Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

The ill-concealed dependence of these men on each other is not resentful. They are the most good-natured men in the world. But they are unenlightened. Without free speech free thought can hardly exist. Without free speech you cannot gather the fruits of the mind’s spontaneous workings. When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise. He may strike out some idea which explains the sphinx. The moral consequences of circumspect and affable reticence are even worse than the intellectual ones. “Live and let live,” says our genial prudence. Well enough, but mark the event. No one ever lost his social standing merely because of his offences, but because of the talk about them. As free speech goes out the rascals come in.

Speech is a great part of social life, but not the whole of it. Dress, bearing, expression, betray a man, customs show character, all these various utterances mingle and merge into the general tone which is the voice of a national temperament; private motive is lost in it.

This tone penetrates and envelops everything in America. It is impossible to condemn it altogether. This desire to please, which has so much of the shopman’s smile in it, graduates at one end of the scale into a general kindliness, into public benefactions, hospitals, and college foundations; at the other end it is seen melting into a desire to efface one’s self rather than give offence, to hide rather than be noticed.

In Europe, the men in the pit at the theatre stand up between the acts, face the house, and examine the audience at leisure. The American dares not do this. He cannot stand the isolation, nor the publicity. The American in a horse car can give his seat to a lady, but dares not raise his voice while the conductor tramps over his toes. It violates every instinct of his commercial body to thrust his private concerns into prominence. The American addresses his equal, whom he knows familiarly, as Mr. Jones, giving him the title with as much subserviency as the Englishman pays to an unknown Earl.

Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history of civilization. Who cares whether Cæsar stole or Cæsar Borgia cheated? Their intellects stayed clear. The real evil that follows in the wake of a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual dishonesty it generates. One need not mind stealing, but one must cry out at people whose minds are so befuddled that they do not know theft when they see it. Robert Walpole bought votes. He deceived others, but he did not deceive himself.

We have seen that the retailer in the small town could not afford to think clearly upon the political situation. But this was a mere instance, a sample of his mental attitude. He dare not face any question. He must shuffle, qualify, and defer. Here at last we have the great characteristic which covers our continent like a climate—intellectual dishonesty. This state of mind does not merely prevent a man having positive opinions. The American is incapable of taking a real interest in anything. The lack of passion in the American—noticeable in his books and in himself—comes from the same habitual mental distraction; for passion is concentration. Hence also the flippancy, superficiality, and easy humor for which we are noted. Nothing except the dollar is believed to be worthy the attention of a serious man. People are even ashamed of their tastes. Until recently, we thought it effeminate for a man to play on the piano. When a man takes a living interest in anything, we call him a “crank.” There is an element of self-sacrifice in any honest intellectual work which we detect at once and score with contumely.

It was not solely commercial interest that made the biographers of Lincoln so thrifty to extend and veneer their book. It was that they themselves did not, could not, take an interest in the truth about him. The second-rate quality of all our letters and verse is due to the same cause. The intellectual integrity is undermined. The literary man is concerned for what “will go,” like the reformer who is half politician. The attention of every one in the United States is on some one else’s opinion, not on truth.

The matter resolves itself at last into Pilate’s question: What is truth? We do not know, and shall never know. But it seems to involve a certain focussing and concentration of the attention that brings all the life within us into harmony. When this happens to us, we discover that truth is the only thing we had ever really cared about in the world. The thing seems to be the same thing, no matter which avenue we reach it by. At whatever point we are touched, we respond. A quartet, a cathedral, a sonnet, an exhibition of juggling, anything well done—we are at the mercy of it. But as the whole of us responds to it, so it takes a whole man to do it. Whatever cracks men up and obliterates parts of them, makes them powerless to give out this vibration. This is about all we know of individualism and the integrity of the individual. The sum of all the philosophies in the history of the world can be packed back into it. All the tyrannies and abuses in the world are only bad because they injure this integrity. We desire truth. It is the only thing we desire. To have it, we must develop the individual. And there are practical ways and means of doing this. We see that all our abuses are only odious because they injure some individual man’s spirit. We can trace the corruption of politics into business, and find private selfishness at the bottom of it. We can see this spread out into a network of invisible influence, in the form of intellectual dishonesty blighting the minds of our people. We can look still closer and see just why and how the temperament of the private man is expressed.

We study this first in social life; for social life is the source and fountain of all things. The touchstone for any civilization is what one man says to another man in the street. Everything else that happens there bears a traceable relation to the tone of his voice. The press reflects it, the pulpit echoes it, the literature reproduces it, the architecture embodies it.

The rays of force which start in material prosperity pass through the focus of social life, and extend out into literature, art, architecture, religion, philosophy. All these things are but the sparks thrown off the gestures and gaits, the records of the social life of some civilization. That is the reason why it has been useful to pause over a club-house and study its inmates. The ball-room, the dinner-table, would have been equally instructive. The deference to reigning convention is the same everywhere. The instinct of self-concealment, the policy of classing like with like, leads to the herding of the young with the young only, the sporting with the sporting only, the rich with the rich only, which is the bane of our society. The suffocation is mitigated here and there by the influence of ambitious and educated women. They are doing their best to stem the tide which they can neither control nor understand. The stratification of our society, and its crystallization into social groups, is little short of miraculous, considering the lightning changes of scene. The nouveaux riches of one decade are the old noblesse of the next decade, and yet any particular set, at any particular time, has its exclusions, its code of hats and coats and small talk, which are more rigid than those of London.