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BY BERNICE LESBIA KENYON

HE colorless thin voices of the dark

TH

Grow fainter as the moon begins to rise,
And like a scimitar the river lies

Curving among pale trees with silvered bark.
Here at this height we stand, whose lips contain
Our vain protesting youth that stirs and cries
Dumbly within us. Under widened skies

Star-deep in silence, how should we complain?

The hours move slowly toward their shining end,
Brimmed with broad moonlight and the damp of earth.
We are but misers who are forced to spend

Our heritage of time, and face long dearth

Of wordless nights beneath moon-whitened trees,

In years to come, more desolate than these.

WHAT'S THE MATTER?

AN ESSAY BY IRVING BACHELLER

BEGINNING WITH THE FABLE OF THE INDIA-RUBBER PARENTS

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NCE upon a time I knew a dear young girl and her name was Notmary. She had two beautiful parents, and she used to say that if she had any more she would be crazy. They were obedient and honored their son and their daughter, and their days grew very long. Notmary's mother and father went with her regularly to the Chocolate Sundae School and the Movie Academy. She was never tardy or guilty of inattention. To her, life was ice-cream and Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford surrounded by chocolate and caramels. When the family was walking in the street, people would often turn and look at them and say, "What lovely parents Notmary has!" When they went with her to a neighbor's house, they sat quietly and did not interrupt the conversation of their young

ers.

Indeed, people used to say that they would make their mark in the world-and they did, but it was all they made.

She brought them up in the fear of Altman and Tiffany and often gave them a few pennies to spend just as they pleased; and now and then, if they were very, very good, she would let them go to one of her weddings. By and by they became so soft and limber that people called them the India-Rubber Parents. And a day came when Notmary had outgrown them and saw that they were of no more account than a penny whistle, so she got a divorce from her father and mother and cast them into the dooryard. Later she was divorced from each of her many friends, and by and by the property, which had been left to her by the dear old gentleman who was her third husband, secured a separation on the ground that she had been associating with certain disreputable oil shares. Then her health left her in a heartless fashion

and it was said that she had even grown weary of her life and would welcome a decree.

The moral is obvious. A child must honor its father and mother or it will honor no one and speedily acquire the divorce habit.

There was a time, my friends, when the average American home was the wonder of the world because of its product. It was a humble home, and yet statesmen, poets, prophets, inventors, scholars, scientists, came out of it. They had been made, too, at a small expense out of cheap material-good health, industry, humble environment. No patronage of wealth and influence, no decorations and coronets, had been employed. They had had no spur save an indefinite promise of public usefulness after years of struggle. The equal of that little plant the world had never seen. Its raw material was like the five loaves of the desert which fed a multitude. What was the secret of the old-time American home? I would say, first, organization.. It had laws and a lawgiver. But the greater part of its secret lay in the instruction it gave to the young. It taught obedience, modesty, thrift, industry, the love of honor and of God.

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Do not need to remind you that the old plant is out of order. It has been running down. Its product is inferior in quality and quantity. Youth no longer submits to the wisdom of age. For a year or more certain schools and colleges have been reeking with scandal. The dance has been tending toward the orgy in which the recklessness of the boy and girl has been outdone by that of the chaperon.

In most of the homes I know children do about as they please. There is no voice of authority. The young lady's

beauty is openly discussed by her mother in her presence.

"Well, mother," said the young daughter of a neighbor of mine, "if you do not want us to play bridge on Sunday, we'll go over to Thompson's. They'll stand for it."

"So," said the mother, "I let them play just to keep them at home, and they played until two in the morning."

What has become of the authority of the parent and the obedience of the child? A new situation has arisen, and its menace lies chiefly in the fact that many of us are disposed to make light of it. "Don't worry," they say; "it is a passing phase. Let us continue to eat, drink, and be merry."

We ought not deceive ourselves. Folly is not so easily disposed of. It does not vanish at the waving of your hand. It can hide itself like rats and breed faster.

In my youth a fool was a curiosity. There were three or four people in our village who were under suspicion. They were being watched. But there was only one man of proved capacity. He had been seen going down the street one day holding his hands before him, some three feet apart, and saying:

"Folks, git out of my way. This is the exact measure of a door, and I got to keep it till I git to the carpenter's shop."

We thought him an asset, but he grew in disgrace and folly until he started a fire in his dooryard on a windy day that nearly consumed the village. What a testimonial were those smoldering heaps of ashes!

It became apparent that one fool in a town is too many. Also it signalized the qualifications of a fool. He does not worry about consequences. Now as I look back upon the village, familiar with the story of forty years, 1 recognize that he was the most harmless fool

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in its history. There were others who set the town afire. They started the hidden, creeping, inextinguishable fires that travel through generations of human life. They were the eminent, respected, intermittent, deliberate fools. What heaps of ashes lie along their pathway!

It is so much better to be a fool all the time an out-and-out, reliable idiotthan one who is now and then knocking off, so to speak. We don't know where to place him. The certified fool is not so hard to get along with. The harm he can do, at most, is only physical. But when one of a trained, respectable intellect turns to folly he becomes the most dangerous individual that society has to deal with. He has influence.

It is folly which smooths and adorns the way to disaster. Not that I think it possible or even desirable that it should be put out of the world, but only that it should be looked after, for it is ever striving for greater freedom. Crime is comparatively a matter of slight importance. I remember once when a young fellow was convicted of a revolting crime a wise man said: "Bill is no longer important save as a lesson to you boys. He has shot his bolt. He has done about all the harm he can do. What is really worth knowing about Bill is the kind of folly which made him a criminal."

When a man turns rogue, we have got him placed. He is no longer a force in the community. His influence is gone. He may do more harm, but that will not be important.

So I beg to remind you that the great danger of society is not crime, but folly. It is that which produces crime. We are apt to laugh at folly as a temporary, trifling matter. It is nothing of the kind. It swiftly develops into a disease of which crime is only a symptom. We hear much complaint of burglars and highwaymen. They seem to be trying to establish a new industry. That is bad, but the thing to correct is the growing disrespect for law which has so increased their number. I suppose it is true that one honest, respected person can do more harm than half a dozen highwaymen.

Folly has become general, and even respectable. We are all having a good time with no thought of what is to come of it. That's what's the matter.

I was walking one delightful summer day with a wise friend. We had sat down on a fine natural terrace overlooking a valley which for years had been growing wild. Near where we sat, and visible through the tree columns, were the bent, broken, leaning walls of a ruined farmhouse. My friend filled his pipe and began talking.

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a wonderful lot. There were four of them. Miranda had three distinguished sons. Isabel raised a boy who was a famous poet. Mary Ann had a daughter who became the wife of a President. The foundations for all that were laid under the torn and tumbling roof you see yonder. It was a home. These days we have many houses but few homes. That home had a master.

"Now, you know, a home is a kind of ship. It cannot stand still. It is ever moving in one direction or another; and on every side are perils. So it must have a master, and it must steer for some port. The ship must make headway. It must not drift. There are perils in the sea-reefs and icebergs and hurricanes. The main fact is that it must have a master who knows where he wants to go and about how to steer to get there. The port of wealth was not on my grandfather's chart. It never entered his reckoning. It was a little out of his course. I do not need to tell you what port he was steering for. I am sure that he arrived. If he was sick or away for a season, his wife knew how to steer the ship.

"What a home it was! Ten children, and not one servant! How often, now, we see ten servants and not one child! The ship was well organized. Every boy and girl had some share of the work to do. When the day ended, they gathered around the evening lamp for play or study, or to listen while some one read aloud. Immortal guests entered that humble home those winter nights -Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Holmes, Tennyson, Longfellow. I remember a night when I lay on the lounge and heard the story of Enoch Arden. It made an imperishable impression upon my mind-that picture of the lonely man standing in the darkness and peering in at his own windows while the 'cups and silver on the burnished board sparkled and shone.'

"The story was founded on the steadfast faithfulness of men and women and their capacity for self-immolation. I wonder if Enoch's wife would be waiting around these days, year after year, to learn of the fate of her husband.

"Since then what a change has come over the spirit of the young! I went to the old school down there in the valley one winter. There was an invisible bar between the boys and girls. The boys regarded the girls with a kind of awe. We were just a little afraid of them. If a boy had misbehaved, the teacher would make him go and sit with one of the girls, and after that he was careful.

"I fell in love with one of those girls -she was so pretty! I got to the schoolhouse early one morning and looked at her books. It thrilled me to handle them. I wrote with my pencil on the fly-leaf of her grammar this tender message:

"The rose is red. the violet blue,
Both are beautiful, so are you.

"What a courageous act! I was scared about it. At noon when the girls

gathered and began whispering I got ashamed and went out and hid in the bushes. Think of that! The boys aren't quite as timid these days.

"If any of us ran away from school or cut up badly, there was that inevitable hour of reckoning with the master of the ship. He was stern but kindly. It was a memorable hour back in a lonely part of the grove or the orchard. The purpose of the school was explained to us. We were made to see and acknowledge our error, but that was not enough. My grandfather would then ask, 'How am I going to make you remember that you are not to do it again?' There was a moment of calm discussion.

"A man down in the village once asked my grandfather what he raised up there on the hill.

"Mostly boys and girls and just about enough wheat and corn and sheep and cattle to feed and clothe 'em,' he answered.

"The boys and girls were the main thing; and what a crop this old farm sent out into the world!

"Things are different now. Here in New England the farms are mostly dead. The work of the men is no longer home. It takes them away to

at.

the mill, the shop, the store, and the office. I am almost persuaded that boys and girls are not now the main thing. It would seem to be business. It may almost be said that the American home is, and has been for some years, without a master. Its government is largely in the hands of women. There is yet another factor in the change; it is the revolt of women against the government of men, in home and state. Are not our men almost wholly absorbed by the problem of getting rich? Are they not mostly money dopes-given over to a consuming thirst like that for cocaine or opium? I wonder if men, spent day by day in the pursuit of wealth, have not been glad to give up the job of the ship's master. Women took the helm unprepared for such responsibility, and naturally so. It was a new task, for the duties of which they had had little training. Moreover, nature had not given them the strong hand of authority. If the strong hand is needed anywhere, it is with those semi-barbaric people we call children, who are learning the difference between right and wrong. It should be gentle, never tyrannical, but it must be strong, for strength is the thing they respect above all others. Is it not true that mainly women had not learned to reckon with remote consequences, and possibly because they had had little chance to learn?

"Again, nobody will stay at home these days. We have become a restless, wandering tribe. We have money to carry us, and we go. We strive to outdo our neighbors in a search for strange lands and curious peoples and odd adventures. We take the whole family and we go. We lead a public life. Discipline is largely and necessarily cut out of it. We like to think that we are broadening our vision. Possibly we are,

but our great need is intense, not broad, vision. (We could learn more truth in a ten-acre lot than we get by rushing around the globe.) We see only the surface of its life, and return with a lot of knowledge that isn't so-with many confused and unreliable impressions. Great men and women are not made that way. They establish their center and settle down upon it and find each year a wider circumference. Beating about the world accomplishes little. Always the great men and women have stayed at home. How much travel do you suppose Shakespeare had? The trip from Stratford up to London and a little way, a very little way, out in the near provinces. Never in all his life, probably, did he travel so far as we go in a round trip from New York to Boston. The same is true of Milton. Who saw so far and so deeply as those two? The men of approved greatness lived before wide travel was possible. The most extended journey of our own Lincoln was from Springfield to New York. We are notoriously a nation of fun chasers racing around the world. It is one of the things that is killing our home life. (We should learn that he who has a home and sticks to it gets farthest in the race of life.)

"We like to believe that we are independent, and in a sense we are, but as we have prospered the graces and manners of the Old World have had an increasing power over us. We have borrowed our fashions from France and our manners from England. Now under Edward VII the manners and morals of England underwent a serious change. He had, I think, overvalued commercial success a good thing in its way, but not a big one. It bulks large, but it is really a thing of small importance. Edward was much impressed by it. Iron-makers, railway presidents, bankers, brewers, oil magnates, mine developers, became baronets and lords. It was their reward for making England preeminent in the world's commerce. The King ate and drank with them and patted their backs. He was a most popular King, but he had extended the circumference of the circle of fashion until it embraced some of the most common clay in the Empire. The old aristocracy of England, which, say what else you may of it, had maintained a high standard of manners and set its face against all vulgarity, was now appalled. They frowned upon the newcomers and snubbed them. They shoved the hot stinger of their contempt into 'the long-eared mule who was trying to be a charger. The mule resented it. He started a revolt against the ancient standards and conventions. It expressed itself in shallow wit and bold irreverence and sometimes through shocking indecency.

"But the change of manners and of spirit which we have suffered cannot be wholly charged to our imitation of cheap aristocracy, or to the indifference of our men, or the incapacity of our women. We must reckon also with the

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ingenuity of Henry Ford. Think of the non-skid rubber footprints in the sands of time! Almost every day for years the American home has been packed into a flivver and vigorously shaken up and dumped into the nearest village and electrified with sundry exhibitions of ingenious crime and amusing violence and high-volted love-making, and packed up again and returned to the hated quiet of the countryside. Now the dooryard has a hundred square miles in it. All the allurements of the town and the village are as handy as the croquet ground and the swimming-hole. No more reading under the evening lamp! Often after the day's end the house is silent, dark, and deserted. It is a dead home. When the lights are aglow of an evening, you may hear the barbaric yawp of canned inebriacy and sex passion sounding on the phonograph while the young dance. No more 'Pull for the Shore, Sailor,' no more Watts and Bliss and Moody and Sankey! Perhaps this new condition is a part of the ruin of war. Some two million of our boys lived a long time without law save that of the soldier. Many of them brought to their homes a reckless, dare-devil spirit and gave it to their sisters and brothers. In the most unexpected places we find the lawless cruelty of No Man's Land. We find everywhere a growing disrespect for law and decency. I think it is due largely to the fact that women have not been equal to the task they have lightly taken upon themselves in assuming the reins of government at home, and yet men are more at fault than women.

"In my youth we had a minister down there in the village who was a man of great learning. Even the children of

the street respected him. Every day he was going from house to house. He knew all the young people by name. Most of them he had baptized. He kept watch of them. He knew what they had been doing in and out of school. He was the shepherd of the flock. If one of them had committed a folly, somehow he had found it out. He would graciously invite the foolish one to his study; when the culprit arrived, no hard words would be spoken.

"My child,' he would say, 'I am your shepherd. I love you. I cannot let you go astray. It is my duty to watch over you. I want you to know that you can bring your doubts and troubles to me and I will do what I can to help you. That is my business. It may be a matter of which you would not wish to speak to your mother or father. Do not fail to bring it to me, because I am the shepherd of the flock, and I will be a light to your feet, my child.'

"Where is the shepherd of the flock? Perhaps it is my fault, but somehow these days I do not see him-at least, his flock would seem to have gone astray. Has he, too, been tempted by the rewards of business?"

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THE APPROACH TO A JAPANESE TEMPLE

PICTURES FROM AN OUTLOOK READER

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THE LIFE OF HERMAN MELVILLE'

A REVIEW BY LLOYD R. MORRIS

T was perhaps in a mood not altogether devoid of prophetic insight

"Moby Dick" through the press, wrote to his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne: "All fame is patronage. Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in that. What 'reputation' H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, anyway; but to go down as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'! When I speak of posterity, in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of them, in all likelihood. "Typee' will be given them, perhaps, with their gingerbread. I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities."

Mr. Weaver's brilliant and vividly written biography of Melville makes a substantial contribution to our knowledge of one of the most significant artists, and surely one of the most interesting figures, in American literature. It is, moreover, fascinating reading; book which has all the intellectual keenness and finely edged wit of Mr. Strachey's "Queen Victoria" and is served besides by a quickened critical insight.

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Melville's career, viewed retrospectively, is as beguiling in its unrealized potentialities as in its actual accomplishment. Before his twenty-fifth year MelIville had been a merchant-sailor in the transatlantic trade, a whaler in the Pacific, had been for three months a resident of the Marquesas Islands, had been a prisoner in Tahiti as the result of a mutiny, and returned to the United States by way of South America as an "ordinary seaman" on an American man-of-war. In 1846 he published "Typee," the record of his stay in the Marquesas, which brought him immediate popularity in the United States and in England. This was followed by "Omoo," "Redburn," and "White Jacket," and in 1851 by his finest work, "Moby Dick." The following year brought forth a much-misunderstood novel, "Pierre," and in 1857 Melville practically renounced literature. From then on until his death in 1891 he was the willing tenant of a remote corner of oblivion.

"At the age of thirty-two," says Mr. Weaver, "so brilliant, so intense, so crowded, had been the range of experience that burned through him, that at the period of his life when most men are just beginning to strike their gait, Melville found himself looking forward into

1.Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. By Raymond M. Weaver. The George H. Doran Company, New York. $3.50.

Herman Melulle

utter night. Nearly forty years before his death he had come to be the most completely disenchanted of all considerable American writers. From his youth, Melville had felt the flagrant and stubborn discord between aspiration and fact. He was born with an imagination of very extraordinary vigor and with a constitution of corresponding vitality. In sheer capacity to feel, most American writers look pale beside him. Fired by his rebellious imagination, and abetted by his animal courage, he sallied forth in quest of happiness. Few men have ever compassed such a span of experience as he crowded within the thirty-two years of his quest; few men have lived with such daring, such intensity. And one by one, as he put his illusions to the test, the bolts of his imagination, discharged against reality, but blazed charred avenues to despair."

Melville himself seems to have had a premonition of waning power, for in the letter to Hawthorne previously quoted he wrote: "The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose-that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches." And with a touch of humor

he adds: "I'm rather sore, perhaps, in this letter."

Being of an uncompromising turn of mind, Melville did not write the "other way;" instead, he wrote what is possibly one of the least known books by any American writer of importance, "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," a novel roundly abused by the contemporary critics and almost wholly forgotten by the posterity of which Melville was so contemptuous. In "Pierre," Mr. Weaver tells us, "Melville coiled down into the night of his soul to write an anatomy of despair." "The subtlety of the analysis," he continues, "is extraordinary; and in its probings into unsuspected determinants from unconsciousness it is prophetic of some of the most recent findings in psychology. . . . In the winding ambiguities of 'Pierre' Melville attempts to reveal man's fatal facility at self-deception; to show that the human mind is like a floating iceberg, hiding below the surface of the sea most of its bulk; that from a great depth of thought and feeling below the level of awareness, long silent hands are ever reaching out, urging us to whims of the blood and tensions of the nerves whose origins we never suspect. 'In reserves men build imposing characters,' Melville says; 'not in revelations.' 'Pierre' is not conspicuous for its reserves."

Melville's disillusion reached a climax in "Pierre" which left him little to say even on the subject of disillusion itself. And he turned more and more completely to metaphysical speculation. Mr. Weaver shows that Melville's interest in metaphysics had its genesis in the Marquesas, where he came first to speculate as to the possible advantages of conferring Christian civilization upon the "humane, gentlemanly, and amiable set of epicures" who constituted their population. The publication of "Omoo" brought Melville into controversy with the London Missionary Society over his plea for forbearance and charity to the islanders; later this controversy bore fruit in an ironic theory that in this world a wise man resigns himself to the world's ways. "Resigned to the insight that while on earth no man aims at heaven except by a virtuous expediency," says Mr. Weaver, "he accepted the London Missionary Society as one of the evils inherent in the universe, and, leaving it to its own fate, looked prophetically forward to the InterChurch World Movement. In 'The Confidence Man' he makes one the characters say: 'Missions I would quicken with the Wall Street spirit. For if, confessedly, certain spiritual ends are to be gained but through the auxiliary agency of worldly means, then, to the surer gaining of such spiritual ends, the example of worldly policy in worldly projects should not by spiritual projectors be slighted. In brief, the conversion of the heathen, so far, at least, as depend

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