Francis Hackett

“ America was New York, and New York was down town, and down town was a vortex of new duties. There I learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning a living, and the art of eating at Childs’. At night the hall-bedroom near Broadway, and the resourceless promenade up and down Broadway for amusement. The only women to say “dear,” the women who say it on the street.
In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United States. The word “settlement” gave me my first puzzled intimation that there was somewhere a clew to this grim struggle down town. ”

“ The insiders, the initiated, the disillusioned, are aware of them. They no longer subsist on them. They read between the lines. And yet when the insiders see in print the true facts—say, about Robert Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or John Jones—these very insiders rush forward with a Mother Hubbard to fling around the naked truth. We must not speak the truth. We must edify. We must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced world.
It means that we need a revolution in education, nothing less. It means that the truth must be taken out of the hands of the censor. ”

“ The mother whose boy is at twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think that youth has the air of spring about it, that spring is the morning of the gods. Youth is so often handsome and straight and fearless; it has its mysterious silences—its beings are beings of clear fire in high spaces, kin with the naked stars. Yet there is in it something not less fiery which is far more human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers on board.
As one grows older one is less impatient of the supposition that innocence actually exists. ”

“ All of these leave little doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, dirty, unruly and mean. It has size without spaciousness, opportunity without imaginativeness, action without climax, wealth without distinction. A sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though far from gracious where most characteristic; but for the most part it is shoddy, dingy and vulgar, making more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from heaven. It is not for its beaux yeux that the outsider begins to love the town. ”

“ If we think that the ordinary soldier’s marksmanship is wasteful, we may well look to ourselves. Our life is peppered with motions that fly wide and wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms—waste motion! We ought to utilize that gesture for polishing our shoes. We rub our eyes—more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday for the rest of the week. But it is in processes like shaving that scientific management is really needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave with the minimum of gesture. ”

“ But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an adventure, a frank and passionate creator struggling with hucksters and hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the assassins of genius, a frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of succession and a weary bread-line. ”

“ Much better for the purposes of drama to have Cleopatra receive a breathless minion, not a laconic imp with a receipt to be signed. Yet a telegram has magic. If you are hardened you do not register. It is the fresh who have the thrill. But no one is totally superior to telegrams. Be you ever so inured, there is one telegram, the telegram, which will find your core.
Sometimes at a hotel-desk I stand aside while an important person, usually a man but occasionally a woman, gets a handful of mail without any sign of curiosity, and goes to the elevator without even sorting out the wires. ”

“ He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself, yet he started out rather indifferent to you, and the mere fact that he is willing to criticize you is a proof that he has overcome the initial inhumanity of the human race. This alone should help, but more than that, you have the advantage of knowing he is an amateur on that topic where you are most expert—namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps if you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the beginning of the entente between you is that he should always start out by appeasing your ego. ”

“ On the southern shore of Long Island, who has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that Atlantic is drenching.
The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. ”

“ What the censor is chiefly interested in is, let us say, edification. He aims by no means to give us access to the facts. He aims not at all to let us judge for ourselves. With all his might he strives to relate the facts under his supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, whatever it may be. And so, when facts come to light which do not chime in with his prepossession, he does his best either to discredit them or to set them down as immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. ”

“ A person with such open sympathies is called upon to slave in their service, to rush here and there like a general practitioner, to sleep with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at his head. How does he find the energy to do it! I admire it. I marvel at men who understand all and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt Whitman. Think of those who have a good word to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a lot of much-needed vitality. ”

“ What was the good of forcing this youth to unlearn everything he had learned? If I took away his faith in the divine office of president, perhaps he might begin to lose his patriotism and his willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Perhaps he might go on and lose faith in the jury system, the institution of marriage, the right of free speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance of Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endowment. ”

“ Every bird takes what he finds to build his own spiritual nest. Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and wild and rude, but I prefer to see it as an impuritan. Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished Chicago’s big little men. The triumvirate that Mr. Taylor mentions had no statesmanship in them. One was an admirable huckster, another an inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine who carved a destiny in ham. But these men gave themselves and their city to business enterprise in its ugliest manifestation. ”

“ Between the Irish people and English authority, as every one knows, there has been an interminable struggle. A tolerable solution of this contest has only recently seemed in sight. The military necessity of England has of itself precluded one solution, the complete independence of Ireland. The desire for self-government in Ireland has opposed another solution, complete acquiescence in the union. Between these two goals the struggle has raged bitterly. But human beings cannot live forever in profitless conflict. ”

“ When you hear that he goes through all the gyrations and gesticulations of baseball, you think of a yahoo, but in practice he is not wild. Needing to arrest the attention of an incredibly large number of people, he adopts various evolutions that have a genuine emphatic value. It is a physical language with which the vast majority have friendly heroic associations, and for them, spoken so featly and gracefully, it works. Grasping the edge of the platform table as if about to spring like a tiger into the auditorium, Sunday gives to his words a drive that makes you tense in your seat. ”

“ In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor of whom Eminent Victorians is so subversive, there are particularly these irrational and ritualistic characteristics, these remnants of outgrown institutions, these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed. Most biography, especially official biography, is written with such a censor in mind, under his very eye. Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and stimulating was precisely in its refusal to keep him in mind. ”

“ It is not humanly possible, considering how relative liberalism is, to examine all the facts or even convince oneself of the necessity of examining them, and in every case we are sure to be tempted to oppose certain novel ideas in the name of inertia, respectability and decorum. To dissemble awkward facts, in such cases, is much easier than to account for them—which is where the censor comes in.
I do not say that it is possible to do away with every discipline, even the rule-of-thumb of decorum. As a subservient middle-class citizen, I believe in the regulation of impulse. ”

“ It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that is free, that one must seek the opposition to enemy culture, not in the culture that is opposed. Must one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? To do so is to show an immunity from the actual which is not to be envied. It is only necessary to imagine New York bombarded, as many French and English and Belgian and Russian towns have been bombarded since the beginning of the war, to realize the rush of resistance that is born in mankind, expedient for government to recruit and to rally to the end. ”

“ But there is aroused in the night lodging the imperishable dream of happiness, and no one is ready to quench it.
Why is the grave and beautiful play not gloomy? It is not enough to say that the really gloomy play gives a naturalistic version of life which the spectator rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows or in its discords but in its absence of the vitamin of beauty. Many plays are denied truth because their truth is not agreeable. ”

“ A little wisp of white steam may suggest humanity, but not these bleak cliffs themselves. At night, however, they become human. They look out on the black moving river with marigold eyes. And Madison Square at nightfall has the same, or even a more ætherial, radiance. From the hurried streets the walls of light seem like a deluge of fairy splendor. This is always a gay transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him. ”

“ Sunday is so hoarse, the nervously facetious youths who won’t be swayed, the sedentary “providers” who cannot open their ears without dropping their jaws. A collection of decidedly stable, normal, and one may crudely say “average” mortals, some of them destined to catch religion, more of them destined to catch an impression, and a few of them, sitting near the entrances, destined resentfully to catch a cold. ”

“ The day will come when our present barbaric attitude toward youth will be altered. Before it can be altered, however, we must completely revise our conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly innocent than it is certainly happy, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounds youth is not to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness. Innocence, besides, can last too long. Every one has pitied stale innocence. If a New York child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may quite easily be shocking to older people. ”

“ Still, with all this acceptance of ethics, the nature of the censorship has to be recognized—the true character of the censor is so often not taste or conscience in any clear condition, but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional bully. In the censor as he appears in psycho-analytic literature there is something of the archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic—all just as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is the thing in us which is against license and anarchy. ”

“ Many plays are denied beauty simply because their beauty is a stranger. Yet we know that truth or beauty may be as sable as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the child of ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental, conventional ugliness. It is the people who think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see Night Lodging as depressing. ”

“ And the worst of them are the filmy, the vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the opportunity of truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently difficult picture-puzzle, but what chance have we if the turnip-headed censor confiscates some particularly indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike? On reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to escape from those wax effigies that we once believed to be statesmen—the kind of effigies of which text-books and correct histories and correct biographies are full! ”

“ As she told in the slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those eyes to the inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged in the water, as if to contemn it for lying there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression bespoke the sternness and gravity of her fight for existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant fighter. ”

“ Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains, if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed, death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation. ”

“ It is good to see what solid, ample caravans are required to replenish man with beer. It is not the single glass that is glorious. It is not even the single car-load. It is the steady, deliberate, ponderous procession that streams through the early hours. Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy of beer-wagons. It satisfied the faith that there was Design in creation, but the Percheron is not needed. There is the same institutional impressiveness about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer. ”

“ What it means to come at last into possession of Lincoln, whose spirit is so precious to the social settlement, is probably unintelligible to Lincoln’s normal inheritors. To understand this, however, is to understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries from which we come there have been men of such humane ideals, but they have almost without exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of the peoples of Europe have not been the governors of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of the governed. But here among America’s governors and statesmen was a simple authenticator of humane ideals. ”

“ When the sun shines on the bottom, every pebble is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a happy memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of Maine one has the same visual delight in water as clear as crystal, and on the coast of Ireland I have seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst or thunder in a wall of emerald. ”

“ A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and leisure. ”

“ When a rebellion has failed men say it was wicked or foolish. It is, on the contrary, wickedness and folly to judge in these terms. If men rise against authority the measure of their act cannot be loyalty or prudence. It is the character of the authority against which men revolt that must shape one’s mind. No free man sets an ultimate value on his life. No free man sets an ultimate sanction on authority. ”