HENRY WARD BEECHER
The happy-go-lucky humor of the day is no match for the cool calculation of European communists. English and American humorists do for the public what the court jester once did for blasé kings.
In the sardonic temper of the Russian revolutionist, I see a return of the French temper of 1793.
Most of the sermons and speeches of the time are chameleon in character and tepid in feeling. English humorists developed a flagrant cynicism, spotted with a varioloid paradox, while French writers have halted between the isolation of the hospital and the insularity of the home.
The war brought Anatole France to his senses, the last of the Gallic wits, who possessed a greater charm than Voltaire without attaining his universal prestige. Prince Bismarck declares that the French have learned nothing since their defeat at Sedan. Yet French writers have learned more from the great war than the writers of any other country.
English humor is meant to entertain a public lost in the cynical buffooneries of materialism; American humor is meant to amuse a public lost in the mazes of extravagant pleasures and provincial inanities.
English humor has a certain seal; American humor a certain mark—the difference between sealing wax and a postage stamp. Both aim to fill the ghastly gap left by the doctrine of evolution since it caught the fancy of agnostic freebooters in 1870—forerunners of something grimmer than the Soviet symbols of a return of puritanism even now creeping into view as ivy creeps up the water spouts.
Laughter will vanish, since there will be nothing left to laugh at. Dancing will cease, for curfew will ring at nine and people will begin work at five.
Remember that all the great modern movements had an obscure origin. Spiritualism began in a country farm-house, Christian Science developed out of mediumship, prohibition was started in a village, woman’s suffrage was started by a Quakeress, Theosophy began at a farm-house in Vermont, the Salvation Army was started by a group of obscure persons.
The new puritanism will start by a committee of persons unknown to the public, chosen from the ranks of the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians. Grim determinists, they will ignore satire, sarcasm and irony, ignore party politics, ignore the opposition of luke-warm Christians, form committees, in which they will be aided by drastic reactions during the period of readjustment.
Centers will soon be formed in Atlanta, Nashville, Cleveland, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia and Washington, D. C.
What is causing so much crime? Not one, but many elements of decadence, all operating together, among which I can name rag, jazz, high balls, cabarets, free verse, neurotic art, sentimental optimism, cheap notions of progress, neutral sermons, automobilism, lack of child discipline, absence of fear among people under the age of forty—evils which you may apply to all English-speaking countries.
The licence of the cities dominates country life and country thought. The city minority rules the majority in the country, and it is in the country that the reaction will begin.