Agnes Repplier

“ Are Americans a Timid People?
As the hare is timid—no! They have made good their fighting record in war. They have proved themselves over and over again to be tranquilly courageous in moments of acute peril. They have faced “their duty and their death” as composedly as Englishmen; and nobler comparison there is none. The sinking of the Titanic offered but one opportunity out of many for the display of a quality which is apt to be described in superlatives; but which is, nevertheless, an inherent principle of manhood. The protective instinct is strong in the native American. ”

“ Austen’s heroines that they have “a certain gentle self-respect, and humour, and hardness of heart,” she must have had Emma in her mind. Humour hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity; and Emma surveys her little world of Highbury very much as Miss Austen surveyed her little world of Steventon and Chawton, with a less piercing intelligence, but with the same appreciation of foibles, and the same unqualified acceptance of tedium. To a modern reader, the most striking thing about the life depicted in all these novels is its dullness. ”

“ Still less is their affection for us to be accepted as a guarantee of our integrity. The assumption that a dog knows a good from a bad human being when he sees one is unwarranted. It is part of that engulfing wave of sentiment which swept the world in the wake of popular fiction. Dickens is its most unflinching exponent. Henry Gowan’s dog, Lion, springs at the throat of Blandois, alias Lagnier, alias Rigaud, for no other reason than that he recognizes him as a villain, without whom the world would be a safer and better place to live in. ”

“ Whether or not the time and trouble are well spent depends on the amount of money which that mouse and those crullers eventually wring from an appreciative and laughter-loving public.
The dearth of humorous situations—at no time inexhaustible—has compelled the two-reel comic to depend on such substitutes as speed, violence, and a succession of well-nigh inconceivable mishaps. A man acting in one cannot open a door, cross a street, or sit down to dinner without coming to grief. Even the animals—dogs, donkeys and pigs—are subject to catastrophes that must wreck their confidence in life. ”

“ To ask that the autobiographer should “know himself as a realist, and deal with himself as an artist,” is one way of demanding perfection. Realists are plentiful, and their ranks are freshly recruited every year. Artists are rare, and grow always rarer in an age which lacks the freedom, the serenity, the sense of proportion, essential to their development. It has happened from time to time that a single powerful and sustained emotion has forced from a reticent nature an unreserved and illuminating disclosure. ”

“ In the end—and it is an end which comes quickly—he finds that the one thing unendurable to his soul is isolation. Cut off from the thought currents of his group, he is chilled, lonely, and beset by a vague uneasiness. He yields, and he yields without a pang, glad to get back into the warm familiar atmosphere of class complacency, of smugness, of “safety first”; glad to sacrifice a wavering idealism and a purposeless independence for the solid substance of smooth living and conformity to his neighbours’ point of view. ”

“ Rawdon, who does nothing, is disgusted because his brother gives them no money; but Rebecca, who does everything, is content with credit. Sir Pitt, as the head of the family, is the corner-stone upon which she rears the fabric of her social life.
The exact degree of Becky’s innocence and guilt is a matter of slight importance. There is no goodness in her to be spoiled or saved. To try to soften our judgment by pleading one or two acts of contemptuous kindness is absurd. ”

“ It may be possible to construct a state in which men will be content with their own lot, if they be reasonable, and with their neighbours’ lot, if they be generous. It is manifestly impossible to construct a world on this principle. Therefore there will always be a latent grief in the nobler part of man’s soul. Therefore there will always be a content as impious as the discontent from which Pope prayed to be absolved.
The unbroken cheerfulness, no less than the personal neatness, of the British prisoners in the World War astounded the more temperamental Germans. ”

“ But our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage. M. Maeterlinck recognizes our dependence on the dog for the deification we crave, and is unreasonably angry with the cat for her aloofness. In her eyes, he complains, we are parasites in our own homes. “She curses us from the depths of her mysterious heart.”
She does not. She tolerates us with a wise tolerance, recognizing our usefulness, and indulgent of our foibles. Domesticity has not cost her the heavy price it has cost the dog. ”

“ To him a young Irishman sets forth the value of certain things well worth the surrender of life; but the old American smiles away such a primitive mode of reckoning. The salient article of his creed is that nothing should be paid for in blood that can be bought for money; and that, as every man has his price, money, if there is enough of it, will buy the world. ”

“ Yet back of every field of labour lies the story of the labourer, and back of every chapter in the history of civilization lie the chapters that elucidate it. “Wisdom,” says Santayana, “is the funded experience which mankind has gathered by living.” Education gives to a student that fraction of knowledge which sometimes leads to understanding and a clean-cut basis of opinions. The process is engrossing, and, to certain minds, agreeable and consolatory. Man contemplates his fellow man with varied emotions, but never with unconcern. ”

“ The happiness of writing an autobiography which is going to be published and read is a simple and comprehensible emotion. Before books were invented, men carved on stone something of a vainglorious nature about themselves, and expected their subjects, or their neighbours, to decipher it. But there is a deeper and subtler gratification in writing an autobiography which seeks no immediate public, and contents itself with the expression of a profound and indulged egotism. ”

“ Did any sane man ever doubt that Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder? But if Dean Inge or his sympathizers knew of any argument, save that of arms, by which the Central Powers could have been convinced that they were blundering, and persuaded to retrieve their blunder, so that what ought not to have happened need not have happened, it is a pity that this enlightenment was not vouchsafed to an imperilled world.
It is possible for two boys to build up a friendship on the basis of a clean fight. ”

“ Back of every man lies the story of his race. The Negro is more than a voter. He has a history which may be ascertained without undue effort. Haiti, San Domingo, Liberia, all have their tales to tell. The Irishman is more than a voter. He has a long, interesting and instructive history. It pays us to be well informed about these things. “The passionate cry of ignorance for power” rises in our ears like the death-knell of civilization. ”

“ In the United States we have never been kindly disposed towards extravagance of this order. During the years of our comparative poverty, when few citizens aspired to more than a competence, there was still money enough for Latin, and now and then for Greek. There was still a race of men with slender incomes and wide acquirements, to whom scholarship was a dearly bought but indestructible delight. Now that we have all the money there is, it is universally understood that Americans cannot afford to spend any of it on the study of “the best that has been known and thought in the world.” ”

“ There is no telling whom it may hit, and there is no calculating the return blows. “To covet the truth is a very distinguished passion,” observes Santayana. It has burned in the bosom of man, but not in the corporate bosoms of municipalities and legislative bodies. A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candour.
The plain-speaker may, for example, offend the Jews; and nothing can be more manifestly unwise than to give umbrage to a people, thin-skinned, powerful and clannish, who hold the purse-strings of the country. ”

“ They believe that the world is the better for what they have to give; but they know that it is not for the world’s sake that they so keenly desire to be in a position to give it. They are profoundly sentimental, but their sentiment is all for la patrie. Internationally they are practical to the point of hardness, and they see no reason why they should be otherwise. There is for them no pressing necessity to assume that they love their neighbours as themselves.
It is different with Americans in whom idealism and materialism dispute every inch of the ground. ”

“ They will toss their heads and stimulate one another to peals of laughter which are a pure make-believe. When they are really absorbed in their play, and astir with delicious excitation, they do not laugh; they give vent to piercing shrieks which sound as if they were being cut into little pieces. These shrieks are the spontaneous expression of delight; but their sense of absurdity, which implies a sense of humour, is hard to capture before it has become tainted with pretence. ”

“ Hazlitt says that bangs and blows which we know do not hurt provoke legitimate laughter; and, until we see a funny film, we have no conception of the amount of business which can be constructed out of anything so simple as men hitting one another. Producers of these comics have taken the public into their confidence, and have assured us that their work is the hardest in the motion-picture industry; that the slugging policeman is trained for weary weeks to slug divertingly, and that every tumble has to be practised with sickening monotony before it acquires its purely accidental character. ”

“ It keeps the soul of man immune from whatever degradation his body may be suffering. It saves the land that bred him from the stigma of defeat. It is remotely and humanly akin to the tranquillity of the great Apostle in a Roman prison. It is wholly alien to the sin of smugness which has crept in among the domestic virtues, and rendered them more distasteful than ever to austere thinkers, and to those lonely, generous souls who starve in the midst of plenty. ”

“ Timidity was as alien to the soul of Henry Adams as it is alien to the soul of [Pg 83] Admiral Sims. He was not a man who skirted the hard places on the road, or who was so busy keeping both feet on the ground that he feared to take a step. But he was conscious of the inquisitorial spirit which is part of the righteousness of America, and which keeps watch and ward over all the schooling of the country. “Education,” he wrote, “like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest.” ”

“ Under no other circumstance is it possible to say anything of value or of distinction. Under no other circumstance can we enjoy the luxury of self-respect. There is an occasional affectation of courage and candour on the part of those who know they are striking a popular note; but to dare to be unpopular, “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word,” is to hold fast to the principles which speeded the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock, and Penn to the shores of the Delaware. ”

“ The humour of selecting a group of men and women in one corner of the world, and delegating to them the unofficial task of settling public affairs in another, was lost upon Americans, who, having been repeatedly told that they were to “show the way,” conceived themselves to be showing it. When Great Britain and Ireland settled their own affairs without asking our advice or summoning our aid, there were hyphenated citizens in New York and elsewhere who deeply resented such independent action, and who have shown ever since a bitter unfriendliness to their own kith and kin. ”

“ The nastiest bit of hypocrisy ever put forward by wrong-doers was the cant of the early slave-dealers about Christianity and the negroes’ souls. The slaves were Christianized by thousands, and took kindly to their new creed; but their spiritual welfare was not a controlling factor in the commerce which supplied the Southern States with labour. That four fifths of the labourers were better off in America than they would have been in Africa was a circumstance equally unfit to be offered as a palliative by civilized men. The inherent injustice of slavery lay too deep for vindication. ”

“ He preached in his lifetime full thirty thousand sermons—an overwhelming and relentless figure. He wrestled with lagging Churchmen of the Establishment no less than with zealous Antinomians, Swedenborgians, Necessitarians, Anabaptists and Quakers. Other records of human endeavour read like the idling of a summer day alongside of his supernatural activities. Yet so great is the compulsion of the born diarist to confide to the world the history of his thoughts and deeds that Wesley found time—or took time—to write, in a minute, cryptic short-hand, a diary which fills seven large volumes. ”