The Time-Spirit of the Twentieth Century

HAD we the faculty of the Greeks for embodying our perceptions of life in beautiful or terrifying myths, we should probably possess some legend of a Sphinx who lay across the path of entrance into life, and forced each generation to answer her conundrum of the correct formula for the search of the highest human good. In the legend, each generation would cast aside with contempt its predecessor’s efforts at the solution of the enigma, and enter gayly upon the task of demonstrating the triumphant wisdom of its guess at the worldold problems.

It was after some such fashion as this that the last century — nineteenth of its era — came into being. Flushed, happy, confident, it came an army with banners ; every standard having blazoned upon it in letters of gold the magic device, “ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Here was a potent formula indeed !

How we hustled the poor painted, formal, withered old eighteenth century out at the nether gate ! — smashing its idols, toppling over its altars, tearing down its tarnished hangings of royalty from the walls, and bundling its poor antiquated furniture of authority out of the window. All doors were flung wide ; the barriers of caste, class, sex, religion, race, were burst open, and light poured in. The gloomy Ghettos were emptied of their silent, stubborn, cringing population, — forged by the hammer of Christian hate through two thousand years into a race as keen, compact, and flexible as steel. The slave stood up free of bonds ; half exultant, half frightened, at the liberty that brought with it responsibilities heavier and more inexorable than the old shackles. Woman caught her breath and lifted up her arms. The old superstitious Asiatic curse fixed upon her by the Church was scornfully laughed away. She was as free as the Roman woman again, — free to be proud of her sex, free to wed where she chose, free to claim as her own the child for whom she had travailed to give it life.

A vast bonfire was made of the stake, the wheel, the gyve ; of crowns, of orders, of robes of state. All wrongs were to be righted, all oppressions redressed, all inequalities leveled, all cruelties forbidden. Men shuddered when they thought of the cruelties of the past, shuddered when they talked of the execution of Calas. Such a crime would never be possible in this new golden age. Only of oppression and cruelty was vice bred. Given perfect liberty and perfect justice, the warring world would become Arcadia once more. Lions, if not hunted, if judiciously trained by the constant instilling of virtuous maxims, would acquire a perfect disgust for mutton ; and lambs would consequently lie down beside them, would grow as courageous and self-reliant as wolves.

What a beautiful time it was, those first thrilling days of the new era ! How the spirit dilates in contemplating it, even now ! The heart beat with the noble new emotions, the cheek flushed, the eye glistened with sensibility’s ready tear. It was so pleasant to be good, to be kind, to be just; to feel that even the bonds of nationality were cast aside, and that all mankind were brothers, striving only for preeminence in virtue. The heart could hardly hold without delicious pain this broad flood of universal human-kindness.

It was then that Anarcharsis Clootz presented to the National Assembly his famous " deputation of mankind.”

“ On the 19th evening of June, 1790, the sun’s slant rays lighted a spectacle such as our foolish little planet has not often to show. Anarcharsis Clootz entering the august Salle de Manège with the human species at his heels. Swedes, Spaniards, Polacks, Turks, Chaldeans, Greeks, dwellers in Mesopotamia, come to claim place in the grand Federation, having an undoubted interest in it. . . . In the meantime we invite them to the honors of the sitting, honnear de la séance. A long-flowing Turk, for rejoinder, bows with Eastern solemnity, and utters articulate sounds; but, owing to his imperfect knowledge of the French dialect, his words are like spilt water ; the thought he had in him remains conjectural to this day. . . . To such things does the august National Assembly ever and anon cheerfully listen, suspending its regenerative labors.”

It was at this time that big words beginning with capital letters made their appearance, and were taken very seriously. One talked of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the Ideal, and felt one’s bosom splendidly inflated by these capitalized mouthfuls. There were other nice phrases much affected at the time, — the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World, la République de Genre Humain. The new generation was intoxicated with its new theory of life, with its own admirable sentiments.

Discrepancies existed, no doubt. The fine theories were not always put into complete practice. While the glittering phrases of the Declaration of Independence were declaring all men free and equal, some million of slaves were helping to develop the new country with their enforced labor. The original owners of the soil were being mercilessly hunted like vermin, and the women of America had scarcely more legal claim to their property, their children, or their own persons than had the negro slaves. Nor did the framers of the Declaration show any undue haste in setting about abolishing these anomalies. The National Assembly of France decreed liberty, equality, and fraternity to all men, and hurried to cut off the heads and confiscate the property of all those equal brothers who took the liberty of differing with them.

But it was a poor nature that would boggle at a few inconsistencies, would quench this fresh enthusiasm with carping criticism. After all, mere facts were unimportant. Given the proper emotion, the lofty sentiment of liberty and goodness, the rest would come right of itself.

It was a period of upheaval, of political and social chaos. A new heaven and a new earth — so they believed — were to be created by this virile young generation, which had rid itself of the useless lumber of the past. Emotion displayed itself in a thousand forms: in iconoclastic rages against wrong, — rages which could be exhausted only by the destruction of customs, laws, and religions that had bound the western world for two thousand years; in sanguinary furies against oppression which were to be satiated only by seas of blood. It showed itself in floods of sympathy for the weak that swept away weak and strong together in equal ruin. It was demonstrated in convulsions of philanthropy so violent that a man might not refuse the offered brotherhood and kindness save at the price of his life.

The cold dictates of the head were ignored. The heart was the only guide.

Who can wonder that, driven by this wind of feeling and with the rudder thrown overboard, the ship pursued an erratic and contradictory course ?

From this point of view, one is no longer astounded at the lack of consistency of the Declaration des Droits de l’Homme that declared : “ All men are born and continue free and equal in rights ; ” “ Society is an association of men to preserve the rights of man ; ” “ Freedom of speech is one of the most precious of rights.” Nor yet that France, crying aloud these noble phrases, slaughtered the most silent and humble who were supposed to maintain even secret thoughts opposed to the opinions of the majority. It is no longer surprising to read the generous sentiments of our own Declaration, and to remember the persecutions, confiscations, and burnings that drove thirty thousand of those not in sympathy with the Revolution over the borders of the New England states into Canada, and hunted a multitude from the South into Spanish Louisiana. One is no longer amazed to hear de Tocqueville declare that in no place had he found so little independence of thought as in this country during the early years of the republic. The revolutionary sentimentalist by the word “ liberty ” meant only liberty to think as he himself did. All the history of man is a record that there is nothing crueler than a tender heart ungoverned by a cooler head. It is in this same spirit that the inquisitor, yearning in noble anguish over souls, burns the recalcitrant. It is plain to him that such as are so gross and vicious as to refuse to fall in with his admirable intentions for their eternal welfare can be worthy of nothing gentler than fire.

But, whatever the discrepancies might be, the state of feeling was, of course, vastly more wholesome, more promising, than the dry formalism, the frivolous cynicism, which it had annihilated, and out of which it had been bred.

The delicate, fastidious, selfish formalists of the eighteenth century were naturally aghast at the generation to which they had given birth. It was as if an elderly dainty cat had been delivered of a blundering, slobbering mastiff puppy, a beast which was to tear its disgusted and terrified parent in pieces. No doubt they asked themselves in horror, " When did we generate this wild animal, that sheds ridiculous tears even while drinking our blood ? ” — not seeing that the creature was the natural child, the natural reaction from the selfish shortsightedness of “ Que ne mangent-ils de la brioche ? ” from the frigid sneer of " Après nous le déluge.”

The torrent of emotionalism to which the early part of the nineteenth century gave itself up is amazing to our colder time. It manifested itself not only in its public policy, in its schemes of universal regeneration ; it was also visible in its whole attitude toward life.

Madame Necker could so ill bear the thought of her friend Moulton’s departure, after a short visit, that he was obliged to leave secretly and without a farewell. She fainted when she learned the truth, and says: “ I gave myself up to all the bitterness of grief. The most gloomy ideas presented themselves to my desolate heart, and torrents of tears could not diminish the weight that seemed to suffocate me.” And all this despair over the departure of an amiable old gentleman from Paris to Geneva!

This young emotionalism had no reserves. The most secret sentiments of the heart were openly displayed, discussed. Tears were always flowing. Nothing was too sacred for verbal expression. The people of that day wrote out their prayers, formal compositions of exquisite sentiments, and handed them about among their friends, as Italian gentlemen did sonnets in the quattrocento. On every anniversary or special occasion they penned lengthy epistles, full of high-sounding phrases and invocations to friends living under the same roof, who received these letters next morning with the breakfast tray, and shed delicious tears over them into their chocolate.

A “ delicate female ” was a creature so finely constituted that the slightest shock caused hysterics or a swoon, and it was useless to hope for her recovery until the person guilty of the blow to her sensitiveness had shed the salt moisture of repentance upon her cold and lifeless hand, and had wildly adjured her to “ live ; ” after which her friends of the same sex, themselves tremulous and much shaken by the mere sight of such sensibility, “recovered her with an exhibition of lavender water,” or with some of those cordials which they all carried in their capacious pockets for just such exigencies. Nor did the delicate female monopolize all the delicacy and emotionalism. The “ man of feeling ” was her fitting mate, and the manly tear was as fluent and frequent as the drop in Beauty’s eye. Swooning was not so much in his line; there was, perhaps, less competition for the privilege of supporting his languishing frame, but a mortal paleness was no stranger to his sensitive countenance, his features contracted in agony over the smallest annoyance, and he had an ominous fashion of rushing madly from the presence of the fair one in a way that left all his female relatives panting with apprehension, though long experience might have taught them that nothing serious ever came of it.

Thus the nineteenth century entered upon its experiment with the eternal verities, beginning gloriously ; palpitating with generous emotion ; ready with its “ blazing ubiquities ” to light the way to the millennium. The truth had been discovered, and needed but to be thoroughly applied to insure perfect happiness. A few adherents of the old order clung to their traditions, but by 1840 the tide of liberalism had risen to flood.

The minority were overawed and dumb. To suggest doubts of the impeccable ideals of democracy was to awaken only contempt, as if one were to dispute the theory of gravity. It was chose jugée. It did not admit of question. The theory, having swept away all opposition, had free play for the creation of Arcadias. Alas ! in a very similar fashion, in the eighteenth period of our era, had authority cleared the ground. It had burned, hanged, shut up in Bastilles, all cavilers; and just as the scheme had a chance to work, it crumbled suddenly to pieces in the blood and smoke of revolutions. Democracy, from the very nature of its principles, had no fear of a like tragedy; but it had decreed liberty, and liberty began to be taken to doubt its conclusions. Voices arose here and there bewailing the lentils and the fleshpots of the ruined house of bondage. Democracy had brought much good, — that was not denied. But what had it done with the old dear things it had swept away ? — the sweet loyalties that bound server to served; the tender lights of faith ; the mutual warm ties of that enormous social and political edifice reared by feudalism, which hid black dungeons and noisome cloacæ, perhaps, but which was rich with beauty and glorious with romance. The ugly rectangular wholesome edifice which democracy had substituted as a dwelling for the soul of man, with its crude, fierce lights, left many homesick for the past, with its inconveniences, its ruined beauties, and its hoary charm.

These plaints were swelled, too, by the hard, unsentimental voice of Science, who began to demonstrate the fallacies of the heart’s ardent reasoning. Democracy had decreed with thunderous finality that the feeble should be by law placed in eternal equality with the strong, and this was announced as the evident intention of beneficent Nature. Science relentlessly showed that Nature was not beneficent, and even undertook to prove that she was a heartless snob ; that to “ Nature’s darling, the Strong,” she ruthlessly sacrificed multitudes of the feeble. Science tore away the veil through which sentiment had seen the peaceful fields, and showed the faint-flushed orchard blossoms, the delicate springing grass, the insects floating on the perfumed breeze, the birds singing the praise of Nature’s God, — all, all engaged in a fierce battle for existence ; trampling on the weak, snatching at food and place, brutally crushing the feeble.

Democracy had made itself the champion of the bumble, and had cursed the greedy and powerful. Science proved that not the meek and the unaggressive were the fittest and noblest, as was shown by their failing to survive in that terrible struggle for life, of which the human mêlée was but an articulate expression.

The conviction that humanity had once known perfect equality, that freedom had been filched by the unscrupulous, was shown to be quite unfounded. Rousseau’s Contrat Social was made ridiculous by Darwin’s Descent of Man. All research tended to prove that from the earliest Pliocene it was not the weak nor the humble, but he who

who had founded families, developed races, brought order out of chaos, had made civilizations possible, had ordained peace and security, and had been the force of upward evolution. It was thus that the freedom which the heart had given to the head was used to prove how fallible that generous heart was.

Then out of all of this new knowledge, this groping regret, there arose with excursions and alarums one of democracy’s most trenchant foes, — Carlyle ; the first who dared frankly to impeach the new ruler, to question his decrees. Through all his vociferousness; through all his droning tautology, his buzzing, banging, and butting among phrases, like an angry cockchafer; through the general egregiousness of his intolerable style, there rang out clear once again the paean of the strong. Here was no talk of the rights of man. His right, as of old, was to do his duty and walk in the fear of the Lord.

“ A king or leader in all bodies of men there must be,” he says. “ Be their work what it may, there is one man here who by character, faculty, and position is fittest of all to do it.”

For the aggregate wisdom of the multitude, to which democracy pinned its faith, he had only scorn : —

“ To find a Parliament more and more the expression of the people could, unless the people chanced to be wise, give no satisfaction. . . . But to find some sort of King made in the image of God who could a little achieve for the people, if not their spoken wishes, yet their dumb wants, and what they would at last find to be their instinctive will, — which is a far different matter usually in this babbling world of ours,” — that was the thing to be desired. “ He who is to be my ruler, whose will is higher than my will, was chosen for me by heaven. Neither, except in obedience to the heaven-chosen, is freedom so much as conceivable.”

Here was the old doctrine of divine right come to life again, and masquerading in democratic garments.

The democratic theory did not fall into ruins even at the blast of Carlyle’s stertorous trumpet, but the serious-minded of his day were deeply stirred by the seer’s scornful words, more especially since that comfortable middle-class prosperity and content, to which the democrat pointed as the best testimony to the virtue of his doctrines, was being attacked at the same time from another quarter. Not only did Carlyle contemptuously declare that this bourgeois prosperity was a thing unimportant, almost contemptible, but the proletarian — a new factor in the argument — began to mutter and growl that he had not had his proper share in it, and that he found it as oppressive and unjust as he had found the arrogant prosperity of the nobles.

That old man vociferous has long since passed to where, beyond these voices, there is peace; but the obscui’e muttering of the man in the street, which was once but a vague undertone, has grown to an open menace. We of the middle classes who threw off the yoke of the aristocracy clamored just such impeachments, a century back. We are amazed to hear them now turned against ourselves. To us this seems an admirable world that we have made; orderly, peaceable, prosperous. We see no fault in it. It has not worked out, perhaps, on as generous lines as we had planned, but, on the whole, each man gets, we think, his deserts.

We begin to ask ourselves, wonderingly, if that aristocrat of the eighteenth century may not have seen his world in the same way. He paid no taxes, but he considered that he did his just share of work for the body politic; he fought, he legislated, he administered. Perhaps it seemed a good world to him, — well arranged. Perhaps he was as honestly indignant at our protests as we are at those of our accusers to-day. We thought ourselves intolerably oppressed by his expenditure of the money we earned, by his monopoly of place and power ; but we argue in our turn that, as we are the brains of the new civilization, we should have all the consequent privileges. What, we ask ourselves, do these mad creatures (who are very well treated) mean by their talk of slavery, of wage slavery ? How can there be right or reason in their contention that the laborer rather than the capitalist should have the profit of labor ? Does not the capitalist, as did the noble, govern, administer, defend ?

Attacked, abused, execrated, we begin to sympathize with those dead nobles, who were perhaps as honest, as well meaning, as we feel ourselves to be ; who were as annoyed, as disgusted, as little convinced, by our arguments as we are by those which accuse us in our turn of being greedy, idle feeders upon the sweat of others. Perhaps to them the established order of things seemed as just and eternal as it does to us. We begin to understand, we begin to sympathize with, the dead aristocrats.

For one hundred years, now, democracy has been dominant, has had a free hand for the full application of its hypotheses of life. It is well to brush aside conventionalities and cant, and reckon up the results of this century-long reign of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

The millennium still remains a mirage upon the horizon of hope. Many abuses have been swept away, but power still uses its strength to brush the feeble from its path and grasp the things to be desired. Out of the triumphant bourgeoisie has grown a class as proud and strong as the aristocracy it supplanted. It has wealth, luxury, and power, such as the nobles never dreamed of. The lettres de cachet are no longer in use, and tax farmers are mere tradition ; but financiers, by a stroke of the pen, can levy a tax upon the whole land whose results make the horde of Fouquet absurd, and the payers of the impost are as helpless as any inmate of the cells of the Ile Sainte Marguerite. Capital organizes itself into incredibly potent aggregations, and labor in its turn has built up a despotism far reaching and unescapable as the Lex Romanorum, such as the workman under the old regime would never have tolerated. The two are arrayed against each other in struggles of ever increasing intensity.

After a hundred years of acceptance of the principle of the brotherhood of man, all nations are exaggerating their barriers and differences. The Celt revives and renews his hatred of the Saxon. In Ireland and in Wales the aboriginal tongues and literatures are being disinterred and taught, as a means of loosening the corporate nationalism of the British Isles. The Bretons protest against the appellation of Frenchmen. Hungary has repudiated the German language, and the Hungarians, Czechs, and Bohemians, held together by the bond of Austrian government, are restive and mutually repellent. The Empire of Spain has fallen into jealous and unsympathetic fragments. The continent of Europe is dominated by two autocratic sovereigns, who overawe their neighbors by the consistent and continuous policy possible only to a despotism. France and the republics of South America are the prey of a military clique and a horde of adventurers who only alternate dictators. The armaments of the world are so prodigious that each nation fears to use its dangerous weapon. The barriers of increasing tariffs wall peoples apart. The great nations are dividing the weak ones as lions do their prey. Universal fraternity has become the dimmest of dreams.

And America! America, the supreme demonstration and embodiment of the democratic ideal, — what of her ? America has embarked upon imperial wars, refuses sanctuary to the poor as inadmissible paupers, and laughs at the claim to brotherhood or citizenship of any man with a yellow skin.

That Church which, by the very nature of her being, is most opposed to liberty of thought or conscience is more powerful than ever, and sees a great body of Protestants ardently repudiating its protests against arbitrary religious government, and earnestly endeavoring to assimilate its beliefs and rule to her ancient example. The Ghetto is open, but the Jew is still hated and oppressed. A Calas is no longer sacrificed to bigoted churchmen, but an intolerant Catholic nation makes possible an affaire Dreyfus. After a century of democracy, Zola is called upon to take up once again the protests of Voltaire.

Thus time has one by one burst and scattered the iridescent bubbles of democracy’s sentimental hopes.

What wonder is it, then, that so significant a change has taken place in our attitude toward ourselves ? We, who believed ourselves the regenerators of the world, are now humbler of mood. Man, who spelled himself with reverent large letters, who pictured a universe created solely for his needs, who imagined a Deity flattered by his homage and wounded by his disrespect, who had but to observe a respectable code of morals to be received into eternal happiness with all the august honors due a condescending monarch, has fallen to the humility of such admissions as these : —

“ What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber ; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself ; grown up with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that glitter in his face ; a thing to set children screaming! . . . Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent; savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives ; . . . infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind ; sitting down to debate of right or wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to battle for an egg or die for an idea. . . . To touch the heart of his mystery we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy, — the thought of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbor, to his God ; an ideal of decency to which he would rise if possible ; a limit of shame below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. ... Not in man alone, but we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honor sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little.”

Alas, poor Yorick ! how a century of self-contemplation has humbled him !

It is thus the successors of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of the believers in the perfectibility of man, speak, — saying calmly, “The Empire of this world belongs to force.” And again : “ Hitherto, in our judgments of men, we have taken for our masters the oracles and poets, and like them we have received for certain truths the noble dreams of our imaginations and the imperious suggestions of our hearts. We have bound ourselves by the partiality of religious divinations, and we have shaped our doctrines by our instincts and our vexations. . . . Science at last approaches with exact and penetrating implements ; . . . and in this employment of science, in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to discover them.”

Along with this changed attitude has come an alteration in our heroic ideals. For the sentimental rubbish, the dripping egotism, of a Werther, of a Manfred, in whom the young of their day found the most adequate expression of their self-consciousness, we have substituted the Stevenson and the Kipling hero, hard-headed, silent, practical, scornful of abstractions, contemptuous of emotions ; who has but two dominant notions, patriotism and duty; who keeps his pores open and his mouth shut-

The old democratic shibboleths remain on our lips, and still pass current as if they were truisms, but we have ceased to live by their precepts. We have lost our youthful cocksureness and intolerance in imposing them upon others. We realize that, despite all we have so proudly decreed, the strong still rule, and often plunder the weak ; that the weak still rage, and impotently imagine a vain thing of legislation as a means of redressing the eternal inequality of life. We see the flaws in our tyranny of commercialism and militarism. We regard ourselves — our erstwhile important and impeccable selves — with half-humorous leniency.

Much of good we gave. How could any ideal so tender, so high of purpose, fail of righting a thousand wrongs ? How could all those floods of sweet, foolish tears leave the soil of life quite hard and dry, or fail to cause a thousand lovely flowers of goodness and gentleness to bloom ?

That we have not solved the riddle of the Sphinx is hardly cause for wonder or shame. Neither will our successors find the answer, but it will be interesting to see the nature of their guess. It is plain that our formula will not serve for them, but the new programme is not yet announced. The newcomers are thoughtful and silent, daunted perhaps by the failure of our own drums and shoutings.

Will the wage earners shear the bourgeoisie, as we shore the nobles a century ago ? Or will Liberty sell herself to authority, for protection from the dry hopelessness of socialism or the turmoil of anarchy ? Or will the new generation evolve some thought undreamed of, some new and happier guess at the great central truth which forever allures and forever eludes our grasp ?

Elizabeth Bisland.