NORTHERN liberals are the chief supporters of civil rights and of integration . They have also led the nation in the direction of a welfare state . And both in their objectives of non-discrimination and of social progress they have had ranged against them the Southerners who are called Bourbons . The name presumably derives from the French royal house which never learned and never forgot ; since Bourbon whiskey , though of Kentucky origin , is at least as much favored by liberals in the North as by conservatives in the South . 
The nature of the opposition between liberals and Bourbons is too little understood in the North . The race problem has tended to obscure other , less emotional , issues which may fundamentally be even more divisive . It is these other differences between North and South — other , that is , than those which concern discrimination or social welfare — which I chiefly discuss herein . 
I write about Northern liberals from considerable personal experience . A Southerner married to a New Englander , I have lived for many years in a Connecticut commuting town with a high percentage of artists , writers , publicity men , and business executives of egghead tastes . Most of them are Democrats and nearly all consider themselves , and are viewed as , liberals . This is puzzling to an outsider conscious of the classic tradition of liberalism , because it is clear that these Democrats who are left-of-center are at opposite poles from the liberal Jefferson , who held that the best government was the least government . Yet paradoxically my liberal friends continue to view Jefferson as one of their patron saints . When I question them as to what they mean by concepts like liberty and democracy , I find that they fall into two categories : the simpler ones who have simply accepted the shibboleths of their faith without analysis ; and the intelligent , cynical ones who scornfully reply that these things do n't count any more in the world of to-day . I am naive , they say , to make use of such words . 
I take this to mean that the intelligent — and therefore necessarily cynical ? — liberal considers that the need for a national economy with controls that will assure his conception of social justice is so great that individual and local liberties as well as democratic processes may have to yield before it . This seems like an attitude favoring a sort of totalitarian bureaucracy which , under a President of the same stamp , would try to coerce an uncooperative Congress or Supreme Court . As for states ' rights , they have never counted in the thinking of my liberal friends except as irritations of a minor and immoral nature which exist now only as anachronisms . 
The American liberal may , in the world of to-day , have a strong case ; but he presents it publicly so enmeshed in hypocrisy that it is not an honest one . Why , in the first place , call himself a liberal if he is against laissez-faire and favors an authoritarian central government with womb-to-tomb controls over everybody ? If he attaches little importance to personal liberty , why not make this known to the world ? And if he is so scornful of the rights of states , why not advocate a different sort of constitution that he could more sincerely support ? 
I am concerned here , however , with the Northern liberal 's attitude toward the South . It appears to be one of intense dislike , which he makes little effort to conceal even in the presence of Southern friends . His assumption seems to be that any such friends , being tolerable humans , must be more liberal than most Southerners and therefore at least partly in sympathy with his views . Time 's editor , Thomas Griffith , in his book , The Waist-High Culture , wrote : " … most of what was different about it ( the Deep South ) I found myself unsympathetic to … " . This , for the liberals I know , would be an understatement . Theirs is no mere lack of sympathy , but something closer to the passionate hatred that was directed against Fascism . 
I do not think that my experience would be typical for Southerners living in the North . In business circles , usually conservative , this sort of atmosphere would hardly be found . But in our case — and neither my wife nor I have extreme views on integration , nor are we given to emotional outbursts — the situation has ruined one or two valued friendships and come close to wrecking several more . In fact it has caused us to give serious thought to moving our residence south , because it is not easy for the most objective Southerner to sit calmly by when his host is telling a roomful of people that the only way to deal with Southerners who oppose integration is to send in troops and shoot the bastards down . 
Accounts have been published of Northern liberals in the South up against segregationist prejudice , especially in state-supported universities where pressure may be strong to uphold the majority view . But these accounts do not show that Northerners have been subjected to embarrassment or provocation by Yankee-hatred displayed in social gatherings . From my wife 's experience and other sources , this seems to be rarely encountered in educated circles . The strong feeling is certainly there ; but there is a leavening of liberalism among college graduates throughout the South , especially among those who studied in the North . And social relations arising out of business ties impose courtesy , if not sympathy , toward resident and visiting Northerners . Also , among the latter a large percentage soon acquire the prevalent Southern attitude on most social problems . 
There are of course many Souths ; but for this discussion the most important division is between those who have been reconstructed and those who have n't . My definition of this much abused adjective is that a reconstructed rebel is one who is glad that the North won the War . Nobody knows how many Southerners there are in this category . I suspect that there are far more unreconstructed ones than the North likes to believe . I never heard of a poll being taken on the question . No doubt such a thing would be considered unpatriotic . Prior to 1954 I imagine that a majority of Southerners would have voted against the Confederacy . Since the Supreme Court 's decision of that year this is more doubtful ; and if a poll had been taken immediately following the dispatch of troops to Little Rock I believe the majority would have been for the Old South . 
Belief in the traditional way of life persists much more in the older states than in the new ones . Probably a larger percentage of Virginians and South Carolinians remain unreconstructed than elsewhere , with Georgia , North Carolina , and Alabama following along after them . Old attitudes are held more tenaciously in the Tidewater than the Piedmont ; so that a line running down the length of the South marking the upper limits of tidewater would roughly divide the Old South from the new , but with , of course , important minority enclaves . 
The long-settled areas of states like Virginia and South Carolina developed the ante-bellum culture to its richest flowering , and there the memory is more precious , and the consciousness of loss the greater . Also , we should not even to-day discount the fact that a region such as the coastal lowlands centering on Charleston had closer ties with England and the West Indies than with the North even after independence . The social and psychological consequences of this continue to affect the area . In certain respects defeat increased the persistent Anglophilia of the Old South . Poor where they had once been rich , humbled where they had been arrogant , having no longer any hope of sharing in the leadership of the nation , the rebels who would not surrender in spirit drew comfort from the sympathy they felt extended to them by the mother country . And no doubt many people in states like the Carolinas and Georgia , which were among the most Tory in sentiment in the eighteenth century , bitterly regretted the revolt against the Crown . 
Among Bourbons the racial issue may have less to do with their remaining unreconstructed than other factors . All Southerners agree that slavery had to go ; but many historians maintain that except for Northern meddling it would have ended in states like Virginia years before it did . Southern resentment has been over the method of its ending , the invasion , and Reconstruction ; their fears now are of miscegenation and Negro political control in many counties . But apart from racial problems , the old unreconstructed South — to use the moderate words favored by Mr. Thomas Griffith — finds itself unsympathetic to most of what is different about the civilization of the North . And this , in effect , means most of modern America . 
It is hard to see how the situation could be otherwise . And therein , I feel , many Northerners delude themselves about the South . For one thing , this is not a subject often discussed or analyzed . There seems to be almost a conspiracy of silence veiling it . I suppose the reason is a kind of wishful thinking : do n't talk about the final stages of Reconstruction and they will take care of themselves . Or else the North really believes that all Southerners except a few quaint old characters have come around to realizing the errors of their past , and are now at heart sharers of the American Dream , like everybody else . 
If the circumstances are faced frankly it is not reasonable to expect this to be true . The situation of the South since 1865 has been unique in the western world . Regardless of rights and wrongs , a population and an area appropriate to a pre-World-War-/1 , great power have been , following conquest , ruled against their will by a neighboring people , and have had imposed upon them social and economic controls they dislike . And the great majority of these people are of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic descent . This is the only case in modern history of a people of Britannic origin submitting without continued struggle to what they view as foreign domination . The fact is due mainly to international wars , both hot and cold . In every war of the United States since the Civil War the South was more belligerent than the rest of the country . So instead of being tests of the South 's loyalty , the Spanish War , the two World Wars , and the Korean War all served to overcome old grievances and cement reunion . And there is no section of the nation more ardent than the South in the cold war against Communism . Had the situation been reversed , had , for instance , England been the enemy in 1898 because of issues of concern chiefly to New England , there is little doubt that large numbers of Southerners would have happily put on their old Confederate uniforms to fight as allies of Britain . It is extraordinary that a people as proud and warlike as Southerners should have been as docile as they have . The North should thank its stars that such has been the case ; but at the same time it should not draw false inferences therefrom . 
The two main charges levelled against the Bourbons by liberals is that they are racists and social reactionaries . There is much truth in both these charges , and not many Bourbons deny them . Whatever their faults , they are not hypocrites . Most of them sincerely believe that the Anglo-Saxon is the best race in the world and that it should remain pure . Many Northeners believe this , too , but few of them will say so publicly . The Bourbon economic philosophy , moreover , is not very different from that of Northern conservatives . But those among the Bourbons who remain unreconstructed go much further than this . They believe that if the South had been let alone it would have produced a civilization superior to that of modern America . As it is , they consider that the North is now reaping the fruits of excess egalitarianism , that in spite of its high standard of living the " American way " has been proved inferior to the English and Scandinavian ways , although they disapprove of the socialistic features of the latter . 
The South 's antipathy to Northern civilization includes such charges as poor manners , harsh accents , lack of appreciation of the arts of living like gastronomy and the use of leisure . Their own easier , slower tempo is especially dear to Southerners ; and I have heard many say that they are content to earn a half or a third as much as they could up North because they so much prefer the quieter habits of their home town .  
In the past , the duties of the state , as Sir Henry Maine noted long ago , were only two in number : internal order and external security . By prevailing over other claimants for the loyalties of men , the nation-state maintained an adequate measure of certainty and order within its territorial borders . Outside those limits it asserted , as against other states , a position of sovereign equality , and , as against the " inferior " peoples of the non-Western world , a position of dominance . It became the sole " subject " of " international law " ( a term which , it is pertinent to remember , was coined by Bentham ) , a body of legal principle which by and large was made up of what Western nations could do in the world arena . ( That corpus of law was a reflection of the power system in existence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . Speaking generally , it furthered — and still tends to further — the interests of the Western powers . The enormous changes in world politics have , however , thrown it into confusion , so much so that it is safe to say that all international law is now in need of reexamination and clarification in light of the social conditions of the present era . ) 
Beyond the two basic tasks mentioned above , no attention was paid by statesman or scholar to an idea of state responsibility , either internally or externally . This was particularly true in the world arena , which was an anarchical battleground characterized by strife and avaricious competition for colonial empires . That any sort of duty was owed by his nation to other nations would have astonished a nineteenth-century statesman . His duty was to his sovereign and to his nation , and an extension to peoples beyond the territorial boundaries was not to be contemplated . Thus , to cite but one example , the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century , whether with the British navy ruling the seas or with the City of London ruling world finance , was strictly national in motivation , however much other nations ( e.g. , the United States ) may have incidentally benefited . At the same time , all suggestions that some sort of societal responsibility existed for the welfare of the people within the territorial state was strongly resisted . Social Darwinism was able to stave off the incipient socialist movement until well into the present century . 
However , in recent decades , for what doubtless are multiple reasons , an unannounced but nonetheless readily observable shift has occurred in both facets of national activity . A concept of responsibility is in process of articulation and establishment . Already firmly implanted internally , it is a growing factor in external matters .   A little more than twenty years ago the American people turned an important corner . In what has aptly been called a " constitutional revolution " , the basic nature of government was transformed from one essentially negative in nature ( the " night-watchman state " ) to one with affirmative duties to perform . The " positive state " came into existence . For lawyers , reflecting perhaps their parochial preferences , there has been a special fascination since then in the role played by the Supreme Court in that transformation — the manner in which its decisions altered in " the switch in time that saved nine " , President Roosevelt 's ill-starred but in effect victorious " Court-packing plan " , the imprimatur of judicial approval that was finally placed upon social legislation . Of greater importance , however , is the content of those programs , which have had and are having enormous consequences for the American people . Labor relations have been transformed , income security has become a standardized feature of political platforms , and all the many facets of the American version of the welfare state have become part of the conventional wisdom . A national consensus of near unanimity exists that these governmental efforts are desirable as well as necessary . Ratified in the Republican Party victory in 1952 , the Positive State is now evidenced by political campaigns being waged not on whether but on how much social legislation there should be . 
The general acceptance of the idea of governmental ( i.e. , societal ) responsibility for the economic well-being of the American people is surely one of the two most significant watersheds in American constitutional history . The other , of course , was the Civil War , the conflict which a century ago insured national unity over fragmentation . A third , one of at least equal and perhaps even greater importance , is now being traversed : American immersion and involvement in world affairs . 
Internal national responsibility , now a truism , need not be documented . Nevertheless , it may be helpful to cite one example — that of employment — for , as will be shown below , it cuts across both facets of the new concept . Thirty years ago , while the nation was wallowing in economic depression , the prevailing philosophy of government was to stand aside and allow " natural forces " to operate and cure the distress . That guiding principle of the Hoover Administration fell to the siege guns of the New Deal ; less than a score of years later Congress enacted the Employment Act of 1946 , by which the national government assumed the responsibility of taking action to insure conditions of maximum employment . Hands-off the economy was replaced by conscious guidance through planning — the economic side of the constitutional revolution . In 1961 the first important legislative victory of the Kennedy Administration came when the principle of national responsibility for local economic distress won out over a " state's-responsibility " proposal — provision was made for payment for unemployment relief by nation-wide taxation rather than by a levy only on those states afflicted with manpower surplus . The American people have indeed come a long way in the brief interval between 1930 and 1961 . 
Internal national responsibility is a societal response to the impact of the Industrial Revolution . Reduced to its simplest terms , it is an assumption of a collective duty to compensate for the inability of individuals to cope with the rigors of the era . National responsibility for individual welfare is a concept not limited to the United States or even to the Western nations . A measure of its widespread acceptance may be derived from a statement of the International Congress of Jurists in 1959 . Meeting in New Delhi under the auspices of the International Commission of Jurists , a body of lawyers from the free world , the Congress redefined and expanded the traditional Rule of Law to include affirmative governmental duties . It is noteworthy that the majority of the delegates to the Congress were from the less developed , former colonial nations . The Rule of Law , historically a principle according everyone his " day in court " before an impartial tribunal , was broadened substantively by making it a responsibility of government to promote individual welfare . Recognizing that the Rule of Law is " a dynamic concept … which should be employed not only to safeguard the civil and political rights of the individual in a free society " , the Congress asserted that it also included the responsibility " to establish social , economic , educational and cultural conditions under which his legitimate aspirations and dignity may be realized " . The idea of national responsibility thus has become a common feature of the nations of the non-Soviet world . For better or for worse , we all now live in welfare states , the organizing principle of which is collective responsibility for individual well-being . 
Whether a concept analogous to the principle of internal responsibility operates in a nation 's external relations is less obvious and more difficult to establish . The hypothesis ventured here is that it does , and that evidence is accumulating validating that proposition . The content is not the same , however : rather than individual security , it is the security and continuing existence of an " ideological group " — those in the " free world " — that is basic . External national responsibility involves a burgeoning requirement that the leaders of the Western nations so guide their decisions as to further the viability of other friendly nations . If internal responsibility suggests acceptance of the socialist ideal of equality , then external responsibility implies adherence to principles of ideological supranationalism . 
Reference to two other concepts — nationalism and sovereignty — may help to reveal the contours of the new principle . In its beginnings the nation-state had to struggle to assert itself — internally , against feudal groups , and externally , against the power and influence of such other claimants for loyalty as the Church . The breakup of the Holy Roman Empire and the downfall of feudalism led , not more than two centuries ago , to the surge of nationalism . ( Since the time-span of the nation-state coincides roughly with the separate existence of the United States as an independent entity , it is perhaps natural for Americans to think of the nation as representative of the highest form of order , something permanent and unchanging . ) The concept of nationalism is the political principle that epitomizes and glorifies the territorial state as the characteristic type of socal structure . But it is more than that . For it includes the emotional ties that bind men to their homeland and the complex motivations that hold a large group of people together as a unit . Today , as new nations rise from the former colonial empires , nationalism is one of the hurricane forces loose in the world . Almost febrile in intensity , the principle has become worldwide in application — unfortunately at the very time that nationalist fervors can wreak greatest harm . Historically , however , the concept is one that has been of marked benefit to the people of the Western civilizational group . By subduing disparate lesser groups the nation has , to some degree at least , broadened the capacity for individual liberty . Within their confines , moreover , technological and industrial growth has proceeded at an accelerated pace , thus increasing the cornucopia from which material wants can be satisfied . While the pattern is uneven , some having gained more than others , nationalism has in fact served the Western peoples well . ( Whether historical nationalism helped the peoples of the remainder of the world , and whether today 's nationalism in the former colonial areas has equally beneficial aspects , are other questions . ) 
It is one of the ironic quirks of history that the viability and usefulness of nationalism and the territorial state are rapidly dissipating at precisely the time that the nation-state attained its highest number ( approximately 100 ) . But it is more than irony : one of the main reasons why nationalism is no longer a tenable concept is because it has spread throughout the planet . In other words , nationalism worked well enough when it had limited application , both as to geography and as to population ; it becomes a perilous anachronism when adopted on a world-wide basis . 
Complementing the political principle of nationalism is the legal principle of sovereignty . The former receives its legitimacy from the latter . Operating side by side , together they helped shore up the nation-state . While sovereignty has roots in antiquity , in its present usage it is essentially modern . Jean Bodin , writing in the sixteenth century , may have been the seminal thinker , but it was the vastly influential John Austin who set out the main lines of the concept as now understood . Austin 's nineteenth-century view of law and sovereignty still dominates much of today 's legal and political thinking . To him , law is the command of the sovereign ( the English monarch ) who personifies the power of the nation , while sovereignty is the power to make law — i.e. , to prevail over internal groups and to be free from the commands of other sovereigns in other nations . These fundamental ideas — the indivisibility of sovereignty and its dual ( internal-external ) aspects — still remain the core of that concept of ultimate political power . 
The nation-state , then , exemplifies the principle of nationalism and exercises sovereignty : supreme power over domestic affairs and independence from outside control . In fact , however , both principles have always been nebulous and loosely defined . High-level abstractions are always difficult to pin down with precision . That is particularly true of sovereignty when it is applied to democratic societies , in which " popular " sovereignty is said to exist , and in federal nations , in which the jobs of government are split . Nevertheless , nationalism and sovereignty are reputed , in the accepted wisdom , to describe the modern world . Is there a different reality behind the facade ? Does the surface hide a quite different picture ? 
The short answer to those questions is " yes " . Both concepts are undergoing alteration ; to some degree they are being supplanted by a concept of national responsibility . As evidence to support that view , consider the following illustrative instances .  Can thermonuclear war be set off by accident ? What steps have been taken to guard against the one sort of mishap that could trigger the destruction of continents ? Are we as safe as we should be from such a disaster ? Is anything being done to increase our margin of safety ? Will the danger increase or decrease ? 
I have just asked these questions in the Pentagon , in the White House , in offices of key scientists across the country and aboard the submarines that prowl for months underwater , with neat rows of green launch tubes which contain Polaris missiles and which are affectionately known as " Sherwood Forest " . I asked the same questions inside the launch-control rooms of an Atlas missile base in Wyoming , where officers who wear sidearms are manning the " commit buttons " that could start a war — accidentally or by design — and in the command centers where other pistol-packing men could give orders to push such buttons . 
To the men in the instrument-jammed bomber cockpits , submarine compartments and the antiseptic , windowless rooms that would be the foxholes of tomorrow 's impersonal intercontinental wars , the questions seem farfetched . There is unceasing pressure , but its sources are immediate . " Readiness exercises " are almost continuous . Each could be the real thing . 
In the command centers there are special clocks ready to tick off the minutes elapsed since " E hour " . " E " stands for " execution " — the moment a " go order " would unleash an American nuclear strike . There is little time for the men in the command centers to reflect about the implications of these clocks . They are preoccupied riding herd on control panels , switches , flashing colored lights on pale green or gray consoles that look like business machines . They know little about their machinery beyond mechanical details . Accidental war is so sensitive a subject that most of the people who could become directly involved in one are told just enough so they can perform their portions of incredibly complex tasks . 
Among the policy makers , generals , physicists , psychologists and others charged with controlling the actions of the button pushers and their " hardware " , the answers to my questions varied partly according to a man 's flair for what the professionals in this field call " scenarios " . As an Air Force psychiatrist put it : " You ca n't have dry runs on this one " . The experts are thus forced to hypothesize sequences of events that have never occurred , probably never will — but possibly might . Only one rule prevailed in my conversations with these men : The more highly placed they are — that is , the more they know — the more concerned they have become . 
Already accidental war is a silent guest at the discussions within the Kennedy Administration about the urgency of disarmament and nearly all other questions of national security . Only recently new " holes " were discovered in our safety measures , and a search is now on for more . Work is under way to see whether new restraining devices should be installed on all nuclear weapons . 
Meanwhile , the experts speak of wars triggered by " false pre-emption " , " escalation " , " unauthorized behavior " and other terms that will be discussed in this report . They inhabit a secret world centered on " go codes " and " gold phones " . Their conversations were , almost invariably , accompanied by the same gestures — arms and pointed forefingers darting toward each other in arclike semicircular motions . One arm represented our bombers and missiles , the other arm " theirs " . Yet implicit in each movement was the death of millions , perhaps hundreds of millions , perhaps you and me — and the experts . 
These men are not callous . It is their job to think about the unthinkable . Unanimously they believe that the world would become a safer place if more of us — and more Russians and Communist Chinese , too — thought about accidental war . 
The first systematic thinking about this Pandora 's box within Pandora 's boxes was done four years ago by Fred Ikle , a frail , meek-mannered Swiss-born sociologist . He was , and is , with the RAND Corporation , a nonprofit pool of thinkers financed by the U. S. Air Force . His investigations made him the Paul Revere of accidental war , and safety procedures were enormously increased . 
In recent weeks , as a result of a sweeping defense policy reappraisal by the Kennedy Administration , basic United States strategy has been modified — and large new sums allocated — to meet the accidental-war danger and to reduce it as quickly as possible . 
The chain starts at BMEWS ( Ballistic Missile Early Warning System ) in Thule , Greenland . Its radar screens would register Soviet missiles shortly after they are launched against the United States . BMEWS intelligence is simultaneously flashed to NORAD ( North American Air Defense Command ) in Colorado Springs , Colorado , for interpretation ; to the SAC command and control post , forty-five feet below the ground at Offutt Air Force Base , near Omaha , Nebraska ; to the Joint War Room of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon and to the President . 
Telephones , Teletypes , several kinds of radio systems and , in some cases , television , link all vital points . Alternate locations exist for all key command centers . For last-ditch emergencies SAC has alternate command posts on KC-135 jet tankers . Multiple circuits , routings and frequencies make the chain as unbreakable as possible . 
The same principle of " redundancy " applies to all communications on these special networks . And no messages can be transmitted on these circuits until senders and receivers authenticate in advance , by special codes , that the messages actually come from their purported sources . Additional codes can be used to challenge and counterchallenge the authentications . 
Only the President is permitted to authorize the use of nuclear weapons . That 's the law . But what if somebody decides to break it ? The President can not personally remove the safety devices from every nuclear trigger . He makes the momentous decision . Hundreds of men are required to pass the word to the button pushers and to push the buttons . What if one or more of them turn irrational or suddenly , coolly , decide to clobber the Russians ? What if the President himself , in the language of the military , " goes ape " ? Or singlehandedly decided to reverse national policy and hit the Soviets without provocation ? 
Nobody can be absolutely certain of the answers . However , the system is designed , ingeniously and hopefully , so that no one man could initiate a thermonuclear war . 
Even the President can not pick up his telephone and give a " go " order . Even he does not know the one signal for a nuclear strike — the " go code " . In an emergency he would receive available intelligence on the " gold-phone circuit " . A system of " gold " — actually yellow — phones connects him with the offices and action stations of the Secretary of Defense , the Joint Chiefs of Staff , the SAC commander and other key men . All can be connected with the gold circuit from their homes . All could help the President make his decision . The talk would not be in code , but neither would it ramble . Vital questions would be quickly answered according to a preprepared agenda . Officers who participate in the continual practice drills assured me that the President 's decision could be made and announced on the gold circuit within minutes after the first flash from BMEWS . 
If communications work , his decision would be instantly known in all command posts that would originate the actual go order . For these centers , too , are on the gold circuit . They include the Navy 's Atlantic Command at Norfolk , Virginia , which is in contact with the Polaris subs ; NATO headquarters in Europe ; Air Force forward headquarters in Europe and in the Pacific , which control tactical fighters on ships and land bases ; and SAC , which controls long-range bombers and Atlas missiles . 
Let us look in on one of these nerve centers — SAC at Omaha — and see what must still happen before a wing of B-52 bombers could drop their H-bombs . 
In a word , plenty . The key man almost certainly would be Col. William W. Wisman , SAC 's senior controller . He or his deputy or one of their seven assistants , all full colonels , mans the heart of the command post twenty-four hours a day . It is a quiet but impressive room — 140 feet long , thirty-nine feet wide , twenty-one feet high . Movable panels of floor-to-ceiling maps and charts are crammed with intelligence information . And Bill Wisman , forty-three , a farmer 's son from Beallsville , Ohio , is a quiet but impressive man . His eyes are steady anchors of the deepest brown . His movements and speech are precise , clear and quick . No question ruffles him or causes him to hesitate . 
Wisman , who has had the chief controller 's job for four years , calls the signals for a team operating three rows of dull-gray consoles studded with lights , switches and buttons . At least a dozen men , some armed , are never far away from him . In front of him is a gold phone . In emergencies the SAC commander , Gen. Thomas Power , or his deputies and their staff would occupy a balcony that stretches across the length of the room above Wisman and his staff . At General Power 's seat in the balcony there is also a gold phone . General Power would participate in the decision making . Wisman , below , would listen in and act . His consoles can give him instant contact with more than seventy bases around the world and with every SAC aircraft . 
He need only pick up one of the two red telephone receivers at his extreme left , right next to the big red button marked ALERT . ( There are two receivers in case one should be dropped and damaged . ) 
But Wisman , too , does not know the go code . He must take it from " the red box " . In point of fact , this is a beige box with a bright red door , about one and a half feet square and hung from the wall about six feet from the door to Wisman 's right . The box is internally wired so the door can never be opened without setting off a screeching klaxon ( " It 's real obnoxious " ) . 
Now we must become vague , for we are approaching one of the nation 's most guarded secrets . The codes in the red box — there are several of them covering various contingencies — are contained in a sealed X-ray-proof " unique device " . They are supplied , a batch at a time , by a secret source and are continually changed by Wisman or his staff , at random intervals . 
But even the contents of Wisman 's box can not start a war . They are mere fragments , just one portion of preprepared messages . What these fragments are and how they activate the go order may not be revealed . The pieces must be placed in the context of the prepared messages by Wisman 's staff . In addition to the authentication and acknowledgment procedures which precede and follow the sending of the go messages , again in special codes , each message also contains an " internal authenticator " , another specific signal to convince the recipient that he is getting the real thing . 
I asked Wisman what would happen if he broke out the go codes and tried to start transmitting one . " I 'd wind up full of .38 bullet holes " , he said , and there was no question that he was talking about bullets fired by his coworkers . 
Now let us imagine a wing of B-52 's , on alert near their " positive control ( or fail-safe ) points " , the spots on the map , many miles from Soviet territory , beyond which they are forbidden to fly without specific orders to proceed to their targets . They , too , have fragments of the go code with them . As Wisman put it , " They have separate pieces of the pie , and we have the whole pie . Once we send out the whole pie , they can put their pieces into it . Unless we send out the whole pie , their pieces mean nothing " . Why does Wisman 's ever-changing code always mesh with the fragments in possession of the button pushers ? The answer is a cryptographic secret . At any rate , three men out of a six-man B-52 crew are required to copy down Wisman 's go-to-war message . Each must match Wisman 's " pie " with the fragment that he carries with him . All three must compare notes and agree to " go " .   After that , it requires several minutes of concentrated work , including six separate and deliberate actions by a minimum of three men sitting at three separate stations in a bomber , each with another man beside him to help , for an armed bomb to be released . Unless all gadgets are properly operated — and the wires and seals from the handles removed first — no damage can be done .  
Suddenly , however , their posture changed and the game ended . They went as rigid as black statuary … six figures , lean and tall and angular , went still . Their heads were in the air sniffing . They all swung at the same instant in the same direction . They saw it before I did , even with my binoculars . It was nothing more than a tiny distant rain squall , a dull gray sheet which reached from a layer of clouds to the earth . In the 360 degrees of horizon it obscured only a degree , no more . A white man would not have seen it . The aborigines fastened upon it with a concentration beyond pathos . Watching , they waited until the squall thickened and began to move in a long drifting slant across the dry burning land . At once the whole band set off at a lope . They were chasing a rain cloud . 
They went after the squall as mercilessly as a wolf pack after an abandoned cow . I followed them in the jeep and now they did not care . The games were over , this was life . Occasionally , for no reason that I could see , they would suddenly alter the angle of their trot . Sometimes I guessed it was because the rain squall had changed direction . Sometimes it was to skirt a gulley . Their gait is impossible to convey in words . It has nothing of the proud stride of the trained runner about it , it is not a lope , it is not done with style or verve . It is the gait of the human who must run to live : arms dangling , legs barely swinging over the ground , head hung down and only occasionally swinging up to see the target , a loose motion that is just short of stumbling and yet is wonderfully graceful . It is a barely controlled skimming of the ground . 
They ran for three hours . Finally , avoiding hummocks and seeking low ground , they intercepted the rain squall . For ten minutes they ran beneath the squall , raising their arms and , for the first time , shouting and capering . Then the wind died and the rain squall held steady . They were studying the ground . Suddenly one of them shouted , ran a few feet , bent forward and put his mouth to the ground . He had found a depression with rain water in it . He bent down , a black cranelike figure , and put his mouth to the ground . 
With a lordly and generous gesture , the discoverer stood up and beckoned to the closest of his fellows . The other trotted over and swooped at the tiny puddle . In an instant he had sucked it dry . 
The aborigine lives on the cruelest land I have ever seen . Which does not mean that it is ugly . Part of it is , of course . There are thousands of square miles of salt pan which are hideous . They are huge areas which have been swept by winds for so many centuries that there is no soil left , but only deep bare ridges fifty or sixty yards apart with ravines between them thirty or forty feet deep and the only thing that moves is a scuttling layer of sand . Such stretches have an inhuman moonlike quality . But much of the land which the aborigine wanders looks as if it should be hospitable . It is softened by the saltbush and the bluebush , has a peaceful quality , the hills roll softly . 
The malignancy of such a landscape has been beautifully described by the Australian Charles Bean . He tells of three men who started out on a trip across a single paddock , a ten-by-ten-mile square owned by a sheep grazer . They went well-equipped with everything except knowledge of the " outback " country . " 
The countryside looked like a beautiful open park with gentle slopes and soft gray tree-clumps . Nothing appalling or horrible rushed upon these men . Only there happened — nothing . There might have been a pool of cool water behind any of these tree-clumps : only — there was not . It might have rained , any time ; only — it did not . There might have been a fence or a house just over the next rise ; only — there was not . They lay , with the birds hopping from branch to branch above them and the bright sky peeping down at them . No one came " . 
The white men died . And countless others like them have died . Even today range riders will come upon mummified bodies of men who attempted nothing more difficult than a twenty-mile hike and slowly lost direction , were tortured by the heat , driven mad by the constant and unfulfilled promise of the landscape , and who finally died . 
The aborigine is not deceived ; he knows that the land is hard and pitiless . He knows that the economy of life in the " outback " is awful . There is no room for error or waste . Any organism that falters or misperceives the signals or weakens is done . I do not know if such a way of life can come to be a self-conscious challenge , but I suspect that it can . Perhaps this is what gives the aborigine his odd air of dignity .  THE FAMILY AT THE BOULDER  SEEING an aborigine today is a difficult thing . Many of them have drifted into the cities and towns and seaports . Others are confined to vast reservations , and not only does the Australian government justifiably not wish them to be viewed as exhibits in a zoo , but on their reservations they are extremely fugitive , shunning camps , coming together only for corroborees at which their strange culture comes to its highest pitch — which is very low indeed . 
I persuaded an Australian friend who had lived " outback " for years to take me to see some aborigines living in the bush . It was a difficult and ambiguous kind of negotiation , even though the rancher was said to be expert in his knowledge of the aborigines and their language . Finally , however , the arrangements were made and we drove out into the bush in a Land Rover . We followed the asphalt road for a few miles and then swung off onto a smaller road which was nothing more than two tire marks on the earth . The rancher went a mile down this road and then , when he reached a big red boulder , swung off the road . At once he started to glance toward the instrument panel . It took me a moment to realize what was odd about that panel : there was a gimbaled compass welded to it , which rocked gently back and forth as the Land Rover bounced about . The rancher was navigating his way across the flatland . 
" Do you always navigate like this " ? I asked . 
" Damned right " , he said . " Once I get out on the flat I do . Some chaps that know an area well can make their way by landmarks … a tree here , a wash here , a boulder there . But if you do n't know the place like the palm of your hand , you 'd better use a compass and the speedometer . Two miles northeast , then five miles southwest … that sort of thing . Very simple " . 
He was right . The landscape kept repeating itself . I would try to memorize landmarks and saw in a half-hour that it was hopeless . Finally we approached the bivouac of the aborigines . They were camped beside a large column-shaped boulder : a man , his lubra , and two children . The sun was not yet high and all of them were in the small area of shade cast by the boulder . 
There was also a dog , a dingo dog . Its ribs showed , it was a yellow nondescript color , it suffered from a variety of sores , hair had scabbed off its body in patches . It lay with its head on its paws and only its eyes moving , watching us carefully . It struck me as a very bright and very malnourished dog . No one patted the dog . It was not a pet . It was a worker . 
" The buggers love shade " , the rancher said . " I suppose because it saves them some loss of body water . They 'll move around that rock all day , following the shade . During the hottest part of the day , of course , the sun comes straight down and there is n't any shade " . 
We drove close to the boulder , stopped the Land Rover , and walked over toward the family . 
The man was leaning against the rock . He gazed away from us as we approached . He was over six feet tall and very thin . His legs were narrow and very long . Every bone and muscle in his body showed , but he did not give the appearance of starving . He had long black hair and a wispy beard . The ridges over his eyes were huge and his eyelids were half shut . There was something about his face that disturbed me and it took several seconds to realize what . It was not merely that flies were crawling over his face but his narrowed eyelids did not blink when the flies crawled into his eye sockets . A fly would crawl down the bulging forehead , into the socket of the eye , walk along the man 's lashes and across the wet surface of the eyeball , and the eye did not blink . The Australian and I both were wearing insect repellent and were not badly bothered by insects , but my eyes watered as we stood watching the aborigine . 
I turned to look at the lubra . She remained squatting on her heels all the time we were there ; like the man , she was entirely naked . Her long thin arms moved in a slow rhythmical gesture over the family possessions which were placed in front of her . There were two rubbing sticks for making fire , two stones shaped roughly like knives , a woven-root container which held a few pounds of dried worms and the dead body of some rodent . There was also a long wooden spear and a woomera , a spear-throwing device which gives the spear an enormous velocity and high accuracy . There was also a boomerang , elaborately carved . Everything was burnished with sweat and grease so that all of the objects seemed to have been carved from the same material and to be ageless . 
The two children , both boys , wandered around the Australian and me for a few moments and then returned to their work . They squatted on their heels with their heads bent far forward , their eyes only a few inches from the ground . They had located the runway of a colony of ants and as the ants came out of the ground , the boys picked them up , one at a time , and pinched them dead . The tiny bodies , dropped onto a dry leaf , made a pile as big as a small apple . 
The odor here was more powerful than that which surrounded the town aborigines . The smell at first was more surprising than unpleasant . It was also subtly familiar , for it was the odor of the human body , but multiplied innumerable times because of the fact that the aborigines never bathed . One 's impulse is to say that the smell was a stink and unpleasant . But that is a cliche and a dishonest one . The smell is sexual , but so powerfully so that a civilized nose must deny it . 
Their skin was covered with a thin coating of sweat and dirt which had almost the consistency of a second skin . They roll at night in ashes to keep warm and their second skin has a light dusty cast to it . In spots such as the elbows and knees the second skin is worn off and I realized the aborigines were much darker than they appeared ; as if the coating of sweat , dirt , and ashes were a cosmetic . The boys had beautiful dark eyes and unlike their father they brushed constantly at the flies and blinked their eyes . 
" That smell is something , eh , mate " ? the Australian asked . " They swear that every person smells different and every family smells different from every other . At the corroborees , when they get to dancing and sweating , you 'll see them rubbing up against a man who 's supposed to have a specially good smell . Idje , here " , and he nodded at the man , " is said to have great odor . The stink is all the same to me , but I really think they can make one another out blindfolded " . 
" Here , Idje , you fella like tabac " ? he said sharply . Idje still stared over our shoulders at the horizon . The Australian stopped trying to talk a pidgin I could understand , and spoke strange words from deep in his chest .  
It was a fortunate time in which to build , for the seventeenth century was a great period in Persian art . The architects , the tile and carpet makers , the potters , painters , calligraphers , and metalsmiths worked through Abbas 's reign and those of his successors to enrich the city . Travelers entering from the desert were confounded by what must have seemed an illusion : a great garden filled with nightingales and roses , cut by canals and terraced promenades , studded with water tanks of turquoise tile in which were reflected the glistening blue curves of a hundred domes . At the heart of all of this was the square , which one such traveler declared to be " as spacious , as pleasant and aromatick a Market as any in the Universe " . In time Isfahan came to be known as " half the world " , Isfahan nisf-i-jahan . 
In the early eighteenth century this fantastic city , then the size of London , started to decline . The Afghans invaded ; the Safavids fell from power ; the capital went elsewhere ; the desert encroached . Isfahan became more of a legend than a place , and now it is for many people simply a name to which they attach their notions of old Persia and sometimes of the East . They think of it as a kind of spooky museum in which they may half see and half imagine the old splendor . 
Those who actually get there find that it is n't spooky at all but as brilliant as a tile in sunlight . But even for them it remains a museum , or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a tomb , a tomb in which Persia lies well preserved but indeed dead . Everyone is ready to grant the Persians their history , but almost no one is willing to acknowledge their present . It seems that for Persia , and especially for this city , there are only two times : the glorious past and the corrupt , depressing , sterile present . The one apparent connection between the two is a score of buildings which somehow or other have survived and which naturally enough are called " historical monuments " . 
However , just as all the buildings have not fallen and flowed back to their original mud , so the values which wanted them and saw that they were built have not all disappeared . The values and talents which made the tile and the dome , the rug , the poem and the miniature , continue in certain social institutions which rise above the ordinary life of this city , as the great buildings rise above blank walls and dirty lanes . Often , too , the social institutions are housed in these pavilions and palaces and bridges , for these great structures are not simply " historical monuments " ; they are the places where Persians live . 
The promenade , for example , continues to take place on the Chahar Bagh , a mile-long garden of plane and poplar trees that now serves as the city 's principal street . ? t takes place as well along the terraces and through the arcades of the Khaju bridge , and also in the gardens of the square . On Fridays , the day when many Persians relax with poetry , talk , and a samovar , people do not , it is true , stream into Chehel Sotun — a pavilion and garden built by Shah Abbas /2 , in the seventeenth century — but they do retire into hundreds of pavilions throughout the city and up the river valley , which are smaller , more humble copies of the former . And of course religious life continues to center in the more famous mosques , and commercial life — very much a social institution — in the bazaar . Those three other great activities of the Persians , the bath , the teahouse , and the zur khaneh ( the latter a kind of club in which a leader and a group of men in an octagonal pit move through a rite of calisthenics , dance , chanted poetry , and music ) , do not take place in buildings to which entrance tickets are sold , but some of them occupy splendid examples of Persian domestic architecture : long , domed , chalk-white rooms with daises of turquoise tile , their end walls cut through to the orchards and the sky by open arches . 
But more important , and the thing which the casual traveler and the blind sojourner often do not see , is that these places and activities are often the settings in which Persians exercise their extraordinary aesthetic sensibilities . Water , air , fruit , poetry , music , the human form — these things are important to Persians , and they experience them with an intense and discriminating awareness . 
I should like , by the way , to make it clear that I am not using the word " Persians " carelessly . I do n't mean a few aesthetes who play about with sensations , like a young prince in a miniature dabbling his hand in a pool . These things are important to almost all Persians and perhaps most important to the most ordinary . The men crying love poems in an orchard on any summer 's night are as often as not the lutihaw , mustachioed toughs who spend most of their lives in and out of the local prisons , brothels , and teahouses . A few months ago it was a fairly typical landlord who in the dead of night lugged me up a mountainside to drink from a spring famous in the neighborhood for its clarity and flavor . Not long ago an acquaintance , a slick-headed water rat of a lad up from the maw of the city , stood on the balcony puffing his first cigarette in weeks . The air , he said , was just right ; a cigarette would taste particularly good . I really did n't know what he meant . It was a nice day , granted . But he knew ; he sniffed the air and licked it on his lip and knew as a vintner knows a vintage . 
The natural world then , plus poetry and some kinds of art , receives from the most ordinary of Persians a great deal of attention . The line of an eyebrow , the color of the skin , a ghazal from Hafiz , the purity of spring water , the long afternoon among the boughs which crowd the upper story of a pavilion — these things are noticed , judged , and valued . 
Nowhere in Isfahan is this rich aesthetic life of the Persians shown so well as during the promenade at the Khaju bridge . There has probably always been a bridge of some sort at the southeastern corner of the city . For one thing , there is a natural belt of rock across the river bed ; for another , it was here that one of the old caravan routes came in . It was to provide a safe and spacious crossing for these caravans , and also to make a pleasance for the city , that Shah Abbas /2 , in about 1657 built , of sun-baked brick , tile , and stone , the present bridge . It is a splendid structure . From upstream it looks like a long arcaded box laid across the river ; from downstream , where the water level is much lower , it is a high , elaborately facaded pavilion . 
The top story contains more than thirty alcoves separated from each other by spandrels of blue and yellow tile . At either end and in the center there are bays which contain nine greater alcoves as frescoed and capacious as church apses . Here , in the old days — when they had come to see the moon or displays of fireworks — sat the king and his court while priests , soldiers , and other members of the party lounged in the smaller alcoves between . 
Below , twenty vaults tunnel through the understructure of the bridge . These are traversed by another line of vaults , and thus rooms , arched on all four sides , are formed . Down through the axis of the bridge there is a long diminishing vista like a visual echo of piers and arches , while the vaults fronting upstream and down frame the sunset and sunrise , the mountains and river pools . Here , on the hottest day , it is cool beneath the stone and fresh from the water flowing in the sluices at the bottom of the vaults . 
On the downstream , or " pavilion " , side these vaults give out onto terraces twice as wide as the bridge itself . From the terraces — eighteen in all — broad flights of steps descend into the water or onto still more terraces barely above the level of the river . Out of water , brick , and tile they have made far more than just a bridge . 
On spring and summer evenings people leave their shops and houses and walk up through the lanes of the city to the bridge . It is a great spectacle . The bridge itself rises up from the river , light-flared and enormous , like the outdoor set for an epic opera . Crowds press along the terraces , down the steps , in and out of the arcades , massing against it as though it were a fortress under siege . All kinds come to walk in the promenade : merchants from the bazaar bickering over a deal ; a Bakhtiari khan in a cap and hacking jacket ; dervishes who stand with the stillness of the blind , their eyes filmed with rheum and visions ; the old Kajar princes arriving in their ancient limousines ; students , civil servants , beggars , musicians , hawkers , and clowns . Families go out to the edge of the terraces to sit on carpets around a samovar . Below , people line the steps , as though on bleachers , to watch the sky and river . Above , in the tiled prosceniums of the alcoves , boys sing the ghazals of Hafiz and Saadi , while at the very bottom , in the vaults , the toughs and blades of the city hoot and bang their drums , drink arak , play dice , and dance . 
Here in an evening Persians enjoy many of the things which are important to them : poetry , water , the moon , a beautiful face . To a stranger their delight in these things may seem paradoxical , for Persians chase the golden calf as much as any people . Many of them , moreover , are beginning to complain about the scarcity of Western amusements and to ridicule the old life of the bazaar merchant , the mullah , and the peasant . Nonetheless , they take time out — much time — from the game of grab and these new Western experiments to go to the gardens and riverbanks . Above all , they will stop in the middle of anything , anywhere , to hear or quote some poetry . 
Poetry in Persian life is far more than a common ground on which — in a society deeply fissured by antagonisms — all may stand . It contains , in fact , their whole outlook on life . And it is expressed , at least to their taste , in a perfect form . Poetry for a Persian is nothing less than truth and beauty . In most Western cultures today these twins have been sent away to the libraries and museums . In Persia , where practically speaking there are no museums or libraries or , for that matter , hardly any books , the twins run free . 
It is perhaps difficult to conceive , but imagine that tonight on London bridge the Teddy boys of the East End will gather to sing Marlowe , Herrick , Shakespeare , and perhaps some lyrics of their own . That , at any rate , is what happens at the Khaju bridge . Boys and men go along the riverbank or to the alcoves in the top arcade . Here in these little rooms — or stages arched open to the sky and river — they choose a few lines out of the hundreds they may know and sing them according to one of the modes into which Persian music is divided . Each mode is believed to have a specific attribute — one inducing pleasure , another generosity , another love , and so on , to include all of the emotions . The singer simply matches the poem to a mode ; for example , the mode of bravery to this anonymous folk poem : " They brought me news that Spring is in the plains And Ahmad 's blood the crimson tulip stains ; Go , tell his aged mother that her son Fought with a thousand foes , and he was one " . Or the mode of love to this fragment by a recent poet : " Know ye , fair folk who dwell on earth Or shall hereafter come to birth , That here , with dust upon his eyes , Iraj , the sweet-tongued singer , lies . In this true lover 's tomb interred A world of love lies sepulchred … " . 
These songs ( practically all Persian music , for that matter ) are limited to a range of two octaves . Yet within this limitation there is an astonishing variety : design as intricate as that in the carpet or miniature , with the melodic line like the painted or woven line often flowing into an arabesque .  Die Frist ist um , und wiederum verstrichen sind sieben Jahr , the Maestro quoted The Flying Dutchman , as he told of his career and wanderings , explaining that the number seven had significantly recurred in his life several times . 
The music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra , William Steinberg , has molded his group into a prominent musical organization , which is his life . When he added to his Pittsburgh commitments the directorship of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1958 , he conducted one hundred fifty concerts within nine months , " commuting " between the two cities . This schedule became too strenuous , even for the energetic and conscientious Mr. Steinberg . His London contract was rescinded , and now , he explains cheerfully , as a bright smile lightens his intense , mobile face , " I conduct only one hundred and twenty concerts " ! 
Our meeting took place in May , 1961 , during one of the Maestro 's stop-overs in New York , before he left for Europe . As we began to converse in the lounge of his Fifth Avenue hotel , his restlessness and sensitivity to light and sound became immediately apparent . Seeking an obscure , dark , relatively quiet corner in the airy room otherwise suffused with afternoon sunshine , he asked if the soft background music could be turned off . Unfortunately , it was Muzak , which automatically is piped into the public rooms , and which nolens volens had to be endured . As he talked about himself , time and again stuffing and dragging on his pipe , Steinberg began to relax and the initial hurried feeling grew faint and was dispelled . 
Did he come from a musical family ? Yes : though not professional musicians , they were a music-loving family . In his native Cologne , where his mother taught him to play the piano , he was able to read notes before he learned the alphabet . She even devised a system of colors , whereby the boy could easily distinguish the different note values . When he started school at the age of five-and-a-half , he could not understand why the alphabet begins with the letter A , instead of C , as in the scale . Because , like many other children , he intensely disliked practicing Czerny Etudes , he composed his own studies . When he was eight he began violin lessons . Soon he was playing in the Cologne Municipal Orchestra , and during World War /1 , , when musicians were scarce , he joined the opera orchestra as well . Steinberg claims that these early years of orchestra participation were of invaluable help to his career . " By observing the conductor " , he says with a twinkle in his eyes , " I learned how not to conduct " . 
The musician ran away from school when he was fifteen , but this escapade did not save him from the Gymnasium . Simultaneously , he pursued his musical studies at the conservatory , receiving sound training in counterpoint and harmony , as well in the violin and piano . His professional career began when he was twenty ; he became Otto Klemperer 's personal assistant at the Cologne Opera , and a year later was promoted to the position of regular conductor . 
Was n't this an unusually young age to fill such a responsible post ? Yes , the Maestro assented . 
Had he always wished to be a conductor ? No , originally he had hoped to become a concert pianist and had even performed as such . However , when he assumed the duties of a conductor , he relinquished his career as a pianist . 
Five years were spent with the Cologne Opera , after which he was called to Prague by Alexander von Zemlinsky , teacher of Arnold Sch.ouml ; nberg and Erich Korngold . In 1927 he succeeded Zemlinsky as opera director of the German Theater at Prague . During his tenure he also fulfilled guest engagements at the Berlin State Opera . Two years later he became director of the Frankfurt Opera , where he remained until he lost this position in 1933 through the rise of the Hitler regime . During these years the youthful conductor had contributed greatly to the high level of musical life in Germany . He had presented the first German performances of Puccini 's Manon Lescaut and de Falla 's La Vida Breve . The Frankfurt years were particularly noteworthy for his performance of Berg 's Wozzek soon after the Berlin premiere under Erich Kleiber , and the world premiere of Sch.ouml ; nberg 's Von heute auf morgen . At the outset of his career , Steinberg had dedicated himself to the advancement of contemporary music by vowing to do a Sch.ouml ; nberg work every year . In Frankfurt , too , he directed the Museum and Opera House concerts which , in addition to the standard repertoire , featured novelties like Erdmann 's Piano Concerto and Mahler 's Sixth Symphony . 
Because of the political upheaval in Germany in the 1930 's , Steinberg was forced to restrict his activities to the Jewish community . Through the Frankfurt Jewish Kulturbund he began to give sonata recitals in synagogues , with Cellist Emanuel Feuermann . As more and more Jewish musicians lost their jobs with professional organizations Steinberg united them into the Frankfurt Kulturbund Orchestra , which also gave guest performances in other German cities . In 1936 he accepted the leadership of the Berlin Kulturbund . In the fall of that year the best musicians of the Berlin and Frankfurt Kulturbund orchestras joined under the combined efforts of Bronislaw Hubermann and Steinberg to become the Palestine Orchestra — now known as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra — with Steinberg as founder-conductor . 
In 1938 , at the insistence of Arturo Toscanini , Steinberg left Germany for the United States , by way of Switzerland . After he had spent the first three years in New York as associate conductor , at Toscanini 's invitation , of the NBC Orchestra , he made numerous guest appearances throughout the United States and Latin America . In 1945 he became conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic . Seven years later he was asked to become director of the Pittsburgh Symphony . Since 1944 he has also conducted regularly at the San Francisco Opera , where he made his debut with a memorable performance of Verdi 's Falstaff . In recent years he has traveled widely in Europe , conducting in Italy , France , Austria , and Switzerland . He returned to Germany for the first time in 1953 , where he has since conducted in Cologne , Frankfurt , and Berlin . 
Where in Europe was he going now ? 
First of all , to Italy for a short vacation — Forte dei Marmi , a place he loves . Since it is not far from Viareggio , he will visit Puccini 's house , as he never fails to do , to pay his respects to the memory of the composer of La Boheme , which he considers one of Puccini 's masterpieces . Steinberg spoke with warmth and enthusiasm about Italy : " Rome is my second home . I consider it the center of the world and make it a point to be there once a year " . He will conduct two concerts at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia , as well as concerts in Munich and Cologne . " Then I return to the United States for engagements at the Hollywood Bowl and in Philadelphia " , he added . 
The forthcoming season in Pittsburgh also promises to be of unusual interest . There will be premieres of new works , made possible through Ford Foundation commissions : Carlisle Floyd 's Mystery , with Phyllis Curtin as soprano soloist . Other world premieres will be Gardner Read 's Third Symphony and Burle Marx 's Samba Concertante . 
" And next year we will do — also a Ford commission — a piano concerto by Elliott Carter , with Jacob Lateiner as soloist . Of course , I shall conduct Mahler and Bruckner works in the coming season , as usual . We 'll play Bruckner 's Fifth Symphony in the original version , and Mahler 's Seventh — the least accessible , known , and played of Mahler 's works . My Pittsburghers have become real addicts to Mahler and Bruckner " . 
He added that he also stresses the works of these favorite masters on tour , especially Mahler 's First and Fourth symphonies , and Das Lied von der Erde , and Bruckner 's Sixth — which is rarely played — and Seventh . Bruckner 's Eighth he refers to as " my travel symphony " . He recalled that in California after a critic had attacked him for " still trying to sell Bruckner to the Americans " , the public 's response at the next concert was a standing ovation . 
" Now that Bruno Walter is virtually in retirement and my dear friend Dimitri Mitropoulos is no longer with us , I am probably the only one — with the possible exception of Leonard Bernstein — who has this special affinity for and champions the works of Bruckner and Mahler " . 
Since he introduces so much modern music , I could not resist asking how he felt about it . 
" There was always and at all times a contemporary music and it expresses the era in which it was created . But I usually stick to the old phrase : 'Ich habe ein Amt , aber keine Meinung ( I hold an office , but I do not feel entitled to have an opinion ) . I consider it to be my job to expose the public to what is being written today " . 
With all his musical activities , did he have the time and inclination to do anything else ? He had just paid a brief visit to the Frick Collection to admire his favorite paintings by Rembrandt and Franz Hals . He was not enthusiastic over the newly acquired Claude Lorrain , but reminisced with pleasure over a Poussin exhibit he had been able to see in Paris a year ago . 
And how did he feel about modern art ? Again Steinberg was cautious and replied with a smile that he was not exposed to it enough to hazard comments . " As my wife puts it " , he said , again with a twinkle in his eyes , " all you know is your music . But after all , you never learned anything else " ! 
What did he do for relaxation ? Like his late colleague , Mitropoulos , he reads mystery stories , in particular Sir Arthur Conan Doyle . He cited Heine and Stendhal as favorites in literature . 
But his prime interest , apart from music , he insisted seriously , was his family — his wife , daughter and son . At the moment he was excited about his son 's having received the Prix de Rome in archaeology and was looking forward to being present this summer at the excavation of an Etruscan tomb . " Both children are musical and my wife is a music lover of unfailing instinct and judgment " . " IS the attitude of German youth comparable to that of " the angry young men' of England " ? was the topic for a round-table discussion at the Bayerische Rundfunk in Munich . 
I was chairman , the only not youthful participant . Since attack serves to stimulate interest in broadcasts , I added to my opening statement a sentence in which I claimed that German youth seemed to lack the enthusiasm which is a necessary ingredient of anger , and might be classified as uninterested and bored rather than angry . I was far from convinced of the truth of my statement , but could not think of anything that might evoke responses more quickly . 
" It is easy for you to talk " ; countered a twenty year old law student , " you travel around the world . We would like to do that too " . 
" But you want a job guaranteed when you return " , I continued my attack . " You must have some security " , said a young clerk . 
When I mentioned that for my first long voyage I did not even have the money for the return fare , but had trusted to luck that I would earn a sufficient amount , the young people looked at me doubtingly . One girl expressed what was obviously in their minds . 
" Would you advise us to act the same way ? You might have failed . I think it is rather foolhardy to trust to luck " . 
Others mentioned that I might have had to ask friends or even strangers for help and that to be stranded in a foreign country without sufficient funds did not contribute to international understanding . 
The debate needed no additional controversy and soon I could ask each individually what he expected from life , what his hopes were and what his fears . 
Though the four boys and two girls , the youngest nineteen years of age , the oldest twenty-four , came from varying backgrounds and had different professional and personal interests , there was surprising agreement among them . What they wished for most was security ; what they feared most was war or political instability in their own country . 
The ideal home , they agreed , would be a small private house or a city apartment of four to five rooms , just enough for a family consisting of husband , wife , and two children . No one wanted a larger family or no children , and none hoped for a castle or said that living in less settled circumstances would be satisfactory . 
All expressed interest in world affairs but no one offered to make any sacrifices to satisfy this interest .    ONCE again , as in the days of the Founding Fathers , America faces a stern test . That test , as President Kennedy forthrightly depicted it in his State of the Union message , will determine " whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure " . 
It is well then that in this hour both of " national peril " and of " national opportunity " we can take counsel with the men who made the nation . Incapable of self-delusion , the Founding Fathers found the crisis of their time to be equally grave , and yet they had confidence that America would surmount it and that a republic of free peoples would prosper and serve as an example to a world aching for liberty . 
Seven Founders — George Washington , Benjamin Franklin , John Adams , Thomas Jefferson , Alexander Hamilton , James Madison and John Jay — determined the destinies of the new nation . In certain respects , their task was incomparably greater than ours today , for there was nobody before them to show them the way . As Madison commented to Jefferson in 1789 , " We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us . Our successors will have an easier task " . 
They thought of themselves , to use Jefferson 's words , as " the Argonauts " who had lived in " the Heroic Age " . Accordingly , they took special pains to preserve their papers as essential sources for posterity . Their writings assume more than dramatic or patriotic interest because of their conviction that the struggle in which they were involved was neither selfish nor parochial but , rather , as Washington in his last wartime circular reminded his fellow countrymen , that " with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved " . 
Strong men with strong opinions , frank to the point of being refreshingly indiscreet , the Founding Seven were essentially congenial minds , and their agreements with each other were more consequential than their differences . Even though in most cases the completion of the definitive editions of their writings is still years off , enough documentation has already been assembled to warrant drawing a new composite profile of the leadership which performed the heroic dual feats of winning American independence and founding a new nation . 
Before merging them into a common profile it is well to remember that their separate careers were extraordinary . Certainly no other seven American statesmen from any later period achieved so much in so concentrated a span of years . 
Eldest of the seven , Benjamin Franklin , a New Englander transplanted to Philadelphia , wrote the most dazzling success story in our history . The young printer 's apprentice achieved greatness in a half-dozen different fields , as editor and publisher , scientist , inventor , philanthropist and statesman . Author of the Albany Plan of Union , which , had it been adopted , might have avoided the Revolution , he fought the colonists ' front-line battles in London , negotiated the treaty of alliance with France and the peace that ended the war , headed the state government of Pennsylvania , and exercised an important moderating influence at the Federal Convention .   ON a military mission for his native Virginia the youthful George Washington touched off the French and Indian War , then guarded his colony 's frontier as head of its militia . Commanding the Continental Army for six long years of the Revolution , he was the indispensable factor in the ultimate victory . Retiring to his beloved Mount Vernon , he returned to preside over the Federal Convention , and was the only man in history to be unanimously elected President . During his two terms the Constitution was tested and found workable , strong national policies were inaugurated , and the traditions and powers of the Presidential office firmly fixed . 
John Adams fashioned much of pre-Revolutionary radical ideology , wrote the constitution of his home state of Massachusetts , negotiated , with Franklin and Jay , the peace with Britain and served as our first Vice President and our second President .   HIS political opponent and lifetime friend , Thomas Jefferson , achieved immortality through his authorship of the Declaration of Independence , but equally notable were the legal and constitutional reforms he instituted in his native Virginia , his role as father of our territorial system , and his acquisition of the Louisiana Territory during his first term as President . 
During the greater part of Jefferson 's career he enjoyed the close collaboration of a fellow Virginian , James Madison , eight years his junior . The active sponsor of Jefferson 's measure for religious liberty in Virginia , Madison played the most influential single role in the drafting of the Constitution and in securing its ratification in Virginia , founded the first political party in American history , and , as Jefferson 's Secretary of State and his successor in the Presidency , guided the nation through the troubled years of our second war with Britain . 
If Franklin was an authentic genius , then Alexander Hamilton , with his exceptional precocity , consuming energy , and high ambition , was a political prodigy . His revolutionary pamphlets , published when he was only 19 , quickly brought him to the attention of the patriot leaders . Principal author of " The Federalist " , he swung New York over from opposition to the Constitution to ratification almost single-handedly . His collaboration with Washington , begun when he was the general 's aide during the Revolution , was resumed when he entered the first Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury . His bold fiscal program and his broad interpretation of the Constitution stand as durable contributions .   LESS dazzling than Hamilton , less eloquent than Jefferson , John Jay commands an equally high rank among the Founding Fathers . He served as president of the Continental Congress . He played the leading role in negotiating the treaty with Great Britain that ended the Revolution , and directed America 's foreign affairs throughout the Confederation period . As first Chief Justice , his strong nationalist opinions anticipated John Marshall . He ended his public career as a two-term governor of New York . 
These Seven Founders constituted an intellectual and social elite , the most respectable and disinterested leadership any revolution ever confessed . Their social status was achieved in some cases by birth , as with Washington , Jefferson and Jay ; in others by business and professional acumen , as with Franklin and Adams , or , in Hamilton 's case , by an influential marriage . Unlike so many of the power-starved intellectuals in underdeveloped nations of our own day , they commanded both prestige and influence before the Revolution started . 
As different physically as the tall , angular Jefferson was from the chubby , rotund Adams , the seven were striking individualists . Ardent , opinionated , even obstinate , they were amazingly articulate , wrote their own copy , and were masters of phrasemaking .   CAPABLE of enduring friendships , they were also stout controversialists , who could write with a drop of vitriol on their pens . John Adams dismissed John Dickinson , who voted against the Declaration of Independence , as " a certain great fortune and piddling genius " . Washington castigated his critic , General Conway , as being capable of " all the meanness of intrigue to gratify the absurd resentment of disappointed vanity " . And Hamilton , who felt it " a religious duty " to oppose Aaron Burr 's political ambitions , would have been a better actuarial risk had he shown more literary restraint . 
The Seven Founders were completely dedicated to the public service . Madison once remarked : " My life has been so much a public one " , a comment which fits the careers of the other six . Franklin retired from editing and publishing at the age of 42 , and for the next forty-two years devoted himself to public , scientific , and philanthropic interests . Washington never had a chance to work for an extended stretch at the occupation he loved best , plantation management . He served as Commander in Chief during the Revolution without compensation .   JOHN ADAMS took to heart the advice given him by his legal mentor , Jeremiah Gridley , to " pursue the study of the law , rather than the gain of it " . In taking account of seventeen years of law practice , Adams concluded that " no lawyer in America ever did so much business as I did " and " for so little profit " . When the Revolution broke out , he , along with Jefferson and Jay , abandoned his career at the bar , with considerable financial sacrifice . 
Hamilton , poorest of the seven , gave up a brilliant law practice to enter Washington 's Cabinet . While he was handling the multi-million-dollar funding operations of the Government he had to resort to borrowing small sums from friends . " If you can conveniently let me have twenty dollars " , he wrote one friend in 1791 when he was Secretary of the Treasury . 
To support his large family Hamilton went back to the law after each spell of public service . Talleyrand passed his New York law office one night on the way to a party . Hamilton was bent over his desk , drafting a legal paper by the light of a candle . The Frenchman was astonished . " I have just come from viewing a man who had made the fortune of his country , but now is working all night in order to support his family " , he reflected .   ALL seven combined ardent devotion to the cause of revolution with a profound respect for legality . John Adams asserted in the Continental Congress ' Declaration of Rights that the demands of the colonies were in accordance with their charters , the British Constitution and the common law , and Jefferson appealed in the Declaration of Independence " to the tribunal of the world " for support of a revolution justified by " the laws of nature and of nature 's God " . 
They fought hard , but they were forgiving to former foes , and sought to prevent vindictive legislatures from confiscating Tory property in violation of the Treaty of 1783 . 
This sense of moderation and fairness is superbly exemplified in an exchange of letters between John Jay and a Tory refugee , Peter Van Schaack . Jay had participated in the decision that exiled his old friend Van Schaack . Yet when , at war 's end , the ex-Tory made the first move to resume correspondence , Jay wrote him from Paris , where he was negotiating the peace settlement : 
" As an independent American I considered all who were not for us , and you amongst the rest , as against us , yet be assured that John Jay never ceased to be the friend of Peter Van Schaack " . 
The latter in turn assured him that " were I arraigned at the bar , and you my judge , I should expect to stand or fall only by the merits of my cause " . 
All seven recognized that independence was but the first step toward building a nation . " We have now a national character to establish " , Washington wrote in 1783 . " Think continentally " , Hamilton counseled the young nation . This new force , love of country , super-imposed upon — if not displacing — affectionate ties to one 's own state , was epitomized by Washington . His first inaugural address speaks of " my country whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love " . 
All sought the fruition of that nationalism in a Federal Government with substantial powers . Save Jefferson , all participated in the framing or ratification of the Federal Constitution . They supported it , not as a perfect instrument , but as the best obtainable . Historians have traditionally regarded the great debates of the Seventeen Nineties as polarizing the issues of centralized vs. limited government , with Hamilton and the nationalists supporting the former and Jefferson and Madison upholding the latter position .   THE state 's rights position was formulated by Jefferson and Madison in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves , but in their later careers as heads of state the two proved themselves better Hamiltonians than Jeffersonians . In purchasing Louisiana , Jefferson had to adopt Hamilton 's broad construction of the Constitution , and so did Madison in advocating the rechartering of Hamilton 's bank , which he had so strenuously opposed at its inception , and in adopting a Hamiltonian protective tariff . Indeed , the old Jeffersonians were far more atune to the Hamilton-oriented Whigs than they were to the Jacksonian Democrats .   WHEN , in 1832 , the South Carolina nullifiers adopted the principle of state interposition which Madison had advanced in his old Virginia Resolve , they elicited no encouragement from that senior statesman . In his political testament , " Advice to My Country " , penned just before his death , Madison expressed the wish " that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated . Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened ; and the disguised one , as the serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise " .   TOBACCO ROAD IS DEAD . LONG LIVE TOBACCO ROAD .  Nostalgic Yankee readers of Erskine Caldwell are today informed by proud Georgians that Tobacco Road is buried beneath a four-lane super highway , over which travel each day suburbanite businessmen more concerned with the Dow-Jones average than with the cotton crop . Thus we are compelled to face the urbanization of the South — an urbanization which , despite its dramatic and overwhelming effects upon the Southern culture , has been utterly ignored by the bulk of Southern writers . Indeed , it seems that only in today 's Southern fiction does Tobacco Road , with all the traditional trimmings of sowbelly and cornbread and mint juleps , continue to live — but only as a weary , overexploited phantom . 
Those writers known collectively as the " Southern school " have received accolades from even those critics least prone to eulogize ; according to many critics , in fact , the South has led the North in literature since the Civil War , both quantitatively and qualitatively . Such writers as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren have led the field of somewhat less important writers in a sort of post-bellum renaissance . It is interesting , however , that despite this strong upsurge in Southern writing , almost none of the writers has forsaken the firmly entrenched concept of the white-suited big-daddy colonel sipping a mint julep as he silently recounts the revenue from the season 's cotton and tobacco crops ; of the stereotyped Negro servants chanting hymns as they plow the fields ; of these and a host of other antiquated legends that deny the South its progressive leaps of the past century . This is not to say that the South is no longer agrarian ; such a statement would be the rankest form of oversimplification . But the South is , and has been for the past century , engaged in a wide-sweeping urbanization which , oddly enough , is not reflected in its literature . 
In 1900 the South was only 15% urban ; in 1950 it had become 47.1% urban . In a mere half-century the South has more than tripled its urban status . There is a New South emerging , a South losing the folksy traditions of an agrarian society with the rapidity of an avalanche — especially within recent decades . As the New South snowballs toward further urbanization , it becomes more and more homogeneous with the North — a tendency which Willard Thorp terms " Yankeefication " , as evidenced in such cities as Charlotte , Birmingham , and Houston . It is said that , even at the present stage of Southern urbanization , such a city as Atlanta is not distinctly unlike Columbus or Trenton . Undoubtedly even the old Southern stalwart Richmond has felt the new wind : William Styron mentions in his latest novel an avenue named for Bankhead McGruder , a Civil War general , now renamed , in typical California fashion , " Buena Vista Terrace " . The effects of television and other mass media are erasing regional dialects and localisms with a startling force . As for progress , the " backward South " can boast of Baton Rouge , which increased its population between 1940 and 1950 by two hundred and sixty-two percent , to 126,000 , the second largest growth of the period for all cities over 25,000 . 
The field , then , is ripe for new Southerners to step to the fore and write of this twentieth-century phenomenon , the Southern Yankeefication : the new urban economy , the city-dweller , the pains of transition , the labor problems ; the list is , obviously , endless . But these sources have not been tapped . Truman Capote is still reveling in Southern Gothicism , exaggerating the old Southern legends into something beautiful and grotesque , but as unreal as — or even more unreal than — yesterday . William Styron , while facing the changing economy with a certain uneasy reluctance , insists he is not to be classified as a Southern writer and yet includes traditional Southern concepts in everything he publishes . Even the great god Faulkner , the South 's one probable contender for literary immortality , has little concerned himself with these matters ; such are simply not within his bounded province . 
Where are the writers to treat these changes ? Has the agrarian tradition become such an addiction that the switch to urbanism is somehow dreaded or unwanted ? Perhaps present writers hypnotically cling to the older order because they consider it useful and reliable through repeated testings over the decades . Lacking the pioneer spirit necessary to write of a new economy , these writers seem to be contenting themselves with an old one that is now as defunct as Confederate money . 
An example of the changes which have crept over the Southern region may be seen in the Southern Negro 's quest for a position in the white-dominated society , a problem that has been reflected in regional fiction especially since 1865 . Today the Negro must discover his role in an industrialized South , which indicates that the racial aspect of the Southern dilemma has n't changed radically , but rather has gradually come to be reflected in this new context , this new coat of paint . The Negro faces as much , if not more , difficulty in fitting himself into an urban economy as he did in an agrarian one . This represents a gradual change in an ever-present social problem . But there have been abrupt changes as well : the sit-ins , the picket lines , the bus strikes — all of these were unheard-of even ten years ago . Today 's evidence , such as the fact that only three Southern states ( South Carolina , Alabama and Mississippi ) still openly defy integration , would have astounded many of yesterday 's Southerners into speechlessness . 
Other examples of gradual changes that have affected the Negro have been his moving up , row by row , in the busses ; his requesting , and often getting , higher wages , better working conditions , better schools — changes that were slowly emerging even before the Supreme Court decision of 1954 . Then came this decision , which sped the process of gaining equality ( or perhaps hindered it ; only historical evolution will determine which ) : an abrupt change . 
Since 1954 the Negro 's desire for social justice has led to an ironically anarchical rebellion . He has frequently refused to move from white lunch counters , refused to obey local laws which he considers unjust , while in other cases he has appealed to federal laws . This bold self-assertion , after decades of humble subservience , is indeed a twentieth-century phenomenon , an abrupt change in the Southern way of existence . A new order is thrusting itself into being . A new South is emerging after the post-bellum years of hesitation , uncertainty , and lack of action from the Negro in defining his new role in the amorphously defined socio-political organizations of the white man . 
The modern Negro has not made a decisive debut into Southern fiction . It is clear that , while most writers enjoy picturing the Negro as a woolly-headed , humble old agrarian who mutters " yassuhs " and " sho' nufs " with blissful deference to his white employer ( or , in Old South terms , " massuh " ) , this stereotype is doomed to become in reality as obsolete as Caldwell 's Lester . While there may still be many Faulknerian Lucas Beauchamps scattered through the rural South , such men appear to be a vanishing breed . Writers openly admit that the Negro is easier to write than the white man ; but they obviously mean by this , not a Negro personality , but a Negro type . Presenting an individualized Negro character , it would seem , is one of the most difficult assignments a Southern writer could tackle ; and the success of such an endeavor is , as suggested above , glaringly rare . 
Just as the Negro situation points up the gradual and abrupt changes affecting Southern life , it also points up the non-representation of urbanism in Southern literature . The book concerned with the Negro 's role in an urban society is rare indeed ; recently only Keith Wheeler 's novel , Peaceable Lane , has openly faced the problem . 
All but the most rabid of Confederate flag wavers admit that the Old Southern tradition is defunct in actuality and sigh that its passing was accompanied by the disappearance of many genteel and aristocratic traditions of the reputedly languid ante-bellum way of life . Many earlier writers , mourning the demise of the old order , tended to romanticize and exaggerate this " gracious Old South " imagery , creating such lasting impressions as Margaret Mitchell 's " Tara " plantation . Modern writers , who are supposed to keep their fingers firmly upon the pulse of their subjects , insist upon drawing out this legend , prolonging its burial , when it well deserves a rest after the overexploitation of the past century . Perhaps these writers have been too deeply moved by this romanticizing ; but they can hardly deny that , exaggerated or not , the old panorama is dead . As John T. Westbrook says in his article , " Twilight of Southern Regionalism " ( Southwest Review , Winter 1957 ) : " … The miasmal mausoleum where an Old South , already too minutely autopsied in prose and poetry , should be left to rest in peace , forever dead and ( let us fervently hope ) forever done with " . 
Westbrook further bemoans the Southern writers ' creation of an unreal image of their homeland , which is too readily assimilated by both foreign readers and visiting Yankees : " Our northerner is suspicious of all this crass evidence [ of urbanization ] presented to his senses . It bewilders and befuddles him . He is too deeply steeped in William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren . The fumes of progress are in his nose and the bright steel of industry towers before his eyes , but his heart is away in Yoknapatawpha County with razorback hogs and night riders . On this trip to the South he wants , above all else , to sniff the effluvium of backwoods-and-sand-hill subhumanity and to see at least one barn burn at midnight " . Obviously , such a Northern tourist 's purpose is somewhat akin to a child 's experience with Disneyland : he wants to see a world of make-believe . 
In the meantime , while the South has been undergoing this phenomenal modernization that is so disappointing to the curious Yankee , Southern writers have certainly done little to reflect and promote their region 's progress . Willard Thorp , in his new book American Writing in the Twentieth Century , observes , quite validly it seems : " … Certain subjects are conspicuously absent or have been only lightly touched . No southern novelist has done for Atlanta or Birmingham what Herrick , Dreiser , and Farrell did for Chicago or Dos Passos did for New York … There are almost no fictional treatments of the industrialized south " . Not a single Southern author , major or minor , has made the urban problems of an urban South his primary source material . 
Faulkner , for one , appears to be safe from the accusing fingers of all assailants in this regard . Faulkner culminates the Southern legend perhaps more masterfully than it has ever been , or could ever be , done . He has made it his , and his it remains , irrevocably . He treats it with a mythological , universal application . 
As his disciples boast , even though his emphasis is elsewhere , Faulkner does show his awareness of the changing order of the South quite keenly , as can be proven by a quick recalling of his Sartoris and Snopes families . Even two decades ago in Go Down , Moses Faulkner was looking to the more urban future with a glimmer of hope that through its youth and its new way of life the South might be reborn and the curse of slavery erased from its soil . Yet his concern even here is with a slowly changing socio-economic order in general , and he never deals with such specific aspects of this change as the urban and industrial impact . 
Faulkner traces , in his vast and overpowering saga of Yoknapatawpha County , the gradual changes which seep into the South , building layer upon layer of minute , subtle innovation which eventually tend largely to hide the Old Way . Thus Faulkner reminds us , and wisely , that the " new " South has gradually evolved out of the Old South , and consequently its agrarian roots persist . Yet he presents a realm of source material which may well serve other writers if not himself : the problems with which a New South must grapple in groping through a blind adolescence into the maturity of urbanization . With new mechanization the modern farmer must perform the work of six men : a machine stands between the agrarian and his soil . The thousands of city migrants who desert the farms yearly must readjust with even greater stress and tension : the sacred wilderness is gradually surrendering to suburbs and research parks and industrial areas .  
Another element to concern the choreographer is that of the visual devices of the theatre . Most avant-garde creators , true to their interest in the self-sufficiency of pure movement , have tended to dress their dancers in simple lines and solid colors ( often black ) and to give them a bare cyclorama for a setting . But Robert Rauschenberg , the neo-dadaist artist , has collaborated with several of them . He has designed a matching backdrop and costumes of points of color on white for Mr. Cunningham 's Summerspace , so that dancers and background merge into a shimmering unity . For Mr. Taylor 's Images and Reflections he made some diaphanous tents that alternately hide and reveal the performer , and a girl 's cape lined with grass . Mr. Nikolais has made a distinctive contribution to the arts of costume and decor . In fact , he calls his productions dance-theatre works of motion , shape , light , and sound . To raise the dancer out of his personal , pedestrian self , Mr. Nikolais has experimented with relating him to a larger , environmental orbit . He began with masks to make the dancer identify himself with the creature he appeared to be . He went on to use objects — hoops , poles , capes — which he employed as extensions of the body of the dancer , who moved with them . The depersonalization continued as the dancer was further metamorphosed by the play of lights upon his figure . In each case , the object , the color , even the percussive sounds of the electronic score were designed to become part of the theatrical being of the performer . The dancer who never loosens her hold on a parasol , begins to feel that it is part of herself . Or , clad from head to toe in fabric stretched over a series of hoops , the performer may well lose his sense of self in being a " finial " . As the dancer is depersonalized , his accouterments are animized , and the combined elements give birth to a new being . From this being come new movement ideas that utilize dancer and property as a single unit . 
Thus , the avant-garde choreographers have extended the scope of materials available for dance composition . But , since they have rejected both narrative and emotional continuity , how are they to unify the impressive array of materials at their disposal ? Some look deliberately to devices used by creators in the other arts and apply corresponding methods to their own work . Others , less consciously but quite probably influenced by the trends of the times , experiment with approaches that parallel those of the contemporary poet , painter , and musician . 
An approach that has appealed to some choreographers is reminiscent of Charles Olson 's statement of the process of projective verse : " one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception " . The creator trusts his intuition to lead him along a path that has internal validity because it mirrors the reality of his experience . He disdains external restrictions — conventional syntax , traditional metre . The unit of form is determined subjectively : " the Heart , by the way of the Breath , to the Line " . The test of form is fidelity to the experience , a gauge also accepted by the abstract expressionist painters . 
An earlier but still influential school of painting , surrealism , had suggested the way of dealing with the dream experience , that event in which seemingly incongruous objects are linked together through the curious associations of the subconscious . The resulting picture might appear a maze of restless confusions and contradictions , but it is more true to life than a portrait of an artificially contrived order . The contemporary painter tends to depict not the concrete objects of his experience but their essences as revealed in abstractions of their lines , colors , masses , and energies . He is still concerned , however , with a personal event . He accepts the accidents of his brushwork because they provide evidence of the vitality of the experience of creation . The work must be true to both the physical and the spiritual character of the experience . 
Some painters have less interest in the experience of the moment , with its attendant urgencies and ambiguities , than in looking beyond the flux of particular impressions to a higher , more serene level of truth . Rather than putting their trust in ephemeral sensations they seek form in the stable relationships of pure design , which symbolize an order more real than the disorder of the perceptual world . The concept remains subjective . But in this approach it is the artist 's ultimate insight , rather than his immediate impressions , that gives form to the work . 
Others look to more objective devices of order . The musician employing the serial technique of composition establishes a mathematical system of rotations that , once set in motion , determines the sequence of pitches and even of rhythms and intensities . The composer may reverse or invert the order of his original set of intervals ( or rhythms or dynamic changes ) . He may even alter the pattern by applying a scheme of random numbers . But he can not order his elements by will , either rational or inspired . The system works as an impersonal mechanism . Musicians who use the chance method also exclude subjective control of formal development . Again , the composer must select his own materials . But a tossing of coins , with perhaps the added safeguard of reference to the oracles of the I Ching , the Chinese Book of Changes , dictates the handling of the chosen materials . 
Avant-garde choreographers , seeking new forms of continuity for their new vocabulary of movements , have turned to similar approaches . Some let dances take their form from the experience of creation . According to Katherine Litz , " the becoming , the process of realization , is the dance " . The process stipulates that the choreographer sense the quality of the initial movement he has discovered and that he feel the rightness of the quality that is to follow it . The sequence may involve a sharp contrast : for example , a quiet meditative sway of the body succeeded by a violent leap ; or it may involve more subtle distinctions : the sway may be gradually minimized or enlarged , its rhythmic emphasis may be slightly modified , or it may be transferred to become a movement of only the arms or the head . Even the least alteration will change the quality . An exploration of these possible relationships constitutes the process of creation and thereby gives form to the dance . 
The approach to the depiction of the experience of creation may be analytic , as it is for Miss Litz , or spontaneous , as it is for Merle Marsicano . She , too , is concerned with " the becoming , the process of realization " , but she does not think in terms of subtle variations of spatial or temporal patterns . The design is determined emotionally : " I must reach into myself for the spring that will send me catapulting recklessly into the chaos of event with which the dance confronts me " . Looking back , Miss Marsicano feels that her ideas may have been influenced by those of Jackson Pollock . At one time she felt impelled to make dances that " moved all over the stage " , much as Pollock 's paintings move violently over the full extent of the canvas . But her conscious need was to break away from constricting patterns of form , a need to let the experience shape itself . 
Midi Garth also believes in subjective continuity that begins with the feeling engendered by an initial movement . It may be a free front-back swing of the leg , leading to a sideways swing of the arm that develops into a turn and the sensation of taking off from the ground . This became a dance called Prelude to Flight . A pervading quality of free lyricism and a building from turns close to the ground towards jumps into the air gives the work its central focus . 
Alwin Nikolais objects to art as an outpouring of personal emotion . He seeks to make his dancers more " godlike " by relating them to the impersonal elements of shape , light color , and sound . If his dancers are sometimes made to look as if they might be creatures from Mars , this is consistent with his intention of placing them in the orbit of another world , a world in which they are freed of their pedestrian identities . It is through the metamorphosed dancer that the germ of form is discovered . In his recognition of his impersonal self the dancer moves , and this self , in the " first revealed stroke of its existence " , states the theme from which all else must follow . The theme may be the formation of a shape from which other shapes evolve . It may be a reaction to a percussive sound , the following movements constituting further reactions . It may establish the relation of the figure of the dancer to light and color , in which case changes in the light or color will set off a kaleidescope of visual designs . Unconcerned with the practical function of his actions , the dancer is engrossed exclusively in their " motional content " . Movements unfold freely because they are uninhibited by emotional bias or purposive drive . But the metamorphosis must come first . 
Though he is also concerned with freeing dance from pedestrian modes of activity , Merce Cunningham has selected a very different method for achieving his aim . He rejects all subjectively motivated continuity , any line of action related to the concept of cause and effect . He bases his approach on the belief that anything can follow anything . An order can be chanced rather than chosen , and this approach produces an experience that is " free and discovered rather than bound and remembered " . Thus , there is freshness not only in the individual movements of the dance but in the shape of their continuity as well . Chance , he finds , enables him to create " a world beyond imagination " . He cites with pleasure the comment of a lady , who exclaimed after a concert : " Why , it 's extremely interesting . But I would never have thought of it myself " . 
The sequence of movements in a Cunningham dance is unlike any sequence to be seen in life . At one side of the stage a dancer jumps excitedly ; nearby , another sits motionless , while still another is twirling an umbrella . A man and a girl happen to meet ; they look straight at the audience , not at each other . He lifts her , puts her down , and walks off , neither pleased nor disturbed , as if nothing had happened . If one dancer slaps another , the victim may do a pirouette , sit down , or offer his assailant a fork and spoon . Events occur without apparent reason . Their consequences are irrelevant — or there are no consequences at all . 
The sequence is determined by chance , and Mr. Cunningham makes use of any one of several chance devices . He may toss coins ; he may take slips of paper from a grab bag . The answers derived by these means may determine not only the temporal organization of the dance but also its spatial design , special slips designating the location on the stage where the movement is to be performed . The other variables include the dancer who is to perform the movement and the length of time he is to take in its performance . The only factors that are personally set by the choreographer are the movements themselves , the number of the dancers , and the approximate total duration of the dance . The " approximate " is important , because even after the order of the work has been established by the chance method , the result is not inviolable . Each performance may be different . If a work is divided into several large segments , a last-minute drawing of random numbers may determine the order of the segments for any particular performance . And any sequence can not only change its positions in the work but can even be eliminated from it altogether . 
Mr. Cunningham tries not to cheat the chance method ; he adheres to its dictates as faithfully as he can . However , there is always the possibility that chance will make demands the dancers find impossible to execute . Then the choreographer must arbitrate . He must rearrange matters so that two performers do not bump into each other . He must construct transitions so that a dancer who is told to lie prone one second and to leap wildly the next will have some physical preparation for the leap .  
THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH were in greater agreement on sovereignty , through all their dispute about it , than were the Founding Fathers . The truth in their conflicting concepts was expounded by statesmen of the calibre of Webster and Calhoun , and defended in the end by leaders of the nobility of Lincoln and Lee . The people everywhere had grown meanwhile in devotion to basic democratic principles , in understanding of and belief in the federal balance , and in love of their Union . Repeated efforts — beginning with the Missouri Compromise of 1821 — were made by such master moderates as Clay and Douglas to resolve the difference peacefully by compromise , rather than clear thought and timely action . Even so , confusion in this period gained such strength ( from compromise and other factors ) that it led to the bloodiest war of the Nineteenth century . Nothing can show more than this the immensity of the danger to democratic peoples that lies in even relatively slight deviation from their true concept of sovereignty . 
The present issue in Atlantica — whether to transform an alliance of sovereign nations into a federal union of sovereign citizens — resembles the American one of 1787-89 rather than the one that was resolved by Civil War . And so I would only touch upon it now ( much as I have long wanted to write a book about it ) . I think it is essential , however , to pinpoint here the difference between the two concepts of sovereignty that went to war in 1861 — if only to see better how imperative is our need today to clarify completely our far worse confusion on this subject . 
The difference came down to this : The Southern States insisted that the United States was , in last analysis , what its name implied — a Union of States . To their leaders the Constitution was a compact made by the people of sovereign states , who therefore retained the right to secede from it . This right of the State , its upholders contended , was essential to maintain the federal balance and protect the liberty of the people from the danger of centralizing power in the Union government . The champions of the Union maintained that the Constitution had formed , fundamentally , the united people of America , that it was a compact among sovereign citizens rather than states , and that therefore the states had no right to secede , though the citizens could . Writing to Speed on August 24 , 1855 , Lincoln made the latter point clear . In homely terms whose timeliness is startling today , he thus declared his own right to secede . " 
We began by declaring that all men are created equal . We now practically read it , all men are created equal except negroes . When the Know-nothings get control , it will read , All men are created equal except negroes and foreigners and Catholics . When it comes to this , I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia , for instance , where despotism can be taken pure , without the base alloy of hypocrisy " . [ His emphasis ] 
When the Southern States exercised their " right to secede " , they formed what they officially styled " The Confederate States of America " . Dictionaries , as we have seen , still cite this government , along with the Articles of Confederation of 1781 , as an example of a confederacy . The fact is that the Southern Confederacy differed from the earlier one almost as much as the Federal Constitution did . The Confederate Constitution copied much of the Federal Constitution verbatim , and most of the rest in substance . It operated on , by and for the people individually just as did the Federal Constitution . It made substantially the same division of power between the central and state governments , and among the executive , legislative and judicial branches .  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONFEDERACY AND FEDERAL UNION IN 1861  Many believe — and understandably — that the great difference between the Constitution of the Southern Confederacy and the Federal Constitution was that the former recognized the right of each state to secede . But though each of its members had asserted this right against the Union , the final Constitution which the Confederacy signed on March 11 — nearly a month before hostilities began — included no explicit provision authorizing a state to secede . Its drafters discussed this vital point but left it out of their Constitution . Their President , Jefferson Davis , interpreted their Constitution to mean that it " admits of no coerced association " , but this reremained so doubtful that " there were frequent demands that the right to secede be put into the Constitution " . 
The Constitution of the Southern " Confederation " differed from that of the Federal Union only in two important respects : It openly , defiantly , recognized slavery — an institution which the Southerners of 1787 , even though they continued it , found so impossible to reconcile with freedom that they carefully avoided mentioning the word in the Federal Constitution . They recognized that slavery was a moral issue and not merely an economic interest , and that to recognize it explicitly in their Constitution would be in explosive contradiction to the concept of sovereignty they had set forth in the Declaration of 1776 that " all men are created equal , that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights , that among them are life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness … " . The other important difference between the two Constitutions was that the President of the Confederacy held office for six ( instead of four ) years , and was limited to one term . 
These are not , however , differences in federal structure . The only important differences from that standpoint , between the two Constitutions , lies in their Preambles . The one of 1861 made clear that in making their government the people were acting through their states , whereas the Preamble of 1787-89 expressed , as clearly as language can , the opposite concept , that they were acting directly as citizens . Here are the two Preambles :  FEDERAL CONSTITUTION , 1789  
" we the People of the United States , in order to form a more perfect Union , establish Justice , insure domestic Tranquility , provide for the common Defence , promote the general Welfare , and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity , do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America " .  CONFEDERATE CONSTITUTION , 1861  
" We the people of the Confederate States , each state acting in its sovereign and independent character , in order to form a permanent federal government , establish justice , insure domestic tranquility , and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and the guidance of Almighty God — do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America " . 
One is tempted to say that , on the difference between the concepts of sovereignty in these two preambles , the worst war of the Nineteenth century was fought . But though the Southern States , when drafting a constitution to unite themselves , narrowed the difference to this fine point by omitting to assert the right to secede , the fact remained that by seceding from the Union they had already acted on the concept that it was composed primarily of sovereign states . If the Union conceded this to them , the same right must be conceded to each remaining state whenever it saw fit to secede : This would destroy the federal balance between it and the states , and in the end sacrifice to the sovereignty of the states all the liberty the citizens had gained by their Union . 
Lincoln saw that the act of secession made the issue for the Union a vital one : Whether it was a Union of sovereign citizens that should continue to live , or an association of sovereign states that must fall prey either to " anarchy or despotism " . 
Much as he abhorred slavery , Lincoln was always willing to concede to each " slave state " the right to decide independently whether to continue or end it . Though his election was interpreted by many Southerners as the forerunner of a dangerous shift in the federal balance in favor of the Union , Lincoln himself proposed no such change in the rights the Constitution gave the states . After the war began , he long refused to permit emancipation of the slaves by Union action even in the Border States that stayed with the Union . He issued his Emancipation Proclamation only when he felt that necessity left him no other way to save the Union . In his Message of December 2 , 1862 , he put his purpose and his policy in these words — which I would call the Lincoln Law of Liberty-and-Union : " In giving freedom to the slave , we assure freedom to the free " . 
What Lincoln could not concede was that the states rather than the people were sovereign in the Union . He fought to the end to preserve it as a " government of the people , by the people , for the people " .  THE TRUTH ON EACH SIDE WON IN THE CIVIL WAR  The fact that the Americans who upheld the sovereignty of their states did this in order to keep many of their people more securely in slavery — the antithesis of individual liberty — made the conflict grimmer , and the greater . Out of this ordeal the citizen emerged , in the South as in the North , as America 's true sovereign , in " a new birth of freedom " , as Lincoln promised . But before this came about , 214,938 Americans had given their lives in battle for the two concepts of the sovereign rights of men and of states . 
On their decisive battlefield Lincoln did not distinguish between them when he paid tribute to the " brave men , living and dead , who fought here " . He understood that both sides were at fault , and he reached the height of saying so explicitly in his Second Inaugural . 
To my knowledge , Lincoln remains the only Head of State and Commander-in-Chief who , while fighting a fearful war whose issue was in doubt , proved man enough to say this publicly — to give his foe the benefit of the fact that in all human truth there is some error , and in all our error , some truth . So great a man could not but understand , too , that the thing that moves men to sacrifice their lives is not the error of their thought , which their opponents see and attack , but the truth which the latter do not see — any more than they see the error which mars the truth they themselves defend . 
It is much less difficult now than in Lincoln 's day to see that on both sides sovereign Americans had given their lives in the Civil War to maintain the balance between the powers they had delegated to the States and to their Union . They differed in the balance they believed essential to the sovereignty of the citizen — but the supreme sacrifice each made served to maintain a still more fundamental truth : That individual life , liberty and happiness depend on a right balance between the two — and on the limitation of sovereignty , in all its aspects , which this involves . The 140,414 Americans who gave " the last full measure of devotion " to prevent disunion , preserved individual freedom in the United States from the dangers of anarchy , inherent in confederations , which throughout history have proved fatal in the end to all associations composed primarily of sovereign states , and to the liberties of their people . But the fact that 70,524 other Americans gave the same measure of devotion to an opposing concept served Liberty-and-Union in other essential ways . 
Its appeal from ballots to bullets at Fort Sumter ended by costing the Southerners their right to have slaves — a right that was even less compatible with the sovereignty of man . The very fact that they came so near to winning by the wrong method , war , led directly to their losing both the war and the wrong thing they fought for , since it forced Lincoln to free their slaves as a military measure . There was a divine justice in one wrong thus undoing another . There was also a lesson , one that has served ever since to keep Americans , in their conflicts with one another , from turning from the ballot to the bullet . Yet though the Southern States lost the worst errors in their case , they did not lose the truth they fought for . The lives so many of them gave , to forestall what they believed would be a fatal encroachment by the Union on the powers reserved to their states have continued ever since to safeguard all Americans against freedom 's other foe .  As cells coalesced into organisms , they built new " unnatural " and internally controlled environments to cope even more successfully with the entropy-increasing properties of the external world . The useful suggestion of Professor David Hawkins which considers culture as a third stage in biological evolution fits quite beautifully then with our suggestion that science has provided us with a rather successful technique for building protective artificial environments . One wonders about its applicability to people . Will advances in human sciences help us build social structures and governments which will enable us to cope with people as effectively as the primitive combination of protein and nucleic acid built a structure of molecules which enabled it to adapt to a sea of molecular interaction ? The answer is of course yes . For the family is the simplest example of just such a unit , composed of people , which gives us both some immunity from , and a way of dealing with , other people . Social invention did not have to await social theory any more than use of the warmth of a fire had to await Lavoisier or the buoyant protection of a boat the formulations of Archimedes . But it has been during the last two centuries , during the scientific revolution , that our independence from the physical environment has made the most rapid strides . We have ample light when the sun sets ; the temperature of our homes is independent of the seasons ; we fly through the air , although gravity pulls us down ; the range of our voice ignores distance . At what stage are social sciences then ? Is the future of psychology akin to the rich future of physics at the time of Newton ? There is a haunting resemblance between the notion of cause in Copernicus and in Freud . And it is certainly no slight to either of them to compare both their achievements and their impact . 
Political theoretical understanding , although almost at a standstill during this century , did develop during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , and resulted in a flood of inventions which increased the possibility for man to coexist with man . Consitutional government , popular vote , trial by jury , public education , labor unions , cooperatives , communes , socialized ownership , world courts , and the veto power in world councils are but a few examples . Most of these , with horrible exceptions , were conceived as is a ship , not as an attempt to quell the ocean of mankind , nor to deny its force , but as a means to survive and enjoy it . The most effective political inventions seem to make maximum use of natural harbors and are aware that restraining breakwaters can play only a minor part in the whole scheme . Just as present technology had to await the explanations of physics , so one might expect that social invention will follow growing sociological understanding . We are desperately in the need of such invention , for man is still very much at the mercy of man . In fact the accumulation of the hardware of destruction is day by day increasing our fear of each other .  /3 ,  I want , therefore , to discuss a second and quite different fruit of science , the connection between scientific understanding and fear . There are certainly large areas of understanding in the human sciences which in themselves and even without political invention can help to dispel our present fears . Lucretius has remarked : " The reason why all Mortals are so gripped by fear is that they see all sorts of things happening in the earth and sky with no discernable cause , and these they attribute to the will of God " . Perhaps things were even worse then . It is difficult to reconstruct the primeval fears of man . We get some clue from a few remembrances of childhood and from the circumstance that we are probably not much more afraid of people now than man ever was . We are not now afraid of atomic bombs in the same way that people once feared comets . The bombs are as harmless as an automobile in a garage . We are worried about what people may do with them — that some crazy fool may " push the button " . 
I am certainly not adequately trained to describe or enlarge on human fears , but there are certain features of the fears dispelled by scientific explanations that stand out quite clearly . They are in general those fears that once seemed to have been amenable to prayer or ritual . They include both individual fears and collective ones . They arise in situations in which one believes that what happens depends not only on the external world , but also on the precise pattern of behavior of the individual or group . Often it is recognized that all the details of the pattern may not be essential to the outcome but , because the pattern was empirically determined and not developed through theoretical understanding , one is never quite certain which behavior elements are effective , and the whole pattern becomes ritualized . Yet often fear persists because , even with the most rigid ritual , one is never quite free from the uneasy feeling that one might make some mistake or that in every previous execution one had been unaware of the really decisive act . To say that science had reduced many such fears merely reiterates the obvious and frequent statement that science eliminated much of magic and superstition . But a somewhat more detailed analysis of this process may be illuminating . 
The frequently postulated antique worry that the daylight hours might dwindle to complete darkness apparently gave rise to a ritual and celebration which we still recognize . It is curious that even centuries of repetition of the yearly cycle did not induce a sufficient degree of confidence to allow people to abandon the ceremonies of the winter solstice . This and other fears of the solar system have disappeared gradually , first , with the Ptolemaic system and its built-in concept of periodicity and then , more firmly , with the Newtonian innovation of an universal force that could account quantitatively for both terrestial and celestial motions . This understanding provides a very simple example of the fact that one can eliminate fear without instituting any controls . In fact , although we have dispelled the fear , we have not necessarily assured ourselves that there are no dangers . There is still the remote possibility of planetoid collision . A meteor could fall on San Francisco . Solar activities could presumably bring long periods of flood or drought . Our understanding of the solar system has taught us to replace our former elaborate rituals with the appropriate action which , in this case , amounts to doing nothing . Yet we no longer feel uneasy . This almost trivial example is nevertheless suggestive , for there are some elements in common between the antique fear that the days would get shorter and shorter and our present fear of war . We , in our country , think of war as an external threat which , if it occurs , will not be primarily of our own doing . And yet we obviously also believe that the avoidance of the disaster depends in some obscure or at least uncertain way on the details of how we behave . What elements of our behavior are decisive ? Our weapons production , our world prestige , our ideas of democracy , our actions of trust or stubbornness or secrecy or espionage ? We have staved off a war and , since our behavior has involved all these elements , we can only keep adding to our ritual without daring to abandon any part of it , since we have not the slightest notion which parts are effective . 
I think that we are here also talking of the kind of fear that a young boy has for a group of boys who are approaching at night along the streets of a large city . If an automobile were approaching him , he would know what was required of him , even though he might not be able to act quickly enough . With the group of boys it is different . He does not know whether to look up or look aside , to put his hands in his pockets or to clench them at his side , to cross the street , or to continue on the same side . When confronted with a drunk or an insane person I have no notion of what any one of them might do to me or to himself or to others . I believe that what I do has some effect on his actions and I have learned , in a way , to commune with drunks , but certainly my actions seem to resemble more nearly the performance of a rain dance than the carrying out of an experiment in physics . I am usually filled with an uneasiness that through some unwitting slip all hell may break loose . Our inability to explain why certain people are fond of us frequently induces the same kind of ritual and malaise . We are forced , in our behavior towards others , to adopt empirically successful patterns in toto because we have such a minimal understanding of their essential elements . 
Our collective policies , group and national , are similarly based on voodoo , but here we often lack even the empirically successful rituals and are still engaged in determing them . We use terms from our personal experience with individuals such as " trust " , " cheat " , and " get tough " . We talk about national character in the same way that Copernicus talked of the compulsions of celestial bodies to move in circles . We perform elaborate international exhortations and ceremonies with virtually no understanding of social cause and effect . Small wonder , then , that we fear . 
The achievements which dispelled our fears of the cosmos took place three centuries ago . What additional roles has the scientific understanding of the 19th and 20th centuries played ? In the physical sciences , these achievements concern electricity , chemistry , and atomic physics . In the life sciences , there has been an enormous increase in our understanding of disease , in the mechanisms of heredity , and in bio — and physiological chemistry . The major effect of these advances appears to lie in the part they have played in the industrial revolution and in the tools which scientific understanding has given us to build and manipulate a more protective environment . In addition , our way of dealing directly with natural phenomena has also changed . Even in domains where detailed and predictive understanding is still lacking , but where some explanations are possible , as with lightning and weather and earthquakes , the appropriate kind of human action has been more adequately indicated . 
Apparently the population as a whole eventually acquires enough confidence in the explanations of the scientists to modify its procedures and its fears . How and why this process occurs would provide an interesting separate subject for study . In some areas , the progress is slower than in others . In agriculture , for example , despite the advances in biology , elaborate rituals tend to persist along with a continued sense of the imminence of some natural disaster . In child care , the opposite extreme prevails ; procedures change rapidly and parental confidence probably exceeds anything warranted by established psychological theory . There are many domains in which understanding has brought about widespread and quite appropriate reduction in ritual and fear . Much of the former extreme uneasiness associated with visions and hallucinations and with death has disappeared . The persistent horror of having a malformed child has , I believe , been reduced , not because we have gained any control over this misfortune , but precisely because we have learned that we have so little control over it . In fact , the recent warnings about the use of X-rays have introduced fears and ambiguities of action which now require more detailed understanding , and thus in this instance , science has momentarily aggravated our fears . In fact , insofar as science generates any fear , it stems not so much from scientific prowess and gadgets but from the fact that new unanswered questions arise , which , until they are understood , create uncertainty . 
Perhaps the most illuminating example of the reduction of fear through understanding is derived from our increased knowledge of the nature of disease . The situation with regard to our attitude and " control " of disease contains close analogies to problems confronting us with respect to people . The fear of disease was formerly very much the kind of fear I have tried to describe .    Nothing like Godot , he arrived before the hour . His letter had suggested we meet at my hotel at noon on Sunday , and I came into the lobby as the clock struck twelve . He was waiting . 
My wish to meet Samuel Beckett had been prompted by simple curiosity and interest in his work . American newspaper reviewers like to call his plays nihilistic . They find deep pessimism in them . Even so astute a commentator as Harold Clurman of The Nation has said that " Waiting for Godot " is " the concentrate … of the contemporary European … mood of despair " . But to me Beckett 's writing had seemed permeated with love for human beings and with a kind of humor that I could reconcile neither with despair nor with nihilism . Could it be that my own eyes and ears had deceived me ? Is his a literature of defeat , irrelevant to the social crises we face ? Or is it relevant because it teaches us something useful to know about ourselves ? 
I knew that a conversation with the author would not settle such questions , because a man is not the same as his writing : in the last analysis , the questions had to be settled by the work itself . Nevertheless I was curious . 
My curiosity was sharpened a day or two before the interview by a conversation I had with a well-informed teacher of literature , a Jesuit father , at a conference on religious drama near Paris . When Beckett 's name came into the discussion , the priest grew loud and told me that Beckett " hates life " . That , I thought , is at least one thing I can find out when we meet .   Beckett 's appearance is rough-hewn Irish . The features of his face are distinct , but not fine . They look as if they had been sculptured with an unsharpened chisel . Unruly hair goes straight up from his forehead , standing so high that the top falls gently over , as if to show that it really is hair and not bristle . One might say it combines the man ; own pride and humility . For he has the pride that comes of self-acceptance and the humility , perhaps of the same genesis , not to impose himself upon another . His light blue eyes , set deep within the face , are actively and continually looking . He seems , by some unconscious division of labor , to have given them that one function and no other , leaving communication to the rest of the face . The mouth frequently breaks into a disarming smile . The voice is light in timbre , with a rough edge that corresponds to his visage . The Irish accent is , as one would expect , combined with slight inflections from the French . His tweed suit was a baggy gray and green . He wore a brown knit sports shirt with no tie . 
We walked down the Rue de L'Arcade , thence along beside the Madeleine and across to a sidewalk cafe opposite that church . The conversation that ensued may have been engrossing but it could hardly be called world-shattering . For one thing , the world that Beckett sees is already shattered . His talk turns to what he calls " the mess " , or sometimes " this buzzing confusion " . I reconstruct his sentences from notes made immediately after our conversation . What appears here is shorter than what he actually said but very close to his own words . 
" The confusion is not my invention . We can not listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion . It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in . The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess . It is not a mess you can make sense of " . 
I suggested that one must let it in because it is the truth , but Beckett did not take to the word truth . 
" What is more true than anything else ? To swim is true , and to sink is true . One is not more true than the other . One can not speak anymore of being , one must speak only of the mess . When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence , they may be right , I do n't know , but their language is too philosophical for me . I am not a philosopher . One can only speak of what is in front of him , and that now is simply the mess " . 
Then he began to speak about the tension in art between the mess and form . Until recently , art has withstood the pressure of chaotic things . It has held them at bay . It realized that to admit them was to jeopardize form . " How could the mess be admitted , because it appears to be the very opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be " ? But now we can keep it out no longer , because we have come into a time when " it invades our experience at every moment . It is there and it must be allowed in " . 
I granted this might be so , but found the result to be even more attention to form than was the case previously . And why not ? How , I asked , could chaos be admitted to chaos ? Would not that be the end of thinking and the end of art ? If we look at recent art we find it preoccupied with form . Beckett 's own work is an example . Plays more highly formalized than " Waiting for Godot " , " Endgame " , and " Krapp 's Last Tape " would be hard to find . 
" What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art . It only means that there will be new form , and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else . The form and the chaos remain separate . The latter is not reduced to the former . That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation , because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates . To find a form that accommodates the mess , that is the task of the artist now " . 
Yet , I responded , could not similar things be said about the art of the past ? Is it not characteristic of the greatest art that it confronts us with something we can not clarify , demanding that the viewer respond to it in his own never-predictable way ? What is the history of criticism but the history of men attempting to make sense of the manifold elements in art that will not allow themselves to be reduced to a single philosophy or a single aesthetic theory ? Is n't all art ambiguous ? 
" Not this " , he said , and gestured toward the Madeleine . The classical lines of the church which Napoleon thought of as a Temple of Glory , dominated all the scene where we sat . The Boulevard de la Madeleine , the Boulevard Malesherbes , and the Rue Royale ran to it with graceful flattery , bearing tidings of the Age of Reason . " Not this . This is clear . This does not allow the mystery to invade us . With classical art , all is settled . But it is different at Chartres . There is the unexplainable , and there art raises questions that it does not attempt to answer " . 
I asked about the battle between life and death in his plays . Didi and Gogo hover on the edge of suicide ; Hamm 's world is death and Clov may or may not get out of it to join the living child outside . Is this life-death question a part of the chaos ? 
" Yes . If life and death did not both present themselves to us , there would be no inscrutability . If there were only darkness , all would be clear . It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable . Take Augustine 's doctrine of grace given and grace withheld : have you pondered the dramatic qualities in this theology ? Two thieves are crucified with Christ , one saved and the other damned . How can we make sense of this division ? In classical drama , such problems do not arise . The destiny of Racine 's Phedre is sealed from the beginning : she will proceed into the dark . As she goes , she herself will be illuminated . At the beginning of the play she has partial illumination and at the end she has complete illumination , but there has been no question but that she moves toward the dark . That is the play . Within this notion clarity is possible , but for us who are neither Greek nor Jansenist there is not such clarity . The question would also be removed if we believed in the contrary — total salvation . But where we have both dark and light we have also the inexplicable . The key word in my plays is 'perhaps ' " .   Given a theological lead , I asked what he thinks about those who find a religious significance to his plays . 
" Well , really there is none at all . I have no religious feeling . Once I had a religious emotion . It was at my first Communion . No more . My mother was deeply religious . So was my brother . He knelt down at his bed as long as he could kneel . My father had none . The family was Protestant , but for me it was only irksome and I let it go . My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died . At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old-school tie . Irish Catholicism is not attractive , but it is deeper . When you pass a church on an Irish bus , all the hands flurry in the sign of the cross . One day the dogs of Ireland will do that too and perhaps also the pigs " . 
But do the plays deal with the same facets of experience religion must also deal with ? 
" Yes , for they deal with distress . Some people object to this in my writing . At a party an English intellectual — so-called — asked me why I write always about distress . As if it were perverse to do so ! He wanted to know if my father had beaten me or my mother had run away from home to give me an unhappy childhood . I told him no , that I had had a very happy childhood . Then he thought me more perverse than ever . I left the party as soon as possible and got into a taxi . On the glass partition between me and the driver were three signs : one asked for help for the blind , another help for orphans , and the third for relief for the war refugees . One does not have to look for distress . It is screaming at you even in the taxis of London " . 
Lunch was over , and we walked back to the hotel with the light and dark of Paris screaming at us .   The personal quality of Samuel Beckett is similar to qualities I had found in the plays . He says nothing that compresses experience within a closed pattern . " Perhaps " stands in place of commitment . At the same time , he is plainly sympathetic , clearly friendly . If there were only the mess , all would be clear ; but there is also compassion . 
As a Christian , I know I do not stand where Beckett stands , but I do see much of what he sees . As a writer on the theater , I have paid close attention to the plays . Harold Clurman is right to say that " Waiting for Godot " is a reflection ( he calls it a distorted reflection ) " of the impasse and disarray of Europe 's present politics , ethic , and common way of life " . Yet it is not only Europe the play refers to . " Waiting for Godot " sells even better in America than in France . The consciousness it mirrors may have come earlier to Europe than to America , but it is the consciousness that most " mature " societies arrive at when their successes in technological and economic systematization propel them into a time of examining the not-strictly-practical ends of culture . America is now joining Europe in this " mature " phase of development . Whether any of us remain in it long will depend on what happens as a result of the technological and economic revolutions now going on in the countries of Asia and Africa , and also of course on how long the cold war remains cold .  Even Hemingway , for all his efforts to formulate a naturalistic morality in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms never maintained that sex was all . Hemingway 's fiction is supported by a " moral " backbone and in its search for ultimate meaning hints at a religious dimension . And D. H. Lawrence , in Fantasia of the Unconscious , protested vehemently against the overestimation of the sexual motive . Though sex in some form or other enters into all human activity and it was a good thing that Freud emphasized this aspect of human nature , it is fantastic to explain everything in terms of sex . " All is not sex " , declared Lawrence . Man is not confined to one outlet for his vital energy . The creative urge , for example , transcends the body and the self . 
But for the beat generation all is sex . Nothing is more revealing of the way of life and literary aspirations of this group than their attitude toward sex . For the beatnik , like the hipster , is in opposition to a society that is based on the repression of the sex instinct . He has elevated sex — not Eros or libido but pure , spontaneous , uninhibited sex — to the rank of the godhead ; it is Astarte , Ishtar , Venus , Yahwe , Dionysus , Christ , the mysterious and divine orgone energy flowing through the body of the universe . Jazz is sex , marijuana is a stimulus to sex , the beat tempo is adjusted to the orgiastic release of the sexual impulse . Lawrence Lipton , in The Holy Barbarians , stresses that for the beat generation sex is more than a source of pleasure ; it is a mystique , and their private language is rich in the multivalent ambiguities of sexual reference so that they dwell in a sexualized universe of discourse . The singular uncompromising force of their revolt against the cult of restraint is illustrated by their refusal to dance in a public place . The dance is but a disguised ritual for the expression of ungratified sexual desire . For this reason , too , their language is more forthright and earthy . The beatniks crave a sexual experience in which their whole being participates . 
It is therefore not surprising that they resist the lure of marriage and the trap of domesticity , for like cats they are determined not to tame their sexual energy . They withdraw to the underground of the slums where they can defy the precepts of legalized propriety . Unlike the heroes and flappers of the lost generation , they disdain the art of " necking " and " petting " . That is reserved for the squares . If they avoid the use of the pungent , outlawed four-letter word it is because it is taboo ; it is sacred . As Lipton , the prophet of the beat generation , declares : " In the sexual act , the beat are filled with mana , the divine power . This is far from the vulgar , leering sexuality of the middle-class square in heat " . This is the Holy Grail these knights of the orgasm pursue , this is the irresistible cosmic urge to which they respond . 
If Wilhelm Reich is the Moses who has led them out of the Egypt of sexual slavery , Dylan Thomas is the poet who offers them the Dionysian dialectic of justification for their indulgence in liquor , marijuana , sex , and jazz . In addition , they have been converted to Zen Buddhism , with its glorification of all that is " natural " and mysteriously alive , the sense that everything in the world is flowing . Thus , paradoxically , the beat writers resort to " religious " metaphors : they are in search of mana , the spiritual , the numinous , but not anything connected with formal religion . What they are after is the beatific vision . And Zen Buddhism , though it is extremely difficult to understand how these internal contradictions are reconciled , helps them in their struggle to achieve personal salvation through sexual release . 
The style of life chosen by the beat generation , the rhythm and ritual they have adopted as uniquely their own , is designed to enhance the value of the sexual experience . Jazz is good not only because it promotes wholeness but because of its decided sexual effect . Jazz is the musical language of sex , the vocabulary of the orgasm ; indeed , it is maintained that the sexual element in jazz , by freeing the listener of his inhibitions , can have therapeutic value . That is why , the argument runs , the squares are so fearful of jazz and yet perversely fascinated by it . Instead of giving themselves spontaneously to the orgiastic release that jazz can give them , they undergo psychoanalysis or flirt with mysticism or turn to prostitutes for satisfaction . Thus jazz is transmuted into something holy , the sacred road to integration of being . Jazz , like sex , is a mystique . It is not a substitute for sex but a dynamic expression of the creative impulse in unfettered man . 
The mystique of sex , combined with marijuana and jazz , is intended to provide a design for living . Those who are sexually liberated can become creatively alive and free , their instincts put at the service of the imagination . Righteous in their denunciation of all that makes for death , the beat prophets bid all men become cool cats ; let them learn to " swing " freely , to let go , to become authentically themselves , and then perhaps civilization will be saved . The beatnik , seceding from a society that is fatally afflicted with a deathward drive , is concerned with his personal salvation in the living present . If he is the child of nothingness , if he is the predestined victim of an age of atomic wars , then he will consult only his own organic needs and go beyond good and evil . He will not curb his instinctual desires but release the energy within him that makes him feel truly and fully alive , even if it is only for this brief moment before the apocalypse of annihilation explodes on earth . 
That is why the members of the beat generation proudly assume the title of the holy barbarians ; they will destroy the shrines , temples , museums , and churches of the state that is the implacable enemy of the life they believe in . Apart from the categorical imperative they derive from the metaphysics of the orgasm , the only affirmation they are capable of making is that art is their only refuge . Their writing , born of their experiments in marijuana and untrammeled sexuality , reflects the extremity of their existential alienation . The mind has betrayed them , reason is the foe of life ; they will trust only their physical sensations , the wisdom of the body , the holy promptings of the unconscious . With lyrical intensity they reveal what they hate , but their faith in love , inspired by the revolutionary rhythms of jazz , culminates in the climax of the orgasm . Their work mirrors the mentality of the psychopath , rootless and irresponsible . Their rebellion against authoritarian society is not far removed from the violence of revolt characteristic of the juvenile delinquent . 
And the life they lead is undisciplined and for the most part unproductive , even though they make a fetish of devoting themselves to some creative pursuit — writing , painting , music . They are non-conformists on principle . When they express themselves it is incandescent hatred that shines forth , the rage of repudiation , the ecstasy of negation . It is sex that obsesses them , sex that is at the basis of their aesthetic creed . What they discuss with dialectical seriousness is the degree to which sex can inspire the Muse . Monogamy is the vice from which the abjectly fearful middle class continue to suffer , whereas the beatnik has the courage to break out of that prison of respectability . One girl describes her past , her succession of broken marriages , the abortions she has had and finally confesses that she loves sex and sees no reason why she must justify her passion . If it is an honest feeling , then why should she not yield to it ? " Most often " , she says , " it 's the monogamous relationship that is dishonest " . There is nothing holy in wedlock . This girl soon drops the bourgeois pyschiatrist who disapproves of her life . She finds married life stifling and every prolonged sex relationship unbearably monotonous . 
This confession serves to make clear in part what is behind this sexual revolution : the craving for sensation for its own sake , the need for change , for new experiences . Boredom is death . In the realm of physical sensations , sex reigns supreme . Hence the beatniks sustain themselves on marijuana , jazz , free swinging poetry , exhausting themselves in orgies of sex ; some of them are driven over the borderline of sanity and lose contact with reality . One beat poet composes a poem , " Lines on a Tijuana John " , which contains a few happy hints for survival . The new fact the initiates of this cult have to learn is that they must move toward simplicity . The professed mission of this disaffiliated generation is to find a new way of life which they can express in poetry and fiction , but what they produce is unfortunately disordered , nourished solely on the hysteria of negation . 
Who are the creative representatives of this movement ? Nymphomaniacs , junkies , homosexuals , drug addicts , lesbians , alcoholics , the weak , the frustrated , the irresolute , the despairing , the derelicts and outcasts of society . They embrace independent poverty , usually with a " shack-up " partner who will help support them . They are full of contempt for the institution of matrimony . Their previous legalized marriages do not count , for they hold the laws of the state null and void . They feel they are leagued against a hostile , persecutory world , faced with the concerted malevolent opposition of squares and their hirelings , the police . This is the rhetoric of righteousness the beatniks use in defending their way of life , their search for wholeness , though their actual existence fails to reach these " religious " heights . One beatnik got the woman he was living with so involved in drugs and self-analysis and all-night sessions of sex that she was beginning to crack up . What obsessions had she picked up during these long nights of talk ? Sex as the creative principle of the universe , the secret of primitive religion , the life of myth . Everything in the final analysis reduced itself to sexual symbolism . In his chapter on " The Loveways of the Beat Generation " , Lipton spares the reader none of the sordid details . No one asks questions about the free union of the sexes in West Venice so long as the partners share the negative attitudes of the group . 
The women who come to West Venice , having forsaken radicalism , are interested in living only for the moment , in being constantly on the move . Others who are attracted to this Mecca of the beat generation are homosexuals , heroin addicts , and smalltime hoodlums . Those who are sexual deviants are naturally drawn to join the beatniks . Since the homosexuals widely use marijuana , they do not have to be initiated . Part of the ritual of sex is the use of marijuana . As Lipton puts it : " The Eros is felt in the magic circle of marijuana with far greater force , as a unifying principle in human relationships , than at any other time except , perhaps , in the mutual metaphysical orgasms . The magic circle is , in fact , a symbol of and preparation for the metaphysical orgasm " . Under the influence of marijuana the beatnik comes alive within and experiences a wonderfully enhanced sense of self as if he had discovered the open sesame to the universe of being . Carried high on this " charge " , he composes " magical " poetry that captures the organic rhythms of life in words . If he thus achieves a lyrical , dreamlike , drugged intensity , he pays the price for his indulgence by producing work — Allen Ginsberg 's " Howl " is a striking example of this tendency — that is disoriented , Dionysian but without depth and without Apollonian control . For drugs are in themselves no royal road to creativity . How is the beat poet to achieve unity of form when he is at the same time engaged in a systematic derangement of senses . 
If love reflects the nature of man , as Ortega y Gasset believes , if the person in love betrays decisively what he is by his behavior in love , then the writers of the beat generation are creating a new literary genre .     
There were fences in the old days when we were children . Across the front of a yard and down the side , they were iron , either spiked along the top or arched in half circles . Alley fences were made of solid boards higher than one 's head , but not so high as the golden glow in a corner or the hollyhocks that grew in a line against them . Side fences were hidden beneath lilacs and hundred-leaf roses ; front fences were covered with Virginia creeper or trumpet vines or honeysuckle . Square corner — and gate posts were an open-work pattern of cast-iron foliage ; they were topped by steeples complete in every detail : high-pitched roof , pinnacle , and narrow gable . On these posts the gates swung open with a squeak and shut with a metallic clang . 
The only extended view possible to anyone less tall than the fences was that obtained from an upper bough of the apple tree . The primary quality of that view seems , now , to have been its quietness , but that can not at the time have impressed us . What one actually remembers is its greenness . From high in the tree , the whole block lay within range of the eye , but the ground was almost nowhere visible . One looked down on a sea of leaves , a breaking wave of flower . Every path from back door to barn was covered by a grape-arbor , and every yard had its fruit trees . In the center of any open space remaining our grandfathers had planted syringa and sweet-shrub , snowball , rose-of-Sharon and balm-of-Gilead . From above one could only occasionally catch a glimpse of life on the floor of this green sea : a neighbor 's gingham skirt flashing into sight for an instant on the path beneath her grape-arbor , or the movement of hands above a clothesline and the flutter of garments hung there , half-way down the block . 
That was one epoch : the apple-tree epoch . Another had ended before it began . Time is a queer thing and memory a queerer ; the tricks that time plays with memory and memory with time are queerest of all . From maturity one looks back at the succession of years , counts them and makes them many , yet can not feel length in the number , however large . In a stream that turns a mill-wheel there is a lot of water ; the mill-pond is quiet , its surface dark and shadowed , and there does not seem to be much water in it . Time in the sum is nothing . And yet — a year to a child is an eternity , and in the memory that phase of one 's being — a certain mental landscape — will seem to have endured without beginning and without end . The part of the mind that preserves dates and events may remonstrate , " It could have been like that for only a little while " ; but true memory does not count nor add : it holds fast to things that were and they are outside of time . 
Once , then — for how many years or how few does not matter — my world was bound round by fences , when I was too small to reach the apple tree bough , to twist my knee over it and pull myself up . That world was in scale with my own smallness . I have no picture in my mind of the garden as a whole — that I could not see — but certain aspects of certain corners linger in the memory : wind-blown , frost-bitten , white chrysanthemums beneath a window , with their brittle brown leaves and their sharp scent of November ; ripe pears lying in long grass , to be turned over by a dusty-slippered foot , cautiously , lest bees still worked in the ragged , brown-edged holes ; hot-colored verbenas in the corner between the dining-room wall and the side porch , where we passed on our way to the pump with the half-gourd tied to it as a cup by my grandmother for our childish pleasure in drinking from it . 
It was mother who planted the verbenas . I think that my grandmother was not an impassioned gardener : she was too indulgent a lover of dogs and grandchildren . My great-grandmother , I have been told , made her garden her great pride ; she cherished rare and delicate plants like oleanders in tubs and wall-flowers and lemon verbenas in pots that had to be wintered in the cellar ; she filled the waste spots of the yard with common things like the garden heliotrope in a corner by the woodshed , and the plantain lilies along the west side of the house . These my grandmother left in their places ( they are still there , more persistent and longer-lived than the generations of man ) and planted others like them , that flourished without careful tending . Three of these only were protected from us by stern commandment : the roses , whose petals might not be collected until they had fallen , to be made into perfume or rose-tea to drink ; the peonies , whose tight sticky buds would be blighted by the laying on of a finger , although they were not apparently harmed by the ants that crawled over them ; and the poppies . I have more than once sat cross-legged in the grass through a long summer morning and watched without touching while a poppy bud higher than my head slowly but visibly pushed off its cap , unfolded , and shook out like a banner in the sun its flaming vermilion petals . Other flowers we might gather as we pleased : myrtle and white violets from beneath the lilacs ; the lilacs themselves , that bloomed so prodigally but for the most part beyond our reach ; snowballs ; hollyhock blossoms that , turned upside down , make pink-petticoated ladies ; and the little , dark blue larkspur that scattered its seed everywhere . 
More potent a charm to bring back that time of life than this record of a few pictures and a few remembered facts would be a catalogue of the minutiae which are of the very stuff of the mind , intrinsic , because they were known in the beginning not by the eye alone but by the hand that held them . Flowers , stones , and small creatures , living and dead . Pale yellow snapdragons that by pinching could be made to bite ; seed-pods of the balsams that snapped like fire-crackers at a touch ; red-and-yellow columbines whose round-tipped spurs were picked off and eaten for the honey in them ; morning-glory buds which could be so grasped and squeezed that they burst like a blown-up paper bag ; bright flowers from the trumpet vine that made " gloves " on the ends of ten waggling fingers . Fuzzy caterpillars , snails with their sensitive horns , struggling grasshoppers held by their long hind legs and commanded to " spit tobacco , spit " . Dead fledgling birds , their squashed-looking nakedness and the odor of decay that clung to the hand when they had been buried in our graveyard in front of the purple flags . And the cast shell of a locust , straw-colored and transparent , weighing nothing , fragile but entire , with eyes like bubbles and a gaping slit down its back . Every morning early , in the summer , we searched the trunks of the trees as high as we could reach for the locust shells , carefully detached their hooked claws from the bark where they hung , and stabled them , a weird faery herd , in an angle between the high roots of the tulip tree , where no grass grew in the dense shade … . We collected " lucky stones " — all the creamy translucent pebbles , worn smooth and round , that we could find in the driveway . When these had been pocketed , we could still spend a morning cracking open other pebbles for our delight in seeing how much prettier they were inside than their dull exteriors indicated . We showed them to each other and said " Would you have guessed … " ? Squatting on our haunches beside the flat stone we broke them on , we were safe behind the high closed gates at the end of the drive : safe from interruption and the observation and possible amusement of the passers-by . Thus shielded , we played many foolish games in comfortable unselfconsciousness ; even when the fences became a part of the game — when a vine-embowered gate-post was the Sleeping Beauty 's enchanted castle , or when Rapunzel let down her golden hair from beneath the crocketed spire , even then we paid little heed to those who went by on the path outside . 
We enjoyed a paradoxical freedom when we were still too young for school . In the heat of the summer , the garden solitudes were ours alone ; our elders stayed in the dark house or sat fanning on the front porch . They never troubled themselves about us while we were playing , because the fence formed such a definite boundary and " Do n't go outside the gate " was a command so impossible of misinterpretation . We were not , however , entirely unacquainted with the varying aspects of the street . We were forbidden to swing on the gates , lest they sag on their hinges in a poor-white-trash way , but we could stand on them , when they were latched , rest our chins on the top , and stare and stare , committing to memory , quite unintentionally , all the details that lay before our eyes . 
The street that is full now of traffic and parked cars then and for many years drowsed on an August afternoon in the shade of the curbside trees , and silence was a weight , almost palpable , in the air . Every slight sound that rose against that pressure fell away again , crushed beneath it . A hay-wagon moved slowly along the gutter , the top of it swept by the low boughs of the maple trees , and loose straws were left hanging tangled among the leaves . A wheel squeaked on a hub , was still , and squeaked again . If a child watched its progress he whispered , " Hay , hay , load of hay — make a wish and turn away " , and then stared rigidly in the opposite direction until the sound of the horses ' feet returned no more . When the hay wagon had gone , and an interval passed , a huckster 's cart might turn the corner . The horse walked , the reins were slack , the huckster rode with bowed shoulders , his forearms across his knees . Sleepily , as if half-reluctant to break the silence , he lifted his voice : " Rhu-beb-ni-ice fresh rhu-beb today " ! The lazy sing-song was spaced in time like the drone of a bumble-bee . No one seemed to hear him , no one heeded . The horse plodded on , and he repeated his call . It became so monotonous as to seem a part of the quietness . After his passage , the street was empty again . The sun moved slant-wise across the sky and down ; the trees ' shadows circled from street to sidewalk , from sidewalk to lawn . At four-o'clock , or four-thirty , the coming of the newsboy marked the end of the day ; he tossed a paper toward every front door , and housewives came down to their steps to pick them up and read what their neighbors had been doing . 
The streets of any county town were like this on any sunshiny afternoon in summer ; they were like this fifty-odd years ago , and yesterday . But the fences were still in place fifty-odd years ago , and when we stood on the gate to look over , the sidewalk under our eyes was not cement but two rows of paving stones with grass between and on both sides . The curb was a line of stone laid edgewise in the dirt and tilted this way and that by frost in the ground or the roots of trees . Opposite every gate was a hitching post or a stone carriage-step , set with a rusty iron ring for tying a horse . The street was unpaved and rose steeply toward the center ; it was mud in wet weather and dust , ankle-deep , in dry , and could be crossed only at the corner where there were stepping stones . It had a bucolic atmosphere that it has lost long since . The hoofmarks of cattle and the prints of bare feet in the mud or in the dust were as numerous as the traces of shod horses . Cows were kept in backyard barns , boys were hired to drive them to and from the pasture on the edge of town , and familiar to the ear , morning and evening , were the boys ' coaxing voices , the thud of hooves , and the thwack of a stick on cowhide .  
It is worth dwelling in some detail on the crisis of this story , because it brings together a number of characteristic elements and makes of them a curious , riddling compound obscurely but centrally significant for Mann 's work . 
The wife , Amra , and her lover are both savagely portrayed , she as incarnate sensuality , " voluptuous " and " indolent " , possibly " a mischief maker " , with " a kind of luxurious cunning " to set against her apparent simplicity , her " birdlike brain " . L.auml ; utner , for his part , " belonged to the present-day race of small artists , who do not demand the utmost of themselves " , and the bitter description of the type includes such epithets as " wretched little poseurs " , the devastating indictment " they do not know how to be wretched decently and in order " , and the somewhat extreme prophecy , so far not fulfilled : " They will be destroyed " . 
The trick these two play upon Jacoby reveals their want not simply of decency but of imagination as well . His appearance as Lizzy evokes not amusement but horror in the audience ; it is a spectacle absolutely painful , an epiphany of the suffering flesh unredeemed by spirit , untouched by any spirit other than abasement and humiliation . At the same time the multiple transvestitism involved — the fat man as girl and as baby , as coquette pretending to be a baby — touches for a moment horrifyingly upon the secret sources of a life like Jacoby 's , upon the sinister dreams which form the sources of any human life . 
The music which L.auml ; utner has composed for this episode is for the most part " rather pretty and perfectly banal " . But it is characteristic of him , we are told , " his little artifice " , to be able to introduce " into a fairly vulgar and humorous piece of hackwork a sudden phrase of genuine creative art " . And this occurs now , at the refrain of Jacoby 's song — at the point , in fact , of the name " Lizzy " - ; a modulation described as " almost a stroke of genius " . " A miracle , a revelation , it was like a curtain suddenly torn away to reveal something nude " . It is this modulation which reveals to Jacoby his own frightful abjection and , simultaneously , his wife 's infidelity . By the same means he perceives this fact as having communicated itself to the audience ; he collapses , and dies . 
In the work of every artist , I suppose , there may be found one or more moments which strike the student as absolutely decisive , ultimately emblematic of what it is all about ; not less strikingly so for being mysterious , as though some deeply hidden constatation of thoughts were enciphered in a single image , a single moment . So here . The horrifying humor , the specifically sexual embarrassment of the joke gone wrong , the monstrous image of the fat man dressed up as a whore dressing up as a baby ; the epiphany of that quivering flesh ; the bringing together around it of the secret liaison between indolent , mindless sensuality and sharp , shrewd talent , cleverness with an occasional touch of genius ( which , however , does not know " how to attack the problem of suffering " ) ; the miraculous way in which music , revelation and death are associated in a single instant — all this seems a triumph of art , a rather desperate art , in itself ; beyond itself , also , it evokes numerous and distant resonances from the entire body of Mann 's work . 
When I try to work out my reasons for feeling that this passage is of critical significance , I come up with the following ideas , which I shall express very briefly here and revert to in a later essay . 
Love is the crucial dilemma of experience for Mann 's heroes . The dramatic construction of his stories characteristically turns on a situation in which someone is simultaneously compelled and forbidden to love . The release , the freedom , involved in loving another is either terribly difficult or else absolutely impossible ; and the motion toward it brings disaster . 
This prohibition on love has an especially poignant relation to art ; it is particularly the artist ( Tonio Kr.ouml ; ger , Aschenbach , Leverk.uuml ; hn ) who suffers from it . The specific analogy to the dilemma of love is the problem of the " breakthrough " in the realm of art . 
Again , the sufferings and disasters produced by any transgression against the commandment not to love are almost invariably associated in one way or another with childhood , with the figure of a child . 
Finally , the theatrical ( and perversely erotic ) notions of dressing up , cosmetics , disguise , and especially change of costume ( or singularity of costume , as with Cipolla ) , are characteristically associated with the catastrophes of Mann 's stories . 
We shall return to these statements and deal with them more fully as the evidence for them accumulates . For the present it is enough to note that in the grotesque figure of Jacoby , at the moment of his collapse , all these elements come together in prophetic parody . Professionally a lawyer , that is to say associated with dignity , reserve , discipline , with much that is essentially middle-class , he is compelled by an impossible love to exhibit himself dressed up , disguised — that is , paradoxically , revealed — as a child , and , worse , as a whore masquerading as a child . That this abandonment takes place on a stage , during an 'artistic' performance , is enough to associate Jacoby with art , and to bring down upon him the punishment for art ; that is , he is suspect , guilty , punishable , as is anyone in Mann 's stories who produces illusion , and this is true even though the constant elements of the artist-nature , technique , magic , guilt and suffering , are divided in this story between Jacoby and L.auml ; utner . 
It appears that the dominant tendency of Mann 's early tales , however pictorial or even picturesque the surface , is already toward the symbolic , the emblematic , the expressionistic . In a certain perfectly definite way , the method and the theme of his stories are one and the same . 
Something of this can be learned from " The Way to the Churchyard " ( 1901 ) , an anecdote about an old failure whose fit of anger at a passing cyclist causes him to die of a stroke or seizure . There is no more " plot " than that ; only slightly more , perhaps , than a newspaper account of such an incident would give . The artistic interest , then , lies in what the encounter may be made to represent , in the power of some central significance to draw the details into relevance and meaningfulness . 
The first sentence , with its platitudinous irony , announces an emblematic intent : " The way to the churchyard ran along beside the highroad , ran beside it all the way to the end ; that is to say , to the churchyard " . And the action is consistently presented with regard for this distinction . The highroad , one might say at first , belongs to life , while the way to the churchyard belongs to death . But that is too simple , and wo n't hold up . As the first sentence suggests , both roads belong to death in the end . But the highroad , according to the description of its traffic , belongs to life as it is lived in unawareness of death , while the way to the churchyard belongs to some other sort of life : a suffering form , an existence wholly comprised in the awareness of death . Thus , on the highroad , a troop of soldiers " marched in their own dust and sang " , while on the footpath one man walks alone . 
This man 's isolation is not merely momentary , it is permanent . He is a widower , his three children are dead , he has no one left on earth ; also he is a drunk , and has lost his job on that account . His name is Praisegod Piepsam , and he is rather fully described as to his clothing and physiognomy in a way which relates him to a sinister type in the author 's repertory — he is a forerunner of those enigmatic strangers in " Death in Venice " , for example , who represent some combination of cadaver , exotic , and psychopomp . 
This strange person quarrels with a cyclist because the latter is using the path rather than the highroad . The cyclist , a sufficiently commonplace young fellow , is not named but identified simply as " Life " — that and a license number , which Piepsam uses in addressing him . " Life " points out that " everybody uses this path " , and starts to ride on . Piepsam tries to stop him by force , receives a push in the chest from " Life " , and is left standing in impotent and growing rage , while a crowd begins to gather . His rage assumes a religious form ; that is , on the basis of his own sinfulness and abject wretchedness , Piepsam becomes a prophet who in his ecstasy and in the name of God imprecates doom on Life — not only the cyclist now , but the audience , the world , as well : " all you light-headed breed " . This passion brings on a fit which proves fatal . Then an ambulance comes along , and they drive Praisegod Piepsam away . 
This is simple enough , but several more points of interest may be mentioned as relevant . The season , between spring and summer , belongs to life in its carefree aspect . Piepsam 's fatal rage arises not only because he can not stop the cyclist , but also because God will not stop him ; as Piepsam says to the crowd in his last moments : " His justice is not of this world " . 
Life is further characterized , in antithesis to Piepsam , as animal : the image of a dog , which appears at several places , is first given as the criterion of amiable , irrelevant interest aroused by life considered simply as a spectacle : a dog in a wagon is " admirable " , " a pleasure to contemplate " ; another wagon has no dog , and therefore is " devoid of interest " . Piepsam calls the cyclist " cur " and " puppy " among other things , and at the crisis of his fit a little fox-terrier stands before him and howls into his face . The ambulance is drawn by two " charming " little horses . 
Piepsam is not , certainly , religious in any conventional sense . His religiousness is intimately , or dialectically , connected with his sinfulness ; the two may in fact be identical . His unsuccessful strivings to give up drink are represented as religious strivings ; he keeps a bottle in a wardrobe at home , and " before this wardrobe Praisegod Piepsam had before now gone literally on his knees , and in his wrestlings had bitten his tongue — and still in the end capitulated " . 
The cyclist , by contrast , blond and blue-eyed , is simply unreflective , unproblematic Life , " blithe and carefree " . " He made no claims to belong to the great and mighty of this earth " . 
Piepsam is grotesque , a disturbing parody ; his end is ridiculous and trivial . He is " a man raving mad on the way to the churchyard " . But he is more interesting than the others , the ones who come from the highroad to watch him , more interesting than Life considered as a cyclist . And if I have gone into so much detail about so small a work , that is because it is also so typical a work , representing the germinal form of a conflict which remains essential in Mann 's writing : the crude sketch of Piepsam contains , in its critical , destructive and self-destructive tendencies , much that is enlarged and illuminated in the figures of , for instance , Naphta and Leverk.uuml ; hn . 
In method as well as in theme this little anecdote with its details selected as much for expressiveness and allegory as for " realism " , anticipates a kind of musical composition , as well as a kind of fictional composition , in which , as Leverk.uuml ; hn says , " there shall be nothing unthematic " . It resembles , too , pictures such as D.uuml ; rer and Bruegel did , in which all that looks at first to be solely pictorial proves on inspection to be also literary , the representation of a proverb , for example , or a deadly sin . 
" Gladius Dei " ( 1902 ) resembles " The Way to the Churchyard " in its representation of a conflict between light and dark , between " Life " and a spirit of criticism , negation , melancholy , but it goes considerably further in characterizing the elements of this conflict . 
The monk Savonarola , brought over from the Renaissance and placed against the background of Munich at the turn of the century , protests against the luxurious works displayed in the art-shop of M. Bluthenzweig ; in particular against a Madonna portrayed in a voluptuous style and modeled , according to gossip , upon the painter 's mistress . Hieronymus , like Piepsam , makes his protest quite in vain , and his rejection , though not fatal , is ridiculous and humiliating ; he is simply thrown out of the shop by the porter . On the street outside , Hieronymus envisions a holocaust of the vanities of this world , such a burning of artistic and erotic productions as his namesake actually brought to pass in Florence , and prophetically he issues his curse : " Gladius Dei super terram cito et velociter " .  The " reality " to which they respond is rationally empty and their art is an imitation of the inescapable powerfulness of this unknown and empty world . Their artistic rationale is given to the witness of unreason . 
These polar concerns ( imitation vs. formalism ) reflect a philosophical and religious situation which has been developing over a long period of time . The breakdown of classical structures of meaning in all realms of western culture has given rise to several generations of artists who have documented the disintegrative processes . Thus the image of man has suffered complete fragmentation in personal and spiritual qualities , and complete objectification in sub-human and quasi-mechanistic powers . The image of the world tends to reflect the hostility and indifference of man or else to dissolve into empty spaces and overwhelming mystery . The image of God has simply disappeared . All such imitations of negative quality have given rise to a compensatory response in the form of a heroic and highly individualistic humanism : if man can neither know nor love reality as it is , he can at least invent an artistic " reality " which is its own world and which can speak to man of purely personal and subjective qualities capable of being known and worthy of being loved . The person of the artist becomes a final bastion of meaning in a world rendered meaningless by the march of events and the decay of classical religious and philosophical systems . 
Whatever pole of this contrast one emphasizes and whatever the tension between these two approaches to understanding the artistic imagination , it will be readily seen that they are not mutually exclusive , that they belong together . Without the decay of a sense of objective reference ( except as the imitation of mystery ) , the stress on subjective invention would never have been stimulated into being . And although these insights into the nature of art may be in themselves insufficient for a thoroughgoing philosophy of art , their peculiar authenticity in this day and age requires that they be taken seriously and gives promise that from their very substance , new and valid chapters in the philosophy of art may be written . For better or worse we can not regard " imitation " in the arts in the simple mode of classical rationalism or detached realism . A broader concept of imitation is needed , one which acknowledges that true invention is important , that the artist 's creativity in part transcends the non-artistic causal factors out of which it arises . On the other hand , we can not regard artistic invention as pure , uncaused , and unrelated to the times in which it occurs . We need a doctrine of imitation to save us from the solipsism and futility of pure formalism . Accordingly , it is the aim of this essay to advance a new theory of imitation ( which I shall call mimesis in order to distinguish it from earlier theories of imitation ) and a new theory of invention ( which I shall call symbol for reasons to be stated hereafter ) .  THE MIMETIC IMAGINATION IN THE ARTS  The word " mimesis " ( " imitation " ) is usually associated with Plato and Aristotle . For Plato , " imitation " is twice removed from reality , being a poor copy of physical appearance , which in itself is a poor copy of ideal essence . All artistic and mythological representations , therefore , are " imitations of imitations " and are completely superseded by the truth value of " dialectic " , the proper use of the inquiring intellect . In Plato 's judgment , the arts play a meaningful role in society only in the education of the young , prior to the full development of their intellectual powers . Presupposed in Plato 's system is a doctrine of levels of insight , in which a certain kind of detached understanding is alone capable of penetrating to the most sublime wisdom . Aristotle also tended to stratify all aspects of human nature and activity into levels of excellence and , like Plato , he put the pure and unimpassioned intellect on the top level . The Poetics , in affirming that all human arts are " modes of imitation " , gives a more serious role to artistic mimesis than did Plato . But Aristotle kept the principle of levels and even augmented it by describing in the Poetics what kinds of character and action must be imitated if the play is to be a vehicle of serious and important human truths . For both Plato and Aristotle artistic mimesis , in contrast to the power of dialectic , is relatively incapable of expressing the character of fundamental reality . 
The central concern of Erich Auerbach 's impressive volume called Mimesis is to describe the shift from a classic theory of imitation ( based upon a recognition of levels of truth ) to a Christian theory of imitation in which the levels are dissolved . Following the theme of Incarnation in the Gospels , the Christian artist and critic sees in the most commonplace and ordinary events " figures " of divine power and reality . Here artistic realism involves the audience in an impassioned participation in events whose overtones and implications are transcendent . Artistic mimesis under Christian influence records the involvement of all persons , however humble , in a divine drama . The artist , unlike the philosopher , is not a removed observer aiming at neutral and rarified high levels of abstraction . He is the conveyor of a sacred reality by which he has been grasped . I have chosen to use the word " mimesis " in its Christian rather than its classic implications and to discover in the concrete forms of both art and myth powers of theological expression which , as in the Christian mind , are the direct consequence of involvement in historical experience , which are not reserved , as in the Greek mind , only to moments of theoretical reflection . 
In the first instance , " mimesis " is here used to mean the recalling of experience in terms of vivid images rather than in terms of abstract ideas or conventional designations . By " image " is meant not only a visual presentation , but also remembered sensations of any of the five senses plus the feelings which are immediately conjoined therewith . This is the primary function of the imagination operating in the absence of the original experiential stimulus by which the images were first appropriated . Mimesis is the nearest possible thing to the actual re-living of experience , in which the imagining person recovers through images something of the force and depth characteristic of experience itself . The images themselves , like their counterparts in experience , are not neutral qualities to be surveyed dispassionately ; they are fields of force exerting a unique influence on the sensibilities and a unique relatedness to one another . They bring an inextricable component of value within themselves , with attractions and repulsions native to their own quality . As in experience one is seized by given entities and their interrelations and is forced to respond in value feelings to them , so one is similarly seized in the mimetic presentation of images . Mimesis here is not to be confused with literalism or realism in the conventional sense . A word taken in its dictionary meaning , a photographic image of a recognizable object , the mere picturing of a " scene " tends to lose experiential vividness and to connote such conventional abstractions as to invite neutral reception without the incitement of value feelings . Similarly experience itself can be conventionalized so that people react to certain preconceived clues for behavior without awareness of the vitality of their experiential field . A truly vivid imagination moves beyond the conventional recollection to a sense of immediacy . 
The mimetic character of the imaginative consciousness tends to express itself in the presentation of artistic forms and materials . When words can be used in a more fresh and primitive way so that they strike with the force of sights and sounds , when tones of sound and colors of paint and the carven shape all strike the sensibilities with an undeniable force of data in and of themselves , compelling the observer into an attitude of attention , all this imitates the way experience itself in its deepest character strikes upon the door of consciousness and clamors for entrance . These are like the initial ways in which the world forces itself upon the self and thrusts the self into decision and choice . The presence of genuine mimesis in art is marked by the persistence with which the work demands attention and compels valuation even though it is but vaguely understood . 
Underlying these conceptions of mimesis are certain presuppositions concerning the nature of primary human experience which require some exposition before the main argument can proceed . Experience is not seen , as it is in classical rationalism , as presenting us initially with clear and distinct objects simply located in space and registering their character , movements , and changes on the tabula rasa of an uninvolved intellect . Neither is primary experience understood according to the attitude of modern empiricism in which nothing is thought to be received other than signals of sensory qualities producing their responses in the appropriate sense organs . Primary feelings of the world come neither as a collection of clearly known objects ( houses , trees , implements , etc. ) nor a collection of isolated and neutral sensory qualities . In contrast to all this , primary data are data of a self involved in environing processes and powers . 
The most primitive feelings are rudimentary value feelings , both positive and negative : a desire to appropriate this or that part of the environment into oneself ; a desire to avoid and repel this or that other part . These desires presuppose a sense of causally efficacious powers in which one is involved , some working for one 's good , others threatening ill . Gone is the tabula rasa of the mind . In its place is a passionate consciousness grasped and molded to feelings of positive or negative values even as the actions of one 's life are determined by constellations of process in which one is caught . 
The principal defender of this view of primary experience as " causal efficacy " is Alfred North Whitehead . Our most elemental and unavoidable impressions , he says , are those of being involved in a large arena of powers which have a longer past than our own , which are interrelated in a vast movement through the present toward the future . We feel the quality of these powers initially as in some degree wholesome or threatening . Later abstractive and rational processes may indicate errors of judgment in these apprehensions of value , but the apprehensions themselves are the primary stuff of experience . It takes a great deal of abstraction to free oneself from the primitive impression of larger unities of power and influence and to view one 's world simply as a collection of sense data arranged in such and such sequence and pattern , devoid of all power to move the feelings and actions except in so far as they present themselves for inspection . Whitehead is here questioning David Hume 's understanding of the nature of experience ; he is questioning , also , every epistemology which stems from Hume 's presupposition that experience is merely sense data in abstraction from causal efficacy , and that causal efficacy is something intellectually imputed to the world , not directly perceived . What Hume calls " sensation " is what Whitehead calls " perception in the mode of presentational immediacy " which is a sophisticated abstraction from perception in the mode of causal efficacy . As long as perception is seen as composed only of isolated sense data , most of the quality and interconnectedness of existence loses its objectivity , becomes an invention of consciousness , and the result is a philosophical scepticism . Whitehead contends that the human way of understanding existence as a unity of interlocking and interdependent processes which constitute each other and which cause each other to be and not to be is possible only because the basic form of such an understanding , for all its vagueness and tendency to mistake the detail , is initially given in the way man feels the world . In this respect experience is broader and full of a richer variety of potential meanings than the mind of man or any of his arts or culture are capable of making clear and distinct . 
A chief characteristic of experience in the mode of causal efficacy is one of derivation from the past . Both I and my feelings come up out of a chain of events that fan out into the past into sources that are ultimately very unlike the entity which I now am .  After only eighteen years of non-interference , there were already indications of melioration , though " in a slight degree " , to be sure . 
There were more indications by the mid-twentieth century . I leave it to the statisticians to say what they were , but I noticed several a few years ago , during an automobile ride from Memphis to Hattiesburg . In town after town my companion pointed out the Negro school and the White school , and in every instance the former made a better appearance ( it was newer , for one thing ) . It really looked as if a change of the sort predicted by Booker T. Washington had been going on . But with the renewal of interference in 1954 ( as with its beginning in 1835 ) , the improvement was impaired . 
For over a hundred years Southerners have felt that the North was picking on them . It 's infuriating , this feeling that one is being picked on , continually , constantly . By what right of superior virtue , Southerners ask , do the people of the North do this ? The traditional strategy of the South has been to expose the vices of the North , to demonstrate that the North possessed no superior virtue , to " show the world that " ( as James 's Christopher Newman said to his adversaries ) " however bad I may be , you 're not quite the people to say it " . 
In the pre-Civil War years , the South argued that the slave was not less humanely treated than the factory worker of the North . At the present time , the counter-attack takes the line that there 's no more of the true spirit of " integration " in the North than in the South . The line is a pretty good one . 
People talk about " the law of the land " . The expression has become quite a cliche . But people ca n't be made to integrate , socialize ( the two are inseparable by Southern standards ) by law . 
I was having lunch not long ago ( apologies to N. V. Peale ) with three distinguished historians ( one specializing in the European Middle Ages , one in American history , and one in the Far East ) , and I asked them if they could name instances where the general mores had been radically changed with " deliberate speed , majestic instancy " ( Francis Thompson 's words for the Hound of Heaven 's pursuit ) by judicial fiat . They did n't seem to be able to think of any . 
A Virginia judge a while back cited a Roman jurist to the effect that ten years might be a reasonable length of time for such a change . But I suspect that the old Roman was referring to change made under military occupation — the sort of change which Tacitus was talking about when he said , " They make a desert , and call it peace " ( " Solitudinem faciunt , pacem appellant " . ) . 
Moreover , the law of the land is not irrevocable ; it can be changed ; it has been , many times . Mr. Justice Taney 's Dred Scott decision in 1857 was unpopular in the North , and soon became a dead letter . Prohibition was the law of the land , but it was unpopular ( how many of us oldsters took up drinking in prohibition days , drinking was so gay , so fashionable , especially in the sophisticated Northeast ! ) and was repealed . The cliche loses its talismanic virtue in the light of a little history . 
The Declaration of Independence says that " governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed " . The phrase " consent of the governed " needs a hard look . How do we define it ? Is the consent of the governed a numerical majority ? Calhoun dealt with this question in his " Disquisition on Government " . 
To guard against the tyranny of a numerical majority , Calhoun developed his theory of " concurrent majority " , which , he said , " by giving to each portion of the community which may be unequally affected by the action of government , a negative on the others , prevents all partial or local legislation " . Who will say that our country is even now a homogeneous community ? that regional peculiarities do not still exist ? that the Court order does not unequally affect the Southern region ? Who will deny that in a vast portion of the South the Federal action is incompatible with the Jeffersonian concept of " the consent of the governed " ? 
Circumstances alter cases . A friend of mine in New Mexico said the Court order had caused no particular trouble out there , that all had gone as merry as a marriage bell . He seemed a little surprised that it should have caused any particular trouble anywhere . I murmured something about a possible difference between New Mexico 's history and Mississippi 's . 
One can meet with aloofness almost anywhere : the TOOLONG viewpoint , It Does n't Affect Us ! Southern Liberals ( there are a good many ) — especially if they 're rich — often exhibit blithe insouciance . The trouble here is that it 's almost too easy to take the high moral ground when it does n't cost you anything . You 've already sent your daughter to Miss X 's select academy for girls and your son to Mr. Y 's select academy for boys , and you can be as liberal as you please with strict impunity . If there 's no suitable academy in your own neighborhood , there 's always New England . New England academies welcome fugitives from the provinces , South as well as West . They may even enroll a colored student or two for show , though he usually turns out to be from Thailand , or any place other than the American South . It would be interesting to know how much " integration " there is in the famous , fashionable colleges and prep schools of New England . A recent newspaper report said there were five Negroes in the 1960 graduating class of nearly one thousand at Yale ; that is , about one-half of one per cent , which looks pretty " tokenish " to me , especially in an institution which professes to be " national " . 
I must confess that I prefer the Liberal who is personally affected , who is willing to send his own children to a mixed school as proof of his faith . I leave out of account the question of the best interests of the children , the question of what their best interests really are . I 'm talking about the grand manner of the Liberal — North and South — who is not affected personally . If these people were denied a voice ( do they have a moral right to a voice ? ) , what voices would be left ? Who is involved willy nilly ? Well , after everybody has followed the New England pattern of segregating one 's children into private schools , only the poor folks are left . And it is precisely in this poorer economic class that one finds , and has always found , the most racial friction .   A dear , respected friend of mine , who like myself grew up in the South and has spent many years in New England , said to me not long ago : " I ca n't forgive New England for rejecting all complicity " . Being a teacher of American literature , I remembered Whittier 's " Massachusetts to Virginia " , where he said : " But that one dark loathsome burden ye must stagger with alone , And reap the bitter harvest which ye yourselves have sown " . There is a legend ( Hawthorne records it in his " English Notebooks " . and one finds it again in Thomas Nelson Page ) to the effect that the Mayflower on its second voyage brought a cargo of Negro slaves . Whether historically a fact or not , the legend has a certain symbolic value . 
Complicity is an embarrassing word . It is something which most of us try to get out from under . Like the cowboy in Stephen Crane 's " Blue Hotel " , we run around crying , " Well , I did n't do anything , did I " ? Robert Penn Warren puts it this way in " Brother to Dragons " : " The recognition of complicity is the beginning of innocence " , where innocence , I think , means about the same thing as redemption . A man must be able to say , " Father , I have sinned " , or there is no hope for him . Lincoln understood this better than most when he said in his " Second Inaugural " that God " gives to both North and South this terrible war , as the woe due to those by whom the offense came " . He also spoke of " the wealth piled by the bondsman 's two hundred and fifty years in unrequited toil " . Lincoln was historian and economist enough to know that a substantial portion of this wealth had accumulated in the hands of the descendants of New Englanders engaged in the slave trade . After how many generations is such wealth ( mounting all the while through the manipulations of high finance ) purified of taint ? It is a question which New Englanders long ago put out of their minds . But did n't they get off too easy ? The slaves never shared in their profits , while they did share , in a very real sense , in the profits of the slave-owners : they were fed , clothed , doctored , and so forth ; they were the beneficiaries of responsible , paternalistic care . 
Emerson — Platonist , idealist , doctrinaire — sounded a high Transcendental note in his " Boston Hymn " , delivered in 1863 in the Boston Music Hall amidst thundering applause : " Pay ransom to the owner and fill the bag to the brim . Who is the owner ? The slave is owner , And ever was . Pay him " ! It is the abstractionism , the unrealism , of the pure idealist . It ignores the sordid financial aspects ( quite conveniently , too , for his audience , who could indulge in moral indignation without visible , or even conscious , discomfort , their money from the transaction having been put away long ago in a good antiseptic brokerage ) . Like Pilate , they had washed their hands . But can one , really ? Can God be mocked , ever , in the long run ? 
New Englanders were a bit sensitive on the subject of their complicity in Negro slavery at the time of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence , as Jefferson explained in his " Autobiography " : " 
The clause reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia , who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves , and who on the contrary still wished to continue it . Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures ; for though their people had very few slaves themselves , yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others " . 
But that was a long time ago . The New England conscience became desensitized . George W. Cable ( naturalized New Englander ) , writing in 1889 from " Paradise Road , Northampton " ( lovely symbolic name ) , agitated continuously the " Southern question " . It was nice to be able to isolate it .   New England , as everyone knows , has long been schoolmaster to the Nation . There one finds concentrated in a comparatively small area the chief universities , colleges , and preparatory schools of the United States . Why should this be so ? It is true that New England , more than any other section , was dedicated to education from the start . But I think that something more than this is involved . 
How did it happen , for example , that the state university , that great symbol of American democracy , failed to flourish in New England as it did in other parts of the country ? Is n't it a bit odd that the three states of Southern New England ( Massachusetts , Connecticut , and Rhode Island ) have had state institutions of university status only in the very recent past , these institutions having previously been A+M colleges ? Was it supposed , perchance , that A+M ( vocational training , that is ) was quite sufficient for the immigrant class which flooded that part of the New England world in the post-Civil War period , the immigrants having been brought in from Southern Europe , to work in the mills , to make up for the labor shortage caused by migration to the West ? Is it not ironical that Roger Williams 's state , Rhode Island , should have been the very last of the forty-eight to establish a state university ? The state universities of Maine , New Hampshire , And Vermont are older and more " respectable " ; they had less immigration to contend with . 
A Yale historian , writing a few years ago in The Yale Review , said : " We in New England have long since segregated our children " . He was referring not only to the general college situation but more especially to the preparatory schools . And what a galaxy of those adorns that fair land ! I do n't propose to go into their history , but I have one or two surmises . One is that they were established , or gained eminence , under pressure provided by these same immigrants , from whom the old families wished to segregate their children . In the early days of a homogeneous population , the public school was quite satisfactory .  
AMONG THE RECIPIENTS of the Nobel Prize for Literature more than half are practically unknown to readers of English . Of these there are surely few that would be more rewarding discoveries than Verner von Heidenstam , the Swedish poet and novelist who received the award in 1916 and whose centennial was celebrated two years ago . Equally a master of prose and verse , he recreates the glory of Sweden in the past and continues it into the present . In the following sketch we shall present a brief outline of his life and let him as much as possible speak for himself . 
Heidenstam was born in 1859 , of a prosperous family . On his father 's side he was of German descent , on his mother 's he came of the old Swedish nobility . The family estate was situated near Vadstena on Lake V.auml ; ttern in south central Sweden . It is a lonely , rather desolate region , but full of legendary and historic associations . As a boy in a local school he was shy and solitary , absorbed in his fondness for nature and his visions of Sweden 's ancient glory . He liked to fancy himself as a chieftain and to dress for the part . Being somewhat delicate in health , at the age of sixteen he was sent to Southern Europe , for which he at once developed a passion , so that he spent nearly all of the following ten years abroad , at first in Italy , then in Greece , Egypt , Asia Minor , and Palestine . In one of his summers at home he married , to the great disapproval of his father , who objected because of his extreme youth . 
Deciding to become a painter , he entered the studio of Gerome in Paris , where he enjoyed the life of the artists , but soon found that whatever talent he might have did not lie in that direction . He gives us an account of this in his lively and humorous poem , " The Happy Artists " . " I scanned the world through printed symbol swart , And through the beggar 's rags I strove to see The inner man . I looked unceasingly With my cold mind and with my burning heart " . In this final line , we have the key to his nature . Few writers have better understood their deepest selves . Heidenstam could never be satisfied by surface . It may , however , be noted that his gift for color and imagery must have been greatly stimulated by his stay in Paris . 
The first result of Heidenstam 's long sojourn abroad was a volume of poems , Pilgrimage and Wander-Years ( Vallfart och vandringsar ) , published in 1888 . It was a brilliant debut , so much so indeed that it aroused a new vitality in the younger poets , as did Byron 's Childe Harold . Professor Fredrik B.ouml ; . ouml ; k , Sweden 's foremost critic of the period , acclaims it as follows : " In this we have the verse of a painter ; strongly colorful , plastic , racy , vivid . In a bold , sometimes careless , form there is nothing academic ; all is seen and felt and experienced , the observation is sharp and the imagination lively . The young poet-painter reproduces the French life of the streets ; he tells stories of the Thousand and One Nights , and conjures up before us the bazaars of Damascus . In the care-free indolence of the East he sees the last reflection of the old happy existence , and for that reason he loves it . And yet amid all the gay hedonism in Pilgrimage and Wander-Years is a cycle of short poems , " Thoughts in Loneliness " , filled with brooding , melancholy , and sombre longing " . 
Of the longer pieces of the volume none is so memorable as " Nameless and Immortal " , which at once took rank among the finest poems ever written in the Swedish language . It celebrates the unknown architect who designed the temple of Neptune at Paestum , next to the Parthenon the noblest example of Grecian classic style now in existence . On the eve of his return to their native Naxos he speaks with his wife of the masterpiece which rises before them in its completed perfection . The supreme object of their lives is now fulfilled , says the wife , her husband has achieved immortality . Not so , he answers , it is not the architect but the temple that is immortal . " The man 's true reputation is his work " . 
The short poems grouped at the end of the volume as " Thoughts in Loneliness " is , as Professor B.ouml ; . ouml ; k indicated , in sharp contrast with the others . It consists of fragmentary personal revelations , such as " The Spark " : " There is a spark dwells deep within my soul . To get it out into the daylight 's glow Is my life 's aim both first and last , the whole . It slips away , it burns and tortures me . That little spark is all the wealth I know , That little spark is my life 's misery " . A dominant motive is the poet 's longing for his homeland and its boyhood associations : " Not men-folk , but the fields where I would stray , The stones where as a child I used to play " . He is utterly disappointed in himself and in the desultory life he has been leading . What he really wants is to find " a sacred cause " to which he can honestly devote himself . This restless individualism found its answer when he returned to live nearly all the rest of his life in Sweden . His cause was to commemorate the glory of her past and to incite her people to perpetuate it in the present . 
He did not , however , find himself at once . His next major work , completed in 1892 , was a long fantastic epic in prose , entitled Hans Alienus , which Professor B.ouml ; . ouml ; k describes as a monument on the grave of his carefree and indolent youth . The hero , who is himself , is represented as a pilgrim in the storied lands of the East , a sort of Faustus type , who , to quote from Professor B.ouml ; . ouml ; k again , " even in the pleasure gardens of Sardanapalus can not cease from his painful search after the meaning of life . He is driven back by his yearning to the wintry homeland of his fathers in the forest of Tiveden " . 
From this time on Heidenstam proceeded to find his deeper self . By the death of his father in 1888 he had come into possession of the family estate and had re-assumed its traditions . He did not , however , settle back into acquiescence with things as they were . Like his friend and contemporary August Strindberg he had little patience with collective mediocrity . He saw Sweden as a country of smug and narrow provincialism , indifferent to the heroic spirit of its former glory . Strindberg 's remedy for this condition was to tear down the old structures and build anew from the ground up . Heidenstam 's conception , on the contrary , was to revive the present by the memories of the past .   Whether in prose or poetry , all of Heidenstam 's later work was concerned with Sweden . With the first of a group of historical novels , The Charles Men ( Karolinerna ) , published in 1897-8 , he achieved the masterpiece of his career . In scope and power it can only be compared to Tolstoy 's War and Peace . About one-third as long , it is less intimate and detailed , but better coordinated , more concise and more dramatic . Though it centers around the brilliant and enigmatic figure of Charles /12 , , the true hero is not finally the king himself . Hence the title of the book , referring to the soldiers and subjects of the king ; on the fatal battlefield of Poltava , to quote from the novel , " the wreath he twined for himself slipped down upon his people " . 
The Charles Men consists not of a connected narrative but of a group of short stories , each depicting a special phase of the general subject . Somewhat uneven in interest for an average reader , eight or ten of these are among the finest of their kind in literature . They comprise a great variety of scene and interest : grim episodes of war , idyllic interludes , superb canvases of world-shaking events , and delightfully humorous sketches of odd characters . The general effect is tragic . Almost nothing is said of Charles ' spectacular victories , the central theme being the heroic loyalty of the Swedish people to their idolized king in misfortune and defeat . 
To carry out this exalted conception the author has combined the vivid realism and imaginative power we have noticed in his early poetry and carried them out on a grand scale . His peculiar gift , as had been suggested before , is his intensity . George Meredith has said that fervor is the core of style . Of few authors is this more true than of Heidenstam . The Charles Men has a tremendous range of characters , of common folk even more than of major figures . The career of Charles /12 , is obviously very similar to that of Napoleon . His ideal was Alexander of Macedon , as Napoleon 's was Julius Caesar . His purpose , however , was not to establish an empire , but to assert the principle of divine justice . Each aspired to be a god in human form , but with each it was a different kind of god . Each failed catastrophically in an invasion of Russia and each brought ruin on the country that worshipped him . Each is still glorified as a national hero . 
The first half of The Charles Men , ending on the climax of the battle of Poltava in 1709 , is more dramatically coherent than the second . After the collapse of that desperate and ill-fated campaign the character of the king degenerated for a time into a futility that was not merely pitiable but often ridiculous . Like Napoleon , he was the worst of losers . There are , however , some wonderful chapters at the beginning of the second part , concerning the reactions of the Swedes in adversity . Then more than ever before did they show their fortitude and patient cheerfulness . This comes out in " When the Bells Ring " , which describes the rallying of the peasants in southern Sweden to repel an invasion by the Danes . 
In " The King 's Ride " , Charles breaks out of a long period of petulance and inertia , regains his old self , escapes from Turkey , and finally reaches his own land after an absence of eighteen years . He finds it in utter misery and desolation . All his people ask for is no more war . But he plunges into yet another , this time with Norway , and is killed in an assault on the fortress of Fredrikshall , being only thirty-six years of age when he died . He had become king at fifteen . 
Then suddenly there was a tremendous revulsion of popular feeling . From being a hated tyrant and madman he was now the symbol of all that was noblest and best in the history of Sweden . This is brought out in the next to last chapter of the book , " A Hero 's Funeral " , written in the form of an impassioned prose poem . Slowly the procession of warriors and statesmen passes through the snow beside the black water and into the brilliantly lighted cathedral , the shrine of so many precious memories . The guns are fired , the hymns are sung , and the body of Charles is carried down to the vault and laid beside the tombs of his ancestors . As he had longed to be , he became the echo of a saga . 
Heidenstam wrote four other works of fiction about earlier figures revered in Swedish memory . Excellent in their way , they lack the wide appeal of The Charles Men , and need not detain us here . It is different with his volume The Swedes and Their Chieftains ( Svenskarna och deras h.ouml ; vdingar ) , a history intended for the general reader and particularly suited for high school students . Admirably written , it is a perfect introduction to Swedish history for readers of other countries . Some of the earlier episodes have touches of the supernatural , as suited to the legendary background . These are suggestive of Selma Lagerl.ouml ; f . Especially touching is the chapter , " The Little Sister " , about a king 's daughter who became a nun in the convent of St. Birgitta . The record teems with romance and adventure . Gustaf Vasa is a superb example , and Charles /10 , , the conqueror of Denmark , hardly less so . Of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles /12 , it is unnecessary to speak .  Today the private detective will also investigate insurance claims or handle divorce cases , but his primary function remains what it has always been , to assist those who have money in their unending struggle with those who have not . It is from this unpromising background that the fictional private detective was recruited .   THE mythological private eye differs from his counterpart in real life in two essential ways . On the one hand , he does not work for a large agency , but is almost always self-employed . As a free-lance investigator , the fictional detective is responsible to no one but himself and his client . For this reason , he appears as an independent and self-reliant figure , whose rugged individualism need not be pressed into the mold of a 9 to 5 routine . On the other hand , the fictional detective does not break strikes or handle divorce cases ; no client would ever think of asking him to do such things . Whatever his original assignment , the fictional private eye ends up by investigating and solving a crime , usually a murder . Operating as a one man police force in fact if not in name , he is at once more independent and more dedicated than the police themselves . He catches criminals not merely because he is paid to do so ( frequently he does not receive a fee at all ) , but because he enjoys his work , because he firmly believes that murder must be punished . Thus the fictional detective is much more than a simple businessman . He is , first and foremost , a defender of public morals , a servant of society . 
It is this curious blend of rugged individualism and public service which accounts for the great appeal of the mythological detective . By virtue of his self-reliance , his individualism and his freedom from external restraint , the private eye is a perfect embodiment of the middle class conception of liberty , which amounts to doing what you please and let the devil take the hindmost . At the same time , because the personal code of the detective coincides with the legal dictates of his society , because he likes to catch criminals , he is in middle class eyes a virtuous man . In this way , the private detective gets the best of two possible worlds . He is an individualist but not an anarchist ; he is a public servant but not a cop . In short , the fictional private eye is a specialized version of Adam Smith 's ideal entrepreneur , the man whose private ambitions must always and everywhere promote the public welfare . In the mystery story , as in The Wealth of Nations , individualism and the social good are two sides of the same benevolent coin .   THERE is only one catch to this idyllic arrangement : Adam Smith was wrong . Not only did the ideal entrepreneur not produce the greatest good for the greatest number , he ended by destroying himself , by giving birth to monopoly capitalism . The rise of the giant corporations in Western Europe and the United States dates from the period 1880-1900 . Now , although the roots of the mystery story in serious literature go back as far as Balzac , Dickens , and Poe , it was not until the closing decades of the 19th century that the private detective became an established figure in popular fiction . Sherlock Holmes , the ancestor of all private eyes , was born during the 1890s . Thus the transformation of Adam Smith 's ideal entrepreneur into a mythological detective coincides closely with the decline of the real entrepreneur in economic life . Driven from the marketplace by the course of history , our hero disguises himself as a private detective . The birth of the myth compensates for the death of the ideal . 
Even on the fictional level , however , the contradictions which give rise to the mystery story are not fully resolved . The individualism and public service of the private detective both stem from his dedication to a personal code of conduct : he enforces the law without being told to do so . The private eye is therefore a moral man ; but his morality rests upon that of his society . The basic premise of all mystery stories is that the distinction between good and bad coincides with the distinction between legal and illegal . Unfortunately , this assumption does not always hold good . As capitalism in the 20th century has become increasingly dependent upon force and violence for its survival , the private detective is placed in a serious dilemma . If he is good , he may not be legal ; if he is legal , he may not be good . It is the gradual unfolding and deepening of this contradiction which creates the inner dialectic of the evolution of the mystery story .   WITH the advent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes , the development of the modern private detective begins . Sherlock Holmes is not merely an individualist ; he is very close to being a mental case . A brief list of the great detective 's little idiosyncrasies would provide Dr. Freud with ample food for thought . Holmes is addicted to the use of cocaine and other refreshing stimulants ; he is prone to semi-catatonic trances induced by the playing of the vioiln ; he is a recluse , an incredible egotist , a confirmed misogynist . Holmes rebels against the social conventions of his day not on moral but rather on aesthetic grounds . His eccentricity begins as a defense against boredom . It was in order to avoid the stuffy routine of middle class life that Holmes became a detective in the first place . As he informs Watson , " My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence . These little problems help me to do so " . Holmes is a public servant , to be sure ; but the society which he serves bores him to tears . 
The curious relationship between Holmes and Scotland Yard provides an important clue to the deeper significance of his eccentric behavior . Although he is perfectly willing to cooperate with Scotland Yard , Holmes has nothing but contempt for the intelligence and mentality of the police . They for their part are convinced that Holmes is too " unorthodox " and " theoretical " to make a good detective . Why do the police find Holmes " unorthodox " ? On the face of it , it is because he employs deductive techniques alien to official police routine . Another , more interesting explanation , is hinted at by Watson when he observes on several occasions that Holmes would have made a magnificent criminal . The great detective modestly agrees . Watson 's insight is verified by the mysterious link between Holmes and his arch-opponent , Dr. Moriarty . The two men resemble each other closely in their cunning , their egotism , their relentlessness . The first series of Sherlock Holmes adventures ends with Holmes and Moriarty grappling together on the edge of a cliff . They are presumed to have plunged to a common grave in this fatal embrace . Linked to Holmes even in death , Moriarty represents the alter-ego of the great detective , the image of what our hero might have become were he not a public servant . Just as Holmes the eccentric stands behind Holmes the detective , so Holmes the potential criminal lurks behind both .   IN the modern English " whodunnit " , this insinuation of latent criminality in the detective himself has almost entirely disappeared . Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Whimsey ( the respective creations of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers ) have retained Holmes ' egotism but not his zest for life and eccentric habits . Poirot and his counterparts are perfectly respectable people ; it is true that they are also extremely dull . Their dedication to the status quo has been affirmed at the expense of the fascinating but dangerous individualism of a Sherlock Holmes . The latter 's real descendents were unable to take root in England ; they fled from the Victorian parlor and made their way across the stormy Atlantic . In the American " hardboiled " detective story of the '20s and '30s , the spirit of the mad genius from Baker Street lives on . 
Like Holmes , the American private eye rejects the social conventions of his time . But unlike Holmes , he feels his society to be not merely dull but also corrupt . Surrounded by crime and violence everywhere , the " hardboiled " private eye can retain his purity only through a life of self-imposed isolation . His alienation is far more acute than Holmes ' ; he is not an eccentric but rather an outcast . With Rex Stout 's Nero Wolfe , alienation is represented on a purely physical plane . Wolfe refuses to ever leave his own house , and spends most of his time drinking beer and playing with orchids . More profound and more disturbing , however , is the moral isolation of Raymond Chandler 's Philip Marlowe . In a society where everything is for sale , Marlowe is the only man who can not be bought . His tough honesty condemns him to a solitary and difficult existence . Beaten , bruised and exhausted , he pursues the elusive killer through the demi-monde of high society and low morals , always alone , always despised . In the end , he gets his man , but no one seems to care ; virtue is its own and only reward . A similar tone of underlying futility and despair pervades the spy thrillers of Eric Ambler and dominates the most famous of all American mystery stories , Dashiell Hammett 's The Maltese Falcon . Sam Spade joins forces with a band of adventurers in search of a priceless jeweled statue of a falcon ; but when the bird is found at last , it turns out to be a fake . Now the detective must save his own skin by informing on the girl he loves , who is also the real murderer . For Sam Spade , neither crime nor virtue pays ; moreover , it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two . 
Because the private eye intends to save society in spite of himself , he invariably finds himself in trouble with the police . The latter are either too stupid to catch the killer or too corrupt to care . In either case , they do not appreciate the private detective 's zeal . Perry Mason and Hamilton Burger , Nero Wolfe and Inspector Cramer spend more time fighting each other than they do in looking for the criminal . Frequently enough , the police are themselves in league with the killer ; Dashiell Hammett 's Red Harvest provides a classic example of this theme . But even when the police are honest , they do not trust the private eye . He is , like Phillip Marlowe , too alienated to be reliable . Finally , in The Maltese Falcon among others , the clash between detective and police is carried to its logical conclusion : Sam Spade becomes the chief murder suspect . In order to exonerate himself , he is compelled to find the real criminal , who happens to be his girl friend . What was only a vague suspicion in the case of Sherlock Holmes now appears as a direct accusation : the private eye is in danger of turning into his opposite .   IT IS the growing contradiction between individualism and public service in the mystery story which creates this fatal dilemma . By upholding his own personal code of behavior , the private detective has placed himself in opposition to a society whose fabric is permeated with crime and corruption . That society responds by condemning the private eye as a threat to the status quo , a potential criminal . If the detective insists upon retaining his personal standards , he must now do so in conscious defiance of his society . He must , in short , cease to be a detective and become a rebel . On the other hand , if he wishes to continue in his chosen profession , he must abandon his own code and sacrifice his precious individualism . Dashiell Hammett resolved this contradiction by ceasing to write mystery stories and turning to other pursuits . His successors have adopted the opposite alternative . In order to save the mystery story , they have converted the private detective into an organization man . 
The first of two possible variations on this theme is symbolized by Mickey Spillane 's Mike Hammer . At first glance , this hero seems to be more rather than less of an individualist than any of his predecessors . For Hammer , nothing is forbidden . He kills when he pleases , takes his women where he finds them and always acts as judge , jury and executioner rolled into one .  It will be shown that the objectives of the cooperative people in an organization determine the type of network required , because the type of network functions according to the characteristics of the messages enumerated in Table 1 . Great stress is placed on the role that the monitoring of information sending plays in maintaining the effectiveness of the network . By monitoring , we mean some system of control over the types of information sent from the various centers . 
As a word of caution , we should be aware that in actual practice no message is purely one of the four types , question , command , statement , or exclamation . For example , suppose a man wearing a $200 watch , driving a 1959 Rolls Royce , stops to ask a man on the sidewalk , " What time is it " ? This sentence would have most of the characteristics of a question , but it has some of the characteristics of a statement because the questioner has conveyed the fact that he has no faith in his own timepiece or the one attached to his car . If the man on the sidewalk is surprised at this question , it has served as an exclamation . Also , since the man questioned feels a strong compulsion to answer ( and thereby avoid the consequences of being thought queer ) the question has assumed some measurable properties of a command . However , for convenience we will stick to the idea that information can be classified according to Table 1 . On this basis , certain extreme kinds of networks will be discussed for illustrative purposes .  NETWORKS ILLUSTRATING SOME SPECIAL TYPES OF ORGANIZATION   THE COCKTAIL PARTY .  
Presumably a cocktail party is expected to fulfill the host 's desire to get together a number of people who are inadequately acquainted and thereby arrange for bringing the level of acquaintance up to adequacy for future cooperative endeavors . The party is usually in a room small enough so that all guests are within sight and hearing of one another . The information is furnished by each of the guests , is sent by oral broadcasting over the air waves , and is received by the ears . Since the air is a continuum , the network of communication remains intact regardless of the positions or motions of the points ( the people ) in the net . As shown in Figure 1 , there is a connection for communication between every pair of points . This , and other qualifications , make the cocktail party the most complete and most chaotic communication system ever dreamed up . All four types of message listed in Table 1 are permitted , although decorum and cocktail tradition require holding the commands to a minimum , while exclamations having complimentary intonations are more than customarily encouraged . The completeness of the connections provide that , for N people , there are **f lines of communication between the pairs , which can become a large number ( 1,225 ) for a party of fifty guests . Looking at the diagram , we see that **f connection lines come in to each member . Thus the cocktail party would appear to be the ideal system , but there is one weakness . In spite of the dreams of the host for oneness in the group , the **f incoming messages for each guest overload his receiving system beyond comprehension if N exceeds about six . The crowd consequently breaks up into temporary groups ranging in size from two to six , with a half-life for the cluster ranging from three to twenty minutes . 
For the occasion on which everyone already knows everyone else and the host wishes them to meet one or a few honored newcomers , then the " open house " system is advantageous because the honored guests are fixed connective points and the drifting guests make and break connections at the door .  THE RURAL COMMUNITY .  
We consider a rural community as an assemblage of inhabited dwellings whose configuration is determined by the location and size of the arable land sites necessary for family subsistence . We assume for this illustration that the size of the land plots is so great that the distance between dwellings is greater than the voice can carry and that most of the communication is between nearest neighbors only , as shown in Figure 2 . Information beyond nearest neighbor is carried second- , third- , and fourth-hand as a distortable rumor . In Figure 2 , the points in the network are designated by a letter accompanied by a number . The numbers indicate the number of nearest neighbors . It will be noted that point f has seven nearest neighbors , h and e have six , and p has only one , while the remaining points have intermediate numbers . In any social system in which communications have an importance comparable with that of production and other human factors , a point like f in Figure 2 would ( other things being equal ) be the dwelling place for the community leader , while e and h would house the next most important citizens . A point like p gets information directly from n , but all information beyond n is indirectly relayed through n . The dweller at p is last to hear about a new cure , the slowest to announce to his neighbors his urgent distresses , the one who goes the farthest to trade , and the one with the greatest difficulty of all in putting over an idea or getting people to join him in a cooperative effort . Since the hazards of poor communication are so great , p can be justified as a habitable site only on the basis of unusual productivity such as is made available by a waterfall for milling purposes , a mine , or a sugar maple camp . Location theorists have given these matters much consideration .  MILITARY ORGANIZATIONS .  
The networks for military communications are one of the best examples of networks which not only must be changed with the changes in objectives but also must be changed with the addition of new machines of war . They also furnish proof that , in modern war , message sending must be monitored . Without monitoring , a military hookup becomes a noisy party . The need for monitoring became greater when radio was adopted for military signaling . Alexander the Great , who used runners as message carriers , did not have to worry about having every officer in his command hear what he said and having hundreds of them comment at once . As time has passed and science has progressed , the speed of military vehicles has increased , the range of missiles has been extended , the use of target-hunting noses on the projectiles has been adopted , and the range and breadth of message sending has increased . Next to the old problem of the slowness of decision making , network structure seems to be paramount , and without monitoring no network has value . 
On the parade ground the net may be similar to that shown in Figure 3 . The monitoring is the highest and most restrictive of any organization in existence . No questions , statements , or explanations are permitted — only commands . Commands go only from an officer to the man of nearest lower rank . The same command is repeated as many times as there are levels in rank from general to corporal . All orders originate with the officer of highest rank and terminate with action of the men in the ranks . Even the officer in charge , be it a captain ( for small display ) or a general , is restrained by monitoring . This is done for simplicity of commands and to bring the hidden redundancy up to where misunderstanding has almost zero possibility . The commands are specified by the military regulations ; are few in number , briefly worded , all different in sound ; and are combinable into sequences which permit any marching maneuver that could be desired on a parade ground . This monitoring is necessary because , on a parade ground , everyone can hear too much , and without monitoring a confused social event would develop . 
With troops dispersed on fields of battle rather than on the parade ground , it may seem that a certain amount of monitoring is automatically enforced by the lines of communication . Years ago this was true , but with the replacement of wires or runners by radio and radar ( and perhaps television ) , these restrictions have disappeared and now again too much is heard . 
In contrast to cocktail parties , military organizations , even in the field , are more formal . In the extreme and oversimplified example suggested in Figure 3 , the organization is more easily understood and more predictable in behavior . A military organization has an objective chosen by the higher command . This objective is adhered to throughout the duration of the action . The connective system , or network , is tailored to meet the requirements of the objective , and it is therefore not surprising that a military body acting as a single coordinated unit has a different communication network than a factory , a college , or a rural village . 
The assumptions upon which the example shown in Figure 3 is based are : ( a ) One man can direct about six subordinates if the subordinates are chosen carefully so that they do not need too much personal coaching , indoctrinating , etc. ( b ) A message runs too great a risk of being distorted if it is to be relayed more than about six consecutive times . ( c ) Decisions of a general kind are made by the central command . And ( d ) all action of a physical kind pertinent to the mission is relegated to the line of men on the lower rank . These assumptions lead to an organization with one man at the top , six directly under him , six under each of these , and so on until there are six levels of personnel . The number of people acting as one body by this scheme gives a surprisingly large army of **f 55,987 men . 
This organizational network would be of no avail if there were no regulations pertaining to the types of message sent . Of types of message listed in Table 1 , commands and statements are the only ones sent through the vertical network shown in Figure 3 . A further regulation is that commands always go down , unaccompanied by statements , and statements always go up , unaccompanied by commands . Questions and , particularly , exclamations are usually channeled along informal , horizontal lines not indicated in Figure 3 and seldom are carried beyond the nearest neighbor . 
It will readily be seen that in this suggested network ( not materially different from some of the networks in vogue today ) greater emphasis on monitoring is implied than is usually put into practice . Furthermore , the network in Figure 3 is only the basic net through which other networks pertaining to logistics and the like are interlaced . 
Not discussed here are some military problems of modern times such as undersea warfare , where the surveillance , sending , transmitting , and receiving are all so inadequate that networks and decision making are not the bottlenecks . Such problems are of extreme interest as well as importance and are so much like fighting in a rain forest or guerrilla warfare at night in tall grass that we might have to re-examine primitive conflicts for what they could teach .  A TEAM FOR USEFUL RESEARCH .  
This is an unsolved problem which probably has never been seriously investigated , although one frequently hears the comment that we have insufficient specialists of the kind who can compete with the Germans or Swiss , for example , in precision machinery and mathematics , or the Finns in geochemistry . We hear equally fervent concern over the belief that we have not enough generalists who can see the over-all picture and combine our national skills and knowledge for useful purposes . This problem of the optimum balance in the relative numbers of generalists and specialists can be investigated on a communicative network basis . Since the difficulty of drawing the net is great , we will merely discuss it . 
First , we realize that a pure specialist does not exist . But , for practical purposes , we have people who can be considered as such . For example , there are persons who are in physical science , in the field of mineralogy , trained in crystallography , who use only X-rays , applying only the powder technique of X-ray diffraction , to clay minerals only , and who have spent the last fifteen years concentrating on the montmorillonites ; or persons in the social sciences in the field of anthropology , studying the lung capacity of seven Andean Indians . So we see that a specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less as he develops , as contrasted to the generalist , who knows less and less about more and more .  AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC THOUGHT , pointed up the relation between the Protestant movement in this country and the development of a social religion , which he called the American Democratic Faith . Those familiar with his work will remember that he placed the incipience of the democratic faith at around 1850 . And he describes it as a balanced polarity between the notions of the free individual and what he called the fundamental law . 
I want to say more about Gabriel 's so-called fundamental law . But first I want to quote him on the relationship that he found between religion and politics in this country and what happened to it . He points out that from the time of Jackson on through World War /1 , , evangelical Protestantism was a dominant influence in the social and political life of America . He terms this early enthusiasm " Romantic Christianity " and concludes that its similarity to democratic beliefs of that day is so great that " the doctrine of liberty seems but a secular version of its counterpart in evangelical Protestantism " . Let me quote him even more fully , for his analysis is important to my theme . 
He says : " Beside the Protestant philosophy of Progress , as expressed in radical or conservative millenarianism , should be placed the doctrine of the democratic faith which affirmed it to be the duty of the destiny of the United States to assist in the creation of a better world by keeping lighted the beacon of democracy " . He specifies , " In the middle period of the Nineteenth Century it was colored by Christian supernaturalism , in the Twentieth Century it was affected by naturalism . But in every period it has been humanism " . And let me add , utopianism , also . 
Some fourteen or fifteen years ago , in an essay I called The Leader Follows — Where ? I used his polarity to illustrate what I thought had happened to us in that form of liberalism we call Progressivism . It seemed to me that the liberals had scrapped the balanced polarity and reposed both liberty and the fundamental law in the common man . That is to say Gabriel 's fundamental law had been so much modified by this time that it was neither fundamental nor law any more . It is a weakness of Gabriel 's analysis that he never seems to realize that his so-called fundamental law had already been cut loose from its foundations when it was adapted to democracy . And with Progressivism the Religion of Humanity was replacing what Gabriel called Christian supernaturalism . And the common man was developing mythic power , or charisma , on his own . 
During the decade that followed , the common man , as that piece put it , grew uncomfortable as the Voice of God and fled from behind Saint Woodrow ( Wilson ) only to learn from Science , to his shocked relief that after all there was no God he had to speak for and that he was just an animal anyhow — that there was a chemical formula for him , and that too much could n't be expected of him . 
The socialism implicit in the slogan of the Roosevelt Revolution , freedom from want and fear , seems a far cry from the individualism of the First Amendment to the Constitution , or of the Jacksonian frontier . What had happened to the common man ? 
French Egalitarianism had had only nominal influence in this country before the days of Popularism . The riotous onrush of industrialism after the War for Southern Independence and the general secular drift to the Religion of Humanity , however , prepared the way for a reception of the French Revolution 's socialistic offspring of one sort of another . The first of which to find important place in our federal government was the graduated income tax under Wilson . Moreover the centralization of our economy during the 1920s , the dislocations of the Depression , the common ethos of Materialism everywhere , all contributed in various ways to the face-lifting that replaced Mike Fink and the Great Gatsby with the anonymous physiognomy of the Little People . 
However , it is important to trace the philosophy of the French Revolution to its sources to understand the common democratic origin of individualism and socialism and the influence of the latter on the former . That John Locke 's philosophy of the social contract fathered the American Revolution with its Declaration of Independence , I believe , we generally accept . Yet , after Rousseau had given the social contract a new twist with his notion of the General Will , the same philosophy , it may be said , became the idea source of the French Revolution also . 
The importance of Rousseau 's twist has not always been clear to us , however . This notion of the General Will gave rise to the Commune of Paris in the Revolution and later brought Napoleon to dictatorship . And it is clearly argued by Lord Percy of Newcastle , in his remarkable long essay , The Heresy of Democracy , and in a more general way by Voegelin , in his New Science of Politics , that this same Rousseauan idea , descending through European democracy , is the source of Marx 's theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat . This is important to understanding the position that doctrinaire liberals found themselves in after World War /2 , and our great democratic victory that brought no peace . 
The long road that had taken liberals in this country into the social religion of democracy , into a worship of man , led logically to the Marxist dream of a classless society under a Socialist State . And the USSR existed as the revolutionary experiment in radical socialism , the ultimate exemplar . And by the time the war ended , liberal leadership in this country was spiritually Marxist . 
We will recall that the still confident liberals of the Truman administration gathered with other Western utopians in San Francisco to set up the legal framework , finally and at last , to rationalize war — to rationalize want and fear — out of the world : the United Nations . We of the liberal-led world got all set for peace and rehabilitation . Then suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of another fight , an irrational , an indecent , an undeclared and immoral war with our strongest ( and some had thought noblest ) ally . 
During the next five years the leaders of the Fair Deal reluctantly backed down from the optimistic expectations of the New Deal . During the next five years liberal leaders in the United States sank in the cumulative confusion attendant upon and manifested in a negative policy of Containment — and the bitterest irony — enforced and enforceable only by threat of a weapon that we felt the greatest distaste for but could not abandon : the atom bomb . In 1952 , it will be remembered , the G.O.P. without positive program campaigned on the popular disillusionment with liberal leadership and won overwhelmingly . 
All of this , I know , is recent history familiar to you . But I have been at some pains to review it as the drama of the common man , to point up what happened to him under Eisenhower 's leadership . 
A perceptive journalist , Sam Lubell , has phrased it in the title of one of his books as THE REVOLT OF THE MODERATES . He opens his discourse , however , with a review of the Eisenhower inaugural festivities at which a sympathetic press had assembled its massive talents , all primed to catch some revelation of the emerging new age . The show was colorful , indeed , exuberant , but the press for all its assiduity could detect no note of a fateful rendezvous with destiny . 
Lubell offers his book as an explanation of why there was no clue . And I select this sentence as its pertinent summation : " In essence the drama of his ( Eisenhower 's ) Presidency can be described as the ordeal of a nation turned conservative and struggling — thus far with but limited and precarious success — to give effective voice and force to that conservatism " . 
I will assume that we are all aware of the continuing struggle , with its limited and precarious success , toward conservatism . It has moved on various levels , it has been clamorous and confused . Obviously there has been no agreement on what American conservatism is , or rather , what it should be . For it was neglected , not to say nascent , when the struggle began . I saw a piece the other day assailing William Buckley , author of MAN AND GOD AT YALE and publisher of the National Review , as no conservative at all , but an old liberal . I would agree with this view . But I 'm not here to define conservatism . 
What I am here to do is to report on the gyrations of the struggle — a struggle that amounts to self-redefinition — to see if we can predict its future course . 
One of the obvious conclusions we can make on the basis of the last election , I suppose , is that we , the majority , were dissatisfied with Eisenhower conservatism . Though , to be sure , we gave Kennedy no very positive approval in the margin of his preferment . 
This is , however , symptomatic of our national malaise . But before I try to diagnose it , I would offer other evidence . I will mention two volumes of specific comment on this malaise that appeared last year . The earlier of them was an unofficial enterprise , sponsored by Life magazine , under the title of the National purpose . The contributors to this testament were all well-known : a former Democratic candidate for President , a New Deal poet , the magazine 's chief editorial writer , two newspaper columnists , head of a national broadcasting company , a popular Protestant evangelist , etc . What I want to point out here is that all of them are ex-liberals , or modified liberals , with perhaps one exception . I suppose we might classify Billy Graham as an old liberal . And I would further note that they all — with one exception again — sang in one key or another the same song . Its refrain was : " Let us return to the individualistic democracy of our forefathers for our salvation " . 
Adlai Stevenson expressed some reservations about this return . Others invoked technology and common sense . Only Walter Lippman envisioned the possibility of our having " outlived most of what we used to regard as the program of our national purposes " . 
But the most notable thing about the incantation of these ex-liberals was that the one-time shibboleth of socialism was conspicuously absent . 
The second specific comment was the report of Eisenhower 's Commission on National Goals , titled GOALS FOR AMERICANS . They , perhaps , gave the pitch of their position in the preface where it was said that Eisenhower requested that the Commission be administered by the American Assembly of Columbia University , because it was non-partisan . The Commission seems to represent the viewpoint of what I would call the unconscious liberal , but not unconscious enough , to invoke the now taboo symbolism of socialism . And here again we hear the same refrain mentioned above : " The paramount goal of the United States … set long ago … was to guard the rights of the individual … ensure his development … enlarge his opportunity " . This group is secularist and their program tends to be technological . 
But it is the need to undertake these testaments that I would submit here as symptom of the common man 's malaise . And let me add Murray 's new book as another symptom of it , particularly so in view of the attention TIME magazine gave it when it came out recently . Father Murray goes back to the Declaration of Independence , too , though I may add , with considerably more historical perception . 
I will reserve discussion of it for a moment , however , to return to President Kennedy . As symptomatic of the common man 's malaise , he is most significant : a liberal and a Catholic , elected by the skin of his teeth . Does that not suggest to you an uncertain and uneasy , not to say confused , state of the public mind ? 
What is the common man 's complaint ? Let 's take a panoramic look back over the course we have come . Has not that way been lit always by the lamp of liberalism up until the turning back under Eisenhower ? And the basic character of that liberalism has been spiritual rather than economic . Ralph Gabriel gave it the name of Protestant philosophy of Progress . But there 's a subjective side to that utopian outlook .  
DOES our society have a runaway , uncontrollable growth of technology which may end our civilization , or a normal , healthy growth ? Here there may be an analogy with cancer : we can detect cancers by their rapidly accelerating growth , determinable only when related to the more normal rate of healthy growth . Should the accelerating growth of technology then warn us ? Noting such evidence is the first step ; and almost the only " cure " is early detection and removal . One way to determine whether we have so dangerous a technology would be to check the strength of our society 's organs to see if their functioning is as healthy as before . So an objective look at our present procedures may move us to consider seriously this possibly analogous situation . In any event , whether society may have cancer , or merely a virus infection , the " disease " , we shall find , is political , economical , social , and even medical . Have not our physical abilities already deteriorated because of the more sedentary lives we are now living ? Hence the prime issue , as I see it , is whether a democratic or free society can master technology for the benefit of mankind , or whether technology will rule and develop its own society compatible with its own needs as a force of nature . 
We are already committed to establishing man 's supremacy over nature and everywhere on earth , not merely in the limited TOOLONG context we are fond of today . Otherwise , we go on endlessly trying to draw the line , color and other , as to which kind of man we wish to see dominate . We have proved so able to solve technological problems that to contend we can not realize a universal goal in the immediate future is to be extremely shortsighted , if nothing else . We must believe we have the ability to affect our own destinies : otherwise why try anything ? So in these pages the term " technology " is used to include any and all means which could amplify , project , or augment man 's control over himself and over other men . Naturally this includes all communication forms , e.g. languages , or any social , political , economic or religious structures employed for such control . Properly mindful of all the cultures in existence today throughout the world , we must employ these resources without war or violent revolution . 
If we were creating a wholly new society , we could insist that our social , political , economic and philosophic institutions foster rather than hamper man ; best growth . But we can not start off with a clean slate . So we must first analyze our present institutions with respect to the effect of each on man 's major needs . Asked which institution most needs correction , I would say the corporation as it exists in America today . At first glance this appears strange : of all people , was not America founded by rugged individualists who established a new way of life still inspiring " undeveloped " societies abroad ? But hear Harrison E. Salisbury , former Moscow correspondent of The New York Times , and author of " To Moscow — And Beyond " . In a book review of " The Soviet Cultural Offensive " , he says , " Long before the State Department organized its bureaucracy into an East-West Contacts Staff in order to wage a cultural counter-offensive within Soviet borders , the sharp cutting-edge of American culture had carved its mark across the Russian steppes , as when the enterprising promoters of 'Porgy and Bess ' overrode the State Department to carry the contemporary 'cultural warfare' behind the enemy lines . They were not diplomats or jazz musicians , or even organizers of reading-rooms and photo-montage displays , but rugged capitalist entrepreneurs like Henry Ford , Hugh Cooper , Thomas Campbell , the International Harvester Co. , and David W. Griffith . Their kind created an American culture superior to any in the world , an industrial and technological culture which penetrated Russia as it did almost every corner of the earth without a nickel from the Federal treasury or a single governmental specialist to contrive directives or program a series of consultations of interested agencies . This favorable image of America in the minds of Russian men and women is still there despite years of energetic anti-American propaganda … "  CORPORATIONS NOW OUTMODED  Perhaps the public 's present attitude toward business stems from the fact that the " rugged capitalist entrepreneur " no more exists in America . In his stead is a milquetoast version known as " the corporation " . But even if we can not see the repulsive characteristics in this new image of America , foreigners can ; and our loss of " prestige " abroad is the direct result . No amount of ballyhoo will cover up the sordid facts . If we want respect from ourselves or others , we will have to earn it . First , let us realize that whatever good this set-up achieved in earlier times , now the corporation per se can not take economic leadership . Businesses must develop as a result of the ideas , energies and ambitions of an individual having purpose and comprehensive ability within one mind . When we " forced " individuals to assume the corporate structure by means of taxes and other legal statutes , we adopted what I would term " pseudo-capitalism " and so took a major step toward socialism . The biggest loss , of course , was the individual 's lessened desire and ability to give his services to the growth of his company and our economy . Socialism , I grant , has a definite place in our society . But let us not complain of the evils of capitalism by referring to a form that is not truly capitalistic . Some forms of capitalism do indeed work — superb organizations , a credit to any society . But the pseudo-capitalism which dictates our whole economy as well as our politics and social life , will not stand close scrutiny . Its pretense to operate in the public interest is little more than a sham . It serves only its own stockholders and poorly at that . As a creative enterprise , its abilities are primarily in " swallowing " creative enterprises developed outside its own organization ( an ability made possible by us , and almost mandatory ) . As to benefits to employees , it is notorious for its callous disregard except where it depends on them for services . 
The corporation in America is in reality our form of socialism , vying in a sense with the other socialistic form that has emerged within governmental bureaucracy . But while the corporation has all the disadvantages of the socialist form of organization ( so cumbersome it can not constructively do much of anything not compatible with its need to perpetuate itself and maintain its status quo ) , unluckily it does not have the desirable aspect of socialism , the motivation to operate for the benefit of society as a whole . So we are faced with a vast network of amorphous entities perpetuating themselves in whatever manner they can , without regard to the needs of society , controlling society and forcing upon it a regime representing only the corporation 's needs for survival . 
The corporation has a limited , specific place in our society . Ideally speaking , it should be allowed to operate only where the public has a great stake in the continuity of supply or services , and where the actions of a single proprietor are secondary to the needs of society . Examples are in public utilities , making military aircraft and accessories , or where the investment and risk for a proprietorship would be too great for a much needed project impossible to achieve by any means other than the corporate form , e.g. constructing major airports or dams . Thus , if corporations are not to run away with us , they must become quasi-governmental institutions , subject to public control and needs . In all other areas , private initiative of the " proprietorship " type should be urged to produce the desired goods and services .  PROPRIETORSHIP  Avoiding runaway technology can be done only by assuring a humane society ; and for this human beings must be firmly in control of the economics on which our society rests . Such genuine human leadership the proprietorship can offer , corporations can not . It can project long-range goals for itself . Corporations react violently to short-range stimuli , e. g. , quarterly and annual dividend reports . Proprietorships can establish a unity and integrity of control ; corporations , being more amorphous , can not . Proprietorships can establish a meaningful identity , representing a human personality , and thus establish sincere relationships with customers and community . Corporations are apt by nature to be impersonal , inhumane , shortsighted and almost exclusively profit-motivated , a picture they could scarcely afford to present to the public . The proprietor is able to create a leadership impossible in the corporate structure with its board of directors and stockholders . Leadership is lacking in our society because it has no legitimate place to develop . Men continuously at the head of growing enterprises can acquire experiences of the most varied , complicated and trying type so that at maturation they have developed the competence and willingness to accept the personal responsibility so sorely needed now . 
Hence government must establish greater controls upon corporations so that their activities promote what is deemed essential to the national interest . Proprietorships should get the tax advantages now accruing to corporations , e. g. the chance to accumulate capital so vital for growth . Corporations should pay added taxes , to be used for educational purposes ( not necessarily of the formal type ) . The right to leave legacies should be substantially reduced and ultimately eliminated . To perpetuate wealth control led by small groups of individuals who played no role in its creation prevents those with real initiative from coming to the fore , and is basically anti-democratic . When the proprietor dies , the establishment should become a corporation until it is either acquired by another proprietor or the government decides to drop it . Strikes should be declared illegal against corporations because disagreements would have to be settled by government representatives acting as controllers of the corporation whose responsibility to the state would now be defined against proprietorship because employees and proprietors must be completely interdependent , as they are each a part of the whole . Strikes threatening the security of the proprietorship , if internally motivated , prevent a healthy relationship . Certainly external forces should not be applied arbitrarily out of mere power available to do so . If we can not stop warfare in our own economic system , how can we expect to abolish it internationally ?  ONE KIND OF PROPRIETORSHIP  These proposals would go far toward creating the economic atmosphere favoring growth of the individual , who , in turn , would help us to cope with runaway technology . Individual human strength is needed to pit against an inhuman condition . The battle is not easy . We are tempted to blame others for our problems rather than look them straight in the face and realize they are of our own making and possible of solution only by ourselves with the help of desperately needed , enlightened , competent leaders . Persons developed in to-day 's corporations can not hope to serve here — a judgment based on experiences of my own in business and in activities outside . In my own company , in effect a partnership , although legally a corporation , I have been able to do many things for my employees which " normal " corporations of comparable size and nature would have been unable to do . Also , I am convinced that if my company were a sole proprietorship instead of a partnership , I would have been even abler to solve long-range problems for myself and my fellow-employees . Any abilities I may have were achieved in their present shape from experience in sharing in the growth and control of my business , coupled with raising my family . This combined experience , on a foundation of very average , I assure you , intelligence and background , has helped me do things many well-informed people would bet heavily against . Perhaps a list of some of the " practices " of my company will help here . 
The company grew out of efforts by two completely inexperienced men in their late twenties , neither having a formal education applicable to , or experience in , manufacturing or selling our type of articles . From an initial investment of $1,200 in 1943 , it has grown , with no additional capital investment , to a present value estimated by some as exceeding $10,000,000 ( we do n't disclose financial figures to the public ) . Its growth continues steadily on a par with past growth ; and no limitation is in evidence . Our pin-curl clips and self-locking nuts achieved dominance in just a few years time , despite substantial , well established competition .  
DURING the last years of Woodrow Wilson 's administration , a red scare developed in our country . Many Americans reacted irrationally to the challenge of Russia and turned to the repression of ideas by force . Postmaster General Burleson set about to protect the American people against radical propaganda that might be spread through the mails . Attorney General Palmer made a series of raids that sent more than 4,000 so-called radicals to the jails , in direct violation of their constitutional rights . Then , not many years later , the Un-American Activities Committee , under the leadership of Martin Dies , pilloried hundreds of decent , patriotic citizens . Anyone who tried to remedy some of the most glaring defects in our form of democracy was denounced as a traitorous red whose real purpose was the destruction of our government . This hysteria reached its height under the leadership of Senator Joseph McCarthy . Demagogues of this sort found communist bogeys lurking behind any new idea that would run counter to stereotyped notions . New ideas were dangerous and must be repressed , no matter how . 
Those who would suppress dangerous thoughts , credit ideas with high potency . They give strict interpretation to William James ' statement that " Every idea that enters the mind tends to express itself " . They seem to believe that a person will act automatically as soon as he contacts something new . Hence , the only defensible procedure is to repress any and every notion , unless it gives evidence that it is perfectly safe . 
Despite this danger , however , we are informed on every hand that ideas , not machines , are our finest tools ; they are priceless even though they can not be recorded on a ledger page ; they are the most valuable of commodities — and the most salable , for their demand far exceeds supply . So all-important are ideas , we are told , that persons successful in business and happy in social life usually fall into two classes : those who invent new ideas of their own , and those who borrow , beg , or steal from others . 
Seemingly , with an unrestricted flow of ideas , all will be well , and we are even assured that " an idea a day will keep the sheriff away " . That , however , may also bring the police , if the thinking does not meet with social approval . Criminals , as well as model citizens , exercise their minds . Merely having a mental image of some sort is not the all-important consideration . 
Of course , there must be clarity : a single distinct impression is more valuable than many fuzzy ones . But clarity is not enough . The writer took a class of college students to the state hospital for the mentally ill in St. Joseph , Missouri . An inmate , a former university professor , expounded to us , logically and clearly , that someone was pilfering his thoughts . He appealed to us to bring his case to the attention of the authorities that justice might be done . Despite the clarity of his presentation , his idea was not of Einsteinian calibre . 
True , ideas are important , perhaps life 's most precious treasures . But have we not gone overboard in stressing their significance ? Have we not actually developed idea worship ? 
Ideas we must have , and we seek them everywhere . We scour literature for them ; here we find stored the wisdom of great minds . But are all these works worthy of consideration ? Can they stand rigid scrutiny ? 
Shakespeare 's wit and wisdom , his profound insight into human nature , have stood the test of centuries . But was he infallible in all things ? What of his treatment of the Jew in The Merchant of Venice ? 
Shakespeare gives us a vivid picture of Shylock , but probably he never saw a Jew , unless in some of his travels . The Jews had been banished from England in 1290 and were not permitted to return before 1655 , when Shakespeare had been dead for thirty-nine years . If any had escaped expulsion by hiding , they certainly would not frequent the market-place . 
Shakespeare did not usually invent the incidents in his plays , but borrowed them from old stories , ballads , and plays , wove them together , and then breathed into them his spark of life . Rather than from a first-hand study of Jewish people , his delineation of Shylock stems from a collection of Italian stories , Il Pecorone , published in 1558 , although written almost two centuries earlier . He could learn at second hand from books , but could not thus capture the real Jewish spirit . Harris J. Griston , in Shaking The Dust From Shakespeare ( 216 ) , writes : " There is not a word spoken by Shylock which one would expect from a real Jew " . 
He took the story of the pound of flesh and had to fasten it on someone . The Jew was the safest victim . No Jew was on hand to boycott his financially struggling theater . It would have been unwise policy , for instance , to apply the pound-of-flesh characterization to the thrifty Scotchman . Just as now anyone may hurl insults at a citizen of Mars , or even of Tikopia , and no senatorial investigation will result . Who cares about them ! 
Shakespeare does not tell us that Shylock was an aberrant individual . He sets him forth as being typical of the group . He tells of his " Jewish heart " — not a Shylockian heart ; but a Jewish heart . This would make anyone crafty and cruel , capable of fiendish revenge . 
There is no justification for such misrepresentation . If living Jews were unavailable for study , the Bible was at hand . Reading the Old Testament would have shown the dramatist that the ideas attributed to Shylock were abhorrent to the Jews . 
Are we better off for having Shakespeare 's idea of Shylock ? Studying The Merchant of Venice in high school and college has given many young people their notions about Jews . Does this help the non-Jew to understand this group ? 
Thomas de Torquemada , Inquisitor-General of the Spanish Inquisition , put many persons to death . His name became synonymous with cold-blooded cruelty . Would we gain by keeping alive his memory and besmirching today 's Roman Catholics by saying he had a Catholic heart ? Let his bones and his memory rest in the fifteenth century where they belong ; he is out of place in our times . Shakespeare 's Shylock , too , is of dubious value in the modern world . 
Ideas , in and of themselves , are not necessarily the greatest good . A successful businessman recently prefaced his address to a luncheon group with the statement that all economists should be sent to the hospitals for the mentally deranged where they and their theories might rot together . Will his words come to be treasured and quoted through the years ? 
Frequently we are given assurance that automatically all ideas will be sifted and resifted and in the end only the good ones will survive . But is that not like going to a chemistry laboratory and blindly pouring out liquids and powders from an array of bottles and then , after stirring , expecting a new wonder drug inevitably to result ? 
What of the efficiency of this natural instrument of free discussion ? Is there some magic in it that assures results ? 
When Peter B. Kyne ( Pride of Palomar , 43 ) informed us in 1921 that we had an instinctive dislike for the Japanese , did the heated debates of the Californians settle the truth or falsity of the proposition ? 
The Leopard 's Spots came from the pen of Thomas Dixon in 1902 , and in this he announced an " unchangeable " law . If a child had a single drop of Negro blood , he would revert to the ancestral line which , except as slaves under a superior race , had not made one step of progress in 3,000 years . That doctrine has been accepted by many , but has it produced good results ? 
In the same vein , a certain short-story plot has been overworked . The son and heir of a prominent family marries a girl who has tell-tale shadows on the half-moons of her finger nails . In time she presents her aristocratic husband with a coal-black child . Is the world better for having this idea thrust upon it ? Will argument and debate decide its truth or falsity ? 
For answers to such questions we must turn to the anthropologists , the biologists , the historians , the psychologists , and the sociologists . Long ago they consigned the notions of Kyne and Dixon to the scrap heap . 
False ideas surfeit another sector of our life . For several generations much fiction has appeared dealing with the steprelationship . The stepmother , almost without exception , has been presented as a cruel ogress . Children , conditioned by this mistaken notion , have feared stepmothers , while adults , by their antagonistic attitudes , have made the role of the substitute parents a difficult one . Debate is not likely to resolve the tensions and make the lot of the stepchild a happier one . Research , on the other hand , has shown many stepmothers to be eminently successful , some far better than the real mothers . 
Helen Deutsch informed us ( The Psychology of Women , Vol. /2 , , 434 ) that in all cultures " the term 'stepmother' automatically evokes deprecatory implications " , a conclusion accepted by many . Will mere debate on that proposition , even though it be free and untrammeled , remove the dross and leave a residue of refined gold ? That is questionable , to say the least . Research into several cultures has proven her position to be a mistaken one . 
Most assuredly ideas are invaluable . But ideas , just for the sake of having them , are not enough . In the 1930 's , cures for the depression literally flooded Washington . For a time the President received hundreds of them every day , most of them worthless . 
Ideas need to be tested , and not merely by argument and debate . When some question arises in the medical field concerning cancer , for instance , we do not turn to free and open discussion as in a political campaign . We have recourse to the scientifically-trained specialist in the laboratory . The merits of the Salk anti-polio vaccine were not established on the forensic platform or in newspaper editorials , but in the laboratory and by tests in the field on thousands of children . 
Our presidential campaigns provide much debate and argument . But is the result new barnsful of tested knowledge on the basis of which we can with confidence solve our domestic and international problems ? Man , we are told , is endowed with reason and is capable of distinguishing good from bad . But what a super-Herculean task it is to winnow anything of value from the mud-beplastered arguments used so freely , particularly since such common use is made of cliches and stereotypes , in themselves declarations of intellectual bankruptcy . 
We are reminded , however , that freedom of thought and discussion , the unfettered exchange of ideas , is basic under our form of government . 
Assuredly in our political campaigns there is freedom to think , to examine any and all issues , and to speak without restraint . No holds are barred . But have the results been heartening ? May we state with confidence that in such an exhibition a republic will find its greatest security ? 
We must not forget , to be sure , that free discussion and debate have produced beneficial results . In truth , we can say that this broke the power of Senator Joseph McCarthy , who was finally exposed in full light to the American people . If he had been " liquidated " in some way , he would have become a martyr , a rallying point for people who shared his ideas . Debate in the political arena can be productive of good . But it is a clumsy and wasteful process : it can produce negative results but not much that is positive . Debate rid us of McCarthy but did not give us much that is positive . It did something to clear the ground , but it erected no striking new structure ; it did not even provide the architect 's plan for anything new . 
In the field of the natural sciences , scientifically verified data are quite readily available and any discussion can be shortened with good results . In the field of the social sciences a considerable fund of tested knowledge has been accumulated that can be used to good advantage . 
By no means would we discourage the production of ideas : they provide raw materials with which to work ; they provide stimulations that lead to further production . We would establish no censorship .  The President 's personality would have opened that office to him . And for the first time a representative of the highest office in the land would have been liable to the charge that he had attempted to make it a successorship by inheritance . It is testimony to the deep respect in which Mr. Eisenhower was held by members of all parties that the moral considerations raised by his approach to the matter were not explicitly to be broached . 
These began to be apparent in a press conference held during the second illness in order that the consulting specialists might clarify the President 's condition for the nation . And if Howard Rutstein felt impelled thereafter to formulate the ethics of the medical profession , his article in the Atlantic Monthly accomplished a good deal more . It forced us to fix the responsibility for the position in which all medical commentators had been placed . The discussion of professional ethics inevitably reminded us that in the historical perspective the President 's decision will finally clarify itself as a moral , rather than a medical , problem . Because the responsibility for resolving the issue lay with the President , rather than with his doctors , nothing raises more surely for us the difficulties simple goodness faces in dealing with complex moral problems under political pressure . For the President had dealt with the matter humbly , in what he conceived as the democratic way . But the problem is one which gives us the measure of a man , rather than a group of men , whether a group of doctors , a group of party members assembled at a dinner to give their opinion , or the masses of the voters . 
Any attempt to reconcile this statement of the central issue in the campaign of 1956 with the nature of the man who could not conceive it as the central issue will at least resolve our confusions about the chaotic and misleading results of the earnestness of both doctors and President in a situation which should never have arisen . It was a response to the conflict between political pressure and the moral intuition which resulted in attempts at prediction . In no other situation would a group of doctors , struggling competently to improve the life expectancy of a man beloved by the world , be subjected to such merciless and persistent questioning , and before they were prepared to demonstrate the kind of verbal precision which alone can clarify for mankind the problems it faces . And though we can look back now and see their errors , we can look back also to the ultimate error . 
It recurred in the press conferences : the President 's remarks about his running developed a singular tone , one which we find in few statements made by public individuals on such a matter . The press conference became a stage which betrayed the drift of his private thinking , rather than his convictions . He commented — thoughtfully , a reporter told us — that it was " not too important for the individual how he ends up " . He gave us a simile to explain his admission that even at the worst period of his second illness it never occurred to him there was any renewed question about his running : as in the Battle of the Bulge , he had no fears about the outcome until he read the American newspapers . Yet the attitude that the fate of the Presidency demands in such a situation is quite distinct from the simple courage that can proceed with battles to be fought , regardless of the consequences . In this case others should not have had to raise the doubts and fears . The Presidency demands an incisive awareness of the larger implications of the death of any incumbent . It is of the utmost importance to the people of America and of the world how their governing President " ends up " during the four years of his term . Only when that term is ended and he is a private citizen again can he be permitted the freedom and the courage to discount the dangers of his death . Ironically enough , in this instance such personal virtues were a luxury . 
At the national and international level , then , what is the highest kind of morality for the private citizen represents an instance of political immorality . And we had the uneasy sense that the cleavage between the moral and the political progressed amid the events which concern us . For the tone of the editorials which greeted Mr. Eisenhower 's original announcement of his running had been strangely disquieting . Neither the vibrant enthusiasm which bespeaks a people 's intuitive sense of the fitness of things at climactic moments nor the vital argumentation betraying its sense that something significant has transpired was in evidence . Nothing testifies more clearly to that cleavage than the peculiar editorial page appearing in a July issue of Life Magazine , the issue which also carried the second announcement of the candidacy . The double editorial on two aspects of " The U. S. Spirit " was subtly calculated to suggest a moral sanction for gambles great as well as small , reflecting popular approval of this questionable attitude toward the highest office in the land . " The Moral Creed " and " The Will to Risk " live happily together , if we do not examine where the line is to be drawn . " I may possibly be a greater risk than is the normal person of my age " , the President had said on February 29th of the election year , ignoring the fact that no one of his age had ever lived out another term . " My doctors assure me that this increased percentage of risk is not great " . But by the time the risk was doubled , events had dismissed from his mind both increased percentages and a previously stated intention of considering carefully anything more serious than a bout of influenza . Only infrequently did the situation color his thinking . Ironically no president we have had would have regretted more than President Eisenhower the possibility to which his own words , in the press conference held at the beginning of August , testified : that unable as he was himself to say his running was best for the country , unconsciously he had placed his party before his nation . 
So it is that we relive his opening statement in the first television address with the dramatic immediacy of the present . No consideration of risk urges itself upon him now : for this is what the mind does with the ideas on which it has not properly focussed . Yet with a mind less shallow , if less sharp , than some of the fortune-happy syndicates which back him , he feels what he can not formulate ; and we watch him amid the overtones which suggest he could never in any conscience urge a risk upon the voters . Moving as he is into the phase of the campaign which demands conviction of him , he adopts a position that is morally indefensible . He ascribes to the mercy of God the peace which this personal matter — the assurance that he can physically sustain the burden of the office longer than any individual in the history of our nation has been able to do — has brought him . What is simply an opinion formed in defiance of the laws of human probability , whether or not it is later confirmed , has become by September of the election year " a firm conviction " . As a means of silencing a discussion which ought to have taken place , the statement is an effective one : we sympathize with the universal confusion which gives rise to such convictions . But it is also the climax to one of the absorbing chapters in our current political history . 
In assigning to God the responsibility which he learned could not rest with his doctors , Eisenhower gave evidence of that weakening of the moral intuition which was to characterize his administration in the years to follow . In any other man this reassurance to the electorate would have caused us a profound moral shock . About this man we had to think twice . We knew that it was , as reassurance , the ironic fruit of a deeply moral nature . But the fact remains that even the unconscious acceptance of himself as a man of destiny divinely protected must be censored in any man who evades the responsibility for his major decisions , and thus for imposing his will on the people . And in the context of drifting personal utterances we have examined , there was occasional evidence of the origin of all such evasions . When the possibility that he had not given reconsideration to so weighty a decision seemed to disconcert his questioners , Mr. Eisenhower was known to make his characteristic statement to the press that he was not going to talk about the matter any more . Thinking had stopped ; it was not to be resumed . 
The portrait that had developed , fragmentarily but consistently , was the portrait of a man to whom serious thinking is alien enough that the making of a decision inhibits , when it does not forestall , any ability to review the decision in the light of new evidence . This does not mean that the decision to run for office should inevitably have been revoked . Instead it means that the thinking in which decision issues has the power to determine the morality of the decision , as in this instance the pressure for renewed practical or legislative attention to the constitutional problems the decision had uncovered might have done . Drifting through a third illness , apparently without any provision for the handling of a major national emergency other than a talk with the vice-president , Eisenhower revealed the singularly static quality of his thinking . Despite three warnings , no sense of moral urgency impelled him to distinguish his situation , and thus his responsibilities , from Wilson 's .   By contrast , the energetic reaction of the leader to the full demands his decision imposes upon him strengthens the moral intuition and gives us the measure of the man . Only by means of an intensive preoccupation with the detailed considerations following from any decision can he ensure attention to the practical details to be dealt with if the implications of immorality in the major decision are effectively to be checked . In the incessant struggle with recalcitrant political fact he learns to focus the essence of a problem in the significant detail , and to articulate the distinctions which clarify the detail as significant , with what is sometimes astounding rapidity . Like Lincoln , he can distinguish his relation to God from the constitutional responsibilities a questionable decision exacts of him . Like Roosevelt , he can distinguish an attitude toward a Russian leader he may share with a host of Americans from the responsibilities diplomatic convention may impose upon him . He chooses to subordinate one to the other , sometimes reluctantly , accepting criticism for the lesser immoralities facts breed . The very nature of a choice so grounded in distinction and fact leads to the valid convictions which become force of will in the manifest leader . The capacity for making the distinctions of which diplomacy is compact , and the facility with language which can render them into validity in the eyes of other men are the leader 's means for transforming the moral intuition into moral leadership . 
The making of distinctions , like the perception of the great distinctions made , is an inordinately difficult business . Lincoln 's slow progress towards the several marking his achievement is even now unrecognizable as such , and loosely interpreted as the alternation of inconsistency with vision . But because it is the function of the mind to turn the one into the other by means of the capacities with which words endow it , we do not unwisely examine the type of distinction , in the sphere of politics , on which decisions hang . Only recently , and perhaps because a television debate can so effectively dramatize President Kennedy 's extraordinary mastery of detail , have the abilities on which the capacity for making distinctions depend begun to be clearly discernible at the level of politics . In his recent evaluation of Kennedy 's potentialities for leadership , Walter Lippmann has cited the " precision " of his mind , his " immense command " of factual detail , and his " instinct for the crucial point " as impressive in the extreme ; and it is surely clear that the first of these is the result of the way in which the individual 's command of language interacts with the other two .  For this change is not a change from one positive position to another , but a change from order and truth to disorder and negation . The liberal-conservative division , we might observe in passing , is not of itself directly involved in a private interest conflict nor even in struggle between ruling groups . Rather it is rooted in a difference of response to the threat of social disintegration . The division is not between those who wish to preserve what they have and those who want change . Rather it is a division established by two absolutely different ways of thought with regard to man 's life in society . These ways are absolutely irreconcilable because they offer two different recipes for man 's redemption from chaos . 
The civilizational crisis , the third type of change raises the question " what are we to do " ? on the most primitive level . For the answer can not be derived from any socially cohesive element in the disrupting community . There is no socially existential answer to the question . For the truth formerly experienced by the community no longer has existential status in the community , nor does any answer elaborated by philosophers or theoriticians . In this phase of change , no idea has social acceptance and so none has ontological status in the community . An interregnum ensues in which not men but ideas compete for existence . 
If we examine the three types of change from the point of view of their internal structure we find an additional profound difference between the third and the first two , one that accounts for the notable difference between the responses they evoke . The first two types of change occur within the inward and immanent structure of the society . The first involves a simple shift of interests in the society . The second involves something deeper , but its characteristic form focuses on a shift in policy for the community , not in the truth on which the community rests . Thus in both types attention is focused on the community itself , and its phenomenological life . The third type , however , wrenches attention from the life of action and interests in the community and focuses it on the ground of being on which the community depends for its existence . Voegelin has analyzed this experience in the case of the stable , healthy community . There the community , faced with the need to formulate policy on the level of absolute justice , can find the answer to its problem in the absolute truth which it holds as partially experienced . This , however , can not be done by a community whose very experience of truth is confused and incoherent : it has no absolute standard , and consequently can not distinguish the absolute from the contingent . It has lost its ground of being and floats in a mist of appearances . Relativism and equality are its characteristic diseases . Precisely at the moment when it has lost its vision the mind of the community turns out from itself in a search for the ontological standard whereby it can measure itself . For paradigmatic history " breaks " rather than unfolds precisely when the movement is from order to disorder , and not from one order to a new order . The liberal-conservative split , to define it further , derives from a basic difference concerning the existential status of standard sought and about the spiritual experience that leads to its identification . 
When disruptive change has penetrated to the third level of social order , the process of disruption rapidly reaches a point of no return . Indeed , it is probable that this point is reached the moment the third level of change begins . At that point we reach the " closed " historical situation : the situation in which man is no longer free to return to a status quo ante . At that point men become aware of the mystery of history called variously " fate " , or " destiny " , or " providence " , and feel themselves caught helplessly in the writhing of a disrupted society . The reasons for this experience are rooted in the metaphysical characteristics of such a change . 
Of all forms of being , society , or community , has the greatest element of determinability . Its ontological status is itself most tenuous because apart from individual men , who are its " matter " , tradition , the " form " of society exists only as a shared perception of truth . The ontological status of society thus is constituted by the TOOLONG status of society 's members . The content of that psychological status determines , ultimately , the content of civilization . Those social , civilizational factors not rooted in the human spirit of the group , ultimately cease to exist . Civilization itself — tradition — falls out of existence when the human spirit itself becomes confused . Civilization is what man has made of himself . Its massive contours are rooted in the simple need of man , since he is always incomplete , to complete himself . 
It is not enough for man to be an ontological esse . He needs existential completion , he needs , that is , to move in the direction of completion . And the direction of that movement is determined by his perception of the truth about himself . He must , consequently , exist as a self-perceived substantive , developing agent , or he does not exist as man . Thus , it is no mystical intuition , but an analyzable conception to say that man and his tradition can " fall out of existence " . This happens at the moment man loses the perception of moral substance in himself , of a nature that , in Maritain 's words , is perceived as a " locus of intelligible necessities " . An existentialist is a man who perceives himself only as " esse " , as existence without substance . 
Thus human perception and human volition is the immanent cause of all social change and this most truly when the change reaches the civilizational level . Thus with regard to the loss of tradition , in the change from order to disorder the metaphysics of change works itself out as a disruption of the individual soul , a change in which man continues as an objective ontological existent , but no longer as a man . 
Further , change is a form of motion , it occurs as the act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency and has not yet reached the terminus of the change . With regard to the change we are examining , the question is , at what point does the change become irreversible ? A number of considerations suggest that this occurs early in the process . Change involves the displacement of form . This means that the inception of change itself can begin only when the factors conducive to change have already become more powerful than those anchoring the existent form in being . If the existent form is to be retained new factors that reinforce it must be introduced into the situation . In the case of social decay , form is displaced simply by the process of dissolution with no form at the terminus of the process . Now in the mere fact of the beginning of such displacement we have prima-facie evidence of the ontological weakness of the fading form . And when we consider the tenuous hold tradition has on existence , any weakening of that hold constitutes a crisis of existence . The retention of a tradition confronted with such a crisis necessitates the introduction of new spiritual forces into the situation . However , the crisis occurs precisely as a weakening of spiritual forces . It would seem , therefore , that in a civilizational crisis man can not save himself . The emergence of the crisis itself would seem to constitute a warranty for the victory of disorder . And it would seem that history is a witness to this truth . 
As a further characterization of the liberal conservative split we may observe that it involves differences in the formula for escaping inevitabilities in history . These differences , in turn , derive from prior differences concerning the friendly or hostile character of change .  UNANALYZED RESPONSES  ANXIETY AND DEEP INSECURITY are the characteristic responses evoked by the crisis in tradition . To experience them , it is not necessary for a people to be actively aware of what is happening to it . The process of erosion need only undermine the tradition and a series of consequences begin unfolding within the individual , while in institutions a quiet but deep transformation of processes occurs . Within the individual the reaction has been called various names , all , however , pointing to the same basic experience . Weil identifies it as being " rootless " , Guardini as being " placeless " , Riesman as being " lonely " . Others call it " alienation " , and mean by that no simple economic experience ( as Marx does ) but a deep spiritual sense of dislocation . Within institutions there is a marked decline of the process of persuasion and the substitution of a force-fear process which masquerades as the earlier one of persuasion . We note the use of rhetoric as a weapon , the manipulation of the masses by propaganda , the " mobilization " of effort and resources . 
Within this context of spontaneous and unanalyzed responses to the experience of civilizational crisis , two basic organizations of response are observable : reaction and ideological progressivism . These responses are explicable in terms of characteristics inherent in the crisis . Both are predictably destined to fail . 
The response of reaction is dominated by a concern for what is vanishing . Its essence lies in its attempt to recover previous order through the repression of disruptive forces . To this end political authority is called upon to exercise its negative and coercive powers . The implicit assumption of this response is that history is reversible . Seemingly , order is perceived as a kind of subsistent entity now covered by adventitious accretions . The problem is to remove the accretions and thereby uncover the order that was always there . Such a response , of course , misses the point that in crisis order is going out of existence . Moreover its posture of stubborn but simple resistance is doomed to failure because of the metaphysical weakness of the existent form of order , once the activation of change has reached visible proportions . The most reaction can achieve is stasis , and a stasis that can be maintained only by the expenditure of an effort which ultimately exhausts itself . 
Despite the hopelessness of the response , it is explicable in terms of the crisis of tradition itself . Since a civilizational crisis involves also a crisis in private interests and in the ruling class , reaction is normally found among those who feel themselves to be among the ruling class . Their great error is to mingle the responses typical of each of the three types of change . Since civilizational change is the most difficult to perceive and analyze , it seldom is given adequate attention . And the anxiety it generates is misinterpreted as anxiety over private interest and threatened social status . 
The basic truth in the reactionary response is to be found in its realistic assumption of the primacy of the real over the ideational . But this truth is distorted by its extreme application : the assumption of the separate existence of tradition . The reactionary misses the point that tradition exists ontologically only in the form of TOOLONG relations . Reactionary theories , for this reason , usually assume some form of organismic theory . In its defensive formulations , the theory will attack conscious change on the grounds of the independent existence of the community . In its dynamic form , it visualizes the community as the embodiment of an ontological force — the race , for instance , which unfolds in history . In both cases the individual tends to be treated as an instrument of the organic reality . 
When the reactionary response is thus bolstered by an intellectual defense , the characteristics of that defense are explicable only in terms of the basic attitudes of unanalyzed reaction . Reaction is rooted in a perception of tradition as a whole . It is a total situation that is defended : the " good old days " . There is no selectivity ; even the questionable features of the past are defended . The point is that the reactionary , for whatever motive , perceives himself to have been part or a partner of something that extended beyond himself , something which , consequently , he was not able to accept or reject on the basis of subjective preference . The reactionary is confused about the existential status of a decaying tradition , but he does perceive the unity tradition had when it was healthy .  
All of which brings up another problem in the use of psychoanalytic insight in a literary work . Is the Oedipus complex , the clinical syndrome , material for a tragedy ? If we remove ourselves for a moment from our time and our infatuation with mental disease , is n't there something absurd about a hero in a novel who is defeated by his infantile neurosis ? I am not making a clinical judgment here , for such personal tragedies are real and are commonplace in the analyst 's consulting room , but literature makes a different claim upon our sympathies than tragedy in life . A man in a novel who is defeated in his childhood and condemned by unconscious forces within him to tiredly repeat his earliest failure in love , only makes us a little weary of man ; his tragedy seems unworthy and trivial . 
Now we can argue that the irresistible fate of Oedipus Rex was nothing more than the irresistible unconscious longings of Oedipus projected outward , but this externalization of unconscious conflict makes all the difference between a story and a clinical case history . We can also argue that the three brothers Karamazov and Smerdyakov were the external representatives of an internal conflict within one man , Dostoevsky , a conflict having to do with father-murder and the wish to possess the father 's woman . But a novel in which one man Karamazov explored the divisions within his personality would scarcely merit publication in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly . 
It is a mistake to look upon the Oedipus of Oedipus Complex as a literary descendant of Oedipus Rex . Whatever the psychological truth in the Oedipus myth , an Oedipus who is drawn to his fate by irresistible external forces can carry the symbol of humanity and its archaic crime , and the incest that is unknowing renews the mystery of the eternal dream of childhood and absorbs us in the secret . But a modern Oedipus who is doomed because he can not oppose his own childhood is only pathetic , and for renouncing the mystery in favor of psychological truth he gives up the claim on our sympathies . 
I am suggesting that a case-history approach to the Oedipus complex is a blind alley for a storyteller . The best gifts of the novelist will be wasted on the reader who is insulated against any surprises the novelist may have in store for him . Incest is still a durable theme , but if it wants to get written about it will have to find ways to surprise the emotions , and there is no better way to do this than that of concealment and symbolic representation . And the best way to conceal and disguise the elements of an incest story is not to set out to write an incest story . Which brings to mind another Lawrence story and some interesting comparisons in the treatment of the Oedipal theme . 
" The Rocking Horse Winner " is also a story about a boy 's love for his mother . If I now risk some comparisons with Sons and Lovers let it be clear that I am not comparing the two works or judging their merits ; I am only singling out differences in treatment of a theme and the resultant effects . " The Rocking Horse Winner " is a fantasy with extraordinary power to disturb the reader — but we do not know why . It is the story of the hopeless love of a little boy for his cold and vain mother . There are ghostly scenes in which the little boy on his rocking horse rocks madly toward the climax that will magically give him the name of the winning horse . The child grows rich on his winnings and conspires with his uncle to make secret gifts of his money to his mother . The story ends in the child 's illness and delirium brought on by the feverish compulsion to ride his horse to win for his mother . The child dies with his mourning mother at his bedside . 
I had read the story many times without asking myself why it affected me or caring why it did . But on one occasion when I encountered a similar fantasy in a little boy who was my patient I began to understand the uncanny effects of this story . It was , of course , a little boy 's fantasy of winning his mother to himself , and replacing the father who could not give her the things she wanted — a classical oedipal fantasy if you like — but if it were only this the story would be banal . Why does the story affect us ? How does the rocking exert its uncanny effect upon the reader ? The rocking is actually felt in the story , a terrible and ominous rhythm that prophesies the tragedy . The rocking , I realized , is the single element in the story that carries the erotic message , the unspoken and unconscious undercurrent that would mar the innocence of a child 's fantasy and disturb the effects of the work if it were made explicit . The rocking has the ambiguous function of keeping the erotic undercurrent silent and making it present ; it conceals and yet is suggestive ; a perfect symbol . And if we understand the rocking as an erotic symbol we can also see how well it serves as the symbol of impending tragedy . For this love of the boy for his mother is a hopeless and forbidden love , doomed by its nature . 
We are also struck by the fact that this story of a boy 's love for his mother does not offend , while the incestuous love of the man , Paul Morel , sometimes repels . It 's easy to see why . This love belongs to childhood ; we accord it its place there , and in Lawrence 's treatment we are given the innocent fantasy of a child , in fact , the form in which oedipal love is expressed in childhood . And when the child dies in Lawrence 's story in a delirium that is somehow brought on by his mania to win and to make his mother rich , the manifest absurdity of such a disease and such a death does not enter into our thoughts at all . We have so completely entered the child 's fantasy that his illness and his death are the plausible and the necessary conclusion . 
I am sure that none of the effects of this story were consciously employed by Lawrence to describe an oedipal fantasy in childhood . It is most probable that Freud and the Oedipus complex never entered his head in the writing of this story . He was simply writing a story that wanted to be told , and in the writing a childhood fantasy of his own emerged . He would not have cared why it emerged , he only wanted to capture a memory to play with it again in his imagination and somehow to fix and hold in the story the disturbing emotions that accompanied the fantasy . 
In our own time we have seen that the novelist 's debt to psychoanalysis has increased but that the novel itself has not profited much from this marriage . Ortega 's hope that modern psychology might yet bring forth a last flowering of the novel has only been partially fulfilled . The young writer seems intimidated by psychological knowledge ; he has lost confidence in his own eyes and in the validity of his own psychological insights . He borrows the insights of psychology to improve his impaired vision but can not bring to his work the distinctive vision that should be a novelist 's own . He has been seduced by the marvels of the unconscious and has lost interest in studying the surfaces of character . If many of the characters in contemporary novels appear to be the bloodless relations of characters in a case history it is because the novelist is often forgetful today that those things that we call character manifest themselves in surface behavior , that the ego is still the executive agency of personality , and that all we know of personality must be discerned through the ego . The novelist who has been badly baptized in psychoanalysis often gives us the impression that since all men must have an Oedipus complex all men must have the same faces .  /2 , .  I have argued that Oedipus of the Oedipus complex has a doubtful future as a tragic figure in literature . But a writer who has a taste for irony and who sees incest in all its modern dimensions can let his imagination work on the disturbing joke in the incest myth , the joke that strikes right at the center of man 's humanness . Moral dread is seen as the other face of desire , and here psychoanalysis delivers to the writer a magnificent irony and a moral problem of great complexity . 
There is probably some significance in the fact that two of the best incest stories I have encountered in recent years are burlesques of the incest myth . The ancient types are reassembled in gloom and foreboding to be irresistibly drawn to their destinies , but the myth fails before the modern truth ; the oracle speaks false and the dream speaks true . In both the farmer 's tale in Ralph Ellison 's Invisible Man and in Thomas Mann 's The Holy Sinner , the incest hero rises above the myth by accepting the wish as motive ; the heroic act is the casting off of pretense . 
Thomas Mann wrote The Holy Sinner in 1951 . It was conceived as a leave-taking , a kind of melancholy gathering-in of the myths of the West , " bevor die Nacht sinkt , eine lange Nacht vielleicht und ein tiefes Vergessen " . He chose a medieval legend of incest , Gregorius vom Stein , and freely borrowed and parodied other myths of the West , mixing themes , language , peoples and times in a master myth in which the old forms continually renew themselves , as in his previous treatment of Joseph . 
But The Holy Sinner is not simply a retelling of old stories for an old man 's entertainment . Mann understood better than most men the incest comedy at the center of the myth and the psychological truth in which dread is shown as the other face as longing was for him just the kind of deep and complicated joke he liked to tell . And when he retold the legend of Gregorius he interpolated a modern version in which the medieval players speak contemporary thoughts in archaic language ; while they move through the pageantry of the ancient incest myth and cover themselves through not-knowing , they reveal the unconscious motive in seeking each other and in the last scene make an extraordinary confession of guilt in the twentieth-century manner . 
Grigorss is the child of an incestuous union between a royal brother and sister , the twins Sibylla and Wiligis . He is born in secrecy after the death of his father and cast adrift soon after birth . The infant is discovered by a fisherman who brings him home to rear him . An ivory tablet in the infant 's cask recounts the story of his sinful origins and is preserved for the child by the monks of a monastery in the fishing village . Grigorss , at seventeen , learns his story and goes forth as a knight to uncover his origins . His sailing vessel is guided by fate to the shores of his own country at a time when Sibylla 's domain is overrun by the armies of one of her rejected suitors . Grigorss overcomes the suitor in battle , delivers the city from its oppressors and marries Sibylla who had fallen in love with the beautiful knight the moment she saw him . 
Sibylla is pregnant with their second child when she finds the ivory tablet concealed by her husband , and the identities of mother and son are revealed . Grigorss goes off to do penance on a rock for seventeen years . At the end of this period two pious Christians in Rome receive the revelation which leads them to seek the next Pope on the rock . Grigorss comes to Rome and becomes a great and beloved Pope . In the last pages of the book Sibylla comes to Rome to seek an audience with the great Pope and to give her confession . Mother and son recognize each other and , in Mann 's version of this legend , make a remarkable confession of guilt to each other , the confession of unconscious motive and unconscious knowledge of their true identities from the time they had first set eyes on each other .  In recollection he has said : " Natural or man-made objects kept coming into my head , but I would suppress them sternly " . Moreover , he organized the movement of his forms , within his rigorously shaped space , into highly complex equilibriums ; and used gradations of color value as well as sharply contrasting elementary colors . 
The worthy Mondrian , seeing these pictures , said in a tone of kindly reproof : " But you are really an artist of the naturalistic tradition " ! Helion did not realize it at the time , but it was true . 
His " monumental " abstraction , made up of smooth , metallic " non-objects " acting upon each other with great tension , won Helion much acclaim during the 'thirties . The play of novel lighting effects also entered into these compositions , whose controlled power and varied activity made them well worth meditating . 
As Helion 's work showed more and more nostalgia for the world of man and nature , the pure abstractionists expressed some disapproval ; but Leger , Arp , Lipchitz and Alexander Calder , at the time , gave him their blessing . His canvases nowadays bore titles frankly declaring them to be " Figures in Space " , or " Blue Figure " , or " Pink Figure " ; and they had ( vaguely ) heads and feet . Exhibited in shows in London in 1935 , and in New York the following year , the new , more elaborated abstracts were much favored in the circles of the modernists as three-dimentional dramas of great intellectual coherence . At this period the thirty-year old Helion was ranked " as one of the mature leaders of the modern movement " , according to Herbert Read , " and in the direct line of descent from Cezanne , Seurat , Gris and Leger " . In America , Meyer Schapiro observed that , unlike the Mondrian school , Helion " sought a return path to the fullness of nature within the framework of abstract art " . 
It is notable that at this time he was writing with admiration of Cimabue 's and Poussin 's way of filling space . Abstract art was still the right path for him ; but , he held , instead of continuing as an " art of reduction " , it must grow , must make a place for the contributions of the Raphaels and Poussins as well as for those of the early cubists and Mondrian . 
Later Helion wrote of this phase : " For years I built for myself a subtle instrument of relationships — colors and forms without a name . I played on it my secret songs , unexplained , passionate and peaceful " . 
But his own work was evolving further . The extreme limitations he sensed in all current abstract art made that seem to him increasingly arid and cold . He was engaged in constant experiments that searched for new directions . Where would it all lead ? He himself did not know , as he said in 1935 . But he was " afraid of the future — he would in fact welcome a way back to social integration , a functional art of some kind " . 
During the 1920 's the Abstractionists , the German Bauhaus group of industrial designers , and the new architects all had the dream of some well ordered utopia , or welfare state , in which their neat and logical constructions might find their proper place . But whereas the postwar American abstractionists seem to Helion to be determined to " escape " from the real world , or simply to rebel against it , the ordered abstractions which he and his associates of the 1930 's were painting embodied the hope of " improving " things . " We were possessed by visions of a new civilization to come , very pure and elevated " , he has said , " in fact some ideal form of socialism such as we had dreamed of since the war of 1914-1918 " . 
Instead of this the 1930 's witnessed a tragic economic depression , the rise of Fascist dictators in Europe , the wasting Civil War in Spain . Very much the political man , Helion felt himself deeply affected by the increasingly pessimistic atmosphere of France and all Europe , whose foundations seemed to him more and more shaky . In 1936 he decided to migrate to America . The Rooseveltian America was a haven of liberalism and progress and seemed to him to constitute the last best hope for civilization . Helion also hoped that America 's mastery of technology and industrial efficiency would be accompanied by the production of new and beautiful art works . " I arrived in the United States with the idea of establishing myself there more or less permanently and finding inspiration for new compositions " . 
In New York he was well received by what was then only a small brave band of non-figurative artists , including Alexander Calder , George K. L. Morris , De Kooning , Holty and a few others . After a year in a studio on Sheridan Square , having married an American girl who was a native of Virginia , Helion moved to a village in the Blue Ridge mountains , where he produced some of the most imposing of his abstract canvases . 
The darkening world scene , at the time of the Munich Pact , continued to trouble his mind even in his remote Virginia studio . " Fear possessed me , and the certainty of war " , he has related . " I truly smelled blood , death , heaps of corpses everywhere " . In haste he labored to finish some last abstract paintings : a three-panel frieze , with a flying figure and a fallen figure ; a " Double-Figure " , which went to the Chicago Art Institute , and is considered by him the most successful of his abstracts ; and in early 1939 , a " Fallen Figure " of very ominous character , which concluded his abstract phase . " I knew I was carrying on with abstraction to its very end — for me " , he said of the two years ' output in Virginia . With those paintings of big constructions crashing down , he felt he could stop . They were , in effect his last testament to non-objective art . 
He had taken out first papers for American citizenship ; but after war came to Europe , he decided to return to France , arriving there in January , 1940 . " I hated the war " , he said , " but thought I ought to go because I was , perhaps , one of those who had n't done enough to prevent it " .   In June , 1940 , Sergeant Helion , with a company of reserve troops waiting to go into battle , was sketching the hills south of the Loire River , when the war suddenly rolled in upon him . Its first apparition was a long , gloomy column of refugees riding in farm wagons , or pushing prams . His company then carried out a confused retreating movement until it was surrounded by the Germans , a few days before France capitulated . After a sort of death march during four days without food , Helion and his comrades were shipped by cattle-car to a labor camp at an estate farm in East Germany . A year later they were removed to a Stalag in the harbor of Stettin . At the time of his capture Helion had on his person a sketchbook he had bought at Woolworth 's in New York . When he was stripped , deloused and numbered by his guards , his much-thumbed sketchbook was seized and thrown on a pile of prisoners ' goods to be confiscated . " It was then I knew that they were making war against Man , the individual within ! — who questioned things when given orders " . 
At Stettin the university-educated artist , who had studied German , was chosen to serve as interpreter and clerk in the office of the Stalag commander . In secret he also acted as a member of the prisoners ' Central Committee , which plotted sabotage , planned a few escapes , and maintained a hidden control over the wretched French slave-laborers . 
In the Stalag , Helion came to know and love his comrades , most of them plain folk , who , in their extremity , showed true courage and ran great risks to help each other . How much they esteemed him is shown by the fact that their underground committee selected him as one of the few who would be helped to escape . In the prison camp 's Black Market civilian clothes were quietly bought and forged papers were devised for him ; during long weeks the plan for his flight was rehearsed . 
Every morning contingents of prisoners would be sent out to labor in nearby factories . One evening , while a volley-ball game was being played in the yard among the prisoners remaining there , a simulated melee was staged — just as the gates were opened to admit other prisoners returning from work . As Helion wrote afterward : " 
Their sentry followed … Four hands were stretched toward me by my comrades behind me . Marquet held my briefcase ; Finot held a wallet with my money and papers ; Moineau and David held nothing but their fingers … They felt rough and kind and warm . At this moment the volley-ball hit the ground . Duclos ran toward Desprez with fists raised . The guards all rushed up to intervene … " 
Shedding his prison cloak , Helion shot through the gates , now clad in civilian garments and with the passport of a Flemish worker . Riding trains , hitching hikes on trucks across Germany , slipping through guarded frontiers with the help of secret guides , he eventually reached Vichy France , and , by the winter of 1943 , was back in Virginia . He wrote : " 
To escape from a prison camp required a very special state of mind ; not only loathing of captivity , but a faith , a hope that is even stronger . I left behind me brave men , whom captivity had robbed of all hope . They too loved their families , longed for their villages : yet lacked the faith that drove one to dare … the fearful chance of escape " . 
It was a time of revelations for him . Even the most rational of men , under great stress , may be transported by a new faith and behave like mystics . Helion knew that he owed his freedom as much to the self-sacrifice of his fellow-men in Arbeitskommando /13 , , Stettin , as to his own fierce will and love of life . After that , he declared , " to return to freedom was to fall to one 's knees before the real world and adore it " . In prison he had been able to sketch nothing but figures from life , his guards , his companions in misery . Now all his desires centered on " rediscovering and singing of the prosaic and yet beautiful world of men and objects so long barred from me by a barbed wire fence " . And , he added : " During the many months in prison camp , all abstract images vanished from my mind " . 
Before leaving for America , he happened to see his old friend Jean Arp and confided to him his new resolutions . Arp protested : " But it is impossible ! Everything in the way of representation has already been done by the old masters " . Helion , however , clung to the belief that " in escaping from the Stalag I had also escaped from Abstraction " . 
While convalescing in his Virginia home he wrote a book recording his prison experiences and escape , entitled : They Shall Not Have Me … Published originally in ( Helion 's ) English by Dutton + Co. of New York , in 1943 , the book was received by the press as a work of astonishing literary power and one of the most realistic accounts of World War /2 , from the French side . It was very widely read , too ; and the author , who seemed the embodiment of France 's rising spirit of resistance to her conquerors , was much complimented for his daring military action . But when he showed his new figurative pictures to his artist friends of the abstract camp , they paid him no compliments and drew long faces . 
Between 1944 and 1947 Helion had a series of one-man shows — at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in New York and in Paris — of his new realistic pictures . They reincarnated the figures of human beings banished from his canvases since the 1920 's . These new pictures focussed on the familiar and commonplace objects that he had heard the men in his prison camp talking about as the things they missed most , hence associated with the sense of lost freedom : the cafe at the corner , the newspaper kiosk , the girls in doorways and windows along the street , the golden-crusted French bread they lacked , the cigarettes denied them . One of the pictures was of a man with hat drawn over his face ceremoniously lighting a cigarette ; others were of men doffing their hats to each other , carrying umbrellas with pomp , reading newspapers , or simply showing loaves of bread spread out .  
Important as was Mr. O'Donnell 's essay , his thesis is so restricting as to deny Faulkner the stature which he obviously has . He and also Mr. Cowley and Mr. Warren have fallen to the temptation which besets many of us to read into our authors — Nathaniel Hawthorne , for example , and Herman Melville — protests against modernism , material progress , and science which are genuine protests of our own but may not have been theirs . Faulkner 's total works today , and in fact those of his works which existed in 1946 when Mr. Cowley made his comment , or in 1939 , when Mr. O'Donnell wrote his essay , reveal no such simple attitude toward the South . If he is a traditionalist , he is an eclectic traditionalist . If he condemns the recent or the present , he condemns the past with no less force . If he sees the heroic in a Sartoris or a Sutpen , he sees also — and he shows — the blind and the mean , and he sees the Compson family disintegrating from within . If the barn-burner 's family produces a Flem Snopes , who personifies commercialism and materialism in hyperbolic crassness , the Compson family produces a Jason Compson /4 , . Faulkner is a most untraditional traditionalist . 
Others writing on Faulkner have found the phrase " traditional moralist " either inadequate or misleading . Among them are Frederick J. Hoffman , William Van O'Connor , and Mrs. Olga Vickery . They have indicated the direction but they have not been explicit enough , I believe , in pointing out Faulkner 's independence , his questioning if not indeed challenging the Southern tradition . Faulkner 's is not the mind of the apologist which Mr. O'Donnell implies that it is . He is not one to remain more comfortably and unquestioningly within a body of social , cultural , or literary traditions than he was within the traditions — or possibly the regulations — governing his tenure in the post office at Oxford , Mississippi , thirty-five years ago . 
That is not to deny that he has been aware of traditions , of course , that he is steeped in them , in fact , or that he has dealt with them , in his books . It is to say rather , I believe , that he has brought to bear on the history , the traditions , and the lore of his region a critical , skeptical mind — the same mind which has made of him an inveterate experimenter in literary form and technique . He has employed from his section rich immediate materials which in a loose sense can be termed Southern . The fact that he has cast over those materials the light of a skeptical mind does not make him any the less Southern , I rather think , for the South has been no more solid than other regions except in the political and related areas where patronage and force and intimidation and fear may produce a surface uniformity . Some of us might be inclined to argue , in fact , that an independence of mind and action and an intolerance of regimentation , either mental or physical , are particularly Southern traits . 
There is no necessity , I suppose , to assert that Mr. Faulkner is Southern . It would not be easy to discover a more thoroughly Southern pedigree than that of his family . And , after all , he has lived comfortably at both Oxford , Mississippi , and Charlottesville , Virginia . The young William Faulkner in New Orleans in the 1920 's impressed the novelist Hamilton Basso as obviously conscious of being a Southerner , and there is no evidence that since then he has ever considered himself any less so . Besides showing no inclination , apparently , to absent himself from his native region even for short periods , and in addition writing a shelf of books set in the region , he has handled in those books an astonishingly complete list of matters which have been important in the South during the past hundred years . 
It is more difficult with Faulkner than with most authors to say what is the extent and what is the source of his knowledge . His own testimony is that he has read very little in the history of the South , implying that what he knows of that history has come to him orally and that he knows the world around him primarily from his own unassisted observation . His denials of extensive reading notwithstanding , it is no doubt safe to assume that he has spent time schooling himself in Southern history and that he has gained some acquaintance with the chief literary authors who have lived in the South or have written about the South . To believe otherwise would be unrealistic . 
But in looking at Faulkner against his background in Mississippi and the South , it is important not to lose the broader perspective . His earliest work reflected heavy influences from English and continental writers . Evidence is plentiful that early and later also he has been indebted to the Gothic romancers , who deal in extravagant horror , to the symbolists writing at the end of the preceding century , and in particular to the stream-of-consciousness novelists , Henry James and James Joyce among them . His repeated experimentation with the techniques of fiction testifies to an independence of mind and an originality of approach , but it also shows him touching at many points the stream of literary development back of him . My intention , therefore , is not to say that Faulkner 's awareness has been confined within the borders of the South , but rather that he has looked at his world as a Southerner and that presumably his outlook is Southern . 
The ingredients of Faulkner 's novels and stories are by no means new with him , and most of the problems he takes up have had the attention of authors before him . A useful comment on his relation to his region may be made , I think , by noting briefly how in handling Southern materials and Southern problems he has deviated from the pattern set by other Southern authors while remaining faithful to the essential character of the region . 
The planter aristocracy has appeared in literature at least since John Pendleton Kennedy published Swallow-Barn in 1832 and in his genial portrait of Frank Meriwether presiding over his plantation dominion initiated the most persistent tradition of Southern literature . The thoroughgoing idealization of the planter society did not come , however , until after the Civil War when Southern writers were eager to defend a way of life which had been destroyed . As they looked with nostalgia to a society which had been swept away , they were probably no more than half-conscious that they painted in colors which had never existed . Their books found no less willing readers outside than inside the South , even while memories of the war were still sharp . The tradition reached its apex , perhaps , in the works of Thomas Nelson Page toward the end of the century , and reappeared undiminished as late as 1934 in the best-selling novel So Red the Rose , by Stark Young . Although Faulkner was the heir in his own family to this tradition , he did not have Stark Young 's inclination to romanticize and sentimentalize the planter society . 
The myth of the Southern plantation has had only a tangential relation with actuality , as Francis Pendleton Gaines showed forty years ago , and I suspect it has had a far narrower acceptance as something real than has generally been supposed . Faulkner has found it useful , but he has employed it with his habitual independence of mind and skeptical outlook . Without saying or seeming to say that in portraying the Sartoris and the Compson families Faulkner 's chief concern is social criticism , we can say nevertheless that through those families he dramatizes his comment on the planter dynasties as they have existed since the decades before the Civil War . It may be that in this comment he has broken from the conventional pattern more violently than in any other regard , for the treatment in his books is far removed from even the genial irony of Ellen Glasgow , who was the only important novelist before him to challenge the conventional picture of planter society . 
Faulkner 's low-class characters had but few counterparts in earlier Southern novels dealing with plantation life . They have an ancestry extending back , however , at least to 1728 , when William Byrd described the Lubberlanders he encountered in the back country of Virginia and North Carolina . The chief literary antecedents of the Snopes clan appeared in the realistic , humorous writing which originated in the South and the Southwest in the three decades before the Civil War . These narratives of coarse action and crude language appeared first in local newspapers , as a rule , and later found their way between book covers , though rarely into the planters ' libraries beside the morocco-bound volumes of Horace , Mr. Addison , Mr. Pope , and Sir Walter Scott . There is evidence to suggest , in fact , that many authors of the humorous sketches were prompted to write them — or to make them as indelicate as they are — by way of protesting against the artificial refinements which had come to dominate the polite letters of the South . William Gilmore Simms , sturdy realist that he was , pleaded for a natural robustness such as he found in his favorites the great Elizabethans , to vivify the pale writings being produced around him . Simms admired the raucous tales emanating from the backwoods , but he had himself social affiliations which would not allow him to approve them fully . Augustus Baldwin Longstreet , a preacher and a college and university president in four Southern states , published the earliest of these backwoods sketches and in the character Ransy Sniffle , in the accounts of sharp horse-trading and eye-gouging physical combat , and in the shockingly unliterary speech of his characters , he set an example followed by many after him . 
Others who wrote of low characters and low life included Thomas Bangs Thorpe , creator of the Big Bear of Arkansas and Tom Owen , the Bee-Hunter ; Johnson Jones Hooper , whose character Simon Suggs bears a close kinship to Flem Snopes in both his willingness to take cruel advantage of all and sundry and the sharpness with which he habitually carried out his will ; and George Washington Harris , whose Tennessee hillbilly character Sut Lovingood perpetrated more unmalicious mischief and more unintended pain than any other character in literature . It would be profitable , I believe , to read these realistic humorists alongside Faulkner 's works , the thought being not that he necessarily read them and owed anything to them directly , but rather that they dealt a hundred years ago with a class of people and a type of life which have continued down to our time , to Faulkner 's time . Such a comparison reminds us that in employing low characters in his works Faulkner is recording actuality in the South and moreover is following a long-established literary precedent . Such characters , with their low existence and often low morality , produce humorous effects in his novels and tales , as they did in the writing of Longstreet and Hooper and Harris , but it need not be added that he gives them far subtler and more intricate functions than they had in the earlier writers ; nor is there need to add that among them are some of the most highly individualized and most successful of his characters . 
One of the early humorists already mentioned , Thomas Bangs Thorpe , can be used to illustrate another point where Faulkner touches authentic Southern materials and also earlier literary treatment of those materials . Thorpe came to Louisiana from the East as a young man prepared to find in the new country the setting of romantic adventure and idealized beauty . But Thorpe saw also the hardships of pioneer existence , the cultural poverty of the frontier settlements , and the slack morality which abounded in the new regions . As a consequence of the tensions thus produced in his thoughts and feelings , he wrote on the one hand sketches of idealized hunting trips and on the other an anecdote of the village of Hardscrabble , Arkansas , where no one had ever seen a piano ; and he wrote also the masterpiece of frontier humor , " The Big Bear of Arkansas " , in which earthy realism is placed alongside the exaggeration of the backwoods tall-tale and the awe with which man contemplates the grandeur and the mysteries of nature .  
SOME years ago Julian Huxley proposed to an audience made up of members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that " man 's supernormal or extra-sensory faculties are [ now ] in the same case as were his mathematical faculties during the ice age " . As a Humanist , Dr. Huxley interests himself in the possibilities of human development , and one thing we can say about this suggestion , which comes from a leading zoologist , is that , so far as he is concerned , the scientific outlook places no rigid limitation upon the idea of future human evolution . 
This text from Dr. Huxley is sometimes used by enthusiasts to indicate that they have the permission of the scientists to press the case for a wonderful unfoldment of psychic powers in human beings . There may be a case of this sort , but it is not one we wish to argue , here . Even if people do , in a not far distant future , begin to read one another 's minds , there will still be the question of whether what you find in another man 's mind is especially worth reading — worth more , that is , than what you can read in good books . Even if men eventually find themselves able to look through walls and around corners , one may question whether this will help them to live better lives . There would be side-conclusions to be drawn , of course ; such capacities are impressive evidence pointing to a conception of the human being which does not appear in the accounts of biologists and organic evolutionists ; but the basic puzzles of existence would still be puzzling , and we should still have to work out the sort of problems we plan to discuss in this article . 
All we want from Dr. Huxley 's statement is the feeling that this is an open world , in the view of the best scientific opinion , with practically no directional commitments as to what may happen next , and no important confinements with respect to what may be possible . 
It seems quite obvious that all the really difficult tasks of human beings arise from the fact that man is not one , but many . Each man , that is , is both one and many . He is a dreamer of the good society with a plan to put into effect , and he is an individual craftsman with something to make for himself and the people of his time . He is a parent with a child to nurture , here and now , and he is an educator who worries about the children half way round the world . He is a utopian with a stake in tomorrow and he is a vulnerable human made captive by the circumstances of today . He can sacrifice himself for tomorrow and he can sacrifice tomorrow for himself . He is a Craig 's wife who agonizes about tobacco ash on the living room rug and he is a forgetful genius who goes boating with the town baker when dignitaries from the local university have come to call . He is the stern guardian of the status quo who has raised the utilitarian structures of the age , and he is the revolutionary poet with a gun in his hand who writes a tragic apologetic to posterity for the men he has killed . 
What will be the final symmetry of the good society ? For what do the utopians labor ? Here , on a desk , is a stack of pamphlets representing the efforts of some of the best men of the day to penetrate these questions . The pamphlets are about law , the corporation , forms of government , the idea of freedom , the defense of liberty , the various lethargies which overtake our major institutions , the gap between traditional social ideals and the working mechanisms that have been set in motion for their realization . The thing that is notable in all these discussions is the lack of ideological ardor . There is another kind of ardor , a quiet , sure devotion to the fundamental decencies of human life , but no angry utopian contentions . Actually , you could wish for some passion , now and then , but when you look around the world and see the little volcanos of current history which partisan social passions have wrought , you are glad that in these pamphlets there is at least some civilized calm . 
You could also say that in these pamphlets is a relieving quality of maturity . There is essential pleasantness in reading the writing of men who are not angry , who can contend without quarreling . This is the good kind of sophistication , and with all our problems and crises this kind of sophistication has flowered in the United States during recent years . A characteristic expression of such concern and inquiry is found in Joseph P. Lyford 's introduction to The Agreeable Autocracies , a recent paperback study of the institutions of modern democratic society . Mr. Lyford gives voice to a temper that represents , we think , an achieved plateau of reflective thinking . After casting about for a way of describing this spirit , we decided that it would be better to use Mr. Lyford 's introduction as an illustration . He begins : " 
At one time it seemed as if the Soviet Union had done us a favor by providing a striking example of how not to behave towards other peoples and other nations . As things turned out , however , we have not profited greatly from the lesson : instead of persistently following a national program of our own we have often been satisfied to be against whatever Soviet policy seemed to be at the moment . Such activity may or may not have irritated the Kremlin , but it has frequently condemned America to an unnatural defensiveness that has undermined our effort to give leadership to the free world . 
The defensiveness has been exaggerated by another bad habit , our tendency to rate the " goodness " or " badness " of other nations by the extent to which they applaud the slogans we circulate about ourselves . Since the slogans have little application to reality and are sanctimonious to boot , the applause is faint even in areas of the world where we should expect to find the greatest affection for free government . Shocked at the response to our proclamations , we grow more defensive , and worse , we lose our sense of humor and proportion . Mr. Nehru is subjected to stern lectures on neutralism by our Department of State , and an American President observes sourly that Sweden would be a little less neurotic if it were a little more capitalistic " . 
One thing you can say about Mr. Lyford is that he does not suffer from any insecurity as an American . Those who are insecure fear to be candid in self-examination . Only the strong look squarely at weakness . The maturity in this point of view lies in its recognition that no basic problem is ever solved without being clearly understood . Mr. Lyford continues : " 
Even if the self portrait we distribute for popular consumption were accurate it would be dangerous to present it as a picture of the ideal society . We would be ignoring the special circumstances of other countries . The picture is the more treacherous when it misrepresents the facts of American life . The discrepancy between what we commonly profess and what we practice or tolerate is great , and it does not escape the notice of others . If our sincerity is granted , and it is granted , the discrepancy can only be explained by the fact that we have come to believe hearsay and legend about ourselves in preference to an understanding gained by earnest self-examination . What is more , the legends have become so sacrosanct that the very habit of self-examination or self-criticism smells of low treason , and men who practice it are defeatists and unpatriotic scoundrels . 
… although we continue to pay our conversational devotions to " free private enterprise " , " individual initiative " , " the democratic way " , " government of the people " , " competition of the marketplace " , etc. , we live rather comfortably in a society in which economic competition is diminishing in large areas , bureaucracy is corroding representative government , technology is weakening the citizen 's confidence in his own power to make decisions , and the threat of war is driving him economically and physically into the ground " . 
The interesting thing about Mr. Lyford 's approach , and the approach of the contributors to The Agreeable Autocracies ( Oceana Publications , 1961 ) to the situation of American civilization , is that it is concerned with comprehending the psychological relationships which are having a decisive effect on American life . In an ideological argument , the participants tend to thump the table . They are determined to prove something . The new spirit , so well illustrated by Mr. Lyford 's work , is wholly free of this anxiety . The problem is rather to find out what is actually happening , and this is especially difficult for the reason that " we are busily being defended from a knowledge of the present , sometimes by the very agencies — our educational system , our mass media , our statesmen — on which we have had to rely most heavily for understanding of ourselves " . The Introduction continues : " 
We experience a vague uneasiness about events , a suspicion that our political and economic institutions , like the genie in the bottle , have escaped confinement and that we have lost the power to recall them . We feel uncomfortable at being bossed by a corporation or a union or a television set , but until we have some knowledge about these phenomena and what they are doing to us , we can hardly learn to control them . It does not appear that we will be delivered from our situation by articles on The National Purpose . 
The Agreeable Autocracies is an attempt to explore some of the institutions which both reflect and determine the character of the free society today . The men who speculate on these institutions have , for the most part , come to at least one common conclusion : that many of the great enterprises and associations around which our democracy is formed are in themselves autocratic in nature , and possessed of power which can be used to frustrate the citizen who is trying to assert his individuality in the modern world " . 
These institutions which Mr. Lyford names " agreeable autocracies " — where did they come from ? Of one thing we can be sure : they were not sketched out by the revolutionary theorists of the eighteenth century who formulated the political principles and originally shaped the political institutions of what we term the " free society " . No doubt there are historians who can explain to a great extent what happened to the plans and projects of the eighteenth century . Going back over this ground and analyzing the composition of forces which have created the present scene is one of the tasks undertaken by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions , in Santa Barbara . But however we come , finally , to explain and account for the present , the truth we are trying to expose , right now , is that the makers of constitutions and the designers of institutions find it difficult if not impossible to anticipate the behavior of the host of all their enterprises . The host is the flowing life of the human race . This life has its own currents and rhythms , its own multiple cycles and adaptations . On occasion it produces extraordinary novelties . Should Rousseau have been able to leave room in his social theory for the advent of television , atomic energy , and IBM machines ? How would Thomas Jefferson feel after reading Factories in the Field ? They tell us , sir , that we are free , because we have in one hand a ballot , and in the other a stock certificate . With these we shape our destiny and own private property , and that , sir , makes ours the best of all possible societies . The reality of the situation , however , is described by Mr. Lyford : " 
Many of us may even be secretly relieved at having a plausible excuse to delegate ancient civic responsibilities to a new bureaucracy of experts . Thus the member of an industrial union comes to regard his officers as business agents who may proceed without interference or recall ; the stockholder delivers his proxy ; and the citizen narrows his political participation to the mere act of voting — if he votes at all " .  Copernicus did not question it , Ptolemy could not . Given the conceptual context within which ancient thought thrived , how could anyone have questioned this principle ? The reasons for this are partly observational , partly philosophical , and reinforced by other aesthetic and cultural factors . 
First , the observational reasons . The obvious natural fact to ancient thinkers was the diurnal rotation of the heavens . Not only did constellations like Draco , Cepheus , and Cassiopeia spin circles around the pole , but stars which were not circumpolar rose and set at the same place on the horizon each night . Nor did a constellation 's stars vary in brightness during the course of their nocturnal flights . The conclusion — the distances of the constellations did not vary and their paths were circular . Moreover , the sun 's path over earth described a segment of a great circle ; this was clear from the contour of the shadow traced by a gnomon before and after noon . 
As early as the /6 , th century B.C. the earth was seen to be spherical . Ships disappear hull-first over the horizon ; approaching shore their masts appeared first . Earth , being at the center of the universe , would have the same shape as the latter ; so , e.g. did Aristotle argue , although this may not be an observational reason in favor of circularity . The discoid shapes of sun and moon were also felt to indicate the shape of celestial things . 
In light of all this , one would require special reasons for saying that the paths of the heavenly bodies were other than circular . Why , for example , should the ancients have supposed the diurnal rotation of the heavens to be elliptical ? Or oviform ? Or angular ? There were no reasons for such suppositions then . This , conjoined with the considerations above , made the circular motions of heavenly bodies appear an almost directly observed fact . 
Additional philosophical considerations , advanced notably by Aristotle , supported further the circularity principle . By distinguishing superlunary ( celestial ) and sublunary ( terrestrial ) existence , and reinforcing this with the four-element physics of Empedocles , Aristotle came to speak of the stars as perfect bodies , which moved in only a perfect way , viz. in a perfect circle . 
Now what is perfect motion ? It must , apparently , be motion without termini . Because motion which begins and ends at discrete places would ( e.g. for Aristotle ) be incomplete . Circular motion , however , since it is eternal and perfectly continuous , lacks termini . It is never motion towards something . Only imcomplete , imperfect things move towards what they lack . Perfect , complete entities , if they move at all , do not move towards what they lack . They move only in accordance with what is in their natures . Thus , circular motion is itself one of the essential characteristics of completely perfect celestial existence . 
To return now to the four-element physics , a mixture of muddy , frothy water will , when standing in a jar , separate out with earth at the bottom , water on top , and the air on top of that . A candle alight in the air directs its flame and smoke upwards . This gives a clue to the cosmical order of elements . Thus earth has fallen to the center of the universe . It is covered ( partly ) with water , air is atop of that . Pure fire ( the stars ) is in the heavens . When combined with the metaphysical notion that pure forms of this universe are best appreciated when least embodied in a material substratum , it becomes clear that while earth will be dross on a scale of material-formal ratios , celestial bodies will be of a subtle , quickened , ethereal existence , in whose embodiment pure form will be the dominant component and matter will be absent or remain subsidiary . 
The stars constitute an order of existence different from what we encounter on earth . This is clear when one distinguishes the types of motion appropriate to both regions . A projectile shot up from earth returns rectlinearly to its 'natural' place of rest . But the natural condition for the heavenly bodies is neither rest , nor rectilinear motion . Being less encumbered by material embodiments they partake more of what is divine . Their motion will be eternal and perfect . 
Let us re-examine the publicized contrasts between Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy . Bluntly , there never was a Ptolemaic system of astronomy . Copernicus ' achievement was to have invented systematic astronomy . The Almagest and the Hypotheses outline Ptolemy 's conception of his own task as the provision of computational tables , independent calculating devices for the prediction of future planetary perturbations . Indeed , in the Halma edition of Theon 's presentation of the Hypotheses there is a chart setting out ( under six distinct headings ) otherwise unrelated diagrams for describing the planetary motions . No attempt is made by Ptolemy to weld into a single scheme ( a la Aristotle ) , these independent predicting-machines . They all have this in common : the earth is situated near the center of the deferent . But that one should superimpose all these charts , run a pin through the common point , and then scale each planetary deferent larger and smaller ( to keep the epicycles from 'bumping' ) , this is contrary to any intention Ptolemy ever expresses . He might even suppose the planets to move at infinity . Ptolemy 's problem is to forecast where , against the inverted bowl of night , some particular light will be found at future times . His problem concerns longitudes , latitudes , and angular velocities . The distances of these points of light is a problem he can not master , beyond crude conjectures as to the orderings of the planetary orbits viewed outward from earth . But none of this has prevented scientists , philosophers , and even historians of science , from speaking of the Ptolemaic system , in contrast to the Copernican . This is a mistake . It is engendered by confounding the Aristotelian cosmology in the Almagest with the geocentric astronomy . 
Ptolemy recurrently denies that he could ever explain planetary motion . This is what necessitates the nonsystematic character of his astronomy . So when textbooks , like that of Baker set out drawings of the 'Ptolemaic System' , complete with earth in the center and the seven heavenly bodies epicyclically arranged on their several deferents , we have nothing but a misleading /20 , th-century idea of what never existed historically . 
It is the chief merit in Copernicus ' work that all his planetary calculations are interdependent . He can not , e.g. compute the retrograde arc traveled by Mars , without also making suppositions about the earth 's own motion . He can not describe eclipses without entertaining some form of a three-body problem . In Ptolemaic terms , however , eclipses and retrograde motion were phenomena simpliciter , to be explained directly as possible resultants of epicyclical combinations . In a systematic astronomy , like that of Copernicus , retrogradations become part of the conceptual structure of the system ; they are no longer a puzzling aspect of intricately variable , local planetary motions . 
Another contrast stressed when discussing Ptolemaic vs . Copernican astronomy , turns on the idea of simplicity . It is often stated that Copernican astronomy is 'simpler' than Ptolemaic . Some even say that this is the reason for the ultimate acceptance of the former . Thus , Margenau remarks : " A large number of unrelated epicycles was needed to explain the observations , but otherwise the [ Ptolemaic ] system served well and with quantitative precision . Copernicus , by placing the sun at the center of the planetary universe , was able to reduce the number of epicycles from eighty-three to seventeen . Historical records indicate that Copernicus was unaware of the fundamental aspects of his so-called 'revolution' , unaware perhaps of its historical importance , he rested content with having produced a simpler scheme for prediction . As an illustration of the principle of simplicity the heliocentric discovery has a peculiar appeal because it allows simplicity to be arithmetized ; it involves a reduction in the number of epicycles from eighty-three to seventeen " . 
Without careful qualification this can be misleading . If in any one calculation Ptolemy had had to invoke 83 epicycles all at once , while Copernicus never required more than one third this number , then ( in the sense obvious to Margenau ) Ptolemaic astronomy would be simpler than Copernican . But no single planetary problem ever required of Ptolemy more than six epicycles at one time . This , of course , results from the non-systematic , 'cellular' character of Ptolemaic theory . Calculations within the Copernican framework always raised questions about planetary configurations . These could be met only by considering the dynamical elements of several planets at one time . This is more ambitious than Ptolemy is ever required to be when he faces his isolated problems . Thus , in no ordinary sense of 'simplicity' is the Ptolemaic theory simpler than the Copernican . The latter required juggling several elements simultaneously . This was not simpler but much more difficult than exercises within Ptolemy 's astronomy . 
Analogously , anyone who argues that Einstein 's theory of gravitation is simpler than Newton 's , must say rather more to explain how it is that the latter is mastered by student-physicists , while the former can be managed ( with difficulty ) only by accomplished experts . 
In a sense , Einstein 's theory is simpler than Newton 's , and there is a corresponding sense in which Copernicus ' theory is simpler than Ptolemy 's . But 'simplicity' here refers to systematic simplicity . The number of primitive ideas in systematically-simple theories is reduced to a minimum . The axioms required to make the theoretical machinery operate are set out tersely and powerfully , so that all permissible operations within the theory can be traced rigorously back to these axioms , rules , and primitive notions . This characterizes Euclid 's formulation of geometry , but not Ptolemy 's astronomy . There are in the Almagest no rules for determining in advance whether a new epicycle will be required for dealing with abberations in lunar , solar , or planetary behavior . The strongest appeal of the Copernican formulation consisted in just this : ideally , the justification for dealing with special problems in particular ways is completely set out in the basic 'rules ' of the theory . The lower-level hypotheses are never 'ad hoc' , never introduced ex post facto just to sweep up within the theory some recalcitrant datum . Copernicus , to an extent unachieved by Ptolemy , approximated to Euclid 's vision . De Revolutionibus is not just a collection of facts and techniques . It is an organized system of these things . Solving astronomical problems requires , for Copernicus , not a random search of unrelated tables , but a regular employment of the rules defining the entire discipline . 
Hence , noting the simplicity achieved in Copernicus ' formulation does not provide another reason for the acceptance of De Revolutionibus , another reason beyond its systematic superiority . It provides exactly the same reason . 
1543 A.D. is often venerated as the birthday of the scientific revolution . It is really the funeral day of scholastic science . Granted , the cosmological , philosophical , and cultural reverberations initiated by the De Revolutionibus were felt with increasing violence during the 300 years to follow . But , considered within technical astronomy , a different pattern can be traced . 
In what does the dissatisfaction of TOOLONG consist ? What in the Almagest draws his fire ? Geocentricism per se ? No . The formal displacement of the geocentric principle far from being Copernicus ' primary concern , was introduced only to resolve what seemed to him intolerable in orthodox astronomy , namely , the 'unphysical' triplication of centric reference-points : one center from which the planet 's distances were calculated , another around which planetary velocities were computed , and still a third center ( the earth ) from which the observations originated . This arrangement was for Copernicus literally monstrous : " With [ the Ptolemaists ] it is as though an artist were to gather the hands , feet , head and other members for his images from divers models , each part excellently drawn , but not related to a single body ; and since they in no way match each other , the result would be a monster rather than a man " . 
Copernicus required a systematically integrated , physically intelligible astronomy . His objective was , essentially , to repair those aspects of orthodox astronomy responsible for its deficiencies in achieving these ends . That such deficiencies existed within Ptolemy 's theory was not discovered de novo by Copernicus . The critical , rigorous examinations of Nicholas of Cusa and Nicholas of Oresme provided the context ( a late medieval context ) for Nicholas Copernicus ' own work . The latter looked backward upon inherited deficiencies . Without abandoning too much , Copernicus sought to make orthodox astronomy systematically and mechanically acceptable . He did not think himself to be firing the first shot of an intellectual revolution .  Henrietta 's feeling of identity with Sara Sullam was crowned by her discovery of the coincidence that Sara 's epitaph in the Jewish cemetery in Venice referred to her as " the Sulamite " . 
Into the texture of this tapestry of history and human drama Henrietta , as every artist delights to do , wove strands of her own intuitive insights into human nature and — especially in the remarkable story of the attraction and conflict between two so disparate and fervent characters as this pair — into the relations of men and women : " In their relations , she was the giver and he the receiver , nay the demander . His feeling always exacted sacrifices from her . … One is so accustomed to think of men as the privileged who need but ask and receive , and women as submissive and yielding , that our sympathies are usually enlisted on the side of the man whose love is not returned , and we condemn the woman as a coquette … . The very firmness of her convictions and logical clearness of her arguments captivated and stimulated him to make greater efforts ; usually , this is most exasperating to men , who expect every woman to verify their preconceived notions concerning her sex , and when she does not , immediately condemn her as eccentric and unwomanly … . She had the opportunity that few clever women can resist , of showing her superiority in argument over a man … . Women themselves have come to look upon matters in the same light as the outside world , and scarcely find any wrong in submitting to the importunities of a stronger will , even when their affections are withheld … . She was exposing herself to temptation which it is best to avoid where it can consistently be done . One who invites such trials of character is either foolhardy , overconfident or too simple and childlike in faith in mankind to see the danger . In any case but the last , such a course is sure to avenge itself upon the individual ; the moral powers no more than the physical and mental , can bear overstraining . And , in the last case , a bitter disappointment but too often meets the confiding nature … " . 
Henrietta was discovering in the process of writing , as the born writer does , not merely a channel for the discharge of accumulated information but a stimulus to the development of the creative powers of observation , insight and intuition . 
Dr. Isaacs was so pleased with the quality of her biographical study of Sara Sullam that he considered submitting it to the Century Magazine or Harper 's but he decided that its Jewish subject probably would not interest them and published it in The Messenger , " so our readers will be benefited instead " . Under her father 's influence it did not occur to Henrietta that she might write on subjects outside the Jewish field , but she did begin writing for other Anglo-Jewish papers and thus increased her output and her audience . And she wrote the libretto for an oratorio on the subject of Judas Maccabeus performed at the Hanukkah festival which came in December . By her eighteenth birthday her bent for writing was so evident that Papa and Mamma gave her a Life of Dickens as a spur to her aspiration . 
Another source of intellectual stimulus was opened to her at that time by the founding of Johns Hopkins University within walking distance of home . It was established in a couple of buildings in the shopping district , with only a few professors , but all eminent men , and a few hundred eager students housed in nearby dwellings . In September '76 Thomas Huxley , Darwin 's famous disciple , came from England to speak in a crowded auditorium at the formal opening of the University ; and although it was a school for men only , it afforded Henrietta an opportunity to attend its public lectures . 
In the following year her father undertook to give a course in Hebrew theology to Johns Hopkins students , and this brought to the Szold house a group of bright young Jews who had come to Baltimore to study , and who enjoyed being fed and mothered by Mamma and entertained by Henrietta and Rachel , who played and sang for them in the upstairs sitting room on Sunday evenings . From Philadelphia came Cyrus Adler and Joseph Jastrow . Adler , Judge Sulzberger 's nephew , came to study Assyriology . A smart , shrewd and ambitious young man , well connected , and with a knack for getting in the good graces of important people , he was bound to go far . Joseph Jastrow , the younger son of the distinguished rabbi , Marcus Jastrow , was a friendly , round-faced fellow with a little mustache , whose field was psychology , and who was also a punster and a jolly tease . His father was a good friend of Rabbi Szold , and Joe lived with the Szolds for a while . Both these youths , who greatly admired Henrietta , were somewhat younger than she , as were also the neighboring Friedenwald boys , who were then studying medicine ; and bright though they all were , they could not possibly compete for her interest with Papa , whose mind — although he never tried to dazzle or patronize lesser lights with it — naturally eclipsed theirs and made them seem to her even younger than they were . Besides , Miss Henrietta — as she was generally known since she had put up her hair with a chignon in the back — had little time to spare them from her teaching and writing ; so Cyrus Adler became interested in her friend Racie Friedenwald , and Joe Jastrow — the only young man who when he wrote had the temerity to address her as Henrietta , and signed himself Joe — fell in love with pretty sister Rachel . 
Henrietta , however , was at that time engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Joe 's older and more serious brother , Morris , who was just about her own age and whom she had got to know well during trips to Philadelphia with Papa , when he substituted for Rabbi Jastrow at Rodeph Shalom Temple there during its Rabbi 's absence in Europe . Young Morris , who , while attending the University of Pennsylvania , also taught and edited a paper , found time to write Henrietta twenty-page letters on everything that engaged his interest , from the acting of Sarah Bernhardt in Philadelphia to his reactions to the comments of " Sulamith " on the Jewish reform movement being promulgated by the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati . Unlike his younger brother , Joe , he never presumed to address her more familiarly than as " My dear friend " , although he praised and envied the elegance and purity of her style . And when he complained of the lack of time for all he wanted to do , Henrietta advised him to rise at five in the morning as she and Papa did . 
One thing Papa had not taught Henrietta was how to handle a young man as high-spirited and opinionated as herself . She could not resist the opportunity " of showing her superiority in argument over a man " which she had remarked as one of the " feminine follies " of Sara Sullam ; and in her forthright way , Henrietta , who in her story of Sara had indicated her own unwillingness " to think of men as the privileged " and " women as submissive and yielding " , felt obliged to defend vigorously any statement of hers to which Morris Jastrow took the slightest exception — he objected to her stand on the Corbin affair , as well as on the radical reforms of Dr. Wise of Hebrew Union College — until once , in sheer desperation , he wrote that he had given up hope they would ever agree on anything . But that did not prevent him from writing more long letters , or from coming to spend his Christmas vacations with the hospitable , lively Szolds in their pleasant house on Lombard Street .  1880S : " LITTLE WOMEN "  " WE 'VE GOT Father and Mother and each other … " said Beth on the first page of Louisa Alcott 's Little Women ; and , " I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world " , burst out Jo some five hundred pages later in that popular story of the March family , which had first appeared when Henrietta was eight ; and the Szold family , as it developed , bore a striking resemblance to the Marches . 
Mr. March , like Benjamin Szold , was a clergyman , although of an indeterminate denomination ; and " Marmee " March , like Sophie Szold , was the competent manager of her brood of girls , of whom the Marches had only four to the Szolds ' five . But the March girls had their counterparts in the Szold girls . Henrietta could easily identify herself with Jo March , although Jo was not the eldest sister . Neither was Henrietta hoydenish like Jo , who frankly wished she were a boy and had deliberately shortened her name , which , like Henrietta 's , was the feminine form of a boy 's name . But both were high-spirited and vivacious , both had tempers to control , both loved languages , especially English and German , both were good teachers and wrote for publication . Each was her mother 's assistant and confidante ; and each stood out conspicuously in the family picture . 
Bertha Szold was more like Meg , the eldest March girl , who " learned that a woman 's happiest kingdom is home , her highest honor the art of ruling it , not as a queen , but a wise wife and mother " . Bertha , blue-eyed like Mamma , was from the start her mother 's daughter , destined for her mother 's role in life . Sadie , like Beth March , suffered ill health — got rheumatic fever and had to be careful of her heart — but that never dampened her spirits . When her right hand was incapacitated by the rheumatism , Sadie learned to write with her left hand . She wrote gay plays about the girls for family entertainments , like " Oh , What Fun ! A comedy in Three Acts " , in which , under " Personages " , Henrietta appeared as " A Schoolmarm " , and Bertha , who was only a trifle less brilliant in high school than Henrietta had been , appeared as " Dummkopf " . Sadie studied piano ; played Chopin in the " Soiree Musicale of Mr. Guthrie 's Pupils " ; and she recited " Hector 's Farewell to Andromache " most movingly , to the special delight of Rabbi Jastrow at his home in Germantown near Philadelphia , where the Szold girls took turns visiting between the visits of the Jastrow boys at the Szolds ' in Baltimore . Adele , like Amy , the youngest of the Marches , was the rebellious , mischievous , rather calculating and ambitious one . For Rachel , conceded to be the prettiest of the Szold girls — and she did make a pretty picture sitting in the grape-arbor strumming her guitar and singing in her silvery tones — there was no particular March counterpart ; but both groups were so closely knit that despite individual differences the family life in both cases was remarkably similar in atmosphere if not entirely in content — the one being definitely Jewish and the other vaguely Christian . 
The Szolds , like the Marches , enjoyed and loved living together , even in troubled times ; and , as in the March home , any young man who called on the Szolds found himself confronted with a phalanx of femininity which made it rather difficult to direct his particular attention to any one of them . This included Mamma , jolly , generous , and pretty , with whom they all fell in love , just as Papa had first fallen in love with her Mamma before he chose her ; and when a young man like Morris Jastrow had enjoyed the Szold hospitality , he felt obliged to send his respects and his gifts not merely to Henrietta , in whom he was really interested , but to all the Szold girls and Mamma . And just as " Laurie " Lawrence was first attracted to bright Jo March , who found him immature by her high standards , and then had to content himself with her younger sister Amy , so Joe Jastrow , who had also been writing Henrietta before he came to Johns Hopkins , had to content himself with her younger sister , pretty Rachel . And like Jo March , who saw her sisters Meg and Amy involved in " lovering " before herself , Henrietta saw her sisters Rachel and Sadie drawn outside their family circle by the attraction of suitors , Rachel by Joe Jastrow , and Sadie by Max L.ouml ; bl , a young businessman who would write her romantic descriptions of his trips by steamboat down the Mississippi .  
This time he was making no mistake . Olgivanna — in her country the nickname was a respectful form of address — was not only attractive but shrewd , durable , sensible , and smart . No wonder Wright was enchanted — no two better suited people ever met . Almost from that day , until his death , Olgivanna was to stay at his side ; but the years that immediately followed were to be extraordinarily trying , both for Wright and his Montenegrin lady . 
It must be granted that the flouting of convention , no matter how well intentioned one may be , is sure to lead to trouble , or at least to the discomfort that goes with social disapproval . Even so , many of the things that happened to Wright and Olgivanna seem inordinately severe . Their afflictions centered on one maddening difficulty : Miriam held up the divorce proceedings that she herself had asked for . Reporters began to trail Miriam everywhere , and to encourage her to make appalling statements about Wright and his doings . Flocks of writs , attachments , and unpleasant legal papers of every sort began to fly through the air . The distracted Miriam would agree to a settlement through her legal representative , then change her mind and make another attack on Wright as a person . At last her lawyer , Arthur D. Cloud , gave up the case because she turned down three successive settlements he arranged . Cloud made an interesting statement in parting from his client : " I wanted to be a lawyer , and Mrs. Wright wanted me to be an avenging angel . So I got out . Mrs. Wright is without funds . The first thing to do is get her some money by a temporary but definite adjustment pending a final disposition of the case . But every time I suggested this to her , Mrs. Wright turned it down and demanded that I go out and punish Mr. Wright . I am an attorney , not an instrument of vengeance " . Miriam Noel disregarded the free advice of her departing counselor , and appointed a heavy-faced young man named Harold Jackson to take his place . 
There were three years of this strange warfare ; and during the unhappy time , Miriam often would charge that Wright and Olgivanna were misdemeanants against the public order of Wisconsin . Yet somehow , when officers were prodded into visiting Taliesin to execute the warrants , they would find neither Wright nor Olgivanna at home . This showed that common sense had not died out at the county and village level — though why the unhappy and obviously unbalanced woman was not restrained remains a puzzle . The misery of Miriam 's bitterness can be felt today by anyone who studies the case — it was hopeless , agonizing , and destructive , with Miriam herself bearing the heaviest burden of shame and pain . 
To get an idea of the embarrassment and chagrin that was heaped upon Wright and Olgivanna , we should bear in mind that the raids were sometimes led by Miriam in person . One of the most distressing of these scenes occurred at Spring Green toward the end of the open warfare , on a beautiful day in June . At this time Miriam Noel appeared , urging on Constable Henry Pengally , whose name showed him to be a descendant of the Welsh settlers in the neighborhood . A troop of reporters brought up the rear . Miriam was stopped at the Taliesin gate , and William Weston , now the estate foreman , came out to parley . He said that Mr. Wright was not in , and so could not be arrested on something called a peace warrant that Miriam was waving in the air . Miriam now ordered Pengally to break down the gate , but he said he really could n't go that far . At this point Mrs. Frances Cupply , one of Wright 's handsome daughters by his first wife , came from the house and tried to calm Miriam as she tore down a NO VISITORS sign and smashed the glass pane on another sign with a rock . 
Miriam Noel Wright said , " Here I am at my own home , locked out so I must stand in the road " ! Then she rounded on Weston and cried , " You always did Wright 's dirty work ! When I take over Taliesin , the first thing I 'll do is fire you " . 
" Madame Noel , I think you had better go " , said Mrs. Cupply . 
" And I think you had better leave " , replied Miriam . Turning to the reporters , she asked , " Did you hear her ? 'I think you had better leave' ! And this is my own home " . In the silence that followed , Miriam walked close to Mrs. Cupply , who drew back a step on her side of the gate . Then , with staring eyes and lips drawn thin , Miriam said to the young woman , " You are ugly — uglier than you used to be , and you were always very ugly . You are even uglier than Mr. Wright " . 
The animosity expressed by such a scene had the penetrating quality of a natural force ; and it gave Miriam Noel a fund of energy like that of a person inspired to complete some great and universal work of art . As if to make certain that Wright would be unable to pay any settlement at all , Miriam wrote to prospective clients denouncing him ; she also went to Washington and appealed to Senator George William Norris of Nebraska , the Fighting Liberal , from whose office a sympathetic but cautious harrumphing was heard . Then , after overtures to accept a settlement and go through with a divorce , Miriam gave a ghastly echo of Mrs. Micawber by suddenly stating , " I will never leave Mr. Wright " . 
Under this kind of pressure , it is not surprising that Wright would make sweeping statements to the newspapers . Miriam had not yet goaded him into mentioning her directly , but one can feel the generalized anger in Wright 's remarks to reporters when he was asked , one morning on arrival in Chicago , what he thought of the city as a whole . First , Wright said , he was choked by the smoke , which fortunately kept him from seeing the dreadful town . But surely Michigan Avenue was handsome ? " That is n't a boulevard , it 's a racetrack " ! cried Wright , showing that automobiles were considered to be a danger as early as the 1920 's . " This is a horrible way to live " , Wright went on . " You are being strangled by traffic " . He was then asked for a solution of the difficulty , and began to talk trenchant sense , though private anguish showed through in the vehemence of his manner . " Take a gigantic knife and sweep it over the Loop " , Wright said . " Cut off every building at the seventh floor . Spread everything out . You do n't need concentration . If you cut down these horrible buildings you 'll have no more traffic jams . You 'll have trees again . You 'll have some joy in the life of this city . After all , that 's the job of the architect — to give the world a little joy " . 
Little enough joy was afforded Wright in the spring of 1925 , when another destructive fire broke out at Taliesin . The first news stories had it that this blaze was started by a bolt of lightning , as though Miriam could call down fire from heaven like a prophet of the Old Testament . A storm did take place that night , and fortunately enough , it included a cloudburst that helped put out the flames . Later accounts blamed defective wiring for starting the fire ; at any rate , heat grew so intense in the main part of the house that it melted the window panes , and fused the K'ang-si pottery to cinders . Wright set his loss at $200,000 , a figure perhaps justified by the unique character of the house that had been ruined , and the faultless taste that had gone into the selection of the prints and other things that were destroyed . In spite of the disaster , Wright completed during this period plans for the Lake Tahoe resort , in which he suggested the shapes of American Indian tepees — a project of great and appropriate charm , that came to nothing . Amid a shortage of profitable work , the memory of Albert Johnson 's $20,000 stood out in lonely grandeur — the money had quickly melted away . A series of conferences with friends and bankers began about this time ; and the question before these meetings was , here is a man of international reputation and proved earning power ; how can he be financed so that he can find the work he ought to do ? While this was under consideration , dauntless as ever Wright set about the building of Taliesin /3 , . 
As he made plans for the new Taliesin , Wright also got on paper his conception of a cathedral of steel and glass to house a congregation of all faiths , and the idea for a planetarium with a sloping ramp . Years were to pass before these plans came off the paper , and Wright was justified in thinking , as the projects failed , that much of what he had to show his country and the world would never be seen except by visitors to Taliesin . And now there was some question as to his continued residence there . Billy Koch , who had once worked for Wright as a chauffeur , gave a deposition for Miriam 's use that he had seen Olgivanna living at Taliesin . This might put Wright in such a bad light before a court that Miriam would be awarded Taliesin ; nor was she moved by a letter from Wright pointing out that if he was not " compelled to spend money on useless lawyer 's bills , useless hotel bills , and useless doctor 's bills " , he could more quickly provide Miriam with a suitable home either in Los Angeles or Paris , as she preferred . Miriam sniffed at this , and complained that Wright had said unkind things about her to reporters . His reply was , " Everything that has been printed derogatory to you , purporting to have come from me , was a betrayal , and nothing yet has been printed which I have sanctioned " . What irritated Miriam was that Wright had told the papers about a reasonable offer he had made , which he considered she would accept " when she tires of publicity " . From her California headquarters , Miriam fired back , " I shall never divorce Mr. Wright , to permit him to marry Olga Milanoff " . 
Then Miriam varied the senseless psychological warfare by suddenly withdrawing a suit for separate maintenance that had been pending , and asking for divorce on the grounds of cruelty , with the understanding that Wright would not contest it . The Bank of Wisconsin sent a representative to the judge 's chambers in Madison to give information on Wright 's ability to meet the terms . He said that the architect might reasonably be expected to carry his financial burdens if all harrassment could be brought to an end , and that the bank would accept a mortgage on Taliesin to help bring this about . Miriam said that she must be assured that " that other woman , Olga , will not be in luxury while I am scraping along " . This exhausted Wright 's patience , and in consequence he talked freely to reporters in a Madison hotel suite . " Volstead laws , speed laws , divorce laws " , he said , " as they now stand , demoralize the individual , make liars and law breakers of us in one way or another , and tend to make our experiment in democracy absurd . If Mrs. Wright does n't accept the terms in the morning , I 'll go either to Tokyo or to Holland , to do what I can . I realize , in taking this stand , just what it means to me and mine " . Here Wright gave a slight sigh of weariness , and continued , " It means more long years lived across the social grain of the life of our people , making shift to live in the face of popular disrespect and misunderstanding as I best can for myself and those dependent upon me " . Next day , word came that Miriam was not going through with the divorce ; but Wright stayed in the United States . His mentioning of Japan and Holland had been merely the expression of wishful thinking . No matter what troubles might betide him , this most American of artists knew in his heart he could not function properly outside his native land . 
In a few weeks Miriam made another sortie at Taliesin , but was repulsed at the locked and guarded gates .  More likely , you simply told yourself , as you handed us the book , that it mattered little what we incanted providing we underwent the discipline of incantation . 
For pride 's sake , I will not say that the coy and leering vade mecum of those verses insinuated itself into my soul . Besides , that particular message does no more than weakly echo the roar in all fresh blood . But what you could not know , of course , was how smoothly the Victorian Fitzgerald was to lead into an American Fitzgerald of my own vintage under whose banner we adolescents were to come , if not of age , then into a bright , taut semblance of it . I do not suppose you ever heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald , living or dead , and moreover I do not suppose that , even if you had , his legend would have seemed to you to warrant more than a cluck of disapproval . Neither his appetites , his exacerbations , nor his despair were kin to yours . He might have been the man in the moon for all you could have understood him . But he was no man in the moon to me . Although his tender nights were not the ones I dreamed of , nor was it for yachts , sports cars , tall drinks , and swimming pools , nor yet for money or what money buys that I burned , I too was burning and watching myself burn . The flame was simply of a different kind . It was symbolized ( at least for those of us who recognized ourselves in the image ) by that self-consuming , elegiac candle of Edna St. Vincent Millay 's , that candle which from the quatrain where she ensconced it became a beacon to us , but which in point of fact would have had to be as tall as a funeral taper to last even the evening , let alone the night . One should not , of course , pluck the head off a flower and expect its perfume to linger on . Yet this passion for passion , now that I look back on it with passion spent , seems somewhat overblown and operatic , though as a diva Miss Millay perfectly controlled her notes . Only what else was she singing but the old Song of Songs , that most ancient of tunes that nature plays with such unfailing response upon young nerves ? Perhaps this is not so little . Perhaps the mere fact that by plucking on the nerves nature can awaken in the most ordinary of us , temporarily anyway , the sleeping poet , and in poets can discover their immortality , is the most remarkable of all the remarkable phenomena to which we can attest ? One can see it as humiliating that an extra hormone casually fed into our chemistry may induce us to lay down our lives for a lover or a friend ; one can take it as no more than another veil torn from the mystery of the soul . But it could also be looked at from the other end of the spectrum . One could see this chemical determinant as in itself a miracle . In any case , Miss Millay 's sweet-throated bitterness , her variations on the theme that the world was not only well lost for love but even well lost for lost love , her constant and wonderfully tragic posture , so unlike that of Fitzgerald since it required no scenery or props , drew from the me that I was when I fell upon her verses an overwhelming yea . 
But all this , I am well aware , is the bel canto of love , and although I have always liked to think that it was to the bel canto and to that alone that I listened , I know well enough that it was not . If I am to speak the whole truth about my knowledge of love , I will have to stop trying to emulate the transcendant nightingale . There is another side of love , more nearly symbolized by the croak of the mating capercailzie , or better still perhaps by the mute antics of the slug . 
Whether you experienced the passion of desire I have , of course , no way of knowing , nor indeed have I wished with even the most fleeting fragment of a wish to know , for the fact that one constitutes by one 's mere existence so to speak the proof of some sort of passion makes any speculation upon this part of one 's parents ' experience more immodest , more scandalizing , more deeply unwelcome than an obscenity from a stranger . I recoil from the very thought . At the same time , I am aware that my recoil could be interpreted by readers of the tea leaves at the bottom of my psyche as an incestuous sign , since theirs is a science of paradox : if one hates , they say it is because one loves ; if one bullies , they say it is because one is afraid ; if one shuns , they say it is because one desires ; and according to them , whatever one fancies one feels , what one feels in fact is the opposite . Well , normally abnormal or normally normal , neurotic or merely fastidious ( do the tea-leaf readers , by the way , allow psyches to have moral taste ? ) , I have never wanted to know what you knew of passion .   YOU PROBABLY WOULD NOT REMEMBER , SINCE YOU NEVER seemed to remember even the same moments as I , much less their intensity , one sunny midday on Fifth Avenue when you had set out with me for some final shopping less than a week before the wedding you staged for me with such reluctance at the Farm . I can see us now . We had been walking quite briskly , for despite your being so small and me so tall , your stride in those days could easily match mine . We had stopped before a shop window to assess its autumnal display , when you suddenly turned to me , looking up from beneath one of your wrong hats , and with your nervous " ahem " ! said : " There are things I must tell you about this man you are marrying which he does not know himself " . If you had screamed right there in the street where we stood , I could not have felt more fear . With scarcely a mumble of excuse , I fled . I fled , however , not from what might have been the natural fear of being unable to disguise from you that the things about my bridegroom — in the sense you meant the word " things " — which you had been galvanizing yourself to tell me as a painful part of your maternal duty were things which I had already insisted upon finding out for myself ( despite , I may now say , the unspeakable awkwardness of making the discovery on principle , yes , on principle , and in cold blood ) because I was resolved , as a modern woman , not to be a mollycoddle waiting for Life but to seize Life by the throat . I had developed too foolproof a facade to be afraid of self-betrayal . What I fled from was my fear of what , unwittingly , you might betray , without meaning to , about my father and yourself . 
But I can see from this latest trick of memory how much more arbitrary and influential it is than the will . While my memory holds with relentless tenacity , as I can not too often stress , to my wrongs , when it comes to my shames , it gestures and jokes and toys with chronology like a prestidigitator in the hope of distracting me from them . Just as I was about to enlarge upon my discovery of the underside of the leaf of love , memory , displeased at being asked to yield its unsavory secrets , dashed ahead of me , calling back over its shoulder : " Skip it . Cut it out " . But I will not skip it or cut it out . It is not my intention in this narrative to picture myself as a helpless victim moored to the rock of experience and left to the buffetings of chance . If to be innocent is to be helpless , then I had been — as are we all — helpless at the start . But the time came when I was no longer innocent and therefore no longer helpless . Helpless in that sense I can never be again . However , I confess my hope that I will be innocent again , not with a pristine , accidental innocence , but rather with an innocence achieved by the slow cutting away of the flesh to reach the bone . 
For innocence , of all the graces of the spirit , is I believe the one most to be prayed for . Although it is constantly made to look foolish ( too simple to come in out of the rain , people say , who have found in the innocent an impediment ) , it does not mind looking foolish because it is not concerned with how it looks . It assumes that things are as they seem when they seem best , and when they seem worst it overlooks them . To innocence , a word given is a word that will be kept . Instinctively , innocence does unto others as it expects to be done by . But when these expectations are once too often ground into the dust , innocence can falter , since its strength is according to the strength of him who possesses it . The innocence of which I speak is , I know , not incorruptible . But I insist upon believing that even when it is lost , it may , like paradise , be regained . 
However , it was not of innocence in general that I was speaking , but of perhaps the frailest and surely the least important side of it which is innocence in romantic love . Here , if anywhere , it is not wholly incontrovertible . To you , for instance , the word innocence , in this connotation , probably retained its Biblical , or should I say technical sense , and therefore I suppose I must make myself quite clear by saying that I lost — or rather handed over — what you would have considered to be my innocence two weeks before I was legally entitled , and in fact by oath required , to hand it over along with what other goods and bads I had . But to me innocence is far less tangible . I had long since begun to lose my general innocence when I lost my trust in you , but this special innocence I lost before ever I loved , through my discovery that one could tremble with desire and even experience a flaming delight that had nothing , nothing whatever to do with friendship or liking , let alone with love . I knew this knowledge to be corrupting at the time I acquired it ; today , these many years later , after all the temptations resisted or yielded to , the weasel satisfactions and the engulfing dissatisfactions since endured , I call it corrupting still . 
You , I could swear to it , remained innocent in this sense until the end . Yours , but not mine , was an age in which innocence was fostered and carefully — if not perhaps altogether innocently — preserved . You had grown up at a time when the most distinguishing mark of a lady was the noli me tangere writ plain across her face . Moreover , because of the particular blot on your family escutcheon through what may only have been one unbridled moment on your grandmother 's part , and because you had the lean-to kitchen and trundle bed of your childhood to outgrow , what you obviously most desired with both your conscious and unconscious person , what you bent your whole will , sensibility , and intelligence upon , was to be a lady . Before being daughter , wife , or mother , before being cultured ( a word now bereft both socially and politically of the sheen you children of frontiersmen bestowed on it ) , before being sorry for the poor , progressive about public health , and prettily if somewhat imprecisely humanitarian , indeed first and foremost , you were a lady . There was , of course , more to the portrait of a lady you carried in your mind 's eye than the sine qua non of her virtue . A lady , you made clear to me both by precept and example , never raised her voice or slumped in her chair , never failed in social tact ( in heaven , for instance , would not mention St. John the Baptist 's head ) , never pouted or withdrew or scandalized in company , never reminded others of her physical presence by unseemly sound or gesture , never indulged in public scenes or private confidences , never spoke of money save in terms of alleviating suffering , never gossiped or maligned , never stressed but always minimized the hopelessness of anything from sin to death itself .  With each song he gave verbal footnotes . The songs Sandburg sang often reminded listeners of songs of a kindred character they knew entirely or in fragments . Often these listeners would refer Sandburg to persons who had similar ballads or ditties . In due time Sandburg was a walking thesaurus of American folk music . 
After he had finished the first two volumes of his Lincoln , Sandburg went to work assembling a book of songs out of hobo and childhood days and from the memory of songs others had taught him . He rummaged , found composers and arrangers , collaborated on the main design and outline of harmonization with musicians , ballad singers , and musicologists . 
The result was a collection of 280 songs , ballads , ditties , brought together from all regions of America , more than one hundred never before published : The American Songbag . Each song or ditty was prefaced by an author 's note which indicated the origin and meaning of the song as well as special interest the song had , musical arrangement , and most of the chorus and verses . 
The book , published in 1927 , has been selling steadily ever since . As Sandburg said at the time : " It is as ancient as the medieval European ballads brought to the Appalachian Mountains , it is as modern as skyscrapers , the Volstead Act , and the latest oil well gusher " .  SCHOPENHAUER NEVER LEARNED  Sandburg is in constant demand as an entertainer . Two things contribute to his popularity . First , Carl respects his audience and prepares his speeches carefully . Even when he is called upon for impromptu remarks , he has notes written on the back of handy envelopes . He has his own system of shorthand , devised by abbreviations : " humility " will be " humly " , " with " will be " w " , and " that " will be " tt " . 
The second reason for his popularity is his complete spontaneity with the guitar . It is a mistake , however , to imagine that Sandburg uses the guitar as a prop . He is no dextrous-fingered college boy but rather a dedicated , humble , and bashful apostle of this instrument . At age seventy-four , he became what he shyly terms a " pupil " of Andres Segovia , the great guitarist of the Western world . 
It is not easy to become Segovia 's pupil . One needs high talent . Segovia has written about Carl : 
" His fingers labor heavily on the strings and he asked for my help in disciplining them . I found that this precocious , grown-up boy of 74 deserved to be taught . There has long existed a brotherly affection between us , thus I accepted him as my pupil . Just as in the case of every prodigy child , we must watch for the efficacy of my teaching to show up in the future — if he should master all the strenuous exercises I inflicted on him . 
To play the guitar as he aspires will devour his three-fold energy as a historian , a poet and a singer . One cause of Schopenhauer 's pessimism was the fact that he failed to learn the guitar . I am certain that Carl Sandburg will not fall into the same sad philosophy . The heart of this great poet constantly bubbles forth a generous joy of life — with or without the guitar " . 
The public 's identification of Carl Sandburg and the guitar is no happenstance . Nor does Carl reject this identity . 
He is proud of having Segovia for a friend and dedicated a poem to him titled " The Guitar " . 
Carl says it is the greatest poem ever written to the guitar because he has never heard of any other poem to that subtle instrument . " A portable companion always ready to go where you go — a small friend weighing less than a freshborn infant — to be shared with few or many — just two of you in sweet meditation " . 
The New York Herald Tribune 's photographer , Ira Rosenberg , tells an anecdote about the time he wanted to take a picture of Carl playing a guitar . Carl had n't brought his along . Mr. Rosenberg suggested that they go out and find one . 
" Preferably " , said Carl , " one battered and worn , such as might be found in a pawnshop " . 
They went to the pawnshop of Joseph Miller of 1162 Sixth Avenue . 
" Mr. Miller was in the shop " , the Herald Tribune story related , " but was reluctant to have anybody 's picture taken inside , because his business was too 'confidential' for pictures . 
" But after introductions he asked : 'Carl Sandburg ? Well you can pose inside' . 
" He wanted Mr. Sandburg to pose with one of the guitars he had displayed behind glass in the center of his shop , but the poet eyed this somewhat distastefully. 'Kalamazoo guitars ' , he said , 'used by radio hillbilly singers ' . 
" He chose one from Mr. Miller 's window , a plain guitar with no fancy polish . While the picture was taken , Mr. Miller 's disposition to be generous to Mr. Sandburg increased to the point where he advised , 'I wo n't even charge you the one dollar rental fee' " .  A KNOWLEDGEABLE CELEBRITY  When someone in the audience rose and asked how does it feel to be a celebrity , Carl said , " A celebrity is a fellow who eats celery with celerity " . 
This has always been Carl 's attitude . Lloyd Lewis wrote that when he first knew Carl in 1916 , Sandburg was making $27.50 a week writing features for the Day Book and eating sparse luncheons in one-arm restaurants . He walked home at night for two miles beyond the end of a suburban trolley . 
When fame came it changed Sandburg only slightly . Lewis remembered another newspaperman asking , " Carl , have your ideas changed any since you got all these comforts " ? 
Carl thought the question over slowly and answered : " I know a starving man who is fed never remembers all the pangs of his starvation , I know that " . 
That was all he said , Lewis reports . That was all he had to say . 
In answer to a New York Times query on what is fame ( " Thoughts on Fame " , October 23 , 1960 ) , Carl said : " Fame is a figment of a pigment . It comes and goes . It changes with every generation . There never were two fames alike . One fame is precious and luminous ; another is a bubble of a bauble " .  " AH , DID YOU ONCE SEE SHELLEY PLAIN " ?  The impression you get from Carl Sandburg 's home is one of laughter and happiness ; and the laughter and the happiness are even more pronounced when no company is present . 
Carl has been married to Paula for fifty-three years , and he has not made a single major decision without careful consideration and thorough discussion with his wife . Through all these years , Mrs. Sandburg has pointedly avoided the limelight . She has shared her husband 's greatness , but only within the confines of their home ; it is a dedication which began the moment she met Carl . 
Mrs. Sandburg received a Phi Beta Kappa key from the University of Chicago and she was busy writing and teaching when she met Sandburg . " You are the 'Peoples ' Poet' " was her appraisal in 1908 , and she stopped teaching and writing to devote herself to the fulfillment of her husband 's career . 
She has rarely been photographed with him and , except for Carl 's seventy-fifth anniversary celebration in Chicago in 1953 , she has not attended the dozens of banquets , functions , public appearances , and dinners honoring him — all of this upon her insistence . Even now I will not intrude upon her except to state a few bare facts . 
The only way to describe Paula Sandburg is to say she is beautiful in a Grecian sense . Her clothes , her hair , everything about her is both graceful and simple . She has small , broad , capable hands and an enormous energy . 
She is not only a trained mathematician and Classicist , but a good architect . She designed and supervised the building of the Harbert , Michigan , house , most of which was constructed by one local carpenter who carried the heavy beams singly upon his shoulder . As the Sandburg goat herd increased , she also designed the barn alterations to accommodate them . When erosion threatened the foundation of their home in Harbert , Paula Sandburg planted grapevines and arranged the snow fences which helped hold the sands away . 
She was born Lilian Steichen , her parents immigrants from Luxemburg . Her mother called her Paus'l , a Luxemburg endearment meaning " pussycat " . Some of the children of the family could not pronounce this name and called her Paula , a soubriquet Carl liked so much she has been Paula ever since . 
But neither was Lilian her baptismal name . Her parents , pious Roman Catholics , christened her Mary Anne Elizabeth Magdalene Steichen . " My mother read a book right after I was born and there was a Lilian in the book she loved and I became Lilian — and eventually I became Paula " . 
Lilian Steichen was an exceptional student . This family of Luxemburg immigrants , in fact , produced two exceptional children . Paula 's older brother is Edward Steichen , a talented artist and , for the past half-century , one of the world 's eminent photographers . ( Two years ago the photography editor of Vogue magazine titled his article about Steichen , " The World 's Greatest Photographer " . ) 
By the time Lilian had been graduated from public school , her parents were doing quite well . Her mother was a good manager and established a millinery business in Milwaukee . But her father was not enthusiastic about sending young Paula to high school . " This is no place for a young girl " , he said . The parents compromised , however , on a convent school and Paula went to Ursuline Academy in London , Ontario . 
She was pious , too , once kneeling through the night from Holy Thursday to Good Friday , despite the protest of the nuns that this was too much for a young girl . She knelt out of reverence for having read the Meditations of St. Augustine . 
She read everything else she could get her hands on , including an article ( she thinks it was in the Atlantic Monthly ) by Mark Twain on " White Slavery " . Paula was saddened about what was happening to little girls and vowed to kneel no more in Chapel . She had come to a decision . If there was ever a thought in her mind she might devote her life to religion , it was now dispelled . " I felt that I must devote myself to the 'outside' world " . 
She passed the entrance examinations to the University of Illinois , but during the year at Urbana felt more important events transpired at the University of Chicago . 
" And besides , Thorstein Veblen was one of the Chicago professors " . 
At the University of Chicago she studied Whitman and Shelley , and became a Socialist . Socialist leaders in Milwaukee recognized her worth , not only because of her dedication but because of her fluency in German , French , and Luxemburg . She once gave a German recitation before a convention of German-language teachers in Milwaukee . 
Carl and Paula met in Milwaukee in 1907 during Paula 's Christmas holiday visit to her parents . Carl was still Charles A. Sandburg . He " legitimized " Paula for Lilian Steichen , and it was Paula who insisted on Carl for Charles . 
Victor Berger , the panjandrum of Wisconsin Socialism and member of Congress , had asked Paula Steichen to translate some of his German editorials into English . Carl , who was stationed in Appleton , Wisconsin , organizing for the Social Democrats , was in Berger 's office and made it his business to escort Paula to the streetcar . She left the next day for her teaching job at Princeton , Illinois . ( After graduation from the University of Chicago , Paula taught for two years in the normal school at Valley City , North Dakota , then two years at Princeton ( Illinois ) Township High School . ) By the time the streetcar pulled away , he had fallen in love with Paula . 
A letter awaited her at Princeton . Paula says that even though Carl 's letters usually began , " Dear Miss Steichen " , there was an understanding from the beginning that they would become husband and wife . 
Paula generously lent me one of Carl 's love letters , dated February 21 , 1908 , Hotel Athearn , Oshkosh , Wisconsin : 
" Dear Miss Steichen : It is a very good letter you send me — softens the intensity of this guerilla warfare I am carrying on up here . Never until in this work of S-D organization have I realized and felt the attitude and experience of a Teacher .  
The United States is always ready to participate with the Soviet Union in serious discussion of these or any other subjects that may lead to peace with justice . 
Certainly it is not necessary to repeat that the United States has no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of any nation ; by the same token , we reject any Soviet attempt to impose its system on us or other peoples by force or subversion . 
Now this concern for the freedom of other peoples is the intellectual and spiritual cement which has allied us with more than forty other nations in a common defense effort . Not for a moment do we forget that our own fate is firmly fastened to that of these countries ; we will not act in any way which would jeopardize our solemn commitments to them .   We and our friends are , of course , concerned with self-defense . Growing out of this concern is the realization that all people of the Free World have a great stake in the progress , in freedom , of the uncommitted and newly emerging nations . These peoples , desperately hoping to lift themselves to decent levels of living must not , by our neglect , be forced to seek help from , and finally become virtual satellites of , those who proclaim their hostility to freedom . 
But they must have technical and investment assistance . This is a problem to be solved not by America alone , but also by every nation cherishing the same ideals and in position to provide help . 
In recent years America 's partners and friends in Western Europe and Japan have made great economic progress . 
The international economy of 1960 is markedly different from that of the early postwar years . No longer is the United States the only major industrial country capable of providing substantial amounts of the resources so urgently needed in the newly developed countries . 
To remain secure and prosperous themselves , wealthy nations must extend the kind of co-operation to the less fortunate members that will inspire hope , confidence , and progress . A rich nation can for a time , without noticeable damage to itself , pursue a course of self-indulgence , making its single goal the material ease and comfort of its own citizens — thus repudiating its own spiritual and material stake in a peaceful and prosperous society of nations . But the enmities it will incur , the isolation into which it will descend , and the internal moral and spiritual softness that will be engendered , will , in the long term , bring it to economic and political disaster . 
America did not become great through softness and self-indulgence . Her miraculous progress in material achievements flows from other qualities far more worthy and substantial : adherence to principles and methods consonant with our religious philosophy ; a satisfaction in hard work ; the readiness to sacrifice for worthwhile causes ; the courage to meet every challenge ; the intellectual honesty and capacity to recognize the true path of her own best interests . 
To us and to every nation of the Free World , rich or poor , these qualities are necessary today as never before if we are to march together to greater security , prosperity and peace . 
I believe that the industrial countries are ready to participate actively in supplementing the efforts of the developing nations to achieve progress . 
The immediate need for this kind of co-operation is underscored by the strain in this nation 's international balance of payments . Our surplus from foreign business transactions has in recent years fallen substantially short of the expenditures we make abroad to maintain our military establishments overseas , to finance private investment , and to provide assistance to the less developed nations . In 1959 our deficit in balance of payments approached four billion dollars . 
Continuing deficits of anything like this magnitude would , over time , impair our own economic growth and check the forward progress of the Free World . 
We must meet this situation by promoting a rising volume of exports and world trade . Further , we must induce all industrialized nations of the Free World to work together to help lift the scourge of poverty from less fortunate . This co-operation in this matter will provide both for the necessary sharing of this burden and in bringing about still further increases in mutually profitable trade . 
New Nations , and others struggling with the problems of development , will progress only — regardless of any outside help — if they demonstrate faith in their own destiny and use their own resources to fulfill it . Moreover , progress in a national transformation can be only gradually earned ; there is no easy and quick way to follow from the oxcart to the jet plane . But , just as we drew on Europe for assistance in our earlier years , so now do these new and emerging nations that do have this faith and determination deserve help . 
Respecting their need , one of the major focal points of our concern is the South-Asian region . Here , in two nations alone , are almost five hundred million people , all working , and working hard , to raise their standards , and in doing so , to make of themselves a strong bulwark against the spread of an ideology that would destroy liberty . 
I can not express to you the depth of my conviction that , in our own and free world interest , we must co-operate with others to help these people achieve their legitimate ambitions , as expressed in their different multi-year plans . Through the World Bank and other instrumentalities , as well as through individual action by every nation in position to help , we must squarely face this titanic challenge . 
I shall continue to urge the American people , in the interests of their own security , prosperity and peace , to make sure that their own part of this great project be amply and cheerfully supported . Free world decisions in this matter may spell the difference between world disaster and world progress in freedom . 
Other countries , some of which I visited last month , have similar needs . 
A common meeting ground is desirable for those nations which are prepared to assist in the development effort . During the past year I have discussed this matter with the leaders of several Western nations . 
Because of its wealth of experience , the Organization for European Economic Cooperation could help with the initial studies needed . The goal is to enlist all available economic resources in the industrialized Free World , especially private investment capital . 
By extending this help , we hope to make possible the enthusiastic enrollment of these nations under freedom 's banner . No more startling contrast to a system of sullen satellites could be imagined . 
If we grasp this opportunity to build an age of productive partnership between the less fortunate nations and those that have already achieved a high state of economic advancement , we will make brighter the outlook for a world order based upon security and freedom . Otherwise , the outlook could be dark indeed . We face , indeed , what may be a turning point in history , and we must act decisively and wisely .   As a nation we can successfully pursue these objectives only from a position of broadly based strength . 
No matter how earnest is our quest for guaranteed peace , we must maintain a high degree of military effectiveness at the same time we are engaged in negotiating the issue of arms reduction . Until tangible and mutually enforceable arms reduction measures are worked out we will not weaken the means of defending our institutions . 
America possesses an enormous defense power . It is my studied conviction that no nation will ever risk general war against us unless we should become so foolish as to neglect the defense forces we now so powerfully support . It is world-wide knowledge that any power which might be tempted today to attack the United States by surprise , even though we might sustain great losses , would itself promptly suffer a terrible destruction . But I once again assure all peoples and all nations that the United States , except in defense , will never turn loose this destructive power . 
During the past year , our long-range striking power , unmatched today in manned bombers , has taken on new strength as the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile has entered the operational inventory . In fourteen recent test launchings , at ranges of five thousand miles , Atlas has been striking on an average within two miles of the target . This is less than the length of a jet runway — well within the circle of destruction . Incidentally , there was an Atlas firing last night . From all reports so far received , its performance conformed to the high standards I have just described . Such performance is a great tribute to American scientists and engineers , who in the past five years have had to telescope time and technology to develop these long-range ballistic missiles , where America had none before . 
This year , moreover , growing numbers of nuclear powered submarines will enter our active forces , some to be armed with Polaris missiles . These remarkable ships and weapons , ranging the oceans , will be capable of accurate fire on targets virtually anywhere on earth . 
To meet situations of less than general nuclear war , we continue to maintain our carrier forces , our many service units abroad , our always ready Army strategic forces and Marine Corps divisions , and the civilian components . The continuing modernization of these forces is a costly but necessary process . It is scheduled to go forward at a rate which will steadily add to our strength . 
The deployment of a portion of these forces beyond our shores , on land and sea , is persuasive demonstration of our determination to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies for collective security . Moreover , I have directed that steps be taken to program on a longer range basis our military assistance to these allies . This is necessary for a sounder collective defense system . 
Next I refer to our program in space exploration , which is often mistakenly supposed to be an integral part of defense research and development . 
We note that , first , America has already made great contributions in the past two years to the world 's fund of knowledge of astrophysics and space science . These discoveries are of present interest chiefly to the scientific community ; but they are important foundation stones for more extensive exploration of outer space for the ultimate benefit of all mankind . 
Second , our military missile program , going forward so successfully , does not suffer from our present lack of very large rocket engines , which are necessary in distant space exploration . I am assured by experts that the thrust of our present missiles is fully adequate for defense requirements . 
Third , the United States is pressing forward in the development of large rocket engines to place vehicles of many tons into space for exploration purposes . 
Fourth , in the meantime , it is necessary to remember that we have only begun to probe the environment immediately surrounding the earth . Using launch systems presently available , we are developing satellites to scout the world 's weather ; satellite relay stations to facilitate and extend communications over the globe ; for navigation aids to give accurate bearings to ships and aircraft ; and for perfecting instruments to collect and transmit the data we seek . 
Fifth , we have just completed a year 's experience with our new space law . I believe it deficient in certain particulars . Suggested improvements will be submitted to the Congress shortly .   The accomplishment of the many tasks I have alluded to requires the continuous strengthening of the spiritual , intellectual , and economic sinews of American life . The steady purpose of our society is to assure justice , before God , for every individual . We must be ever alert that freedom does not wither through the careless amassing of restrictive controls or the lack of courage to deal boldly with the issues of the day . 
A year ago , when I met with you , the nation was emerging from an economic downturn , even though the signs of resurgent prosperity were not then sufficiently convincing to the doubtful . Today our surging strength is apparent to everyone . 1960 promises to be the most prosperous year in our history . 
Yet we continue to be afflicted by nagging disorders . Among current problems that require solutions , participated in by citizens as well as government , are : 
the need to protect the public interest in situations of prolonged labor-management stalemate ; 
the persistent refusal to come to grips with a critical problem in one sector of American agriculture ; 
the continuing threat of inflation , together with the persisting tendency toward fiscal irresponsibility ; 
in certain instances the denial to some of our citizens of equal protection of the law .  
The group , upon the issuance of its first press release on December 21 , 1957 , designated itself a " Committee of Investigation " . In the course of its inquiry , it took testimony from only seven witnesses . It heard Bang-Jensen twice and his lawyer , Adolf A. Berle , Jr. , once . 
Its second press release was on January 15 , 1958 , and it recommended that the secret papers be destroyed . It also implied that Paul Bang-Jensen had been irresponsible . 
On January 18 , Ernest Gross conducted a press conference at the U.N . lasting an hour . Here , he openly attacked Bang-Jensen and referred to his " aberrant conduct " . This conference was held despite Stavropoulos ' assurance to Adolf Berle , who was leaving the same day for Puerto Rico , that nothing would be done until his return on January 22 , except that the Secretary General would probably order the list destroyed . 
On January 24 Paul Bang-Jensen , accompanied by Adolf Berle , was met by Dragoslav Protitch and Colonel Frank Begley , former Police Chief of Farmington , Conn. , and now head of U.N . special police . 
The four , bundled in overcoats , mounted to the wind-swept roof of the U.N . 
There , Begley lit a fire in a wire basket , and Bang-Jensen dropped four sealed envelopes into the flames . In one of these he said were notes on the identities of the eighty-one refugees . 
The method of destroying the evidence embarrassed Paul Bang-Jensen . He knew it would be implied that it was done in this way at his insistence . He was right , and Peter Marshall could not help but recall Andrew Cordier 's words on the subject , " Well , it seemed as good a place as any to do the job " . 
The Gross group had been formed for the express purpose of advising the Secretary General . Hammarskjold 's supposed desire to seek outside legal advice in the guise of Ernest Gross is illusion , at best . Gross 's being " outside " the U.N . applied only to a physical state , not an objective one . But by the time the papers were finally disposed of , the group had informed the world of its purpose , its recommendations , and its belief that Paul Bang-Jensen was not of sound mind . 
Shortly the group would issue its report to the Secretary General , recommending Paul Bang-Jensen 's dismissal from the United Nations . The contents of this 195-page document would become known to many before it would become known to the man it was written about .   " Until this Hungarian Committee matter came up , Bang-Jensen was a fine and devoted individual . I had known him for some years , when I was a delegate and before , and this manner had never been his " . 
Ernest A. Gross leaned back in his chair and told Peter Marshall how Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold had , on December 4,1957 , called him in as a private lawyer to review Bang-Jensen 's conduct " relating to his association with the Special Committee on the problem of Hungary " . The result was the " Gross Report " , prepared by Gross , as chairman , with the assistance of two U.N . Under Secretaries , Constantin Stavropoulos and Philippe de Seynes . 
" Yes " , Gross went on , " Bang-Jensen was an up-and-coming young man . He had always done well . Never well known , but he had done his work competently … " . 
Gross had received Marshall courteously and they were discussing the case . " You know " , the lawyer said , " it 's difficult to talk like this about a man who ca n't answer back " . 
Gross was behind a clean-top desk , only a manila folder before him . Marshall sat in one of the several leather chairs . Outside the office windows , twenty-four stories above Wall Street , a light rain was falling . 
" Mr. Gross , your report says that 'our function is investigative and advisory and does not in any way derogate from or prejudice Mr. Bang-Jensen 's rights as a staff member' . You know , Bang-Jensen characterized your Committee as having prejudged his case " . 
Gross swung his swivel chair . " Well , how could that have been ? I do n't consider that he was prejudged . We were given a job and we carried it out , and later , his case was taken up by the Disciplinary Committee … . 
" We have nothing to hide under a bushel . We did our job , Mr. Stavropoulos and Mr. de Seynes and myself , taking evidence from a number of people " . 
" What did you think about his mental state " ? 
" I think our report sums up our finding " , Gross answered . " Do n't forget , here was a man who had been accusing his colleagues for almost a year of willfully attempting to present an incorrect report … . 
" This was not merely alleging errors , but was carried out by day-after-day allegations in memos , written charges of serious consequence … . 
" This is a distressing thing . Supposing you or I were being accused in this manner , and yet we were doing our level best to carry on our work . No organization can carry on like that . 
" I 've been in government and I can tell some pretty hairy stories about personnel difficulties , so I know what a problem he was " . 
" What I 'd like you to comment on is the criticism leveled at your Committee " . 
" What do you mean " ? 
" For instance , regarding the fact that the Gross Committee issued two interim announcements to the press during its investigation . You know Bang-Jensen was told the Committee was 'to convey its views , suggestions and recommendations to the Secretary General' . In his own words , Bang-Jensen 'took it for granted that the Group would report to the Secretary General privately and not in public' . He claimed that the release of the preliminary findings was 'prejudicial to his position' " . 
Gross bristled . For an instant he glared speechless at Marshall . " Listen " , he said . " I thought the entire report was going to be confidential from beginning to end . But you know Bang-Jensen launched an active campaign against us in the press . It was getting so that we , the Committee , were being tried . You can find it in the papers " . 
" Well , as a matter of fact , I 've looked through back-issue files of New York papers for December , 1957 , and have n't found a great deal " — 
Gross shot another look at Marshall . " It was n't necessarily all here in New York . Do n't forget the foreign press " . 
" Then what about the second interim public announcement ? This cited Bang-Jensen 's 'aberrant conduct' " . 
" The reason for that report was to settle the matter of the list . As far as I 'm concerned , it was a separate matter from the general Committee study of Bang-Jensen 's conduct . The January fifteen report recommended that Bang-Jensen be instructed to burn the list — the papers — in the presence of a U.N . Security Officer " . 
" How about your press conference three days later — what was the reason for that ? Bang-Jensen said you told correspondents that you had checked in advance to make sure the term 'aberrant conduct' was not libelous . He claimed you made other slanderous allegations " . 
Gross paused and repeated himself . " The entire object of the press conference was to clarify the problem of the list , since many in the press were querying the U.N . about it . What was the list ? I do n't know . Bang-Jensen never explained what the documents or papers were that he had in his possession . 
" It was foolish of him to keep them , whatever they were . He could have been blackmailed , or his family might have been threatened . Of course the matter caught the public 's attention . We attempted to conclude this , and did so by having the papers burned . 
Hammerskjold did n't like the way it was carried out . It was a sort of G.ouml ; tterd.auml ; mmerung affair . Hammarskjold believes the U.N . is an organization that settles matters in a procedural way … " . 
Peter Marshall reflected . If Hammarskjold had not wanted the list disposed of in this manner , and if Bang-Jensen had not wanted it — who had ordered it ? 
" Mr. Gross , concerning the formation of your Committee , there 's the fact that you have been a legal adviser to the U.N . in the past ; as I understand it , Mr. Hammarskjold wanted outside advice . Could you comment on that " ? 
" I 've served as a counsel for the U.N . for some years , specializing particularly in real estate matters or other problems that the regular U.N . legal staff might not be equipped to handle . Mr. Stavropoulos is the U.N . legal chief and a very good man , but he is not fully versed on some technical points of American law " . 
" What did you think about Bang-Jensen 's contention of errors and omissions in the Hungarian report " ? Marshall asked . 
" Those " ! Gross answered . " Why , Mick Shann went over and over the report with Alsing Andersen , trying to check them out . Even after the incident between Bang-Jensen and Shann in the Delegates ' Lounge … and this was not the way the Chicago Tribune presented it " . 
Gross reached in his desk and pulled out two newspaper clippings . One was an article on the U.N . by Alice Widener from the Cincinnati Enquirer . The other was by Chesly Manley in the Chicago Daily Tribune . 
Gross pointed to the Manley story . " I know Ches , he 's a friend of mine . He probably did n't mean to write it this way , or maybe he did . There was n't any 'violent argument' between Bang-Jensen and Shann , as the Tribune puts it . That implies that Shann was on the enemy side . You see what I mean ? How it 's phrased there — the word 'violent' . 
" The case was that Bang-Jensen came up to Shann claiming he had found further errors in the report . 'I 've found errors and I want you to look them over' . So once again Shann had to argue with him about this . But it was n't a violent discussion . And after all this , Shann went over all that Bang-Jensen had brought up " . 
( Shann 's own report , Peter Marshall reflected , describes the encounter as " immoderate " . Bang-Jensen was in " hysterical condition " . ) 
Gross stopped briefly , then went on . " Shann was responsible for the report . He has felt terrible about all this . It was a good report , he did all he could to make it a good report . When I speak of how Shann felt , I know well . Do n't forget , I am an old member of the club , a former delegate . I think you are being unfair to take these things up now . 
" You know , this hits in many areas . It appeals to those who were frustrated in the outcome of the Hungarian situation . Do n't forget , the U.N . did no more than the United States did … it takes a great deal of sophisticated thought to get the impact of this fact " .  CHAPTER 22  FROM THE HOME of his friend , Henrik Kauffmann , in Washington , D.C. , Paul Bang-Jensen sent a telegram dated December 9 , 1957 , to Ernest Gross . It said in part : 
" … the matters to be considered are obviously of a grave character , and I therefore respectfully request that the hearing be postponed for two weeks in order that I might make adequate preparation " . 
Ernest Gross replied the next day , putting the suspended diplomat 's fears to rest . " This reveals some misunderstanding on your part . The group conducting the review is not holding formal hearings . It wished to pursue , in the course of this review , questions arising from the body of material already in its possession … " . 
It sounded like a fair enough invitation , Peter Marshall reflected , and Bang-Jensen must have thought so too , because on the thirteenth , he met the group of three on the thirty-sixth floor of the U.N . There , Ernest Gross further assured him : 
" We were requested by the Secretary General , as I understand it , to discuss with you such matters as appear to us to be relevant , and we are not of course either a formal group or a committee in the sense of being guided by any rules or regulations of the Secretariat . The only rules which I think we shall follow will be those of common sense , justice , and fairness " . 
Peter Marshall noted that Bang-Jensen had later referred to his two interviews with the Gross group as " unfortunate experiences " , and after his second meeting on the sixteenth the Dane refused to attend further hearings without legal counsel . Marshall pondered the reason for this , and pondered too the replacement of one member of the three-man group . 
J. A. C. Robertson , after serving Gross one week , left for England .  Fortunately the hole was found at last and plugged . Another week passed and even the missionaries were enjoying the voyage . The sickness was gone and , after all , the two young couples were on their honeymoon . 
The only lasting difficulty was the food . In spite of Pickering Dodge 's explicit instructions regarding variation of meals , the food did not seem the same as at home . " Everything tasted differently from what it does on land and those things I was most fond of at home , I loathed the most here " , Ann noted . At last they concluded that the heavy , full feeling in their stomachs was due to lack of exercise . Walking was the remedy , they decided , but a deck full of chicken coops and pigpens was hardly suitable . Skipping was the alternative . A rope was found and , like children in school , the missionaries skipped for hours at a time . Finally , tiring of so monotonous a form of exercise , they decided to dance instead . It was much more fun , reminding the girls of their old carefree days in the Hasseltine frolics room at Bradford . The weather turned warmer and with it came better appetites , although Harriet was still a little off-color . She could not face coffee or tea without milk , and was always craving types of food that were not available aboard a sailing ship . By now she was sure she was going to have a baby , deciding it would be born in India or Burma that November . She was more excited than frightened at the prospect of having her first child in a foreign land . 
The crew of the Caravan never failed to amaze Ann , who during her stay in Salem must frequently have overheard strong sailorly language . She wrote in her journal , " I have not heard the least profane language since I have been on board the vessel . This is very uncommon " . 
She was now enjoying the voyage very much . Even the first wave of homesickness had passed , although there were moments when Captain Heard pointed out on his compass the direction of Bradford that she felt a little twinge at her heart . As for Adoniram , she found him to be " the kindest " of husbands . 
On Sundays , with the permission of Captain Heard , who usually attended with two of his officers , services were held in the double cabin . Sometimes a ship would be sighted and the Caravan pass so close that people could easily be seen on the distant deck . Captain Heard did not communicate with any strange vessels because of the possibility of war between the United States and Britain . As warmer temperatures were encountered Ann and Harriet were introduced to the pleasures of bathing daily in salt water . 
When May came the Caravan had already crossed the Equator . They were sailing round the Cape of Good Hope ; the weather had turned wet and cold . At this time Harriet wrote in a letter which after their finally landing in India was sent to her mother : 
" I care not how soon we reach Calcutta , and are placed in a still room , with a bowl of milk and a loaf of Indian bread . I can hardly think of this simple fare without exclaiming , oh , what a luxury . I have been so weary of the excessive rocking of the vessel , and the almost intolerable smell after the rain , that I have done little more than lounge on the bed for several days . But I have been blest with excellent spirits , and to-day have been running about the deck , and dancing in our room for exercise , as well as ever " . 
While studying at the seminary in Andover , Adoniram had been working on a New Testament translation from the original Greek . He had brought it along to continue during the voyage . There was one particular word that troubled his conscience . This was the Greek word most often translated as " baptism " . 
Born a Congregationalist , he had been baptized as a tiny baby in the usual manner by having a few drops of water sprinkled on his head , yet nowhere in the whole of the New Testament could he find a description of anybody being baptized by sprinkling . John the Baptist used total immersion in the River Jordan for believers ; even Christ was baptized by this method . The more Adoniram looked at the Greek word for baptism , the more unhappy he became over its true meaning . 
As was only natural he confided his searchings to Ann , conceding ruefully that it certainly looked as if their own Congregationalists were wrong and the Baptists right . 
Ann was very troubled . By this time she had learned that it was futile to argue with her young husband , yet the uncomfortable fact remained : the American Congregationalists were sending them as missionaries to the Far East and paying their salaries . What would happen if Adoniram " changed horses in midstream " ? Baptists and Congregationalists in New England were on friendly terms . How embarrassing it would be if the newly appointed Congregationalist missionaries should suddenly switch their own beliefs in order to embrace Baptist teachings ! 
" If you become a Baptist , I will not " , Ann informed her husband , but sweeping her threat aside Adoniram continued to search for an answer to the personal dilemma in which he found himself . 
By early June they were a hundred miles off the coast of Ceylon , by which time all four missionaries were hardened seafarers . Even Harriet could boldly write , " I know not how it is ; but I hear the thunder roll ; see the lightning flash ; and the waves threatening to swallow up the vessel ; and yet remain unmoved " . 
Ann thrilled to the sight of a delicate butterfly and two strange tropical birds . Land was near , and on June 12 , one hundred and fourteen days after leaving America , they actually saw , twenty miles away , the coast of Orissa . 
Captain Heard gave orders for the ship to be anchored in the Bay of Bengal until he could obtain the services of a reputable pilot to steer her through the shallow waters . 
Sometimes ships waited for days for such a man , but Captain Heard was lucky . Next day a ship arrived with an English pilot , his leadsman , an English youth , and the first Hindu the Judsons and Newells had ever seen . A little man with a " a dark copper color " skin , he was wearing " calico trousers and a white cotton short gown " . Ann was plainly disappointed in his appearance . " He looks as feminine as you can imagine " , she decided . 
The pilot possessed excellent skill at his calling ; all day long the Caravan slowly made her way through the difficult passages . Alas , to Ann 's consternation , his language while thus employed left much to be desired . He swore so loudly at the top of his voice , that she did n't get any sleep all the next night . 
Next morning the Caravan was out of the treacherous Bay . Relieved of the major part of his responsibility for the safety of the ship , the pilot 's oaths became fewer . Slowly she moved up the Hooghli River , a mouth of the mighty Ganges , toward Calcutta . 
Ann was entranced with the view , as were her husband and friends . Running across the deck , which was empty now that the livestock had been killed and eaten , they sniffed the spice-laden breezes that came from the shore , each pointing out new and exciting wonders to the other . 
Out came the journal and in it went Ann 's own description of the scene : 
" On each side of the Hoogli , where we are now sailing , are the Hindoo cottages , as thick together as the houses in our seaports . They are very small , and in the form of haystacks , without either chimney or windows . They are situated in the midst of trees , which hang over them , and appear truly romantick . The grass and fields of rice are perfectly green , and herds of cattle are everywhere feeding on the banks of the river , and the natives are scattered about differently employed . Some are fishing , some driving the team , and many are sitting indolently on the banks of the river . The pagodas we have passed are much larger than the houses " . 
Harriet was just as delighted . Where were the hardships she had expected ? She was certain now that it would be no harder to bear her child here in such pleasant surroundings than at home in the big white house in Haverhill . With childlike innocence she wrote of the Indians as " walking with fruit and umbrellas in their hands , with the tawny children around them … . This is the most delightful trial I have ever had " , she decided . 
The Indians who came aboard ship to collect the mail also interested her greatly , even if she was suitably shocked , according to the customs of the society in which she had been reared , to find them " naked , except a piece of cotton cloth wrapped around their middle " . 
At last they saw Calcutta , largest city of Bengal and the Caravan 's destination . Founded August 24 , 1690 by Job Charnock of the East India Company , and commonly called " The City of Palaces " , it seemed a vast and elegant place to Ann Hasseltine Judson . Solid brick buildings painted dazzling white , large domes and tall , picturesque palms stretched as far as the eye could see , while the wharves and harbor were filled with tall-masted sailing ships . The noise stunned her . Crowds flocked through the waterfront streets chattering loudly in their strange-sounding Bengali tongue . 
Harriet 's mouth watered with anticipation when after months of dreaming she sat down at last to her much-craved milk and fresh bread . Ann , pleased to see her friend happy , was intrigued by the new fruits a friend of Captain Heard had sent on board for their enjoyment . Cautiously she sampled her first pineapple and another fruit whose taste she likened to that of " a rich pear " . Though she did not then know its name , this strange new fruit was a banana .  SIX  The first act of Adoniram and Samuel on reaching Calcutta was to report at the police station , a necessity when landing in East India Company territory . On the way they tried to discover all they could about Burma , and they were disturbed to find that Michael Symes 's book had not presented an altogether true picture . He had failed to realize that the Burmese were not really treating him as the important visitor he considered himself . They were in fact quietly laughing at him , for their King wished to have nothing to do with the Western world . When Captain John Gibault of Salem had visited Burma in 1793 his ship , the Astra , had been promptly commandeered and taken by her captors up the Irrawaddy River . Although after much trouble he did manage to get it back , he discovered there was no trade to be had . All Captain Gibault took back to Salem were a few items for the town 's East India Museum . A year later another Salem ship returned from Burma with a cargo of gum lacquer which nobody wanted to buy . After that Salem ships decided to bypass unfriendly Burma . 
The Burmese appeared to have little knowledge of British power or any idea of trade . They despised foreigners . Cruel Burmese governors could , on the slightest whim , take a man 's life . As for missionaries , even if they succeeded in getting into the country they probably would not be allowed to preach the Christian faith to the Burmans . Unspeakable tortures or even execution might well be their fate . 
" Go back to America or any other place " , well-meaning friends of Captain Heard advised them , " but put thoughts of going to Burma out of your heads " . 
Somewhat daunted , the two American missionaries reached the police station where they were questioned by a most unfriendly clerk . When he discovered they had received from the Company 's Court of Directors no permission to live in India , coupled with the fact that they were Americans who had been sent to Asia to convert " the heathen " , he became more belligerent than ever . 
They explained that they desired only to stop in India until a ship traveling on to Burma could be found .  She describes , first , the imaginary reaction of a foreigner puzzled by this " unseasonable exultation " ; he is answered by a confused , honest Englishman . The reasons for the Whig joy on this occasion are found to be their expectation of regaining control of the government , their delight at the prospect of a new war , their hopes of having the Tories hanged , and so on . As for the author of the Englishman , Mrs. Manley sarcastically deplores that the sole defense of the Protestant cause should be left to " Ridpath , Dick Steele , and their Associates , with the Apostles of Young Man 's Coffee-House " . 
Another controversy typical of the war between the Englishman and the Examiner centered on Robert ( later Viscount ) Molesworth , a Whig leader in Ireland and a member of the Irish Privy Council . On December 21 , the day that the Irish House of Commons petitioned for removal of Sir Constantine Phipps , their Tory Lord Chancellor , Molesworth reportedly made this remark on the defense of Phipps by Convocation : " They that have turned the world upside down , are come hither also " . Upon complaints from the Lower House of Convocation to the House of Lords , he was removed from the Privy Council , his remark having been represented as a blasphemous affront to the clergy . Steele , who had earlier praised Molesworth in Tatler No. 189 , now defended him in Englishman No. 46 , depicting his removal as a setback to the Constitution . On the other hand , Molesworth was naturally assailed in the Tory press . Swift , in the Dublin edition of A Preface to the Bishop of Sarum 's Introduction , indicated his feelings by including Molesworth , along with Toland , Tindal , and Collins , in the group of those who , like Burnet , are engaged in attacking all Convocations of the clergy . In the same way he coupled Molesworth and Wharton in a letter to Archbishop King , and he had earlier described him as " the worst of them " in some " Observations " on the Irish Privy Council submitted to Oxford . A month later , in The Publick Spirit of the Whigs , he used Steele 's defense of Molesworth as evidence of his disrespect for the clergy , calling Steele 's position an affront to the " whole Convocation of Ireland " . On this issue , then , as on so many in these months , Steele and Swift took rigidly opposed points of view . 
In the early months of 1714 , the battle between Swift and Steele over the issue of the Succession entered its major phase . The preliminaries ended with the publication of Steele 's Crisis on January 19 , and from that point on the fight proceeded at a rapid pace . In answer to The Crisis , Swift produced The Publick Spirit of the Whigs , his most extensive and bitter attack on his old friend . By this time , as we shall see , the Tories were already planning to " punish " Steele for his political writing by expelling him from the House of Commons . Despite his defense of himself in the final paper of the Englishman and in his speech before the House , their efforts were successful . Steele lost his seat in Parliament , and his personal quarrel with Swift , by now a public issue , thus reached its climax . 
Of all the Whig tracts written in support of the Succession , The Crisis is perhaps the most significant . Certainly it is the most pretentious and elaborate . Hanoverian agents assisted in promoting circulation , said to have reached 40,000 , and if one may judge by the reaction of Swift and other government writers , the work must have had considerable impact . Steele 's main business here is to arouse public opinion to the immediate danger of a Stuart Restoration . To this end , the first and longest section of the tract cites all the laws enacted since the Revolution to defend England against the " Arbitrary Power of a Popish Prince " . In his comment on these laws Steele sounds all the usual notes of current Whig propaganda , ranging from a criticism of the Tory peace to an attack on the dismissal of Marlborough ; but his principal theme is that the intrigues of the Tories , " our Popish or Jacobite Party " , pose an immediate threat to Church and State . Like Burnet , he deplores the indifference of the people in the face of the crisis . Treasonable books striking at the Hanoverian Succession , he complains , are allowed to pass unnoticed . In this connection , Swift , too , is drawn in for attack : " The Author of the Conduct of the Allies has dared to drop Insinuations about altering the Succession " . In his effort to stir the public from its lethargy , Steele goes so far as to list Catholic atrocities of the sort to be expected in the event of a Stuart Restoration , and , with rousing rhetoric , he asserts that the only preservation from these " Terrours " is to be found in the laws he has so tediously cited . " It is no time " , he writes , " to talk with Hints and Innuendos , but openly and honestly to profess our Sentiments before our Enemies have compleated and put their Designs in Execution against us " . 
Steele apparently professed his sentiments in this book too openly and honestly for his own good , since the government was soon to use it as evidence against him in his trial before the House . In the final issues of the Englishman , which ended just as the new session of Parliament began , he provided his enemies with still more ammunition . For example , No. 56 printed the patent giving the Electoral Prince the title of Duke of Cambridge . In a few months the Duke was to be the center of a controversy of some significance on the touchy question of the Protestant Succession . At the order of the Dowager Electress , the Hanoverian agents , supported by the Whig leaders , demanded that a writ of summons be issued which would call the Duke to England to sit in Parliament , thus further insuring the Succession by establishing a Hanoverian Prince in England before the Queen 's death . Anne was furious , and Bolingbroke advised that the request be refused . Oxford , realizing that the law required the issuance of the writ , took the opposite view , for which the Queen never forgave him . Accordingly the request was granted , but the Elector himself , who had not been consulted by his mother , rejected the proposal and recalled his agent Sch.uuml ; tz , whose impolitic handling of the affair had caused the Hanoverian interest to suffer and had made Oxford 's dismissal more likely than ever . Steele in this paper is indicating his sympathy for such a plan . A few days after this Englishman appeared , Defoe reported to Oxford that Steele was expected to move in Parliament that the Duke be called over ; Defoe then commented , " If they Could Draw that young Gentleman into Their Measures They would show themselves quickly , for they are not asham 'd to Say They want Onely a head to Make a beginning " . 
The final issue of the Englishman , No. 57 for February 15 , ran to some length and was printed as a separate pamphlet , entitled The Englishman : Being the Close of the Paper So-called . Steele 's purpose is to present a general defense of his political writing and a resume of the themes which had occupied him in the Englishman ; but there is much here also which bears directly on his personal quarrel with Swift . Thus he complains , with considerable justice , that the Tory writers have resorted to libel instead of answering his arguments . His birth , education , and fortune , he says , have all been ridiculed simply because he has spoken with the freedom of an Englishman , and he assures the reader that " whoever talks with me , is speaking to a Gentleman born " . As notable examples of this abuse , he quotes passages from the Examiner , " that Destroyer of all things " , and The Character of Richard Steele , which he here attributes to Swift . Though put in rather maudlin terms , Steele 's defense of himself has a reasonable basis . His point is simply that the Tories have showered him with personal satire , despite the fact that as a private subject he has a right to speak on political matters without affronting the prerogative of the Sovereign . He claims , too , that his political convictions are simply those which are called " Revolution Principles " and which are accepted by moderate men in both parties . 
The final section of this pamphlet is of special interest in a consideration of Steele 's relations with Swift . It purports to be a letter from Steele to a friend at court , who , in Miss Blanchard 's opinion , could only be meant as Swift . Steele first answers briefly the charges which his " dear old Friend " has made about his pamphlet on Dunkirk and his Crisis . Then he launches into an attack on the Tory ministers , whom he calls the " New Converts " ; by this term he means to ridicule their professions of acting in the interest of the Church despite their own education and manner of life — a gibe , in other words , at the " Presbyterianism " in Harley 's family and at Bolingbroke 's reputed impiety . The Tory leaders , he insinuates , are cynically using the Church as a political " By-word " to increase party friction and keep themselves in power . This is the principal point made in this final section of Englishman No. 57 , and it caps Steele 's efforts in his other writing of these months to counteract the notion of the Tories as a " Church Party " supported by the body of the clergy . 
Next , Steele turns his attention to the " Courtier " he is addressing . He explains that there are sometimes honorable courtiers , but that too often a man who succeeds at court does not hesitate to sacrifice his Sovereign and nation to his own avarice and ambition . Such , he implies , is the case with his friend , who is not really a new convert himself but merely a favorer of new converts . If " Jack the Courtier " is really to be taken as Swift , the following remark is obviously Steele 's comment on Swift 's change of parties and its effect on their friendship : " I assure you , dear Jack , when I first found out such an Allay in you , as makes you of so malleable a Constitution , that you may be worked into any Form an Artificer pleases , I foresaw I should not enjoy your Favour much longer " . He closes his " letter " by demanding that Dunkirk be demolished , that the Pretender be forced to move farther away from the coast of England , and that the Queen and the House of Hanover come to a better understanding . The last point was soon to be included in the " seditious " remarks used against him in Parliament . 
The Examiner , during Steele 's trial a month later , printed an answer from the " courtier " addressed to " R. S. " at Button 's coffee-house . He reviews Steele 's entrance into politics and finds that his present difficulties are due to his habit of attributing to his own abilities and talents achievements which more properly should be credited to the indulgence of his friends . Once more , in other words , Steele is said to be indebted to Swift for his " wit " ; this was the form in which their private feud most often appeared in the Tory press , especially the Examiner . In The Publick Spirit of the Whigs , it may be noted , Swift himself contemptuously dismissed Steele 's reference to his friend at court : " I suppose by the Style of old Friend , and the like , it must be some Body there of his own Level ; among whom , his Party have indeed more Friends than I could wish " . 
On February 16 , Steele took his seat in Parliament . By now he was undergoing a fresh torrent of abuse from Tory papers and pamphlets , and action was being taken to effect his punishment by expulsion from Parliament . On the very day that the parliamentary session began , another " Infamous Libel " appeared , entitled A Letter from the Facetious Dr. Andrew Tripe , at Bath , to the Venerable Nestor Ironside . It is filled with the usual personal abuse of Steele , especially of his physical appearance ; in the opening paragraph , too , Steele is accused of extreme egotism , of giving " himself the preference to all the learned , his contemporaries , from Dr. Sw-ft himself , even down to Poet Cr-spe of the Customhouse " .  When Harold Arlen returned to California in the winter of 1944 , it was to take up again a collaboration with Johnny Mercer , begun some years before . The film they did after his return was an inconsequential bit of nothing titled Out of This World , a satire on the Sinatra bobby-soxer craze . The twist lay in using Bing Crosby 's voice on the sound track while leading man Eddie Bracken mouthed the words . If nothing else , at least two good songs came out of the project , " Out of This World " and " June Comes Around Every Year " . 
Though they would produce some very memorable and lasting songs , Arlen and Mercer were not given strong material to work on . Their first collaboration came close . Early in 1941 they were assigned to a script titled Hot Nocturne . It purported to be a reasonably serious attempt at a treatment of jazz musicians , their aims , their problems — the tug-of-war between the " pure " and the " commercial " — and seemed a promising vehicle , for the two men shared a common interest in jazz . 
Johnny Mercer practically grew up with the sound of jazz and the blues in his ears . He was born in Savannah , Georgia , in 1909 . His father , George A. Mercer , was descended from an honored Southern family that could trace its ancestry back to one Hugh Mercer , who had emigrated from Scotland in 1747 . 
The lyricist 's father was a lawyer who had branched out into real estate . His second wife , Lillian , was the mother of John H. Mercer . By the age of six young Johnny indicated that he had the call . One day he followed the Irish Jasper Greens , the town band , to a picnic and spent the entire day listening , while his family spent the day looking . The disappearance caused his family to assign a full-time maid to keeping an eye on the boy . But one afternoon Mrs. Mercer met her ; both were obviously on the way to the Mercer home . The mother inquired , " Where 's Johnny , and why did you leave him " ? " There was nothing else I could do " , the maid answered , satisfied with a rather vague explanation . But Mrs. Mercer demanded more . The maid then told her , " Because he fired me " . 
With her son evidencing so strong a musical bent his mother could do little else but get him started on the study of music — though she waited until he was ten — beginning with the piano and following that with the trumpet . Young Mercer showed a remarkable lack of aptitude for both instruments . Still , he did like music making and even sang in the chapel choir of the Woodberry Forest School , near Orange , Virginia , where he sounded fine but did not matriculate too well . 
When he was fifteen John H. Mercer turned out his first song , a jazzy little thing he called " Sister Susie , Strut Your Stuff " . If his scholarship and formal musicianship were not all they might have been , Mercer demonstrated at an early age that he was gifted with a remarkable ear for rhythm and dialect . From his playmates in Savannah , Mercer had picked up , along with a soft Southern dialect , traces also of the Gullah dialects of Africa . Such speech differences made him acutely aware of the richness and expressivness of language . 
During the summers , while he was still in school , Mercer worked for his father 's firm as a messenger boy . It generally took well into the autumn for the firm to recover from the summer 's help . " We 'd give him things to deliver , letters , checks , deeds and things like that " , remembers his half-brother Walter , still in the real estate business in Savannah , " and learn days later that he 'd absent-mindedly stuffed them into his pocket . There they stayed " . 
This rather detached attitude toward life 's encumbrances has seemed to be the dominant trait in Mercer 's personality ever since . It is , however , a disarming disguise , or perhaps a shield , for not only has Mercer proved himself to be one of the few great lyricists over the years , but also one who can function remarkably under pressure . He has also enjoyed a successful career as an entertainer ( his records have sold in the millions ) and is a sharp businessman . 
He has also an extraordinary conscience . In 1927 his father 's business collapsed , and , rather than go bankrupt , Mercer senior turned his firm over to a bank for liquidation . He died before he could completely pay off his debts . Some years later the bank handling the Mercer liquidation received a check for $300,000 , enough to clear up the debt . The check had been mailed from Chicago , the envelope bore no return address , and the check was not signed . 
" That 's Johnny " , sighed the bank president , " the best-hearted boy in the world , but absent-minded " . But Mercer 's explanation was simple : " I made out the check and carried it around a few days unsigned — in case I lost it " . When he remembered that he might have not signed the check , Mercer made out another for the same amount , instructing the bank to destroy the other — especially if he had happened to have absent-mindedly signed both of them . 
When the family business failed , Mercer left school and on his mother 's urging — for she hoped that he would become an actor — he joined a local little theater group . When the troupe traveled to New York to participate in a one-act-play competition — and won — Mercer , instead of returning with the rest of the company in triumph , remained in New York . He had talked one other member of the group to stay with him , but that friend had tired of not eating regularly and returned to Savannah . But Mercer hung on , living , after a fashion , in a Greenwich Village fourth-flight walk-up . " The place had no sink or washbasin , only a bathtub " , his mother discovered when she visited him . " Johnny insisted on cooking a chicken dinner in my honor — he 's always been a good cook — and I 'll never forget him cleaning the chicken in the tub " . 
A story , no doubt apocryphal , for Mercer himself denies it , has him sporting a monacle in those Village days . Though merely clear glass , it was a distinctive trade mark for an aspiring actor who hoped to imprint himself upon the memories of producers . One day in a bar , so the legend goes , someone put a beer stein with too much force on the monacle and broke it . The innocent malfeasant , filled with that supreme sense of honor found in bars , insisted upon replacing the destroyed monacle — and did , over the protests of the former owner — with a square monacle . Mercer is supposed to have refused it with , " Anyone who wears a square monacle must be affected " ! 
Everett Miller , then assistant director for the Garrick Gaieties , a Theatre Guild production , needed a lyricist for a song he had written ; he just happened not to need any actor at the moment , however . For him Mercer produced the lyric to " Out of Breath Scared to Death of You " , introduced in that most successful of all the Gaieties , by Sterling Holloway . This 1930 edition also had songs in it by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin , by E. Y. Harburg and Duke , and by Harry Myers . Entrance into such stellar song writing company encouraged the burgeoning song writer to take a wife , Elizabeth Meehan , a dancer in the Gaieties . The Mercers took up residence in Brooklyn , and Mercer found a regular job in Wall Street " misplacing stocks and bonds " . 
When he heard that Paul Whiteman was looking for singers to replace the Rhythm Boys , Mercer applied and got the job , " not for my voice , I 'm sure , but because I could write songs and material generally " . While with the Whiteman band Mercer met Jerry Arlen . He had yet to meet Harold Arlen , for although they had " collaborated " on " Satan 's Li'l Lamb " , Mercer and Harburg had worked from a lead sheet the composer had furnished them . The lyric , Mercer remembers , was tailored to fit the unusual melody . 
Mercer 's Whiteman association brought him into contact with Hoagy Carmichael , whose " Snowball " Mercer relyriced as " Lazybones " , in which form it became a hit and marked the real beginning of Mercer 's song-writing career . After leaving Whiteman , Mercer joined the Benny Goodman band as a vocalist . With the help of Ziggy Elman , also in the band , he transformed a traditional Jewish melody into a popular song , " And the Angels Sing " . The countrywide success of " Lazybones " and " And the Angels Sing " could only lead to Hollywood , where , besides Harold Arlen , Mercer collaborated with Harry Warren , Jimmy Van Heusen , Richard Whiting , Walter Donaldson , Jerome Kern , and Arthur Schwartz . Mercer has also written both music and lyrics for several songs . He may be the only song writer ever to have collaborated with a secretary of the U. S. Treasury ; he collaborated on a song with William Hartman Woodin , who was Secretary of the Treasury , 1932-33 . 
When Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen began their collaboration in 1940 , Mercer , like Arlen , had several substantial film songs to his credit , among them " Hooray for Hollywood " , " Ride , Tenderfoot , Ride " , " Have You Got Any Castles , Baby ? " , and " Too Marvelous for Words " ( all with Richard Whiting ) ; with Harry Warren he did " The Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish " , " Jeepers Creepers " , and " You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby " . Mercer 's lyrics are characterized by an unerring ear for rhythmic nuances , a puckish sense of humor expressed in language with a colloquial flair . Though versatile and capable of turning out a ballad lyric with the best of them , Mercer 's forte is a highly polished quasi-folk wit . 
His casual , dreamlike working methods , often as not in absentia , were an abrupt change from Harburg 's , so that Arlen had to adjust again to another approach to collaboration . There were times that he worked with both lyricists simultaneously . 
Speaking of his work with Johnny Mercer , Arlen says , " Our working habits were strange . After we got a script and the spots for the songs were blocked out , we 'd get together for an hour or so every day . While Johnny made himself comfortable on the couch , I 'd play the tunes for him . He has a wonderfully retentive memory . After I would finish playing the songs , he 'd just go away without a comment . I would n't hear from him for a couple of weeks , then he 'd come around with the completed lyric " . 
Arlen is one of the few ( possibly the only ) composer Mercer has been able to work with so closely , for they held their meetings in Arlen 's study . " Some guys bothered me " , Mercer has said . " I could n't write with them in the same room with me , but I could with Harold . He is probably our most original composer ; he often uses very odd rhythms , which makes it difficult , and challenging , for the lyric writer " . 
While Arlen and Mercer collaborated on Hot Nocturne , Mercer worked also with Arthur Schwartz on another film , Navy Blues . Arlen , too , worked on other projects at the same time with old friend Ted Koehler . Besides doing a single song , " When the Sun Comes Out " , they worked on the ambitious Americanegro Suite , for voices and piano , as well as songs for films . 
The Americanegro Suite is in a sense an extension of the Cotton Club songs in that it is a collection of Negro songs , not for a night club , but for the concert stage . The work had its beginning in 1938 with an eight-bar musical strain to which Koehler set the words " There 'll be no more work/ There 'll be no more worry " , matching the spiritual feeling of the jot . This grew into the song " Big Time Comin' " . By September 1940 the suite had developed into a collection of six songs , " four spirituals , a dream , and a lullaby " . 
The Negro composer Hall Johnson studied the Americanegro Suite and said of it , " Of all the many songs written by white composers and employing what claims to be a Negroid idiom in both words and music , these six songs by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler easily stand far out above the rest . Thoroughly modern in treatment , they are at the same time , full of simple sincerity which invariably characterizes genuine Negro folk-music and are by no means to be confused with the average 'Broadway Spirituals ' which depend for their racial flavor upon sundry allusions to the 'Amen Corner' , 'judgement day' , 'Gabriel 's horn' , and a frustrated devil — with a few random 'Hallelujahs ' thrown in for good measure .  
I feel obliged to describe this cubbyhole . It had a single porcelain stall and but one cabinet for the chairing of the bards . It was here that the terror-stricken Dennis Moon played an unrehearsed role during the children 's party . A much larger room , adjacent to the lavatory , served as a passageway to and from the skimpy toilet . That unused room was large enough for — well , say an elephant could get into it … and , as a matter of fact , an elephant did … 
Something occurred on the morning of the children 's party which may illustrate the kind of trouble our restricted toilet facilities caused us . It so happened that sports writer Arthur Robinson got out of the hospital that morning after promising his doctor that he would be back in an hour or two to continue his convalescence . Arthur Robinson traveled with the baseball clubs as staff correspondent for the American . He was ghost writer for Babe Ruth , whose main talent for literary composition was the signing of his autograph . Robbie was a war veteran with battle-shattered knees . 
He arrived on crutches at the Newspaper Club with one of his great pals , Oliver Herford , artist , author , and foe of stupidity . Mr. Herford 's appearance was that of a frustrated gnome . He seemed timid ( at first ) , wore nose glasses from which a black ribbon dangled , and was no bigger than a jockey . Robinson asked Herford to escort him to the club 's lavatory before they sat down for a highball and a game of cards . In the jakes , after Robbie and his crutches were properly stowed , Mr. Herford went to the adjoining facility . He had barely assumed his stance there when a fat fellow charged through the doorway . Without any regard for rest-room protocol , the hulking stranger almost knocked Herford off his pins . The artist-author said nothing , but stood to one side . He waited a long time . Nothing was said , nothing accomplished . The unrelieved stranger eventually turned away from the place of his — shall we dare say his Waterloo ? — to go to the door . 
Mr. Herford touched the fat man 's arm . " Pardon me , sir . May I say that you have just demonstrated the truth of an old proverb — the younger Pliny 's , if memory serves me — which , translated freely from the archaic Latin , says , 'The more haste , the less peed' " . 
Governor Alfred E. Smith was the official host at the children 's party . United States Senator Royal S. Copeland was wearing the robes of Santa Claus and a great white beard ; the Honorable Robert Wagner , Sr. , at that time a justice of the New York Supreme Court , was on the reception committee . I was in charge of the arrangements — which were soon enough disarranged . 
I had had difficulties from the very first day . When , in my enthusiasm , I proposed the party , my city editor ( who disliked the club and many of its members ) tried to block my participation in the gala event . Even earlier than that he had resented the fact that I had been chosen to edit the club 's Reporter . 
City editor Victor Watson of the New York American was a man of brooding suspicions and mysterious shifts of mood . Mr. Hearst 's telegraphic code word for Victor Watson was " fatboy " . The staff saw in him the qualities of a Don Cossack , hence , as mentioned before , his nickname " the Hetman " . 
The Hetman 's physical aspects were not those of a savage rider of the steppes . Indeed , he looked more like a well-fleshed lay brother of the Hospice of St. Bernard . Nor were his manners barbaric . He had a purring voice and poker player 's immobility of features which somehow conveyed the feeling that he knew where all the bodies were buried . He was the son of a Scottish father and an American Jewish mother , long widowed , with whom he lived in a comfortable home in Flushing . He had worked in the newspaper business since he was nineteen years old , always for the Hearst service . From the very first he regarded himself as Mr. Hearst 's disciple , defender , and afterward his prime minister , self-ordained . 
It was said that the Hetman plotted to take over the entire Hearst newspaper empire one day by means of various coups : the destruction of editors who tried to halt his course , the unfrocking of publishers whose mistakes of judgment might be magnified in secret reports to Mr. Hearst . Whatever the Hetman 's ambitions , his colleagues were kept ill at ease . Among the outstanding members of the Hearst cabinet whom he successfully opposed for a time were the great Arthur Brisbane , Bradford Merrill , S.S. Carvalho , and Colonel Van Hamm . He also disliked Runyon , for no good reason other than the fact that the Demon 's talent was so marked as to put him well beyond the Hetman 's say-so or his supervision . 
Runyon , for his part , had a contemptuous regard for Mr. Watson . " He 's a wrong-o " , said Runyon , " and I would n't trust him as far as I could throw the Statue of Liberty " . 
Arthur " Bugs " Baer wrote to me just recently , " Vic wanted to die in harness , with his head towards the wagon . He supported his mother and his brother , who afterwards committed suicide . Watson told me that his brother always sent roses to his mother , blossoms bought with Vic 's allowance to him . 'And would you believe it' , Vic added , 'she likes him better than she does me . Why' " ? 
About the only time the Hetman seemed excited was when one of his own pet ideas was born . Then he would get to his feet , as though rising in honor of his own remarkable powers , and say almost invariably , " Gentlemen , this is an amazing story ! It 's bigger than the Armistice " . 
Some of the Hetman 's " ideas " were dream-ridden , vaguely imparted , and at times preposterous . One day he assigned me to lay bare a " plot " by the Duponts to supply munitions to a wholly fictitious revolution he said was about to occur in Cuba . He said that his information was so secret that he would not be able to confide in me the origin of his pipeline tip . 
" I can tell you this much " , he said . It 's bigger than the Armistice " . 
I worked for a day on this plainly ridiculous assignment and consulted several of my own well-informed sources . Then I spent the next two days at the baseball park and at Jack Doyle 's pool parlors . When I returned to make my report , the Hetman did not remember having sent me on the secret mission . He was busy , he said , in having someone submit to a monkey-gland operation . And I was to go to work on that odd matter . I shall tell of it later on . 
The Hetman had a strong liking for a story , any story which was to be had by means of much sleuthing or by roundabout methods . Most of my stories were obtained by simply seeking out the person who could give me the facts , and not as a rule by playing clever tricks . 
One day I tired of following the Hetman 's advice of " shadowing " and of the " ring-around-the-rosie " approach to a report that Enrico Caruso had pinched a lady 's hip while visiting the Central Park monkey house . I explained my state of mind to artist Winsor McCay and to " Bugs " Baer . Mr. Baer obtained a supply of crepe hair and spirit-gum from an actor at the Friars . We fashioned beards , put them on , and reported to the Hetman at the city desk . 
Mr. Baer had an auburn beard , like Longfellow 's . Mr. McCay had on a sort of Emperor Maximilian beard and mustache . As for myself , I had on an enormous black " muff " . This , together with a derby hat and horn-rim eyeglasses , gave me the appearance of a Russian nihilist . 
" We are ready for your next mysterious assignment " , said Mr. Baer to the Hetman . " Where to , sir " ? 
Mr. Watson did not have much humor in his make-up , but he managed a mirthless smile . Just then a reporter telephoned in from the Bronx to give the rewrite desk an account of a murder . The Hetman told me to take the story over the phone and to write it . While I was sitting at one of the rewrite telephones with my derby and my great beard , Arthur Brisbane whizzed in with some editorial copy in his hand . He paused for a moment to look at me , then went on to the city desk to deliver his " Today " column . 
I thought it expedient to take off my derby , my glasses , and the beard ; and also to change telephones . I managed to do this by the time the great A.B . returned to the place where he last had seen the fierce nihilist . He stood there staring with disbelief at the vacant desk . Then he wrinkled his huge brow and went slowly out of the room . He had a somewhat goggle-eyed expression . He had been " seeing things " . 
The Hetman 's " ideas " for news stories or editorial campaigns were by no means always fruitless or lacking in merit . He campaigned successfully for the riddance of " Death Avenue " and also brought about the ending of pollution of metropolitan beaches by sewage . He exposed the bucket-shop racket with the able assistance of two excellent reporters , Nat Ferber and Carl Helm . In the conduct of these and many other campaigns , the Hetman proved to be a much abler journalist than his critics allowed . 
It seems to me now , in a long backward glance , that many of the Hetman 's conceits and odd actions — together with his grim posture when brandishing the hatchet in the name of Mr. Hearst — were keyed with the tragedy which was to close over him one day . Alone , rejected on every hand , divorced , and in financial trouble , he leaped from an eleventh-floor window of the Abbey Hotel in 1937 . 
One finds it difficult to pass censure on the lonely figure who waited for days for a saving word from his zealously served idol , W.R. Hearst . That word was withheld when the need of it seemed the measure of his despair . The unfinished note , written in pencil upon the back of a used envelope , and addressed to the coroner , makes one wonder about many things : " God forgive me for everything . I can not … " 
Much to Damon Runyon 's amazement , as well as my own , I got along splendidly with the Hetman ; that is , until I became an editor , hence , in his eyes , a rival . Not long after Colonel Van Hamm had foisted me on the Watson staff I received a salary raise and a contract on the Hetman 's recommendation . During the next years he gave me the second of the five contracts I would sign with the Hearst Service . It was a somewhat unusual thing for a reporter to have a contract in those days before the epidemic of syndicated columnists . I would like to believe that my ability warranted this advancement . Somehow I think that Watson paid more attention to me than he otherwise might have because his foe , Colonel Van Hamm , would n't touch me with a ten-foot blue pencil . 
I remember one day when Mr. Hearst ( and I never knew why he liked me , either ) sent the Hetman a telegram : " Please find some more reporters like that young man from Denver " . Watson showed this wire to Colonel Van Hamm . The colonel grunted , then made a remark which might be construed in either of two ways . " Do n't bother to look any further . We already have the only one of its kind " . 
The Hetman did have friends , but they were mostly outside the newspaper profession . Sergeant Mike Donaldson , Congressional Medal of Honor soldier , was one of them . Dr. Menas S. Gregory was another . I used to go with Watson to call on the eminent neurologist at his apartment , to sit among the doctor 's excellent collection of statues , paintings , and books and drink Oriental coffee while Watson seemed to thaw out and become almost affable . 
There was one time , however , when his face clouded and he suddenly blurted , " Why did my brother commit suicide " ? 
I can not remember Dr. Gregory 's reply , if , indeed , he made one .  If she were not at home , Mama would see to it that a fresh white rose was there . Sometimes , Mrs. Coolidge would close herself in the Green Suite on the second floor , and play the piano she had brought to the White House . Mama knew she was playing her son 's favorite pieces and feeling close to him , and did not disturb her . 
All the rest of the days in the White House would be shadowed by the tragic loss , even though the President tried harder than ever to make his little dry jokes and to tease the people around him . 
A little boy came to give the President his personal condolences , and the President gave word that any little boy who wanted to see him was to be shown in . Backstairs , the maids cried a little over that , and the standing invitation was not mentioned to Mrs. Coolidge . 
The President was even more generous with the First Lady than he had been before the tragedy . He would bring her boxes of candy and other presents to coax a smile to her lips . 
He brought her shawls . Dresses were short in the days of Mrs. Coolidge , and Spanish shawls were thrown over them . He got her dozens of them . One shawl was so tremendous that she could not wear it , so she draped it over the banister on the second floor , and it hung over the stairway . The President used to look at it with a ghost of a smile . 
Mrs. Coolidge spent more time in her bedroom among her doll collection . She kept the dolls on the Lincoln bed . At night , when Mama would turn back the covers , she would have to take all the dolls off the bed and place them elsewhere for the night . Mama always felt that the collection symbolized Mrs. Coolidge 's wish for a little girl . 
Among the dolls was one that meant very much to the First Lady , who would pick it up and look at it often . It had a tiny envelope tied to its wrist . An accompanying sympathetic letter explained that inside the envelope was a name for Mrs. Coolidge 's first granddaughter . Mama knew this doll was meant to help Mrs. Coolidge overcome her grief by turning her eyes to the future . The name inside the envelope was " Cynthia " . 
The Coolidges ' life , after the death of their son , was quieter than ever . John was away at school most of the time . Mrs. Coolidge would knit , and the President would sit reading , or playing with the many pets around them . 
Now and then , the President would call for " Little Jack , Master of the Hounds " , which was his nickname for a messenger who had worked in the White House since Teddy Roosevelt 's administration , and discuss the welfare of some one of the animals . It was part of Little Jack 's work to look after the dogs . 
One White House dog was immortalized in a painting . That was Rob Roy , who posed with Mrs. Coolidge for the portrait by Howard Chandler Christy . To get him to pose , Mrs. Coolidge would feed him candy , so he enjoyed the portrait sessions as well as she did . 
I would like to straighten out a misconception about the dress Mrs. Coolidge is wearing in this painting . It is not the same dress as the one on her manikin in the Smithsonian . People think the dress in the picture was lengthened by an artist much later on . This is not true . The dress in the painting is a bright red , with rhinestones forming a spray on the right side . There is a long train flowing from the shoulders . 
Mrs. Coolidge gave Mama this dress for me , and I wore it many times . I still have the dress , and I hope to give it to the Smithsonian Institution as a memento , or , as I more fondly hope , to present it to a museum containing articles showing the daily lives of the Presidents — if I can get it organized . 
But to get back to the Coolidge household , Mrs. Coolidge so obviously loved dogs , that the public sent her more dogs — Calamity Jane , Timmy , and Blackberry . The last two were a red and a black chow . Rob Roy remained boss of all the dogs . He showed them what to do , and taught them how to keep the maids around the White House in a state of terror . 
The dogs would run through the halls after him like a burst of bullets , and all the maids would run for cover . Mama did n't know what to do — whether to tell on Rob Roy or not — since she had the ear of Mrs. Coolidge more than the other maids . But she was afraid the First Lady would not understand , because Rob Roy was a perfect angel with the First Family . 
Every day , when the President took his nap , Rob Roy would stretch out on the window seat near him , like a perfect gentleman , and stare thoughtfully out the window , or he would take a little nap himself . He would not make a sound until the President had wakened and left for the office ; then he would bark to let everyone know the coast was clear . His signal was for the other dogs to come running , but it was also the signal for Mama and the other maids to watch out . 
Rob Roy was self-appointed to accompany the President to his office every morning . Rob Roy was well aware of the importance of this mission , and he would walk in front of the President , looking neither to the right nor to the left . 
At dinner , lunch , or breakfast , the President would call out , " Supper " ! — he called all meals supper — after the butler had announced the meal . All the dogs would dash to get on the elevator with the President and go to the dining room . They would all lie around on the rug during the meal , a very pretty sight as Rob Roy , Prudence , and Calamity Jane were all snow-white . 
When Prudence and Blackberry were too young to be trusted in the dining room , they were tied to the radiator with their leashes , and they would cry . Mama tried to talk to them and keep them quiet while she tidied up the sitting room before the First Family returned . 
Finally , Mama did mention to Mrs. Coolidge that she felt sorry for the little dogs , and then Mrs. Coolidge decided to leave the radio on for them while she was gone , even though her husband disapproved of the waste of electricity . 
Mama was now the first maid to Mrs. Coolidge , because Catherine , the previous first maid , had become ill and died . Mrs. Coolidge chose Mama in her place . It was a high mark for Mama . 
Every First Family seems to have one couple upon whom it relies for true friendship . For the Coolidges , it was Mr. and Mrs. Frank W. Stearns of Boston , Massachusetts , owners of a large department store . They seemed to be at the White House half the time . The butlers were amused because when the Stearns were there , the President would say grace at breakfast . If the Stearns were not there , grace would be omitted . 
Speaking of breakfast , the President inaugurated a new custom — that of conducting business at the breakfast table . The word was that this too was part of an economy move on his part . A new bill had been passed under Harding that designated the Government , rather than the President , as the tab-lifter for official meals . So the President would make a hearty breakfast official by inviting Government officials to attend . 
He caused a lot of talk when he also chose the breakfast hour to have the barber come in and trim his hair while he ate . Mama said that if Presidents were supposed to be colorful , Mr. Coolidge certainly made a good president . He knew exactly how to be colorful ! 
The favorite guest of the house , as far as the staff was concerned , was Mr. Wrigley , the chewing gum king . The White House had chewing gum until it could chew no more , and every Christmas , Mr. Wrigley sent the President a check for $100 , to be divided among all the help . You can imagine that he got pretty good service . 
Another good friend of the Coolidges ' was George B. Harvey , who was the Ambassador to Great Britain from 1921 to 1923 . He had been a friend of the Hardings , and continued to be invited by the Coolidges . 
The first royalty whom Mama ever waited on in the White House was Queen Marie of Rumania , who came to a State dinner given in her honor on October 21 , 1926 . She was not an overnight guest in the White House , but Mr. Ike Hoover , the chief usher , had Mama check her fur coat when she came in , and take care of her needs . Mama said she was one of the prettiest ladies she had ever seen . 
Mama was very patriotic , and one of the duties she was proudest of was repairing the edges of the flag that flew above the White House . Actually , two flags were used at the mansion — a small one on rainy days , and a big one on bright days . The wool would become frazzled around the edges from blowing in the wind , and Mama would mend it . She would often go up on the roof to see the attendant take down the flag in the evening . She used to tell me , " When I stand there and look at the flag blowing this way and that way , I have the wonderful , safe feeling that Americans are protected no matter which way the wind blows " . 
Even when Mrs. Coolidge was in mourning for her son , she reached out to help other people in trouble . One person she helped was my brother . Mama had told her how Emmett 's lungs had been affected when he was gassed in the war . He was in and out of Mount Alto Hospital for veterans any number of times . 
Taking a personal interest , she had the doctor assigned to the White House , Dr. James Coupal , look Emmett over . As a result , he was sent to a hospital in Arizona until his health improved enough for him to come back to Washington to work in the Government service . But again , there was danger that his lungs would suffer in the muggy Washington weather , and he had to return to the dry climate of the West to live and work . 
When Mrs. Coolidge was in mourning , she did not wear black . She wore grey every day , and white every evening . Mama knew that she was out of mourning when she finally wore bright colors . The President helped her a lot by selecting some lovely colored dresses to get her started . She opened the boxes with a tear in her eye and a sad smile on her face . 
On the social side , the chore Mama had at the formal receptions at the White House thrilled her the most . It was her job to stand at the foot of the stairs , and , just as the First Lady stepped off the last tread , Mama would straighten out her long train before she marched to the Blue Room to greet her guests with the President . Mama would enjoy the sight of the famous guests as much as anyone , and would note a gown here and there to tell me about that night . 
One night , Mama came home practically in a state of shock . She had stood at the bottom of the stairs , as usual , when Mrs. Coolidge came down , in the same dress that is now in the Smithsonian , to greet her guests . Mama stooped down to fix the train , but there was no train there ! She reached and reached around the dress , but there was nothing there . She looked up and saw that , without knowing it , Mrs. Coolidge was holding it aloft . Mrs. Coolidge looked down , saw Mama 's horrified expression and quickly let the whole thing fall to the floor . Mama swirled the train in place , and not a step was lost . 
The Coolidges did not always live at the White House during the Presidency .  
Impressive as this enumeration is , it barely hints at the diverse perceptions of Jews , collectively or individually , that have been attested by their Gentile environment . It is reasonable to affirm two propositions : Jews have been perceived by non-Jews as all things to all men ; some Jews have in fact been all things to all men . In the arena of power Jews have at one time or another been somebody 's ally ; they have observed correct neutrality ; they have been someone 's enemy . In the market place Jews have in fact under various circumstances been valued customers and suppliers , or clannish monopolists and cutthroat competitors . And so on through the roles referred to in the previous paragraph . Diversity of perception , yes ; diversity of fact , yes . 
But the two do not invariably or even typically coincide . The " conventional " image of a particular time and place is not necessarily congruent with the image of the facts as established over the years by scholarly and scientific research . Conventional images of Jews have this in common with all perceptions of a configuration in which one feature is held constant : images can be both true and false . 
The genuinely interesting question , then , becomes : What factors determine the degree of realism or distortion in conventional images of Jews ? The working test of " the facts " must always be the best available description obtainable from scholars and scientists who have applied their methods of investigation to relevant situations . Granted , such " functional " images are subject to human error ; they are self-correcting in the sense that they are subject to disciplined procedures that check and recheck against error . 
In accounting for realism or distortion two sets of factors can be usefully distinguished : current intelligence ; predispositions regarding intelligence . General Grant may have been the victim of false information in the instance reported in this book ; if so , he would not be the first or last commanding officer who has succumbed to bad information and dubious estimates of the future . But General Grant may have been self-victimized . He may have entered the situation with predispositions that prepared him to act uncritically in the press of affairs . 
Predispositions , in turn , fall conveniently into two categories for purposes of analysis . To some extent predispositions are shaped by exposure to group environments . In some measure they depend upon the structure of individual personality . The anti-Semitism of Hitler owed something to his exposure to the ideology of Lueger 's politically successful Christian socialist movement in Vienna . But millions of human beings were exposed to Lueger 's propaganda and record . After allowing for group exposures , it is apparent that other factors must be considered if we are to comprehend fanaticism . These are personality factors ; they include harmonies and conflicts within the whole man , and mechanisms whereby inner components are more or less smoothly met . Modern psychiatric knowledge provides us with many keys to unlock the significance of behavior of the kind . 
The foregoing factors are pertinent to the analysis of perceptual images and the broad conditions under which they achieve realism or fall short of it . Undoubtedly one merit of the vast panorama of Gentile conceptions of the Jew unfolded in the present anthology is that it provides a formidable body of material that invites critical examination in terms of reality . Many selections are themselves convincing contributions to this appraisal . 
Undoubtedly , however , the significance of the volume is greater than the foregoing paragraphs suggest . Speaking as a non-Jew I believe that its primary contribution is in the realm of future policy . Since we can neither undo nor redo the past , we are limited to the events of today and tomorrow . In this domain the simple fact of coexistence in the same local , national , and world community is enough to guarantee that we can not refrain from having some effect , large or small , upon Gentile-Jewish relations . What shall these effects be ? 
I am deliberately raising the policy problems involved in Gentile-Jewish relations . Comprehensive examination of any policy question calls for the performance of the intellectual tasks inseparable from any problem-solving method . The tasks are briefly indicated by these questions : What are my goals in Gentile-Jewish relations ? What are the historical trends in this country and abroad in the extent to which these goals are effectively realized ? What factors condition the degree of realization at various times and places ? What is the probable course of future developments ? What policies if adopted and applied in various circumstances will increase the likelihood that future events will coincide with desired events and do so at least cost in terms of all human values ? 
It is beyond the province of this epilogue to cover policy questions of such depth and range . The discussion is therefore limited to a suggested procedure for realizing at least some of the potential importance of this volume for future policy . As a groundwork for the proposal I give some attention to the first task enumerated above , the clarification of goal . 
My reply is that I associate myself with all those who affirm that Gentile-Jewish relations should contribute to the theory and practice of human dignity . The basic goal finds partial expression in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , a statement initiated and endorsed by individuals and organizations of many religious and philosophical traditions . 
Within this frame of reference policies appropriate to claims advanced in the name of the Jews depend upon which Jewish identity is involved , as well as upon the nature of the claim , the characteristics of the claimant , the justifications proposed , and the predispositions of the community decision makers who are called upon to act . If Jews are identified as a religious body in a controversy that comes before a national or international tribunal , it is obviously compatible with the goal of human dignity to protect freedom of worship . When decision makers act within this frame they determine whether a claim put forward in the name of religion is to be accepted by the larger community as appropriate to religion . Since the recognition of Israel as a nation state , claims are made in many cases which identify the claimant as a member of the new body politic . Community decision makers must make up their minds whether a claim is acceptable to the larger community in terms of prevailing expectations regarding members of nation states . In free countries many controversies involve self-styled Jews who use the symbol in asserting a vaguely " cultural " rather than religious or political identity . The decision maker who acts for the community as a whole must decide whether the objectives pursued and the methods used are appropriate to public policy regarding cultural groups . 
We know that much is made of the multiplicity and ambiguity of the identities that cluster around the key symbol of the Jew . Many public and private controversies will undoubtedly continue to reflect these confusions in the mind and usage of Gentile and Jew . However , in the context of legal and civic policy , these controversies are less than novel . They involve similar uncertainties regarding the multiple identities of any number of non-Jewish groups . So far as the existing body of formal principle and procedure is concerned , categorical novelties are not to be anticipated in Jewish-Gentile relationships ; claims are properly disposed of according to norms common to all parties . 
It is not implied that formal principles and procedures are so firmly entrenched within the public order of the world community or even of free commonwealths that they will control in all circumstances involving Jews and Gentiles during coming years . Social process is always anchored in past predisposition ; but it is perennially restructured in situations where anchors are dragged or lost . In conformance with the maximization principle we affirm that Gentile-Jewish relations will be harmonious or inharmonious to the degree that one relation or the other is expected by the active participants to yield the greatest net advantage , taking all value outcomes and effects into consideration . It is not difficult to anticipate circumstances in which negative tensions will cumulate ; for instance , imagine the situation if Israel ever joins an enemy coalition . The formal position of Americans who identify themselves with one or more of the several identities of the Jewish symbol is already clear ; the future weight of informal factors can not be so easily assessed . 
When we consider the disorganized state of the world community , and the legacy of predispositions adversely directed against all who are identified as Jews , it is obvious that the struggle for the minds and muscles of men needs to be prosecuted with increasing vigor and skill . During moments of intense crisis the responsibility of political leaders is overwhelming . But their freedom of policy is limited by the pattern of predisposition with which they and the people around them enter the crisis . At such critical moments predispositions favorable to human dignity most obviously " pay off " . By the same test predispositions destructive of human personality exercise their most sinister impact , with the result that men of good will are often trapped and nullified . 
Among measures in anticipation of crisis are plans to inject into the turmoil as assistants of key decision makers qualified persons who are cognizant of the corrosive effect of crisis upon personal relationships and are also able to raise calm and realistic voices when overburdened leaders near the limit of self-control . We are learning how to do these things in some of the vast organized structures of modern society ; the process can be accelerated . 
A truism is that the time to prepare for the worst is when times are best . During intercrisis periods the educational facilities of the community have the possibility of remolding the perspectives and altering the behavior of vast numbers of human beings of every age and condition . As more men and women are made capable of living up to the challenge of decency the chances are improved that the pattern of predisposition prevailing in positions of strength in future crises can be favorably affected . 
Now an abiding difficulty of paragraphs like the foregoing is that they appear to preach ; and in contemporary society we often complain of too much reaffirmation of the goodness of the good . In any case I do not intend to let the present occasion pass without dealing more directly with the problem of implementing good intentions . I assume that the number of readers of this anthology who regard themselves as morally perfect is small , and that most readers are willing to consider procedures by which they may gain more insight into themselves and better understanding of others . Properly used , the present book is an excellent instrument of enlightenment . 
Let us not confuse the issue by labeling the objective or the method " psychoanalytic " , for this is a well established term of art for the specific ideas and procedures initiated by Sigmund Freud and his followers for the study and treatment of disordered personalities . The traditional method proceeds by the technique of free association , punctuated by interpretations proposed by the psychoanalytic interviewer . 
What we have in mind does have something in common with the goals of psychoanalysis and with the methods by which they are sought . For what we propose , however , a psychoanalyst is not necessary , even though one aim is to enable the reader to get beneath his own defenses — his defenses of himself to himself . For this purpose a degree of intellectual and emotional involvement is necessary ; but involvement needs to be accompanied by a special frame of mind . 
The relatively long and often colorful selections in this anthology enable the reader to become genuinely absorbed in what is said , whether he responds with anger or applause . But simple involvement is not enough ; self-discovery calls for an open , permissive , inquiring posture of self-observation . 
The symposium provides an opportunity to confront the self with specific statements which were made at particular times by identifiable communicators who were addressing definite audiences — and throughout several hundred pages everyone is talking about the same key symbol of identification . 
An advantage of being exposed to such specificity about an important and recurring feature of social reality is that it can be taken advantage of by the reader to examine covert as well as overt resonances within himself , resonances triggered by explicit symbols clustering around the central figure of the Jew .  
Two facets of this aspect of the literary process have special significance for our time . One , a reservation on the point I have just made , is the phenomenon of pseudo-thinking , pseudo-feeling , and pseudo-willing , which Fromm discussed in The Escape from Freedom . In essence this involves grounding one 's thought and emotion in the values and experience of others , rather than in one 's own values and experience . There is a risk that instead of teaching a person how to be himself , reading fiction and drama may teach him how to be somebody else . Clearly what the person brings to the reading is important . Moreover , if the critic instructs his audience in what to see in a work , he is contributing to this pseudo-thinking ; if he instructs them in how to evaluate a work , he is helping them to achieve their own identity . 
The second timely part of this sketch of literature and the search for identity has to do with the difference between good and enduring literary works and the ephemeral mass culture products of today . In the range and variety of characters who , in their literary lives , get along all right with life styles one never imagined possible , there is an implicit lesson in differentiation . The reader , observing this process , might ask " why not be different " ? and find in the answer a license to be a variant of the human species . The observer of television or other products for a mass audience has only a permit to be , like the models he sees , even more like everybody else . And this , I think , holds for values as well as life styles . One would need to test this proposition carefully ; after all , the large ( and probably unreliable ) Reader 's Digest literature on the " most unforgettable character I ever met " deals with village grocers , country doctors , favorite if illiterate aunts , and so forth . Scientists often turn out to be idiosyncratic , too . But still , the proposition is worth examination . 
It is possible that the study of literature affects the conscience , the morality , the sensitivity to some code of " right " and " wrong " . I do not know that this is true ; both Fl.uuml ; gel and Ranyard West deal with the development and nature of conscience , as do such theologians as Niebuhr and Buber . It forms the core of many , perhaps most , problems of psychotherapy . I am not aware of great attention by any of these authors or by the psychotherapeutic profession to the role of literary study in the development of conscience — most of their attention is to a pre-literate period of life , or , for the theologians of course , to the influence of religion . 
Still , it would be surprising if what one reads did not contribute to one 's ideas of right and wrong ; certainly the awakened alarm over the comic books and the continuous concern over prurient literature indicate some peripheral aspects of this influence . Probably the most important thing to focus on is not the development of conscience , which may well be almost beyond the reach of literature , but the contents of conscience , the code which is imparted to the developed or immature conscience available . This is in large part a code of behavior and a glossary of values : what is it that people do and should do and how one should regard it . In a small way this is illustrated by the nineteenth-century novelist who argued for the powerful influence of literature as a teacher of society and who illustrated this with the way a girl learned to meet her lover , how to behave , how to think about this new experience , how to exercise restraint . 
Literature may be said to give people a sense of purpose , dedication , mission , significance . This , no doubt , is part of what Gilbert Seldes implies when he says of the arts , " They give form and meaning to life which might otherwise seem shapeless and without sense " . Men seem almost universally to want a sense of function , that is , a feeling that their existence makes a difference to someone , living or unborn , close and immediate or generalized . Feeling useless seems generally to be an unpleasant sensation . A need so deeply planted , asking for direction , so to speak , is likely to be gratified by the vivid examples and heroic proportions of literature . The terms " renewal " and " refreshed " , which often come up in aesthetic discussion , seem partly to derive their import from the " renewal " of purpose and a " refreshed " sense of significance a person may receive from poetry , drama , and fiction . The notion of " inspiration " is somehow cognate to this feeling . How literature does this , or for whom , is certainly not clear , but the content , form , and language of the " message " , as well as the source , would all play differentiated parts in giving and molding a sense of purpose . 
One of the most salient features of literary value has been deemed to be its influence upon and organization of emotion . Let us differentiate a few of these ideas . The Aristotelian notion of catharsis , the purging of emotion , is a persistent and viable one . The idea here is one of discharge but this must stand in opposition to a second view , Plato 's notion of the arousal of emotion . A third idea is that artistic literature serves to reduce emotional conflicts , giving a sense of serenity and calm to individuals . This is given some expression in Beardsley 's notion of harmony and the resolution of indecision . A fourth view is the transformation of emotion , as in Housman 's fine phrase on the arts : they " transform and beautify our inner nature " . It is possible that the idea of enrichment of emotion is a fifth idea . F.S.C. Northrop , in his discussion of the " Functions and Future of Poetry " , suggests this : " One of the things which makes our lives drab and empty and which leaves us , at the end of the day , fatigued and deflated spiritually is the pressure of the taxing , practical , utilitarian concern of common-sense objects . If art is to release us from these postulated things [ things we must think symbolically about ] and bring us back to the ineffable beauty and richness of the aesthetic component of reality in its immediacy , it must sever its connection with these common sense entities " . I take the central meaning here to be the contrast between the drab empty quality of life without literature and a life enriched by it . Richards ' view of the aesthetic experience might constitute a sixth variety : for him it constitutes , in part , the organization of impulses . 
A sketch of the emotional value of the study of literature would have to take account of all of these . But there is one in particular which , it seems to me , deserves special attention . In the wide range of experiences common to our earth-bound race none is more difficult to manage , more troublesome , and more enduring in its effects than the control of love and hate . The study of literature contributes to this control in a curious way . William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks , it seems to me , have a penetrating insight into the way in which this control is effected : " For if we say poetry is to talk of beauty and love ( and yet not aim at exciting erotic emotion or even an emotion of Platonic esteem ) and if it is to talk of anger and murder ( and yet not aim at arousing anger and indignation ) — then it may be that the poetic way of dealing with these emotions will not be any kind of intensification , compounding , or magnification , or any direct assault upon the affections at all . Something indirect , mixed , reconciling , tensional might well be the strategem , the devious technique by which a poet indulged in all kinds of talk about love and anger and even in something like " expressions " of these emotions , without aiming at their incitement or even uttering anything that essentially involves their incitement " . The rehearsal through literature of emotional life under controlled conditions may be a most valuable human experience . Here I do not mean catharsis , the discharge of emotion . I mean something more like Freud 's concept of the utility of " play " to a small child : he plays " house " or " doctor " or " fireman " as a way of mastering slightly frightening experiences , reliving them imaginatively until they are under control . 
There is a second feature of the influences of literature , good literature , on emotional life which may have some special value for our time . In B. M. Spinley 's portrayal of the underprivileged and undereducated youth of London , a salient finding was the inability to postpone gratification , a need to satisfy impulses immediately without the pleasure of anticipation or of savoring the experience . Perhaps it is only an analogy , but one of the most obvious differences between cheap fiction and fiction of an enduring quality is the development of a theme or story with leisure and anticipation . Anyone who has watched children develop a taste for literature will understand what I mean . It is at least possible that the capacity to postpone gratification is developed as well as expressed in a continuous and guided exposure to great literature . 
In any inquiry into the way in which great literature affects the emotions , particularly with respect to the sense of harmony , or relief of tension , or sense of " a transformed inner nature " which may occur , a most careful exploration of the particular feature of the experience which produces the effect would be required . In the calm which follows the reading of a poem , for example , is the effect produced by the enforced quiet , by the musical quality of words and rhythm , by the sentiments or sense of the poem , by the associations with earlier readings , if it is familiar , by the boost to the self-esteem for the semi-literate , by the diversion of attention , by the sense of security in a legitimized withdrawal , by a kind license for some variety of fantasy life regarded as forbidden , or by half-conscious ideas about the magical power of words ? These are , if the research is done with subtlety and skill , researchable topics , but the research is missing . 
One of the most frequent views of the value of literature is the education of sensibility that it is thought to provide . Sensibility is a vague word , covering an area of meaning rather than any precise talent , quality , or skill . Among other things it means perception , discrimination , sensitivity to subtle differences . Both the extent to which this is true and the limits of the field of perceptual skill involved should be acknowledged . Its truth is illustrated by the skill , sensitivity , and general expertise of the English professor with whom one attends the theatre . The limits are suggested by an imaginary experiment : contrast the perceptual skill of English professors with that of their colleagues in discriminating among motor cars , political candidates , or female beauty . Along these lines , the particular point that sensitivity in literature leads to sensitivity in human relations would require more proof than I have seen . In a symposium and general exploration of the field of Person Perception and Interpersonal Behavior the discussion does not touch upon this aspect of the subject , with one possible exception ; Solomon Asch shows the transcultural stability of metaphors based on sensation ( hot , sweet , bitter , etc. ) dealing with personal qualities of human beings and events . But to go from here to the belief that those more sensitive to metaphor and language will also be more sensitive to personal differences is too great an inferential leap . 
I would say , too , that the study of literature tends to give a person what I shall call depth . I use this term to mean three things : a search for the human significance of an event or state of affairs , a tendency to look at wholes rather than parts , and a tendency to respond to these events and wholes with feeling . It is the obverse of triviality , shallowness , emotional anaesthesia . I think these attributes cluster , but I have no evidence . In fact , I can only say this seems to me to follow from a wide , continuous , and properly guided exposure to literary art .  
THE late R. G. Collingwood , a philosopher whose work has proved helpful to many students of literature , once wrote " We are all , though many of us are snobbish enough to wish to deny it , in far closer sympathy with the art of the music-hall and picture-palace than with Chaucer and Cimabue , or even Shakespeare and Titian . By an effort of historical sympathy we can cast our minds back into the art of a remote past or an alien present , and enjoy the carvings of cavemen and Japanese colour-prints ; but the possibility of this effort is bound up with that development of historical thought which is the greatest achievement of our civilization in the last two centuries , and it is utterly impossible to people in whom this development has not taken place . The natural and primary aesthetic attitude is to enjoy contemporary art , to despise and dislike the art of the recent past , and wholly to ignore everything else " . 
One might argue that the ultimate purpose of literary scholarship is to correct this spontaneous provincialism that is likely to obscure the horizons of the general public , of the newspaper critic , and of the creative artist himself . There results a study of literature freed from the tyranny of the contemporary . Such study may take many forms . The study of ideas in literature is one of these . Of course , it goes without saying that no student of ideas can justifiably ignore the contemporary scene . He will frequently return to it . The continuities , contrasts , and similarities discernible when past and present are surveyed together are inexhaustible and the one is often understood through the other . 
When we assert the value of such study , we find ourselves committed to an important assumption . Most students of literature , whether they call themselves scholars or critics , are ready to argue that it is possible to understand literary works as well as to enjoy them . Many will add that we may find our enjoyment heightened by our understanding . This understanding , of course , may in its turn take many forms and some of these — especially those most interesting to the student of comparative literature — are essentially historical . But the historian of literature need not confine his attention to biography or to stylistic questions of form , " texture " , or technique . He may also consider ideas . It is true that this distinction between style and idea often approaches the arbitrary since in the end we must admit that style and content frequently influence or interpenetrate one another and sometimes appear as expressions of the same insight . But , in general , we may argue that the student can direct the primary emphasis of his attention toward one or the other . 
At this point a working definition of idea is in order , although our first definition will have to be qualified somewhat as we proceed . The term idea refers to our more reflective or thoughtful consciousness as opposed to the immediacies of sensuous or emotional experience . It is through such reflection that literature approaches philosophy . An idea , let us say , may be roughtly defined as a theme or topic with which our reflection may be concerned . In this essay , we are , along with most historians , interested in the more general or more inclusive ideas , that are so to speak " writ large " in history of literature where they recur continually . Outstanding among these is the idea of human nature itself , including the many definitions that have been advanced over the centuries ; also secondary notions such as the perfectibility of man , the depravity of man , and the dignity of man . One might , indeed , argue that the history of ideas , in so far as it includes the literatures , must center on characterizations of human nature and that the great periods of literary achievement may be distinguished from one another by reference to the images of human nature that they succeed in fashioning . 
We need not , to be sure , expect to find such ideas in every piece of literature . An idea , of the sort that we have in mind , although of necessity readily available to imagination , is more general in connotation than most poetic or literary images , especially those appearing in lyric poems that seek to capture a moment of personal experience . Thus Burns 's " My love is like a red , red rose " and Hopkins ' " The thunder-purple sea-beach , plumed purple of thunder " although clearly intelligible in content , hardly present ideas of the sort with which we are here concerned . On the other hand , Arnold 's " The unplumbed , salt , estranging sea " , taken in its context , certainly does so . 
Understanding a work of art involves recognition of the ideas that it reflects or embodies . Thus the student of literature may sometimes find it helpful to classify a poem or an essay as being in idea or in ideal content or subject matter typical or atypical of its period . Again , he may discover embodied within its texture a theme or idea that has been presented elsewhere and at other times in various ways . Our understanding will very probably require both these commentaries . Very likely it will also include a recognition that the work we are reading reflects or " belongs to " some way of thought labelled as a " school " or an " -ism " , i.e. a complex or " syndrome " of ideas occurring together with sufficient prominence to warrant identification . Thus ideas like " grace " , " salvation " , and " providence " cluster together in traditional Christianity . Usually the work studied offers us a special or even an individualized rendering or treatment of the ideas in question , so that the student finds it necessary to distinguish carefully between the several expressions of an " -ism " or mode of thought . Accordingly we may speak of the Platonism peculiar to Shelley 's poems or the type of Stoicism present in Henley 's " Invictus " , and we may find that describing such Platonism or such Stoicism and contrasting each with other expressions of the same attitude or mode of thought is a difficult and challenging enterprise . After all , Shelley is no " orthodox " or Hellenic Platonist , and even his " romantic " Platonism can be distinguished from that of his contemporaries . Again , Henley 's attitude of defiance which colors his ideal of self-mastery is far from characteristic of a Stoic thinker like Marcus Aurelius , whose gentle acquiescence is almost Christian , comparable to the patience expressed in Milton 's sonnet on his own blindness . 
In recent years , we have come increasingly to recognize that ideas have a history and that not the least important chapters of this history have to do with thematic or conceptual aspects of literature and the arts , although these aspects should be studied in conjunction with the history of philosophy , of religion , and of the sciences . When these fields are surveyed together , important patterns of relationship emerge indicating a vast community of reciprocal influence , a continuity of thought and expression including many traditions , primarily literary , religious , and philosophical , but frequently including contact with the fine arts and even , to some extent , with science . 
Here we may observe that at least one modern philosophy of history is built on the assumption that ideas are the primary objectives of the historian 's research . Let us quote once more from R. G. Collingwood : " History is properly concerned with the actions of human beings … Regarded from the outside , an action is an event or series of events occurring in the physical world ; regarded from the inside , it is the carrying into action of a certain thought … The historian 's business is to penetrate to the inside of the actions with which he is dealing and reconstruct or rather rethink the thoughts which constituted them . It is a characteristic of thoughts that … in re-thinking them we come , ipso facto , to understand why they were thought " . Such an understanding , although it must seek to be sympathetic , is not a matter of intuition . " History has this in common with every other science : that the historian is not allowed to claim any single piece of knowledge , except where he can justify his claim by exhibiting to himself in the first place , and secondly to any one else who is both able and willing to follow his demonstration , the grounds upon which it is based . This is what was meant , above , by describing history as inferential . The knowledge in virtue of which a man is an historian is a knowledge of what the evidence at his disposal proves about certain events " . It is obvious that the historian who seeks to recapture the ideas that have motivated human behavior throughout a given period will find the art and literature of that age one of his central and major concerns , by no means a mere supplement or adjunct of significant historical research . 
The student of ideas and their place in history will always be concerned with the patterns of transition , which are at the same time patterns of transformation , whereby ideas pass from one area of activity to another . Let us survey for a moment the development of modern thought — turning our attention from the Reformation toward the revolutionary and romantic movements that follow and dwelling finally on more recent decades . We may thus trace the notion of individual autonomy from its manifestation in religious practice and theological reflection through practical politics and political theory into literature and the arts . Finally we may note that the idea appears in educational theory where its influence is at present widespread . No one will deny that such broad developments and transitions are of great intrinsic interest and the study of ideas in literature would be woefully incomplete without frequent reference to them . Still , we must remember that we can not construct and justify generalizations of this sort unless we are ready to consider many special instances of influence moving between such areas as theology , philosophy , political thought , and literature . The actual moments of contact are vitally important . These moments are historical events in the lives of individual authors with which the student of comparative literature must be frequently concerned . 
Perhaps the most powerful and most frequently recurring literary influence on the Western world has been that of the Old and New Testament . Certainly one of the most important comments that can be made upon the spiritual and cultural life of any period of Western civilization during the past sixteen or seventeen centuries has to do with the way in which its leaders have read and interpreted the Bible . This reading and the comments that it evoked constitute the influence . A contrast of the scripture reading of , let us say , St. Augustine , John Bunyan , and Thomas Jefferson , all three of whom found in such study a real source of enlightenment , can tell us a great deal about these three men and the age that each represented and helped bring to conscious expression . In much the same way , we recognize the importance of Shakespeare 's familarity with Plutarch and Montaigne , of Shelley 's study of Plato 's dialogues , and of Coleridge 's enthusiastic plundering of the writings of many philosophers and theologians from Plato to Schelling and William Godwin , through which so many abstract ideas were brought to the attention of English men of letters . 
We may also recognize cases in which the poets have influenced the philosophers and even indirectly the scientists . English philosopher Samuel Alexander 's debt to Wordsworth and Meredith is a recent interesting example , as also A. N. Whitehead 's understanding of the English romantics , chiefly Shelley and Wordsworth . Hegel 's profound admiration for the insights of the Greek tragedians indicates a broad channel of classical influence upon nineteenth-century philosophy . Again the student of evolutionary biology will find a fascinating , if to our minds grotesque , anticipation of the theory of chance variations and the natural elimination of the unfit in Lucretius , who in turn seems to have borrowed the concept from the philosopher Empedocles . 
Here an important caveat is in order . We must avoid the notion , suggested to some people by examples such as those just mentioned , that ideas are " units " in some way comparable to coins or counters that can be passed intact from one group of people to another or even , for that matter , from one individual to another .  
" Suppose you take Mr. Hearst 's morning American at $10,000 a year " , Brisbane proposed . " You could come down to the office once a day , look over a few exchanges , dictate an editorial , and then have the remainder of your time for your more serious literary labors . If within one year you can make a success out of the American , you can practically name your own salary thereafter . Of course , if you do n't make the American a success , Hearst will have no further use for you " . 
The blue-eyed Watson decided that he would dislike living in New York , and the deal fell through . Hearst 's luck was even poorer when he had a chat with Franklin K. Lane , a prominent California journalist and reform politician , whom he asked for his support . Lane was still burning because he had narrowly missed election as governor of California in 1902 and laid his defeat to the antagonism of Hearst 's San Francisco Examiner . Hearst disclaimed blame for this , but the conversation , according to Lane , ended on a tart note . 
" Mr. Lane " , Hearst said , " if you ever wish anything that I can do , all you will have to do will be to send me a telegram asking , and it will be done " . 
" Mr. Hearst " , Lane replied as he left , " if you ever get a telegram from me asking you to do anything , you can put the telegram down as a forgery " . 
Hearst took a brief respite to hurry home to New York to become a father . On April 10 , 1904 , his first child was born , a son named George after the late Senator . Hearst saw his wife and child , sent a joyful message to his mother in California , and soon returned to Washington , where on April 22 , for the first time , he opened his mouth in Congress . 
This was not before the House but before the Judiciary Committee , where he asked for action on one of his pet bills , that calling for an investigation of the coal-railroad monopoly . Attorney Shearn had worked on this for two years and had succeeded in getting a report supporting his stand from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York . Hearst had spent more than $60,000 of his own money in the probe , but still Attorney General Knox was quiescent . 
Six of the railroads carrying coal to tidewater from the Pennsylvania fields , Hearst said , not only had illegal agreements with coal operators but owned outright at least eleven mines . They had watered their stock at immense profit , then had raised the price of coal fifty cents a ton , netting themselves another $20,000,000 in annual profit . 
" The Attorney General has been brooding over that evidence like an old hen on a doorknob for eighteen months " , Hearst said . " He has not acted in any way , and wo n't let anyone take it away from him … What I want is to have this evidence come before Congress and if the Attorney General does not report it , as I am very sure he wo n't , as he has refused to do anything of the kind , I then wish that a committee of seven Representatives be appointed with power to take the evidence … " . 
The Congressman tried hard , but failed . This was the very sort of legislation that Roosevelt himself had in mind . There can be little doubt that there was a conspiracy in Washington , overt or implied , to block anything Hearst wanted , even if it was something good . Hatred tied his hands in Congress . Roosevelt and others considered him partly responsible for the murder of McKinley . They were repelled by his noisy newspapers , his personal publicity , his presumptuous campaign for the Presidential nomination , and by the swelling cloud of rumor about his moral lapses . He might get votes from his constituents , but he would never get a helping hand in Congress . He was the House pariah . Even the regular Democrats disowned him . Inherently incapable of cooperating with others , he ran his own show regardless of how many party-line Democratic toes he stepped on . He was a political maverick , a reformer with his own program , determined to bulldoze it through or to blazon the infamy of those who balked him . He showed little interest in measures put forward by the regular Democrats . He sought to run Congress as he ran his New York American or Journal , a scheme veteran legislators resisted . For a freshman Congressman to read political lessons to graybeard Democrats was poor policy for one who needed to make friends . He soon quarreled with all the party leaders in the House , and came to be regarded with detestation by regular Democrats as a professional radical leading a small pack of obedient terriers whose constant snapping was demoralizing to party discipline . 
To old-line Democrats , the Hearst Presidential boom , now in full cry , was the joke of the new century . Yet no leader had come to the fore who seemed likely to give the puissant T. R. a semblance of a race . There was talk of dragging old ex-President Cleveland out of retirement for another try . Some preferred Judge Alton B. Parker of New York . There was a host of dark horses . The sneers at Hearst changed to concern when it was seen that he had strong support in many parts of the country . Platoons of Hearst agents were traveling from state to state in a surprisingly successful search for delegates at the coming convention , and there were charges that money was doing a large part of the persuading . Just when it was needed for the campaign , Hearst Paper No. 8 , the Boston American , began publication . A Bay State supporter said , " Mr. Hearst 's fight has been helped along greatly by the starting of his paper in Boston " . His candidacy affected his journalism somewhat . He ordered his editors to tone down on sensationalism and to refrain from using such words as " seduction " , " rape " , " abortion " , " criminal assault " and " born out of wedlock " . 
In a story headed , " HEARST OFFERS CASH " , the Republican New York Tribune spread the money rumor , quoting an unnamed " Hearst supporter " as saying : 
" The argument that is cutting most ice is that Hearst is the only candidate who is fighting the trusts fearlessly and who would use all the powers of government to disrupt them if he were elected . The Hearst men say that if Hearst is nominated , he and his immediate friends will contribute to the Democratic National Committee the sum of $1,500,000 . This , it is urged , would relieve the national committee from the necessity of appealing to the trust magnates . The alternative to this is that if a conservative candidate is nominated the national committee will have to appeal to the trusts for their campaign funds , and in doing this will incur obligations which would make a Democratic victory absolutely fruitless … . the average Democratic politician , especially in the country districts , is hungry for the spoils of office . It has been a long time since he has seen any campaign money , and when the proposition is laid down to him as the friends of Mr. Hearst are laying it down these days he is quite likely to get aboard the Hearst bandwagon " . 
If anything , the conservative Democrats were more opposed to Hearst than the Republicans . In his own state of New York , the two Democratic bellwethers , State Leader Hill and Tammany Boss Murphy , were saying nothing openly against Hearst but industriously boosting their own favorites , Murphy being for Cleveland and Hill for Parker . They had lost twice with the radical Bryan , and were having no part of Hearst , whom they considered more radical than Bryan . But his increasing strength in the West looked menacing . It caused Henry Watterson to sound a blast in his Louisville Courier-Journal : 
" … Does any sane Democrat believe that Mr. Hearst , a person unknown even to his constituency and his colleagues , without a word or act in the public life of his country , past or present , that can be shown to be his to commend him , could by any possibility be elected President of the United States ? But there is a Hearst barrel … " 
More splenetic was Senator Edward Carmack of Tennessee , a Parker man . " … the nomination of Hearst would compass the ruin of the party " , Carmack said . " It would be a disgrace , and , as I have already said to the people of Tennessee , if Hearst is nominated , we may as well pen a dispatch , and send it back from the field of battle : 'All is lost , including our honor' " . 
A lone pro-Hearst voice from New York City was that of William Devery , who had been expelled as a Tammany leader but still claimed strong influence in his own district . " I understand [ Hearst ] is a candidate for Presidential honors " , Devery said without cracking a smile . " There 's nothing like buildin' from the bottom up . If he 's going to the St. Louis convention as a delegate we ought to know it . He 's got a lot of friends , and he ought to come along and let us know if he wants our help " . 
Hearst won the Iowa state convention , but ran into a bitter battle in Indiana before losing to Parker , drawing an angry statement from Indiana 's John W. Kern : 
" We are menaced for the first time in the history of the Republic by the open and unblushing effort of a multi-millionaire to purchase the Presidential nomination . Our state has been overrun with a gang of paid agents and retainers … As for the paid Hessians from other states , we are here to instruct the Indiana Democracy in their duty , I have nothing but contempt … The Hearst dollar mark is all over them … " 
The talk of a Hearst " barrel " was increasing . Another Indiana observer later commented , " Perhaps we shall never know how much was spent [ by Hearst ] , but if as much money was expended elsewhere as in Indiana a liberal fortune was squandered " . 
In his fight for the Illinois and Indiana delegations , Hearst made several trips to Chicago to confer with Andrew Lawrence , the former San Francisco Examiner man who was now his Chicago kingpin , and once to meet with Bryan . On one visit he stopped at the office of the American , where he was known surreptitiously as " the Great White Chief " , and for the first time met his managing editor , fat Moses Koenigsberg . Koenigsberg never did learn what Hearst wanted , for the latter shook hands and moved toward the door . 
" Never mind , thank you " , he said . " I must hurry to catch my train " . 
Another editor pointed despairingly at a bundle of letters that had accumulated for him , saying , " But Mr. Hearst , what shall I do with this correspondence " ? 
" I 'll show you " , Hearst replied , grinning . He took the stack of mail and tossed it into the waste basket . " Do n't bother . Every letter answers itself in a couple of weeks " .  /2 , . THE HEARST " BARREL "  HEARST hopped into a private railroad car with Max Ihmsen and made an arduous personal canvass for delegates in the western and southern states , always wearing a frock coat , listening intently to local politicians , and generally making a good impression . He laughed at a story that he planned to bolt the party if he was not nominated . 
" I should , of course " , he said , " like any other man , be honored and gratified should the Democrats see fit to nominate me . But I do not have to be bribed by office to be a Democrat . I have supported the Democratic party in the last five campaigns . I supported Cleveland three times and Bryan twice . I intend to support the nominee of the party at St. Louis , whoever he may be " . 
The Hearst press followed the Chief 's progress at the various state conventions with its usual admiring attention , stressing the " enthusiasm " and " loyalty " he inspired . This was historic in its way , for it marked the first time an American Presidential aspirant had advertised his own virtues in his own string of newspapers spanning the land . 
Yet his editors did not abandon their sense of story value . When Nan Patterson , a stunning and money-minded chorus girl who had appeared in a Florodora road show , rode down Broadway in a hansom cab with her married lover , Frank Young , she stopped the cab to disclose that Young had been shot dead , tearfully insisting that he had shot himself although experts said he could not have done so .  Trevelyan 's Liberalism was above all a liberalism of the spirit , a deep feeling of communion with men fighting for country and for liberty . His passion and enthusiasm convey the courage and high adventure of Garibaldi 's exploits and give the reader a unique sense of participation in the events described . 
The three volumes brought to the fore a characteristic of Trevelyan 's prose which remained conspicuous through his later works — a genius for describing military action with clarity and with authority . The confused rambling of guerrilla warfare , such as most of Garibaldi 's campaigns were , was brought to life by Trevelyan 's pen in some of the best passages in the books . His personal familiarity with the scenes of action undoubtedly contributed much to the final result , but familiarity alone would not have been enough without other qualities . Military knowledge , love of detail , and a sure feeling for the portrayal of action were the added ingredients . 
But the Garibaldi volumes were more than a romantic story . Trevelyan contributed considerable new knowledge of the issues connected with his subject . The outstanding example was in Garibaldi and the Thousand , where he made use of unpublished papers of Lord John Russell and English consular materials to reveal the motives which led the British government to permit Garibaldi to cross the Straits of Messina . 
In looking back over the volumes , it is possible to find errors of interpretation , some of which were not so evident at the time of writing . Thus Trevelyan repeats the story which pictured Victor Emmanuel as refusing to abandon the famous Statuto at the insistence of General Radetzky . Later research has shown this part of the legend of the Re Galantuomo to be false . Trevelyan accepts Italian nationalism with little analysis , he is unduly critical of papal and French policy , and he is more than generous in assessing British policy . But fifty years later the trilogy still maintains a firm place in the list of standard works on the unification of Italy , a position cautiously prophesied by the reviewers at the time of publication . 
Trevelyan 's Manin and the Venetian revolution of 1848 , his last major volume on an Italian theme , was written in a minor key . Published in 1923 , it did not gain the popular acclaim of the Garibaldi volumes , probably because Trevelyan felt less at home with Manin , the bourgeois lawyer , than with Garibaldi , the filibuster . The complexities of Venetian politics eluded him , but the story of the revolution itself is told in restrained measures , with no superfluous passages and only an occasional overemphasis of the part played by its leading figure . If it is not one of his best books , it can only be considered unsatisfactory when compared with his own Garibaldi . 
Already Trevelyan had begun to parallel his nineteenth-century Italian studies with several works on English figures of the same period . First The life of John Bright appeared and seven years later Lord Grey of the Reform Bill . Of the two , the life of Bright is incomparably the better biography . Trevelyan centers too exclusively on Bright , is insufficiently appreciative of the views of Bright 's opponents and critics , and makes light of the genuine difficulties faced by Peel . Yet he is right when he claims in his autobiography that he drew the real features of the man , his tender and selfless motives and his rugged fearless strength . In the story of Bright and the Corn Law agitation , the Crimean War , the American Civil War , and the franchise struggle Trevelyan reflects something of the moral power which enabled this independent man to exercise so immense an influence over his fellow countrymen for so long . Because Bright 's speeches were so much a part of him , there are long and numerous quotations , which , far from making the biography diffuse , help to give us the feel of the man . Associated in a sense with the Manchester School through his mother 's family , Trevelyan conveys in this biography something of its moral conviction and drive . Nineteenth-century virtues , however , seem somehow to have gone out of fashion and the Bright book has never been particularly popular . 
The biography of Lord Grey is strictly speaking not a biography at all . It is a Whig history of the " Tory reaction " which preceded the Reform Bill of 1832 , and it uses the figure of Grey to give some unity to the narrative . The volume is a piece of passionate special pleading , written with the heat — and often with the wisdom , it must be said — of a Liberal damning the shortsightedness of politicians from 1782 to 1832 . Characteristically , Trevelyan enjoyed writing the work . The theme of glorious summer coming after a long winter of discontent and repression was , he has told us , congenial to his artistic sense . And Grey 's Northumberland background was close to Trevelyan 's own . But his concentration on personalities and his categorical assessment of their actions fail to convey the political complexities of a long generation harassed by world-wide war and confronted with the problem of adjustment to an unprecedented industrial and social transformation . Some historians have found his point of view not to their taste , others have complained that he makes the Tory tradition appear " contemptible rather than intelligible " , while a sympathetic critic has remarked that the " intricate interplay of social dynamics and political activity of which , at times , politicians are the ignorant marionettes is not a field for the exercise of his talents " . The Liberal-Radical heritage which informs all of Trevelyan 's interpretations of history here seems clearly to have distorted the issues and oversimplified the period . For once his touch deserted him . 
Research in the period of Grey and Bright led naturally to a more ambitious work . Britain in the nineteenth century is a textbook designed " to give the sense of continuous growth , to show how economic led to social , and social to political change , how the political events reacted on the economic and social , and how new thoughts and new ideals accompanied or directed the whole complicated process " . The plan is admirably fulfilled for the period up to 1832 . More temperately than in the study of Grey and despite his Liberal bias , Trevelyan vividly sketches the England of pre-French Revolution days , portrays the stresses and strains of the revolutionary period in rich colors , and brings developments leading to the Reform Bill into sharp and clear focus . His technique is genuinely masterful . By what one reader called a " series of dissolving views " , he merges one period into another and gives a sense of continuous growth . 
But after 1832 , the narrative tends to lose its balanced , many-sided quality and to become a medley of topics , often unconnected by any single thread . Economic analysis was never Trevelyan 's strong point and the England of the industrial transformation cries out for economic analysis . Yet after 1832 , the interrelations of economic and social and political affairs become blurred and the narrative becomes largely a conventional political account . Finally , the period after 1870 receives little attention and that quite superficial . Yet Britain in the nineteenth century became the vade mecum of beginning students of history , went through edition after edition , and continues to be reprinted up to the very present . Its success is a tribute , above all , to Trevelyan 's brilliance as a literary stylist . 
In 1924 Trevelyan traveled to the United States , where he delivered the Lowell lectures at Harvard University . These lectures formed the nucleus of a general survey of English development which took form afterward as a History of England . In short order , the general history became his most popular work and has remained , aside from his later Social history , the work most widely favored by the public . 
The History of England has often been compared with Green 's Short history . Like Green , Trevelyan aimed to write a history not of " English kings or English conquests " , but of the English people . The result was fortunate . The History takes too much for granted to serve as a text for other than English schoolboys , and like Britain in the nineteenth century it deteriorates badly as it goes beyond 1870 . Trevelyan 's excursions into contemporary history were rarely happy ones . But as a stimulating , provocative interpretation of the broad sweep of English development it is incomparable . Living pictures of the early boroughs , country life in Tudor and Stuart times , the impact of the industrial revolution compete with sensitive surveys of language and literature , the common law , parliamentary development . The strength of the History is also its weakness . Trevelyan is militantly sure of the superiority of English institutions and character over those of other peoples . His nationalism was not a new characteristic , but its self-consciousness , even its self-satisfaction , is more obvious in a book that stretches over the long reach of English history . And yet the elements which capture his liberal and humanistic imagination are those which make the English story worth telling and worth remembering . Tolerance and compromise , social justice and civil liberty , are today too often in short supply for one to be overly critical of Trevelyan 's emphasis on their central place in the English tradition . Like most major works of synthesis , the History of England is informed by the positive views of a first-class mind , and this is surely a major work . 
Four years after the publication of the History of England , the first volume of Trevelyan 's Queen Anne trilogy appeared . By now he had become Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and had been honored by the award of the Order of Merit . His academic duties had little evident effect on his prolific pen . Blenheim was followed in rapid succession by Ramillies and the union with Scotland and by The peace and the Protestant succession , the three forming together a detailed picture of England under Queen Anne . Like his volume on Wycliffe , the work was accompanied by the publication of a selected group of documents , in this case illustrative of the history of Queen Anne 's reign down to 1707 . 
Trevelyan was at least in part attracted to the period by an almost unconscious desire to take up the story where Macaulay 's History of England had broken off . In addition , he believed in the " dramatic unity and separateness of the period from 1702-14 , lying between the Stuart and Hanoverian eras with a special ethos of its own " . He saw the age as one in which Britain " settled her free constitution " and attained her modern place in the world . To most observers , there is little doubt that he placed an artificial strait jacket of unity upon the years of Anne 's reign which in reality existed only in the pages of his history . 
Of the three volumes , Blenheim is easily the best . In four opening chapters reminiscent of Macaulay 's famous third chapter , Trevelyan surveys the state of England at the opening of the eighteenth century . His delightful picture of society and institutions is filled with warm detail that brings the period vividly to life . He tends to underestimate — or perhaps to view charitably — the brutality and the violence of the age , so that there is an idyllic quality in these pages which hazes over some of its sharp reality . Yet as an evocation of time past , there are few such successful portraits in English historical literature . Once the scene is set , Trevelyan skilfully builds up the tense story until it reaches its climax in the dramatic victory of Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy at Blenheim . The account of the battle is , next to his descriptions of Garibaldi 's campaigns , Trevelyan 's outstanding military narrative . The scene is etched in sharp detail , the military problems brilliantly explained , and the excitement and importance of the battle made evident . If only for this modest masterpiece of military history , Blenheim is likely to be read and reread long after newer interpretations have perhaps altered our picture of the Marlborough wars . 
Ramillies and the union with Scotland has fewer high spots than Blenheim and much less of its dramatic unity . Yet in several chapters on Scotland in the eighteenth century , Trevelyan copes persuasively with the tangled confusion of Scottish politics against a vivid background of Scottish religion , customs , and traditions .  
I stood on a table , surrounded by hundreds of expectant young faces . Questions came to me from all sides about my world citizenship activities . After making a short statement about human rights , and the freedom to travel , I told them I would be going to the Kehl bridge the next morning in order to cross the Rhine into Germany . 
" May we come with you " ? called out a dozen young voices . 
" Well , I might not get that far " , I told them , " as actually I have no papers to enter Germany and , as a matter of fact , no permit to return to France once I leave " . 
That was all they needed . They would champion me . We would all meet at ten o'clock at the Kehl bridge , five miles from Strasbourg , and march triumphantly across into Germany . 
There was only one hitch : the small town of Kehl , on the other side of the Rhine , was still under French jurisdiction . The real Franco-German frontier was beyond the town 's limits . In fact , all persons were permitted to cross the Rhine into Kehl , there being no sentry posted on the west side of the river . 
That evening , as I learned later , the students , enjoying that spontaneous immodesty in action known only to university students , surged out onto the streets of Strasbourg , overturning empty streetcars , marking up store fronts , and shouting imprudently , " Garry Davis to power " ! 
As I got off the trolley at Kehl bridge the next morning , I was met by what looked like 5,000 students , some of whom were carrying sticks apparently for the coming " battle " with the police . Alarmed by this display of weapons , I looked toward the bridge and there saw , stretched across the near side , a cordon of policemen , their bicycles forming a roadblock before which stood several French officers in uniform and a small waspish man in a brown derby . 
" Listen please " , I called to the students in French . " I thank you most heartily for being here . This is full evidence of your support for my principles . These principles , however , will not be served by violence in any form . If they are right , they will prevail of and by themselves . I ask you all to support me in this . If one finger is raised against the authorities , all our moral power will vanish . Your self-control in this respect will be the only witness to your understanding of what I am saying . I have full confidence in you . Now , let 's go " . 
I marched up to the waiting officials , the students massed behind me . As usual , the press photographers were on hand . The waspish man stopped me three paces from the bicycle barricade , and asked me in French if I had papers to leave France . I replied in the affirmative , taking out my recently acquired titre d'identite et de voyage , on which was stamped a permission to leave Fran e . He examined it carefully , handed it back and said , " Eh bien , you may leave France " . 
I took one step … eastward . 
One of the uniformed officers stepped in my way , demanding to know whether I had permission to enter Germany . 
" No , I have no permission to enter Germany " , I told him . 
" Alors , you may go no farther " , he said imperiously . 
" Is this then the frontier " ? I asked him . 
" Yes " . 
At this , the students let out a yell , knowing full well the actual frontier was beyond the town of Kehl . 
" But I have no permission to re-enter France , and I have just left " , I told him . " I must then be standing on the line between France and Germany " . 
The waspish man stepped forward . " Line ? Line ? But there is no line between France and Germany , that is , no actual line … I mean … " 
" No line " ? I asked . " But if there is no line , how can there be two countries ? You have just given me permission to leave France , which I did . I have witnesses . And as you know , I have no permission to re-enter France once out . Now I learn I can not enter Germany . Obviously I 'm stuck on the line between the two countries " . 
The students were laughing uproariously at this piece of logic , and even the policemen were trying hard not to smile . 
" Mais non " , the Interior Ministry man coaxed , " you may come back to Strasbourg , now , if you wish " . 
" Oh ? Then will you give me a visa to re-enter France " ? 
" Visa ? But there is no question of a visa . You are still in France " . 
" Ah , then please tell me where the frontier is because this gentleman here " — I indicated the French occupation officer — " informs me that Germany is just on the other side of him " . 
The Interior man looked uneasily at his French compatriot . From the crowd were coming cries of " He 's right " ! " There must be a line " ! and " Bravo , Garry , continue " ! 
Seeing their hesitation , I said , " Well , until I have permission to enter Germany , or a visa to re-enter France , I shall be obliged to remain here … on the line between two countries " , whereupon I moved to the side of the road , parked my backpack against the small guardhouse on the sidewalk , sat down , took out my typewriter , and began typing the above conversation . 
The reporters were questioning the Interior man and the French officer , both of whom remained noncommittal as to what action , if any , would be taken in my regard . Finally they went off to file their stories , after the photographers had taken pictures of my latest vigil . The students crowded around asking questions , slapping me on the back , and generally being friendly . 
" But what will you do this evening , Mr. Davis " ? asked a young mustached Frenchman . " It will be very cold " . 
" I do n't know " , I told him , " except that I will be here " . 
" I shall see about getting you a tent " , he said . " I have a small sports shop in Strasbourg " . 
That would be a great help , I told him , thanking him for his thoughtfulness . A special guard was posted at my end of the bridge to make sure I did n't cross , the ludicrousness of the situation being revealed fully in that everyone else — men , women , and children , dogs , cats , horses , cars , trucks , baby carriages — could cross Kehl bridge into Kehl without surveillance . 
The day passed eventfully enough , with a constant stream of visitors , some stopping only to say hello , others getting into serious conversations , such as one Andre Fuchs , a free-lance journalist from Strasbourg who wrote an article for the Nouvelle Alsatian in highly sympathetic terms . Some students from the University returned around six with a large pot containing enough hot soup to last me a week . A volunteer food brigade had been arranged , they told me , which would supply me with the necessities as long as I remained at the bridge . A little later , the sports shop man returned with a small pup tent . One of the girl students , sitting by while I ate the thick soup , asked me if I had a sleeping bag . When I informed her that I did n't , she said she would borrow her brother 's and bring it to me later that evening . 
" You do not know me " , she said in good English , " but my mother was your governess in Philadelphia when you were a child " . Her name was Esther Peter . I was delighted to make that personal contact in such trying and unusual circumstances . The Peter family proved wonderful and helpful friends in the following days , Mrs. Peter , little Esther , and Raoul , who generously lent me his sleeping bag for my " Watch on the Rhine " . 
Sighting a line from the bridge to a small field directly to the side , I pitched the tent that evening on the stateless " line " , digging a small trench around it as best I could with a toy spade donated by a neighborhood child . The wind from the Rhine was damp and chill , necessitating a fire for warmth . After scouring around a bit in the open area , I came across what proved to be tar-soaked logs which crackled and burned brightly , giving off vast rolls of smoke into the ashen sky . 
Each evening the students appeared with the soup kettle and several petits pains , Esther usually being among them . I had advised friends to write me to " No Man 's Land , Pont Kehl , Between Strasbourg and Kehl , France-Germany " . Sure enough , mail began trickling in , delivered by a talkative , highly amused French postman who informed me there had been quite a debate at the post office as to whether that address would be recognized . 
On Christmas Eve , students brought out two small Christmas trees which I placed on either side of the tent . As the field on which my tent was pitched was a favorite natural playground for the kids of the neighborhood , I had made many friends among them , taking part in their after-school games and trying desperately to translate Grimm 's Fairy Tales into an understandable French as we gathered around the fire in front of the tent . To my great surprise and delight , when they saw the two trees they went rushing off , returning shortly with decorations from their own trees . 
It was a merry if somewhat soggy Christmas for me that year .   In the mail were invitations to speak at the universities of Cologne , Heidelberg , and Baden-Baden . Twenty thousand world citizens at Stuttgart had signed a petition inviting me to visit their town . When Dr. Adenauer was approached by a world citizen delegation to find out his disposition of my case , he gave them his personal approval of my entry , saying that all men advocating peace should be welcomed into Germany . The special guard , however , was still posted on Kehl bridge . 
As it began raining at around eight o'clock on December 26th , I retired into my tent early , somewhat tired and discouraged , my body reacting sluggishly because of the continued exposure . No matter how large the fire , I could n't seem to shake off the chill that day . 
" Oh , Mr. Davis , are you there " ? a voice drifted in to me above the patter of the rain shortly after I had fallen into a fitful sleep . 
" Who is it " ? 
" We 're from the Council of Europe , British delegation . May we have a word with you " ? 
" I 'm sorry . I 've had a trying day and I just ca n't make it out again " , I told them . 
I heard nothing more . Later I learned that Sir Hugh Dalton had expressed a desire to see me , hence their trip to " No Man 's Land " . 
On the evening of December 27th , Esther noticed my pallid look and rasping voice . She entreated me to see a doctor , and when I refused , brought one out to see me . He advised immediate hospitalization . I would n't hear of it because it meant giving up the " line " , though I realized I was in poor shape physically . Esther , mistaking my hesitation , assured me that the hospital expense would be taken care of by a leading merchant in Strasbourg whom she had already approached . 
" No , it 's not that " , I told her . " You see , once I relinquish the position I 've already established here , I could n't regain it without sacrificing the logic of it " . 
At that moment , up walked a tall young man with glasses who announced himself as a world citizen from Basel , Switzerland . Without preliminaries , Esther asked him , " If you are a world citizen , will you take Garry Davis ' place in his tent while he goes to the hospital " ? 
" But of course , with pleasure " , he replied . 
Esther looked at me . I looked from her to him . 
" What is your name " ? I asked him . 
" Jean Babel " . 
" Shake " , I said . " You have just enlisted for the 'Rhine Campaign' " . 
Esther jumped up , ran to him and gave him a little hug . 
" I am so happy . Now come , Garry , we must go quickly . There is a police car outside . Maybe they will take us " . 
Such were the incongruities of the situation that the very police assigned to check up on me were drafted into driving me to the Strasbourg Hospital while World Citizen Jean Babel waved adieu from the " Line " !  He remembered every detail of his pre-assault movements but nothing of the final , desperate rush to come to grips with the enemy . When the victory cheer went up this officer found himself still mounted , with his horse pressed broadside against Cleburne 's log parapet in a tangled group of infantrymen . His hat was gone , the tears were streaming from his eyes . He never knew how he got there . Six climactic minutes in an individual 's life left no memory . 
Eight hundred and sixty-five Rebels surrendered within their works and a thousand more were captured or surrendered themselves that night and the next day . Eight field guns were captured in position . Seven battle flags and fourteen officers ' swords were sent to Thomas ' headquarters . It was the only sizable assault upon infantry and artillery behind breastworks successfully made by either side during the Atlanta campaign . The Fourteenth Regiment of Ohio Volunteers lost one-third of its numbers within a few minutes , among them being several men whose time of service had expired but who had volunteered to advance with their regiment . The Thirty-eighth Regiment of Ohio Volunteers , one of the regiments in Thomas ' First Division during Buell 's command , suffered its greatest loss of the war in this action . 
A popular belief grew up after the war that the only time during the Civil War that Thomas ever put his horse to a gallop was when he went to hurry up Stanley for this assault . Sherman was responsible for the story when he said in his memoirs that this was the only time he could recall seeing Thomas ride so fast . While Thomas ' injured back led him to restrain his mount from its most violent gait he moved quickly enough when he had to . It is not in the record , but he must have galloped his horse at Peach Tree Creek when he brought up Ward 's guns to save Newton 's crumbling line . 
While the final combat of the campaign was being worked out at Jonesborough , Thomas , on Sherman 's instructions , ordered Slocum , now commanding the Twentieth Corps , to make an effort to occupy Atlanta if he could do so without exposing his bridgehead to a counterattack . The dispatch must have been sent after sundown on September 1 . Slocum made his reconnaissanace the next morning , found the town empty , accepted the surrender of the mayor and occupied the city a little before noon . 
On the morning of September 2 the Fourth Corps and the Armies of the Tennessee and the Ohio followed the line of Hardee 's retreat . About noon they came up with the enemy two miles from Lovejoy 's Station and deployed . The Fourth Corps assaulted and carried a small portion of the enemy works but could not hold possession of the gain for want of cooperation from the balance of the line . That night a note written in Slocum 's hand and dated from inside the captured city came to Sherman stating that the Twentieth Corps was in possession of Atlanta . Before making the news public Sherman sent an officer with the note to Thomas . In a short time the officer returned and Thomas followed on his heels . The cautious Thomas re-examined the note and then , making up his mind that it was genuine , snapped his fingers , whistled and almost danced in his exuberance . 
The next day Sherman issued his orders ending the campaign and pulled his armies back to Atlanta . The measure of combat efficiency in an indecisive campaign is a matter of personal choice . Sherman laid great store by place captures . Hood refused to notice anything except captured guns and colors . By both standards Thomas had the right to be proud . 
Thomas thanked his men for their tenacity of purpose , unmurmuring endurance , cheerful obedience , brilliant heroism and high qualities in battle . 
Sherman felt that his own part in the campaign was skillful and well executed but that the slowness of a part of his army robbed him of the larger fruits of victory . He supposed the military world would approve of his accomplishment . 
Whatever the military world thought , the political world approved it wholeheartedly . For some time , despondency in some Northern quarters had been displayed in two ways — an eagerness for peace and a dissatisfaction with Lincoln . Proposals were in the air for a year 's armistice . Lincoln was sure that he would not be re-elected . In the midst of this gloom , at 10:05 P.M. on September 2 , Slocum 's telegram to Stanton , " General Sherman has taken Atlanta " , shattered the talk of a negotiated peace and boosted Lincoln into the White House . To the Republicans no victory could have been more complete . 
Official congratulations showered upon Sherman and his army . Lincoln mentioned their distinguished ability , courage and perseverance . He felt that this campaign would be famous in the annals of war . Grant called it prompt , skillful and brilliant . Halleck described it as the most brilliant of the war . 
Actually the Atlanta campaign was a military failure . Next best to destroying an army is to deprive it of its freedom of action . Sherman had accomplished this much of his job and then inexplicably nullified it by his thirty-mile retreat from Lovejoy 's to Atlanta . But , so far as its territorial objectives were concerned , the campaign was successful . Within the narrow frame of military tactics , too , the experts agree that the campaign was brilliant . In seventeen weeks the military front was driven southward more than 100 miles . There was a battle on an average of once every three weeks . The skirmishing was almost constant . In the summary of the principal events of the campaign compiled from the official records there are only ten days which show no fighting . The casualties in the Army of the Cumberland were 22,807 , while for all three armies they were 37,081 . Men were killed in their camps , at their meals and in their sleep . Rifle fire often kept the opposing gunners from manning their pieces . Modern warfare was born in this campaign — periscopes , camouflage , booby traps , land mines , extended order , trench raids , foxholes , armored cars , night attacks , flares , sharpshooters in trees , interlaced vines and treetops , which were the forerunners of barbed wire , trip wires to thwart a cavalry charge , which presaged the mine trap , and the general use of anesthetics . The use of map coordinates was begun when the senior officers began to select tactical points by designating a spot as " near the letter o in the word mountain " . A few weeks later the maps were being divided into squares and a position was described as being " about lots 239 , 247 and 272 with pickets forward as far as 196 " . This system was dependent upon identical maps and Thomas supplied them from a mobile lithograph press . Orders of the day began to specify the standard map for the movement . 
Sherman proved that a railway base could be movable and the most brilliant feature of the Atlanta campaign was the rapid repair of the tracks . To the Rebels it seemed as if Sherman carried tunnels and bridges in his pockets . The whistle of Sherman 's locomotives often drowned out the rattle of the skirmish fire . As always , the ranks worked out new and better tactics , but there was brilliance in the way the field commands adopted these methods and in the way the army commanders incorporated them into their military thinking . The fossilized , formalized , precedent-based thinking of the legendary military brain was not evident in Sherman 's armies . Sherman could never be accused of sticking too long with the old . 
One of Sherman 's most serious shortcomings , however , was his mistrust of his cavalry . He never saw that it was a complement to his infantry and not a substitute for it . Then , in some way , this lack of faith in the cavalry became mixed up in his mind with the dragging effect of wagon trains and was hardened into a prejudice . A horse needed twenty pounds of food a day but the infantryman got along with two pounds . The horseman required eleven times more than the footman . So Sherman tried a compromise . He would ship by rail five pounds per day per animal and the other fifteen pounds that were needed could be picked up off the country . It failed to work . Already debilitated by the Chattanooga starvation , the quality of Sherman 's horseflesh ran downhill as the campaign progressed . Every recorded request by Thomas for a delay in a flank movement or an advance was to gain time to take care of his horses . 
Well led , properly organized cavalry , in its complementary role to infantry , had four functions . First , it could locate the enemy infantry , learn what they were doing , and hold them until the heavy foot columns could come up and take over . Second , it could screen its own infantry from the sight of the enemy . Third , it could threaten at all times , and destroy when possible , the enemy communications . It could reach key tactical points faster than infantry and destroy them or hold them as the case might be for the foot soldier . Its climactic role was to pursue and demoralize a defeated enemy but this chance never came in the Atlanta campaign . Thomas tried hard to have his cavalry ready for the test it was to meet , but his plans were wrecked when it was forced into a campaign without optimum mobility and with its commander stripped from it . 
Sherman knew the uses of cavalry as well as Thomas but he imagined a moving base with infantry wings instead of cavalry wings . His conception proved workable but slower and it enabled his enemy to make clean , deft , well organized retreats with small materiel losses . Sherman insisted that cavalry could not successfully break up hostile railways , yet Garrard 's Covington raid and Rousseau 's Opelika raid cut two-thirds of the rail lines he had to break and Sherman lived in mortal fear of what Forrest might do to his communications . 
When McPherson pushed blindly through Snake Creek Gap in a potentially decisive movement , the only cavalry in his van was the Ninth Illinois Mounted Infantry , totally inadequate for its role . It stumbled on infantry where no infantry should have been and McPherson 's aggressive impulse faded out , overwhelmed by fears of the unknown . A proper cavalry command in his front would have developed the fact that he had run into one division of Polk 's Army of the Mississippi moving up from the direction of Mobile to join Johnston at Dalton . From the night of August 30 to the morning of September 2 there was no Union cavalry east of the Macon railway to disclose to Sherman that he was missing the greatest opportunity of his career . A great part of the time , Thomas ' infantry never knew the location of the enemy line . At such times Thomas wondered when and where a counterattack would strike him . It was the hard way to fight a war but Thomas did it without making any disastrous mistakes . 
Heat during the Atlanta campaign , coupled with unsuitable clothing , caused individual irritation that was compounded by a lack of opportunity to bathe and shift into clean clothing . To relieve the itch and sweat galls , the men got into the water whenever they could and since each sizable stream was generally the dividing line between the armies the pickets declared a private truce while the men went swimming . Johnston believed that Sherman put his naked engineers into the swimming parties to locate the various fords . Lieutenant Colonel James P. Brownlow , who commanded the First Brigade of Thomas ' First Cavalry Division , was ordered across one of these fords . The water was deep and Brownlow took his troopers across naked — except for guns , cartridge boxes and hats . They kicked their horses through the deep water with their bare heels , drove the Rebels out of their rifle pits and captured four men . Most of the Rebels got away since they could make better time through the stiff brush than their naked pursuers . 
Rank was becoming an explosive issue in all three of Sherman 's armies . Merited recommendations from army commanders were passed over in favor of political appointees from civil life .  
In one of the very few letters in which he ever complained of Meynell , Thompson told Patmore of his distress at having had to leave London before this new friendship had developed further : " 
That was a very absurd and annoying situation in which I was placed by W. M. 's curious methods of handling me . He never let me know that my visit was about to terminate until the actual morning I was to leave for Lymington . The result was that I found myself in the ridiculous position of having made a formal engagement by letter for the next week , only two days before my departure from London . Luckily both women knew my position and if anyone suffered in their opinion it was not I " . It need hardly be remarked that Thompson was not generally known for his scrupulosity about keeping his social engagements , which makes his irritation in this letter all the more significant . 
When Thompson and her daughter began a correspondence which included fervent verses from Pantasaph , Mrs. King felt a proper Victorian alarm . Some , she knew , looked upon Thompson almost as a saint , but others read in " The Hound of Heaven " what they took to be the confessions of a great sinner , who , like Oscar Wilde , had — as one pious writer later put it — thrown himself " on the swelling wave of every passion " . 
Consequently , on October 31 , 1896 , Mrs. King wrote to Thompson , quite against her daughter 's wishes , asking him not to " recommence a correspondence which I believe has been dropped for some weeks " . Katherine was staying at a convent , and her mother felt that , as Thompson himself seems to have suggested , she might eventually stay there . This prospect did not please Mrs. King any more than did the possibility that her daughter might marry a Bohemian , but she used it to suggest to Thompson that , " It is not in her nature to love you " . 
For his part , Thompson had explained in a previous letter that there would be nothing but an honorable friendship between Katie and himself . At no time does he seem to have proposed marriage , and Mrs. King was evidently torn between a concern for her daughter 's emotions and the desire to believe that the friendship might be continued without harm to her reputation . In any case , she told Thompson that she saw no reason why he might not see Katie again , " now that this frank explanation has been made + no one can misunderstand " . She ended her letter with the assurance that she considered his friendship for her daughter and herself to be an honor , from which she could not part " without still more pain " . 
After Thompson came to London to live , he received a letter from Katie , which was dated February 8 , 1897 . She regretted what she described as the " unwarrantable + unnecessary " check to their friendship and said that she felt that they understood one another perfectly . This letter concluded with an invitation : " 
I am a great deal at the little children 's Hospital . Mr. Meynell knows the way . I know you are very busy now , you are writing a great deal + your book is coming out , is n't it ? but if you are able + care to come , you know how glad I shall be . 
Ever yours sincerely , 
Katherine Douglas King " The invitation was accepted and other letters followed , in which she spoke of her concern for his health and her delight in seeing him so much at home among the crippled children she served . It is difficult to say what Thompson expected would come of their relationship , which had begun so soon after his emotions had been stirred by Maggie Brien , but when Katie wrote on April 11 , 1900 , to tell him that she was to be married to the Rev. Godfrey Burr , the vicar of Rushall in Staffordshire , the news evidently helped to deepen his discouragement over the failure of his hopes for a new volume of verse . In a letter to Meynell , which was written in June , less than a month before Katie 's wedding , he was highly melodramatic in his despair and once again announced his intention of returning to the life of the streets : " 
A week in arrears , and without means to pay , I must go , it is the only right thing . … Perhaps Mrs. Meynell would do me the undeserved kindness to keep my own copy of the first edition of my first book , with all its mementos of her and the dear ones . … Last , not least , there are some poems which K. King sent me ( addressed to herself ) when I was preparing a fresh volume , asking me to include them . The terrible blow of the New Year put an end to that project . I wish you would return them to her . I have not the heart . … I never had the courage to look at them , when my projected volume became hopeless , fearing they were poor , until now when I was obliged to do so . … O my genius , young and ripening , you would swear , — when I wrote them ; and now ! What has it all come to ? All chance of fulfilling my destiny is over . … I want you to be grandfather to these orphaned poems , dear father-brother , now I am gone ; and launch them on the world when their time comes . For them a box will be lodgment enough . … Katie can not mind your seeing them now ; since my silence must have ended when I gave the purposed volume to you . … I ask you to do me the last favour of reading them by 8 to-morrow evening , about which time I shall come to say my sad good-bye . If you do n't think much of them , tell me the wholesome truth . If otherwise , you will give me a pleasure . O Wilfrid ! it is strange ; but this — yes , terrible step I am about to take … is lightened with an inundating joy by the new-found hope that here , in these poems , is treasure — or at least some measure of beauty , which I did not know of " . … Thompson , of course , was persuaded not to take the " terrible step " ; Meynell once again paid his debts and it was Katie , rather than Thompson , whose life was soon ended , for she died in childbirth in April , 1901 , in the first year of her marriage . 
The " orphaned poems " mentioned in the letter to Meynell comprised a group of five sonnets , which were published in the 1913 edition of Thompson 's works under the heading " Ad Amicam " , plus certain other completed pieces and rough drafts gathered together in one of the familiar exercise books . The publication of Father Connolly 's The Man Has Wings has made more of the group available in print so that a general picture of what it contained can now be had without difficulty . Some of the poems express a mood of joy in a newly discovered love ; others suggest its coming loss or describe the poet 's feelings when he learns of a final separation . 
The somewhat Petrarchan love story which these poems suggest can not obscure the fact that undoubtedly they have more than a little of autobiographical sincerity . When they were first written , there was evidently no thought of their being published , and those which refer to the writer 's love for Mrs. Meynell particularly have the ring of truth . In " My Song 's Young Virgin Date " , for example , Thompson wrote : " Yea , she that had my song 's young virgin date Not now , alas , that noble singular she , I nobler hold , though marred from her once state , Than others in their best integrity . My own stern hand has rent the ancient bond , And thereof shall the ending not have end : But not for me , that loved her , to be fond Lightly to please me with a newer friend . Then hold it more than bravest-feathered song , That I affirm to thee , with heart of pride , I knew not what did to a friend belong Till I stood up , true friend , by thy true side ; Whose absence dearer comfort is , by far , Than presences of other women are " ! 
Taking into account Thompson 's capacity for self-dramatization and the possibility of a wish to identify his own life with the misfortunes of other poets who had known unhappy loves , there can be no doubt about his genuine emotion for Katie King . That she was affected by his protestations seems obvious , but since she was evidently a sensible young woman — as well as an outgoing and sympathetic type — it would seem that for her the word friendship had a far less intense emotional significance than that which Thompson gave it . From the outset , she must have realized that marriage with him was out of the question , and although she was displeased by the " unwarrantable " interference , it seems probable that she did agree with her mother 's suggestion that the poet was " perhaps " a man " most fitted to live + die solitary , + in the love only of the Highest Lover " . 
The poems which were addressed to her , while they are far more restrained than those of " Love in Dian 's Lap " , show no great technical advance over those of the " Narrow Vessel " group and are , if anything , somewhat more labored . Their interest remains chiefly biographical , for they throw some light on the utter despair which overtook Thompson in the spring and early summer of 1900 . 
Whether or not Danchin is correct in suggesting that Thompson 's resumption of the opium habit also dates from this period is , of course , a matter of conjecture . Reid simply states , without offering any supporting evidence , that " after he returned to London , he resumed his draughts of laudanum , and continued this right up to his death " . There is every reason to recognize that in the very last years of his life , as we shall see , Thompson did take the drug in carefully rationed doses to ease the pains of his illness , but the exact date at which this began has never been determined . If , as Reid says , " nearly all his poetry was produced when he was not taking opium " , there may be some reason to doubt that he was under its influence in the period from 1896 to 1900 when he was writing the poems to Katie King and making plans for another book of verse . In any event , the critical productivity of that time is abundant proof that if he was taking laudanum , it was never in command of him to the extent that it had been during his vagrant years . 
Meynell 's remedy for Thompson 's despondent mood was typically practical . He simply found more work for him to do , and the articles and reviews continued without an evident break .   /3 ,   As a reviewer , Thompson generally displayed a judicious attitude . That he read some of the books assigned to him with a studied carefulness is evident from his notes , which are often so full that they provide an unquestionable basis for the identification of reviews that were printed without his signature . On the basis of this careful reading , Thompson frequently gave a clear , complete , and interesting description of a prose work or chose effective quotations to illustrate his discussions of poetry . 
He was seldom an unmethodical critic , and his reviews generally followed a systematic pattern : a description of what the work contained , a treatment of the things that had especially interested him in it , and , wherever possible , a balancing of whatever artistic merits and faults he might have found . 
It was , of course , in this drawing of the balance sheet of judgment that he most clearly displayed his desire to do full justice to an author . Reviewing Davidson 's The Testament of an Empire Builder , for example , Thompson found that there was " too much metrical dialectic " . Poetry , he said , must be " dogmatic " : it must not stoop to argue like a " K.C. in cloth-of-gold " . Yet Davidson impressed him as a poet capable of " sustained power , passion , or beauty " , and he cited specific passages to illustrate not only these qualities but Davidson 's command of imagery as well . Similarly , he wrote that Laurence Housman had a " too deliberate manner " as well as a lack of " inevitable felicity in diction " . But he admired Housman 's " subtle intellectuality " and delighted in the inversion by which Divine Love becomes the most " fatal " allurement in " Love the Tempter " . 
Of course , there were books about which nothing good could be said . Understanding , as he did , the difficulty of the art of poetry , and believing that the " only technical criticism worth having in poetry is that of poets " , he felt obliged to insist upon his duty to be hard to please when it came to the review of a book of verse .  
As he had done on his first Imperial sortie a year and a half before , Lewis trekked southeast through Red Russia to Kamieniec . Thence he pushed farther south than he had ever been before into Podolia and Nogay Tartary or the Yedisan . There , along the east bank of the Southern Bug , opposite the hamlet of Zhitzhakli a few miles north of the Black Sea , he arrived at General Headquarters of the Russian Army . By June 19 , 1788 , he had presented himself to its Commander in Chief , the Governor of the Southern Provinces , the Director of the War College — The Prince .   Catherine 's first war against the Grand Turk had ended in 1774 with a peace treaty quite favorable to her . By 1783 her legions had managed to annex the Crimea amid scenes of wanton cruelty and now , in this second combat with the Crescent , were aiming at suzerainty over all of the Black Sea 's northern shoreline . 
Through most of 1787 operations on both sides had been lackadaisical ; those of 1788 were going to prove decisive , though many of their details are obscure . To consolidate what her Navy had won , the Czarina was fortunate that , for the first time in Russian history , her land forces enjoyed absolute unity of command under her favorite Giaour . Potemkin was directing this conflict on three fronts : in the Caucasus ; along the Danube and among the Carpathians , in alliance with the Emperor Joseph 's armies ; and in the misty marshlands and shallow coastal waters of Nogay Tartary and Taurida , including the Crimean peninsula . Here the war would flame to its focus , and here Lewis Littlepage had come . 
Potemkin 's Army of Ekaterinoslav , totaling , it was claimed , 40,000 regular troops and 6,000 irregulars of the Cossack Corps , had invested Islam 's principal stronghold on the north shore of the Black Sea , the fortress town of Oczakov , and was preparing to test the Turk by land and sea . During a sojourn of slightly more than three months Chamberlain Littlepage sould see action on both elements . 
As his second in command The Prince had Marshal Repnin , one-time Ambassador to Poland . Repnin , who had a rather narrow face , longish nose , high forehead , and arching brows , looked like a quizzical Mephistopheles . Some people thought he lacked both ability and character , but most agreed that he was noble in appearance and , for a Russian , humane . The Marshal came to know Littlepage quite well . At General Headquarters the newcomer in turn got to know others . There was the Neapolitan , Ribas , a capable conniver whose father had been a blacksmith but who had fawned his way up the ladder of Catherine 's and Potemkin 's favor till he was now a brigadier ( and would one day be the daggerman designated to do in Czar Paul /1 , , after traveling all the way to Naples to procure just the right stiletto ) . 
Then there were the distinguished foreign volunteers . Representing the Emperor were the Prince de Ligne , still as impetuous as a youth of twenty ; and General the Count Pallavicini , founder of the Austrian branch of that celebrated Italian house , a courtier Littlepage could have met at Madrid in December , 1780 . From Milan came the young Chevalier de Litta , an officer in the service of Malta . Out of Saxony rode the Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg , one of the Czarina 's cousins and a lieutenant general in her armies , a frank , sensitive , popular soldier whose kindnesses Littlepage would " always recall with the sincerest gratitude " . 
Though Catherine was vexed at the number of French officers streaming to the Turkish standard , there were several under her own , such as the Prince de Nassau ; the energetic Parisian , Roger de Damas , three year 's Littlepage 's junior , to whom Nassau had taken a liking ; and the artillerist , Colonel Prevost , whom the Count de Segur had persuaded to lend his technical skills to Nassau . England contributed a young subaltern named Newton and the naval architect Samuel Bentham , brother to the economist , who far his colonel 's commission was proving a godsend to the Russian fleet . From America were the Messrs. Littlepage and Jones . 
Lewis had expected to report at once to Jones 's and Nassau 's naval command post . On arrival at headquarters he had , however — in King Stanislas ' words to Glayre — " found such favor with Pe Potemkin that he made him his aide-de-camp and up to now does not want him to go join Paul Jones … " . So of course he stayed put . Having done so , he began to experience all the frustrations of others who attempted to get along with Serenissimus and do a job at the same time . 
The Prince 's perceptions were quick and his energy monstrous , but these qualities were sapped by an Oriental lethargy and a policy of letting nothing interfere with personal passions . At headquarters — sufficiently far from the firing line to make you forget occasionally that you were in a war — Lewis found that the Commander in Chief 's only desk was his knees ( and his only comb , his fingers ) . An entire theater had been set up for his diversion , with a 200-man Italian orchestra under the well-known Sarti . In the great one 's personal quarters , a portable house , almost every evening saw an elegant banquet or reception . Lewis could let his eye caress The Prince 's divan , covered with a rose-pink and silver Turkish cloth , or admire the lovely tapis , interwoven with gold , that spread across the floor . Filigreed perfume boxes exuded the aromas of Araby . Around the billiard tables were always at least a couple of dozen beribboned generals . At dinner the courses were carried in by tall cuirassiers in red capes and black fur caps topped with tufts of feathers , marching in pairs like guards from a stage tragedy . 
Among the visitors arriving every now and then there were , of course , women . For if Serenissimus made the sign of the Cross with his right hand , and meant it , with his left he beckoned lewdly to any lady who happened to catch his eye . Usually Lewis would find at headquarters one or more of The Prince 's various nieces . 
Right now he found Sophie de Witt , that magnificent young matron he had spotted at Kamieniec fours years ago . The Prince took her with him on every tour around the area , and it was rumored he was utilizing her knowledge of Constantinople as part of his espionage network . One evening he passed around the banquet table a crystal cup full of diamonds , requesting every female guest to select one as a souvenir . When a lady chanced to soil a pair of evening slippers , Brigadier Bauer was dispatched to Paris for replacements . 
But if The Prince fancied women and was fascinated by foreigners , he could be haughtiness personified to his subordinates . He had collared one of his generals in public . His coat trimmed in sable , diamond stars of the Orders of Saints Andrew or George agleam , he was often prone to sit sulkily , eye downcast , in a Scheherazade trance . When this happened , everything stopped . As Littlepage noted : " A complete picture of Prince Potemkin may be had in his 1788 operations . He stays inactive for half the summer in front of Oczakov , a quite second-rate spot , begins to besiege it formally only during the autumn rains , and finally carries it by assault in the heart of winter . There 's a man who never goes by the ordinary road but still arrives at his goal , who gratuitously gets himself into difficulty in order to get out of it with eclat , in a word a man who creates monsters for himself in order to appear a Hercules in destroying them " . 
To help him do so The Prince had conferred control of his land forces on a soldier who was different from him in almost every respect save one : both were eccentrics of the purest ray serene . 
Alexander Vasilievitch Suvorov , now in his fifty-ninth year ( ten years Potemkin 's senior ) , was a thin , worn-faced person of less than medium height who looked like a professor of botany . He had a small mouth with deep furrows on either side , a large flat nose , and penetrating blue eyes . His gray hair was thin , his face beginning to attract a swarm of wrinkles . He was ugly . But Suvorov 's face was also a theater of vivacity , and his tough , stooping little frame was briskness embodied . Like all Russians he was an emotional man , and in him the emotions warred . Kind by nature , he never refused charity to a beggar or help to anyone who asked him for it ( as Lewis would one day discover ) . But he was perpetually engaged in a battle to command his own temper . 
When Littlepage was introduced , if the General behaved as usual , the newcomer faced a staccato salvo of queries : origin ? age ? mission ? current status ? Woe betide the interviewee if he answered vaguely . Suvorov 's contempt for don't-know 's was proverbial ; better to give an asinine answer than none at all . Despising luxuries of any sort for a soldier , he slept on a pile of hay with his cloak as blanket . He rose at 4:00 A.M. the year round and was apt to stride through camp crowing like a cock to wake his men . His breakfast was tea ; his dinner fell anywhere from nine to noon ; his supper was nothing . He had n't worn a watch or carried pocket money for years because he disliked both , but highest among his hates were looking glasses : he had snatched one from an officer 's grasp and smashed it to smithereens . He kept several pet birds and liked cats well enough that if one crept by , he would mew at it in friendly fashion . Passing dogs were greeted with a cordial bark . 
Yet General Suvorov — who had never forgotten hearing his adored Czarina declare that all truly great men had oddities — was mad only north , northwest . He had come to learn that a reputation for peculiarity allowed mere field officers a certain leeway at Court ; in camp he knew it won you the affection of your men . He had accordingly cultivated eccentricity to the point of second nature . Underneath , he remained one of the best-educated Russians of his day . He dabbled in verse , could get along well among most of the European languages , and was fluent in French and German . He had also mastered the Cossack tongue . 
For those little men with the short whiskers , shaven polls , and top knots Suvorov reserved a special esteem . Potemkin — as King Stanislas knew , and presently informed Littlepage — looked on the Cossacks as geopolitical tools . To Serenissimus such tribes as the Cossacks of the Don or those ex-bandits the Zaporogian Cossacks ( in whose islands along the lower Dnieper the Polish novelist Sienkiewicz would one day place With Fire and Sword ) were just elements for enforced resettlement in , say , Bessarabia , where , as " the faithful of the Black Sea borders " , he could use their presence as baragining points in the Czarina 's territorial claims against Turkey . Suvorov saw in these scimitar-wielding skirmishers not demographic units but military men of a high potential . He knew how to channel their exuberant disorderliness so as to transform them from mere plunderers into A-1 guerrilla fighters . He always kept a few on his personal staff . He often donned their tribal costumes , such as the one featuring a tall , black sheepskin hat from the top of which dangled a little red bag ornamented by a chain of worsted lace and tassels ; broad red stripes down the trouser leg ; broader leather belt round the waist , holding cartridges and light sabre . Suvorov played parent not just to his Cossacks but to all his troops . It was probably at this period that Littlepage got his first good look at the ordinary Russian soldier . 
These illiterate boors conscripted from villages all across the Czarina 's empire had , Suvorov may have told Lewis , just two things a commander could count on : physical fitness and personal courage . When their levies came shambling into camp , they were all elbows , hair , and beard . They emerged as interchangeable cogs in a faulty but formidable machine : shaved nearly naked , hair queued , greatcoated , jackbooted , and best of all — in the opinion of the British professional , Major Semple-Lisle — " their minds are not estranged from the paths of obedience by those smatterings of knowledge which only serve to lead to insubordination and mutiny " .  Mando , pleading her cause , must have said that Dr. Brown was the most distinguished physician in the United States of America , for our man poured out his symptoms and drew a madly waving line indicating the irregularity of his pulse . " He 's got high blood pressure , too , and bum kidneys " , the doctor said to me . " Transparent look , waxy skin — could well be uremia " . He looked disapprovingly at an ash tray piled high with cigarette stubs , shook his head , and moved his hand back and forth in a strong negative gesture . The little official hung his head in shame . Seeing this , his colleague at the next desk gave a short , contemptuous laugh , pushed forward his own ash tray , innocent of a single butt , thumped his chest to show his excellent condition , and looked proud . The doctor gravely nodded approval . 
At this moment Mando came hurrying up to announce that the problem was solved and all Norton had to do was to sign a sheaf of papers . We went out of the office and down the hall to a window where documents and more officials awaited us , the rest of the office personnel hot upon our heels . By this time word had got around that an American doctor was on the premises . One fellow who had liver spots held out his hands to the great healer . It was funny but it was also touching . " You know " , Norton said to me later , " I am thinking of setting up the Klinico Brownapopolus . I might not make any money but I 'd sure have patients " . 
After luncheon we took advantage of the siesta period to try to get in touch with a few people to whom our dear friend Deppy had written . Deppy is Despina Messinesi , a long-time member of the Vogue staff who , although born in Boston , was born there of Greek parents . Several years of her life have been spent in the homeland , and she had written to friends to alert them of our coming . " All you have to do , Ilka dear , is to phone on your arrival . They are longing to see you " . The wear and tear of life have taught me that very few friends of mutual friends long to see foreign strangers , but I planned on being the soul of tact , of giving them plenty of outs was there the tiniest implication that their cups were already running over without us . My diplomacy was needless . Greek phone service is worse than French , so that it was to be some little time before contact of any sort was established . 
In the late afternoon Mando came back to fetch us , and we drove to the Acropolis . We stopped first at the amphitheater that lies at the foot of the height crowned by the Parthenon . The curving benches are broken , chipped , tumbled , but still in place , as are the marble chairs , the seats of honor for the legislators . The carved statues of the frieze against the low wall are for the most part headless , but their exquisitely graceful nude and draped torsos and the kneeling Atlantes are well preserved in their perfect proportion . 
Having completed our camera work , we started our climb . I suppose the same emotion holds , if to a lesser degree , with any famous monument . Will it live up to its reputation ? The weight of fame and history is formidable , and dreary steel engravings in schoolbooks do little to quicken interest and imagination . Uh huh , we think , looking at them , so that 's the Parthenon . And then perhaps one day we get to Athens . We are here ! We 've come a long way and spent a lot of money . It had better be good . Do n't worry about the Acropolis . It is awe-inspiring . Probably every visitor has a favorite time for his first sight of it . We saw it frequently afterward , but our suggestion for the very first encounter is near sunset . The light at that time is a benediction . The serene , majestic columns of the Parthenon , tawny in color against the pure deep blue sky , frame incredible vistas . All we wanted to do was to stand very quietly and look and look and look . 
More than twenty-four hundred years old , bruised , battered , worn and partially destroyed , combining to an astounding degree solidity and grace , it still stands , incomparable testimony to man 's aspiration . In 1687 the Turks , who had been in control of the city since the fifteenth century , with a truly shattering lack of prudence used the Parthenon as a powder magazine . It was hit by a shell fired by the bombarding Venetian army and the great central portion of the temple was blown to smithereens . 
Nearby is the temple of Athena . The architectural feature , the caryatides upholding the portico , famous around the world as the Porch of the Maidens , was referred to airily by Mando as the Girls ' Place . Another beautiful building is the Propylaea , the entrance gate of the Acropolis . 
My other nugget of art and architectural knowledge — besides remembering that it was Ghiberti who designed the doors of the baptistery in Florence — is the three styles of Greek columns . For some happy reason Doric , Ionic , and Corinthian have always stuck in my mind . Furthermore I can identify each design . It remained , however , for Mando to teach me that Doric symbolized strength , Ionic wisdom , and Corinthian beauty , the three pillars of the ancient world . The columns of the Parthenon are fluted Doric . 
Another classic sight that gave us considerable pleasure was the evzone sentry , in his ballet skirt with great pompons on his shoes , who was patrolling up and down in front of the palace . Gun on shoulder , he would march smartly for a few yards , bring his heels together with a click , make a brisk pirouette , skirts flaring , and march back to his point of departure . We did not dare speak to so exalted a being , but Norton aimed his camera and shot him , so to speak , on the rise , the split second between the halt and the turn . 
The evening of our first day we drove with Christopher and Judy Sakellariadis , who were friends and patients of Norton , to dine at a restaurant on the shores of the Aegean . On the way out Mr. Sakellariadis detoured up a special hill from which one may obtain a matchless view of the Acropolis lighted by night . 
The great spectacle was a source of rancor , and Son et Lumiere , which the French were trying to promote with the Athenians , was the reason . These performances were being staged at historical monuments throughout Europe . By a combination of music , lighting effects , and narration , famous events that have transpired in these locations are evoked and re-created for large audiences usually to considerable acclaim . The Acropolis had been scheduled for the treatment too , but apparently it was to take place at the time of the full moon when the Athenians themselves , out of respect for the natural beauty of the occasion , were wont to forgo their own usual nocturnal illumination . 
Athenian society was split into two factions , the Philistines and the Artists . The Artists contended that the Philistines , gross of soul , were all for having Son et Lumiere , since the French were footing the bill and the attraction , wherever it had been done , had proven popular . This was the crassest kind of materialism and they , the Artists , would have no truck with it . The Acropolis was unique in the world and if that imcomparable work flooded by moonlight was n't enough for both natives and tourists , then they were quite simply barbarians and the hell with them . It was very stimulating . 
The restaurant to which the Sakellariadises took us on this night of controversy was the Asteria , on Asteria beach . This is a public bathing beach , easily accessible by tramway from the center of Athens . Office workers frequently go out there to lunch and swim during the siesta period , which , during the summer , lasts from two until five in the afternoon , when shops and offices are again open for business . They close sometime after eight . Nine o'clock is the rush hour , when the busses are jammed , and by nine-thirty the restaurants are beginning to fill . Bedtime is late , for the balmy evenings are delightful and everyone wants to linger under the stars . 
The sand is fine and pleasant , the cabanas are clean , and the parasols , green , raspberry , and butter yellow , are very gay . Although open to the general public it is not overcrowded ; the atmosphere is that of an attractive private beach club at home . We went there a couple of times to swim and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly . This agreeable state of affairs is explicable , I think , on two counts . One is Greece is not yet suffering from overpopulation . The public may still find pleasure in public places . The other is that the charge for cabanas and parasols , though modest from an American point of view , still is a little high for many Athenians . We were struck by the notable absence of banana skins and beer cans , but just so that we would n't go overboard on Greek refinement , perfection was side-stepped by a couple of braying portable radios . Greek boys and girls also go for rock-and-roll , and the stations most tuned to are those carrying United States overseas programs . A good deal of English was spoken on the beach , most educated Greeks learn it in childhood , and there were also American wives and children of our overseas servicemen . 
For a delightful drive out of Athens I should recommend Sounion , at the end of the Attic Peninsula . The road , a comparatively new one , is very good , winding along inlets , coves , and bays of deep and brilliant blue . I suppose the day will inevitably come when the area will be encrusted with developments , but at present it is deserted and seductive . Three beneficial hurdles to progress are the lack of water , electricity , and telephones . 
At Sounion there is a group of beautiful columns , the ruins of a temple to Poseidon , of particular interest at that time , as active reconstruction was in progress . Gaunt scaffoldings adjoined the ruins , and on the ground segments of columns two and a half to three feet in thickness were being fitted with sections cunningly chiseled to match exactly the fluting and proportion of the original . Later they would be hoisted into place . 
There is a mediocre restaurant at Sounion and I fed a thin little Grecian cat and gave it two saucers of water — there was no milk — which it lapped up as though it were nectar . I think its thirst had never been assuaged before . 
Norton and I dined one night in a sea-food restaurant in Piraeus right on the water 's edge . To enter it , you go down five or six steps from the road . Across the road is the kitchen , and waiters bearing great trays of dishes dodge traffic as nimbly as their French colleagues at the restaurant in the Place du Tertre in Paris . 
This restaurant , too , had a cat , a dusty , thin little creature . How can a cat be thin in a fish restaurant ? But this one was . When offered a morsel it glanced right and left and winced , obviously frightened and expecting a kick , but too hungry not to snatch the tidbit . Greece was one of the highlights of our trip , but beginning in Greece and continuing around the world throughout Southeast Asia the treatment of animals was horrifying , ranging from callous indifference to active cruelty . This of course was not true of the educated and sophisticated people we met , who loved their pets , but kindness is not a basic human instinct . 
We met some charming Athenians , and among them our chauffeur Panyotis ranked high . His English was limited , and the little he knew he found irritating . A particularly galling phrase was " O.K. , Panyotis , we have time at our disposal " . This he claimed was the favorite refrain of the English . They would be lolling under a tree sipping Ouzo , relishing the leisurely life , assuring him that the day was yet young .  " Let him become honest , and they discard him . — But let him be ready to invent whatever falsehood — to assail whatever character — and to prostitute his paper to whatever ends — and they hug him to their heart . In proportion to the degradation of his moral worth , is the increase of his worth to them " . 
To exonerate the legislature and thereby extricate himself from a sticky situation , Pike took another course and made it appear that the legislature had been bilked . He claimed in his attacks that Woodruff , with scurrilous underhandedness , had deliberately written an ambiguous bid that had so confused the honest members of the legislature that they had awarded him the contract without knowing what they were doing . 
The charge was so farfetched that Woodruff paid little attention to it , and answered Pike in a rather bored way , wearily declaring that a " new hand " was pumping the bellows of the Crittenden organ , and concluding : " In a controversy with an adversary so utterly destitute of moral principles , even a triumph would entitle the victor to no laurels . The game is not worth the ammunition it would cost . We therefore leave the writer to the enjoyment of the unenvied reputation which the personal abuse he has heaped on us will entitle him to from the low and vulgar herd to which he belongs " . 
Despite Woodruff 's continuing refusal to debate with Pike through the columns of his newspaper , Pike did not let up his attack for a moment . Over the months he became a political gadfly with an incessant barrage of satirical poems ridiculing Woodruff , the " Casca " letters belittling Woodruff , and long analytical articles vilifying Woodruff . So persistent were these attacks that in March of the following year , Woodruff was finally moved to action , and Pike was to learn his first lesson in frontier politics , the subtle art of diversion . 
To attack Pike directly would gain Woodruff little , for as a penniless newcomer Pike had nothing to lose . By this time Woodruff had accurately measured Pike as a man of great personal pride , a man who would fly into a towering rage if his integrity were questioned , and who would be anxious to avenge himself . Pike 's honor would now come under attack , but not by Woodruff himself . The charges would be made in the Gazette by an anonymous correspondent , and Pike would be so busy trying to track down the illusive character assassin that he would forget about harassing Woodruff . The strategy worked perfectly . 
Pike was stunned by the first blast against his character , which was published in the March 4th issue of the Gazette under the name " Vale " . The anonymous correspondent did not resort to innuendoes . He called Pike a thief . He said Pike had stolen mules from Harris during the Santa Fe expedition ; he accused Pike of continuing his sticky-fingered career in Arkansas with the theft of some otter skins in Van Buren . The charges caught Pike off balance , coming as they did from an unexpected quarter . Outraged , he used the Advocate of March 7th for a denial , sending immediately to Santa Fe and Van Buren for documents to vindicate himself , and demanding that Woodruff reveal the name of this perfidious slanderer who disguised himself under a pastoral pseudonym . 
Woodruff said nothing , and Pike , frustrated , stormed throughout Little Rock in an unsuccessful search for " Vale " , asking his friends to keep their ears open . Finally he learned through the grapevine that the culprit might be one James W. Robinson in Pope County . Without further inquiry , Pike jumped to the conclusion that Robinson was guilty , and , following the honorable route that would eventually lead to the dueling ground , sent a message to Robinson through his friends , demanding that he either confirm or deny his complicity . Robinson did neither . To Pike , silence was tantamount to an admission of guilt , and he determined to get Robinson onto the dueling ground at all costs . On April 11th he wrote an open letter in the Advocate , making it known " to the world that Jas . W. Robinson is by his own admission a base LIAR and a SLANDERER " . 
If Robinson was a liar and a slanderer , he was also a very canny gentleman , for nothing that Pike could do would pry so much as a single word out of him . Preoccupied with his own defense and his attempts to get Robinson to fight , Pike lessened his attacks on Woodruff , and finally stopped them altogether . And Pike never did find out if Robinson was really responsible for the " Vale " letter . Woodruff 's strategy had been immensely successful . 
It took Pike a long time to realize what Woodruff had done , and it had a profound effect on him . Once he learned a lesson , he never forgot it . In the next few months of comparative silence , Pike waited patiently until conditions were perfect for a new attack , and then , displaying a remarkable grasp of the subtleties of political infighting , gained from his first bout with Woodruff , he used these changed conditions to excellent advantage . 
Shortly after the " Vale " incident , a rift began to develop between William Woodruff and Governor Pope . One-armed , gruff , frugally honest , Governor Pope had been the ideal man to assume office in Arkansas after the disgraceful antics of political bosses like Crittenden , and he ruled the state with an iron fist , tolerating no nonsense . Woodruff had supported him all the way , both as a chief executive and as a man . Besides being political allies , they were also friends . This warm relationship came to an abrupt end in June of 1834 when the National Congress appropriated $3,000 for compiling and printing the laws of Arkansas Territory , and , taking note of the recent wave of corruption in the legislature , left it to the governor to award the contract . 
Woodruff wanted this political windfall very badly , and everyone assumed that he would get it because he was a close friend of the governor and his stanchest supporter . After all , Woodruff owned a competent printing plant and was the logical man for the job . But because the governor was determined that friendship should not influence him one way or the other , he looked for a printer with a knowledge of the law ( which Woodruff did not have ) , and awarded the contract to a lawyer named John Steele who had started a newspaper in Helena the year before . 
Woodruff was furious . Considering the governor 's act a personal rebuff , he aired his feelings in the Gazette on August 26 , 1834 : " We think the governor treated us rather shabbily , to say the least of it . … It is but justice to Mr. Steele for us to add that , in the above remarks , nothing is intended to his disparagement , either as a lawyer or as a printer . He got a good fat job and we congratulate him on his good luck . We hope that he will execute it in a manner that will entitle him to credit " . 
As summer cooled into fall and winter , even so the relationship between the two men continued to grow colder by the day , and by December of 1834 it was icy . It was at this point that Pike decided to capitalize on the bad feelings between the two men . The eventual prize in this new battle was the public printing contract that Woodruff still held . 
From his first bout with the canny Woodruff , Pike had learned that it was better not to attack him directly , so , harping on the theme that the cost of printing was too high , he condemned the governor for permitting such a state of affairs to exist . To document his charge , Pike set up two parallel columns in the Advocate showing the price charged by the Gazette and the considerably lower price for which the work could be done elsewhere . Then he called on the governor to explain why . 
The governor was not used to having his integrity questioned , and he promptly passed the charges on to Woodruff , demanding that Woodruff answer them . If Woodruff could not furnish a strong explanation , the governor insisted that he lower his prices in accord with the scale printed in the Advocate . Woodruff was now impaled on the horns of a dilemma . As a proud man , his prestige would suffer if he let Pike dictate to him through the governor 's office , but to lower his prices would be tantamount to an admission that they had been too high in the first place . As a consequence , he did neither . Very angry at Woodruff , the governor used his personal influence to have the printing contract withdrawn from the Gazette and awarded to the lowest bidder , which , by a strange coincidence , happened to be Pike 's Advocate . And , for the moment at least , the governor now found himself allied with the head of the Crittenden faction he had formerly opposed , and Pike was credited with a clear triumph over Woodruff . 
But in the confused atmosphere of frontier politics , alliances were as quickly broken as they were formed , and as Pike came to favor with the governor of the Territory , the governor fell out of favor with the President of the United States . On January 28 , 1835 , Andrew Jackson removed Pope from office and elevated Territorial Secretary William S. Fulton to the position . Fulton was a very close friend of Jackson , and had been his private secretary for a number of years in the old days . As a stanch party man and a rabid Democrat , he had little tolerance for Whigs like Pike , and Pike lost any immediate personal advantage his victory over Woodruff might have gained him .  2  As Pike proved himself adept in the political arena , he also became a social lion in the village of Little Rock , where he served as a symbol of the culture that the ladies of the town were striving so eagerly to cultivate . After all , Pike was an established poet and his work had been published in the respectable periodicals of that center of American culture , Boston . His accomplishments , and the fact that he was resident , did much to offset the unkind words travelers used to describe Little Rock after a visit there . For some reason , none of them were impressed with the territorial capital . The internationally known sportsman and traveler Friedrich Gerst.auml ; cker was typical of its detractors in the mid-thirties . " Little Rock is a vile , detestable place … " . he wrote . " Little Rock is , without any flattery , one of the dullest towns in the United States and I would not have remained two hours in the place , if I had not met with some good friends who made me forget its dreariness " . 
Pike enjoyed his new social position tremendously , and cultivated in himself those traits necessary to its preservation . He was especially popular with women , for , like the romantic poetry he wrote , he was personally gracious , gallant , and chivalrous . He again began to play the violin , and tucking the instrument beneath his chin , performed soulful and romantic airs to match the expressions on the faces of the lovely women who gathered to hear him . His artistic accomplishments guaranteed him entry into any social gathering . He composed songs and set them to music and sang them in a soft , melodious voice , and when his audience had had enough of music he would discourse on politics or tell stories of his western adventures guaranteed to excite the emotions of men and women alike . 
The bulk of his early reputation , however , came not from his poetry or his music , but from his excellence as an orator . By 1834 the art of oratory had reached a very high level in the United States as a literary form . The orator of this period , in order to earn a reputation , had to pay close attention to the formal composition of his speech , judging how it would appear in print as well as the effect it would have on the audience that heard it . 
Very soon after his arrival in Little Rock , Pike had joined one of the most influential organizations in town , the Little Rock Debating Society , and it was with this group that he made his debut as an orator , being invited to deliver the annual Fourth of July address the club sponsored every year .  SAMUEL GORTON , founder of Warwick , was styled by the historian Samuel Greene Arnold " one of the most remarkable men who ever lived " . A biographer called him " the premature John the Baptist of New England Transcendentalism " . The historian Charles Francis Adams called him " a crude and half-crazy thinker " . His contemporaries in Massachusetts called him an arch-heretic , a beast , a miscreant , a proud and pestilent seducer , a prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties . Edward Rawson , secretary of the colony of Massachusetts Bay , described him as " a man whose spirit was stark drunk with blasphemies and insolence , a corrupter of the truth , a disturber of the peace wherever he comes " . Nathaniel Morton stated he " was deeply leavened with blasphemous and familistical opinions " . He was thrown out , more or less , from Boston , Plymouth , Pocasset , Newport , and Providence . 
On the other hand , Dr. Ezra Styles recorded the following testimony of John Angell , the last disciple of Gorton : " 
He said Gorton was a holy man ; wept day and night for the sins and blindness of the world … had a long walk through the trees and woods by his house , where he constantly walked morning and evening , and even in the depths of the night , alone by himself , for contemplation and the enjoyment of the dispensation of light . He was universally beloved by his neighbours , and the Indians , who esteemed him , not only as a friend , but one high in communion with God in Heaven " . Gorton sometimes signed himself " a professor of the mysteries of Christ " . 
There is plenty more to recommend Gorton , the facts of whose life are given in The Life and Times of Samuel Gorton , by Adelos Gorton . He fought like a fiend for the helpless and oppressed , worked for the abolition of slavery , helped the Quakers and Indians , and worked against the prosecution of witches . He defied the Boston hierarchy , and after they sent a small army to get him he befuddled the court , including John Cotton , with one of the most complicated religious discourses ever heard . 
Samuel Gorton was born at Gorton , England , near the present city of Manchester , about 1592 . Although he did not attend any celebrated schools or universities , he was a master of Greek and Hebrew and could read the Bible in the original . He worked as a " clothier " in London , but was greatly concerned with religion . 
Gorton left England , he said , " to enjoy libertie of conscience in respect to faith towards God , and for no other end " . With his wife and three or more children he arrived in Boston in March , 1637 , and soon found it was no place for anyone looking for liberty of conscience . Roger Williams had recently been thrown out , and Anne Hutchinson and her Antinomians were slugging it out with the powers-that-be . Gorton and his family moved to Plymouth . 
Soon he was in trouble there , for defending a woman who was accused of smiling in church . She was Ellen Aldridge , a widow of good repute who was employed by Gorton 's wife and lived with the family . The report was : " 
It had been whispered privately that she had smiled in the congregation , and the Governor Prence sent to knoe her business , and command , after punishment as the bench see fit , her departure and also anyone who brought her " to the place from which she came " " . Gorton said they were preparing to deport her as a vagabond , and to escape the shame she fled to the woods for several days , returning at night . He advised the poor woman not to appear in court as what she was charged with was not in violation of law . Gorton appeared for her , however , and what he told the magistrates must have been plenty , for he was charged with deluding the court , fined , and told to leave the colony within fourteen days . He left in a storm for Pocasset , December 4 , 1638 . His wife was in delicate health and nursing an infant with measles . 
The unconquerable Mrs. Hutchinson was residing at Pocasset , after having been excommunicated by the Boston church and thrown out of the colony . One can imagine that with her and Gorton there it was no place for anyone with weak nerves . William Coddington , who was running the colony , felt constrained to move seven miles south where , with others — as mentioned above — he founded Newport . When , in March , 1640 , the two towns were united under Coddington , Gorton claimed the union was irregular and illegally constituted and that it had never been sanctioned by the majority of freeholders . 
Then he became involved in a ruckus remarkably similar to the one in Plymouth . A cow owned by an old woman trespassed on Gorton 's land . While driving the cow back home the woman was assaulted by a servant maid of Gorton . The old woman complained to the deputy governor , who ordered the servant brought before the court . Gorton reverted to his Plymouth tactics , refused to let her go , and appeared himself before the Portsmouth grand jury . During the trial he told off the jury , called them " Just Asses " and called a freeman " a saucy boy and Jack-an-Apes " . He was jailed and banished . 
Gorton then moved to Providence and soon put the town in a turmoil . He held that no group of colonists could set up or maintain a government without royal sanction . Since Rhode Island at that time did not have such sanction , his opinion was not popular . Roger Williams wrote his friend Winthrop as follows : " 
Master Gorton , having foully abused high and low at Aquidneck is now bewitching and bemaddening poor Providence , both with his unclean and foul censures of all the ministers of this country ( for which myself have in Christ 's name withstood him ) , and also denying all visible and external ordinances in depth of Familism : almost all suck in his poison , as at first they did at Aquidneck . Some few and myself withstand his inhabitation and town privileges , without confession and reformation of his uncivil and inhuman practices at Portsmouth ; yet the tide is too strong against us , and I fear ( if the framer of hearts help not ) it will force me to little Patience , a little isle next to your Prudence " . Williams also stated : " Our peace was like the peace of a man who hath the tertian ague " . 
Providence finally managed to get Gorton out of the town , and he and some friends bought land at Pawtuxet on the west side of Narragansett Bay , five miles south but still within the jurisdiction of the Providence colony . This town should not be confused with Pawtucket , just north of Providence , or Pawcatuck , Connecticut , on the Pawcatuck River , opposite Westerly , Rhode Island . 
Up to now , Gorton had been looking for trouble , and now that he was trying to get away from it , trouble started looking for him . Upon intelligence that the formidable agitator was to favor them with his presence , the benighted inhabitants of Pawtuxet , alas , gave their allegiance to Massachusetts and asked that colony to expel the newcomers . As it was the custom of that alert colony to take over the property of persons asking for protection , this was an act roughly equivalent to throwing open the door to a pack of wolves and saying " Come and get it " . 
Gorton and company , however , promptly bought land from Miantonomi a few miles south of Pawtuxet , extending from the present Gaspee Point south to Warwick Neck and twenty miles inland . The settlement was called Shawomet . It was not within the jurisdiction of anybody or anything , including Providence and Massachusetts . If Gorton wanted peace and quiet for his complicated meditations this is where he should have had it . Instead of that he was engulfed by bedlam . 
Pomham and Soconoco , a couple of minor sachems ( of something less than exalted character ) under Miantonomi , declared that they had never assented to the sale of land to Gorton and had never received anything for it . Following the glorious lead of the heroes of Pawtuxet , they also submitted themselves to the protection of Massachusetts . One historical authority presents laborious and circuitous testimony tending to arouse suspicion that Massachusetts was behind the clouds settling down on the embattled Gorton . 
However , the General Court at Boston ordered the purchasers of Shawomet to appear before them to answer the sachems ' claim . The purchasers rejected the order in two letters written in vigorous terms . Then Massachusetts switched to its standard tactics . It pointed out twenty-six instances of blasphemy in the letters , and ordered the writers to submit or force of arms would be used . The next week , forty soldiers were sent to get the miscreants . The latter tried to arbitrate through a delegation from Providence , which offer was declined by the invaders . The Commissioners at Boston wrote the victims to see their misdeeds and repent or they should " look upon them as men prepared for slaughter " . 
At Shawomet , women and children fled in terror across the Bay . The men fortified a blockhouse and got ready to fight , but meanwhile appealed to the King and again tried to arbitrate . Gorton evidently still had plenty to learn about Massachusetts , but he was learning fast . Governor Winthrop wrote : " 
You may do well to take notice , that besides the title to land between the English and the Indians there , there are twelve of the English that have subscribed their names to horrible and detestable blasphemies , who are rather to be judged as blasphemous than they should delude us by winning time under pretence of arbitration " . 
The attack started on October 2 , 1643 , and the Gortonists held out for a day and a night . The attackers sent for more soldiers , and the defenders , to save bloodshed , surrendered under the promise that they would be treated as neighbors . Promptly their livestock was taken and according to Gorton the soldiers were ordered to knock down anyone who should utter a word of insolence , and run through anyone who might step out of line . 
When the captives arrived in Boston , " the chaplain [ of their captors ] went to prayers in the open streets , that the people might take notice what they had done in a holy manner , and in the name of the Lord " . Gorton and ten of his friends were thrown in jail . 
On Sunday they refused to attend church . The magistrates were determined to compel them . The prisoners agreed , provided they might speak after the sermon , which was permitted . Here was Gorton 's chance to indulge in something at which he was supreme . The Boston elders were great at befuddling the opposition with torrents of ecclesiastical obscurities , but Gorton was better . Reverend Cotton preached to them about Demetrius and the shrines of Ephesus . Gorton replied with blasts that scandalized the congregation . 
At the trial which took place later , the Pomham matter was completely omitted . The Gortonists were charged with blasphemy and tried for their lives . Four ecclesiastical questions were presented by the General Court to Gorton : "  1 .  
Whether the Fathers , who died before Christ was born of the Virgin Mary , were justified and saved only by the blood which hee shed , and the death which hee suffered after his incarnation ?  2 .  
Whether the only price of our redemption were not the death of Christ on the cross , with the rest of his sufferings and obediences , in the time of his life here , after hee was born of the Virgin Mary ?  3 .  
Who was the God whom hee thinke we serve ?  4 .  
What hee means when hee saith , wee worship the starre of our God Remphan , Chion , Moloch " ? 
Gorton answered in writing . All of the elders except three voted for death , but a majority of the deputies refused to sanction the sentence . Seven of the prisoners were sentenced to be confined in irons for as long as it pleased the court , set to work and , if they broke jail or proclaimed heresy , to be executed if convicted . The three others got off easier . The convicts were put in chains , paraded before the congregation at the Reverend Cotton 's lecture as an example , and sent to prisons in various towns , where they languished all winter , chains included .  When Fred wheeled him back into his room , the big one looking out on the back porch , and put him to bed , Papa told him he was very tired but that he had enjoyed greatly the trip downtown . " I 've been cooped up so long " , he added . Getting out again , seeing old friends , had given his spirits a lift . 
That night after supper I went back over to 48 Spruce Street — Ralph and I at that time were living at 168 Chestnut — and Ralph went with me . Papa was still elated over his afternoon visit downtown . " Baby , I saw a lot of old friends I had n't seen in a long time " , he told me , his eyes bright . " It was mighty good for the old man to get out again " . 
The next day he seemed to be in fairly good shape and still in excellent spirits . But a few days after Fred 's return he began hemorrhaging and that was the beginning of early and complete disintegration . It began in the morning , and very quickly the hemorrhage was a massive one . We got Dr. Glenn to him as quickly as we could , and we wired Tom of Papa 's desperate condition . The hemorrhage was in the prostate region ; Dr. Glenn saw at once what had happened . 
" He has lost much blood " , he said . " It 'll take a lot to replace it " . 
" Dr. Glenn , I 've got a lot of blood " , Fred spoke up , " plenty of it . Let me give Papa blood " . 
The doctor agreed , but explained that it would be necessary first to check Fred 's blood to ascertain whether or not it was of the same type as Papa 's . To give a patient the wrong type of blood , said the doctor , would likely kill him . 
That was in the days before blood banks , of course , and transfusions had to be given directly from donor to patient . One had to find a donor , and usually very quickly , whose blood corresponded with the patient 's . And then it took considerably longer to make preparations for giving transfusions . They had to take blood samples to the laboratory to test them , for one thing , and there was much required preliminary procedure . 
They made the tests and came to Fred ; by now it was perhaps two days or longer after Papa had begun hemorrhaging . 
" Fred , your blood matches your father 's , all right " , Dr. Glenn said . " But we are n't going to let you give him any " . 
" But why in the name of God ca n't I give my father blood " ? Fred demanded . " Why ca n't I , Doctor " ? 
" Because , Fred , it could do him no good . It 's too late now . He 's past helping . He 's as good as gone " . 
And in a few minutes Papa was dead . It was well past midnight . Papa had left us about the same hour of the night that Ben had passed on . The date was June 20 , 1922 . 
" W. O. Wolfe , prominent business man and pioneer resident of this section , died shortly after midnight Tuesday at his home 48 Spruce Street " , the Asheville Times of Wednesday , June 21 , announced . " Mr. Wolfe had been in declining health for many years and death was not unexpected " . A biographical sketch followed . 
Funeral services were held Thursday afternoon at four o'clock at the home . Beloved Dr. R. F. Campbell , our First Presbyterian Church pastor , was in charge . The burial was out in Riverside Cemetery . All about him stood tombstones his own sensitive great hands had fashioned . 
A few years before his death Papa had agreed with Mama to make a joint will with her in which it would be provided that in the event of the death of either of them an accounting would be made to their children whereby each child would receive a bequest of $5000 cash . At his death Fred and Ralph , my husband , were named executors of the estate under the terms of the will . 
Fred and Ralph qualified as executors and paid off what debts were currently due , and they were all current , since Papa was never one to allow bills to go unpaid . The bills were principally for hospitalization and doctors ' fees during the last years of his life , and when he died he owed in the main only current doctor 's bills . After they had paid all his debts and the funeral costs , Ralph and Fred had some fourteen thousand dollars , as I remember , with which to pay the bequests . This , manifestly , would not provide $5000 to each of the surviving five children . 
So what Fred and Ralph did was to attempt to prorate the money fairly by taking into account what each of the five had received , if anything , from the estate before Papa 's death . Consequently , Fred and Tom , the two who had been provided college educations , signed statements to the effect that each had received his bequest in full , and Effie and I were each allotted $5000 . Frank had been given about half his legacy to use in a business venture before Papa 's death ; he was given the difference between that amount and $5000 . Tom had received four years of education at the University of North Carolina and two at Harvard , and Fred had been in and out of Georgia Tech and Carneigie Tech and part of the time had been a self-help student . So , because he had received less than Tom , it was felt proper that Fred should receive the few hundred dollars that remained . And that 's how Papa 's estate was divided . 
Papa , I should emphasize , had been an invalid the last several years of his life ; his hospital and doctor bills had been large and his income had been cut until he was receiving little except small rentals on some properties he still owned . Had he been able to escape this long siege of invalidism , I 'm convinced , Papa would have left a sizable estate . But he had succeeded well , we agreed . He had left us a legacy far more valuable than houses and lands and stocks and bonds . 
For years Papa and Mama had been large taxpayers . I recall that several years their taxes exceeded $800 . In those years of lower property valuations and lower tax rates , that payment represented ownership of much property . 
" Merciful God , Julia " ! I have known Papa to exclaim on getting his tax bill , " we 're going to the dogs " ! 
But he never expected to do that . And he did n't , by a long shot !  35 .  In the spring of his second year at Harvard , Tom had been offered a job at Northwestern University as an instructor in the English Department . But he had delayed accepting this job , and as he was leaving to come home to Papa in response to our telegram , he dropped a postcard to Miss McCrady , head of the Harvard Appointment Office , asking her please to write Northwestern authorities and explain the circumstances . 
Actually Tom had been postponing giving them an answer , I 'm confident , because he did not want to go out there to teach . In fact , he did n't want to teach anywhere . He wanted to go back to Harvard for another year of playwriting . But Papa 's death had further complicated the financing of Tom 's hoped-for third year , and for the weeks following it Tom did not know whether his return to Harvard could be arranged . 
But things were worked out in the family and late in August he wrote Miss McCrady an explanatory letter in which he told her that matters at home had been in an unsettled condition after Papa 's death and he had not known whether he would stay at home with Mama , accept the Northwestern job , or return to Harvard . But he was happy to tell her that his finances were now in such condition that he could go back to Harvard for a third year with Professor Baker . 
And that 's what he did . That third year he wrote plays with a fury . I believe there are seventeen short plays by Tom now housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard ; I think I 'm right in that figure . That fall he submitted to Professor Baker the first acts and outlines of the following acts of several plays , six of them , according to some of his associates , and he also worked on a play that he first called Niggertown , the material for which he had collected during the summer at home . Later this play would be called Welcome to Our City . In the spring , it must have been , he began working on the play that he called The House , which later would be Mannerhouse . That spring Welcome to Our City was selected for production by the 47 Workshop and it was staged in the middle of May . It ran two nights , and though it was generally praised , there was considerable criticism of its length . It ran until past one o'clock . That was Tom 's weakness ; it was demonstrated , many critics would later point out , in the length of his novels . In this play there were so many characters and so much detail . Tom never knew how to condense , to boil down . He was always concerned with life , and he tried to picture it whole ; he wanted nothing compressed , tight . He was a big man , and he wanted nothing little , squeezed ; he despised parsimony , and particularly of words . In this play there were some thirty or more named characters and I do n't know how many more unnamed . In describing it to Professor Baker after it had been chosen for production , he defended his great array of characters by declaring that he had included that many not because " I did n't know how to save paint " , but because the play required them . And he threatened someday to write a play " with fifty , eighty , a hundred people — a whole town , a whole race , a whole epoch " . He said he would do it , though probably nobody would produce it , for his own " soul 's ease and comfort " . 
That summer Tom attended the summer session at Harvard , but he did not ask Mama to send him back in the fall . Instead , he went down to New York and submitted Welcome to Our City to the Theatre Guild , which had asked him to let them have a look at it after Professor Baker had recommended it highly . He hung around New York , waiting to hear whether they would accept it for production and in that time came down to Asheville and also paid a short visit to Chapel Hill , where with almost childish delight he visited old friends and favorite campus spots . On returning to New York he had a job for several weeks ; it was visiting University of North Carolina alumni in New York to ask them for contributions to the Graham Memorial Building fund . The Graham Memorial would be the campus student union honoring the late and much beloved Edward Kidder Graham , who had been president when Tom entered the university . 
Well , the Theatre Guild kept that play , and kept it , and finally in December they turned it down . But they would reconsider it , they assured him , if he would rewrite it . Tom told me about it , how one evening he went over to see the Theatre Guild man . This man , Tom said , had the play shut up in his desk , I believe , and when Tom sat down , he pulled it out and apologetically told Tom that they would n't be able to use it . 
Tom said he almost burst into tears , he was so disappointed and put out . The man , Tom said , explained that it was not only too long and detailed but that as it stood it was n't the sort of thing the public wanted . The public , Tom said the man told him , wanted realism , and his play was n't that . It was fantastic writing , beautiful writing , the man declared , but the public , he insisted , wanted realism . 
Tom was not willing to revise the play according to the plan the man suggested . Such a revision , he said , would ruin it , would change his whole conception of the play as well as the treatment . He thought about it and he told the man he just could n't do it over in accordance with the suggestions he had made .    It was not until we had returned to the city to live , while I was still at Brown and Sharpe 's , that I felt the full impact of evangelical Christianity . I came under the spell of a younger group in the church led by the pastor 's older son . The spirit of this group was that we were — and are — living in a world doomed to eternal punishment , but that God through Jesus Christ has provided a way of escape for those who confess their sins and accept salvation . 
There are millions who accept this doctrine , but few indeed are those who accept it so truly that the fate of humanity lies as a weight on their souls night and day . This group in Park Place Church was made up of the earnest few . I was drawn deeper and deeper into these concerns and responsibilities . I engaged more and more in religious activities . Besides Church and Sunday School I went to out-of-door meetings on the sidewalk at the church door . I went to an afternoon service at the YMCA . I went to the Christian Endeavor Society and to the evening service of the church . Much of this lacked the active support of the pastor . The young people were self-energizing , and I was energized . Once or twice my father asked me if I was n't overdoing a bit in my churchgoing . 
Meanwhile I myself was not yet saved . At least I had been unable to lay hold on the experience of conversion . Try as I might to confess my sins and accept salvation , no answer came to me from heaven . Finally , after years , I gave up . 
The basic difficulty , I suppose , was in my ultimate inability to feel a burden of sin from which I sought relief . I was familiar with Pilgrim 's Progress , which I read as literature . No load of sin had been laid on my shoulders , nor did earnest effort enable me to become conscious of one . 
There is , of course , the doctrine of original sin , which asserts that each of us as individuals partakes of the guilt of our first ancestor . In the rhyming catechism this doctrine is worded thus : " In Adam 's fall We sin-ned all " . 
This doctrine was repugnant to my moral sense . I did not feel it presumptuous to expect that the Creator would be at least as just as the most righteous of His creatures ; and the doctrine of original sin is compounded of injustice . 
Some of these thoughts — not all of them — have taken organized form in later years . The actual impelling force which severed me from evangelical effort was of another sort . I became disgusted at being so preoccupied with the state of my own miserable soul . I found myself becoming one of that group of people who , in Carlyle 's words , " are forever gazing into their own navels , anxiously asking 'Am I right , am I wrong' " ? I bethought me of the Lord 's Prayer , and these words came to mind : " Thy kingdom come , Thy will be done , on earth as it is in heaven " . They have remained on the opened page of my mind in all the years which since have passed . From that time to this my religious concern is that I might give effective help to the bringing in of God 's kingdom on earth . 
I do not claim to be free from sin , or from the need for repentance and forgiveness . In my experience the assurance of forgiveness comes only when I have confessed to the wronged one and have made as full reparation as I can devise .   There was one further step in my religious progress . This was taken after I came to live in Springfield , and it was made under the guidance of the Reverend Raymond Beardslee , a young preacher who came to the Congregational Church there at about the same time that I moved from New York . His father was a professor at Hartford Theological Seminary , and from him he acquired a conviction , which he passed along to me , that there is in the universe of persons a moral law , the law of love , which is a natural law in the same sense as is the physical law . 
It is most important that we recognize the law of love as being unbreakable in all personal relationships , whether individually , socially or as between whole nations of people . If obeyed , the law brings order and satisfaction . If disobeyed , the result is turmoil and chaos . 
As we observe moral law and physical law they appear as being inevitable . We can conceive of no alternatives . Their basis seems deeper than mere authority . They are not true because scientists or prophets say they are true . It is not the authority of God Himself which makes them true . Because God is what He is , the laws of the universe , material and spiritual , are what they are . Deity and Law are one and inseparable . 
With this conviction , the partition between the sacred and the secular disappears . One 's daily work becomes sacred , since it is performed in the field of influence of the moral law , dealing as it does with people as well as with matter and energy . 
In his book Civilization and Ethics Albert Schweitzer faces the moral problems which arise when moral law is recognized in business life , for example . His Ethics defines " possessions as the property of the community , of which the individual is sovereign steward . One serves society by conducting a business from which a certain number of employees draw their means of subsistence ; another by giving away his property in order to help his fellow man . Each will decide on his own course somewhere between these two extreme cases according to the sense of responsibility which is determined for him by the particular circumstances of his own life . No one is to judge others " . 
He is uncompromising in assigning guilt to the man who finds it necessary to inflict or permit injury to one individual or group for the sake of a larger good . For this decision a man must take personal responsibility . Says he , " I may never imagine that in the struggle between personal and supra-personal responsibility it is possible to make a compromise between the ethical and the purposive in the shape of a relative ethic ; or to let the ethical be superseded by the purposive . On the contrary it is my duty to make my own decision as between the two " . 
Schweitzer seems , in fact , to acquire for himself a burden of sin , not bequeathed by Adam , but accumulated in the inevitable judgments which life requires of him as between greater and lesser responsibilities . This viewpoint I find interesting , but it has never weighed on my soul . Perhaps it should have . My own experience has followed simpler lines . 
An uncompromising belief in the moral law has the advantage of making religion natural , even as physical law is natural . Neither the engineer nor the ordinary citizen feels any self-consciousness in obeying the laws of matter and energy , nor can he achieve a sense of self-righteousness in such obedience . To obey the moral law is just ordinary common sense , applied to a neglected field . Religion thus becomes integrated with life . 
This truth that the moral law is natural has other important corollaries . One of them is that it gives meaning and purpose to life . In seeking for such meaning and purpose , Albert Schweitzer seized upon the concept of the " sacredness of life " . It is puzzling to the occidental mind ( to mine at least ) to assign " sacredness " to animal , insect , and plant life . These lives are in themselves outside of the moral order and are unburdened with moral responsibility . There is indeed a moral responsibility on man himself , for his own soul 's sake , to respect lower life and to avoid the infliction of suffering , but this viewpoint Schweitzer rejects . 
So far as " sacredness " inheres in any aspect of creation it seems to me to be found in human personality , whether in Lambarene , Africa , or in Washington , D.C. One can not read the records of scientists , officials and travelers who have penetrated to the minds of the most savage races without realizing that each individual met with is a person . Read , for instance , in Malcolm MacDonald 's Borneo People of Segura and her wise father Tomonggong Koh , and her final adjustment to encroaching civilization . Above all read in Jens Bjerre 's The Last Cannibals how the old man of the Wailbri tribe ( not cannibals ) in central Australia gave to the white man his choicest possession , while the tears streamed down his face . The Australian aborigine is the conventional exemplar of degraded humanity ; yet here was a depth of sensibility which is lacking in a considerable portion of the beneficiaries of our civilization . 
Persons , whether white , black , brown or yellow , are a concern of God . Respect for personality is a privilege and a duty for us as brothers . 
Such is the field for exercising our reverence . As to our action , let us align ourselves with the purpose expressed by Jesus in the Lord 's Prayer : " Thy kingdom come , Thy will be done , on earth as it is in heaven " . With the knowledge that the kingdom comes by obedience to the moral law in our relations with all people , we have a firm intellectual grasp on both the means and the ends of our lives . 
This intellectual approach to spiritual life suited me well , because I was never content to lead a divided life . As I have said , words from Tennyson remain ever in my memory : " That mind and soul , according well , May make one music as before " . 
Let us now give some thought to the soul . When the young biologist , Dr. Ballard , began to show interest in our daughter Elizabeth , this induced a corresponding interest , on our part , in him . I asked one day what he was doing . He told me that he had a big newt and a little newt and that he was transplanting a big eye of the big newt onto the little newt and a little eye of the little newt onto the big newt . He was then noting that the big eye on the little newt hung back until the little eye had grown up to it , while the little eye on the big newt grew rapidly until it was as big as the other . Then I asked , " What does that teach you " ? Said he , " It teaches me to wonder " . 
This was a profound statement . In the face of the unfolding universe , our ultimate attitude is that of wonder . Wonder is indeed the intellectual gateway to the spiritual world . 
Gone are the days when , in the nineteenth century , scientists thought that they were close to the attainment of complete knowledge of the physical universe . For them only a little more needed to be learned , and then all physical knowledge could be neatly sorted , packaged and put in the inventory to be drawn on for the solution of any human problem . 
This complacency was blown to bits by the relativity of Einstein , the revelation of the complex anatomy of the atom and the discovery of the expanding universe . None of these discoveries were neatly rounded off bits of knowledge . Each faded out into the unexplored areas of the future . 
It is as if we , in our center of human observation , from time to time penetrate more deeply into the unknown . As our radius of penetration , R , increases , the area of new knowledge increases by **f , and the total of human knowledge becomes measured in terms of **f . Wonder grows . It is endless . 
There are some people , intelligent people , who seem to be untouched by the sea of wonder in which we are immersed and in which we spend our lives . One such is Abraham Meyer , the writer of a recent book , Speaking of Man . This is a straightforward denial of the spiritual world and a vigorous defense of pure materialism . His inability to wonder vitiates his argument . 
The subject of immortality brings to mind a vivid incident which took place in 1929 at Montreux in Switzerland .  
Criticism is as old as literary art and we can set the stage for our study of three moderns if we see how certain critics in the past have dealt with the ethical aspects of literature . I have chosen five contrasting pairs , ten men in all , and they are arranged in roughly chronological order . Such a list must naturally be selective , and the treatment of each man is brief , for I am interested only in their general ideas on the moral measure of literature . Altogether , the list will give us considerable variety in attitudes and some typical ones , for these critics range all the way from censors to those who consider art above ethics , all the way from Plato to Poe . And most of the great periods are represented , because we will compare Plato and Aristotle from the golden age of Greece ; Stephen Gosson and Sir Philip Sidney from renaissance England ; Dr. Johnson and William Hazlitt of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England ; and James Russell Lowell and Edgar Allan Poe of nineteenth century American letters .  PLATO AND ARISTOTLE  Plato and Aristotle agree on some vital literary issues . They both measure literature by moral standards , and in their political writings both allow for censorship , but the differences between them are also significant . While Aristotle censors literature only for the young , Plato would banish all poets from his ideal state . Even more important , in his Poetics , Aristotle differs somewhat from Plato when he moves in the direction of treating literature as a unique thing , separate and apart from its causes and its effects . 
All through The Republic , Plato attends to the way art relates to the general life and ultimately to a good life for his citizens . In short , he is constantly concerned with the ethical effects . When he discusses the subject matter of poetry , he asks what moral effect the scenes will have . When he turns briefly to literary style , in the Third Book , he again looks to the effect on the audience . He explains that his citizens must not be corrupted by any of the misrepresentations of the gods or heroes that one finds in much poetry , and he observes that all " these pantomimic gentlemen " will be sent to another state . Only those story tellers will remain who can " imitate the style of the virtuous " . 
Plato is , at times , just as suspicious of the poets themselves as he is of their work . When he discusses tyrants in the Eighth Book of The Republic , he pictures the poets as willing to praise the worst rulers . But the most fundamental objection he has to poets appears in the Tenth Book , and it is derived from his doctrine of ideal forms . In Plato 's mind there is an irresolvable conflict between the poet and the philosopher , because the poet imitates only particular objects and is incapable of rising to the first level of abstraction , much less the highest level of ideal forms . True reality , of course , is the ideal , and the poet knows nothing of this ; only the philosopher knows the truth . 
Poets , moreover , dwell on human passions . And with this point about the passions , we encounter Plato 's dualism . The same sort of thinking plays so large a part in both Babbitt and More , that we must examine it in some detail . Plato feels that man has two competing aspects , his rational faculty and his irrational . We can be virtuous only if we control our lower natures , the passions in this case , and strengthen our rational side ; and poetry , with all its emphasis on the passions , encourages the audience to give way to emotion . For this reason , then , poetry tends to weaken the power of control , the reason , because it tempts one to indulge his passions , and even the best of men , he maintains , may be corrupted by this subtle influence . 
Plato 's attitude toward poetry has always been something of an enigma , because he is so completely sensitive to its charm . His whole objection , indeed , seems to rise out of a deep conviction that the poets do have great power to influence , but Plato seldom pays any attention to what might be called the poem itself . He is , rather , concerned with the effect on society and he wants the poets to join his fight for justice . He wants them to use their great power to strengthen man 's rational side , to teach virtue , and to encourage religion . 
While Plato finally allows a few acceptable hymns to the gods and famous men , still he clearly leaves the way open for further discussion of the issue . He even calls upon the poets to defend the Muse and to show that poetry may contribute to virtue . He says : " 
We may further grant to those of her [ Poetry 's ] defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets , the permission to speak in prose on her behalf : let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life , and we will listen in a kindly spirit ; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers — I mean , if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight " . 
When we turn to Aristotle 's ideas on the moral measure of literature , it is at once apparent that he is at times equally concerned about the influence of the art . In the ideal state , for instance , he argues that the young citizens should hear only the most carefully selected tales and stories . For this reason , he would banish indecent pictures and speeches from the stage ; and the young people should not even be permitted to see comedies till they are old enough to drink strong wine and sit at the public tables . By the time they reach that age , however , Aristotle no longer worries about the evil influence of comedies . 
In Aristotle 's analysis of tragedy in the Poetics , we find an attempt to isolate the art , to consider only those things proper to it , to discover how it differs from other arts , and to deal with the effects peculiar to it . He assures us , early in the Poetics , that all art is " imitation " and that all imitation gives pleasure , but he distinguishes between art in general and poetic art on the basis of the means , manner , and the objects of the imitation . Once the poetic arts are separated from the other forms , he lays down his famous definition of tragedy , which sets up standards and so lends direction to the remainder of the work . A tragedy , by his definition , is an imitation of an action that is serious , of a certain magnitude , and complete in itself . It should have a dramatic form with pleasing language , and it should portray incidents which so arouse pity and fear that it purges these emotions in the audience . Any tragedy , he maintains , has six elements : plot , character , and thought ( the objects of imitation ) , diction and melody ( the means of imitation ) , and spectacle ( the manner of imitation ) . Throughout the rest of the Poetics , Aristotle continues to discuss the characteristics of these six parts and their interrelationship , and he refers frequently to the standards suggested by his definition of tragedy . 
Aristotle 's method in the Poetics , then , does suggest that we should isolate the work . The Chicago contingent of modern critics follow Aristotle so far in this direction that it is hard to see how they can compare one poem with another for the purpose of evaluation . But there are , however , several features of Aristotle 's approach which open the way for the moral measure of literature . For one thing , Aristotle mentions that plays may corrupt the audience . In addition , his definition of a tragedy invites our attention , because a serious and important action may very well be one that tests the moral fiber of the author or of the characters . And there is one other point in the poetics that invites moral evaluation : Aristotle 's notion that the distinctive function of tragedy is to purge one 's emotions by arousing pity and fear . He rejects certain plots because they do not contribute to that end . The point is that an ethical critic , with an assist from Freud , can seize on this theory to argue that tragedy provides us with a harmless outlet for our hostile urges . In his study Samuel Johnson , Joseph Wood Krutch takes this line when he says that what Aristotle really means by his theory of catharsis is that our evil passions may be so purged by the dramatic ritual that it is " less likely that we shall indulge them through our own acts " . In Krutch 's view , this is one way to show how literature may be moral in effect without employing the explicit methods of a moralist . And we can add that Krutch 's interpretation of purgation is also one answer to Plato 's fear that poetry will encourage our passions . If Krutch is correct , tragedy may have quite the opposite effect . It may allay our passions and so restore the rule of reason . Or in more Freudian terms , the experience may serve to sublimate our destructive urges and strengthen the ego and superego .  GOSSON AND SIDNEY  The second half of the sixteenth century in England was the setting for a violent and long controversy over the moral quality of renaissance literature , especially the drama . No one suggested that the ethical effects of the art were irrelevant . Both sides agreed that the theater must stand a moral test , but they could not agree on whether the poets were a good or a bad influence . Both sides claimed that Plato and Aristotle supported their cause . Those who wanted to close the theaters , for example , pointed to Plato 's Republic and those who wished to keep them open called on the Plato of the Ion to testify in their behalf . 
The most famous document that comes out of this dispute is perhaps Sir Philip Sidney 's An Apologie for Poetrie , published in 1595 . Many students of literature know that classical defense . What is not so well known , however , and what is quite important for understanding the issues of this early quarrel , is the kind of attack on literature that Sidney was answering . For this reason , then I want to describe , first , two examples of the puritanical attacks : Stephen Gosson 's The School of Abuse , 1579 , and his later Playes Confuted , published in 1582 . Second , we will see how Sidney answered the charges , for while Sidney 's essay was not specifically a reply to Gosson , his arguments do support the new theater . 
According to William Ringler 's study , Stephen Gosson , the theater business in London had become a thriving enterprise by 1577 , and , in the opinion of many , a thoroughly bad business . Aroused by what they considered an evil influence , some members of the clergy , joined by city authorities , merchants , and master craftsmen , began the attack on the plays and the actors for what they called " the abuses of the art " , but by 1582 some of them began to denounce the whole idea of acting . Although this kind of wholesale objection came at first from some men who were not technically Puritans , still , once the Puritans gained power , they climaxed the affair by passing the infamous ordinance of 1642 which decreed that all " public stage-plays shall cease and be forborne " . With that act of Parliament the opponents of the stage won the day , and for more than two decades after that England had no legitimate public drama . 
In the early days of this controversy over the theater one of the interested parties , Stephen Gosson , published a little tract in which he objected mildly to the abuses of art , rather than the art itself . But his opposition hardened and by 1579 , in The School of Abuse , he was ready to banish all " players " . He advises women to beware " of those places which in sorrows cheere you and beguile you in mirth " . He does not really approve of levity and laughter , but sex is the deadly sin . He warns that a single glance can lead us into temptation , for " Looking eies have lyking hartes , and lyking hartes may burne in lust " .  
But it would not be very satisfactory to leave our conclusions at the point just reached . fortunately , it is possible to be somewhat more concrete and factual in diagnosing the involvement of values in education . For this purpose we now draw upon data from sociological and psychological studies of students in American colleges and universities , and particularly from the Cornell Values Studies . In the latter research program , information is available for 2,758 Cornell students surveyed in 1950 and for 1,571 students surveyed in 1952 . Of the latter sample , 944 persons had been studied two years earlier ; hence changes in attitudes and values can be analyzed for identical individuals at two points in time . In addition , the 1952 study collected comparable data from 4,585 students at ten other colleges and universities scattered across the country : Dartmouth , Harvard , Yale , Wesleyan , North Carolina , Fisk , Texas , University of California at Los Angeles , Wayne , and Michigan . 
We find , in the first place , that the students overwhelmingly approve of higher education , positively evaluate the job their own institution is doing , do not accept most of the criticisms levelled against higher education in the public prints , and , on the whole , approve of the way their university deals with value-problems and value inculcation . It is not our impression that these evaluations are naively uncritical resultants of blissful ignorance ; rather , the generality of these students find their university experience congenial to their own sense of values . 
Students are approximately equally divided between those who regard vocational preparation as the primary goal of an ideal education and those who chose a general liberal education . Other conceivable goals , such as character-education and social adjustment , are of secondary importance to them . The ideal of a liberal education impresses itself upon the students more and more as they move through college . Even in such technical curricula as engineering , the senior is much more likely than the freshman to choose , as an ideal , liberal education over specific vocational preparation . In the university milieu of scholarship and research , of social diversity , of new ideas and varied and wide-ranging interests , " socialization " into a campus culture apparently means heightened appreciation of the idea of a liberal education in the arts and sciences . 
Students ' choices of ideal educational goals are not arbitrary or whimsical . There is a clear relationship between their educational evaluations and their basic pattern of general values . The selective and directional qualities of basic value-orientations are clearly evident in these data : the " success-oriented " students choose vocational preparation , the " other-directed " choose goals of social adjustment ( " getting along with people " ) , the " intellectuals " choose a liberal arts emphasis . 
The same patterned consistency shows itself in occupational choices . There is impressive consistency between specific occupational preferences and the student 's basic conception of what is for him a good way of life . And , contrary to many popular assertions , the goal-values chosen do not seem to us to be primarily oriented to materialistic success nor to mere conformity . Our students want occupations that permit them to use their talents and training , to be creative and original , to work with and to help other people . They also want money , prestige , and security . But they are optimistic about their prospects in these regards ; they set limits to their aspirations — few aspire to millions of dollars or to " imperial " power and glory . Within the fixed frame of these aspirations , they can afford to place a high value on the expressive and people-oriented aspects of occupation and to minimize the instrumental-reward values of power , prestige , and wealth . 
Occupational choices are also useful — and interesting — in bringing out clearly that values do not constitute the only component in goals and aspirations . For there is also the " face of reality " in the form of the individual 's perceptions of his own abilities and interests , of the objective possibilities open to him , of the familial and other social pressures to which he is exposed . We find " reluctant recruits " whose values are not in line with their expected occupation 's characteristics . Students develop occupational images — not always accurate or detailed — and they try to fit their values to the presumed characteristics of the imagined occupation . The purely cognitive or informational problems are often acute . Furthermore , many reluctant recruits are yielding to social demands , or compromising in the face of their own limitations of opportunity , or of ability and performance . Thus , many a creativity-oriented aspirant for a career in architecture , drama , or journalism , resigns himself to a real estate business ; many a people-oriented student who dreams of the M.D. decides to enter his father 's advertising agency ; and many a hopeful incipient business executive decides it were better to teach the theory of business administration than to practice it . The old ideal of the independent entrepreneur is extant — but so is the recognition that the main chance may be in a corporate bureaucracy . 
In their views on dating , courtship , sex , and family life , our students prefer what they are expected to prefer . For them , in the grim words of a once-popular song , love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage . Their expressed standards concerning sex roles , desirable age for marriage , characteristics of an ideal mate , number of children desired are congruent with the values and stereotypes of the preceding generation — minus compulsive rebellion . They even accept the " double standard " of sex morality in a double sense , i.e. , both sexes agree that standards for men differ from standards for women , and women apply to both sexes a standard different from that held by men . 
" Conservatism " and " traditionalism " seem implied by what has just been said . But these terms are treacherous . In the field of political values , it is certainly true that students are not radical , not rebels against their parents or their peers . And as they go through college , the students tend to bring their political position in line with that prevalent in the social groups to which they belong . Yet they have accepted most of the extant " welfare state " provisions for health , security , and the regulation of economic affairs , and they overwhelmingly approve of the traditional " liberalism " of the Bill of Rights . When their faith in civil liberties is tested against strong pressures of social expediency in specific issues , e.g. , suppression of " dangerous ideas " , many waver and give in . The students who are most willing to acquiesce in the suppression of civil liberties are also those who are most likely to be prejudiced against minority groups , to be conformist and traditionalistic in general social attitudes , and to lack a basic faith in people . 
As one looks at the existing evidence , one finds a correlation , although only a slight one , between high grades and " libertarian " values . But the correlation is substantial only among upperclassmen . In other words , as students go through college , those who are most successful academically tend to become more committed to a " Bill of Rights " orientation . College in gross — just the general experience — may have varying effects , but the the students who are successful emerge with strengthened and clarified democratic values . This finding is consistent also with the fact that student leaders are more likely to be supporters of the values implicit in civil liberties than the other students . 
There is now substantial evidence from several major studies of college students that the experience of the college years results in a certain , selective homogenization of attitudes and values . Detached from their prior statuses and social groups and exposed to the pervasive stimuli of the university milieu , the students tend to assimilate a new common culture , to converge toward norms characteristic of their own particular campus . Furthermore , in certain respects , there are norms common to colleges and universities across the country . For instance , college-educated people consistently show up in study after study as more often than others supporters of the Bill of Rights and other democratic rights and liberties . The interesting thing in this connection is that the norms upon which students tend to converge include toleration of diversity . 
To the extent that our sampling of the orientations of American college students in the years 1950 and 1952 may be representative of our culture — and still valid in 1959 — we are disposed to question the summary characterization of the current generation as silent , beat , apathetic , or as a mass of other-directed conformists who are guided solely by social radar without benefit of inner gyroscopes . Our data indicate that these students of today do basically accept the existing institutions of the society , and , in the face of the realities of complex and large-scale economic and political problems , make a wary and ambivalent delegation of trust to those who occupy positions of legitimized responsibility for coping with such collective concerns . In a real sense they are admittedly conservative , but their conservatism incorporates a traditionalized embodiment of the original " radicalism " of 1776 . Although we have no measures of its strength or intensity , the heritage of the doctrine of inalienable rights is retained . As they move through the college years our young men and women are " socialized " into a broadly similar culture , at the level of personal behavior . In this sense also , they are surely conformists . It is even true that some among them use the sheer fact of conformity — " everyone does it " — as a criterion for conduct . But the extent of ethical robotism is easily overestimated . Few students are really so faceless in the not-so-lonely crowd of the swelling population in our institutions of higher learning . And it may be well to recall that to say " conformity " is , in part , another way of saying " orderly human society " . 
In the field of religious beliefs and values , the college students seem to faithfully reflect the surrounding culture . Their commitments are , for the most part , couched in a familiar idiom . Students testify to a felt need for a religious faith or ultimate personal philosophy . Avowed atheists or freethinkers are so rare as to be a curiosity . The religious quest is often intense and deep , and there are students on every campus who are seriously wrestling with the most profound questions of meaning and value . At the same time , a major proportion of these young men and women see religion as a means of personal adjustment , an anchor for family life , a source of emotional security . These personal and social goals often overshadow the goals of intellectual clarity , and spiritual transcendence . The " cult of adjustment " does exist . It exists alongside the acceptance of traditional forms of organized religion ( church , ordained personnel , ritual , dogma ) . Still another segment of the student population consists of those who seek , in what they regard as religion , intellectual clarity , rational belief , and ethical guidance and reinforcement . 
Our first impression of the data was that the students were surprisingly orthodox and religiously involved . Upon second thought we were forced to realize that we have very few reliable historical benchmarks against which we might compare the present situation , and that conclusions that present-day students are " more " or " less " religious could not be defended on the basis of our data . As we looked more intently at the content of our belief and the extent of religious participation , we received the impression that many of the religious convictions expressed represented a conventional acceptance , of low intensity . But , here again , comparative benchmarks are lacking , and we do not know , in any case , what measure of profoundity and intensity to expect from healthy , young , secure and relatively inexperienced persons ; after all , feelings of immortality and invulnerability are standard illusions of youth . Nor are optimistic and socially-oriented themes at all rare in the distinctive religious history of this country . 
Kluckhohn recently has summarized evidence regarding changes in values during a period of years , primarily 1935-1955 , but extending much farther back in some instances . A variety of data are assembled to bear upon such alleged changes as diminished puritan morality , work-success ethic , individualism , achievement , lessened emphasis on future-time orientation in favor of sociability , moral relativism , consideration and tolerance , conformity , hedonistic present-time orientation . Although he questions the extent and nature of the alleged revival of religion and the alleged increase in conformity , and thinks that " hedonistic " present-time orientation does not have the meaning usually attributed to it , he does conclude that Americans increasingly enjoy leisure without guilt , do not stress achievement so much as formerly , are more accepting of group harmony as a goal , more tolerant of diversity and aware of other cultures .  
From New Jersey , Morgan hastened to the headquarters of Washington at Whitemarsh , Pennsylvania , arriving there on November 18th . There was much sickness in the corps , and the men were , in addition , without the clothing , shoes , and blankets needed for the winter weather . Morgan himself had sciatica again . Even on his tough constitution , the exposure and strenuous activity were beginning to tell in earnest . 
On the morning of November 17th , Cornwallis and 2,000 men had left Philadelphia with the object of capturing Fort Mercer at Red Bank , New Jersey . In order to prevent this , Washington hastened to dispatch several units to reinforce the fort , including a force under the Marquis de Lafayette containing some 160 of Morgan 's riflemen , all who were fit for duty at this time , the rest having no shoes . Although the fort was evacuated in the face of the force of Cornwallis , Morgan and his men did have a chance to take another swing at the redcoats . A picket guard of about 350 , mostly Hessians , were attacked by the Americans under Lafayette , and driven back to their camp , some twenty to thirty of them falling before the riflemen 's fire . 
" I never saw men " , Lafayette declared in regard to the riflemen , " so merry , so spirited , and so desirous to go on to the enemy , whatever force they might have , as that small party in this fight " . Nathanael Greene told Washington that " Lafayette was charmed with the spirited behavior of the militia and riflemen " . 
A few days later it was learned that General Howe was planning an attack upon the American camp . The British general moved his forces north from Philadelphia to Chestnut Hill , near the right wing of the patriot encampment . Here the Pennsylvania militia skirmished with the British , but soon fled . Morgan was ordered to attack the enemy , who had meantime moved to Edge Hill on the left of the Americans . Similar orders were given to the Maryland militia . Morgan immediately disposed his troops for action and found he had not long to wait . A body of redcoats were seen marching down a nearby slope , a tempting target for the riflemen , who threw a volley into their ranks and " messed up " the smart formation considerably . Now the riflemen and the Marylanders followed up their beginning and closed in on the British , giving them another telling round of fire . The redcoats ran like rabbits . But the Maryland militia had likewise fled , all too typical of this type of soldier during the Revolution , an experience which gave Morgan little confidence in militia in general , as he watched other instances of their breaking in hot engagements . The British , although suffering considerable losses , noted the defection of the Marylanders , made a stand , then turned and attacked Morgan who became greatly outnumbered and had to retire . 
The Americans lost forty-four men , among them Major Joseph Morris of Morgan 's regiment , an officer who was regarded with high esteem and affection , not only by his commander , but by Washington and Lafayette as well . The latter was so upset on learning of the death of Morris , that he wrote Morgan a letter , showing his own warmhearted generosity . After complimenting Morgan and the riflemen and saying he was praising them to Congress , too , the ardent Frenchman added he felt that Congress should make some financial restitution to the widow and family of Morris , but that he knew Morgan realized how long such action usually required , if it was done at all . " As Mrs. Morris may be in some want before that time " , Lafayette continued , " I am going to trouble you with a commission which I beg you will execute with the greatest secrecy . If she wanted to borrow any sum of money in expecting the arrangements of Congress , it would not become a stranger , unknown to her , to offer himself for that purpose . But you could ( as from yourself ) tell her that you had friends who , being with the army , do n't know what to do with their money and … would willingly let her have one or many thousand dollars " . This was accordingly done , and the plight of the grateful Mrs. Morris was much relieved as a result of the generous loan , the amount of which is not known . 
Apparently still sensitive about the idea with which General Gates had approached him at Saratoga , namely , that George Washington be replaced , Morgan was vehement in his support of the commander-in-chief during the campaign around Philadelphia . Richard Peters , Secretary of the Board of War , thought Morgan was so extreme on the subject that he accused him of trying to pick a quarrel . Morgan hotly denied this and informed the Board of War that the men in camp linked the name of Peters with the plot against Washington . Peters insisted that this impression was a great misunderstanding , and evidently , from the quarrel , obtained an unfavorable impression of Morgan 's judgment . Such a situation regarding the Board of War could hardly have helped Morgan 's chances for promotion when that matter came before the group later on . 
In late December , the American army moved from Whitemarsh to Valley Forge , and although the distance was only 13 miles , the journey took more than a week because of the bad weather , the barefooted and almost naked men . The position of the new camp was admirably selected and well fortified , its easily defensible nature being one good reason why Howe did not attack it . Besides helping to prevent the movement of the British to the west , Valley Forge also obstructed the trade between Howe 's forces and the farmers , thus threatening the vital subsistence of the redcoats and rendering their foraging to obtain necessary supplies extremely hazardous . In order to see that this hindering situation remained effective , Washington detached several bodies of his troops to the periphery of the Philadelphia area . 
Morgan and his corps were placed on the west side of the Schuylkill River , with instructions to intercept all supplies found going to the city and to keep a close eye on the movements of the enemy . The headquarters of Morgan was on a farm , said to have been particularly well located so as to prevent the farmers nearby from trading with the British , a practice all too common to those who preferred to sell their produce for British gold rather than the virtually worthless Continental currency . In his dealings with offenders , however , Morgan was typically firm but just . For example , he captured some persons from York County , who with teams were taking to Philadelphia the furniture of a man who had just been released from prison through the efforts of his wife , and who apparently was helpless to prevent the theft of his household goods . Morgan took charge of the furniture and restored it to its thankful owners , but he let the culprits who had stolen it go free . 
Morgan complained to Washington about the men detailed to him for scouting duty , most of them he said being useless . " They straggle at such a rate " , he told the commander-in-chief , " that if the enemy were enterprising , they might get two from us , when we would take one of them , which makes me wish General Howe would go on , lest any incident happen to us " . 
If the hardships of the winter at Valley Forge were trying for healthy men , they were , of course , much more so for those not in good health . Daniel Morgan 's rheumatic condition worsened with the increase of the cold and damp weather . He had braved the elements and the enemy , but the strain , aided by the winter , was catching up with him at last . Also , he was now forty-three years old . The mild activity of his command during the sojourn of the troops at Valley Forge could be handled by a subordinate , he felt , so like Henry Knox , equally loyal to Washington , who went to Boston at this time , Morgan received permission to visit his home in Virginia for several weeks . In his absence , the rifle regiment was under the command of Major Thomas Posey , another able Virginian . 
But Morgan did not leave before he had written a letter to a William Pickman in Salem , Massachusetts , apparently an acquaintance , praising Washington and saying that the slanders propagated about him were " opposed by the general current of the people … to exalt General Gates at the expense of General Washington was injurious to the latter . If there be a disinterested patriot in America , 't is General Washington , and his bravery , none can question " . 
It is doubtful if Morgan was able to take home much money to his wife and children , for his pay , as shown by the War Department Abstracts of early 1778 was $75 a month as a colonel , and that apt to be delayed . He was shown a warm welcome regardless , and spent the time in Winchester recuperating from his ailment , enjoying his family and arranging his private affairs which were , of course , run down . His neighbors celebrated his return , even if it was only temporary , and Morgan was especially gratified by the quaint expression of an elderly friend , Isaac Lane , who told him , " A man that has so often left all that is dear to him , as thou hast , to serve thy country , must create a sympathetic feeling in every patriotic heart " . 
There must have been special feelings of joy and patriotism in the heart of Daniel Morgan too , when the news was received on April 30th of the recognition by France of the independence of the United States . His fellow Virginian , George Washington , had stated , " I believe no event was ever received with more heartfelt joy " . The dreary camp at Valley Forge was turned into an arena of rejoicing . Even the dignified Washington indulged in a game of wickets with some children . His soldiers on the whole did not celebrate so mildly . On May 6th , Morgan , who had returned , received from Washington orders to " send out patrols under vigilant officers " to keep near the enemy . " The reason for this " , the orders said , " is that the enemy may think to take advantage of the celebration of this day . The troops must have more than the common quantity of liquor , and perhaps there will be some little drunkenness among them " . 
Apparently no serious disorders resulted from the celebration , and within a few days , Morgan joined the force of Lafayette who now had command of some 2,000 men at Barren Hill , not far above Philadelphia on the Schuylkill . The Frenchman had been ordered to approach the enemy 's lines , harass them and get intelligence of their movements . Interestingly enough , the order transmitted to Morgan through Alexander Hamilton also informed him that " A party of Indians will join the party to be sent from your command at Whitemarsh , and act with them " . These were Oneida Indians . 
Washington evidently was anxious for Morgan to be cautious as well as aggressive , for on May 17th , 18th and 20th he admonished the leader of the riflemen-rangers to be on the alert . Obviously the commander-in-chief had confidence that Morgan would furnish him good intelligence too , for on the 23rd of May , he told Morgan that the British were prepared to move , perhaps in the night , and asked Morgan to have two of his best horses ready to dispatch to General Smallwood with the intelligence obtained . Meantime , however , this same General Smallwood seemed to be serving chivalry as well as the American army . Colonel Benjamin Ford wrote to Morgan from Wilmington that he understood a Mrs. Sanderson from Maryland had obtained permission from Smallwood to visit Philadelphia , and would return on May 26th , escorted by several officers from Maryland " belonging to the new levies in the British service " . Ford urged Morgan to capture these men , who , he thought , might be disguised as Quakers or peasants . Morgan took the suggested steps , but when Mrs. Sanderson appeared , there was nobody with her but her husband , whom he promptly sent to headquarters to be questioned . But Morgan evidently reported matters of intelligence much more important to his commanding general . A letter of a few days later from Washington 's aide to Morgan stated , " His Excellency is highly pleased with your conduct upon this occasion " .  For by now the original cause of the quarrel , Philip 's seizure of Gascony , was only one strand in the spider web of French interests that overlay all western Europe and that had been so well and closely spun that the lightest movement could set it trembling from one end to the other . Even so , Edward 's ambassadors can scarcely have foreseen that five years of unremitting work lay ahead of them before peace was finally made and that when it did come the countless embassies that left England for Rome during that period had very little to do with it . 
It is hard not to lay most of the blame for their failures on the pope . Nogaret is hardly an impartial witness , and even he did not make his charges against Boniface until the latter was dead , but there is some truth in what he said and more in what he did not say . It was not merely a hunger for " money , gold and precious objects " that delayed the papal pronouncement that could have brought the war to an end ; the pope was playing a dangerous game , with so many balls in the air at once that a misstep would bring them all about his ears , and his only hope was to temporize so that he could take advantage of every change in the delicate balance of European affairs . When the negotiations began , his quarrel with the king of France was temporarily in abeyance , and he had no intention of reviving it so long as there was hope that French money would come to pay the troops who , under Charles of Valois , the papal vicar of Tuscany , were so valuable in the crusade against the Colonna cardinals and their Sicilian allies . If his circumspection in regard to Philip 's sensibilities went so far that he even refused to grant a dispensation for the marriage of Amadee 's daughter , Agnes , to the son of the dauphin of Vienne — a truly peacemaking move according to thirteenth-century ideas , for Savoy and Dauphine were as usual fighting on opposite sides — for fear that he might seem to be favoring the anti-French coalition , he would certainly never take the far more drastic step of ordering the return of Gascony to Edward , even though , as he admitted to the English ambassadors , he had been advised that the original cession was invalid . On the other hand , he did not want to offend Edward either , and he found himself in a very difficult position . On the surface , the whole question was purely feudal . The French were now occupying Gascony and Flanders on the technical grounds that their rulers had forfeited them by a breach of the feudal contract . But Edward was invading Scotland for precisely the same reason , and his insubordinate vassal was the ally of the king of France . Boniface had to uphold the sacredness of the feudal contract at all costs , for it was only as suzerain of Sicily and of the Patrimony of Peter that he had any justification for his Italian wars , but in the English-Scottish-French triangle it was almost impossible for him to recognize the claims of any one of the contestants without seeming to invalidate those of the other two . 
Because of these involvements in the matter at stake , Boniface lacked the impartiality that is supposed to be an essential qualification for the position of arbiter , and in retrospect that would seem to be sufficient reason why the English embassies to the Curia proved so fruitless . But when the situation was so complicated that even Nogaret , one of the principal actors in the drama , could misinterpret the pope 's motives , it is possible that Othon and his companions , equally baffled , attributed their difficulties to a more immediate cause . This was Boniface 's monumental tactlessness . " Tact " , by its very derivation , implies that its possessor keeps in touch with other people , but the author of Clericis Laicos and Unam Sanctam , the wielder of the two swords , the papal sun of which the imperial moon was but a dim reflection , the peer of Caesar and vice-regent of Christ , was so high above other human beings that he had forgotten what they were like . He was a learned and brilliant man , one of the best jurists in Europe and with flashes of penetrating insight , and yet in his dealings with other people , particularly when he tried to be ingratiating , he was capable of an abysmal stupidity that can have come only from a complete incomprehension of human nature and human motives . 
This lofty disregard for others was not shared by such men as Pierre Flotte and his associates , that " brilliant group of mediocre men " , as Powicke calls them , who provided the brains for the French embassy that came to Rome under the nominal leadership of the archbishop of Narbonne , the duke of Burgundy , and the count of St.-Pol . They had risen from humble beginnings by their own diligence and astuteness , they were unfettered by the codes that bound nobles like Othon or even the older generation of clerks like Hotham , and they were working for an end that their opponents had never even visualized . Boniface was later to explain to the English that Robert of Burgundy and Guy de St.-Pol were easy enough to do business with ; it was the clerks who caused the mischief and who made him say that the ruling passion of their race was covetousness and that in dealing with them he never knew whether he had to do with a Frenchman or with a devil . To the pope , head of the universal Church , to the duke of Burgundy , taking full advantage of his position on the borders of France and of the Empire , or to Othon , who found it quite natural that he should do homage to Edward for Tipperary and to the count of Savoy for Grandson , Flotte 's outspoken nationalism was completely incomprehensible . And yet he made no pretense about it ; when the pope , trying no doubt to appeal to his better nature , said to him , " You have already taken Normandy . Do you want to drive the king of England from all his overseas possessions " ? the Frenchman 's answer was a terse " Vous dites vrai " . Loyal and unscrupulous , with a single-minded ambition to which he devoted all his energies , he outmatched the English diplomats time and time again until , by a kind of poetic justice , he fell at the battle of Courtrai , the victim of the equally nationalistic if less articulate Flemings . 
The English , relying on a prejudiced arbiter and confronted with superior diplomatic skill , were also hampered in their negotiations by the events that were taking place at home . The Scots had found a new leader in William Wallace , and Edward 's yearly expeditions across the Border called for evermounting taxes , which only increased his difficulties with the barons and the clergy . He was unable to send any more help to his allies on the Continent , and during the next few years many of them , left to resist French pressure unaided , surrendered to the inevitable and made their peace with Philip . The defeat and death of Adolf of Nassau at the hands of Albert of Habsburg also worked to the disadvantage of the English , for all the efforts to revive the anti-French coalition came to nothing when Philip made an alliance with the new king of the Romans . 
These shifts in alliance and allegiance not only increased the difficulties confronting the English embassy as a whole , but also directly involved the two Savoyards , Amadee and Othon . In spite of the armistice negotiated by Amadee two years earlier , the war between Bishop Guillaume of Lausanne and Louis of Savoy was still going on , and although little is known about it , that little proves that it was yet another phase of the struggle against French expansion and was closely interwoven with the larger conflict . A second truce had been arbitrated in April , 1298 , by Jean d'Arlay , lord of Chalon-sur-Saone , the most staunch of Edward 's Burgundian allies , and these last were represented in the discussions at the Curia by Gautier de Montfaucon , Othon 's neighbor and a member of the Vaudois coalition . 
But although in many of these discussions Othon and Amadee might have been tempted to consider their own interests as well as those of the king , Edward 's confidence in them was so absolute that they were made the acknowledged leaders of the embassy . Amadee may have owed this partly to his relationship with the king , but Othon , who at sixty seems still to have been a simple knight , merited his position solely by his own character and ability . The younger men , Vere , and Pembroke , who was also Edward 's cousin and whose Lusignan blood gave him the swarthy complexion that caused Edward of Carnarvon 's irreverent friend , Piers Gaveston , to nickname him " Joseph the Jew " , were relatively new to the game of diplomacy , but Pontissara had been on missions to Rome before , and Hotham , a man of great learning , " jocund in speech , agreeable to meet , of honest religion , and pleasing in the eyes of all " , and an archbishop to boot , was as reliable and experienced as Othon himself . But all the reports of this first embassy show that the two Savoyards were the heads of it , for they were the only ones who were empowered to swear for the king that he would abide by the pope 's decision and who were allowed to appoint deputies in the event that one was unavoidably absent . 
This also gave them the unpleasant duty of being spokesmen for the mission , and they could foresee that that would not be easy . Underneath all the high-sounding phrases of royal and papal letters and behind the more down-to-earth instructions to the envoys was the inescapable fact that Edward would have to desert his Flemish allies and leave them to the vengeance of their indignant suzerain , the king of France , in return for being given an equally free hand with the insubordinate Scots . This was a doubly bitter blow to the king . In the eyes of those who still cared for such things , it was a reflection on his honor , and it gave further grounds for complaint to his overtaxed subjects , who were already grumbling — although probably not in Latin — " Non est lex sana Quod regi sit mea lana " . Bad relations between England and Flanders brought hard times to the shepherds scattered over the dales and downs as well as to the crowded Flemish cities , and while the English , so far , had done no more than grumble , Othon had seen what the discontent might lead to , for before he left the Low Countries the citizens of Ghent had risen in protest against the expense of supporting Edward and his troops , and the regular soldiers had found it unexpectedly difficult to put down the nasty little riot that ensued . 
In all the talk of feudal rights , the knights and bishops must never forget the woolworkers , nor was it easy to do so , for all along the road to Italy they passed the Florentine pack trains going home with their loads of raw wool from England and rough Flemish cloth , the former to be spun and woven by the Arte della Lana and the latter to be refined and dyed by the Arte della Calimala with the pigment recently discovered in Asia Minor by one of their members , Bernardo Rucellai , the secret of which they jealously kept for themselves . These chatty merchants made amusing and instructive traveling companions , for their business took them to all four corners of the globe , and Florentine gossip had already reached a high stage of development as even a cursory glance at the Inferno will prove . A northern ambassador , willing to keep his mouth shut and his ears open , could learn a lot that would stand him in good stead at the Curia . 
They had other topics of conversation , besides their news from courts and fairs , which were of interest to Othon , the builder of castles in Wales and churches in his native country . Behind him lay the Low Countries , where men were still completing the cathedrals that a later Florentine would describe as " a malediction of little tabernacles , one on top of the other , with so many pyramids and spires and leaves that it is a wonder they stand up at all , for they look as though they were made of paper instead of stone or marble " ; the Low Countries , where the Middle Ages were to last for another two centuries and die out only when Charles the Bold of Burgundy met his first defeat in the fields and forests below the walls of Grandson .  It usually turned out well for him because either he liked the right people or there were only a few wrong people in the town . Alfred wanted to invest in my father 's hotel and advance enough money to build a larger place . It was a very tempting offer . My father would have done it if it had n't been for my mother , who had a fear of being in debt to anyone — even Alfred Alpert . 
In spite of his being well liked there were a few people who were very careful about Alfred . They had my mother 's opinion of him : that he was too sharp or a little too good to be true . One of the people who was afraid of Alfred was his own brother , Lew . I do n't know how and I do n't know why but the two stores , the one in Margaretville and the one in Fleischmanns that had been set up as a partnership , were dissolved , separated from each other . Everything was all very friendly , except when it came to Harry , the youngest brother . Alfred , who was a good deal older than Harry , had treated him like a son , and when Harry decided to stay in business with Lew instead of going with Alfred , Alfred looked on the decision as a betrayal . From that day on he never spoke to Harry or to Lew , or to Lew 's two boys , Mort and Jimmy . The six miles between the towns became an ocean and the Alperts became a family of strangers . 
Time went on and everybody got older . I became fifteen , sixteen , then twenty , and still Tessie Alpert sat on the porch with a rose in her hair , and Alfred got richer and sicker with diabetes . It was in the spring of the year when he took to his bed and Tessie and Alfred found out that they did n't know each other . They were like two strangers . The store was their marriage , and when Alfred had to leave it there was nothing to hold them together . Tessie , everybody thought , was a strong woman , but she was only strong because she had Alfred to lean on . And when Alfred was forced into his bed , Tessie left the front porch of the store and sat at home , rocking in her rocker in the living room , staring out the window — the rose still in her hair . Tessie could do nothing for Alfred . She could n't cook or clean or make him comfortable . Instead she waited for Alfred to get better and take care of her . 
Spring was life — and Alfred Alpert in his sickroom was death . Alfred knew that , too . I remember him pointing out of the window and saying that he wished he could live to see another spring but that he would n't . 
Alfred began to put his affairs in order , and he went about it like a man putting his things into storage . My father , who liked Alfred very much , was a constant visitor . One day Alfred told him that he had decided to leave everything to me . My father , a wise man , asked him not to . He knew Alfred liked me ; if he wanted to leave me something let it be a trinket , nothing else . By leaving me everything he would n't be doing me a favor , my father told him , and he did n't want to see his daughter involved in a lawsuit . He did n't want Alfred to leave me trouble because that 's all it would be , and Alfred understood . 
Alfred was getting too sick to stay in his own home . The doctor wanted him in a hospital ; the nearest one was forty miles away in Kingston . The day Alfred left his home and Fleischmanns he gave up the convictions of a lifetime . He sent me for Meltzer the Butcher , whom he wanted not as a friend but as a rabbi . 
Meltzer knew why I had come for him . Solemnly he walked me back to Alfred 's house without a word passing between us . He entered the house in silence , walked into Alfred 's room , and closed the door behind him . I sat down to wait , and I watched Tessie Alpert , who had n't moved or said a word but kept staring out of the window . 
For a few minutes there was nothing to hear . Then Meltzer 's voice , quiet , calm , strong , started the Kaddish , the prayer for the dead . I could hear Alfred 's voice a few words behind Meltzer 's like a counterpoint , punctuated by sobs of sorrow and resignation . There was a finality in the rhythm of the prayer — it was the end of a life , the end of hope , and the wondering if there would ever be another beginning . 
Meltzer stayed with Alfred , and when the door opened they both came out . Alfred was dressed for his trip to the hospital . The car was waiting for him . Alfred , leaning on Meltzer , stopped for a minute to look at Tessie . She did n't turn away from the window . Alfred nodded a little nod and went out through the door . 
Outside , his brother Harry was waiting for him — he had come to say good-bye . Alfred walked past him without a word and got into the car . Harry ran to the side of the car where Alfred was sitting and looked at him , begging him to speak . Alfred looked straight ahead . The car began to move and Harry ran after it crying , " Alfred ! Alfred ! Speak to me " . But the car moved off and Alfred just looked straight ahead . Harry followed the car until it reached the main road and turned towards Kingston . He stood there watching until it had gone from his sight . 
I went to visit Alfred in the Kingston Hospital a few times . The first time I went there he asked me to bring him water from Flagler 's well — water that reminded him of his first days in the mountains — and before I came the next time I filled a five-gallon jug for him and brought it to the hospital . I do n't think he ever got to drink any of it . 
The jug stayed at the hospital and the water — what can happen to water ? — it evaporated , disappeared , and came back to the earth as rain — maybe for another well or another stream or another Alfred Alpert .  12 " WHERE IS IT WRITTEN " ?  Mr. Banks was always called Banks the Butcher until he left town and the shop passed over to Meltzer the Scholar who then became automatically Meltzer the Butcher . Meltzer was a boarder with the Banks family . He came to Fleischmanns directly from the boat that brought him to America from Russia . He was a learned man and a very gentle soul . He was filled with knowledge of the Bible and the Talmud . He knew the whyfores and the wherefores but he was weak , very weak , on the therefores . Banks the Butcher took Meltzer the Scholar as an apprentice and he made it very clear that a man of learning must be able to do more than just quote the Commentaries of the Talmud in order to live . So Meltzer learned a new trade from Banks , who supplied the town and the hotels with meat . 
Banks had a family — a wife , a daughter , and a son . The daughter , Lilly , was a very good friend of mine and I always had hopes that someday she and Meltzer would find each other . They lived in the same house and it did n't seem to be such a hard thing to do , but the sad realities of Lilly 's life and the fact that Meltzer did n't love her never satisfied my wishful thinking . 
Banks the Butcher was a hard master and a hard father , a man who did n't seem to know the difference between the living flesh of his family and the hanging carcasses of his stock in trade . He treated both with equal indifference and with equal contempt ; perhaps he was a little more sympathetic to the sides of beef that hung silently from his hooks . 
Lilly Banks and I became friends . She was the opposite of everything she should have been — a positive pole in a negative home , a living reaction of warmth and kindness to the harsh reality of her father . And Lilly 's whole family seemed to be an apology for Mr. Banks . Her brother Karl was a very gentle soul , her mother was a quiet woman who said little but who had hard , probing eyes . For every rude word of Mr. Banks 's the family had five in apology . 
Every chance I got I left the hotel to visit Lilly . I was free but she was bound to her duties that not even the coming of Meltzer lightened . She had to clean the glass on the display cases in the butcher shop , help her brother scrub the cutting tables with wire brushes , mop the floors , put down new sawdust on the floors and help check the outgoing orders . When these chores were finished , only then , was she allowed whatever freedom she could find . 
I helped Lilly in the store . To me it was a game , to her it was the deadly seriousness of life . I wanted to help so that we could find time to play . And Lilly allowed me to help so that she could have her few little hours of escape . 
When the work was finished , we would walk . The road past the butcher shop took us along the side of a stream . It ran north , away from the town and the people , through woods and past the nothingness of a graveyard . 
Lilly preferred the loneliness of that walk . I would have liked the town and the busyness of its people but I always followed Lilly into the peace of the silent and unstaring road . 
It was n't hard to understand . To me Lilly was a fine and lovely girl . To people who did n't know her she was a gawky , badly dressed kid whose arms were too long , whose legs were a little too bony . She had the hips of a boy and a loose-jointed walk that reminded me of a string of beads strolling down the street . And she had the kind of crossed eyes that shocked . It was unexpected , unexpected because Lilly walked with her head bent down , down , and her mark of friendship was to look into your face . I accepted her crossed eyes as she accepted my childishness ; childishness compared to her grown-up understanding that life was a punishment for as yet undisclosed sins . We were almost the same age , she was fifteen , I was twelve , and where I felt there was a life to look forward to Lilly felt she had had as much of it as was necessary . 
When we went for our walks Lilly 's brother would come along every once in a while . Karl was an almost exact copy of his father physically and it was strange to see the expected become the unexpected . This huge hulk played the guitar and he would take it along on our walks and play for us as we sat alone in the woods or by the stream . Karl played well and his favorite song was a Schubert lullaby . He spoke no German but he could sing it and the words of the song were the only ones he knew in a foreign language . The song , he said , was called " The Stream 's Lullaby " , and when he sang , " Gute ruh , Gute ruh , Mach't die augen zu " there was such longing and such simple sadness that it frightened me . Later , when I was older , I found the song was part of Schubert 's Die Sch.ouml ; ne M.uuml ; llerin . And even hearing it in a concert hall surrounded by hundreds of people the words and the melody would make me a little colder and I would reach out for my husband 's hand . 
The brother and sister seemed to be a sort of mutual-aid society , a little fortress of kindness for each other in a hard world . I felt very flattered to be included in the protection of their company even though I had nothing to be protected from .  
The turn of the century , or to be more precise , the two decades preceeding and following it , marks a great change in the history of early English scholarship . At the bottom of this change were great strides forward in the technical equipment and technical standards of the historian . In archaeology , for example , the contributions of Frederick Haverfield and Reginald Smith to the various volumes of the Victoria County Histories raised the discipline from the status of an antiquarian pastime to that of the most valuable single tool of the early English historian . And with the publication of E. T. Leeds ' Archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon Settlements the student was presented with an organized synthesis of the archaeological data then known . 
What was true for archaeology was also true of place-name studies . The value of place-names in the reconstruction of early English history had long been recognized . Place-names , in fact , had been extensively utilized for this purpose from the time of Camden onwards . Without a precise knowledge of Germanic philology , however , it is debatable whether their use was not more often a source of confusion and error than anything else . Even in the nineteenth century such accomplished philologists as Kemble and Guest were led into what now seem ludicrous errors because of their failure to recognize that modern forms of place names are not necessarily the result of logical philological development . It was therefore not until the publication of J.H. Round 's " The Settlement of the South and East Saxons " , and W.H. Stevenson 's " Dr. Guest and the English Conquest of South Britain " , that a scientific basis for place-name studies was established . 
Diplomatic is another area for which the dawn of the twentieth century marks the beginning of modern standards of scholarship . Although because of the important achievements of nineteenth century scholars in the field of textual criticism the advance is not so striking as it was in the case of archaeology and place-names , the editorial principles laid down by Stevenson in his great edition of Asser and in his Crawford Charters were a distinct improvement upon those of his predecessors and remain unimproved upon today . 
In sum , it can be said that the techniques and standards of present day have their origin at the turn of the century . And it is this , particularly the establishment of archaeology and place-name studies on a scientific basis , which are immediately pertinent to the Saxon Shore . 
Almost inevitably , the first result of this technological revolution was a reaction against the methods and in many cases the conclusions of the Oxford school of Stubbs , Freeman and ( particularly ) Green regarding the nature of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain . Even before the century was out the tide of reaction had set in . Charles Plummer in the introduction and notes to his splendid edition of Bede voiced some early doubts concerning the " elaborate superstructure " they raised up over the slim foundations afforded by the traditional narratives of the conquest . It was Plummer , in fact , who coined the much quoted remark : " Mr. Green indeed writes as if he had been present at the landing of the Saxons and had watched every step of their subsequent progress " . Sir Henry Howorth , writing in 1898 , put himself firmly in the Lappenburg-Kemble tradition by attacking the veracity of the West Saxon annals . 
Early in the present century , W. H. Stevenson continued the attack with a savage article against Guest . Following him in varying degrees of scepticism were T.W. Shore , H.M. Chadwick , Thomas Hodgkin and F. G. Beck . By 1913 , Ferdinand Lot could begin an article subtitled " La conquete de la Grande-Bretagne par les Saxons " with the words , " Il est difficile aujourd 'hui d'entretenir des illusions sur la valeur du recit traditionnel de la conquete de la Grande-Bretagne … " . It is also worthy of note that Lot cited both Kemble and Lappenberg with favor in that article . It would seem that the wheel had turned full circle . 
In fact , modern scholarly opinion in the main has not retreated all the way back to the destructive scepticism of the first half of the nineteenth century . Although one meets with occasional extremists like Zachrisson or , very recently , Arthur Wade-Evans the majority of scholars have taken a middle position between the extremes of scepticism and gullibility . Most now admit that Bede , Gildas , Nennius and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles can not be the infallible guides to early English history that Guest , Freeman and Green thought them to be . As R.H. Hodgkin has remarked : " The critical methods of the nineteenth century shattered most of this picturesque narrative . On the other hand , the consensus of opinion is that , used with caution and in conjunction with other types of evidence , the native sources still provide a valid rough outline for the English settlement of southern Britain . As Sir Charles Oman once said , " it is no longer fashionable to declare that we can say nothing certain about Old English origins " . 
Therefore , in one way Kemble and Lappenberg have been vindicated . Their conclusions concerning the untrustworthiness of the West Saxon annals , the confused chronology of Bede , the unreliability of the early positions of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies and the mythological elements contained in Nennius are now mostly accepted . Nevertheless , in another way modern historians still labor in the vineyard of the Oxford school . For it is their catastrophic concept of the Anglo-Saxon invasions rather than Kemble 's gradualist approach which dominates the field . Despite the rejection of the traditional accounts on many points of detail , as late as 1948 it was still possible to postulate a massive and comparatively sudden ( beginning in ca. 450 ) influx of Germans as the type of invasions . 
At this point , of course , the issue has become complicated by a development unforeseen by Lappenberg and Kemble . They , however much they were in disagreement with the late Victorians over the method by which Britain was Germanized , agreed with them that the end result was the complete extinction of the previous Celtic population and civilization . But beginning , for all practical purposes , with Frederick Seebohm 's English Village Community scholars have had to reckon with a theory involving institutional and agrarian continuity between Roman and Anglo-Saxon times which is completely at odds with the reigning concept of the Anglo-Saxon invasions . Against Seebohm formidable foes have taken the field , notably F. W. Maitland , whose Domesday Book and Beyond was written expressly for this purpose , and Sir Paul Vinogradoff whose The Growth of the Manor had a similar aim . Largely due to their efforts the catastrophic invasion-theory has maintained its position although Seebohm has always found supporters . H.L. Gray in his English Field Systems and Zachrisson 's Romans , Kelts and Saxons defended in part the Seebohm thesis while at the present time H.P.R. Finberg and Gordon Copley seem to fall into the Celtic survivalist camp . This is nevertheless a minority view . Most scholars , while willing to accept a survival ( revival ? ) of Celtic art forms and a considerable proportion of the Celtic population , reject any institutional legacy from pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain . 
Therefore , it is plain that the clear distinctions of the nineteenth century are no longer with us . In the main stream of historical thinking is a group of scholars , H.M. Chadwick , R.H. Hodgkin , Sir Frank Stenton et al. who are in varying degrees sceptical of the native traditions of the conquest but who defend the catastrophic type of invasion suggested by them . They , in effect , have compromised the opposing positions of the nineteenth century . On the other side are the Celtic survivalists who have taken a tack divergent from both these schools of nineteenth century thought . As a group they should be favorable to a concept of gradual Germanic infiltration although the specialist nature of much of their work , e.g. Seebohm , Gray and Finberg , tends to obscure their sympathies . Those who do have occasion to deal with the invasions in a more general way , like T.W. Shore and Arthur Wade-Evans , are on the side of a gradual and often peaceful Germanic penetration into Britain . Wade-Evans , in fact , denies that there were any Anglo-Saxon invasions at all other than a minor Jutish foray in A.D. 514 . 
Now omitting for a moment some recent developments we can say the Saxon Shore hypothesis of Lappenberg and Kemble has undergone virtual eclipse in this century . It is no longer possible to say that a sceptical attitude towards the received accounts of the invasions almost automatically produces a " shore occupied by " interpretation . Everyone is more or less sceptical and virtually no one has been willing to accept Lappenberg or Kemble 's position on that point . One reason is , of course , that the new scepticism has been willing to maintain the general picture of the invasions as portrayed in the traditional sources . The few scholars who have adopted the " shore occupied by " interpretation , Howorth , Shore , and Wade-Evans , have all been Celtic survivalists . Moreover , they have done so in rather special circumstances . 
The primary reason for the abandonment of the " shore occupied by " thesis has been the assimilation and accumulation of archaeological evidence , the most striking feature of early English studies in this century . Again omitting recent developments , E.T . Leeds ' dictum of 1913 has stood unchallenged : " So far as archaeology is concerned , there is not the least warrant for the second ( shore occupied by ) of these theories " . Even earlier Haverfield had come to the same conclusion . What they meant was that there was no evidence to show that the south and east coasts of Britain received Germanic settlers conspicuously earlier than some other parts of England . That is , there was no trace of Anglo-Saxons in Britain as early as the late third century , to which time the archaeological evidence for the erection of the Saxon Shore forts was beginning to point . In the face of a clear judgment from archaeology , therefore , it became impossible for a time for scholars to re-adopt the " shore settled by " theory . 
In recent years , however , a wind of change seems to be blowing through early English historical circles . The great increase in the amount of archaeological activity , and therefore information , in the years immediately preceeding and following the Second World War has brought to light data which has changed the complection of the Saxon Shore dispute . Where there were none fifteen years ago , several scholars currently are edging their way cautiously towards the acceptance of the " shore occupied by " position . We must , therefore , have a look at the new archaeological material and re-examine the literary and place-name evidence which bears upon the problem .    What exactly are we trying to prove ? We know that the Saxon Shore was a phenonenon of late Roman defensive policy ; in other words its existence belongs to the period of Roman Britain . So whenever the Romans finally withdrew from the island , the Saxon Shore disappeared in the first decade of the fifth century . We also know that the Saxon Shore as reflected in the Notitia was created as a part of the Theodosian reorganization of Britain ( post-A.D. 369 ) . My argument is that there was no Saxon Shore prior to that time even though the forts had been in existence since the time of Carausius . Therefore , what we must prove or disprove is that there were Saxons , in the broad sense in which we must construe the word , in the area of the Saxon Shore at the time it was called the Saxon Shore . That is , we must find Saxons in East Anglia , Kent , Sussex and Hampshire in the last half of the fourth century . 
The problem , in other words , is strictly a chronological one . In Gaul the Saxon element on its Saxon Shore was plainly visible because there the Saxons were an intrusive element in the population . In Britain , obviously , the archaeological and place-name characteristics of the Saxon Shore region are bound to be Saxon . It is a matter of trying to sort out an earlier fourth-century Saxon element from the later , fifth-century mainstream of Anglo-Saxon invasions . This , naturally , will be difficult to do since both the archaeological and place-name evidence in this period , with some fortunate exceptions , is insufficient for precise chronological purposes . 
It might be well to consider the literary evidence first because it can provide us with an answer to one important question ; namely , is the idea that there were Saxon mercenaries in England at all reasonable ?  To do so , something was necessary beyond volunteering because there was little glamour or romance in the European war ; it meant instead hardship , dirt , and death . 
Baker gave Leonard Wood credit for the initiation of the draft of soldiers ; from the General 's idea a chain reaction occurred . Wood took the proposal to Chief of Staff Hugh L. Scott , who passed it on to Baker a month before the actual declaration of war against Germany . The Secretary of War gave his assent after studying the history of the draft in the American Civil War as well as the British volunteer system in World War /1 , . He concluded that selective service would not only prevent the disorganization of essential war industries but would avoid the undesirable moral effects of the British reliance on enlistment only — " where the feeling of the people was whipped into a frenzy by girls pinning white feathers on reluctant young men , orators preaching hate of the Germans , and newspapers exaggerating enemy outrages to make men enlist out of motives of revenge and retaliation " . Baker took the plan to Wilson who said : " Baker , this is plainly right on any ground . Start to prepare the necessary legislation so that if I am obliged to go to Congress the bills will be ready for immediate consideration " . The result was that by secret agreement draft machinery was actually ready long before the country knew that the device was to take the place of the volunteering method which Theodore Roosevelt favored . Before the Draft Act was passed Baker had confidentially briefed governors , sheriffs , and prospective draft board members on the administration of the measure — and the confidence was kept so well that only one newspaper learned what was going on . It was Baker , working through Provost Marshal Enoch Crowder and Major Hugh S. ( " Old Ironpants " ) Johnson , who arranged for a secret printing by the million of selective service blanks — again before the Act was passed — until corridors in the Government Printing Office were full and the basement of the Washington Post Office was stacked to the ceiling . General Crowder proposed that Regular Army officers select the draftees in cities and towns throughout the nation ; it was Baker who thought of lessening the shock , which conscription always brings to a country , by substituting " Greetings from your neighbors " for the recruiting sergeant , and registration in familiar voting places rather than at military installations . 
Even so , the Draft Act encountered rough sledding in its progress through the Congress . Democratic Speaker Champ Clark saw little difference between a conscript and a convict . Democrat Stanley H. Dent , Chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee , declined to introduce the bill . Democratic Floor Leader Claude Kitchin would have no part of the measure . In the judgment of Chief of Staff Scott it was ironic that the draft policy of a Democratic President , aimed at Germany , had to be pushed through the House of Representatives by the ranking minority member of the Military Affairs Committee — a Republican Jew born in Germany ! He was Julius Kahn for whom the Chief of Staff thought no honor could be too great . After Kahn 's death in 1924 Scott wrote : " May he rest in peace with the eternal gratitude of his adopted country " . 
In spite of powerful opposition the Draft Act finally passed Congress on May 17 , 1917 . In early June ten million young men registered by name and number . The day passed without incident in spite of the warning of Senator James A. Reed of Missouri : " Baker , you will have the streets of our American cities running with blood on registration day " . On July 20 , the first drawing of numbers occurred in the Senate Office Building before a distinguished group of congressmen and high Army officers . Secretary of War Baker , blindfolded , put his hand into a large glass bowl and drew the initial number of those to be called . It was 258 . A man in Mississippi wired : " Thanks for drawing 258 — that 's me " . He was the first of 2,800,000 called to the Army through the selective service system .   It was one thing to call men to the colors ; it was another to house , feed , and train them . The existing Army posts were wholly inadequate . In a matter of months the War Department built thirty-two camps , each one accommodating fifty thousand men — sixteen were under canvas in the South and sixteen with frame structures in the North . It was a gargantuan task ; a typical cantonment in the North had twelve hundred buildings , an electric-sewer-water system , and twenty-five miles of roads . At Camp Taylor in Kentucky a barracks was built in an hour and a half from timber that had been standing in Mississippi forests one week before . The total operation was a construction project comparable in magnitude with the Panama Canal , but in 1917 time was in short supply ; in three months the Army spent three-quarters as much as had been expended on the " big Ditch " in ten years . 
In later years Josephus Danielswas to claim that World War /1 , was the first in American history in which there was great concern for both the health and morals of our soldiers . It was the first American war in which the death rate from disease was lower than that from battle , due to the provision of trained medical personnel ( of the 200,000 officers , 42,000 were physicians ) , compulsory vaccination , rigorous camp sanitation , and adequate hospital facilities . To the middle of September 1918 , there had been fewer than 10,000 deaths from disease in the new army . This enviable record would have been maintained but for a great and unexpected disaster which struck the world with murderous stealth . It was the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 . The malady was popularly known as the " Spanish flu " from the alleged locale of its origin . The world-wide total of deaths from " Spanish flu " was around twenty million ; in the United States 300,000 succumbed to it . In mid-September 1918 , the influenza-pneumonia pandemic swept through every American military camp ; during the eight-week blitz attack 25,000 soldiers died from the disease and the death rate ( formerly 5 per year per 1,000 men ) increased almost fifty times to 4 per week per 1,000 men . In spite of this catastrophe the final mortality figure from disease in the American Army during World War /1 , was 15 per 1,000 per year , contrasted with 110 per 1,000 per year in the Mexican War , and 65 in the American Civil War . 
Both Secretary of War Baker and Secretary of Navy Daniels devoted much time and effort to the problem of providing reasonably normal and wholesome activities in camp for the millions of men who had been removed from their home environment . Their policy ran counter to the traditional idea that a good fighter was usually a libertine , and that in sex affairs " God-given passion " was a proof of manliness . Baker moved first ; six days after war was declared he appointed Raymond Fosdick chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities ( the CTCA ) . Fosdick , a brother of minister Harry Emerson Fosdick , was a graduate of Princeton , and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philosophical Association . His assignment was not a new one because Baker had sent him to the Mexican border in 1916 to investigate lurid newspaper stories about lack of discipline , drunkenness , and venereal disease in American military camps . Fosdick had found the installations surrounded by a battery of saloons and houses of prostitution , with filles de joie from all over the country flocking to San Antonio , Laredo , and El Paso to " woman the cribs " . He also ascertained that many officers were indifferent to the problem , including Commanding General Frederick Funston who gave Fosdick the nickname of " Reverend " . On the basis of the long chronicle of military history Funston and his brethren assumed that the issue was insoluble and that anyone interested in a mission like Fosdick 's was an impractical idealist or a do-gooder . 
During the brief Mexican venture Fosdick 's report to the Secretary recommended a definite stand by the War Department against the saloon and the excesses of prostitution . The problem involved military necessity as much as morality , for in pre-penicillin days venereal disease was a crippling disability . Fosdick insisted that a strong word was needed from Washington , and it was immediately forthcoming . Baker put the " cribs " and the saloons out of bounds , ordered the co-operation of military officers with local law authorities , and told communities that the troops would be moved unless wholesome conditions were restored . Both Baker and Fosdick knew that a substitute was necessary , that a verboten approach was not the real answer . They were aware that soldiers went to town , in more ways than one , because of the monotony of camp life , to find the only release available in the absence of movies , reading rooms , and playing fields with adequate athletic equipment . Both knew that when trains stopped at Texan crossroads bored soldiers would sometimes enter to ask the passengers if they had any reading material to spare , even a newspaper . There was no time in the short Mexican encounter to evolve a solution but the area provided a proving ground for new departures in the near future . 
When the United States entered the First World War Baker made certain that the Draft Act of 1917 prohibited the sale of liquor to men in uniform and that it provided for broad zones around the camps in which prostitution was outlawed . Even so Fosdick , as the new Chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities , encountered strong and vociferous opposition . New Orleans had a notorious red-light district extending over twenty-eight city blocks , and the business-minded mayor of the city journeyed to Washington to present the case for " the God-given right of men to be men " . In Europe , Premier Clemenceau , showing his animal proclivities as the " Tiger of France " , asked Pershing by letter for the creation of special houses where the sexual desires of American men could be satisfied . When Fosdick showed the letter to Baker his negative response was : " For God 's sake , Raymond , do n't show this to the President or he 'll stop the war " . Ultimately Fosdick 's " Fit to fight " slogan swept across the country and every well-known red-light district in the United States was closed , a hundred and ten of them . The result was that the rate of venereal disease in the American Army was the lowest in our military history . 
This was the negative side of the situation . Affirmatively Baker worked on the premise that " young men spontaneously prefer to be decent , and that opportunities for wholesome recreation are the best possible cure for irregularities in conduct which arise from idleness and the baser temptations " . The wholesome activities were to be provided by many organizations including the YMCA , the Knights of Columbus , the Jewish Welfare Board , the American Library Association , and the Playground and Recreation Association — private societies which voluntarily performed the job that was taken over almost entirely by the Special Services Division of the Army itself in World War /2 , . Over these voluntary agencies , in 1917-18 , the CTCA served as a co-ordinating body in carrying out what Survey called " the most stupendous piece of social work in modern times " . Under Fosdick the first executive officer of the CTCA was Richard Byrd , whose name in later years was to become synonymous with activities at the polar antipodes . From the point of view of popularity the best-known member of the Commission was Walter Camp , the Yale athlete whose sobriquet was " the father of American football " . He was placed in charge of athletics , and among other things adapted the type of calisthenics known as the daily dozen . The CTCA program of activities was profuse : William Farnum and Mary Pickford on the screen , Elsie Janis and Harry Lauder on the stage , books provided by the American Library Association , full equipment for games and sports — except that no " bones " were furnished for the all-time favorite pastime played on any floor and known as " African golf " . The CTCA distributed a khaki-bound songbook that provided the impetus for spirited renditions of the selections found therein , plus a number of others whose lyrics were more earthy — from " Johnny Get Your Gun " to " Keep the Home Fires Burning " to " Mademoiselle from Armentieres " .  In the imagination of the nineteenth century the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare stand side by side , their affinity transcending all the immense contrarieties of historical circumstance , religious belief , and poetic form . 
We no longer use the particular terms of Lessing and Victor Hugo . But we abide by their insight . The word " tragedy " encloses for us in a single span both the Greek and the Elizabethan example . The sense of relationship overreaches the historical truth that Shakespeare may have known next to nothing of the actual works of Aeschylus , Sophocles , and Euripides . It transcends the glaring fact that the Elizabethans mixed tragedy and comedy whereas the Greeks kept the two modes severely distinct . It overcomes our emphatic awareness of the vast difference in the shape and fabric of the two languages and styles of dramatic presentation . The intimations of a related spirit and ordering of human values are stronger than any sense of disparity . Comparable visions of life are at work in Antigone and Romeo and Juliet . We see at once what Victor Hugo means when he calls Macbeth a northern scion of the house of Atreus . Elsinore seems to lie in a range of Mycenae , and the fate of Orestes resounds in that of Hamlet . The hounds of hell search out their quarry in Apollo 's sanctuary as they do in the tent of Richard /3 , . Oedipus and Lear attain similar insights by virtue of similar blindness . It it not between Euripides and Shakespeare that the western mind turns away from the ancient tragic sense of life . It is after the late seventeenth century . I say the late seventeenth century because Racine ( whom Lessing did not really know ) stands on the far side of the chasm . The image of man which enters into force with Aeschylus is still vital in Phedre and Athalie . 
It is the triumph of rationalism and secular metaphysics which marks the point of no return . Shakespeare is closer to Sophocles than he is to Pope and Voltaire . To say this is to set aside the realness of time . But it is true , nevertheless . The modes of the imagination implicit in Athenian tragedy continued to shape the life of the mind until the age of Descartes and Newton . It is only then that the ancient habits of feeling and the classic orderings of material and psychological experience were abandoned . With the Discours de la methode and the Principia the things undreamt of in Horatio 's philosophy seem to pass from the world . 
In Greek tragedy as in Shakespeare , mortal actions are encompassed by forces which transcend man . The reality of Orestes entails that of the Furies ; the Weird Sisters wait for the soul of Macbeth . We can not conceive of Oedipus without a Sphinx , nor of Hamlet without a Ghost . The shadows cast by the personages of Greek and Shakespearean drama lengthen into a greater darkness . And the entirety of the natural world is party to the action . The thunderclaps over the sacred wood at Colonus and the storms in King Lear are caused by more than weather . In tragedy , lightning is a messenger . But it can no longer be so once Benjamin Franklin ( the incarnation of the new rational man ) has flown a kite to it . The tragic stage is a platform extending precariously between heaven and hell . Those who walk on it may encounter at any turn ministers of grace or damnation . Oedipus and Lear instruct us how little of the world belongs to man . Mortality is the pacing of a brief and dangerous watch , and to all sentinels , whether at Elsinore or on the battlements at Mycenae , the coming of dawn has its breath of miracle . It banishes the night wanderers to fire or repose . But at the touch of Hume and Voltaire the noble or hideous visitations which had haunted the mind since Agamemnon 's blood cried out for vengeance , disappeared altogether or took tawdry refuge among the gaslights of melodrama . Modern roosters have lost the art of crowing restless spirits back to Purgatory . 
In Athens , in Shakespeare 's England , and at Versailles , the hierarchies of worldly power were stable and manifest . The wheel of social life spun around the royal or aristocratic centre . From it , spokes of order and degree led to the outward rim of the common man . Tragedy presumes such a configuration . Its sphere is that of royal courts , dynastic quarrels , and vaulting ambitions . The same metaphors of swift ascent and calamitous decline apply to Oedipus and Macbeth because they applied also to Alcibiades and Essex . And the fate of such men has tragic relevance because it is public . Agamemnon , Creon , and Medea perform their tragic actions before the eyes of the polis . Similarly the sufferings of Hamlet , Othello , or Phedre engage the fortunes of the state . They are enacted at the heart of the body politic . Hence the natural setting of tragedy is the palace gate , the public square , or the court chamber . Greek and Elizabethan life and , to a certain extent , the life of Versailles shared this character of intense " publicity " . Princes and factions clashed in the open street and died on the open scaffold . 
With the rise to power of the middle class the centre of gravity in human affairs shifted from the public to the private . The art of Defoe and Richardson is founded on an awareness of this great change . Heretofore an action had possessed the breadth of tragedy only if it involved high personages and if it occurred in the public view . Behind the tragic hero stands the chorus , the crowd , or the observant courtier . In the eighteenth century there emerges for the first time the notion of a private tragedy ( or nearly for the first time , there having been a small number of Elizabethan domestic tragedies such as the famous Arden of Feversham ) . In La Nouvelle-Helo.iuml ; se and Werther tragedy is made intimate . And private tragedy became the chosen ground not of drama , but of the new , unfolding art of the novel . 
The novel was not only the presenter of the new , secular , rationalistic , private world of the middle class . It served also as a literary form exactly appropriate to the fragmented audience of modern urban culture . I have said before how difficult it is to make any precise statements with regard to the character of the Greek and Elizabethan public . But one major fact seems undeniable . Until the advent of rational empiricism the controlling habits of the western mind were symbolic and allegoric . Available evidence regarding the natural world , the course of history , and the varieties of human action were translated into imaginative designs or mythologies . Classic mythology and Christianity are such architectures of the imagination . They order the manifold levels of reality and moral value along an axis of being which extends from brute matter to the immaculate stars . There had not yet supervened between understanding and expression the new languages of mathematics and scientific formulas . The poet was by definition a realist , his imaginings and parables being natural organizations of reality . And in these organizations certain primal notions played a radiant part , radiant both in the sense of giving light and of being a pole toward which all perspectives converge . I mean such concepts as the presence of the supernatural in human affairs , the sacraments of grace and divine retribution , the idea of preordainment ( the oracle over Oedipus , the prophecy of the witches to Macbeth , or God 's covenant with His people in Athalie ) . I refer to the notion that the structure of society is a microcosm of the cosmic design and that history conforms to patterns of justice and chastisement as if it were a morality play set in motion by the gods for our instruction . 
These conceptions and the manner in which they were transposed into poetry or engendered by poetic form are intrinsic to western life from the time of Aeschylus to that of Shakespeare . And although they were , as I have indicated , under increasing strain at the time of Racine , they are still alive in his theatre . They are the essential force behind the conventions of tragedy . They are as decisively present in the Oresteia and Oedipus as in Macbeth , King Lear , and Phedre . 
After the seventeenth century the audience ceased to be an organic community to which these ideas and their attendant habits of figurative language would be natural or immediately familiar . Concepts such as grace , damnation , purgation , blasphemy , or the chain of being , which are everywhere implicit in classic and Shakespearean tragedy , lose their vitality . They become philosophic abstractions of a private and problematic relevance , or mere catchwords in religious customs which had in them a diminishing part of active belief . After Shakespeare the master spirits of western consciousness are no longer the blind seers , the poets , or Orpheus performing his art in the face of hell . They are Descartes , Newton , and Voltaire . And their chroniclers are not the dramatic poets but the prose novelists . 
The romantics were the immediate inheritors of this tremendous change . They were not yet prepared to accept it as irremediable . Rousseau 's primitivism , the anti-Newtonian mythology of Blake , Coleridge 's organic metaphysics , Victor Hugo 's image of the poets as the Magi , and Shelley 's " unacknowledged legislators " are related elements in the rear-guard action fought by the romantics against the new scientific rationalism . From this action sprang the idea of somehow uniting Greek and Shakespearean drama into a new total form , capable of restoring to life the ancient moral and poetic responses . The dream of achieving a synthesis between the Sophoclean and the Shakespearean genius inspired the ambitions of poets and composers from the time of Shelley and Victor Hugo to that of Bayreuth . It could not really be fulfilled . The conventions into which the romantics tried to breath life no longer corresponded to the realities of thought and feeling . But the attempt itself produced a number of brilliant works , and these form a transition from the early romantic period to the new age of Ibsen and Chekhov .   The wedding of the Hellenic to the northern genius was one of the dominant motifs in Goethe 's thought . His Italian journey was a poet 's version of those perennial thrusts across the Alps of the German emperors of the Middle Ages . The dream of a descent into the gardens of the south always drew German ambitions toward Rome and Sicily . Goethe asks in Wilhelm Meister whether we know the land where the lemon trees flower , and the light of the Mediterranean glows through Torquato Tasso and the Roman Elegies . Goethe believed that the Germanic spirit , with its grave strength but flagrant streaks of brutality and intolerance , should be tempered with the old sensuous wisdom and humanism of the Hellenic . On the narrower ground of poetic form , he felt that in the drama of the future the Greek conception of tragic fate should be joined to the Shakespearean vision of tragic will . The wager between God and Satan brings on the destiny of Faust , but Faust assumes his role voluntarily . 
The third Act of Faust /2 , is a formal celebration of the union between the Germanic and the classic , between the spirit of Euripides and that of romantic drama . The motif of Faust 's love for Helen of Troy goes back to the sources of the Faustian legend . It tells us of the ancient human desire to see the highest wisdom joined to the highest sensual beauty . There can be no greater magic than to wrest from death her in whom the flesh was all , in whom beauty was entirely pure because it was entirely corruptible . It is thus that the brightness of Helen passes through Marlowe 's Faustus . Goethe used the fable to more elaborate ends . Faust rescuing Helen from Menelaus ' vengeance is the genius of renaissance Europe restoring to life the classic tradition . The necromantic change from the palace at Sparta to Faust 's Gothic castle directs us to the aesthetic meaning of the myth — the translation of antique drama into Shakespearean and romantic guise . 
This translation , or rather the fusion of the two ideals , creates the Gesamtkunstwerk , the " total art form " .  The Bishop of Gloucester described the elder Thomas in 1577 as the richest recusant in his diocese , worth five hundred pounds a year in lands and goods . When Quiney and William Parsons wrote to Greville in 1593 asking his consent in the election for bailiff , they sent the letter to Mr. William Sawnders , attendant on the worshipful Mr. Thomas Bushell at Marston . Mr. Bushell was mentioned in 1602 in the will of Joyce Hobday , widow of a Stratford glover . Thomas the elder married twice , had seventeen children , and died in 1615 . His daughter Elinor married Quiney 's son Adrian in 1613 , and his son Henry married Mary Lane of Stratford in 1609 . His son Thomas , aged fifteen when he entered Oxford in 1582 , married as his first wife Margaret , sister of Sir Edward Greville . Bridges , a son by his second wife , was christened at Pebworth in 1607 , but Thomas the younger was living at Packwood two years later and sold Broad Marston manor in 1622 . A third Thomas Bushell ( 1594-1674 ) , " much loved " by Bacon , called himself " the Superlative Prodigall " in The First Part of Youths Errors ( 1628 ) and became an expert on silver mines and on the art of running into debt . 
Edward Greville , born about 1565 , had inherited Milcote on the execution of his father Lodowick for murder in 1589 . He refused his consent to the election of Quiney as bailiff in 1592 , but gave it at the request of the recorder , his cousin Sir Fulke Greville . The corporation entertained him for dinner at Quiney 's house in 1596/7 , with wine and sugar sent by the bailiff , Sturley . At Milcote on November 3 , 1597 , the aldermen asked him to support their petition for a new charter . Sturley wrote to Quiney that Sir Edward " gave his allowance and liking thereof , and affied unto us his best endeavour , so that his rights be preserved " , and that " Sir Edward saith we shall not be at any fault for money for prosecuting the cause , for himself will procure it and lay it down for us for the time " . Greville proposed Quiney as the fittest man " for the following of the cause and to attend him in the matter " , and at his suggestion the corporation allowed Quiney two shillings a day . " If you can firmly make the good knight sure to pleasure our Corporation " , Sturley wrote , " besides that ordinary allowance for your diet you shall have  20 for recompence " . 
In his letter mentioning Shakespeare on January 24 , 1597/8 , Sturley asked Quiney especially that " theare might [ be ] bi Sir Ed . Grev. some meanes made to the Knightes of the Parliament for an ease and discharge of such taxes and subsedies wherewith our towne is like to be charged , and I assure u I am in great feare and doubte bi no meanes hable to paie . Sir Ed . Gre . is gonne to Brestowe and from thence to Lond. as I heare , who verie well knoweth our estates and wil be willinge to do us ani good " . The knights for Warwickshire in this parliament , which ended its session on February 9 , were Fulke Greville ( the poet ) and William Combe of Warwick , as Fulke Greville and Edward Greville had been in 1593 . The corporation voted on September 27 , 1598 , that Quiney should ride to London about the suit to Sir John Fortescue , chancellor of the Exchequer , for discharging of the tax and subsidy . He had been in London for several weeks when he wrote to Shakespeare on October 25 . Sturley on November 4 answered a letter from Quiney written on October 25 which imported , wrote Sturley , " that our countriman **f **f Shak. would procure us monei : which I will like of as I shall heare when wheare + howe : and I prai let not go that occasion if it mai sort to ani indifferent condicions . Allso that if monei might be had for 30 or **f a lease +c. might be procured " . Sturley quoted Quiney as having written on November 1 that if he had " more monei presente much might be done to obtaine our Charter enlargd , ij. faires more , with tole of corne , bestes , and sheepe , and a matter of more valewe then all that " . Sturley thought that this matter might be " the rest of the tithes and the College houses and landes in our towne " . He suggested offering half to Sir Edward , fearing lest " he shall thinke it to good for us and procure it for himselfe , as he served us the last time " . This refers to what had happened after the Earl of Warwick died in 1590 , when the town petitioned Burghley for the right to name the vicar and schoolmaster and other privileges but Greville bought the lordship for himself . Sturley 's allusion probably explains why Greville took out the patent in the names of Best and Wells , for Sir Anthony Ashley described Best as " a scrivener within Temple Bar , that deals in many matters for my L. Essex " through Sir Gelly Merrick , especially in " causes that he would not be known of " . 
Adrian Quiney wrote to his son Richard on October 29 and again perhaps the next day , since the bearer of the letter , the bailiff , was expected to reach London on November 1 . In his second letter the old mercer advised his son " to bye some such warys as yow may selle presentlye with profet. yff yow bargen with **f sha … [ so in the MS ] or Receave money ther or brynge your money home yow maye see howe knite stockynges be sold ther ys gret byinge of them at Aysshom … . wherefore I thynke yow maye doo good yff yow can have money " . This seems to refer , not to the loan Richard had asked for , but to a proposed bargain with Shakespeare . 
Richard Quiney the younger , a schoolboy of eleven , wrote a letter in Latin asking his father to buy copybooks ( " chartaceos libellos " ) for him and his brother . His mother Bess , who could not write herself , reminded her husband through Sturley to buy the apron he had promised her and " a suite of hattes for 5 boies the yongst lined + trimmed with silke " ( for John , only a year old ) . A letter signed " Isabell Bardall " entreated " Good Cozen " Quiney to find her stepson Adrian , son of George Bardell , a place in London with some handicraftsman . William Parsons and William Walford , drapers , asked Quiney to see to business matters in London . Daniel Baker deluged his " Unckle Quyne " with requests to pay money for him to drapers in Watling Street and at the Two Cats in Canning Street . His letter of October 26 named two of the men about whom Quiney had written to Shakespeare the day before . Baker wrote : " I tooke order with **f E. Grevile for the payment of Ceartaine monei beefore his going towardes London . + synce I did write unto him to dessier him to paie **f for mee which standeth mee greatly uppon to have paide. + **f more **f peeter Rowswell tooke order with his master to paie for mee " . He asked Quiney to find out whether the money had been paid and , if not , to send to the lodging of Sir Edward and entreat him to pay what he owed . Baker added : " I pray you delivre these inclosed Letters And Comend mee to **f Rychard mytton whoe I know will ffreind mee for the payment of this monei " . Further letters in November mention that Sir Edward paid forty pounds . 
Stratford 's petition to the queen declared that two great fires had burnt two hundred houses in the town , with household goods , to the value of twelve thousand pounds . The chancellor of the Exchequer wrote on the petition : " in myn opinion it is very resonable and conscionable for hir maiestie to graunt in relief of this towne twise afflicted and almost wasted by fire " . The queen agreed on December 17 , a warrant was signed on January 27 , and the Exchequer paid Quiney his expenses on February 27 , 1598/9 . He listed what he had spent for " My own diet in London eighteen weeks , in which I was sick a month ; my mare at coming up 14 days ; another I bought there to bring me home 7 weeks ; and I was six days going thither and coming homewards ; all which cost me at the least  20 " . He was allowed forty-four pounds in all , including fees to the masters of requests , Mr. Fanshawe of the Exchequer , the solicitor general , and other officials and their clerks . If he borrowed money from Shakespeare or with his help , he would now have been able to repay the loan . 
Since more is known about Quiney than about any other acquaintance of Shakespeare in Stratford , his career may be followed to its sudden end in 1602 . During 1598 and 1599 he made " manye Guiftes of myne owne provision bestowed uppon Cowrtiers + others for the better effectinge of our suites in hande " . He was in London " searching records for our town 's causes " in 1600 with young Henry Sturley , the assistant schoolmaster . When Sir Edward Greville enclosed the town commons on the Bancroft , Quiney and others leveled his hedges on January 21 , 1600/1 , and were charged with riot by Sir Edward . He also sued them for taking toll of grain at their market . Accompanied by " Master Greene our solicitor " ( Thomas Greene of the Middle Temple , Shakespeare 's " cousin " ) , Quiney tried to consult Sir Edward Coke , attorney general , and gave money to a clerk and a doorkeeper " that we might have access to their master for his counsel … butt colde nott have him att Leasure by the reason of thees trobles " ( the Essex rising on February 8 ) . He set down that " I gave **f Greene a pynte of muskadell and a roll of bread that last morning I went to have his company to Master Attorney " . After returning to Stratford he drew up a defense of the town 's right to toll corn and the office of collecting it , and his list of suggested witnesses included his father and Shakespeare 's father . No one , he wrote , took any corn of Greville 's , for his bailiff of husbandry " swore a greate oathe thatt who soe came to put hys hande into hys sackes for anye corne shuld leave hys hande be hynde hym " . Quiney was in London again in June , 1601 , and in November , when he rode up , as Shakespeare must often have done , by way of Oxford , High Wycombe , and Uxbridge , and home through Aylesbury and Banbury . 
After Quiney was elected bailiff in September , 1601 , without Greville 's approval , Greene wrote him that Coke had promised to be of counsel for Stratford and had advised " that the office of bayly may be exercised as it is taken upon you , ( **f Edwardes his consent not beinge hadd to the swearinge of you ) " . Asked by the townsmen to cease his suit , Greville had answered that " hytt shulde coste hym **f first + sayed it must be tried ether before my Lorde Anderson in the countrey or his uncle ffortescue in the exchequer with whom he colde more prevaile then we " . The corporation proposed Chief Justice Anderson for an arbiter , sending him a gift of sack and claret . Lady Greville , daughter of the late Lord Chancellor Bromley and niece of Sir John Fortescue , was offered twenty pounds by the townsmen to make peace ; she " labored + thought she shuld effecte " it but her husband said that " we shuld wynne it by the sworde " . His servant Robin Whitney threatened Quiney , who had Whitney bound to " the good abaringe " to keep the peace . A report of **f Edw : Grevyles minaces to the Baileefe Aldermen + Burgesses of Stratforde " tells how Quiney was injured by Greville 's men : " in the tyme **f Ryc' Quyney was bayleefe ther came some of them whoe beinge druncke fell to braweling in ther hosts howse wher thei druncke + drewe ther dagers uppon the hoste : att a faier tyme the Baileefe being late abroade to see the towne in order + comminge by in **f hurley Burley . came into the howse + commawnded the peace to be kept butt colde nott prevayle + in hys endevor to sticle the brawle had his heade grevouselye brooken by one of hys [ Greville 's ] men whom nether hym selfe [ Greville ] punnished nor wolde suffer to be punnished but with a shewe to turne them awaye + enterteyned agayne " .  The fall of Rome , the discovery of precious metals , and the Protestant Reformation were all links and could only be explained and understood by comprehending the links that preceded and those that followed . 
Often the historian must consider the use of intuition or instinct by those individuals or nations which he is studying . Unconsciously , governments or races or institutions may enter into some undertaking without fully realizing why they are doing so . They react in obedience to an instinct or urge which has itself been impelled by natural law . A court may strike down a law on the basis of an intuitive feeling that the law is inimical to the numerical majority . A nation may go to war on some trifling pretext , when in reality it may have been guided by an unconscious instinct that its very life was at stake . When the historian encounters a situation in which he can perceive no visible cause and effect sequence , he should be alert to intuition and unconscious instinct as possible guides . 
Adams firmly contended that the historian must never underrate the impact of the geographical environment on history . Here was another indispensable tool . Indeed , he concluded that " geographical conditions have exercised a great , possibly a preponderating , influence over man 's destiny " . The failure of Greece to reach the imperial destiny that Periclean Athens had seemed to promise was almost directly attributable to her physical conformation . All areas of history were either favorably or adversely affected by the geographical environment , and no respectable historian could pursue the study of history without a thorough knowledge of geography . 
Brooks Adams was consistent in his admonishments to historians about the necessary tools or insights they needed to possess . However , as a practicing historian , he , himself , has left few clues to the amount of professional scholarship that he used when writing history . In fact , if judgments are to be rendered upon the soundness of his historicism , they must be based on scanty evidence . What evidence is available would seem to indicate that Brooks , unlike his older brother Henry , had most of the methodological vices usually found in the amateur . A credulousness , a distaste for documentation , an uncritical reliance on contemporary accounts , and a proneness to assume a theory as true before adequate proof was provided were all evidences of his failure to comprehend the use of the scientific method or to evaluate the responsibilities of the historian to his reading public . This is not to assume that his work was without merit , but the validity of his assumptions concerning the meaning of history must always be considered against this background of an unprofessional approach . 
His credulity is perhaps best illustrated in his introduction to The Emancipation of Massachusetts , which purports to examine the trials of Moses and to draw a parallel between the leader of the Israelite exodus from Egypt and the leadership of the Puritan clergy in colonial New England . Much criticism has been leveled at this rather forced analogy , but what is equally significant is Adams ' complete acceptance of the Biblical record as " good and trustworthy history " . In light of the scholarly reappraisals engendered by the higher criticism this is a most remarkable statement , particularly coming from one who was well known for his antifundamentalist views . The desire to substantiate a thesis at the expense of sound research technique smacks more of the propagandist than the historian . 
A similar amateurish characteristic is revealed in Adams ' failure to check the accuracy and authenticity of his informational sources . If he found data that fitted his general plan , he used it and counted his sources trustworthy . Conversely , if statistics were uncovered which contradicted a cherished theory , the sources were denounced as faulty . Such manipulations are frequently encountered in his essay on the suppression of the monasteries during the English reformation . Adams depended largely on the dispatches of foreign ambassadors and observers in England , claiming that the reports of such agents had to be accurate because there were no newspapers . This is certainly an irrational dogmatism , in which the modern mind attempts to understand the spirit of the sixteenth century on twentieth-century terms . Moreover , he rejects the contemporary accounts of Englishmen , casually adjudging them to be distorted by prejudice because " the opinions of Englishmen are of no great value " . What is exposited by this observation is not the inherent prejudices of Englishmen but the Anglophobia of Brooks Adams . 
In all fairness it must be admitted that Adams made no pretense at being an impartial historian . Impartiality to him meant an unwillingness to generalize and to search for a synthesis . He deplored the impact of German historiography on the writing of history , terming it a " dismal monster " . Ranke and his disciples had reduced history to a profession of dullness ; Brooks Adams preferred the chronicles of Froissart or the style and theorizing of Edward Gibbon , for at least they took a stand on the issues about which they wrote . He wrote eloquently to William James that impartial history was not only impossible but undesirable . If the historian was convinced of his own correctness , then he should not allow his vision to become fogged by disturbing facts . It was history that must be in error , not the historian . It was this basic trait that separated Adams from the ranks of professional historians and led him to commit time and time again what was his most serious offense against the historical method — namely , the tendency to assume the truth of an hypothesis before submitting it to the test of facts . 
All of Adams ' work reflects this dogmatic characteristic . No page seems to be complete without the statement of at least one unproved generalization . One example of this was his assertion that " … all servile revolts must be dealt with by physical force " . There is no explanation of terms nor a qualification that most such revolts have been dealt with by force — only a bald dogmatism that they must , because of some undefined compulsion , be so repelled . On matters of race he was similarly inflexible : " Most of the modern Latin races seem to have inherited … the rigidity of the Roman mind " . He cites the French Revolution as typifying this rigidity but makes no mention of the Italians , who have been able to adapt to all types of circumstances . He pontificates that " one of the first signs of advancing civilization is the fall in the value of women in men 's eyes " . It made no difference that most evidence points to an opposite conclusion . For Adams had made up his mind before all the facts were available . 
All critics of Adams and his methods have observed this particular deficiency . J. T. Shotwell was appalled by such spurious history as that which attributed the fall of the Carolingian empire to the woolen trade , and he urged Adams to " transform his essay into a real history , embodying not merely those facts which fit into his theory , but also the modifications and exceptions " . A. M. Wergeland called the Adams method literally antihistorical , while Clive Day maintained that the assumptions were not confined to theories alone but were also applicable to straight factual evidence . Moreover , stated Day , " He always omits facts which tend to disprove his hypothesis " . Even D. A. Wasson , who compared The Emancipation of Massachusetts to the lifting of a fog from ancient landscapes , was also forced to admit the methodological deficiencies of the author . 
In summary , Brooks Adams felt that the nature of history was order and that the order so discovered was as much subject to historical laws as the forces of nature . Moreover , he believed that most professional historians lacked some of the essential instruments for a proper study of history . However , despite the insight of many of his observations , his own conclusions are open to suspicion because of his failure to employ at all times the correct research methods . This should not prejudice an evaluation of his findings , but they were not the findings of a completely impartial investigator . What was perhaps more important than his concept of the nature of history and the historical method were those forces which shaped the direction of his thought . In the final analysis his contribution to American historiography was founded on almost intuitive insights into religion , economics , and Darwinism , the three factors which conditioned his search for a law of history .  RELIGION WITHOUT SUPERNATURALISM  Brooks Adams considered religion as an extremely significant manifestation of man 's fear of the unknown . But it was nothing more than that . Religion and the churches were institutions which had been created by man , not God . He did not deny God ; he simply did not believe that a Creator intervened or interfered in human affairs . The historian need not be concerned with the philosophical problems suggested by religion . There was no evidence , either of a positive or negative type , of the actions of a Divine Being in this world ; and , since the historian should only be interested in strictly terrestrial activity , his research should eliminate the supernatural . Furthermore , he must regard religion as the expression of human forces . Certainly , he must recognize its power and attempt to ascertain its influence on the flow of history , but he must not confuse the natural and the mundane with the divine . 
Adams was not breaking new ground when he claimed that the worship of an unseen power was in reality a reflection of man 's inability to cope with his environment . Students of anthropology and comparative religion had long been aware that there was , indeed , a direct connection . But Adams was one of the first to suggest that this human incompetence was the only motivating factor behind religion . It was this fear which explained the development of a priestly caste whose function in society was to mollify and appease the angry deities . To keep themselves entrenched in power , the priests were forced to demonstrate their unique status through the miracle . It was the use of the supernatural that kept them in business . The German barbarians of the fourth century offered an excellent example : 
" The Germans in the fourth century were a very simple race , who comprehended little of natural laws , and who therefore referred phenomena they did not understand to supernatural intervention . This intervention could only be controlled by priests , and thus the invasions caused a rapid rise in the influence of the sacred class . The power of every ecclesiastical organization has always rested on the miracle , and the clergy have always proved their divine commission as did Elijah " . 
Adams contended that once such a special class had been created it became a vested interest and sought to maintain itself by assuming exclusive control over the relationships between God and man . Thus , the Church was born and because of its intrinsic character was soon identified as a conservative institution , determined to resist the forces of change , to identify itself with the political rulers , and to maintain a kind of splendid isolation from the masses . Doctrine was not only mysterious ; it was also sacred , " and no believer in an inspired church could tolerate having her canons examined as we should examine human laws " . These basic ideas concerning the nature of religion were , Adams believed , some of the major keys to the understanding of history and the movement of society . The dark views about the Puritans found in The Emancipation of Massachusetts were never altered . 
Despite their adherence to the status quo , the forces of organized religion were compelled to make adjustments as increasing civilization augmented human knowledge . In The Law of Civilization and Decay Brooks Adams traced this evolution , always pointing to the fact that although the forms became more rational , the substance remained unchanged . The relic worship and monasticism of the Middle Ages were more advanced forms than were primitive fetish worship and nature myths . Yet , the idea imbedded in each was identical : to surround the unknown with mystery and to isolate that class which had been given special dominion over the secrets of God . To Adams that age in which religion exercised power over the entire culture of the race was one of imagination , and it is largely the admiration he so obviously held for such eras that betrays a peculiar religiosity — a sentiment he would have probably denied .  Stephens had written his classic " incidents of travel " about these regions a hundred years before , and Catherwood , who had studied Piranesi in London and the great ruins of Egypt and Greece , had drawn the splendid illustrations that accompanied the text . Catherwood , an architect in New York , had been forgotten , like Stephens , and Victor reconstructed their lives as one reconstructs , for a museum , a dinosaur from two or three petrified bones . He had unearthed Stephens 's letters in a New Jersey farmhouse and he discovered Stephens 's unmarked grave in an old cemetery on the east side of New York , where the great traveller had been hastily buried during a cholera epidemic . Victor had been stirred by my account of him in Makers and Finders , for Stephens was one of the lost writers whom Melville had seen in his childhood and whom I was bent on resurrecting . 
Victor had led an adventurous life . His metier was the American tropics , and he had lived all over Latin America and among the primitive tribes on the Amazon river . Well he knew the sleepless nights , the howling sore-ridden dogs and the biting insects in the villages of the Kofanes and Huitotoes . He had not yet undertaken the great exploit of his later years , the rediscovery of the ancient Inca highway , the route of Pizarro in Peru , but he had climbed to the original El Dorado , the Andean lake of Guatemala , and he had scaled the southern Sierra Nevada with its Tibetan-like people and looked into the emerald mines of Muzo . As a naturalist living for two years at the headwaters of the Amazon , he had collected specimens for Mexican museums , and he had taken to the London zoo a live quetzal , the sacred bird of the old Mayans . In fact , he had raised quetzal birds in his camp in the forest of Ecuador . Moreover , he had spent six months on the Galapagos islands , among the great turtles that Captain Cook had found there , and now and then he would disappear into some small island of the West Indies . Victor 's book on John Lloyd Stephens was largely written in my study in the house at Weston . 
I had had my name taken out of the telephone book , and this was partly because of a convict who had been discharged from Sing Sing and who called me night after night . He said he was a friend of Heywood Broun who had run a free employment bureau for several months during the depression , but the generous Broun to whom I wrote did not know his name and I somehow conceived the morbid notion that the man in question was prowling round the house . But one day came the voice of a man I had known when he was a boy , and I later remembered that this boy , thirty years before , had struck me as coming to no good . There had been something sinister about him that warned me against him , — I had never felt that way about any other boy , — but when he uttered his name on the telephone I had forgotten this and I was glad to do what he asked of me . He was a captain , he said , in the army , and on the train to New York his purse and all his money had been stolen , and would I lend him twenty-five dollars to be given him at the General Delivery window ? Never hearing from him again , I remembered the little boy of whom I had had such doubts when he was ten years old . We lived for a while in a movie melodrama with a German cook and her son who turned out to be Nazis . Finally we got them out of the house , after the boy had run away four times looking for other Nazis , threatening to murder village schoolchildren and bragging that he was to be the next F.uuml ; hrer . Then he began to have epileptic fits . We found that a charitable society in New York had a long case-history of the two ; and they agreed to see that the tragic pair would not put poison in anybody else 's soup . 
To the Weston house came once William Allen Neilson , the president of Smith College who had been one of my old professors and who still called me " Boy " when I was sixty . It reminded me of my other professor , Edward Kennard Rand , of whom I had been so fond when I was at Harvard , the great mediaevalist and classical scholar who had asked me to call him " Ken " , saying , " Age counts for nothing among those who have learned to know life sub specie aeternitatis " . I had always thought of that lovable man as many years older than myself , although he was perhaps only twenty years older , and he confirmed my feeling , along with the feeling of both my sons , that teachers of the classics are invariably endearing . I must have written to say how much I had enjoyed his fine book The Building of Eternal Rome , and I found he had not regretted giving me the highest mark in his old course on the later Latin poets , although in my final examination I had ignored the questions and filled the bluebook with a comparison of Propertius and Coleridge . He had written to me about a dinner he had had with the Benedictine monks at St. Anselm 's Priory in Washington . There had been reading at table , especially from two books , Pope Gregory the Great 's account of St. Scholastica in his Dialogues and my own The World of Washington Irving . He said , " Some have criticized your book as being neither literary criticism nor history . Of course it was not meant to be . Some have felt that Washington Irving comes out rather slimly , but let them look at the title of the book " . He felt as I felt about this best of all my books , that it was " really tops " . 
Two or three times , C. C. Burlingham came to lunch with us in Weston , that wonderful man who lived to be more than a hundred years old and whose birthplace had been my Wall Street suburb . His reading ranged from Agatha Christie to the Book of Job and he had an insatiable interest in his fellow-creatures , while his letters were full of gossip about new politicians and old men of letters with whom he had been intimately thrown six decades before . I could never forget the gaiety with which , when he was both blind and deaf , he let me lead him around his rooms to look at some of the pictures ; and once when he came to see us in New York he walked away in a rainstorm , unwilling to hear of a taxi or even an umbrella , although he was at the time ninety years old . There were several men of ninety or more whom I knew first or last , all of whom were still productive and most of whom knew one another as if they had naturally come together at the apex of their lives . I never met John Dewey , whose style was a sort of verbal fog and who had written asking me to go to Mexico with him when he was investigating the cause of Trotsky ; but I liked to think of him at ninety swimming and working at Key West long after Hemingway had moved to Cuba . At Lee Simonson 's house , I had dined with Edith Hamilton , the nonogenarian rationalist and the charming scholar who had a great popular success with The Greek Way . Then there was Mark Howe and there was Henry Dwight Sedgwick , an accomplished man of letters who wrote in the spirit of Montaigne and produced in the end a formidable body of work . I saw Sedgwick often before his death at ninety-five , — he had remarried at the age of ninety , — and he asked me , when once I returned from Rome , if I knew the Cavallinis in the church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere . I had to confess that I had missed these frescoes , recently discovered , that he had studied in his eighties . Sedgwick had chosen to follow the philosophy of Epicurus whom , with his followers , Dante put in hell ; but he defended the doctrine in The Art of Happiness , and what indeed could be said against the Epicurean virtues , health , frugality , privacy , culture and friendship ? Of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe the philosopher Whitehead said the Earth 's first visitors to Mars should be persons likely to make a good impression , and when he was asked , " Whom would you send " ? he replied , " My first choice would be Mark Howe " . This friend of many years came once to visit us in the house at Weston . Then I spoke at the ninetieth birthday party of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois , who embarked on a fictional trilogy at eighty-nine and who , with The Crisis , had created a Negro intelligentsia that had never existed in America before him . As their interpreter and guide , he had broken with Tuskegee and become a spokesman of the coloured people of the world . 
Mr. Burlingham , — " C.C.B. " — wrote to me once about an old friend of mine , S. K. Ratcliffe , whom I had first met in London in 1914 and who also came out for a week-end in Weston . " Did you ever know a man with greater zest for information ? And his memory , like an elephant 's , stored with precise knowledge of men and things and happenings " . His wife , Katie , " as gay as a lark and as lively as a gazelle " , — she was then seventy-six , — had a " a sense of humour that has been denied S.K. , but neither has any aesthetic perceptions . People and books are enough for them " . S.K. was visiting C.C.B. and , not waiting for breakfast , he was off to the University Club , where he spent hours writing obituaries of living Americans for the Manchester guardian or the Glasgow Herald . Later , rising ninety , he was beset by publishers for the story of his life and miracles , as he put it , but , calling himself the Needy Knife-grinder , he had spent his time writing short articles and long letters and could not get even a small popular book done . Then , all but blind , he said there was nothing in Back to Methuselah , — " G.B.S. ought to have known that " , — and " I look at my bookshelves despairingly , knowing that I can have nothing more to do with them " . However , at eighty-five , he had still been busy writing articles , reviewing and speaking , and I had never before known an Englishman who had visited and lectured in three quarters of the United States . Finally , colleges and clubs took the line that speakers from England were not wanted any longer , even speakers like S.K. , so unlike the novelists and poets who had patronized the Americans for many years . With their facile generalizations about the United States , these mediocrities , as they often were , had been great successes . While S.K. did not like Dylan Thomas , I liked his poems very much , but I made the mistake of telling Dylan Thomas so , whereupon he said to me , " I suppose you think you know all about me " . I should have replied , " I probably know something about the best part of you " . But I only thought of that in the middle of the night . 
Many years later I went to see S.K. in England , where he was living at Whiteleaf , near Aylesbury , and he showed me beside his cottage there the remains of the road on which Boadicea is supposed to have travelled . He was convinced that George Orwell 's 1984 was nearly all wrong as it applied to England , which was " driving forward into uncharted waters " , with the danger of a new tyranny ahead . " But however we go , whatever our doom , it will not take the Orwellian shape " . With facts mainly in his mind , he was often acute in the matter of style , and he said , " The young who have as yet nothing to say will try larks with initial letters and broken lines . But put them before a situation which they are forced to depict " , — he was speaking of the Spanish civil war , — " and they have no hesitation ; they merely do their best to make it real for others " .  He looked at her as she spoke , then got up as she was speaking still , and , simply and wordlessly , walked out . And that was the end . Or nearly . 
He went to the Hotel Mayflower and telegraphed Mencken . Would he meet him in Baltimore in Drawing Room A , Car Three on the train leaving Washington at nine o'clock next morning ? They would go to New York together , where parties would be piled on weariness and on misery . But not for long . Both Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace had written him enthusiastic praise of Elmer Gantry ( any changes could be made in proof , which was already coming from the printer ) and they had ordered 140,000 copies — the largest first printing of any book in history . But none of this could soothe the exacerbated nerves . On New Year 's Eve , Alfred Harcourt drove him up the Hudson to Bill Brown 's Training Camp , a well-known establishment for the speedy if temporary rehabilitation of drunkards who could no longer help themselves . But , in departing , Lewis begged Breasted that there be no liquor in the apartment at the Grosvenor on his return , and he took with him the first thirty galleys of Elmer Gantry . 
On January 4 , with the boys back at school and college , Mrs. Lewis wrote Harcourt to say that she was " thro , quite thro " . " This whole Washington venture was my last gesture , and it has failed . Physically as well as mentally I have reached the limit of my endurance . My last gift to him is complete silence until the book is out and the first heated discussion dies down . For him to divorce God and wife simultaneously would be bad publicity . I am really ill at the present moment , and I will go to some sort of a sanitarium to normalize myself " . And she withdrew then to Cromwell Hall , in Cromwell , Connecticut . 
Harcourt replied : " I do really hope you can achieve serenity in the course of time . Of course I hope Hal can also , but those hopes are much more faint " .  8  ON JANUARY 8 , 1927 , he returned to the Grosvenor in high spirits , and looking fit . He had been , he wrote Mencken at once , " in the country " , a euphemism for an experience that had not greatly changed him . Charles Breasted remembers that , before unpacking his bag , he telephoned his bootlegger with a generous order , and almost at once " the familiar procession of people began milling through our living room at any hour between two P.M. and three A.M. " . They were strays of every kind — university students and journalists , Village hangers-on and barflies , taxi drivers and editors and unknown poets , as well as friends like Elinor Wylie and William Rose Benet , the Van Dorens and Nathan , Rebecca West and Hugh Walpole and Osbert Sitwell , Laurence Stallings , Lewis Browne , William Seabrook , Arthur Hopkins , the Woodwards . When he came home from his office at the end of the afternoon , Breasted never knew what gathering he should expect to find , but there almost always was one . 
He did not neglect his wife in Cromwell Hall , but telephoned her and wrote her with assurances of his continuing interest and of his wish to " stand behind " her in their separation and of his hope that there would be no bitterness between them . She was occupying herself in an attempt to write an article about the variety of houses that they had rented abroad . He was of unsettled mind as to whether he should go abroad when the Gantry galleys were finished . For a time , urging Breasted to give up his public relations work and take up writing instead , he hoped to persuade him to become his assistant in research for the labor novel ; if Breasted agreed , they would get a car and tour the country , visiting every kind of industrial center . When Breasted insisted that this was impossible for him , Lewis decided to go abroad . 
He telephoned L. M. Birkhead and asked him and his wife to come to Europe as his guests , but Birkhead declined on the grounds that one of them must be in the United States when Elmer Gantry was published . Lewis was spending his mornings , with the help of two secretaries , on the galleys of that long novel , making considerable revisions , and the combination of hard work and hard frivolity exhausted him once more , so that he was compelled to spend three days in the Harbor Sanatorium in the last week of January . Before he made that retreat , he telephoned Earl Blackman in Kansas City and asked him to come to Europe with him . Blackman was to be in New York by February 2 , because they were sailing at 12:01 next morning . Lewis told him what clothes he should bring along , and enjoined him not to buy anything that he did not already own , they would do that in New York . Blackman arrived a day or two early , and Lewis took him to a department store immediately and outfitted him , luggage and all , and then he took him to a party at the Woodwards that went on until four in the morning . 
On the evening that they were to sail , Lewis himself gave a party , but he was too indisposed to appear at it . Woodward took occasion to warn Blackman about Lewis 's drinking and urged him to " try to keep him sober " . After a dinner party for which she had come down to New York , Mrs. Lewis and Casanova arrived to see them off , and Elinor Wylie made tart observations that indicated that Lewis had been less discreet than he had promised to be about the real nature of their separation . Nevertheless , Mrs. Lewis was still solicitous of his condition : let him do as he wished , let him sleep with chambermaids if he must , but , she begged Blackman , try to keep him from drinking a great deal and bring him back in good health . As they stood at the first-class rail , waving down to his wife and Casanova below , Lewis said , " Earl , there is Gracie 's future husband " . And when questioned by ship 's reporters about the separation , she said , " I adore him , and he adores me " . 
Blackman had brought news from Kansas City . Before his departure , a group of his friends , the Reverend Stidger among them , had given him a luncheon , and Stidger had seen advance sheets of Elmer Gantry . He was outraged by the book and announced that he had discovered fifty technical errors in its account of church practices . L. M. Birkhead challenged him to name one and he was silent . But his rancor did not cease , and presently , on March 13 , when he preached a sermon on the text , " And Ben-hadad Was Drunk " , he told his congregation how disappointed he was in Mr. Lewis , how he regretted having had him in his house , and how he should have been warned by the fact that the novelist was drunk all the time that he was working on the book . But that sermon , like those of hundreds of other ministers , was yet to be delivered . 
In London Lewis took the usual suite in Bury Street . To the newspapers he talked about his unquiet life , about his wish to be a newspaperman once more , about the prevalence of American slang in British speech , about the loquacity of the English and the impossibility of finding quiet in a railway carriage , about his plans to wander for two years " unless stopped and made to write another book " . The Manchester Guardian wondered how anyone in a railway carriage would have an opportunity to talk to Mr. Lewis , since it was well known that Mr. Lewis always did all of the talking . His English friends , it said , had gone into training to keep up with him vocally and with his " allegro movements around the luncheon table " . The New York Times editorialist wondered just who would stop Mr. Lewis and make him write a book . 
Lewis 's remarks about his marriage were suggestive enough to induce American reporters to invade the offices of Harcourt , Brace + Company for information , to pursue Mrs. Lewis to Cromwell Hall , and , after she had returned to New York , to ferret her out at the Stanhope on upper Fifth Avenue where she had taken an apartment . There , to the Evening Post , she emphatically denied the divorce rumors and explained that she had stayed behind because of the schooling of their son , which henceforth would be strictly American . These rumors of permanent separation started up a whole crop of stories about her . One had it that a friend , protesting her snobbery , said , " But , Gracie , you are an American , are n't you " ? and she replied , " I was born in America , but I was conceived in Vienna " . Lewis himself furthered these tales . He is said to have reported that once , when she went to a hospital to call on a friend after a serious operation , and the friend protested that it had been " nothing " , she replied , " Well , it was your healthy American peasant blood that pulled you through " . With these and similar tales he was entertaining his English friends , all of whom he was seeing when he was not showing Blackman the sights of London and its environs . 
At once upon his arrival , he telephoned Lady Sybil Colefax who invited them to tea , and then Lewis decided to give a party as a quick way of rounding up his friends . He invited Lady Sybil , Lord Thomson , Bechhofer Roberts , and a half dozen others . It was a dinner party , Lewis had been drinking during the afternoon , and long before the party really got under way , he was quite drunk , with the result that the party broke up even before dinner was over . Lewis , at the head of the table , would leap up and move around behind the chairs of his guests making remarks that , when not highly offensive , were at least highly inappropriate , and then presently he collapsed and was put to bed . 
When Blackman emerged from the bedroom , everyone was gone except the tolerant Lord Thomson , who stayed and chatted with him for half an hour , and then Blackman lay awake most of that night , despairing of what he must expect on the Continent . Finally , at dawn , he fell asleep , and when he awoke and came into the living room , he found Lewis in his pajamas before the fire , smoking a cigarette . Blackman said that he wanted to apologize for not having prevented Lewis from making that horrible spectacle of himself , that he should have seized him by the neck at once and forcibly hauled him into his bedroom . Lewis warned him never to lay a hand on him , and then Blackman asked for his fare back to the United States . Lewis looked at him and began to cry , and then , saying that he was going to make a promise , he asked Blackman to call the porter and to tell him to take out all the liquor that he did not want . " And from now on , for the rest of this trip , I will only drink what you agree that I should drink " . Blackman called the porter and had him remove everything but one bottle of brandy , and after that they would have a cocktail or two before dinner , or , on one of their walking trips , beer , or , in France and Italy , wine in moderation . 
Lewis gave him a guidebook tour of London and , motoring and walking , took him to Stratford , but the London stay was for only ten days , and on the twentieth they took the train for Southampton , where they spent the night for an early morning Channel crossing . Near Southampton , in a considerable establishment , lived Homer Vachell , a well-known pulp writer , and his brother , Horace — both friends of Lewis 's . He suggested that they call on these brothers , who received them pleasantly . Then they returned to their hotel and got ready for bed . It was late , and Blackman was ready to go to sleep , but Lewis was not . He said , " We had a good time tonight , did n't we , Earl " ? Earl agreed , and Lewis said that it would have been very different if his wife had been with him . Then he kept Blackman awake for more than an hour while he did an imaginary dialogue between his wife and himself in which , discussing the evening , he was continually berated . He began the dialogue by having his wife announce that one does not invade people 's homes without warning them that one is coming , and went on from that with the entire catalogue of his social gaucheries .  From 1613 on , if the lists exist , they contain between twenty to thirty names . As the total number of incepting bachelors in 1629 was , according to Masson ( Life , 1:218 and n ) , two hundred fifty-nine , the twenty-four names listed in the ordo senioritatis for that year constitute slightly less than one tenth of the total number of bachelors who then incepted . There were four from St. John 's and four from Christ 's , three from Pembroke , and two from each of the colleges , Jesus , Peterhouse , Queens ' , and Trinity , with Caius , Clare , King 's , Magdalene , and Sidney supplying one each in the ordo senioritatis . The list was headed by [ Henry ] Hutton of St. John 's who was matriculated from St. John 's at Easter , 1625 . He became a fellow of Jesus in 1629 , proceeded M.A. from Jesus in 1632 , and was proctor in 1639-40 . The second name was [ Edward ] Kempe , matriculated from Queens ' College at Easter , 1625 . He proceeded M.A. in 1632 , and B.D. in 1639 , being made fellow in 1632 . He was ordained deacon 16 June and priest 22 December 1633 . The third name was [ John ] Ravencroft , who was admitted to the Inner Temple in November 1631 . The fourth name was [ John ] Milton of Christ 's College , followed by [ Richard ] Manningham of Peterhouse , who matriculated 16 October 1624 . Venn gave his B.A. as 1624 , a mistake for 1629 . Manningham also proceeded M.A. in 1632 and became a fellow of his college in that year . [ John ] Boutflower of Christ 's was twelfth in the list , coming from Perse School under Mr. Lovering as pensioner 20 April 1625 under Mr. Alsop . The fourteenth name was [ Richard ] Buckenham , written Buckman , admitted to Christ 's College under Scott 2 July 1625 . The fifteenth name was [ Thomas ] Baldwin , admitted to Christ 's 4 March 1625 under Alsop . Christ 's College was well represented that year in the ordo , and the name highest on the list from that college was Milton 's , fourth in the entire university . Small wonder that Milton later boasted of how well his work had been received there , since he attained a rank in the order of commencing bachelors higher than that of any other inceptor from Christ 's of that year . 
It is not possible to reconstruct fully the arrangements whereby these honors lists were then made up or even how the names that they contained assumed the order in which we find them . The process usually began with a tutor boasting about a boy , as Chappell had boasted about Lightfoot , to the higher officers of the college and university . Then the various officers of the college might take up the case . It would , however , reach the proctors and other officers in charge of the public-school performances of the incepting bachelors , and the place that any individual obtained in the lists depended greatly on how he comported himself in the public schools during his acts therein as he was incepting . Of course the higher officials could add or place a name on the list wherever they wished . Milton 's name being fourth is neither too high nor too low to be assigned to the arbitrary action of vice-chancellor , proctor , master , or other mighty hand . He evidently earned the place assigned him .  RECAPITULATION OF MILTON 'S UNDERGRADUATE CAREER  Looking back from the spring of 1629 over the four years of Milton 's undergraduate days , certain phases of his college career stand out as of permanent consequence to him and hence to us . Of course the principal factor in the whole experience was the kind of education he received . It differed from what an undergraduate receives today from any American college or university mainly in the certainty of what he was forced to learn compared with the loose and widely scattered information obtained today by most of our undergraduates . Milton was required to absorb and display an intensive and accurate knowledge of Latin grammar , logic-rhetoric , ethics , physics or natural philosophy , metaphysics , and Latin , Greek , and Hebrew . He had also sampled various special fields of learning , being unable to miss some study of divinity , Justinian ( law ) , and Galen ( medicine ) . Above all , he had learned to write formal Latin prose and verse to a remarkable degree of artistry . He had learned to dispute devastatingly , both formally and informally in Latin , and according to the rules on any topic , pro or con , drawn from almost any subject , more especially from Aristotle 's works . He could produce carefully constructed orations , set and formal speeches , artfully and prayerfully made by writing and rewriting with all the aid his tutor and others could provide , and then delivered verbatim from memory . He had also learned to dispute extempore remarkably well , the main evidence for which of course is the presence of his name in the honors list of 1628/29 . He also displayed the ability to write Latin verse on almost any topic of dispute , the verses , of course , to be delivered from memory . Then we have surviving at least one instance of a poem prepared for another in Naturam non Pati Senium , and perhaps also the De Idea Platonica . But his greatest achievement , in his own eyes and in the eyes of his colleagues and teachers , was his amazing ability to produce literary Latin pieces , and he was often called on to do so . These were his public academic activities , domi forisque , in the college and in the university . And his performances attracted much attention , as the frequency of his surviving pieces in any calendar that may be set up for his undergraduate activities testifies . 
His other activities are not so easily recovered . His statements about sports and exercises of a physical nature are suggestive , but inconclusive . His later boastings of his skill with the small sword are indicative of much time and practice devoted to the use of that weapon . Venn and others have dealt with sports and pastimes at Cambridge in Milton 's day with not very specific results . Milton himself , uncommunicative as he is about his lesser and nonliterary activities , at least gives us some evidence that he was a great walker , under any and all conditions . His early poems and some of his prose prolusions speak of wanderings in the city and the neighboring country that may be extended to Cambridge and its surrounding countryside . The town itself and the " reedy Cam " he often visited , as did all in the university . The churches , the taverns , and the various other places of the town must have known his figure well as he roved to and about them . The tiny hamlet of Chesterton to the north , with the fens and marshes lying on down the Ouse River , may have attracted him often , as it did many other youths of the time . The Gog Magog Hills to the southeast afforded him and all other students a vantage point from which to view the town and university of their dwelling . The country about Cambridge is flat and not particularly spectacular in its scenery , though it offers easy going to the foot traveler . Ball games , especially football , required some attention , and other organized sports may have attracted him as participant or spectator . He smoked , as did everybody , and imbibed the various alcoholic beverages of that day , although his protestations while at Cambridge and after that he was no drunkard point to reasonable abstinence from the wild drinking bouts of some of the undergraduates and , we must add , of some of their elders including many of the regents or teachers . 
What manner of person does Milton appear to have been when as an undergraduate he resided at Christ 's College ? He was then a slightly built young man of pleasing appearance , medium stature , and handsome face . Graceful as his fencing and dancing lessons had taught him to be in addition to the natural grace of his slight , wiry frame , he cut enough of a figure to have evoked a nickname in the college , to which he himself referred in Prolusion /6 , : A quibusdam , audivi nuper Domina . That is , if we can trust that most specious of prolusions , packed as it is with wit and persiflage . The Domina sounds real enough , if we could only trust the conditions under which we learn of its use ; but anyone who would put much trust in any phase of Prolusion /6 , except its illusive allusiveness deserves whatever fate may be meted out to him by virtue of the egregiously stilted banter . In short , the traditional epithet for Milton of 'Lady of Christ's ' , while eminently fitting , rests only on this baffling passage in the midst of the most treacherous piece of writing Milton left us . Aubrey 's mention of it ( 2:67 , and Bodleian MS Aubr. 8 , f. 63 ) comes from this prolusion , through Christopher Milton or Edward Phillips . It is not a question of truth or falsity ; the prolusion in which the autobiographic statement about the epithet occurs is such a mass of intentionally buried allusions that almost nothing in it can be accepted as true — or discarded as false . The entire exercise , Latin and English , is most suggestive of the kind of person Milton had become at Christ 's during his undergraduate career ; the mere fact that he was selected , though as a substitute , to act as interlocutor or moderator for it , or perhaps we should say with Buck as 'father of the act' , is in itself a difficult phase of his development to grasp . Milton was to act as the archfool , the supreme wit , the lightly bantering pater , Pater Liber , who could at once trip lightly over that which deserved such treatment , or could at will annihilate the common enemies of the college gathering , and with words alone . From an exercise involving merely raucous , rough-and-tumble comedy , in his hands the performance turned into a revel of wit and word play , indecent at times , but always learned , pointed , and carefully aimed at some individuals present , and at the whole assembly . To do this successfully required great skill and a special talent for both solemn and ribald raillery , a talent not bestowed on many persons , but one with which Milton was marked as being endowed and in which , at least in this performance , he obviously reveled . It may be thought unfortunate that he was called on entirely by accident to perform , if again we may trust the opening of the oratio , for it marks the beginning for us of his use of his peculiar form of witty word play that even in this Latin banter has in it the unmistakable element of viciousness and an almost sadistic delight in verbally tormenting an adversary . But the real beginnings of this development in him go back to the opposing of grammar school , and probably if it had not been this occasion and these Latin lines it would have been some others , such as the first prolusion , that set off this streak in him of unbridled and scathing verbal attack on an enemy . All western Europe would hear and listen to him in this same vein about the middle of the century . 
But these prolusions that we have surviving from the Christ 's College days are only one phase of his existence then . Perhaps his most important private activity was the combination of reading , discussion with a few — if we can trust his writings to Diodati and the younger Gill , very few — congenial companions . Lines 23-36 of Lycidas later point to a friendship with Edward King , who entered Christ 's College 9 June 1626 . No other names among the young men in residence at the time seem to have been even suggested by Milton as those of persons with whom he in any way consorted . But that scarcely means that he was the aloof , forbidding type of student who shared few if any activities with his fellows , the banter of the surviving prolusions providing enough evidence to deny this . Apparently he was not a participant in the college or university theatricals , which he once attacked as utterly unworthy performances ( see Apology , 3:300 ) ; but even in that famous passage , Milton was aiming not at the theatricals as such but at their performance by 'persons either enter 'd , or presently to enter into the ministry' . The fact that he nowhere mentioned theatrical performances as part of the activities of the boys later in his hypothetical academy ( 1644 ) should not be taken too seriously as evidence that he desired them to eschew such performances . Perhaps , in that short piece or letter written to Hartlib in which he sketched his scheme for educating young men , he merely overlooked that phase of their exercises .  Writers of this class of science fiction have clearly in mind the assumptions that man can master the principles of this cause-and-effect universe and that such mastery will necessarily better the human lot . On the other hand , the bright vision of the future has been directly stated in science fiction concerned with projecting ideal societies — science fiction , of course , is related , if sometimes distantly , to that utopian literature optimistic about science , literature whose period of greatest vigor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced Edward Bellamy 's Looking Backward and H. G. Wells 's A Modern Utopia . In Arthur Clarke 's Childhood 's End ( 1953 ) , though written after the present flood of dystopias began , we can see the bright vision of science fiction clearly defined . 
Childhood 's End — apparently indebted to Kurd Lasswitz 's utopian romance , Auf Zwei Planeten ( 1897 ) , and also to Wells 's histories of the future , especially The World Set Free ( 1914 ) and The Shape of Things to Come ( 1933 ) — describes the bloodless conquest of earth by the Overlords , vastly superior creatures who come to our world in order to prepare the human race for its next stage of development , an eventual merging with the composite mind of the universe . Arriving just in time to stop men from turning their planet into a radioactive wasteland , the Overlords unite earth into one world in which justice , order , and benevolence prevail and ignorance , poverty , and fear have ceased to exist . Under their rule , earth becomes a technological utopia . Both abolition of war and new techniques of production , particularly robot factories , greatly increase the world 's wealth , a situation described in the following passage , which has the true utopian ring : " Everything was so cheap that the necessities of life were free , provided as a public service by the community , as roads , water , street lighting and drainage had once been . A man could travel anywhere he pleased , eat whatever he fancied — without handing over any money " . With destructive tensions and pressures removed men have the vigor and energy to construct a new human life — rebuilding entire cities , expanding facilities for entertainment , providing unlimited opportunities for education — indeed , for the first time giving everyone the chance to employ his talents to the fullest . Mankind , as a result , attains previously undreamed of levels of civilization and culture , a golden age which the Overlords , a very evident symbol of science , have helped produce by introducing reason and the scientific method into human activities . Thus science is the savior of mankind , and in this respect Childhood 's End only blueprints in greater detail the vision of the future which , though not always so directly stated , has nevertheless been present in the minds of most science-fiction writers . 
Considering then the optimism which has permeated science fiction for so long , what is really remarkable is that during the last twelve years many science-fiction writers have turned about and attacked their own cherished vision of the future , have attacked the Childhood 's End kind of faith that science and technology will inevitably better the human condition . And they have done this on a very large scale , with a veritable flood of novels and stories which are either dystopias or narratives of adventure with dystopian elements . Because of the means of publication — science-fiction magazines and cheap paperbacks — and because dystopian science fiction is still appearing in quantity the full range and extent of this phenomenon can hardly be known , though one fact is evident : the science-fiction imagination has been immensely fertile in its extrapolations . Among the dystopias , for example , Isaac Asimov 's The Caves of Steel ( 1954 ) portrays the deadly effects on human life of the super-city of the future ; James Blish 's A Case of Conscience ( 1958 ) describes a world hiding from its own weapons of destruction in underground shelters ; Ray Bradbury 's Fahrenheit 451 ( 1954 ) presents a book-burning society in which wall television and hearing-aid radios enslave men 's minds ; Walter M. Miller , Jr . 's , A Canticle for Leibowitz ( 1959 ) finds men , after the great atomic disaster , stumbling back to their previous level of civilization and another catastrophe ; Frederick Pohl 's " The Midas Touch " ( 1954 ) predicts an economy of abundance which , in order to remain prosperous , must set its robots to consuming surplus production ; Clifford D. Simak 's " How-2 " ( 1954 ) tells of a future when robots have taken over , leaving men nothing to do ; and Robert Sheckley 's The Status Civilization ( 1960 ) describes a world which , frightened by the powers of destruction science has given it , becomes static and conformist . A more complete list would also include Bradbury 's " The Pedestrian " ( 1951 ) , Philip K. Dick 's Solar Lottery ( 1955 ) , David Karp 's One ( 1953 ) , Wilson Tucker 's The Long Loud Silence ( 1952 ) , Jack Vance 's To Live Forever ( 1956 ) , Gore Vidal 's Messiah ( 1954 ) , and Bernard Wolfe 's Limbo ( 1952 ) , as well as the three perhaps most outstanding dystopias , Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth 's The Space Merchants ( 1953 ) , Kurt Vonnegut 's Player Piano ( 1952 ) , and John Wyndham 's Re-Birth ( 1953 ) , works which we will later examine in detail . The novels and stories like Pohl 's Drunkard 's Walk ( 1960 ) , with the focus on adventure and with the dystopian elements only a dim background — in this case an uneasy , overpopulated world in which the mass of people do uninteresting routine jobs while a carefully selected , university-trained elite runs everything — are in all likelihood as numerous as dystopias . 
There is , of course , nothing new about dystopias , for they belong to a literary tradition which , including also the closely related satiric utopias , stretches from at least as far back as the eighteenth century and Swift 's Gulliver 's Travels to the twentieth century and Zamiatin 's We , Capek 's War with the Newts , Huxley 's Brave New World , E. M. Forster 's " The Machine Stops " , C. S. Lewis 's That Hideous Strength , and Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four , and which in science fiction is represented before the present deluge as early as Wells 's trilogy , The Time Machine , " A Story of the Days to Come " , and When the Sleeper Wakes , and as recently as Jack Williamson 's " With Folded Hands " ( 1947 ) , the classic story of men replaced by their own robots . What makes the current phenomenon unique is that so many science-fiction writers have reversed a trend and turned to writing works critical of the impact of science and technology on human life . Since the great flood of these dystopias has appeared only in the last twelve years , it seems fairly reasonable to assume that the chief impetus was the 1949 publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four , an assumption which is supported by the frequent echoes of such details as Room 101 , along with education by conditioning from Brave New World , a book to which science-fiction writers may well have returned with new interest after reading the more powerful Orwell dystopia . 
Not all recent science fiction , however , is dystopian , for the optimistic strain is still very much alive in Mission of Gravity and Childhood 's End , as we have seen , as well as in many other recent popular novels and stories like Fred Hoyle 's The Black Cloud ( 1957 ) ; and among works of dystopian science fiction , not all provide intelligent criticism and very few have much merit as literature — but then real quality has always been scarce in science fiction . In addition , there are many areas of the human situation besides the impact of science and technology which are examined , for science-fiction dystopias often extrapolate political , social , economic tendencies only indirectly related to science and technology . Nevertheless , with all these qualifications and exceptions , the current dystopian phenomenon remains impressive for its criticism that science and technology , instead of bringing utopia , may well enslave , dehumanize , and even destroy men . How effectively these warnings can be presented is seen in Pohl and Kornbluth 's The Space Merchants , Vonnegut 's Player Piano and Wyndham 's Re-Birth . 
Easily the best known of these three novels is The Space Merchants , a good example of a science-fiction dystopia which extrapolates much more than the impact of science on human life , though its most important warning is in this area , namely as to the use to which discoveries in the behavioral sciences may be put . The novel , which is not merely dystopian but also brilliantly satiric , describes a future America where one-sixteenth of the population , the men who run advertising agencies and big corporations , control the rest of the people , the submerged fifteen-sixteenths who are the workers and consumers , with the government being no more than " a clearing house for pressures " . Like ours , the economy of the space merchants must constantly expand in order to survive , and , like ours , it is based on the principle of " ever increasing everybody 's work and profits in the circle of consumption " . The consequences , of course , have been dreadful : reckless expansion has led to overpopulation , pollution of the earth and depletion of its natural resources . For example , even the most successful executive lives in a two-room apartment while ordinary people rent space in the stairwells of office buildings in which to sleep at night ; soyaburgers have replaced meat , and wood has become so precious that it is saved for expensive jewelry ; and the atmosphere is so befouled that no one dares walk in the open without respirators or soot plugs . 
While The Space Merchants indicates , as Kingsley Amis has correctly observed , some of the " impending consequences of the growth of industrial and commercial power " and satirizes " existing habits in the advertising profession " , its warning and analysis penetrate much deeper . What is wrong with advertising is not only that it is an " outrage , an assault on people 's mental privacy " or that it is a major cause for a wasteful economy of abundance or that it contains a coercive tendency ( which is closer to the point ) . Rather what Kornbluth and Pohl are really doing is warning against the dangers inherent in perfecting " a science of man and his motives " . The Space Merchants , like such humanist documents as Joseph Wood Krutch 's The Measure of Man and C. S. Lewis 's The Abolition of Man , considers what may result from the scientific study of human nature . If man is actually the product of his environment and if science can discover the laws of human nature and the ways in which environment determines what people do , then someone — a someone probably standing outside traditional systems of values — can turn around and develop completely efficient means for controlling people . Thus we will have a society consisting of the planners or conditioners , and the controlled . And this , of course , is exactly what Madison Avenue has been accused of doing albeit in a primitive way , with its " hidden persuaders " and what the space merchants accomplish with much greater sophistication and precision . 
Pohl and Kornbluth 's ad men have long since thrown out appeals to reason and developed techniques of advertising which tie in with " every basic trauma and neurosis in American life " , which work on the libido of consumers , which are linked to the " great prime motivations of the human spirit " . As the hero , Mitchell Courtenay , explains before his conversion , the job of advertising is " to convince people without letting them know that they 're being convinced " . And to do this requires first of all the kind of information about people which is provided by the scientists in industrial anthropology and consumer research , who , for example , tell Courtenay that three days is the " optimum priming period for a closed social circuit to be triggered with a catalytic cue-phrase " — which means that an effective propaganda technique is to send an idea into circulation and then three days later reinforce or undermine it . And the second requirement for convincing people without their knowledge is artistic talent to prepare the words and pictures which persuade by using the principles which the scientists have discovered . Thus the copywriter in the world of the space merchants is the person who in earlier ages might have been a lyric poet , the person " capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing " . As Courtenay explains , " Here in this profession we reach into the souls of men and women . And we do it by taking talent — and redirecting it " . 
Now the basic question to be asked in this situation is what motivates the manipulators , that is , what are their values ? — since , as Courtenay says , " Nobody should play with lives the way we do unless he 's motivated by the highest ideals " . But the only ideal he can think of is " Sales " ! Indeed , again and again , the space merchants confirm the prediction of the humanists that the conditioners and behavioral scientists , once they have seen through human nature , will have nothing except their impulses and desires to guide them .    We often say of a person that he " looks young for his age " or " old for his age " . Yet even in the more extreme of such cases we seldom go very far astray in guessing what his age actually is . And this means , I suppose , that almost invariably age reveals itself by easily recognizable signs engraved on both the body and the mind . " Young for his age " means only the presence of some minor characteristic not quite usual . Stigmata quite sufficient for diagnosis are nevertheless there . An assumption of youth , or the presence of a few youthful characteristics , deceives no more successfully than rouge or dyed hair . " Looking young for your age " means " for your age " and it means no more . 
A mind expressing itself in words may reveal itself a little less obviously as old or young . Its surface loses its bloom and submits to its wrinkles in ways less immediately obvious than the body does . Youth may be , and often is , skeptical , cynical or despairing ; age may be idealistic , believing and much given to professions of optimism . But there is , nevertheless , always a subtle difference in the way in which supposedly similar opinions are held . The pessimism of the young is defiant , anxious to confess or even exaggerate its ostensible gloom , and so exuberant as to reveal the fact that it regards its ability to face up to the awful truth as more than enough to compensate for the awfulness of that truth . Similarly the optimism of age protests too much . If it proclaims that the best is yet to be , it always arouses , at least in the young , either a suspicious question or perhaps the exclamation of the Negro youth who saw on a tombstone the inscription , " I am not dead but sleeping " . " Boy , you ai n't fooling nobody but yourself " . 
We may say of some unfortunates that they were never young . We can not truthfully say of anyone who has succeeded in entering deep into his sixties that he was never old . Those famous lines of the Greek Anthology with which a fading beauty dedicates her mirror at the shrine of a goddess reveal a wise attitude : " Venus take my votive glass , Since I am not what I was , What from this day I shall be , Venus , let me never see " . 
No good can come of contemplating the sad , inevitable fact that once youth has passed " a worse and worse time still succeeds the former " . But there are at least two reasons for contemplating one 's mind in even a cracked mirror . One is that there sometimes are real although inadequate compensations in growing old . Serenity , if one is fortunate enough to achieve it , is not so good as joy , but it is something . Even to be " from hope and fear set free " is at least better than to have lost the first without having got rid of the second . The other reason ( and the one with which I am here concerned ) is that one thus becomes inclined to inquire of any opinion , or change of opinion , whether it represents the wisdom of experience or is only the result of the difference between youth and age which is as inevitable as the all too obvious physical differences . One may be exasperatingly aware that if the answer is favorable it will be judged such only by those of one 's own age . But at least the question has been raised . Many readers of this department no doubt discount certain of my opinions for the simple reason that they can guess pretty accurately , even if they have never actually been told , what my age is . At least I should like them to know that I know these discounts are being made .   Let me then ( and in public ) glance into the mirror . I have known some men and women who said that the selves they are told about or even remember seem utter strangers to them now ; that their remote past is as discontinuous with their present selves , as lacking in any conscious likeness to their mature personality , as the self of a butterfly may be imagined discontinuous with that of the caterpillar it once was . For my part I find it difficult to conceive such a state of affairs . I have changed and I have reversed opinions ; but I am so aware of an uninterrupted continuity of the persona or ego that I see only as absurd the tendency of some psychologists from Heraclitus to Pirandello and Proust to regard consciousness as no more than a flux amid which nothing remains unchanged . So far as I am concerned , the child is unmistakably father to the man , despite the obvious fact that child and father differ greatly — sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse . 
Fundamental values , temperament and the way in which one approaches a conviction change less , of course , than specific opinions . That fact is very clearly illustrated in the case of the many present-day intellectuals who were Communists or near-Communists in their youth and are now so extremely conservative ( or reactionary , as many would say ) that they can define no important political conviction that does not seem so far from even a centrist position as to make the distinction between Mr. Nixon and Mr. Khrushchev for them hardly worth noting . But in ways more fundamental than specific political opinions they are still what they always were : passionate , sure without a shadow of doubt of whatever it is that they are sure of , capable of seeing black and white only and , therefore , committed to the logical extreme of whatever it is they are temporarily committed to . 
To those of my readers who find many of my opinions morally , or politically , or sociologically antiquated ( and I have reason to know that there are some such ) , I would like to say what I have already hinted , namely , that some of my opinions may indeed be subject to some discount on the simple ground that I am no longer young and therefore incapable of being youthful of mind . But I will also remind them that I have always been inclined to skepticism , to a kind of Laodicean lack of commitment so far as public affairs are concerned ; so that , although not as eager as I once was to be disapproved of , I can still resist prevailing opinions . 
At about the age of twelve I became a Spencerian liberal , and I have always considered myself a liberal of some kind even though the definition has changed repeatedly since Spencer became a reactionary . Several times in my youth I voted the Socialist ticket , but less because I was Socialist than because I was not either a Republican or a Democrat , and I voted for Franklin Roosevelt every time he was a candidate . Yet during the years when I was on the staff of the Nation , I tried to the limit the patience of the editors on almost every occasion when I was permitted to write an editorial having a bearing on a political or social question . 
Never once during the trying thirties did I come so close to succumbing to the private climate of opinion as to grant Russian communism even that most weasel-worded of encomiums " an interesting experiment " . There are few things of which I am prouder than of that unblemished record . Many of my friends at the time thought that I had received a well-deserved condemnation when Lincoln Steffens denounced me in a review of one of my books as a perfect example of the obsolete man who could understand and sympathize only with the dead past . But he , as I can now retort , was the man who could see so short a distance ahead that after a visit to Russia he gave voice to the famous exclamation : " I have seen the future and it works " . 
The favorite excuse of those who have now recanted their approval of communism is that they did not know how things would develop . With this excuse I have never been much impressed . There was , it seems to me , enough in the openly declared principles and intentions of Russian leaders to alienate honorable men without their having to wait to see how it would turn out . 
Once many years ago I sat at dinner next to Arthur Train , and the subject of the Nation came up . He asked me suddenly , " What are your political opinions " ? " Well " , I replied , " some of my colleagues on the paper regard me as a rank reactionary " . After a moment 's thought he replied , " That still leaves you a lot of latitude " . And I suppose it did . 
I never have been , and am not now , any kind of utopian . When I first came across Samuel Johnson 's pronouncement , " the remedy for the ills of life is palliative rather than radical " , it seemed to me to sum up the profoundest of political and social truths . It will probably explain more of my attitudes toward society than any other phrase or principle could .   Why did I choose to fill these pages in this particular issue with this mixture of rather tenuous reflections and autobiography ? The reason is , I think , my awareness that my remarks last quarter on pacifism may well have served to confirm the opinion of some that my tendency to skepticism and dissent gets us nowhere , and that I am simply too old to hope . I would , however , like to suggest that , wrong though I may be , the tendency to see dilemmas rather than solutions is one of which I have been a victim ever since I can remember , and therefore not merely a senile phenomenon . I know that one must act . But one need not always be sure that the action is either wise or conclusive . 
Apropos of what some would call cynicism , I remember an anecdote the source of which I forget . It concerns a small-town minister who staged an impressive object lesson by confining a lion and a lamb together in the same cage outside his church door . Not only his parishioners , but the whole town and , ultimately , the whole county were enormously impressed by this object lesson . One day he was visited by a delegation of would-be imitators who wanted to know his secret . " How on earth do you manage it ? What is the trick " ? " Why " , he replied , " it is perfectly simple ; there is no trick involved . All you have to do is put in a fresh lamb from time to time " . Cynical ? Blasphemous ? Not really , it seems to me . The promise that the lion and the lamb will lie down together was given in the future tense . It is not something that can be expected to happen now .   Without really changing the general subject , I take this opportunity to confess that I am troubled by doubts , not only about pacifism , but also when asked to join in the protest against a law that most of those who consider themselves humane and liberal seem to regard as obviously barbarous ; namely , the law that prescribes the death penalty for murder when there seem to be no extenuating circumstances . It is not that I am unaware of the force of their strongest contention . Life , they say , should be regarded as sacred and , therefore , as something that neither an individual nor his society has a right to take away . In fact I can not imagine myself condemning a man to the noose or the electric chair if I had to take , as an individual , the responsibility for his death . Just as I know I would make a bad soldier even though I can not sincerely call myself a pacifist , so too I would not be either a hangman by profession or , if I could avoid it , even a member of a hanging jury . Despite these facts the question " Should no murderer ever be executed " ? seems to me to create a dilemma not to be satisfactorily disposed of by a simple negative answer . 
Punishment of the wrongdoer , so liberals are inclined to say , can have only three possible justifications : revenge , reformation or deterrent example .  For here if anywhere in contemporary literature is a major effort to counterbalance Existentialism and restore some of its former lustre to the tarnished image of the species Man , or , as Malraux himself puts it , " to make men conscious of the grandeur they ignore in themselves " .  /1 ,  Andre Malraux 's The Walnut Trees of Altenburg was written in the early years of the second World War , during a period of enforced leisure when he was taken prisoner by the Germans after the fall of France . The manuscript , presumably after being smuggled out of the country , was published in Switzerland in 1943 . The work as it stands is not the entire book that Malraux wrote at that time — it is only the first section of a three-part novel called La Lutte avec l'Ange ; and this first section was somehow preserved ( there are always these annoying little mysteries about the actual facts of Malraux 's life ) when the Gestapo destroyed the rest . If we are to believe the list of titles printed in Malraux 's latest book , La Metamorphose des Dieux , Vol. /1 , ( 1957 ) , he is still engaged in writing a large novel under his original title . But as he remarks in his preface to The Walnut Trees , " a novel can hardly ever be rewritten " , and " when this one appears in its final form , the form of the first part … will no doubt be radically changed " . Malraux pretends , perhaps with a trifle too self-conscious a modesty , that his fragmentary work will accordingly " appeal only to the curiosity of bibliophiles " and " to connoisseurs of what might have been " . Even in its present form , however , the first part of Malraux 's unrecoverable novel is among the greatest works of mid-twentieth century literature ; and it should be far better known than it is . 
The theme of The Walnut Trees of Altenburg is most closely related to its immediate predecessor in Malraux 's array of novels : Man 's Hope ( 1937 ) . This magnificent but greatly underestimated book , which bodies forth the very form and pressure of its time as no other comparable creation , has suffered severely from having been written about an historical event — the Spanish Civil War — that is still capable of fanning the smoldering fires of old political feuds . Even so apparently impartial a critic as W. H. Frohock has taken for granted that the book was originally intended as a piece of Loyalist propaganda ; and has then gone on to argue , with unimpeachable consistency , that all the obviously non-propagandistic aspects of the book are simply inadvertent " contradictions " . 
Nothing , however , could be farther from the truth . The whole purpose of Man 's Hope is to portray the tragic dialectic between means and ends inherent in all organized political violence — and even when such violence is a necessary and legitimate self-defense of liberty , justice and human dignity . Nowhere before in Malraux 's pages have we met such impassioned defenders of a " quality of man " which transcends the realm of politics and even the realm of action altogether — both the action of Malraux 's early anarchist-adventurers like Perken and Garine , and the self-sacrificing action of dedicated Communists like Kyo Gisors and Katow in Man 's Fate . " Man engages only a small part of himself in an action " says old Alvear the art-historian ; " and the more the action claims to be total , the smaller is the part of man engaged " . These lines never cease to haunt the book amidst all the exaltations of combat , and to make an appeal for a larger and more elemental human community than one based on the brutal necessities of war . 
It is this larger theme of the " quality of man " , a quality that transcends the ideological and flows into " the human " , which now forms the pulsating heart of Malraux 's artistic universe . Malraux , to be sure , does not abandon the world of violence , combat and sudden death which has become his hallmark as a creative artist , and which is the only world , apparently , in which his imagination can flame into life . The Walnut Trees of Altenburg includes not one war but two , and throws in a Turkish revolution along with some guerrilla fighting in the desert for good measure . But while war still serves as a catalyst for the values that Malraux wishes to express , these values are no longer linked with the triumph or defeat of any cause — whether that of an individual assertion of the will-to-power , or a collective attempt to escape from the humiliation of oppression — as their necessary condition . On the contrary , the frenzy and furor of combat is only the sombre foil against which the sudden illuminations of the human flash forth with the piercing radiance of a Caravaggio .  /2 ,  The Walnut Trees of Altenburg is composed in the form of a triptych , with the two small side panels framing and enclosing the main central episode of the novel . This central episode consists of a series of staccato scenes set in the period from the beginning of the present century up to the first World War . The framing scenes , on the other hand , both take place in the late Spring of 1940 , just at the moment of the defeat of France in the second great world conflict . The narrator is an Alsatian serving with the French Army , and he has the same name ( Berger ) that Malraux himself was later to use in the Resistance ; like Malraux he was also serving in the tank corps before being captured , and we learn as well that in civilian life he had been a writer . These biographical analogies are obvious , and far too much time has been spent speculating on their possible implications . 
Much more important is to grasp the feelings of the narrator ( whose full name is never given ) as he becomes aware of the disorganized and bewildered mass of French prisoners clustered together in a temporary prison camp in and around the cathedral of Chartres . For as his companions gradually dissolve back into a state of primitive confrontation with elemental necessity , as they lose all the appanage of their acquired culture , he is overcome by the feeling that he is at last being confronted with the essence of mankind . " As a writer , by what have I been obsessed these last ten years , if not by mankind ? Here I am face to face with the primeval stuff " . 
The intuition about mankind conveyed in these opening pages is of crucial importance for understanding the remainder of the text ; and we must attend to it more closely than has usually been done . What does the narrator see and what does he feel ? A good many pages of the first section are taken up with an account of the dogged determination of the prisoners to write to their wives and families — even when it becomes clear that the Germans are simply allowing the letters to blow away in the wind . Awkwardly and laboriously , in stiff , unemotional phrases , the soldiers continue to bridge the distance between themselves and those they love ; they instinctively struggle to keep open a road to the future in their hearts . And by a skillful and unobtrusive use of imagery ( the enclosure is called a " Roman-camp stockade " , the hastily erected lean-to is a " Babylonian hovel " , the men begin to look like " Peruvian mummies " and to acquire " Gothic faces " ) , Malraux projects a fresco of human endurance — which is also the endurance of the human — stretching backward into the dark abyss of time . The narrator feels himself catching a glimpse of pre-history , learning of man 's " age-old familiarity with misfortune " , as well as his " equally age-old ingenuity , his secret faith in endurance , however crammed with catastrophes , the same faith perhaps as the cave-men used to have in the face of famine " . 
This new vision of man that the narrator acquires is also accompanied by a re-vision of his previous view . " I thought I knew more than my education had taught me " notes the narrator , " because I had encountered the militant mobs of a political or religious faith " . Is this not Malraux himself alluding to his own earlier infatuation with the ideological ? But now he knows " that an intellectual is not only a man to whom books are necessary , he is any man whose reasoning , however elementary it may be , affects and directs his life " . From this point of view the " militant mobs " of the past , stirred into action by one ideology or another , were all composed of " intellectuals " — and this is not the level on which the essence of mankind can be discovered . The men around him , observes the narrator , " have been living from day to day for thousands of years " . The human is deeper than a mass ideology , certainly deeper than the isolated individual ; and the narrator recalls the words of his father , Vincent Berger : " It is not by any amount of scratching at the individual that one finally comes down to mankind " . 
The entire middle section of The Walnut Trees is taken up with the life of Vincent Berger himself , whose fragmentary notes on his " encounters with mankind " are now conveyed by his son . " He was not much older than myself " writes the narrator , " when he began to feel the impact of that human mystery which now obsesses me , and which makes me begin , perhaps , to understand him " . For the figure of Vincent Berger Malraux has obviously drawn on his studies of T. E. Lawrence ( though Berger fights on the side of the Turks instead of against them ) , and like both Lawrence and Malraux himself he is a fervent admirer of Nietzsche . A professor at the University of Constantinople , where his first course of lectures was on Nietzsche and the " philosophy of action " , Vincent Berger becomes head of the propaganda department of the German Embassy in Turkey . As an Alsatian before the first World War he was of course of German nationality ; but he quickly involves himself in the Young Turk revolutionary movement to such an extent that his own country begins to doubt his patriotism . And , after becoming the right-hand man of Enver Pasha , he is sent by the latter to pave the way for a new Turkish Empire embracing " the union of all Turks throughout Central Asia from Adrianople to the Chinese oases on the Silk Trade Route " . 
Vincent Berger 's mission is a failure because the Ottoman nationalism on which Enver Pasha counted does not exist . Central Asia is sunk in a somnolence from which nothing can awaken it ; and amid a dusty desolation in which nothing human any longer seemed to survive , Vincent Berger begins to dream of the Occident . " Oh for the green of Europe ! Trains whistling in the night , the rattle and clatter of cabs … " . Finally , after almost being beaten to death by a madman — he could not fight back because madmen are sacred to Islam — he throws up his mission and returns to Europe . This has been his first encounter with mankind , and , although he has now become a legendary figure in the popular European press , it leaves him profoundly dissatisfied . Despite Berger 's report , Enver Pasha refuses to surrender his dream of a Turkish Blood Alliance ; and Vincent Berger learns that political ambition is more apt to hide than to reveal the truth about men . But as he discovers shortly , on returning among intellectuals obsessed by le culte du moi , his experience of action had also taught him a more positive lesson . " For six years my father had had to do too much commanding and convincing " writes the narrator , " not to understand that man begins with 'the other' " . 
And when Vincent Berger returns to Europe , this first result of his encounters with mankind is considerably enriched and deepened by a crucial revelation . For a dawning sense of illumination occurs in consequence of two events which , as so often in Malraux , suddenly confront a character with the existential question of the nature and value of human life . One such event is the landing in Europe itself , when the mingled familiarity and strangeness of the Occident , after the blank immensities of Asia , shocks the returning traveller into a realization of the infinite possibilities of human life .  In a pessimistic assessment of the cold war , Eden declared : " There must be much closer unity within the West before there can be effective negotiation with the East " . Ordinary methods of diplomacy within the free world are inadequate , said the former Prime Minister . " Something much more thorough is required " . Citing the experience of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in World War /2 , , Eden said that all would have been confusion and disarray without them . " This " , he said , " is exactly what has been happening between the politically free nations in the postwar world . We need joint chiefs of a political general staff " . Citing the advances of Communist power in recent years , Sir Anthony observed : " This very grave state of affairs will continue until the free nations accept together the reality of the danger that confronts them and unite their policies and resources to meet it " . 
While I fully agree with Sir Anthony 's contention , I think that we must carry the analysis farther , bearing in mind that while common peril may be the measure of our need , the existence or absence of a positive sense of community must be the measure of our capacity . 
While it is hazardous to project the trend of history , it seems clear that a genuine community is painfully emerging in the Western world , particularly among the countries of Western Europe . At the end of World War /2 , , free Europe was ready for a new beginning . The excesses of nationalism had brought down upon Europe a generation of tyranny and war , and a return to the old order of things seemed unthinkable . Under these conditions a new generation of Europeans began to discover the bonds of long association and shared values that for so long had been subordinated to nationalist xenophobia . A slow and painful trend toward unification has taken hold , a trend which may at any time be arrested and reversed but which may also lead to a binding federation of Europe . It may well be that the unification of Europe will prove inadequate , that the survival of free society will require nothing less than the confederation of the entire Western world . 
The movement toward European unity has been expressed in two currents : federalism and functionalism , one looking to the constitution of a United States of Europe , the other building on wartime precedents of practical co.ouml ; peration for the solution of specific problems . Thus far the advances made have been almost entirely along functional lines . 
Many factors contributed to the growth of the European movement . In 1946 Sir Winston Churchill , who had spoken often of European union during the war , advocated the formation of " a kind of United States of Europe " . Had Churchill been returned to office in 1945 , it is just possible that Britain , instead of standing fearfully aloof , would have led Europe toward union . 
In 1947 and 1948 the necessity of massive co.ouml ; rdinated efforts to achieve economic recovery led to the formation of the Organization for European Economic Co.ouml ; peration to supervise and co.ouml ; rdinate the uses of American aid under the Marshall Plan . The United States might well have exploited the opportunity provided by the European Recovery Program to push the hesitant European nations toward political federation as well as economic co.ouml ; peration , but all proposals to this effect were rejected by the United States Government at the time . 
Another powerful factor in the European movement was the threat of Soviet aggression . The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was followed immediately by the conclusion of the Brussels Treaty , a 50-year alliance among Britain , France and the Benelux countries . And of course the Soviet threat was responsible for NATO , the grand alliance of the Atlantic nations . 
New organs of unification proliferated in the decade following the conclusion of the NATO alliance . In 1949 the Council of Europe came into existence , a purely consultative parliamentary body but the first organ of political rather than functional unity . In 1952 , the European Coal and Steel Community was launched , placing the coal and steel production of France , West Germany , Italy and Benelux under a supranational High Authority . For a time it appeared that a common European army might be created , but the project for a European Defense Community was rejected by the French National Assembly in 1954 . In 1957 the social-economic approach to European integration was capped by the formation among " the Six " of a tariff-free European Common Market , and Euratom for co.ouml ; peration in the development of atomic energy . 
The " overseas " democracies have generally encouraged the European unification movement without seriously considering the wisdom of their own full participation in a broader Atlantic community . The United States and Canada belong only to NATO and the new O.E.C.D . Britain until recently went along in some areas with all of the enthusiasm of the groom at a shotgun wedding . In other areas it held back , pleading its Commonwealth bonds . Now Britain has decided to seek admission to the European Economic Community and it seems certain that she will be joined by some of her partners in the loose Free Trade Area of the " Outer Seven " . Besides its historical significance as a break with the centuries-old tradition of British insularity , Britain 's move , if successful , will constitute an historic landmark of the first importance in the movement toward the unification of Europe and the Western world . 
If a broader Atlantic community is to be formed — and my own judgment is that it lies within the realm of both our needs and our capacity — a ready nucleus of machinery is at hand in the NATO alliance . The time is now ripe , indeed overdue , for the vigorous development of its non-military potentialities , for its development as an instrument of Atlantic community . What is required is the full implementation of Article 2 of the Treaty , which provides : " The Parties will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions , by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded , and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being . They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any and all of them " . As Lester Pearson wrote in 1955 : " NATO can not live on fear alone . It can not become the source of a real Atlantic community if it remains organized to deal only with the military threat which first brought it into being " . 
The problem of NATO is not one of machinery , of which there is an abundance , but of the will to use it . The NATO Council is available as an executive agency , the Standing Group as a high military authority . The unofficial Conference of Parliamentarians is available as a potential legislative authority . This machinery will not become the instrument of an Atlantic community by fiat , but only when that community evolves from potentiality to reality . The existence of a community is a state of mind — a conviction that goals and values are widely shared , that effective communication is possible , that mutual trust is reasonably assured . 
An equally promising avenue toward Atlantic community may lie through the development and expansion of the O.E.C.D . Conceived as an organ of economic co.ouml ; peration , there is no reason why O.E.C.D . can not evolve into a broader instrument of union if its members so desire . Indeed it might be a more appropriate vehicle than NATO for the development of a parliamentary organ of the Atlantic nations , because it could encompass all of the members of the Atlantic community including those , like Sweden and Switzerland , who are unwilling to be associated with an essentially military alliance like NATO . 
Underlying these hopes and prescriptions is a conviction that the nations of the North Atlantic area do indeed form a community , at least a potential community . There is nothing new in this ; what is new and compelling is that the West is now but one of several powerful civilizations , or " systems " , and that one or more of the others may pose a mortal danger to the West . For centuries the North Atlantic nations dominated the world and as long as they did they could afford the luxury of fighting each other . That time is now past and the Atlantic nations , if they are to survive , must develop a full-fledged community , and they must also look beyond the frontiers of " Western civilization " toward a world-wide " concert of free nations " .  /6 ,  The burden of these reflections is that a broader unity among the free nations is at the core of our needs . And if we do not aspire to too much , it is also within our capacity . A realistic balancing of the need for new forms of international organization on the one hand , and our capacity to achieve them on the other , must be approached through the concept of " community " . History has demonstrated many times that concerts of nations based solely on the negative spur of common danger are unlikely to survive when the external danger ceases to be dramatically urgent . Only when a concert of nations rests on the positive foundations of shared goals and values is it likely to form a viable instrument of long-range policy . It follows that the solution to the current disunity of the free nations is only to a very limited extent a matter of devising new machinery of consultation and co.ouml ; rdination . It is very much a matter of building the foundations of community . 
It is for these reasons that proposals for a " new world order " , through radical overhaul of the United Nations or through some sort of world federation , are utterly fatuous . In a recent book called " World Peace Through World Law " , two distinguished lawyers , Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn , call for just such an overhaul of the U.N. , basing their case on the world-wide fear of a nuclear holocaust . I believe that these proposals , however meritorious in terms of world needs , go far beyond our capacity to realize them . Such proposals look to an apocalyptic act , a kind of Lockian " social contract " on a world-wide scale . The defect of these proposals is in their attempt to outrun history and their assumption that because something may be desirable it is also possible . 
A working concept of the organic evolution of community must lead us in a different direction . The failures of the U.N . and of other international organs suggest that we have already gone beyond what was internationally feasible . Our problem , therefore , is to devise processes more modest in their aspirations , adjusted to the real world of sovereign nation states and diverse and hostile communities . The history of the U.N . demonstrates that in a pluralistic world we must develop processes of influence and persuasion rather than coercion . It is possible that international organization will ultimately supplant the multi-state system , but its proper function for the immediate future is to reform and supplement that system in order to render pluralism more compatible with an interdependent world . 
New machinery of co.ouml ; rdination should not be our primary objective in the foreseeable future — though perhaps the " political general staff " of Western leaders proposed by Sir Anthony Eden would serve a useful purpose . Generally , however , there is an abundance of available machinery of co.ouml ; rdination — in NATO , in O.E.C.D. , in the U.N . and elsewhere . The trouble with this machinery is that it is not used and the reason that it is not used is the absence of a conscious sense of community among the free nations . 
Our proper objective , then , is the development of a new spirit , the realization of a potential community . A " concert of free nations " should take its inspiration from the traditions of the nineteenth century Concert of Europe with its common values and accepted " rules of the game " . Constitutions of and by themselves mean little ; the history of both the League of Nations and the United Nations demonstrates that . But a powerful sense of community , even with little or no machinery , means a great deal . That is the lesson of the nineteenth century . 
A realistic " concert of free nations " might be expected to consist of an " inner community " of the North Atlantic nations and an " outer community " embracing much or all of the non-Communist world .  
THE recent experiments in the new poetry-and-jazz movement seen by some as part of the " San Francisco Renaissance " have been as popular as they are notorious . " It might well start a craze like swallowing goldfish or pee wee golf " , wrote Kenneth Rexroth in an explanatory note in the Evergreen Review , and he may have been right . 
Under the general heading " poetry-and-jazz " widely divergent experiments have been carried out . Lawrence Ferlenghetti and Bruce Lippincott have concentrated on writing a new poetry for reading with jazz that is very closely related to both the musical forms of jazz , and the vocabulary of the musician . Even musicians themselves have taken to writing poetry . ( Judy Tristano now has poems as well as ballads written for her . ) 
But the best known exploiters of the new medium are Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen . Rexroth and Patchen are far apart musically and poetically in their experiments . Rexroth is a longtime jazz buff , a name-dropper of jazz heroes , and a student of traditional as well as modern jazz . In San Francisco he has worked with Brew Moore , Charlie Mingus , and other " swinging " musicians of secure reputation , thus placing himself within established jazz traditions , in addition to being a part of the San Francisco " School " . 
Although Patchen has given previous evidence of an interest in jazz , the musical group that he works with , the Chamber Jazz Sextet , is often ignored by jazz critics . ( Downbeat did not mention the Los Angeles appearance of Patchen and the Sextet , although the engagement lasted over two months . ) The stated goal of the CJS is the synthesis of jazz and " serious " music . Patchen 's musicians are outsiders in established jazz circles , and Patchen himself has remained outside the San Francisco poetry group , maintaining a self-imposed isolation , even though his conversion to poetry-and-jazz is not as extreme or as sudden as it may first appear . He had read his poetry with musicians as early as 1951 , and his entire career has been characterized by radical experiments with the form and presentation of his poetry . However , his subject matter and basic themes have remained surprisingly consistent , and these , together with certain key poetic images , may be traced through all his work , including the new jazz experiments . 
From the beginning of his career , Patchen has adopted an anti-intellectual approach to poetry . His first book , Before the Brave ( 1936 ) , is a collection of poems that are almost all Communistic , but after publication of this book he rejected Communism , and advocated a pacifistic anarchy , though retaining his revolutionary idiom . He spoke for a " proletariat " that included " all the lost and sick and hunted of the earth " . Patchen believes that the world is being destroyed by power-hungry and money-hungry people . Running counter to the destroying forces in the world are all the virtues that are innate in man , the capacity for love and brotherhood , the ability to appreciate beauty . Beauty as well as love is redemptive , and Patchen preaches a kind of moral salvation . This salvation does not take the form of a Christian Heaven . In Patchen 's eyes , organized churches are as odious as organized governments , and Christian symbols , having been taken over by the moneyed classes , are now agents of corruption . Patchen envisions a Dark Kingdom which " stands above the waters as a sentinel warning man of danger from his own kind " . The Dark Kingdom sends Angels of Death and other fateful messengers down to us with stern tenderness . Actually Heaven and the Dark Kingdom overlap ; they form two aspects of heavenly life after death . 
Patchen has almost never used strict poetic forms ; he has experimented instead with personal myth-making . Much of his earlier work was conceived in terms of a " pseudo-anthropological " myth reference , which is concerned with imaginary places and beings described in grandiloquent and travelogue-like language . 
These early experiments were evidently not altogether satisfying to Patchen . Beginning in Cloth of the Tempest ( 1943 ) he experimented in merging poetry and visual art , using drawings to carry long narrative segments of a story , as in Sleepers Awake , and constructing elaborate " TOOLONG " in which it is impossible to distinguish between the " art " and the poetry . Art " makings " or pseudo-anthropological myths did not meet all of Patchen 's requirements for a poetic frame of reference . Many of his poems purported to be exactly contemporary and political ; so during the period approximately from 1941 to 1946 , Patchen often used private detective stories as a myth reference , and the " private eye " as a myth hero . Speaking in terms of sociological stereotype , the " private eye " might appeal to the poet in search of a myth for many reasons . The private detective ( at least in the minds of listeners and readers all over the country ) is an individual hero fighting injustice . He is usually something of an underdog , he must battle the organized police force as well as recognized criminals . The private detective must rely , as the Youngest Son or Trickster Hero does in primitive myth , on his wits . The private detective is militant against injustice , a humorous and ironic explorer of the underworld ; most important to Patchen , he was a non-literary hero , and very contemporary . In 1945 , probably almost every American not only knew who Sam Spade was , but had some kind of emotional feeling about him . In The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer ( 1945 ) Patchen exploited this national sentiment by making his hero , Albert Budd , a private detective . 
But since 1945 , Sam Spade has undergone a metamorphosis ; he has become Friday on Dragnet , a mouthpiece of arbitrary police authority . He has , like so many other secular and religious culture symbols , gone over to the side of the ruling classes . Obviously , the " private eye " can have no more appeal for Patchen . To fill the job of contemporary hero in 1955 , Patchen needed someone else . 
It was logical that he would come up with the figure of the modern jazz musician . The revolution in jazz that took place around 1949 , the evolution from the " bebop " school of Dizzy Gillespie to the " cool " sound of Miles Davis and Lennie Tristano , Lee Konitz , and the whole legend of Charlie Parker , had made an impression on many academic and literary men . The differentiation between the East Coast and West Coast schools of jazz , the differences between the " hard bop " school of Rollins , and the " cerebral " experiments of Tristano , Konitz and Marsh , the general differences in the mores of white and negro musicians , all had become fairly well known to certain segments of the public . The immense amount of interest that the new jazz had for the younger generation must have impressed him , and he began working toward the merger of jazz and poetry , as he had previously attempted the union of graphic art and poetry . In addition to his experiments in reading poetry to jazz , Patchen is beginning to use the figure of the modern jazz musician as a myth hero in the same way he used the figure of the private detective a decade ago . In this respect , his approach to poetry-and-jazz is in marked contrast to Kenneth Rexroth 's . Rexroth uses many of his early poems when he reads to jazz , including many of his Chinese and Japanese translations ; he usually draws some kind of comparison with the jazz tradition and the poem he is reading — for instance , he draws the parallel between a poem he reads about an Oriental courtesan waiting for the man she loves , and who never comes , and the old blues chants of Ma Rainy and other Negro singers — but usually the comparison is specious . Rexroth may sometimes achieve an effective juxtaposition , but he rarely makes any effort to capture any jazz " feeling " in the text of his poems , relying on his very competent musicians to supply this feeling . 
Patchen does read some of his earlier works to music , but he has written an entire book of short poems which seem to be especially suited for reading with jazz . These new poems have only a few direct references to jazz and jazz musicians , but they show changes in Patchen 's approach to his poetry , for he has tried to enter into and understand the emotional attitude of the jazz musician . 
It is difficult to draw the line between stereotype and the reality of the jazz musician . Everyone knows that private detectives in real life are not like Sam Spade and Pat Novak , but the real and the imaginary musician are closely linked . Seen by the public , the musician is the underdog par excellence . He is forced to play for little money , and must often take another job to live . His approach to music is highly individualistic ; the accent is on improvisation rather than arrangements . While he is worldly , the musician often cultivates public attitudes of childlike astonishment and naivete . The musician is non-intellectual and non-verbal ; he is far from being a literary hero , yet is a creative artist . Many of these aspects will be seen as comparable to those of the ideal detective , but where the detective is active and militant , the jazz musician is passive , almost a victim of society . In order to write with authority either about musicians , or as a musician , Patchen would have to soft pedal his characteristically outspoken anger , and change ( at least for the purposes of this poetry ) from a revolutionary to a victim . He must become one who knows all about the injustice in the world , but who declines doing anything about it . 
This involves a shift in Patchen 's attitude and it is a first step toward writing a new jazz poetry . He has shown considerable ingenuity in adapting his earliest symbols and devices to the new work , and the fact that he has kept a body of constant symbols through all of his experiments gives an unexpected continuity to his poetry . Perhaps tracing some of these more important symbols through the body of his work will show that Patchen 's new poetry is well thought out , and remains within the mainstream of his work , while being suited to a new form . 
Henry Miller characterized Patchen as a " man of anger and light " . His revolutionary anger is apparent in most of his early poems . The following passage from " The Hangman 's Great Hands " illustrates the directness of this anger . " Anger wo n't help . I was born angry . Angry that my father was being burnt alive in the mills ; Angry that none of us knew anything but filth and poverty . Angry because I was that very one somebody was supposed To be fighting for " . 
This angry and exasperated stance which Patchen has maintained in his poetry for almost fifteen years has been successfully modulated into a kind of woe that is as effective as anger and still expresses his disapproval of the modern world . In his recent book , Hurray for Anything ( 1957 ) , one of the most important short poems — and it is the title poem for one of the long jazz arrangements — is written for recital with jazz . Although it does not follow the metrical rules for a blues to be sung , the phrases themselves carry a blues feeling . " I WENT TO THE CITY And there I did Weep , Men a-crowing likes asses , And living like sheep . Oh , ca n't hold the han' of my love ! Ca n't hold her little white han ! Yes , I went to the city , And there I did bitterly cry , Men out of touch with the earth , And with never a glance at the sky . Oh , ca n't hold the han' of my love ! Ca n't hold her pure little han' ! " Patchen is still the rebel , but he writes in a doleful , mournful tone . Neither of these poems is an aberration ; each is so typical that it represents a prominent trend in the poet 's development . 
Patchen is repeatedly preoccupied with death . In many of his poems , death comes by train : a strongly evocative visual image . Perhaps Patchen was once involved in a train accident , and this passage from First Will and Testament may have been how the accident appeared to the poet when he first saw it — if he did : " 
Lord love us , look at all the disconnected limbs floating hereabouts , like bloody feathers at that — and all the eyes are talking and all the hair are moving and all the tongue are in all the cheek … " .  
Let us see just how typical Krim is . He is New York-born and Jewish . He spent one year at the University of North Carolina because Thomas Wolfe went there . He returned to New York to work for The New Yorker , to edit a Western pulp , to " duck the war in the OWI " , to write publicity for Paramount Pictures and commentary for a newsreel , then he began his career as critic for various magazines . Now he has abandoned all that to be A Writer . I do not want to quibble about typicality ; in a certain sense , one manner of experience will be typical of any given group while another will not . But I 've got news for Krim : he 's not typical , he 's pretty special . His may typify a certain kind of postwar New York experience , but his experience is certainly not typical of his " generation 's " . In any case , who ever thought that New York is typical of anything ? 
Men of Krim 's age , aspirations , and level of sophistication were typically involved in politics before the war . They did not " duck the war " but they fought in it , however reluctantly ; they sweated out some kind of formal education ; they read widely and eclectically ; they did not fall into pseudo-glamorous jobs on pseudo-glamorous magazines , but they did whatever nasty thing they could get in order to eat ; they found out who they were and what they could do , then within the limits of their talent they did it . They did not worry about " experience " , because experience thrust itself upon them . And they traveled out of New York . Only a native New Yorker could believe that New York is now or ever was a literary center . It is a publishing and public relations center , but these very facts prevent it from being a literary center because writers dislike provincialism and untruth . Krim 's typicality consists only in his New Yorker 's view that New York is the world ; he displays what outlanders call the New York mind , a state that the subject is necessarily unable to perceive in himself . The New York mind is two parts abstraction and one part misinformation about the rest of the country and in fact the world . In his fulminating against the literary world , Krim is really struggling with the New Yorker in himself , but it 's a losing battle . 
Closely related to his illusions about his typicality is Krim 's complicated feeling about his Jewishness . He writes , " Most of my friends and I were Jewish ; we were also literary ; the combination of the Jewish intellectual tradition and the sensibility needed to be a writer created in my circle the most potent and incredible intellectual-literary ambition I have ever seen or could ever have imagined . Within themselves , just as people , my friends were often tortured and unappeasably bitter about being the offspring of this unhappily unique-ingrown-screwedup breed ; their reading and thinking gave an extension to their normal blushes about appearing 'Jewish' in subway , bus , racetrack , movie house , any of the public places that used to make the Jew of my generation self-conscious ( heavy thinkers walking across Seventh Avenue without their glasses on , willing to dare the trucks as long as they did n't look like the ikey-kikey caricature of the Yiddish intellectual ) … " . At other points in his narrative , Krim associates Jewishness with unappeasable literary ambition , with abstraction , with his personal turning aside from the good , the true , and the beautiful of fiction in the manner of James T. Farrell to the international , the false , and the inflated . 
Krim says , in short , that he is a suffering Jew . The only possible answer to that is , I am a suffering Franco-Irishman . We all love to suffer , but some of us love to suffer more than others . Had Krim gone farther from New York than Chapel Hill , he might have discovered that large numbers of American Jews do not find his New York version of the Jews ' lot remotely recognizable . More important is the simple human point that all men suffer , and that it is a kind of TOOLONG pride on the part of the Jew to believe that his suffering is more poignant than mine or anyone else 's . This is not to deny the existence of pogroms and ghettos , but only to assert that these horrors have had an effect on the nerves of people who did not experience them , that among the various side effects is the local hysteria of Jewish writers and intellectuals who cry out from confusion , which they call oppression and pain . In their stupidity and arrogance they believe they are called upon to remind the gentile continually of pogroms and ghettos . Some of us have imagination and sensibility too . Finally , there is the undeniable fact that some of the finest American fiction is being written by Jews , but it is not Jewish fiction ; Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud , through intellectual toughness , perception , through experience in fact , have obviously liberated themselves from any sentimental Krim self-indulgence they might have been tempted to . 
Krim 's main attack is upon the aesthetic and the publishing apparatus of American literary culture in our day . Krim was able to get an advance for a novel , and time and opportunity to write at Yaddo , but it was no good . " I had natural sock " , he says , 'as a storyteller and was precociously good at description , dialogue , and most of the other staples of the fiction-writer 's trade but I was bugged by a mammoth complex of thoughts and feelings that prevented me from doing more than just diddling the surface of sustained fiction-writing " . And again , " how can you write when you have n't yet read 'Bartleby the Scrivener' " ? Krim came to believe that " the novel as a form had outlived its vital meaning " . His " articulate Jewish friends " convinced him that education ( read " reading " ) was " a must " . He moved in a " highly intellectual " group in Greenwich Village in the late forties , becoming " internationalized " overnight . Then followed a period in which he wrote reviews for The New York Times Book Review , The Commonweal , Commentary , had a small piece in Partisan Review , and moved on to Hudson , The Village Voice , and Exodus . The work for Commonweal was more satisfying than work for Commentary " because of the staff 's tiptoeing fear of making a booboo " . Commentary was a mere suburb of Partisan Review , the arch-enemy . Both magazines were " rigid with reactionary what-will-T . S. Eliot-or-Martin Buber-think ? fear … " . Partisan has failed , Krim says , for being " snob-clannish , overcerebral , Europeanish , aristocratically alienated " from the U.S. It was " the creation of a monstrous historical period wherein it thought it had to synthesize literature and politics and avant-garde art of every kind with its writers crazily trying to outdo each other in Spenglerian inclusiveness … " . Kenyon , Sewanee , and Hudson operated in an " Anglo-Protestant New Critical chill " ; their example caused Krim and his friends to put on " Englishy airs , affect all sorts of impressive scholarship and social-register unnaturalness … in order to slip through their narrow transoms and get into their pages " . Qui s'excuse s'accuse , as the French Jewish intellectuals used to say . 
Through all this raving , Krim is performing a traditional and by now boring rite , the attack on intelligence , upon the largely successful attempt of the magazines he castigates to liberate American writing from local color and other varieties of romantic corn . God knows that Partisan and the rest often were , and remain , guilty of intellectual flatulence . Sociological jargon , Germano-Slavic approximations to English , third-rate but modish fiction , and outrages to common sense have often disfigured Partisan , and in lesser degree , the other magazines on the list . What Krim ignores , in his contempt for history and for accuracy , is that these magazines , Partisan foremost , brought about a genuine revolution in the American mind from the mid-thirties to approximately 1950 . The most obvious characteristic of contemporary American writing , apart from the beat nonsense , is its cosmopolitanism . 
The process of cosmopolitanism had begun in earnest about 1912 , but the First War and the depression virtually stalled that process in its tracks . Without the good magazines , without their book reviews , their hospitality to European writers , without above all their awareness of literary standards , we might very well have had a generation of Krim 's heroes — Wolfes , Farrells , Dreisers , and I might add , Sandburgs and Frosts and MacLeishes in verse — and then where would we be ? Screwed , stewed , and tattooed , as Krim might say after reading a book about sailors . When Partisan and Kenyon set up shop , Mencken was still accepted as an arbiter of taste ( remember Hergesheimer ? ) , George Jean Nathan and Alexander Woollcott were honored in odd quarters , and the whole Booth Tarkington , Willa Catheter ( sic ) , Pearl Buck , Amy Lowell , William Lyon Phelps atmosphere lay thick as Los Angeles smog over the country . 
Politics , economics , sociology — the entire area of life that lies between literature and what Krim calls " experience " — urgently needed to be dug into . The universities certainly were not doing it , nor were the popular magazines of the day . This Partisan above all did ; if it had never printed a word of literature its contribution to the politico-sociological area would still be historic . But it did print good verse and good fiction . If the editors sometimes dozed and printed pretentious , New York-mind dross , they also printed Malraux , Silone , Chiaromonte , Gide , Bellow , Robert Lowell , Francis Fergusson , Mary McCarthy , Delmore Schwartz , Mailer , Elizabeth Hardwick , Eleanor Clark , and a host of other good writers . Partisan Review and the other literary magazines helped to educate , in the best sense , an entire generation . That these magazines also deluded the Krims of the world is unfortunate but inevitable . It is a fact of life that magazines are edited by groups : they have to be or they would n't be published at all . And it is also a fact of life that there will always be youngish half-educated people around who will be dazzled by the glitter of what looks like a literary movement . ( There are no literary movements , there are only writers doing their work . Literary movements are the creation of pimps who live off writers . ) When Krim says " mine was as severe a critical-intellectual environment as can be imagined " , he is off his rocker . He indicates that he has none of the disciplines that criticism requires , including education ; the result was his inevitable bedazzlement through ignorance . He was n't being educated in those Village bull-sessions , as he claims . No one was ever educated through bull-sessions in anything other than , to quote him again , " perfumed bullshit " . Only a New York hick would expect to find the literary life in Greenwich Village at any point later than Walt Whitman 's day . The " highly intellectual … minds " that Krim says he encountered in the Village did their work in spite of , not because of , any Village atmosphere . But Krim 's complaint is important because not only in New York , but in other cities and in universities throughout this country , young and not so young men at this moment are being bedazzled by half-digested ideas . Those who have quality will outgrow the experience ; the rest will turn beat , or into dentists , or into beat dentists . 
For the sad truth is that while one might write well without having read " Bartleby the Scrivener " , one is more likely to write well if one has read it , and much else . The most appalling aspect of Krim 's piece is his reflection of the beat aesthetic . He mentions the beats only once , when he refers to their having " revived through mere power and abandonment and the unwillingness to commit death in life some idea of a decent equivalent between verbal expression and actual experience … " , but the entire narrative is written in the tiresome vocabulary of that lost and dying cause , and in the sprung syntax that is supposed to supplant our mother tongue . Krim 's aesthetic combines anti-intellectualism , conscious and unconscious na.iuml ; vete , and a winsome reliance upon the " natural " and upon " experience " . Ideas are the " thruway to nowhere " . " My touchstones … had been strictly literature and , humanly enough , American literature ( because that was what I wanted to write ) " . He alludes to something called " direct writing " , and he finds that criticism gets in the way of his " truer , realer , imaginative bounce " .  There had been signs and portents like the regular toppling over and defacing of the bust of Lauro di Bosis near the Villa Lante and in the Gianicolo . 
Something was happening all right , slowly it is true , but you could feel it . The Italians felt it . Little things . An Italian poet had noticed plainclothes policemen lounging around the area of Quirinal Palace , the first time since the war . At least they had n't stepped up and asked to see papers in the hated , flat , dialect mispronunciation of Mussolini 's home district — Dogumenti , per favore . But , who knew , that might be coming one of these days . There were other Italians who still bore scars they had earned in police station basements , resisting . They laughed and , true to national form and manners , never talked long or solemnly on any subject at all , but some of them worried out loud about short memories and ghosts . 
We saw Giuseppe Berto at a party once in a while , tall , lean , nervous and handsome , and , in our opinion , the best novelist of them all except Pavese , and Pavese is dead . Berto 's The Sky Is Red had been a small masterpiece and in its special way the best book to come out of the war . Now he was married to a beautiful girl , had a small son , and lived in an expensive apartment and worked for the movies . On his desk was a slowly accumulating treatment and script of The Count of Monte Cristo . On his bookshelves were some of the latest American novels , including Bellow 's Seize the Day , but he had n't read them ( they were sent by American publishers ) and was n't especially interested in what the American writers were up to . He was interested in Robert Musil 's The Man without Qualities . So were a lot of other people . He was interested in Italo Svevo . He was thinking his way into a new novel , a big one , one that people had been waiting for . It was going to be hard going all the way because he had n't written seriously for a while , except for a few stories , was tired of the old method of realismo he had so successfully used in The Sky Is Red . This one was going to be different . He had bought a little piece of property down along the coast of the hard country of Calabria that he knew so well . He was going to do one or two more films for cash and then chuck it all , leave Rome and its intellectual cliques and money-fed life , go back to Calabria . 
Berto seemed worried , too . He knew all about it and had put it down in journal form in The War in a Black Shirt , a wonderful book not , for some strange reason , published in the U.S. He knew all about the appeal of a black shirt and jackboots to a poor , southern , peasant boy . He knew all about the infection and the fever , and , too , the moment of realization when he saw for himself , threw up his hands and quit , ended the war as a prisoner in Texas . Berto knew all about Fascism . So did his friend , the young novelist Rimanelli . Rimanelli is tough and square-built and adventurous , says what he thinks . He had put it down in a war novel , The Day of the Lion . These people were not talking much about it , but you , a foreigner , sensed their apprehension and disappointment . 
So there we were talking around and about it . The English lady said she had to go to Vienna for a while . It was a pity because she had planned to lay a wreath at the foot of the Garibaldi statue , towering over Rome in spectacular benediction from the highpoint of the Gianicolo . Around that statue in the green park where children play and lovers walk in twos and there is a glowing view of the whole city , in that park are the rows of marble busts of Garibaldi 's fallen men , the ones who one day rushed out of the Porta San Pancrazio and , under fire all the way , up the long , straight narrow lane to take , then lose the high ground of the Villa Doria Pamphili . When they lost it , the French artillery moved in , and that was the end for Garibaldi that time , on 30 April 1849 . Once out of the gate they had charged straight up the narrow lane . We had walked it many times and shivered , figuring what a fish barrel it had been for the French . Now the park is filled with marble busts and all the streets in the immediate area have the full and proper names of the men who fell . 
We were at a party once and heard an idealistic young European call that awful charge glorious . Our companion was a huge , plain-spoken American sculptor who had been a sixteen-year-old rifleman all across France in 1944 . He said it was stupid butchery to order men to make a charge like that , no matter who gave the order and what for . 
" Oh , it would be butchery all right " , the European said . " We would see it that way , but it was glorious then . It was the last time in history anybody could do something gloriously like that " . 
I thought : Who is older now ? Old world and new world . 
The sculptor looked at him , bugeyed and amazed , angry . He had made an assault once with 180 men . It was a picked assault company . They went up against an SS unit of comparable size , over a little rise of ground , over an open field . Object — a village crossroads . They made it , killed every last one of the Krauts , took the village on schedule . When it was over , eight of his company were still alive and all eight were wounded . The whole thing , from the moment when they jumped heavily off the trucks , spread out and moved into position just behind the cover of that slight rise of ground and then jumped off , took maybe between twenty and thirty minutes . The sculptor looked at him , let the color drain out of his face , grinned , and looked down into his drink , a bad Martini made with raw Italian gin . 
" Bullshit " , he said softly . 
" Excuse me " , the European said . " I am not familiar with the expression " . 
The apartment where we were talking that afternoon in March faced onto the street Garibaldi 's men had charged up and along . Across the way from the apartment building is a ruined house , shot to hell that day in 1849 , and left that way as a memorial . There is a bronze wreath on the wall . Like everything else in Rome , ruins and monuments alike , that house is lived in . I have seen diapers strung across the ruined roof . 
The English lady really wanted to put a wreath on the Garibaldi monument on the 30th of April . She had her reasons for this . For one thing , there was n't going to be any ceremony at all this year . There were a few reasons for that , too : Garibaldi had been taken up and exploited by the Communists nowadays . Therefore the government wanted no part of him . ( It is sort of as if our government should decide to disown Washington or Lincoln for the same reason . ) And then there were ecclesiastical matters , the matter of Garibaldi 's anti-clericalism . There was a new Pope and the Vatican was making itself heard and felt these days . As it happens the English lady is a good Catholic herself , but of more liberal political persuasion . Nothing was going to be done this year to celebrate Garibaldi 's bold and unsuccessful defense of Rome . All that the English lady wanted to do was to walk up to the monument and lay a wreath at its base . This would show that somebody , even a foreigner living in Rome , cared . And then there were other things . Some of the marble busts in the park are of young Englishmen who fought and died for Garibaldi . She also mentioned leaving a little bunch of flowers at the bust of Lauro di Bosis . 
It is hard for me to know how I feel about Lauro di Bosis . I suffer from mixed feelings . He was a well-to-do , handsome , and sensitive young poet . His bust shows an intense , mustached , fine-featured face . He flew over Rome one day during the early days of Mussolini and scattered leaflets over the city , denouncing the Fascists . He was never heard of again . He is thought either to have been killed by the Fascists as soon as he landed or to have killed himself by flying out to sea and crashing his plane . He was , thus , an early and spectacular victim . And there is something so wonderfully romantic about it all . He really did n't know how to fly . He had crashed on take off once before . Gossip had it ( for gossip is the soul of Rome ) that a famous American dancer of the time had paid for both the planes . It was absurd and dramatic . It is remembered and has been commemorated by a bust in a park and a square in the city which was renamed Piazzo Lauro di Bosis after the war . Most Romans , even some postmen , know it by the old name . 
Faced with a gesture like Di Bosis ' , I find usually that my sentiments are closer to those of my sculptor friend . The things that happened in police station basements were dirty , grubby , and most often anonymous . No poetry , no airplanes , no dancers . That is how the real routine of resistance goes on , and its strength is directly proportionate to the number of insignificant people who can let themselves be taken to pieces , piece by piece , without quitting . It is an ugly business and there are few , if any , wreaths for them . I keep thinking of a young woman I knew during the Occupation in Austria . She was from Prague . She had been picked up by the Russians , questioned in connection with some pamphlets , sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage . She escaped , crawled through the usual mine fields , under barbed wire , was shot at , swam a river , and we finally picked her up in Linz . She showed us what had happened to her . No airplanes , no Nathan Hale statements . Just no spot , not even a dimesize spot , on her whole body that was n't bruised , bruise on top of bruise , from beatings . I understand very well about Lauro di Bosis and how his action is symbolic . The trouble is that like many symbols it does n't seem a very realistic one . 
The English lady wanted to pay tribute to Garibaldi and to Lauro di Bosis , but she was n't going to be here to do it . Were any of us interested enough in the idea to do it for her , by proxy so to speak ? There was a pretty thorough silence at that point . My spoon stirring coffee , banging against the side of the cup , sounded as loud as a bell . I thought : What the hell ? Why not ? I said I would do it for her . 
I had some reasons , too . I admire the English lady . I hate embarrassing silences and have been known to make a fool out of myself just to prevent one . I also had and have feelings about Garibaldi . Like every Southerner I ca n't escape the romantic tradition of brave defeats , forlorn lost causes . Though Garibaldi 's fight was small shakes compared to Pickett 's Charge — which , like all Southerners , I view in almost Miltonic terms , fallen angels , etc. — I associated the two . And to top it all I am often sentimental on purpose , trying to prove to myself that I am not afraid of sentiment . So much for all that . 
The English lady was pleased and enthusiastic . She gave me the names of some people who would surely help pay for the flowers and might even march up to the monument with me . The idea of the march pleased her . Maybe twenty , thirty , fifty . … Maybe I could call Rimanelli at the magazine Rottosei where he worked . text