But solitude is not good for man. With it we punish our worst criminals and our old maids. Victor Hugo says, “It makes a god or a devil of man.” Neither of these superlative beings could exist in Wagner’s temperate zone. Wagner yearns for quiet and rest, and where can we find them? Scientists tell us nothing in the world is at rest. There are but two spots on the earth which don’t move with it—the poles. And God has made them uninhabitable—as a lesson.
If Wagner could reach them, he might build his Utopia there, warm it with a rainbow and fertilize it with the waters of Lethe.
Yet humanity must have these Arcadian dreams. The epochs are strewn with them. Periodically man grows tired of the spiced flavors of his repasts and would fain go out in the woods and gather manna from heaven. The effort has always been disastrous. We had the experiment of the Perfectionists, the Icarians, the Owenites, the Harmonists and Brook Farm. They were all founded on simplicity and were all dissolved because of the difference between theory and practice. This is unfortunate.
An ideal is like a schoolboy’s ruler—it is very good to measure by, but is very frail to build a habitation with. Optimism is a good thing, and so is Pessimism. But Optimism alone is popular; man does not like to be told the faults of the universe any more than to be told of his own faults. This accounts for his hospitality to all the myopic dogmas of Optimism, and his antipathy to the equally true tenets of Pessimism.
It is as if one faction believed only in the actuality of the day, and the other admitted only the existence of night. Their polemics suggest the law of gravitation run mad. What if there were only a law of attraction and none of repulsion? Certainly we would all be merged into one. But this union would be chaos and extinction. Our repulsions and suspicions save us. They make an individual where the Optimist with his one law of attraction would have an inert mass. The Lord’s Prayer should be changed to “Deliver us from evil—and good.”
Too great a bias toward a recognition of either is dangerous. The one inculcates content—the other discontent. But of the two, discontent is by far the safer. If content had been universal, our present degree of enlightenment and justice would have been impossible.
Content means egotism, inaction and stagnation. Discontent means reformation, revolution and progress. All our great men were discontented. All our imbecile kings were contented—and tried to make their serfs so. Whose mind was the most beneficial to the world—the fermenting, aggressive brain of Luther, or the tranquil cerebellum of the gorged Vitellius? Civilization has arisen from discontent. Discontent means upheaval, and upheaval is to a nation what plowing is to the corn. Sir Robert Peel defined agitation to be “the marshaling of the conscience of a nation to mold its laws.”
What we want at present is not peace, but agitation. There are too many wrongs to be righted—too many national dragons to be slain to respond yet awhile to Wagner’s call to disarmament! What we need are spears, not olive branches; the flag of battle, not the flag of truce.
Wagner wishes to give us happiness. But man’s effort for selfish, personal happiness has caused all the miseries of the world.
It is by persistently closing their eyes to the sorrows of man that our commercial pirates can so tranquilly exist. I believe that when man sees that he cannot make life enjoyable he will then turn his attention to making it endurable. At present our safest philosophy is the belief in progress by antagonism, and our duty is to unsheathe the sword of rebellion from the scabbard of ignorance, and do battle against all despots and oppressors!