But apart from these arguments (which hold good for most serious books) there is in the present case the almost insurmountable difficulty of “system.”
A story in order to be a success must have a beginning and an end. This book has a beginning, but can it ever have an end?
What I mean is this.
I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in the name of righteousness and justice, but really caused by intolerance.
I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell when intolerance was elevated to the rank of one of the major virtues.
I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers shout with one accord, “Down with this curse, and let us all be tolerant!”
But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how this highly desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks which undertake to give us instruction in everything from after-dinner speaking to ventriloquism. In an advertisement of a correspondence course last Sunday I read of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which the institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange for a very small gratuity. But no one thus far has offered to explain in forty (or in forty thousand) lessons “how to become tolerant.”
And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to so many secrets, refuses to be of any use in this emergency.
Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to slavery or free trade or capital punishment or the growth and development of Gothic architecture, for slavery and free trade and capital punishment and Gothic architecture are very definite and concrete things. For lack of all other material we could at least study the lives of the men and women who had been the champions of free trade and slavery and capital punishment and Gothic architecture or those who had opposed them. And from the manner in which those excellent people had approached their subjects, from their personal habits, their associations, their preferences in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about the ideals which they had so energetically espoused or so bitterly denounced.
But there never were any professional protagonists of tolerance. Those who worked most zealously for the great cause did so incidentally. Their tolerance was a by-product. They were engaged in other pursuits. They were statesmen or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans. In the midst of the king business or their medical practice or making steel engravings they found time to say a few good words for tolerance, but the struggle for tolerance was not the whole of their careers. They were interested in it as they may have been interested in playing chess or fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great and Thomas Jefferson and Montaigne as boon companions!) it is almost impossible to discover that common trait of character which as a rule is to be found in all those who are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing or delivering the world from sin.