One may believe in Votes for Women, rejoice over the improvement of the position of workingmen, and hope to see many of the ideals of socialism prevail,—and yet lament clumsiness and maladroitness in the use of motive. For all causes need the aid of the judiciously selected method, the appeal to high expediency, whereas they have to some degree fallen into the hands of extremely clumsy operators, the Pankhursts, the Carons, the Tannenbaums, who recall Newman’s words: “Others are so intemperate and intractable that there is no greater calamity for a good cause than that they should get hold of it.” They also recall Shakespeare’s version of the words of Antony, which may be regarded as the epitome of good form in kicking, so far as motive is concerned:
“This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good of all, made one of them.”
Even more various, important and interesting than the motive of kicking is the object of the kick, l’objet d’appui, das Stossensstoff. Judging from some specimens and examples still to be found among us, we may imagine that the primitive man always objected to specific and tangible things; if an acquaintance impinged too violently upon the person of the primitive, the latter replied by “handing out,” or footing out, a good “swift” blow. So too, now-a-days, the wise and simple person is not likely to go too far afield to kick, there being plenty of objects in the immediate neighborhood on which he can break his toes, such as little eccentricities in his neighbor’s or his own ménage. If he is wise, really wise, he takes exception to these things from the high impersonal motives that we have been examining, and only where he is pretty sure of success. But if he have a disinterested mind, a philanthropic temperament, a broad philosophical outlook on life, he will see a very large assortment of objects that are by no means those of his special field of activity. These are the generalized objets d’appui, and it may be said to the credit of our civilization that we have accumulated them in larger numbers than any of our predecessors. The fact is, indeed, that the primitive had none of them, or, if in his later aeons he recognized some of them, his attitude was religious, terrorful, abject. They apparently grow in number quite as rapidly as other inventions of the human mind; and as each of these latter has been devised and recognized, so its accompanying kick has been engendered, thereafter never quite to leave it; just as the louse of the dead Filipino accompanies him to the nether world. Thus the general recognition of something called Life, brings a kick at Life by those who are hard hit by it. This is on the whole the most idle of the manifestations of the Stossenslust. The most evident thing about life, for the individual, is that it apparently begins somewhere, through no fault whatever of the individual’s own, and ends for the individual in some way that he cannot specifically forecast. Evidently to object to the most hard and fast fact of the world, the time-honored premise that all men are mortal, is a most futile proceeding; and yet it has been made not only the subject of the most varied and legitimate inquiries, but also of wailings and gnashings of teeth, of religious terror, fervor and abnegation. So far as the subject of this paper is concerned, the reasonable kick at life is the kick at conditions that lie along the way; and it is a healthy sign of the times that our energies are being directed rather to improvement of affairs in this world than to a too active calculation about the compensations that the next one affords.
Another almost equally futile aim of the Stossenskunst lies in a kind of objection to alleged tendencies. With the advance of civilization, to use Macaulay’s phrase, new tendencies and movements are thought to appear; and these naturally develop their own special crop of kickings. The decay of modern manners, the growing corruption of the English tongue, the growing impudence of modern youth, the encroachments of scepticism upon the domain of religion, the antagonism of classes, the sentimentality of democratic life, the general increase of foolishness,—these and a thousand other alleged tendencies, are really futile matter for fretting about. Here, indeed, the operation is something like this: the kicker goes forth to kick. He mistakes a balloon for a football and with an inflator proceeds to blow the balloon up, puffing it into enormous size with air (at 99F) from his own lungs. Then he paints on it the sign, “Degeneracy of modern times,” and kicks it a mile or two into the air in about any direction, except toward a goal. Meanwhile really skilful kickers are trying to score by accurate judicious kicks over a cross-bar.
The recognition of real tendencies, of movements, of purposes, of motives, on the other hand, is of course indispensable if the art of objecting is to be successfully practiced. If I were oblivious to the tendency of my neighbor to absorb small portions of my estate, of harum-scarum pictures and statues to oust a more sober art, of armaments to go on increasing, I should find myself bunkoed in a minute; I should be as inept as Piggy Moore in the story, who did not know one goal from another. If one looks up only when his toes are trod on, he will see little. Tendencies must be recognized; without them we could have no such thing as the anticipatory, the preparative, the restraining, the stimulating kick. But it is evident that little except by way of suggestion can come through treating these matters in general; the effective kick has a specific objective. And unless one’s criticism of tendency be based on facts, one does as the protagonists of the last paragraph, booting the self-blown air of vituperation or aspiration.
It is a pastime to kick at institutions as well as at tendencies. I once knew a man who for a whole long year never ceased to complain of the Subway; it was noisy, ill-ventilated, ill-mannered. The kick was very inapposite: I was not the president of the Metropolitan, and moreover I liked the Subway, in spite of some drawbacks. But the correct attitude is quite simple: one is under no undeniable compulsion to ride in the Subway; but even if one cannot escape, to destroy it is inconvenient and impossible; and therefore the only sensible course is to attack the abuses, by writing about them to the management, or to some benignant newspaper. In like manner many of us find a peculiar joy in attacking modern journalism, flats, pianolas, victrolas, automobiles, the modern drama, the study of rhetoric, the management of asylums, city life and many institutions of many descriptions. Whereas the judicious kicker usually aims only at the abuses that such institutions bring with them,—unless the evils are inherent and colossal, as possibly in Tammany Hall and war and the corner saloon. But even here kicking must be piecemeal.