Clarence Day

“ Of course capitalists and laborers did not get on any too well together. Self-respecting men on each side hated the other side's ways—even their ways of dressing and talking, and amusing themselves. The workers talked of the dignity of labor and called capital selfish. On the other hand, ardent young capitalists who loved lofty ideals, complained that the dignity of capital was not respected by labor. These young men despised all non-capitalists on high moral grounds. ”

“ The rich have their pride. Their unfortunate weakness for money may blacken their lives, but they suffer in silence. They try to conceal it all from us. Their feverish attempts to find some sunshine in life every evening, the desperate and futile migrations they make each few months, and the pathetic mental deadness of their gatherings, they try to keep private. We might never know to what straits many rich folk have come, were it not for the newspapers and their kindly society columns. ”

“ But the capitalists wouldn't believe in these laws, because they weren't on their side, nor would they read any of the volumes the professors composed. They would read only a book that an old German capitalist wrote—a radical book which turned economics all upside-down and said that capital ought to start a class war and govern the world.
Discontent breeds agitation. Agitation breeds professional agitators. A few unruly loud-voiced capitalists climbed up on soap-boxes and began to harangue their quiet comrades, just to stir up needless trouble. ”

“ Others of us feel a need for its wisdom and insight—and wings. It deepens our everyday moods. It reminds us of Wonder. Here we are, with our great hearts and brains, descended from blind bits of slime, erecting a busy civilization on a beautiful earth; and that earth is whirling through space, amid great golden worlds: and yet, being grandsons of slime, we forget to look around us.
As Patmore expressed it:
"An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling's jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each ”

“ No, he prefers looking around for trouble in this old world's backyards; he prowls about at night till he comes upon some good hunk of bleakness, and then he sits down, like the cat, to utter long-drawn-out wails, which give him strange, poignant sensations of deep satisfaction. They give us quite other sensations but he doesn't care. In the morning he canters back in, pleased and happy, for breakfast, and he basks in the sun, blinking sagely, the rest of the day. And [83] we say, with respect, "A great pessimist; he thinks life is all sorrow." ”

“ Only, as we all know, it does push so much else to one side! Love, spiritual gropings, the arts, our old closeness to nature, the independent outlook and disinterested friendships of men—all these must be checked and diminished, lest they interfere. Yet those things are life; and big business is just a great game. Why play any game so intently we forget about life?
Well, looking around at mankind, we see some races don't. ”

“ Civilization is the slow modification of our old feral qualities, the slow growth of others, which we test, then discard or retain. An occasional invention seems to hasten things, but chiefly externally; for the internal change in men's natures is slower than glaciers, and it is upon the sum of men's natures that civilization depends. While this testing and churning and gradual molding goes on, some fellow is always holding up a hasty lamp he [92] calls reason, and beckoning the glacier one side, like a will-o'-the-wisp.
Shaw's lamp of reason is one that has an extra fine glitter ”

“ There's one great man now living, however, who has almost too much of this sense: this cosmic adventure emotion. And that man's Joseph Conrad. Perhaps in his youth the sea came upon [87] him too suddenly, or his boyhood sea-dreams awed too deeply his then unformed mind. At all events, the men in his stories are like lonely spirits, sailing, spellbound, through the immense forces surrounding the world. ”

“ But how could a home remain bare of insects? Nature abhors such a vacuum. Some men would like to cover the whole world with porcelain tiles, [187] and make old Mother Earth, as we know her, disappear from our view. They would sterilize and scrub the whole planet, so as to make the place sanitary. Well, I too feel that way at times: we all have finicky moments. But in my robust hours I sympathize with Nature. A hygienic kitchen is unnatural. It should be swarming with life. (The way mine is.)
I see a great deal of the roach when I visit my kitchen. ”

“ We may live through some evening of that sort ourselves, by and by. We may turn to look back at the new faces of the young men and women who will some day be inheriting our world as we go out its gate. Will they laugh at us and think us pompous, as some of us regard Mr. Patmore? ”

“ The worship of a G'il is unconscious, and hence more insidious. Even when an explorer points it out, you won't see its importance. It will seem insignificant to you. And yet, while the Bashwa to whom you build temples is only occasionally deferred to, this G'il of yours sways you in all things. He is the first whom you think of when you rise, and the last when you go to bed. You speak of your G'il hourly or oftener, all day long. Those of you who heed him too little are disapproved of by everybody, while the American who succeeds [114] in life is the man who is most careful of G'il. ”

“ I suppose that that Englishman, Selous, used to go around studying maps, and questioning natives about the best jungles for lions, in much the same way that Elsie constantly studies our continent, looking for some corner of it that might interest an intelligent person. The parts that are civilization to us, are mere jungle to her: the houses and street cars are like underbrush that she must push through, to get to the places where her quarry is, and where she really wakes up. ”

“ Some day when our modern types of capitalists are extinct, in their turn, will future poets sing of their fine deeds and make young readers dream? Our capitalists are not popular in these days, but the knights weren't in theirs, and whenever abuse grows extreme a reaction will follow. Our critics and reformers think they will be the heroes of song, but do we sing of critics who lived in the ages of chivalry? There must have been reformers then who pleaded the cause of down-trodden citizens, and denounced and exposed cruel knights, but we don't know their names. ”

“ The turn that psychology has taken during the last twenty years has naturally been unlucky for Shaw as a leader, or influence. He appears now as the culminating figure of an old school of thinkers, instead of the founder of a new. And that old school is dead. It was so fascinated by reason or what it believed to be such (for we should not assume that its conceptions, even of reason, were right) , that it never properly studied or faced human nature.
Civilization is a process, not a trick to be learned overnight. It is a way of behavior which we super-animals adopt bit by bit. ”

“ So far as the great joys of life go, I live on a diet. And when something reminds me what splendors there may be, round the corner, I take a look out of the door and begin to feel restless. I dream I see life passing by, and I reach for my hat.
But a man like myself doesn't usually go at all far. ”

“ Fabre has his good points. He is imaginative and dramatic, and yet has a passion for truth. He is a philosopher, an artist. And above all he is not sentimental. He is fond of his insects, but he never is foolishly fond. And sometimes the good old soul is as callous as can be toward caterpillars. He shows no more bowels towards caterpillars than do his own wasps. Take, for instance, that experiment when he kept some on the march for eight days, watching them interestedly as they died of exhaustion. Or his delight at the way caterpillars are eaten by the Eumenes wasp. ”

“ Then, to get some relief, he makes a contract with one of those companies, which provides him with what we call insurance, for an annual tribute.
I hope no one will think I am disparaging insurance, which is a useful arrangement. It enables many of us to pool our risks and be protected from hardship. And the best companies nowadays handle the thing very well. They scare a person as little as possible. They just gently depress him. They inflict just enough mental torture to get him to put in his money. It is only when he is stubborn about it that they give him the cold chills. ”

“ Those who take in art for the fun of it, and don't fake their sensations, acquire an appetite that it is a great treat to satisfy. And by and by, art becomes as necessary to them as breathing fresh air. ”

“ Daily life is more comfortable, somehow, if you narrow your vision. When you try to take in all the realities, all the far-away high ones, you must first become quite still and lonely. And then in your loneliness a fire begins to creep through your veins. ”

“ It is odd, or no, it's not, but it's note-worthy, that Shaw has had few disciples. Here is a witty, vivacious man, successful and keen: why isn't he the head of a school of other keen, witty writers? He has provided an attractive form—the play with an essay as preface. He has provided stock characters, such as the handsome-hero male-moth, who protests so indignantly at the fatal attraction of candles. He has developed above all that useful formula which has served many a dramatist—the comic confrontation of reason and instinct in man. ”

“ The test of a civilized person is first self-awareness, and then depth after depth of sincerity in self-confrontation. ”

“ An unobservant citizen might almost suppose she was one of us. But every now and then her neglect of some small ceremonial sets our whole tribe to chattering about her, and eyeing her closely, and nodding their hairy coiffures or their tall shiny hats, whispering around their lodge-fires, evenings, that Elsie is queer. ”

“ His own way of regarding the earth was as a storehouse of treasures—sun, air, great thoughts, great experiences, work, friendship and love. And life was our one priceless chance to delight in all this. I don't say he didn't see much more to life than enjoyment, but he did believe in living richly, and not starving oneself. ”

“ It merely shows what you like best to talk about, not your philosophy. A cat whose life is principally peace and good food and warm fires makes hardly any noise about those things—at most a mere purr. But she does become vocal and wildly so, over midnight encounters. If another cat so much as disputes her way on a fence-top, her tragic shrieks of anguish will sound like the end of the world. Well, Hardy has spent his life in what was chiefly a peaceful era of history, in a liberal and prosperous country ”

“ Was Grandfather Dilke such a case? I've no warrant for saying so. His conscience may have troubled him, possibly, for some quite different reason. He may have secretly hated some relative whom he should have loved. He may have done some small wrong and unfortunately not been found out. But whatever the reason was, he lived an odd, back-groundish life—for a man of his caliber. And his life didn't satisfy him. And this was his fault, not the world's.
The birth of a son, however, in a way gives a man a fresh chance. ”

“ If there must be a test imposed on every one who enters a library, have a brain test, and keep out all readers who are weak in the head. No matter how good their legs are, if their brains aren't first-rate, keep 'em out. But, instead, we impose a leg test, every day of the year, on all comers. We let in the brainless without any examination at all, and shut out the most scholarly persons unless they have legs like an antelope's.
If an explorer told us of some tribe that did this, we'd smile at their ways, and think they had something to learn before they could call themselves civilized. ”

“ To the rest of us, art is only a luxury: a dessert, not a food.
Some poets have to struggle with a harsh world for leave to be poets, like unlucky peaches trying to ripen north of Latitude 50. Coventry Patmore by contrast was bred in a hot-house. He was the son of a man named Peter G. Patmore, who, unlike most fathers, was willing to have a poet in the family. In fact he was eager. He was also, unfortunately, helpful, and did all he could to develop in his son "an ardor for poetry." But ardor is born, not cooked. A watched pot never boils. Nor did Patmore. ”

“ Civilization was Thought. It was measured by what men knew and felt of eternal things. It was wisdom.
Civilization to-day is invention: it is measured by our control over nature. If you remind a modern that nature is not wholly ductile, he is [141] profoundly discouraged! "We expect to make over and control our world." We not only assume it is possible, we assume it is best. ”

“ In other words, we moderns are substituting reading for living.
When our ancestors felt restless they burst out of their poor bookless homes, and roamed around looking for adventure. We read some one else's. The only adventures they could find were often unsatisfactory, and the people they met in the course of them were hard to put up with. We can choose just the people and adventures we like in our books. But our ancestors got real emotions, where we live on canned. ”

“ Another life of Fabre that we ought to have is one by his family. They were not devoted to insects; they probably loathed them; and yet they had to get up every morning and spend the whole day nursing bugs. I picture them, yawning and snarling over the tedious experiments, and listening desperately to Fabre's coleopterous chatter. The members of every famous man's family ought to give us their side of it. ”