Under dispute

by Agnes Repplier

Time and circumstance lent themselves with extraordinary graciousness to Emerson’s invincible optimism. It was easier to be a transcendental philosopher, and much easier to cherish a noble and a sweet content, before the laying of the Atlantic cable. Emerson was over sixty when this event took place, and, while he lived, the wires were used with commendable economy. The morning newspaper did not bring him a detailed account of the latest Turkish massacre. The morning mail did not bring him photographs of starving Russian children. His temperamental composure met with little to derange it. He abhorred slavery; but until Lincoln forced the issue, he seldom bent his mind to its consideration. He loved “potential America”; but he had a happy faculty of disregarding public affairs. Passionate partisanship, which is the basis of so much satisfaction and discontent, was alien to his soul. He loved mankind, but not men; and his avoidance of intimacies saved him much wear and tear. Mr. Brownell says that he did not care enough about his friends to discriminate between them, which was the reason he estimated Alcott so highly.

This immense power of withdrawal, this concentration upon the things of the spirit, made possible Emerson’s intellectual life. He may have been, as Santayana says, “impervious to the evidence of evil”; yet there breaks from his heart an occasional sigh over the low ebb of the world’s virtue, or an entirely human admission that the hopes of the morning are followed by the ennui of noon. Sustained by the supremacy of the moral law, and by a profound and majestic belief in the invincible justice, the “loaded dice” of God, he sums up in careful words his modest faith in man: “Hours of sanity and consideration are always arriving to communities as to individuals, when the truth is seen, and the martyrs are justified.” Perhaps martyrs foresee the dawning of this day or ever they come to die; but to those who stand by and witness their martyrdom, the night seems dark and long.

There is a species of discontent which is more fervently optimistic than all the cheerfulness the world can boast. It is the discontent of the passionate and unpractical reformer, who believes, as Shelley believed, in the perfectibility of the human species, and who thinks, as Shelley thought, that there is a remedy for every disease of civilization. To the poet’s dreaming eyes the cure was simple and sure. Destruction implied for him an automatic reconstruction, a miraculous survival and rebirth. Uncrown the king, and some noble prophet or philosopher will guide—not rule—the people. Unfrock the priest, and the erstwhile congregation will perfect itself in the practice of virtue. Take the arms from the soldier and the policeman, the cap and gown from the college president, authority from the judge, and control from the father. The nations will then be peaceful, the mobs orderly, the students studious, the criminals virtuous, the children well-behaved. An indifferent acquaintance with sociology, and a comprehensive ignorance of biology, made possible these pleasing illusions. Nor did it occur to Shelley that many men, his equals in disinterestedness and his superiors in self-restraint, would have found his reconstructed world an eminently undesirable dwelling-place.

Two counsels to content stand bravely out from the mass of contradictory admonitions with which the world’s teachers have bewildered us. Saint Paul, writing to the Philippians, says simply: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content”; and Marcus Aurelius, contemplating the mighty spectacle of life and death, bids us pass serenely through our little space of time, and end our journey in content. It is the meeting-point of objective and subjective consciousness. The Apostle was having a hard time of it. The things he disciplined himself to accept with content were tangible things, of an admittedly disagreeable character—hunger and thirst, stripes and imprisonment. They were not happening to somebody else; they were happening to him. The Emperor, seeking refuge from action in thought, steeled himself against the nobleness of pity no less than against the weakness of complaint. John Stuart Mill, who did not suffer from enervating softness of heart, pronounced the wholesale killing of Christians in the reign of Marcus Aurelius to be one of the world’s great tragedies. It was the outcome, not only of imperial policy, but of sincere conviction. Therefore historians have agreed to pass it lightly by. How can a man do better than follow the dictates of his own conscience, or of his own judgment, or of whatever directs the mighty ones of earth who make laws instead of obeying them? But the immensity of pain, the long-drawn agony involved in this protracted persecution might have disturbed even a Stoic philosopher passing serenely—though not harmlessly—through his little space of time.

This brings me to the consideration of one prolific source of discontent, the habit we have acquired—and cannot let go—of distressing ourselves over the daily progress of events. The classic world, “innocent of any essential defeat,” was a pitiless world, too clear-eyed for illusions, too intelligent for sedatives. The Greeks built the structure of their lives upon an almost perfect understanding of all that it offered and denied. The Romans, running an empire and ruling a world, had much less time for thinking; yet Horace, observant and acquiescent, undeceived and undisturbed, is the friend of all the ages. It is not from him, or from any classic author, that we learn to talk about the fret and fever of living. He would have held such a phrase to be eminently ill-bred, and unworthy of man’s estate.

The Middle Ages, immersed in heaving seas of trouble, and lifted Heaven-ward by great spiritual emotions, had scant breathing-space for the cultivation of nerves. Men endured life and enjoyed it. Their endurance and their enjoyment were unimpaired by the violence of their fellow men, or by the vision of an angry God. Cruelty, which we cannot bear to read about, and a Hell, which we will not bear to think about, failed signally to curb the zest with which they lived their days. “How high the tide of human delight rose in the Middle Ages,” says Mr. Chesterton significantly, “we know only by the colossal walls they built to keep it within bounds.” There is no reason to suppose that Dante, whose fervid faith compassed the redemption of mankind, disliked his dream of Hell, or that it irked him to consign to it so many eminent and agreeable people.

The Renaissance gave itself unreservedly to all the pleasures that could be extracted from the business of living, though there was no lack of troubles to damp its zeal. It is interesting and instructive to read the history of a great Italian lady, typical of her day, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua. She was learned, adroit, able, estimable, and mistress of herself though duchies fell. She danced serenely at the ball given by the French King at Milan, after he had ousted her brother-in-law, the Duke Ludovico, and sent him to die a prisoner at Loches. When Cæsar Borgia snatched Urbino, she improved the occasion by promptly begging from him two beautiful statues which she had always coveted, and which had been the most treasured possessions of Duke Guidobaldo, her relative, and the husband of her dearest friend. A chilly heart had Isabella when others came to grief, but a stout one when disaster faced her way. If the men and women who lived through those highly coloured, harshly governed days had fretted too persistently over the misfortunes of others, or had spent their time questioning the moral intelligibility of life, the Renaissance would have failed of its fruition, and the world would be a less engaging place for us to live in now.

There is a discontent which is profoundly stimulating, and there is a discontent which is more wearisome than complacency. Both spring from a consciousness that the time is out of joint, and both have a modern background of nerves. “The Education of Henry Adams” and the “Diaries” of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt are cases in point. Blunt’s quarrel was with his country, his world, his fellow creatures and his God—a broad field of dissatisfaction, which was yet too narrow to embrace himself. Nowhere does he give any token of even a moderate self-distrust. Britain is an “engine of evil,” because his party is out of power. “Americans” (in 1900) “are spending fifty millions a year in slaughtering the Filipinos”—a crude estimate of work and cost. “The Press is the most complete engine ever invented for the concealment of historic truth.” “Patriotism is the virtue of nations in decay.” “The whole white race is revelling openly in violence, as though it had never pretended to be Christian. God’s equal curse be on them all.”

“The whole white race,” be it observed. For a time Blunt dreamed fond dreams of yellow and brown and black supremacy. Europe’s civilization he esteemed a failure. Christianity had not come up to his expectations. There remained the civilization of the East, and Mohammedanism—an amended Mohammedanism, innocent of sensuality and averse to bloodshed. Filled with this happy hope, the Englishman set off from Cairo to seek religion in the desert.

Siwah gave him a rude reception. Ragged tribes, ardent but unregenerate followers of the Prophet, pulled down his tents, pillaged his luggage, robbed his servants, and knocked him rudely about. Blunt’s rage at this treatment was like the rage of “Punch’s” vegetarian who is chased by a bull. “There is no hope to be found in Islam, and I shall go no further,” is his conclusion. “The less religion in the world, perhaps the better.”