospel of the prophet may be Japanese art; it may be the necessity of living in Europe; or it may be the futility of thinking anything is better than anything else. This American phenomenon is found in abundance in all of our cities, but if he can get away he lives in an European art centre, an essential part of no life except that of his apostles.
That these persons may be regarded as a class is proved by their surprising agreement of opinion. For instance, of the young art prophets whom I know, all Americans, some living in Europe, some by necessity in America, every one thinks that the others are so shallow that what influence they have is surprising; each thinks that the only art of to-day is French or Japanese; that there has never been any art in England; that the most advanced literature of the world is the realism of the younger men in Paris; that Oscar Wilde is the most intelligent of British writers; that the admiration of Shakespeare is a superstition; that there is much less beauty in nature than in art; that work in any unartistic employment is a waste of life; and that it is impossible for an intelligent man to be contented in America. When so many radical ideas are held in common there must be some way of generalizing about the individuals holding them. They are alike, also, not only in their opinions, but in their fields of ignorance. They are fond of talking about atavism, for instance, and cannot state exactly any one of the conflicting theories of heredity. They ostensibly treat art scientifically, psychologically, and do not know the simplest facts of experimental physiological psychology. They generalize about movements and periods after reading a few books about each. The saying that the French would be the best cooks in Europe if they had any butcher’s meat, modified by Mr. Bagehot into the aphorism that they would be the best writers of the day if they had anything to say, applies also to these critics who make such striking theories out of so little. They accuse of ignorance all who lack knowledge in their fields; all knowledge outside of their field they look upon as pedantry.
Salient, however, as are the weaknesses of these unformed prophets they do have their attractive side. They have enthusiasm about things of the mind, they have indignation for what they deem Philistinism, and with their love of prominence in the world of ideas is mixed some genuine respect for truth. Are our American workers in the world of ideas to be permanently open to the charge of over-emphasis, of lacking distinction, finish, wholeness? Most of us believe not. We believe that the prominence of cleverness, rather than of soundness, just now is a temporary thing, like our social crudities, from which later the powers of a race will free themselves.
In the meantime, we have in an impressive form the first crop of the literature of the future. Journals are founded all over the country which, in an average life of a few months, express the opinions and reveal the art of a few young men who think they are ahead of their times. Just now the main characteristic of this literature is that it suggests as often as it can the art of painting. It calls itself by the name of a color – yellow, green, purple, gray. Constant use is made of the slang of art. Indeed their only way of appearing artistic seems to be to make their writing as far as possible remind the reader of the plastic arts. Art is ostentatiously opposed to everything else, especially to scholarship, morality, and industry. The idea seems to be that art is made by talking about art, or by talking about life in terms of art. Equally noticeable is the instinct that in making one special quality conspicuous by neglecting others, they are showing originality. They do not see that in an artist great enough to give a large man the feeling of life there are too many elements for any detail to be conspicuous. The work of this artist will be life-like; commonplace, unless seen by an eye to which common life reveals its interests. Edmond de Goncourt can see nothing in “The Scandinavian Hamlet.” He prefers Père Goriot, who is newer, he thinks, and more real. Edmond de Goncourt is an admirable example of the attitude of a few men in Paris who have largely influenced some of our tawdry literature. In one of his journals he remarks sadly that in a certain conversation about abstract things, general human points of view, he failed to shine, and he asks plaintively why it is that men who “on all other subjects” find original things to say are in these generalities on a footing with the rest of the world, – which means to him, flat. Readers of the eight volumes of the journal may smile at the “all other subjects,” but it is at least true that on certain narrow topics of which few persons know anything he could feel more profound than he could on subjects of universal human interest. His test of Shakespeare, by the way, is an apt one. It does not condemn a man that he does not find Hamlet interesting. Many intelligent men do not. Any man however, who infers, from his lack of appreciation that Shakespeare is not a great artist is deficient in critical intelligence and in understanding of the value of evidence. And when a man remarks that Raphael, Beethoven, or Shakespeare, was a great man in his time, but that the world has progressed, and that, as we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, the Balzac of this century sees more than the Shakespeare of two centuries earlier, we have a subject for comedy. Artists, except the very highest, are likely to be as critics arbitrary and intolerant, though often acute and original, and these hangers-on of the art-world have the arbitrariness without the compensating exact knowledge.
That any critic who seriously treats with contempt any man or any institution that has a high place in the general world of ideas is shallow, an avoider and not a solver of questions which confront a man of mature culture and broad mind, is almost axiomatic. When we hear so many critics to-day expressing scorn of whole nations, saying of England, perhaps, that she has no art, of Germany, that she has only dull learning, of America that she is Philistine; when we see these critics surrounded by groups of followers, do we not wish, with some reason, that we had a Molière to-day? What a play he could make of “Les Critiques Ridicules;” or of “L’Ecole des Aesthètes,” or of “L’Amèricain Malgré Lui.” The poems of Mr. Gilbert and of Punch are pleasing within their range, but the subject deserves to be treated in one of the world’s comedies. The scientific art criticism of men who know of art and science nothing except the jargon makes one sometimes doubt the value of the general spread of ideas. Lombroso, Nordau, even parts of Spencer, not to speak of the mass of inferior generalizing of wide scope, would have brought a sad smile to the face of the real scientist who spent seven years studying earth-worms alone.
The School of Jingoes
By
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
THE SCHOOL OF JINGOES
IN a certain colored regiment there was a chaplain who was habitually called by the negroes, with their usual gift at lucky misnomers, “Mr. Chapman.” He was very fond of risky adventures, and one of the negroes once said: “Woffor Mas’ Chapman made preacher fo’? He’s de fightin’est mos’ Yankee I ebber see in all my days!” It is impossible not to read this in reading what is written by these friends of peace, who are constantly using the olive branch for a war club and hammering away at those who think differently. The excellent Mr. Angell, in the last number of “Our Dark Friends,” announces in one column that the object of his paper is “the humane education of the millions,” and in another column that it is to be wished “that England had not only Venezuela, but every other Spanish-speaking colony on the face of the earth.” In this manner, more prosaically, do Mr. Edward Atkinson and Mr. Edward D. Mead hold it up as the highest desideratum for every part of Spanish and Portuguese America to pass into English hands. Grant the force of all their arguments, can this be regarded as the gospel of serenity and brotherly love? It rather recalls Heine’s glowing description of one of his early teachers, one Schramm, who had written a book on Universal Peace, and in whose classes the boys pommelled each other with especial vigor.
If jingoism there be on earth, where are its headquarters, its normal school, its university extension system? Where, pray, but in the example of England? No one who has watched the course of things at Washington can help seeing the influence of that vast object-lesson. Seeley’s book, “The Expansion of England,” is of itself enough to demoralize a whole generation of Congressmen. It is the trophies of Great Britain which will not allow Lodge and Roosevelt to sleep. Logically, they have the right of it. If it be a great and beneficent thing for England to annex, by hook or crook, every desirable harbor or island on the globe; to secure Gibraltar by a trick, India by a lucky disobedience of orders, Egypt by a temporary occupation of which the other end never arrives, – why not follow the example? This impulse lay behind the whole Hawaiian negotiation; it asserts itself in all the Venezuela interference, in all the Cuban imbroglio. Moreover, it is absolutely consistent and defensible, if England is, as we are constantly assured, the great, beneficent, and civilizing power on the earth. If so, let us also be beneficent; let us proceed to civilize; let us, too, say, especially to all Spanish-speaking peoples, “Sois mon frère, ou je te tue!”
If there ever was a Church Militant, surely England is the Nation Militant. While we debate a gunboat, she equips a fleet; while we introduce a bill for an earth-work, and refer it to a committee, she forwards ten additional guns to Puget Sound. “Her march is o’er the mountain wave,” as Campbell long since boasted; and yet, whenever the youngest statesman asks why we should not be allowed to take a faltering step after her, he is treated as if he had violated the traditions of the human race and had indeed brought death into the world and all our woe. Let us at heart be consistent. To me, I confess, the old tradition of “an unarmed nation” – about which that good soldier, Gen. F. A. Walker, once made so fine an address – still seems the better thing. But the unarmed nation is the condemnation of England; if defencelessness is right, then England is all wrong, and we should say so. We can by no possible combination be English and pacific at the same time.
Above all, it seems to me an absolute abandonment of the whole principle of republican institutions to say that they are for one nation alone, and for only those who speak one language. If deserving means anything, it means that sooner or later all will grow up to it. Nobody doubts that the Romans governed well and were the best road-builders on this planet; but all now admit that it helped human progress when they took themselves out of England and left those warring tribes to work themselves out of their dark condition into such self-government as they now possess. There was a time on this continent when Mexico was such a scene of chaos that the very word “to Mexicanize” carried a meaning of disorder. Yet what State of the Union has shown more definite and encouraging progress than has been accomplished in Mexico within the last ten years? What Mexico is, every Spanish-American or Portuguese-American state may yet be, only give it time and a fair chance. If we believe that the principle of self-government is unavailable for those who speak Spanish, we might as well have allowed Maximilian to set up his little empire undisturbed. No one ever doubted that Louis Napoleon knew how to build good roads and to shoot straight; and perhaps he might have taught the same arts to his representative. Whatever injury we may before have done to Mexico, we repaid it liberally when we said to Europe, “Hands off,” and secured to that Spanish-American state its splendid career of self-development out of chaos. What Mexico has done the states of South America may yet imitate.