More Truth Than Poetry

The new Atlantic serial BY Hans Zinsser

CHAPTERS I-VI

MORE TRUTH THAN POETRY

THE BIOGRAPHY OF R. S.

BY Hans Zinsser

Author of ‘Rats, Lice and History’

‘More Truth Than Poetry’ is the story of an American who never for an instant forgot the German heritage that came to him from his ancestors in 1848. Here are the twin careers which he chose to follow — the scientific career of medicine, fighting to avert plagues, and the career of the scholar and poet which he followed all his life.

Medicine has taken R. S. to the far corners of the earth. Wherever there were war and infection, there he has gone. In Serbia in 1914-1915, in the American Army in France, in Russia after the great famine, in Mexico, and in China, he has fought as a scientist, and has passed on his instruction to students at Columbia, Leland Stanford, and Harvard, at the Sorbonne and at the universities in China and Japan.

A student of men, a linguist who has read insatiably in the ancient and modern languages, a poet who has long contributed to the Atlantic, a lover of horses who has ridden the Western range, a philosopher who has never for a moment sacrificed his independence of mind, he stands out in our age as an admirable blend of science and the humanities.

MORE TRUTH THAN POETRY

BY HANS ZINSSER

I

‘BUT why in thunder,’asked my friend the novelist, ‘should anyone want to write a biography of R. S.? Biographical study should be reserved for men and women who have been intellectually or politically distinguished, have influenced the course of human thought or destiny, and from whose accomplishments or errors the world can derive profit. The records of the lives of great men are a sort of historical histology in which the microscope is centred on a single significant unit of a period, disclosing the forces which shaped the unusual variant and his influence upon his generation. Or, as in such relatively recent studies as The Education of Henry Adams or Brooks’s New England, the subtle atmosphere of an era is clarified by filtration through the minds of superior individuals in a manner unattainable by the grosser methods of macroscopic history.’

He had learned a certain medical vocabulary from me which he took great pride in displaying.

‘Now this R.S.,’ he continued, ‘what after all distinguishes him from thousands of others? He contributed his little farthings to scientific medicine. He went to war like ten million others. He wrote poetry that wasn’t read — possibly, to do him justice, because it was published in the Atlantic Monthly. He made a nuisance of himself in countless academic controversies. He had so little intellectual self-control that he reacted like an Æolian harp to every wind that blew, missing what little chance he had

of giving out a really significant note in anything. And when he died, the world had no unusual reasons to mourn him.

‘If you want to enter the biographical racket, why don’t you do as Ludwig and Maurois do? Pick some great man who has been well written up, and compile a nice, modern, and exciting version for the education of the near-illiterate adult. Or take up somebody who has really made an impression on our civilization, such as Aimee McPherson or Jimmy Roosevelt.’

I explained to my friend that the very things he criticized were my motives for wishing to write about R.S.

For some years before his death, which occurred quite recently, I had been much thrown with R.S. by common professional interests, and he attracted me largely because he seemed so typically a child of his time. Born and brought up in the nineteenth-century traditions which prevailed until the Great War, he never succeeded in adjusting to the social and political turmoil which, since then, has shaken the foundations of a private and public life that had seemed permanently established in a reasonably stabilized world.

He appeared a noticeably average representative of that educated middle class which lived its maturer years through this transitional period, nostalgically conservative, yet trying hard to fall in with the spirit of the times; eventually realizing that, as far as he and his fellows were concerned, their main contribution must be to carry over into the new era something of the precious past which most other people seemed intent on completely destroying. And I felt that the education and thoughts of a reasonably intelligent, average person might give a more accurate picture of these times than any biographical record of the distinguished and brilliant who might, because of their genius, belong to any age while representing none in particular.

In spite of my novelist’s discouraging remarks, therefore, I suggested to R.S. himself that I write his biography, and explained — more or less as I have tried to in the preceding paragraphs — why I should like to do so. He objected, and to my surprise his opposition was not based, as I had expected, on modesty. Indeed, he was hurt. He seemed to believe that he was quite a remarkable fellow and, if a biography were to be written, it should be a serious one. But he didn’t like the idea of biography for a number of other reasons.

‘First of all,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t tell you some of the most interesting things about me, because I’m ashamed of them. Look at Rousseau. Everyone gloats over the Confessions. If he hadn’t written them, people would occasionally read the Contrat Social and the Nouvelle Héloïse, and realize his intelligence instead of using him for psychoanalytical geniussnooping.

‘Me,’ he said ungrammatically, ‘I have been like most other people, both a hero and a coward; an idealist and a humbug; a Galahad and a sensualist. Virtue and the Devil have been constantly rolling over each other within me.

“ Tras la Cruz esta el Diablo” — behind the Cross is always the Devil, as Cervantes said. Taking it by and large, I had more fun when the Devil was on top, and I have often been thankful that Martin Luther was such a bad shot with the ink bottle. But I am far from considering myself hopelessly wicked for that reason. For after all, man made the Devil in his own image, and if there were no Devil we should have to invent one. Yet I shouldn’t like that to go into a biography — certainly not with documentation.

‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘I’m a doctor. And I’m sick of books by doctors and about doctors. It’s a racket. The whole publicizing of culture is a racket. Everybody’s a little educated nowadays, and they’re all hungry for easy culture — medicine, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, literature. They want books about books. Of course you can’t blame them. People are too busy to read Goethe or Voltaire or Cervantes or Kant. Can you see the citizen poring over “ Zweitens der Grundsatz dass Realitäten (als blosse Bejahung) einander niemals logisch widerstreiten, ist ein ganz anderer Satz von dem Verhältnisse der Begriffe, bedeutet aber weder in Ansehung irgend eines Dinges an sich selbst (von diesem haben wir keinen Begriff) das mindeste?”’ He can get it much more easily from Will Durant or Alpern or Fuller. It’s more fun to read Van Wyck Brooks in a hammock than Emerson, or Ludwig than Goethe. They want it in hypodermics or like liver extract.’

I quote this only as an example of how he was apt to run on at the slightest provocation — always, I may say, including in his reasonable talk a lot of things about which he knew practically nothing at all. This was at the same time his defect and his charm, for — often — the more illogical and excited he was, the more he illustrated the confused reaction of his class to the things going on in the modern world. He became what Rachilde calls a ‘cerveau enflammé.’

I quieted him by telling him that I had no idea of writing about him as a doctor. ‘The medicine,’ I said, ‘is purely incidental. I have no thought of making you the excuse for another Odyssey in Wonderland, like Victor Heiser’s, or a Science and Health, like Dr. Carrel’s. I should like to write about you and your reactions more or less as Henry Adams wrote about himself: the times filtering through your personality — you yourself an example of your kind of people.

‘You see,’ I fortified my point, ‘Henry Adams was an American, blood and bone of him. You represent the recent stock. It would be amusing to contrast the reactions of a relatively parthenogenetic American with those of the immediate post-Iroquois strain.’

At this juncture he broke into a tirade about the advantages of being an outsider. He quoted Samuel Butler. He then started on the Anglo-Saxons in America, who regarded everyone who lived among them without Anglicizing his name as something inferior. I let him run down. But I did get him interested.

Through the ensuing years, there was a tacit understanding between us that he would write, for my perusal and editing, His recollections and thoughts. The responsibility of connecting them into an acceptable sequence was to be mine, and I was to be permitted to write — in the third person, of course — any additional information which I could gather from our frequent conversations. I was also to have complete possession of any papers he left behind, and I fell heir to notes and keepsakes, unfinished articles, poems, and even a Rabelaisian series of unfinished fairy tales, that he would otherwise have destroyed. But, faithful to our friendship, I have suppressed many things that I know he would not have liked to sec in print and which, indeed, were often disgraceful.

The greater part of this biography, written in the first person, is almost unedited from the pen of R. S. himself. In consequence, it is in places badly written, and sometimes vague and discursive. The smoother writing, in the third person, is my own.

My friend the novelist, like many others of my literary acquaintances, questioned my ability to accomplish so difficult a task, since I had published only one non-medical book, which is now printed in the Blue Ribbon series, together with the Complete Dog Book and The Sexual Life of Savages. And, of course, I am considerably intimidated by the modern insistence on what is called ‘craftsmanship’ by professional writers. But I took courage from SainteBeuve’s remark: ‘Rien ne m’est pénible comme le dédain avec lequel on traite souvent des écrivains du second ordre, comme s’il n’y avait place que pour ceux du premier.’

I approached my task with modesty, therefore, hoping that I might acceptably convey in this study the portrait of a representative of that generation, now rapidly disappearing, — like the T-model Ford, — whose lives bridged the transition from horses to gasoline, from gaslight to electric bulbs, from Emerson and Longfellow to T. S. Eliot and Joyce, from stock companies to the movies and the radio, and so forth, and so forth — in short, from Victoria to Mrs. Windsor.

If there appears, in this account, occasional confusion of subject and sequence, this — apart from my possible ineptitude — is due to very reluctant cooperation by R. S. and to the fact that, although in his science he had some excuse for calling himself a specialist, he was one of those people on whom all controversial questions of his time acted like horseflies on a half-broken mule. The work of the last year, however, was much facilitated by the fact that his doctors persuaded him to stop drinking.

II

R. S. speaks of his parents, their marriage and their death: —

Autumn is the season which, more than any other time of the year, brings back to me the bittersweet pageant of the past. In the Hudson Valley in the days before motorcars, — when my horse’s feet went slushing through fallen leaves which a gust of wind brought blowing and tumbling across the roads, — the swamp maples turned first, and then the other trees and bushes, with the wild vines making bright cardinal patches across the great rocks; and the hills, gaudy and carnival-like in the noon sunshine, would grow sombre with a majestic mournfulness as the short afternoons chilled into dusk. The sweet, acrid wood smoke hung in the air as I rode past a farmhouse, and at home, when the saddle was off and a forkful of hay pitched down to the blanketed mare, there would be a log fire in the big stone fireplace that smoked just enough to let one smell the wood.

There would be a cold supper, a bottle of wine, and the affectionate banter of intimacy. And, before bedtime, a stroll to the stable — warm and dark — with the beloved smell of horses and hay; a stamping and a turning of heads in the stalls when the lantern light swung around the shadows of the beams, with perhaps a barn swallow waking from sleep and fluttering into the rafters. Then back under cold stars hung low in a brightly black sky, with just chill enough to send one off to bed with a jump from the opened window to the blankets.

It was in the autumn that my father died. I was sitting beside his bed, waiting. He had looked into the eyes of death for two years; at first, a little frightened and shocked. But as the sense of inevitableness became a habit, and pain more constant and severe, he complained only of the cruel slowness with which death comes — so long after his coming is announced. He died at night and — as I have seen it so often — his mind cleared during the last hours. When the end finally came, there was a pressure of my hand, and a smile. The smile remained to soften the lines of suffering in his face when he was dead, and I found myself sitting there beside him, with the first light of day creeping into the windows — feeling, for the moment, utterly alone in a world which I had never imagined without him.

He had no belief in God. He had no hope of immortality. And in these negations he did not weaken during the months of agony. If he shed a tear, it was for the sorrow of leaving us who loved him so deeply. He believed that man’s immortality lies in the offspring of his body and mind, and wanted no consolation for what he accepted as the inevitable destiny of all living things.

When he died, my mother’s life was over. She had met him, a gay student of twenty-two, with the black-red-gold ribbon — later for a historic moment the colors of the German Republic — across bis breast. She was the daughter of a disgraced political dissenter in the Black Forest, a lawyer who would neither do homage to the political powers nor shave off the beard that proclaimed his allegiance to a defeated cause. The man of her heart went to America, to the promised land where there was still room for all the free spirits whose wings were clipped at home by bigotry and political oppression. The English love liberty, Heine has said, as a legitimate wife — not too caressingly, but with a sense of ownership and protectiveness; the French, he said, love her as a mistress — always to be wooed in order to be retained. The Americans, my father added, treat her like a familiar drudge — so sure of her that they may abuse and neglect her. She will grow old and feeble in time, and will perhaps die altogether. He did not live long enough to know how nearly his prophecy was to be fulfilled. For, in his day, liberty in America was young and vigorous. And up to the end of his life the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ had a sense of solemnity for him. He loved Abraham Jacobi and idolized Hans Kudlich, who said: ‘Ihr Deutsche! haltet die Nacken steif! ‘ — and he wanted to be buried next to Carl Schurz in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where he now lies.

He came to America with pockets almost empty, but with the help of an older brother, already in full career. soon turned his chemical training to good use. But it was no sudden affluence; and, meanwhile, the dark-eyed girl in the Schwarzwald was having a hard time. Her mother had died — the father a little later; there was hardly any money. She went for a while as a governess to France and taught a little Monsieur de Something de Something very little German, in return for which she perfected her French, confirmed her instinct for social formality, and lost a great deal of national prejudice. But I can imagine her often, on autumn evenings, wandering in the château garden thinking wistfully of the merry young chemist who was so sad on leaving her, and who had said that he would never stop loving her, wherever he might be.

And then something happened that seemed like a miracle. A letter came, like the answer to a wish in a fairy tale.

The young chemist had written home. Home was a schoolmaster’s house on the Rhine, in a village conveniently located for harboring refugees at night, when they tapped on the kitchen shutters after the children were asleep — or were supposed to be. Often they were not, as my father told me, and they would lie in their beds in the attic, wide-eyed and alert, listening in silent excitement to the sounds of hurried meals and furtive departures below.

The broad-shouldered old schoolmaster was alone now — his wife dead and all the seven birds flown from the roost into the wide world. Four sons — a doctor, two merchants, and a chemist — in New York; three daughters married, one of them in America. He spent long evenings in his garden — a lonely old man — thinking of the past, and hoping for letters. ‘I am now in a position to marry her,’ the young chemist wrote. ‘But it is two years since we have seen each other and we were then very young. Does she love me enough to journey almost a quarter of the circumference of the world, to settle in a new, strange, and curiously unfriendly country, with no one but myself to be home to her?’

On a happy day the letter came to her from the old schoolmaster, whom she had never seen. ‘The boy loves you and wants you to marry him,’ it said. ‘You may think you are still in love with him and, being a brave girl, you may have courage enough to go to him and fulfill your promise. But you are very young and very lonely, and neither of us can tell how these two years among the clever Yankees may have changed him. But if you think you are sure of your feelings, I will take you to him myself. And if we find him the same warmhearted and high-spirited boy we knew and loved, I will see you married to him before I come back. If not, you shall return with me to the Rhine, for I have sore need of a daughter.’

They met in the city of her birth — Freiburg im Breisgau. The old man arrived with a heavy bag of longhoarded gold pieces. America was much farther away then than it is now, and the schoolmaster was a very old man. But he was also a very gallant one: flirted with his son’s girl all the way over; rolled her in blankets; tucked her in at night; bought her all the simple things he could afford — in short, it was a sort of pre-honeymoon.

That’s how my father and my mother were finally brought together. No parson, however; a justice of the peace at the City Hall and a party in the little wooden house near the chemical factory, with Asmus, the mining engineer-poet, Onkel Fritz, the musician-doctor, and all the jolly half-homesick exiles for whom America was a great adventure where their talents and training had full play but where, in some respects, their freedom was like that of the desert. To the Americans of their own class and culture, though there were plenty of them, they had no easy access, and with the others they wanted little contact. So for many years they remained in a sort of cultural oasis of their own, — socially and intellectually self-sufficient, — waiting perhaps a little arrogantly for this country to seek them out, instead of exploring. We spoke German at the table until my father’s death. Sunday-evening dinners were patriarchal reunions of a clan, imposed by a custom of affectionate reverence, with open house for waifs for whom talent or science or music or sheer loneliness had loosened the latchstring.

These exiles had no complaints to make of their new home, and they became politically Americans with a speed and thoroughness surprising to all who did not understand their fervid admiration of our institutions. But when they had left behind all the things they had hated at home, they rediscovered in their own hearts the love for the many other things they missed in their new surroundings.

Now he was dead. And after fifty-two years of journeying together my mother’s life was over. She wanted to go back to Westchester County to the house where they had spent so many happy years. We younger ones had a little farmhouse not far from the home place, in one of the narrow valleys through which the brooks run down to the Hudson. To this she came, with two maids and her chauffeur.

Maids were different in those days, and chauffeurs were usually old men and recent coachmen. They were not birds of passage and servants. They had little pay compared with today, but their place of service was their home. They stayed a long time, and there was affection in their relationships. My mother was a benevolent tyrant. Her maids were praised and scolded, supervised, bullied, and petted. My mother knew about their families, their small brothers and sisters, and their troubles. They stood in awe of her a little — but loved her a great deal. Now, in her affliction, they cherished her with humble devotion.

She wanted to be alone and, with them, she was alone — and taken care of. We brothers took turns visiting her. One of us came to see her each day, driving up from New York. We would find her sitting on the lawn in front of the house, silently knitting — a pitifully small and shrunken figure against the blazing grandeur of the autumnal hills. At a suitable distance, on one side, sat Anna, her maid; just far enough to be out of the way, but near enough to hear when she was spoken to. Somewhere, near by, John the ex-coachman was busy, tinkering at some useless task, in order to be within reach. Thus, when I came, I would find her, wrapped in a fur coat, sitting — with the dignity and poise of great sorrow — among the falling leaves.

She roused herself when we came and chatted reminiscently, and took great pleasure in our coming. But we whom she had loved so dearly for ourselves were now obviously only what was left of him. Her life was over, and in two weeks she followed him. Gradually, she had grown more feeble for no physically noticeable reason. She seemed to die of his death.

III

R. S. speaks of his birth and childhood, and since he seemed to derive a nostalgic satisfaction from this, I allowed him to run on —though he introduced much that is quite irrelevant: —

My birth fell into the period intermediary between the methods of Dr. Slop and the modern aseptic obstetrics — ‘twilight sleep,’ prenatal and after care — which have made childbirth a not too unpleasant interruption between a dinner party and the bunt races. In May 1847, Semmelweis had introduced chlorine water into the wards of the Vienna hospitals, and the deaths in childbirth had dropped within a year from 12 per cent to 1.2 per cent. The horrors which Dr. Holmes describes in his eloquent essay were recent and dreadful memories. To be sure, there was not yet any intelligence about birth control and — in this sense — I cannot escape the belief that to some extent I really should not have been born. For there were eight years between me and my next older brother. Of course when I came I was not, for that reason, unwelcome; for my parents were intrinsically good and tender of heart.

Yet it is a strange and terrifying thought that a human life — long and adventurous, full of joy and sorrow, effort and disappointment, pregnant with possibilities for good and evil, for suffering, for vice and virtue — should be begotten more or less accidentally, for no particular reason except the enchantment of an early harvest moon.

In the famous letter received by the late Professor Wheeler, Wee-Wee, the King of the Termites, commenting on the inferiority of human society to that of his own species, says: ‘And owing to the absence of eugenics and birth control, and to your habits of fostering all weak and inefficient individuals, there is not even the dubious and slow-working apparatus of natural selection to provide for the organic fixation of castes through heredity.’ Wee-Wee is quite right, and among termites this last offspring would not have been in the planned order of society and might well have been omitted without serious loss.

At any rate, there I was; and, thanks to the newer obstetrics, my mother had not too much discomfort of me, and I was neither rendered imbecile nor paralyzed by the procedures of passing — in the words of Goethe — through that arch under which all candidates for immortality must pass.

Incidentally, the slowness of the progress which this science of obstetrics made through the ages to arrive even at the point which it had reached at the date of my birth is extraordinary. The Greeks had a kind of midwife. Only difficult cases called for a physician, but — strangely enough in a race so athletic —

Simon Magnetes records that three out of every five childbirths were difficult ones. In the oldest sculptures, according to Haeser, the habitual position during birth was a ‘kneeling’ (probably squatting) one; and this seems a habitual phenomenon among aboriginal races, often retained long after their removal from primitive surroundings.

While riding the Roosevelt Hospital ambulance, not yet too old to blush while performing professional service, I encountered several instances of emergency childbirth in the San Juan Hill Negro district, in which the prospective mothers refused to move from the squat in a dark corner of the room. In one case, in order to do my duty of holding back the head, I was forced to lie in an awkward position on a very dirty floor, while performing my probably quite unnecessary functions. But I was young and compassionate, and there was in my heart that pride of devotion which suppresses disgust and ennobles service. Fortunately, the night was bitter cold, and I had a thick overcoat to spread beneath me. But I remember well the difficulties I had kicking a little dog away from my legs, and my worry at being helpless to stop the first-born — a lovely naked pickaninny of three — from looting my ambulance bag while all this was going on. It was done in the dim light of a gas flame; but within the hour we were all — including the little bag robber — riding merrily to the Sloane Maternity in the ambulance.

But to come back to obstetrics: in this art the Greeks did not advance beyond the skill of the ancient Hindus. The latter already had midwives, — four to a case, — knew quite a lot about the stages of pregnancy, tied off the umbilical cord, hung it about the neck of the child, and actually (Susruta) described abnormal positions in utero, recommending ‘version’ in certain cases, to pull down the legs.

In the second century, Soranus of Ephesus wrote a considerable work on diseases of women, in which he included much crude and — to our modern minds — murderous advice about manipulatory aid in first deliveries. Incidentally, living in Rome at the time of Pliny and Trajan, Soranus may be regarded as the first advocate of birth control reliably on record, giving advice which — in principle— is not so unlike that which is now prohibited in the United States mails.

But we are talking about my own birth, and not writing a history of obstetrics. By the time I was born, bacteriology had begun to reveal the principles which made obstetrics, as indeed all other forms of surgery, humane and relatively safe. The rest was technique. And obstetrics had advanced almost as much — if not more — by the principle of noninterference as by safeguarding procedure. Before Semmelweis, it is likely — though we have no statistics to prove it — that fewer women would have died if midwives and doctors had been prohibited by law from coming near the prospective mother until just before delivery of the placenta. Some of the women whom I attended as ambulance surgeon, and who came through quite robustly, had had their babies either by themselves or with the sympathetic and, fortunately, timid ‘assistance’ (in the French sense) of a policeman or a streetcar conductor long before I arrived. In one case a policeman — himself a fat her, as he later told me — had tied off the cord with a shoestring.

One poor girl, — I recall her with the reminiscent tenderness of my youthful compassion, — ashamed of having a baby without a husband, had taken a room in an obscure boardinghouse, with the intention of hiding her disgrace and remaining alone until it was all over. When the crisis came, her nerves gave way and she called for help. I well remember the miserable hallway, the indignant drudge of a landlady, — with bare arms, broom, and mobcap, howling the respectability of her hovel, — the dim hall bedroom, and the agonized, lovely young thing on the dirty bed. It all went well. I don’t know what became of her afterward. The Sloane nurse told me later that she left the hospital quite happy, with a frail baby in her arms. But she never did give her right name, and was ‘O.W.’ (out of wedlock) on the records.

There is not, in our present society, any greater example of hard luck than that of having an illegitimate baby. The only imaginably greater misfortune might be having illegitimate twins or triplets. The only case of that kind I can think of, though of course it must have happened often, is that of Robert Burns’s second love, the patient Jean, who actually did have illegitimate twins — later legalized, though not until, I believe, there had been one or two (I’m not sure) ‘love children’ from other attractive girls in between. And, of all things, this had to happen in Scotland. What a man! Not because he produced the children, but because he could keep right on writing poetry. Indeed, it seemed to stimulate him.

About other obstetrical adventures I may have more to say in later chapters of this narrative. To the sensitive young disciple of medicine, these experiences are perhaps the most profoundly stirring in his education as a human being.

To come back to my own birth: with a knowledge of the circumstances and the state of the science at the time of my entrance into this turbulent planet, it is not difficult to reconstruct just what happened.

Having thoroughly dried me, old Dr. Gulecke slapped me vigorously on the buttocks, leaving across them the scarlet imprint of four bony fingers, thereby stirring me, as was intended, to the indignant protest that filled my lungs with their first sweet air. It brought a healthy flush of anger to my little wrinkled face; but — nothing perturbed — the doctor turned me over to reassure himself as to the kind I was and, wiping his brow with the reverse side of the towel with which he had dried me, handed me to Frau Schultz.

It was, no doubt, an amazingly casual and prosaic performance. There was no rustle of angel wings, there were no strains of heavenly music; but for the tired girl in the next room — who looked then just like the faded photograph that I have on the desk before me — a miracle had been performed that stirred her lips in grateful prayer. And when the competent Frau Schultz — having rolled me and smeared me, dabbed and swathed me — laid me, with a last professional and totally unnecessary wipe of the nose, in the waiting arms, she hugged me to her breast and went immediately to sleep.

Frau Schultz, I am sure, began to tidy up, and the doctor to fasten his cuff links, long before they gave a thought to my poor father, who was pacing up and down on the floor below in his wrinkled clothes, anxiety and a feeling of guilt struggling for mastery within him.

Then the doctor — as they always do — drove away with the air of a worker of miracles.

The minds of little children are like rolls of cinema film on which long series of uncoördinated impressions, gathered by the senses, are caught. Usually most of these fade completely in later years. It is only here and there, in the earlier years, that an experience impresses itself with sufficient coloring to remain as a memory in later life.

My earliest memory goes back to when I must have been between one and two years old. It was like a vaguely remembered dream until I found later, in speaking of it, that it was based on fact.

I remembered clouds in a blue sky, against which the spars of a ship were swinging to and fro, and at the same time I heard a little tune sung with German words: —

Schlaf’, mein liebes Kind.
Draussen bläst der Wind.
IIor! des Nacfibars Hündchen bellt!
Alles schläft in der weiten Welt. .. .

I can’t remember any more of it. Later I learned that I was taken abroad as a baby, and that my father often sat on the deck of the old Moselle, which still had masts and spars for emergency rigging, and sang me to sleep on his lap with the little tune.

As a boy, I would often — especially before going to sleep at night — hear the little song, see the swinging spars against clouds scudding through a blue sky, and go to sleep happily. And a warm wave of affection floods my heart even now for the young, blond man whose love enclosed me while he lived and whose hand I have felt caressingly on my head throughout my life, whenever I was in need of comforting.

At times the dead are closer to us than the living, and the wisdom and affection of the past stretch blessing hands over our lives, projecting a guardian care out of the shadows and helping us over hard places. For there are certain kinds of love that few but the very wise fully understand until they have become memories.

Our dog, a mongrel poodle, was an important part of my life then, as dogs have been more or less ever since. He had not been ruined by too much social life. Let a dog know too many people, and he turns out badly. Bring him up in a family where he is always about with a few people, shares house and board, lies by the fire, runs with the children, steals in the kitchen, and sleeps under a bed, and you have — at five or six — a wise and affectionate and altogether lovable dog.

The same principles apply to people, as Isaac Newton well knew, because it is said that, when he was first asked to join the Royal Society, he declined — saying that he was afraid it ‘might increase the circle of his acquaintances.’

When I lay awake in the very early mornings the birds would begin to chirp in the vines that grew along the wall under my window. They were only humble city sparrows, but they made a merry confusion of sound. And when my mother came in to bid me goodmorning she always said: ‘Did you hear your birds?’ She gave me the birds as my own, as Anatole France’s mother gave him the rose on the wallpaper. And ever since I have thought of the earlymorning sparrows as my own particular property.

The walk in the Park was the event of the mornings. I was accompanied by the dog, on a leash, with a fine green collar, and we were both in the care of the ‘Rothe Anna,’ a faithful, deepchested, redheaded girl from the Schwarz – wald. The dog, being on a leash and thereby protected, made brave growling jumps at squirrels and birds, and I ran ahead, pulling a little express wagon or rolling a hoop. With other children I had little association on these walks, because my English was distinctly foreign. I do remember hitting another little boy over the head with the shaft of the express wagon one day, but have forgotten the preliminaries. It was the earliest example of a great many similar episodes that, in later life, gave me the reputation of having a quick temper; though, as I think them over, they can all be explained by the fact that — not growing very big — I was quarrelsome merely to keep up my self-respect.

Anna always straightened out any difficulties the dog or I got into, and brought us home happy. She was a good Catholic and worried a great deal about my irreligious upbringing. So, on our walks, she often entertained me with stories of saints; and once, just as we were standing under a big elm in the Mall, she pointed upward and said: ‘ Der liebe Gott wohnt dort droben.’ For a long time I believed that God lived in an elm tree in Central Park, and often I would stand under it and gaze upward, hoping to get a glimpse of Him.

Onkel Fritz was a doctor. Of course, I had known him from the beginning in the impersonal way in which a very small boy becomes interested in a shaggy head from which a single sharp and kindly blue eye gazes at him. Little children and dogs have no sense of good looks or ugliness; and it was not until much later that I realized with some surprise that the rest of the world thought Onkel Fritz an unusually unprepossessing person.

By that time he had passed his fiftieth year, and gray threads had begun to accentuate the blondness of his unbrushed hair and patchy beard. While not exactly fat, he was broad and stout, which made him look smaller than he was; and he was always very untidy. His most noticeable feature was his one sharp and humorous eye, of a very light sky-blueness; and most interesting to me was a deep scar which went up diagonally from the other — the blind one — for an inch and a half across his forehead, so deep and adherent to the bone that I could press my finger into it when he held me on his knee — unless he had, as was usual with him, shoved his glasses up from his nose, over his eyebrows. This was a habit of his, and he seemed to me always to be shoving his goldrimmed spectacles out of the way in this manner, whenever he wanted to look at something.

The scar, he always told me, was the result of his falling on a rake when he was about as big as I was. Later, when I found out that he had acquired it in a duel with heavy sabres, he admitted the duel, but said that he had had to fight the Czar of Russia because he had stuck his tongue out at him at a court reception. This scar of Onkel Fritz’s made him a hero to me, and I often imagined him, with his spectacles on his forehead, dressed just as he was then, in striped trousers, a black coat, and stiff collar, — and, most illogically, with the to-beacquired scar already in place, — slashing away at a frantically parrying and terrified Czar who was jumping about in an ermine cape, with a crown on his head.

The reason I loved Onkel Fritz so early in my life was mainly, I believe, because he took me seriously. The ladies and gentlemen to whom I was often embarrassingly introduced at afternoon Kaffee had the habit of making themselves and me ridiculous with baby talk and silly questions, calling me kleiner Mann, and hiding their essential lack of interest under an assumed delight in my resemblance to my parents and similar rubbish. Onkel Fritz made me a contemporary. He was no more ‘grown-up’ with me than he was with the dog. He seemed to realize that we were both of us sensible and intelligent people, and that conversation with me was more profitable than the idle talk of the others about the coffee table.

Whenever I look at an Italian primitive, my feet begin to hurt. The reason for this is that, as a small boy of ten to fourteen, I was often taken along on excursions through Italy in the company of this Onkel Fritz, who felt it his duty to form my taste, as he called it.

Onkel Fritz, whose polyphemoid appearance I have just described, was an odd character. A successful dermatologist and syphilographer in New York in the 1860’s and 1870’s, he retired from practice at a relatively early age, bought himself a house and garden in the lovely Kurort Wiesbaden in Hessen-Nassau, and devoted himself to playing the fiddle and collecting folk songs. I lived with him while I was sent to school for one year in Wiesbaden, and remember him most vividly either pacing the upper hall in his Jaeger underwear, practising Kreutzer études, or lying late in bed in a sunny room lined with bound volumes of music, reading scores and apparently hearing the silent notes as he read. Later in life he took up old paintings and became professor of art and curator of old paintings in the small but excellent local ‘Museum.’ His trips to Italy with us were therefore, in a manner, professional, and he being by instinct a pundit, and the rest of the family having become quite skillful at getting out from under, mine was the helpless mind which he determined to improve.

I was of value to Onkel Fritz in two respects on these travels, a nuisance in all others. My chief usefulness — one from which I myself gathered considerable enjoyment — was in regard to keeping other travelers out of the secondclass compartments in which four of us managed almost invariably, thanks to me, to occupy the space intended for six.

Bribery of the conductor was often quite adequate. But when this appeared impracticable, the same result could be achieved with my help by one or the other of two systems. One — the most satisfactory to me—was to ornament my face and forehead heavily and not inartistically with the red and blue crayons which I carried for the purposes of juvenile sketching, until I presented the appearance of a horrid little boy all broken out with smallpox or leprosy. Then, when we arrived at a station with eager second-class passengers milling about for vacancies, I stuck my head out of the window. This, to the accompaniment of considerable virtuosity in distorting my childlike features into grimaces of great suffering, — an accomplishment in which I took pride, and often practised before a mirror, — quite successfully protected us on most occasions, though it once led to embarrassing attentions from a traveling physician. Onkel Fritz’s other method was to train me to loud and heartbroken weeping during our stops at stations, a subterfuge which, while not as regularly effective as the former, still saved us from many a crowded and unpleasant journey.

The other function in which I was useful to Onkel Fritz was in this matter of old paintings. I take it for granted that he knew a great deal about them, and I am sure that he had much genuine pleasure from them. But his enjoyment was infinitely enhanced by the act of explaining and displaying his learning. The impulse to educate my taste, to start me in the right directions of appreciation, was — though in itself not entirely insincere — yet subsidiary, I believe, to the didactic passion. But it was hard on my feet, and all I gained from it artistically at that time was an aversion to Giottos, Fra Angelicos, Lippo Lippis, and such, which lasted until I returned to these galleries in later life — when, strangely enough, I found that deep in long-unexplored crevices of my mind there lingered memories of the good old man’s enthusiasm which gave me understanding I should not have had without him.

IV

R. S. speaks of his earliest religious impressions and of his school days. But, since the school in which he spent eight years was presided over by a Jew, he wandered off into a diatribe on antiSemitism. I tried to divert him from this dangerous topic, because I feared it might ruin the book. But there was no stopping him.

In assembling material for the preceding chapters my problem was chiefly that of selecting from a mass of notes and conversations those episodes in the childhood of R. S. which I believed might best illustrate domestic environment and personal relations. Since it is obviously difficult to create a complete picture by this method, it has seemed advisable, from time to time, to fill out the background of these disconnected sketches with explanatory information.

It is apparent that family life, habits, language, and cultural influences, during the childhood of R. S., remained essentially German. But it should be understood that the Germanicism of this family was that of the Rhineland and the Black Forest, a variety which penetrating historians like Sorel, Brinton, and others have recognized as clearly differentiated from that of Prussia, the Central States, and Austria. For the Rhineland and the southern border provinces had long been under the influence of French thought and political doctrine. They had been frequently invaded and had ‘felt deeply the republican propaganda of the French Revolution.’ There had even been a Jacobin Club at Mainz during that time, and the aspirations toward civil liberty then fostered were never again completely lost. Moreover, many of the peasantry were landholders whose general outlook was more like that of the French postrevolutionary peasant proprietors than that of the more feudally governed people of the rest of Germany and of Prussia. In consequence, as we shall see in a later chapter, the political storms which broke after 1830 swept over I hose regions more violently than they did over the eastern provinces.

Families emigrating to America from the Rhineland, therefore, fitted immediately and with complete contentment into those free political institutions for which they had unsuccessfully struggled at home. Yet, though thus politically acclimatized from the very beginning, they long remained culturally and socially isolated from Americans of their own class and educational level. This was clue partly to their own conceit and lack of social adaptability, and in part to the provincialism of the American upper classes, who at that period seemed quite unaware that there were cultivated people among foreigners who immigrated and kept them at arm’s length. R. S., who spoke no English until he was ten, though eventually completely absorbed into the life of America, always felt himself — probably because of this early social isolation — to some extent an outsider. This may explain much about his later reactions: —

My mother was brought up in a convent in the Black Forest. In girlhood she had been a pious Catholic. But something happened to her faith early in her married life. Was it that she was carried away by the tide of the new world of scientific skepticism into which she had entered, or was it passive acquiescence, unwillingness to be out of harmony with her surroundings? Probably, being almost altogether heart and not at all a logical person, she concluded that love was enough and that ritual was unessential for what she valued in religion. At any rate, she made no active objection to the complete omission of any kind of religious instruction for her unchristened boys.

In later years, however, I often wondered whether we had not, all of us,— my father included, — taken too much for granted. Much later, thinking about this, I remembered hearing her express horror when Voltaire was mentioned (probably reminiscence of the convent, for she was essentially an unlearned person), and her unwillingness to read either Strauss or Renan when I offered them to her. At any rate, at that time it never occurred to any of her family — at least it was never expressed — that she might have been silently faithful through all those years, with so complete a trust in the goodness of a reasonable God that she felt content, for herself and for her children, to dispense with the forms, so long as the true spirit of her own Christianity could be instilled into their daily lives in feeling and in action.

I suspect that this may have been the case; for I alone, being by many years the youngest and, therefore, most intimately her companion, had occasion to be with her in moments when — with no one but a beloved child to observe her — she relaxed into expressions of that longing to believe that God exists which is the source of faith.

I remember how, on several occasions, in the cold and noisy city dusk of Christmas Eve, unknown to anyone else, my mother took me to the Cathedral of the Paulist Fathers on 59th Street. In her victoria, drawn by the two dapple grays I so admired, we drove through the crowded streets. All about us, in this neighborhood of tenement houses, tiredlooking and poorly dressed people were hurrying homeward with packages under their arms; shop windows were bright: and the man with the long stick was going about lighting the gaslights on the lampposts. At the corner, under the elevated railroad, August the German coachman was left to walk the horses, while my mother took me by the hand and led me up the stone steps and through the padded swing doors into the church. It was chilly and dim in the great Gothic vaults, but the altar was brightly lighted; here and there were a few poor old drudgy-looking women and a shabby man or two, kneeling with bowed heads in front of wicker chairs placed in rows. There was a little chapel on one side, where there were candles burning below a high crucifix, with red, spreading spots on the hands and feet of the Saviour who hung suspended from it. And over a small altar there was a large picture of the Virgin.

Here Mother would sit, and draw me close against her lap. She did not pray — at least, not audibly—and she did not speak; and I was too subdued to move or to say anything by a sense of frightened but still gentle awe. Perhaps I shared her feelings more than I then could comprehend. For, in later years, I found myself going into Catholic churches — Saint-Sulpice, Chartres, my childhood’s Saint Paul’s, and even the Cathedral in South Boston — to sit for a few moments as I used to sit with her, silently and with no realized purpose, except perhaps to feel again the uncomprehended, mystical solemnity which held me peacefully quiet, so many years ago on Christmas Eve, with my body pressed against her knees; and to remember how she softened for me the shock of being again suddenly in the bustling ugliness of the cold and sordid street, held me close to her and kissed me before entering the carriage to drive home.

I was the youngest of four sons, and, as I have said, there was a gap of eight years between me and my next older brother. As a result, I was much spoilt, and my mother, wishing to keep me near her as long as possible, delayed sending me to school until my twelfth year. Meanwhile, I was reasonably well taught by tutors, male and female, both in this country and during a winter at Pallanza on Lago Maggiore; but eventually it became obvious that, by this method, I should develop into an incurable sissy.

The choice of a school was not easy in those days. The public schools, to which a man of my father’s democratic convictions was inclined to send me, were not good enough, and the prospects there even of learning to speak grammatical English were nil. He had solved the problem in the cases of two older brothers by sending them abroad to live with my uncle and attend the Gymnasium. In my case, he abandoned this idea in deference to my mother. But he looked into the possibilities of the New England boarding schools which were then being started in more or less acknowledged imitation of the English public schools. It did not take him long to decide that this was not what he wanted for me.

These institutions were scholastically much superior to public schools — though not nearly as much so as he thought they should have been. The boys were an attractive lot, as a rule, but were sent to these schools as much for snob appeal as for other advantages. And, throughout, there was a deep Anglo-religious atmosphere which my father believed had no place in secondary education, and which repelled him. After taking me to visit one of these institutions over the week-end and attending the compulsory chapel services, he said: ‘When I sat there, listened to a mediævally stupid sermon, and saw all the medicine men going through their ritual exercises, I felt that if any of our family went to a place like that, both your poor grandfathers would roll over in their graves.’

As a matter of fact, I am inclined to think that my father’s superficial judgment of these schools had some prophetic value. Primarily conceived to fill the needs created by the failure of public education to maintain standards under the pressure of the mass immigration of culturally neglected European stock, they soon began to represent instruments of a class differentiation absurd in its incongruous aping of British traditions. In an age during which education in all enlightened countries was being progressively emancipated from church control, they introduced Episcopalian, often High Church management. They borrowed from English school customs their most pernicious practices of fagging and hazing, while failing to take from their prototypes the excellently rigid educational program in mathematics and classical literature. Their underpaid teachers fell far below the scholastic standards established by Arnold and others in England, often combining such duties as the teaching of fundamentals with coaching of the baseball nine or the football team.

Though conceived at first for the training of sons of the established wellto-do bourgeoisie, their foundation fell into our period of Gargantuan commercial expansion, and they were soon overrun by the new plutocracy, a class never exceeded in history for its confidence in the power of money. With a magnificent opportunity to develop out of this vigorous and competent stock the rudiments of a true democratic aristocracy of learning, tolerance, and sense of public obligation, they succeeded only in encouraging class barriers based purely on economic standards, witbout any of the intellectual and spiritual differentiations which justify such distinctions. They made practically no contributions to American national education, either in method or in content.

That the original purposes of such schools can be successfully accomplished without the social and religious hocuspocus has recently been demonstrated by a few exceptional institutions—notably Exeter — and even by a few public high schools in regions less subjected to immigrant pressure. To be just, it must be admitted that a slow transformation is now in progress. Under the influence of inside opinion, as the plutocracy— by several generations of substitution of cigarettes for chewing tobacco — is developing, if not into an aristocracy, at least into a liberal patrician group, these schools are undergoing changes; and with wisdom and weakening of the snob appeal, they may yet become important experiment stations for secondary education and point the way for public institutions less favorably situated. In mv youth, however, they were in their worst reactionary phases, and I believe that my father’s judgment was a wise one.

For one winter session, when my parents were traveling in Europe, I was sent to a Fremdenschule in Wiesbaden. This institution was organized particularly for the education of the sons of English families resident in Germany who wished to have their boys prepared for Oxford and Cambridge. The teaching, therefore, was sound, the instructors largely English university men of the typical Arnold tradition. What I remember most vividly of that school is my introduction to the British scholastic habit of physical chastisement. A bad recitation or an impertinent answer brought a prompt and vigorous box on the ear, and a cane was under the teacher’s desk.

The first time this was applied to me, I fell into a hysterical rage, as did another American boy similarly treated. We were spared repetition, and it still remains a matter of amazement to me that the British boys didn’t seem to mind it. For this reason, or perhaps from a sense of national solidarity, it was on them that all the lickings were thereafter concentrated. They didn’t even appear to feel humiliated, and, contrary to what would now be psychoanalytically predicted, these docilely supported beatings had no influence — certainly no immediately noticeable Rousseauan influence — on their characters. One of them, to whom I manifested contempt at a moment when the welts must still have been painful, gave me the worst light of my quarrelsome boyhood!— in which I came off very much second-best.

All that the canings seemed to do to these English lads was to make them amazingly resistant to pain in that part of the body where the back loses its honest name. It is not impossible that this habit, early inculcated in the British ruling classes, of knowing when they were licked, taking it with docility on the least vulnerable part of the body, yet remaining unhumiliated thereby and ready to rise when opportunities for resistance were more favorable, has had profound influence on English foreign policy. It is only lately that the umbrella has become symbolic of this attitude.

On our return to America my father, who had given the matter much study, decided to send me to a private school in New York in which he believed that the system of German secondary education was competently followed. It was run by a distinguished scholar and pedagogue, a German Jew, Julius Sachs.

Julius Sachs! Oh, the terror of him! Large and well-paunched, he had a head like the marble Jupiter that, weighing a hundred pounds or more, perches precariously on the high shelf over my head. Was he a Jew? The little I had no idea. He was the ruling spirit that presided over the house in 59th Street to which, every morning, I carried my little Ranzen (dogskin knapsack, with white and black spotted hair on the flap), filled with Latin grammars and arithmetic books, getting into the door just as the bells clanged loudly to tell me I was a few minutes late.

From the time I woke up with the sun in my eyes until I entered the schoolhouse doors each morning, my behavior was governed by the instinct to delay the evil hour. Washing and dressing were performed with a deliberate slowness not justified by a too meticulous attention to crevices of the ears and fingernails. There was a good deal of gazing out of the window; making the faucet squirt by holding the thumb over the spout; swimming paper boats in the bathtub; doing dumbbell exercises; or hinging at the doorknob with an old foil. Then, at breakfast, the oatmeal had to be made into an island surrounded by a sea of milk; the eggshell had to be tapped with the spoon to a tune before it could be picked off the top of the egg; the glass of milk, just mulattoed with a tinge of coffee to make it. ‘grown-up,’ was carefully scrutinized and often refused by reason of a ‘hex’ — that is, a film of coagulated milk — which had to be fished out. Mother was patient and helpful. Father almost not —but too much amused to show irritation. At any rate, the little pea jacket adjusted, the flowing tie pulled into place, the Ranzen packed with books, a paper of sandwiches, and an apple, the journey to school was eventually begun, with a kiss and a shove out of the door.

It was amusing either to step on all the cracks between the pavement stones or — at other times — to jump over them. Puddles had to be leaped into, to make splashes. Encountered dogs were always of interest. My father, indulgent in these matters, had often said: ‘If a boy and a dog meet in the street and neither of them pays any attention to the other, they are both a little queer.’

As the school was approached, other boys converged. It was of interest, and often of profit, to compare exercises and answers to problems. Finally, as the fatal hour drew near, there was nothing to do but to enter, in a state of mind compounded of apprehension, loathing, and a certain amount of arrogant courage. Dr. Sachs, who knew his pupils, often called me ‘Fabius Maximus Cunctator’—which shows the kind of man he was. Julius Sachs — Jew, German, schoolmaster, and noble scholar! I often think of him when I ponder this question of anti-Semitic violence that we had thought was settled in the Middle Ages — as we thought until 1914 so many other things, political and social, had been finally disposed of.

In his Rabbi von Bacherach, Heine lets Jäckel, the fool, say: ‘It is an important business, for if Abraham had really slaughtered Isaac and not the billy goat, there would now be more billy goats and not so many Jews in the world.’ Jews were an important influence in my education. It is a curious paradox in the history of the Teutonic race that, although there is an almost instinctive inclination to anti-Semitic prejudice in them, there is — on the other hand— no race upon which the influence of Jewish thought and genius has had a more profound effect.

My father once told me that in the 1840’s, in a village along the Rhine, a boy had thrown a stone at a Jew. The missile did not hit the Jew but it broke a windowpane; and the Jew was made to pay for the damage, because, if he hadn’t dodged, the pane would not have been broken — the playful brutality of healthy children maltreating a cat.

Yet, in this very setting, Jews were taking a more significant part in the moulding of national thoughts—political, literary, philosophical, and musical — than anywhere else in the civilized world. Heine, the lovable, detestable, arrogant, idealistic, materialistic, German-hating, German-loving exile, often expressed his nostalgic love for a fatherland which treated him badly — not because he was a Jew (he was baptized in his youth, and professed himself a Christian), but because his patriotism was too intellectually dangerous. He felt and considered himself a German — witness his verses: —

Und als ich die deutsche Sprache vernahm
Da ward mir seltsam zu Mute.
Ich meinte nicht anders als ob das Herz
Recht angenehm verblute.

Seit ich auf deutsche Erde trat
Durchsfrömen mich Zauberkräfte.
Der Riese hat wieder die Mutter berührt
Und es wuchsen ihm neue Kräfte.

In later days, I heard another exile — not a Jew, but an ex-Chancellor of the Reich — express the same belief in the essential soundness of the soul of a people temporarily subjugated by an hysterical ‘racialism’ born of political and economic fear. Germany, thou owest much of thy national soul to thy Jews, who—as in no other nation in the history of the world — have striven to become citizens of the Western world under thy reluctant wings! English Jews became lords and Chief Justices, French Jews became bankers and cabinet ministers, German Jews became Germans.

Julius Sachs and his staff were learned men, and most of the boys who went to the school were the children of cultivated German-Americans, Jewish or gentile, who— though race-conscious to a moderate degree — were not arrogantly so, certainly not sufficiently so to have it make any difference whatever. I mention this in order to testify to the fact that since my earliest youth I have seen much of Jews. And in later life I have had Jewish friends, pupils, and colleagues — some of whom I have respected and loved, others of whom I have detested, just as it has happened with other people.

Once, even, I was very fond of a Jewish girl. She was lovely, and she pinned a rose on my coat one night when we were beginning to look deeply into each other’s eyes. Then she didn’t let me see her again and, within six months, married one of her own race, now a judge. She had a lot more brains and foresight than I had. She still has, and I hope she remembers me as affectionately as I do her.

Thus I have had every reason to keep a warm spot in my heart for the Jews, and I look with puzzled distress upon the subtle growth of anti-Semitic feeling in our own country. It frightens me, because infinitely more dangerous than the most serious imagined injury that could accrue to society from the Jews is the destructive injury we must inevitably inflict upon all that we cherish in the progress of the world by allowing intolerance and cruelty to determine our treatment of minorities. As Heine said, concerning this question: ‘Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.’

There is probably not an intelligent, kindly gentile today who is not puzzled ’and is not trying, if he is honest with himself, to probe his own prejudice; to ask himself: ‘Why?’ The day for a religious answer is long past. To understand it without religious implications usually leads to the trivial analysis of Jewish social and business habits, their ‘unethical’ competitive spirit, and their ‘egocentric determination to get ahead.’ By these traits, H. G. Wells believes, they step up the competitive tempo until it becomes uncomfortable for the rest of us. ‘ You may repudiate . . . the Nazi methods,’ he continues, ‘but that does not close the Jewish problem for you.’ He sees the root of the evil in Jewish solidarity. ‘Why do they refuse to be men among men? . . . Come out of Israel!’ he cries.

But, we may ask, have they been allowed to ‘come out of Israel’?

Renan, who has given the matter the same deep thought that he gave to other things, says in his L’Antichrist: ‘ Q߈ ne peut, être sans raison que ce pauvre Israël a passé sa vie de peuple à être massacré. Quand toutes les nations et tous les sièclesvous ont persecuté, il faut bien qu’il y ait à cela quelque motif. Le juif jusqu’à notre temps s’insinuait partout en rèclamant le droit commun; mais en réalité le juif n‘était pas dans le droit commun; il gardait son statut particulier. . . . Il voulait les avantages des nations sans etre line nation, sans participer aux charges des nations. Les nations sont des créeations militaires ... elles sont l‘œuvre de paysans et de soldats; les juifs n‘ont contribué en rien d les établir. La est le grand malentendu impliqué dans les prétentions israélites.’

There was probably some truth in this when it was written. Since then — certainly in America and in France — the Jews have taken an energetic part in political and professional life, no better and no worse in effect than that of other groups, feeling and voting and working according to their social and economic positions rather than as Jews.

The points made by Renan seem to me to have lost strength in direct proportion to the degree in which the Jews have been allowed to ‘come out of Israel.’

My friend L., far and away the most distinguished of my professional colleagues, himself a Jew, believes that the solution lies in an absorption of the Jew into the national life, which shall distribute Jewish participation into all layers of social and economic activity. Physical absorption will be an inevitable and less essential consequence. L. says, in agreement with Renan, that the differences between Jew and gentile — which he freely acknowledges as existing —are attributable to the fact that ‘our race, unlike the English, German, and French, has for centuries lacked that backlog of a peasantry from which, annually, the over-commercialized and over-intellectualized urban populations are rejuvenated.’

To pretend that we do not discriminate against the Jews in this country is mere self-deception. Let us be honest. We discriminate in our colleges, in our clubs, and in our hotels. And many quite commonplace people, when they associate intimately with Jews whom they admire, rarely fail to be conscious of their tolerance. As long as this prejudice exists, the problem is not solved — certainly not for the proud and sensitive Jew, the cultivated and high-minded Jew, whom we should accept on terms of absolute equality. Complete sympathetic friendship, without any sense of separateness, is something that has happened to most of us with individual Jewish friends, to prove — to me at least—that the so-called ’Jewish traits,’ other than the physical, are not inherently racial, somatically hereditary, but conditioned by the treatment the Jews have received. The problem, instead of remaining insolubly racial or religious, has resolved itself into the not simple but soluble one of social adjustment. Here, as in France, if ever before in the world, combined efforts of Jews and gentiles might at last bring this wandering Israel to harbor.

When R. S. had arrived at this point, he seemed extremely well satisfied with himself. I could see that he felt rather noble, and believed he had made a distinct contribution.

’I take it, then,’ I said, ‘that you are having no difficulty in suppressing that insidious germ of anti-Semitism that occasionally invades your consciousness and of which you are so afraid.’

‘I refuse,’ he replied with some heat, ‘I utterly refuse to allow myself to yield to any such illogical, inhumane, and pernicious prejudices. I believe with my best Jewish friend, Heine, that if the Jews disappeared from the world, and I found that somewhere there existed a surviving specimen of this people, I would travel hundreds of miles to examine him and to press his hands in reverence for the services his race has rendered.’

He was silent, and sat long in contemplation. I could see that he was thinking, with emotion, of his many Jewish friends. Then, suddenly, with that characteristic and honest self-contradiction which made him so sympathetically amusing to me, he exclaimed: —

‘Oh, Joseph, Jacob, Abe, Milton, Sidney, Rebecca, Isidor, and Lydia! How I love and honor you! You have been my sisters and my brothers. How much I owe you in kindness and friendship! But why, oh why, have you such terrible uncles and cousins and aunts?’

‘Well,’ I thought ‘here is the problem in a nutshell.’

‘But the cousins-and-aunts question may eventually be solved, just as the Joseph, Jacob, and Rebecca one is now. Let’s not make ourselves unhappy about it. And at any rate, even these cousins and aunts can say, as old Börne did: “Jésus-Christ? Je le dis en parenthèse — il était mon cousin”’

V

R. S. tells of college and the rising of the sap: —

Were I writing an autobiography, instead of this disconnected series of thoughts and impressions, I might describe the early years of my college course at Columbia, during which largely because of the imbecile fraternity system which entangled me before I had learned my way about the buildings — I went far toward becoming an objectionable and ignorant young blighter. The group into which I was at first thrown were bawdy and idle; we worked as little as we dared; we drank and spent hours playing pool in the Buckingham Barroom. The only thing that saved me from worse pitfalls was the complete lack of sophistication with which I had come to college and which, though it exposed me to some ridicule and the occasional contempt of my ribald associates, saved me from crossing thresholds from which there is no complete spiritual returning. Before this could happen, I had the good fortune to attract the attention, by some verses I had sent to a college paper, of a group of more mature students, among whom was Frederick P. Keppel. His friendship has been one of the great satisfactions of my life, but of the services his affection has done me that first one was the most far-reaching; for he drew me into the group of young enthusiasts who were at that time sitting at the feet of George Edward Woodberry.

Wood berry was at that time best known for his poetry. I say ‘at that time’ because, as I judge him now, I believe that his ultimate place — a high one in American letters — will eventually rest on his prose writings, his critical essays, and his Taormina, all of which combine distinction and color of style with great learning and a sensitiveness to beauty which mark him as a poet writing prose. Wood berry was of the tradition of Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. His mind was deeply saturated with European culture and the art of Greece and of Italy. But he added to this, especially in his later verse, a purely American note — an enthusiasm for the equality of men, optimism for the realization of the ideal life by the evolution of American democracy. He was an intensely American poet, without trying to break away by studied eccentricities of style or content from the continuous stream of the European traditions which inspired him and which, flowing through his spirit, gathered the emotion and the inspiration of his Americanism. If his poetry is not as great as it might be, it is perhaps because of a certain sentimentality and emotional lushness which sprang from an inherent softness in his character, but which I did not recognize until much later. But there are passages in the North Shore Watch (for which James Russell Lowell called him the American Shelley), in the Roamer, and in a few lyrics and sonnets, which will again be read and loved when the present vogue for incomprehensibility and brutality in verse has run the course of other decadent periods.

Philosophically, Woodberry was a Platonist. He was deeply influenced by Greek idealism, not only in the sense in which Plato ‘ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals and abstractions,’ conceptions of beauty, truth, and love; but in the artistic sense as well — the idealism which, as Professor Waldstein discovered, manifests itself by the representation of the ideal type rather than the particular portrait. Woodberry’s own work was conceived in this spirit, but he fell short, it seems to me now, as Gilbert Murray falls short, by too much ornamentation, by too emotionally softening the austere Greek standards, as though — as a learned lady has said — one planted rambler roses round the Parthenon, obscuring the cold magnificence of its lines.

Whatever may be the eventual position of Woodberry in American letters — an estimate which I am not Competent to make — he was unquestionably one of the greatest teachers this country has seen, inspiring with his own passionate sincerity and sensitive perceptions a large and diverse group of young men, few of whom, whatever their subsequent occupations, ever lost entirely the imprint of his personality. His life turned out to be a deeply tragic one, and the last time I saw him (I took my young son to call on him) he was sitting in the little ancestral farmhouse at Beverly, isolated from the world, a poor and very sad old man. I reflected upon how much I owed him — how the whole course of my life and thoughts had been lighted by the sparks from his spirit, and how I was only one of fifty and more for whom he had done the same thing. I tried to tell him this, and I like to think that it made him happier to hear it acknowledged with grateful affection.

The one thing his teaching needed to make it still more effective was a contemporary Irving Babbitt to counterbalance him, to give us hardness of soul to discipline the emotions Woodberry aroused in us. For his influence, good as it was, left me, at least, with vague yearnings for æsthetic abstractions, with almost a disdain for the discipline of reason, trusting for guidance—as his beloved Shelley recommends in The Defence of Poetry — in the adequacy of emotions nobly exercised. This state of mind, a sort of Weltschmerz, a romantic being-in-love with the ‘ideal’ as Woodberry presented it, had incalculable moral value at the time. It was built, however, on a foundation of feelings and dreams, enthusiasms and exaltations. As far as we thought about religion at all, we were attracted to the mysterious, the miraculous, and the poetry of Christian thought, without being able to accept supernatural authority. We were in the position, attributed (I think wrongly) by some satirist (I think it was Durant) to Santayana, of believing that ‘there is no God and the Virgin Mary is His Mother.’ Yet, though it was a period of intellectual confusion, it was a happy one, and it created for many of us a mental atmosphere of æsthetic values that followed us through life and helped us over many hard places where reason failed.

The destinies of man are guided by the most extraordinary accidents. In my sophomore year, while in the Woodberrian poetic exaltation, and feeling much of the time like a young Shelley, I threw a snowball across the campus at a professor emerging from the Natural Science Building. It was a prodigious shot, a good hundred yards, I think. I hit him in the ear, knocked his hat off, and had time to disappear around the corner. I had nothing against him. It was an impulse, and a happy one, because I became guiltily conscious of him, thereafter, and eventually I took one of his courses as a sort of apologetic gesture. He happened to be both an anthropologist of note and a philosopher, and it was he who awakened in me the realization of the philosophical implications of scientific fact. There were great teachers of science at Columbia in those days, and the junior year— largely owing to the inspiration of the man whom I had hit in the ear — found me, without cutting loose entirely from the Department of Comparative Literature, feeling as though I had suddenly entered a new world of wonders and revelations, under the reign of Edmund B. Wilson and Bashford Dean.

These men and their assistants, Calkins, Strong, and McGregor, were direct spiritual offspring of the magnificent group of biologists that followed in the wake of the Darwinian period. They had known Haeckel and Huxley. Weismann, Dohrn, the Hertwigs, and Tyndall became our household gods. Wilson and Dean, and to a lesser degree Osborn, were a new experience in professors. They were highly trained specialists, but their minds swept the horizon. And though they stood in the first rank of scientific accomplishment, they were cultivated gentlemen and had time for their elementary students — a combination that one must search for to-day with the lantern of Diogenes. Their laboratories became my home, and even more than the courses themselves I remember the afternoons of puttering, when Dean or his faithful McGregor puttered with us and, with that greatest art of the gifted teacher, made us feel like younger colleagues rather than raw students. To be sure, I did not fail here as elsewhere to get into trouble — notably on the day when, for the benefit of a pedantic fellow student whom I did not like, I pretended I had caught hydrophobia from a dog brain, and started to bark and bite this colleague— now hysterical — in the leg. But the astute Oliver Strong, who came on the scene just as my victim, trying to escape, had upset an incubator, instead of disciplining me academically had other students hold me down and poured a bucket of sea urchins down my neck. But, apart from interludes of this type, my career in this department became as deeply satisfying and stimulating as that under Wood berry.

My college education, to make a long story short, then consisted of Woodberry, Wilson, and Dean—thus again affirming the truism that one is trained by men and not by curricula. The remark about the superb educational value of sitting on a log with Mark Hopkins on the other end of it is quite correct in principle—though from what I have read of that gentleman’s philosophical views and information, I should have picked someone else for my log.

During my third year at college came the sinking of the Maine and the Spanish War. It affected Americans in many different ways. There was no great excitement except among those who were by temperament jingoes, and a large proportion of the conservative population considered the war unjustified and imperialistic. By some of the group with which I was associated at Columbia the war was dismissed as an episode of little importance, while others rushed to join the militia or the naval reserve. As for me, I had no philosophical views whatever about the justice or injustice of declaring war on Spain, but I was carried away by the prospects of being a soldier for no reason more sensible than a craving for excitement. After much argument with my father, who took the position that the trouble would be over before I had learned to stand at attention, I finally persuaded him to sign his consent to my enlistment papers to the local cavalry unit, Squadron A. I could ride and I Could shoot, but I had no idea whatever of the meaning of military discipline. I was very proud in my uniform, although — being slight and small for my age, though tough and hard — my sabre came almost to my collarbone. I did get an enormous thrill out of riding forward to face the enlistment officer from Washington and taking the oath of allegiance.

All that summer I drilled. One troop of the Squadron had already left for Chickamauga, and the rest of us were waiting in the hope that we might be sent as replacements, since the boys of the original troop were coming down like flies with typhoid fever. The most notable fact of our Spanish War was the unbelievably miserable sanitary supervision of the camps and the consequent enormous incidence of enteric fevers. It was during this time, it was said, that a high official of the War Department, not a professional man, came to inspect one of these camps and —shown the water supply — filled a glass, held it up to the light, and said: ’This water looks all right to me.’ It was also during this time that Victor Vaughan and his colleagues of the Army Medical Corps discovered the immense importance of flies in the transmission of typhoid bacilli from open latrines to food. It is interesting to remember that the great Belisarius, who was perhaps, apart from being a notable strategist, one of the earliest commanders of troops to realize the importance of sanitation, knew about this fly business, or — according to Procopius — suspected it sufficiently to include it in his precautions.

I never got to the front, and at about the time when our first troop landed in Puerto Rico and we were daily expecting orders to join them, the war ended and my father was grateful in a manner that I did not fully appreciate until my own son was seventeen years old and war was swinging by a thread like a sword of Damocles over the head of an anxious world.

I stayed in the Squadron after the war and proudly became one of the bodyguard of Theodore Roosevelt when he was inducted into the governorship of New York. I was still a private, having been demoted from the eminent position of Troop Bugler, which had appealed to me because I could ride behind the captain on a white horse and transmit his commands by a variety of raucous blasts. I did fairly well in the Armory, but unfortunately just before the Dewey parade, in which I had imagined myself prancing proudly down Fifth Avenue in front of our cavalcade, I blasted a number of sour notes at a drill. The captain, a kindly man, ordered me to his dressing room after dismissal and asked me to blow an intricate series of commands as he directed. The result was that he said: ‘If you could blow as well as you can ride, we might have a successful parade; but as things are, half the troop will be charging while the rest will be doing a left turn.’

Instead, therefore, of proudly bugling my squadron through the parade, I was told off to a detail consisting of a sergeant and twelve privates who were to escort Theodore Roosevelt from his residence to his place in the parade. This was my first close view of the man who later became one of my chief admirations and whom I came to know just before the beginning of the World War, whim he discussed the ‘hyphenated Americans’ problem with me and booked me as Sanitary Inspector of the division that was never to be organized. This first meeting, however, gave me the most characteristic view of him that I was ever to have. We rode to his house, leading with us a spare horse carrying a brand-new yellow Western stock saddle and a bridle wonderfully embossed with silver studding. We dismounted and I held Mr. Roosevelt’s horse beside my own.

We waited about ten minutes, and while we were drawn up at attention in rigid military form the sergeant was beginning to worry about how he could find our proper place in the parade. Suddenly the front door opened, Mr. Roosevelt appeared in a frock coat and a high hat, rushed clown the high stoop straight to the horse I was holding, mounted, and, tearing the bridle out of my hand, was off at a clatter down the street toward Fifth Avenue and around the corner before we could mount and follow. He found his own place, and we never caught up with him again. But that was the sergeant’s worry.

My fellow privates in the Squadron were all members of well-to-do families and almost entirely college men. There came a time, after two years of service in this unit, when — going through that period of socialistic and radical emotion which comes to many young men — I had myself transferred to what I thought was the toughest outfit in New York. I wanted to gel intimately acquainted with the underprivileged — and I did. It was my first experience of the depths to which coarseness, vulgarity, and smut can attain.

Being a medical student at this time, I had a venereal clinic in the lavatory after every drill and learned a vocabulary which prepared me for later experiences with sheepherders in the Rockies, and with fishermen on the Banks. I was too inexperienced at the time to realize that language is a matter of habit and that the bestial implications of the words used had little bearing on the characters of the men of this class who used them as clichés. Wishing to be a thorough democrat, I attended the dances and picnics which were the social life of my new companions and found — another lesson of sociology learned — that the mothers, wives, and sisters of these men were about ten tiers above them in decency and gentleness.

My final performance in this military unit was not to my credit. We were reviewed by the Governor, who passed our parked battery in a victoria with a stovepipe hat held above his head. The arrangement was that after he had passed each gun by about a hundred yards the lanyard was to be pulled and his progress thus marked by a series of cannon shots, going off at regular intervals, firing far in his rear. When he came opposite the gun of which I was the cannoneer, I was overcome by one of those impulses half compounded of nervousness and of a perverted sense of humor. I pulled my lanyard, and the blast of black powder burst under the nearest horse’s belly. The last I saw of the Governor was a cloud of dust and a heavily rocking carriage. The things that our very fat major said to me exceeded in force and in imagination anything I ever heard from a quartermaster. I should have been court-martialed, but my enlistment was up anyway.

I got out of the army with much pleasure, little knowing that I was to spend almost two full years in it later on.

At the end of my third year at college the treasures unlocked for me by Woodberry and by my teachers of science made the world seem a happy and a rich land for exploration. My head was full of moonshine and hope, and I was ready for adventure. I took a job for Professor Osborn, to help dig for fossils on the western edge of the Staked Plain. The books I had with me in my bag testify to the incongruous jumble of badly insulated ideas that were joggling through my head: I had a Golden Treasury, a copy of Dana’s Geology, and a Bible — which I had made up my mind to read through, from one end to the other. The Bible furnished me not only some instruction, but a great deal of amusement. I recall particularly a story in Genesis about the Jews, when they were at war with a tribe they failed to conquer in open battle. So they sent their priests among their enemies, to convert them with all the rites that go with conversions 1o Judaism. And then it said, ‘On the third day, when they were sore,’they descended upon them. This, and similar stories, have made the Old Testament as dear to me as Rabelais’s five books.

But in spite of the ribald pleasure I had from the lusty history of the ancient Jews, I soon found myself — with no lighter literature to turn to — captivated by the magnificent cadences of the language and the maestoso of the poetry of the Psalms. The Bible alone was worth the trip, for I might never have read it, as I did then, against the background of the majestic desolation of the desert and under conditions of physical frugality which have always brought out the best there is in me.

My boss was Collins, a Protohippus expert and a worthy citizen, with some learning, a great enthusiasm, and a long Western experience which had made him a genius at finding his way in mountains and in desert, without being able to tell anyone else how he did it. I was quite the opposite, and usually when I rode out of sight of camp it took me all day to get back. Sometimes they had to look for me.

The other member of our three-man expedition was a cowpuncher by the name of Chipman, the son of a rancher who lived near Clarendon, fifteen miles from the single-track railroad that ran north and south through the panhandle.

We got along together pretty well, largely because Collins was an extraordinarily patient individual, and the cowboy was a little crazy, — possibly from long stretches of lonesomeness, — with a lunacy that expressed itself by long silences, sometimes lasting all day, and complete oblivion of his surroundings.

We had a team, which he drove, and some saddle horses. The cowboy would sit on the box of the truck that carried our outfits hours on end, driving through the hot desert, brooding most of the time; but occasionally, remembering some dance he had attended, he would hang the lines over the brake bar, take out a jew’s-harp, and play. All by himself, he would impersonate a Western dance. He would play a snatch on the jew’s-harp; then shout commands to the dancers: ‘Swing your partners!’ or ‘All form a circle!’; then dance with his heavy boots against the dashboard, while he took up the jew’s-harp again.

Meanwhile Collins, who rode behind, would sing to himself— usually hymns, or, rather, the same hymn over and over again. His favorite was: —

Are your garments spotless?
Are they white as snow?
Are they washed in the blood of the Lamb? He would sing it once, then hawk and spit, and sing it over again.

This sort of thing, going on hour after hour, together with the heat, the long stretches of wide desert, with here and there a few mesquite bushes or some yucca plants, would get on my nerves; and I would ride way off on the horizon, where I could just keep the general direction. When I stayed near the others, or when we made camp and cooked our food, the little habits — like Collins’s hawking or the expression on the cowpuncher’s face—would make me nasty; and that I wasn’t murdered on the expedition is very largely because Collins was at heart a very kind man, and the cowpuncher most of the time didn’t understand what I was driving at.

We were out three months. My job was taking care of the horses, and at night hobbling one of them and letting the others run before I turned into my blankets under the open sky. In the morning I unhobbled the captive horse and drove in the others. On these rides I would often run into a herd of antelope and tire my horse for the day, racing after them. I also helped to search for signs of fossils when we reached the escarpment, and to dig with a pick and shovel when we located something. We did get a Protohippus tooth, besides some mastodon heads, and camel and turtle bones. And so, from the point of view of the Museum, the undertaking was a success. Meanwhile, I learned a good deal of geology, read my Bible, and grew tough, brown, and thin as a leather strap.

Before we started into the desert, Collins left me with the horses at a ranch near the Oklahoma border — then Indian Territory — while he made a ten days’ trip to look at some reported fossil pits north of us. During that time I had nothing to do but see that the horses were grazed and watered, go out with my shotgun for prairie chickens, and hunt jack rabbits on some of the rancher’s horses.

Jack-rabbit coursing was better fun than anything else I have ever clone, except drag hunting. There was a herd of tough young Western horses from which I could choose, and the rancher’s son and 1 would go out with a couple of mongrel greyhounds to start the rabbits. Then we would gallop hell-bent for leather across the prairie. There was nothing to look out for except gopher holes and mesquite bushes. The rabbits would run at an incredible speed, and whenever the hounds got near them would double off at an angle, the dogs shooting way ahead on the wrong course. It was at this point that the rider was useful, standing up in the stirrups and changing direction until the hounds caught up again. It was exciting— and so joyful that I shouted at the top of my lungs while I was riding.

On these rides, the rancher’s daughter would often join us. She was a nice young girl of about seventeen, and her name was Mary. Mary had a hard life. The ranch buildings consisted of a dugout, which was both living room and kitchen for the rancher, his wife, the son and daughter mentioned, and an unbelievably dirty six-year-old boy, whose nose was always running. The older brother, a boy of nineteen, slept in an old wagon bed about a hundred yards from the house, and Mary slept in a lean-to next to the chicken coop. I made myself at home under a mesquite bush on the hill above the dugout.

The only available literature for this family was a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, which was happily thumbed in contemplation of imaginary purchases, few of them ever achieved.

Mary worked very hard, helping her mother, tending the vegetable garden, feeding the chickens, boiling food for the pigs, patching overalls, darning socks, and doing any other chores that were to be done; while her father was out mending fences, and her mother was usually sleeping in the sun. Mary had never had any companionship or fun, and what seemed incredible to her, apparently, was the fact that I was respectful, and carried her saddle for her, saddled her horse when we went out after jack rabbits, or showed her any little courtesy that was perfectly natural and unexaggerated, but of which she had evidently had no experience whatever. She was being courted, nevertheless, because on Sunday a couple of young cowboys came riding in, turned out their horses, and prepared to stay for the day.

The entertainment consisted of sitting in a circle in the dugout — the whole family, the two boys, and I — for the most part in utter silence. Every now and then, one of the visitors would get up and perform a feat of strength. One of them chinned himself on the door with one hand. Then the other got up and leant over backwards, until the top of his head touched his heels. There were various exhibitions like this, and between tricks there would be occasional and widely separated remarks, chiefly dealing with cattle, hogs, grain, and horses. At night, after a tremendous meal of corn, cabbage, and pork, the cowboys caught their horses and rode off.

I spent ten days on the ranch, riding with Mary whenever there were no chores to be done, and telling her about New York. She was thirsty for news of the big places, and I am quite sure that half the true things I told her she didn’t believe, while she took as gospel some of my wildest cock-and-bull stories. When finally our expedition left, and we were riding away, Mary sat by the chicken-coop door, weeping bitterly. I wrote a very bad sonnet about her.

VI

R.S. and women: ‘Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amat.’

The psychoanalytical method of writing biography has, in recent literature, been very much overdone. Yet it is unlikely that any revealing portrait of a human being has ever been written without a good deal of psychological insight. Even Plutarch draws his characters against the background of the events and mores of their periods and, in this sense, is quite modern. For at all times character has been shaped by the impact of society and events, personal and public relations, on the individual. There is possibly no modern biography which is more thoroughly infiltrated with psychological interpretation than Plutarch’s account of the Antony-Cleopatra episode, though it is quite apparent that the psychological approach, in this case. is not a skillful one. And how could anyone write the merest sketch of the life of Sappho — who adored her little hetæræ, but leaped to her death from the cl ills of Leucadia for love of Phaon, the fisherman — without Freudian implications?

However, in the older literature the subconscious and the sexual influences were either neglected or developed with crude ignorance of true motivations. Today, as Fuller — a genial critic of philosophy — says, the Freudian ideas have worked a profound revolution. And ‘it may well be that the psychologist of the future will be as little able to ignore or to reject them as the astronomer of today is able to pass by Galileo and return to Ptolemy, or the contemporary biologist to flout the doctrine of evolution,’ and so on. If, as he believes, the psychoanalytic psychology has come to stay, as heliocentric astronomy and Darwinism apparently have, ‘it has administered a blow to human self-importance and pretensions [pride in one’s so-called individual personality, he implies] far more severe than that dealt by man’s loss of his central position in the sidereal universe and his discovery of his animal ancestry.’ Thus Fuller. And even if he is only partly right, it would be a gross omission to attempt to paint a balanced portrait of R. S. without some reference to his relationship to women and his amorous constitution.

One need not, however, take upon oneself—as so many biographers have attempted to do—any analytical interpretation of one’s subject. This is a technical task for the professionally trained, who may take the conscientiously recorded facts and analyze them with the experienced insight which they alone possess.

In taking up this side of the character of R. S. I abstain therefore from any pretensions to psychological wisdom, and set down without comment what I could find out about his emotional life. The reader can draw any conclusions he may be able or inclined to draw. Our friend may be ‘analyzable’ from these data, even as Hamlet and Lady Macbeth have been analyzed — though with more difficulty, since, being a real person and not the creature of a miraculous imagination, he is far less consistent.

However, even this simple recording was not a simple matter, because of R.S.’s dread of psychoanalysis. In part, this dread was due to his fundamental belief in the soundness of Professor Freud’s methods, and that, if applied to him, the system might reveal a number of things which, all his life, he had endeavored to conceal. More directly, his apprehension was rooted in a period of intimate association with one of the most accomplished psychiatrists of his time, the distinguished Dr. Trout.

As far as I could gather, the circumstances were somewhat as follows: —

On the transport, returning after nearly two years of foreign service in France, R. S., being one of the ranking medical officers on board, was assigned to share a stateroom with Dr. Trout, who had been an important psychiatrist of the A.E.F. When R. S. found his way to the cabin, he discovered that the naval surgeon in charge of assigning quarters, who was an old acquaintance, had exercised that peculiar sense of humor that is often the result of being too long at sea or herding sheep in the desert, and had lodged Dr. Trout and R.S. in the space reserved for the care of commissioned officers who were recognizably— that is, more than usually — deranged. As a natural complement to this distinguished joke, the naval surgeon had whispered into a number of ears that R.S. had been assigned to this cabin in Dr. Trout’s charge because he had shown signs of mental eccentricity.

Of course the rumor spread from the mastheads, and it was said that R.S. had been deprived of his razor and that Dr. Trout was to devote most of his time to supervision. The consequence was that throughout the voyage the officers of the New York Division, many of whom had been fellow troopers of R.S. in the New York Cavalry Squadron, treated him with a degree of consideration and gentle solicitude quite foreign to their ordinary robust habits of association and quite incomprehensible to R. S., who had no idea of the reasons for their unnatural behavior.

Dr. Trout was a tall, albino-blond gentleman, with watery blue eyes and a drooping moustache, who was generally dreaded throughout official circles because no one could ever be sure whether personal attentions from this otherwise agreeable companion, or even the most casual conversation, might not be — as they say in the Army— in line of duty. Indeed, it was said about him that he had once been invited to a dinner at Headquarters with instructions to make careful observation of a certain colonel who was to be placed next to him at the table, and to appraise him from a psychiatric point of view. Dr. Trout is said to have made a report to the effect that the colonel was a pronounced manic-depressive. But unfortunately, since Trout sat between two colonels, his report was made about the one on the left instead of the suspected one on his right. What was finally done about this I never heard.

Colonel Trout had himself the reputation of a well-developed sense of humor. It was he who told the story of a field clerk who, having copied a letter in which the word ‘psyche’ was used, remarked: ‘Ain’t that the hell of a way to spell fish!’ When, at a later date, the Colonel accepted the Professorship of Psychiatry in a well-known medical school, before an organized psychiatric clinic was available, he said that this didn’t bother him because he could occupy his time studying the faculty. Asked whether his constant association with the mentally deranged did not depress him dreadfully, he replied that he far preferred the company of the feebleminded, because they were as a rule far more docile and honest than the socalled ‘normal’ people he knew — and he meant it.

Like many others of his branch of the medical profession, Colonel Trout had acquired the habit of always being on the job. You could never be sure when speaking with him whether you were being conversed with or led into the betrayal of some hidden abyss, some iniquitous collection of psychic evil that you had succeeded hitherto in concealing in the underbrush of the unconscious, and which the slow development of character was gradually managing to encapsulate just as fibrous connective tissue imprisons a tuberculous lesion. There were certain Freudian ground rules in this game with which only the psychiatrists were thoroughly familiar, but of which the victims were so ignorant that, even on their guard, they could never be sure that they might not be caught in some revealing offside play. Few were aware, in the innocence of their ignorant hearts, of the fact that an unguarded reference to a lead pencil, or a church steeple, a barn door, a pitchfork, or a doughnut might immediately strike the psychiatrist’s nose and set him baying on the malodorous trail of a psychic stench.

At a period slightly later than that during which R.S. lived in close communion with Dr. Trout, the development of endocrinology expanded the study of mental characteristics from concentration upon a single set of glands to include at least several, and the guilty feeling which oppressed all nervous sufferers was to some extent relieved by the hope that one of the other glands might be at fault. The time of which we speak, however, still fell into the later years of what might be spoken of as the ‘uniglandular’ psychiatry, and such expressions as ‘libido,’ ‘phallus,’ ‘Œdipus complex,’ ‘paternal fixation,’ and ‘inversion’ had crept out of their biding places in the medical dictionaries and had entered the drawing-room. To dream at all in those days was a misfortune; to mention it, indecent; and to reveal the substance, reckless. One of my friends at this time became a veronal addict because he could not overcome his taste for Welsh rabbits after the theatre; and a dear old lady on Beacon Street jumped into the Charles River Basin because she repeatedly dreamt of the Bunker Hill Monument.

The joke about being confined with Dr. Trout in the cabin which had a grid over the door soon wore off; but night after night R.S. lay in the upper berth in the evenings while the doctor was receiving visits from officers of the New York Division, many of whom had been boyhood friends from the region in central New York which had been his home. None of them came for professional advice. All of them were very fond of Trout and he, obviously, of them. But all conversations, most innocently begun, gradually turned into a sort of analysis of the visitors. After the usual questions and answers concerning past experiences and relatives, Trout’s professional instinct came to the surface — quite amiably and without evil intention, of course, but guided by spontaneous interest in the mental development of his visitor.

Some such question would be asked as: ‘What became of the redheaded girl who lived over the post office?’ or ‘Who was the man your aunt married after your uncle died?’ and so forth; and within ten or fifteen minutes the visitor’s character began to be revealed. Even R. S., entirely unskilled in this technique, would gradually feel that he knew a great deal about these people, and sometimes — when one of them left — he had the slight sensation of shame that comes with eavesdropping.

It was this that made R.S. permanently shy of psychiatrists and of anything that might involve the risk of revealing his sexual reactions. I was never able to get him to talk at all about any of the women who had really influenced his life, but I did succeed in stimulating him to reminiscences which, in their totality, — though none of them were of any serious significance, — may reveal to some extent the manner of man he was in his relations to the other sex. These I have recorded as nearly as possible in his own words and in a chronological sequence of my own arrangement, since they were gathered over the course of years, whenever I could guide the conversation into these channels: —

The first girl I ever noticed in what, later, I recognized as a sentimental emotion was called Mamie. She was the daughter of a truck driver in my father’s chemical factory. We used to play in the large factory yard, where hundreds of barrels of resin were stored on end, and it was great fun to jump from barrel top to barrel top. Mamie had a brother who became a bosom friend, and games of tag on the barrels were organized in which Mamie—being several years younger

— was patronizingly allowed to participate. She and her brother were sweet children, amiable and gentle, and I loved them both very dearly. Their lives were hard. At twelve and ten, respectively, they were called upon for severe domestic service, and their poor mother, — a stout, red-faced woman, — kind enough when she was sober, was less so when drunk. Their happy moments were the ones they spent with me, playing on the barrels; but when I went back to my playroom to have my feet dried and to be fed my supper they went back to a little frame house where dirt, noise, unmerited abuse, and frugal tolerance were their lot.

Mamie was blue-eyed and blonde, with a bright blondeness that shone through the dirt on her face and the squalor of her clothes. And how humbly grateful she was to be allowed to be ‘It,’ chasing us over the barrels. There must have been a faint dawning of the endocrines in me even then, baneful prophecy of a long life of struggle, for while I was sorry for Jimmy when I happened to think of being so, there was always a protective tenderness in my heart for Mamie.

One day — it was drizzling — the wet drove us from our playground into a little shed where carboys of sulphuric acid were stored. I dug a nickel out of my pocket and Jimmy was dispatched to the store on the corner to buy some barberpole candy sticks. Mamie and I sat close together, for we were damp and a little chilly. She stuck up her wot face to be kissed, and I looked down at her with the warm intention of kissing her. But when I looked into her face I saw two little rivulets running from Mamie’s nose to her pouted upper lip. I had never noticed them before, although I had often observed her sticking her tongue out and upward, whenever she sniffed — for ours was a catarrhal climate. Now I looked and saw. But I have always been proud in later days that, even at this early age, I mastered my repulsion and kissed Mamie on her salty lips. Dear Mamie! What has become of you since? You were a lovely child, in spite of the rivulets on your upper lip, and — no doubt — you deserved more consideration than the world has given you. What happened to me at that moment has never left me since and is perhaps the only achievement that may eventually entitle me to some measure of self-approbation — namely, the mastery of arrogance and disgust by tenderness and pity.

We played in the great court of my father’s chemical factory and the atmosphere was redolent with odors of resin, sulphuric acid, and amyl acetate. I never pass a chemical factory or smell amyl acetate without thinking of Mamie and our games on the barrels. Yes, the sense of smell is the most nostalgic of our senses. I recall a charming lady from the West who stayed with us in New York, but left suddenly — long before she had intended to. She was in the recently cleaned bathroom one morning and, smelling the household ammonia, got so homesick for her twins that she couldn’t stand it and had to go home.

It is strange that after all these years I should remember their names. They were called Galeoti, and came from Florence; and the name of the English governess was Miss Sattorthwaite. For a month, in the late spring, we played together, the two little girls and I, in the garden of the hotel at Pegli, on the Italian Riviera. Everything was bursting into flower, and the garden had bushes blazing with while and red; there were gravel walks, and a fountain with a spout in the middle, and goldfish which were fed conscientiously every morning by the fat proprietress. We skipped and laughed in the garden, for the little Galeoti girls — one of them my age, the other two years younger, which would make her ten — were merry and great chatterboxes in a mixture of Italian and English that was frequently corrected by the governess. We took long walks together into the hills, and came home with great bunches of violets.

Late in the afternoon, Miss Satterthwaite often read to us. Among other things, she read an English translation ol De Amicis. She was only a child herself, about seventeen, I should judge, and pretty as blonde, high-colored British girls so often are at that age. To me she seemed a young goddess. I sat very quiet when she read, and followed her about like a little dog. She was very lonely — probably it was the first time she had been away from home and isolated, as a young English governess would be in an Italian family. The parents Galeoti were away most of the time on excursions and at night played cards with my father and mother and other people in the hotel, drinking large quantities of Asti spumante and having very jolly times, as we children could hear after we had gone to bed.

I slept in a room that faced the garden, and the warm fragrance from many flowers and shrubs came into my window. I used to pretend that I was going to bed outside, among the bushes. One night I remember I could not sleep because the moon was white in the window; and, feeling restless and adventurous, I tiptoed through the hall and crept out into the garden. There, on a bench, Miss Satterthwaite was sitting, and when I slipped up beside her I saw that she was weeping. I was very sorry for her, but she took my hand between hers and told me that it was only the moonlight, that she had felt lonesome and was weeping only because if was so terribly beautiful. And suddenly she said, ‘Hush!’ and I heard my first nightingale. But if was a great disappointment. I was thinking of Miss Satterthwaite and the terrible grief I thought she was enduring when she led me to the door and told me to be a good boy and go to bed.

Of course I have been more or less in love all my life. But in the golden, adolescent days I fell in and out much faster than I did later. A look, a touch of the hand, a word, or — as in one case — only the sound of a snatch of song heard through a window on a summer night, and I was off on the new, sometimes before I was out of the old. Even this was not embarrassing, because the ladies in question had been fallen in love with, adored in half a dozen execrable sonnets, taken on honeymoons to Spanish castles that I kept always ready and fully equipped for such purposes, and dropped again for a new love before they themselves had become aware that they were participating in a romantic adventure, I used them, so to speak, as lay figures for my sentimental education. It did me a lot of good, and them no harm.

There was Marie-Louise, the New York society girl, ten years older than I, indeed approaching thirty, an accomplished musician with a magnificent, almost Wagnerian soprano, but a figure pathologically — that is, incapacitatingly—fat. She would have made four of me, and she thought I was ‘a nice boy but a little funny.’

There was Maud, the harness maker’s daughter, a young Diana, but always suspecting melodramatic perils to her virtue from the rich man’s son.

There was the Smith girl, who really had no particular attractions except that she lived in a hotel across the lake and tempted my Hero and Leander complex by sitting out on the wharf with a lantern at night, knowing that I would swim across a half mile of cold, black, starlit water just because of the stage setting.

I might have been drowned half a dozen times, and no one the wiser till the next day; and when I did arrive and sat dripping and cold on the dock, we had nothing to say to each other — she because she was a stupid little doll, and I because I was blown. Yet even she served a purpose, and I used to swim home and climb up the hill through the woods, half-frozen but feeling elatedly heroic and devoted.

There was — but why catalogue them ? They were all appropriate in their individual ways, and played passive, usually unconscious rôles in my development. Unlike François Villon, I know more or less what became of them — poor things. Not one turned out to be a princess, and those I’ve seen within the last ten years had turned out just as one would have expected — quite commonplace, with no signs whatever of having lived for a time in a cloud-swept castle somewhere between Barcelona and Bourg Madame.

In all this there was — I should say, in my own justification — a minimum of the physical. In defense of romanticism, which in so many of its aspects appears silly and affected, one should not underestimate the service it does, at a certain age, in sublimating into its lovely hocuspocus what might otherwise — and, in its absence, often does — become a gross or careless attitude toward physical love. The romanticism which had me in its grip at that age was associated with hard riding, frugal living, — as far as food and drink were concerned, — and intellectual intoxication, under George Wood berry’s influence, with the English romantic poets and their idealization of love. The cult of physical hardness helped considerably in keeping this state of mind from becoming, as it might so easily have done, a morbid one; for by instinct I knew the wisdom of Guarnerius’s prescription for love-melancholy: ‘To go with haircloth, etc., as monks do, but above all to fast.’

Also, the ladies as a rule were far from sentimental themselves. One of them, now the mother of four and the still attractive grandmother of two or three, — Ella, — how lovely, but, withal, how sensible she was! She was the daughter of the principal of a well-known boys’ boarding school, and had an apartment of her own, on the corner of the big barracklike school building, high above the road. I used to serenade her at night, riding under her window on my big gray horse, Harry, and singing softly to the twang of a lute — with many a sour chord, for Harry was young and lively. The first time, Ella came to the window for a moment in a lovely pink nightgown. The second lime, she didn’t come to the window at all. She pretended to be asleep, and didn’t mention my visit the next day. The third time, just as I was really finding my voice, the window above her own was thrown open and a bucket of cold soapsuds came smack down on my horse’s head. For a mile I just hung on, trying not to drop the lute. I was halfway to Shruboak before I had the horse under control. Ella didn’t mention this the next day, either. The boy who threw the water was, I believe, the one whom she married a few years later. I trust she had little comfort of him. He had a depraved sense of humor.

There was a chestnut girl, who lived over the grocery store in the village. In those days, I classified girls as chestnut, sorrel, or bay. Her father was quite a celebrity. He was very old, a carpenter by trade, and had fought in the Civil War. When my father once complimented him on his hale-and-hearty appearance, and asked him how he had managed to live to such a healthy old age, he made a remark which I then thought original with him: ‘Ye want to know why I’ve lived so long? Well, it’s because I had sense enough to run like hell at the second battle o’ Bull Run.’

Pansy was the apple of his eye. She was pretty, in the slightly oversolid bucolic manner, and was what was called ‘pert’ in her conversation. On warm summer evenings, when the roads were fragrant with locust blossoms, I often rode down to the store to sit on the piazza with her and the old man, who would tell us stories of what was still known as ‘the War.’ He often told the same tale, but since he was a great liar and never told it the same way twice, it was never stale. Pansy was amorously inclined, and in this case, at least, any ideas I got into my head were initiated by her. She was something of a local belle, and had acquired the habit, in a rather bovine manner, of exercising, in male company, beguilements which were highly effective with the young farmer boys, grooms, and store clerks throughout the township. This is not to insinuate that she was not a thoroughly nice girl, and if I was flattered and inclined to dangerous plays of imagination in her regard, I was probably like the foolish one of the verse: —

Stultus quando videt
Quod pulchra puellula ridet
Tum fatuus credit
Se quod amare velit —

which is to say that when a fool sees a fair maid smile at him, he thinks it love when it’s only flirtation. At any rate, Pansy in her way was a dear girl, and I might have made a fool of myself with her as with others had it not been for one of those fortunate flashes of common sense which have so often snatched me, by mere accident, from precipices of imbecility.

One evening we were sitting on the porch. The old man had talked himself to sleep, and began to snooze right in the middle of the Wilderness. Invention had tired him. Pansy and I were sitting closer together than the temperature warranted, and her arm was pressed caressingly against my shoulder. There was a crescent moon, and a gentle breeze enfolded us with the fragrance of the honeysuckle vine. If her head had followed her arm at that moment, God knows what might have happened. But Pansy, though (I still truly believe) a good girl, possibly intent on a holder yet (I insist) entirely innocent (innocent in the conventional sense) attack upon my emotions, asked me suddenly whether I would like to see their new calf. It was so darling, she said, and had such lovely eyes and such a soft, wet nose. It was a temptation, for the calf of course was in the barn; and the barn was isolated and dark and full of hay. I fell, and said I’d love to see the calf. Merely for convention’s sake, I think, Pansy lighted a stable lantern, so that we might at least fulfill the ostensible purpose of really looking at the calf. Oh, how sweet and aphrodisiacally caressing is the odor of a cowbarn at night, with its indescribable blending of clover, cow manure, sour milk, and animal! A gentle tremor ascended my spine as I stepped over the threshold, and I drew Pansy’s soft form closer to my side as we stumbled over the rough boards by the dim and swinging light in her hand. I had lost all interest in the calf, and dear Pansy I believe had completely forgotten it. Yet we dared not not look at if — half craving, half dreading what might happen when we had seen it.

But here Pallas Athene — ever my guardian goddess intervened. Pansy walked into the stall, put her chubby arm about the calf’s neck, and held the stable lantern at arm’s length in front of her. And here they were — both confronting me, the dim rays of the lantern illuminating both their faces. Fascinated, I gazed upon them. They appeared like two sisters — helpless, bovine, kindly; infinite vacuity looked out at me from those two pairs of large, swimming eyes. The expression of Pansy’s warm and moist lips was not more invitingly tender than the soft, velvety nozzle of the calf. There they stood, — poor innocents, — two calves together; and I gazed and gazed, hypnotically held in the light, of the lamp, until I did not know which was Pansy and which calf. And I bent down and kissed the calf tenderly on the nose. Then I went out quietly, and untied my horse from the hitching post. Pansy followed me out. There were tears in her eyes when she said good-night, as I mounted and rode away — sadly, but not without a sense of relief.

(To be continued)

With each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

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