I Swapping Martyrdoms AM well aware that the polite reader will look askance at this title, and yet I cannot find any other word which so precisely expresses my meaning as "swapping." "Trading" would not do, for it gives a hint of mercenary desire which I do not wish to convey; "exchanging" is too coldly formal; so, though it is marked in the dictionary as colloquial, and though it cannot be traced to any dignified old English ancestor, I use it because it means just what I want to say. "Swap, to strike a bargain"-with, if one may divine the underlying figure, a congratulatory slap of the handsuggests a new form of barter, of spiritual barter, which is all-too-prevalent at this time of social investigation. I live in a world alive with new philanthropic ideas concerning the duty of man to man, and I am amazed at the difference between these and the old ones, carefully inserted, at the point of the catechism, into my own youthful mind. I hear the young exhorting one another not to follow selfishly natural gift or inclination, but to apply all their energies to the direct betterment of mankind; I hear their elders congratulating themselves that they have abandoned mere home cares to shoulder the burdens of the race. It seems nowadays, for some reason, the duty of every man to assume the next man's responsibility, face his dilemmas, fight his battles for what? England expects every man to do his duty; that is outgrown; America, my corner of America at least, expects every man to do some other man's duty. It is naturally an exciting task; it has all the joy of experiment to try, as it were, to work another man's muscles, react to stimulus on his nerves, respond to calls at his brain centres. Something of the charm of playacting goes into it, perhaps also of dual personality, and the fascinations of the unknown attend it. Yet I cannot help wondering at the ultimate outcome if every man lifts the next man's load. What is to become of his own? Too often he drops it upon the backs of friends or by-standers unable to assume the weight. An acquaintance of mine, in a fit of generosity, flung her whole little fortune into the laps of two aged people, and, as a result, became dependent upon relatives ill-fitted for the charge. A colleague, grinding with me at the mill, suddenly deserted her hard task to tilt, for a little, at a windmill, and fell crippled at the first onslaught. The result is that her share of the grinding has been added to my own. . . Even while I was railing in this fashion, I myself became fired by a vision of serving as ministering angel, and went to sit by the sickbed of one suffering from a contagious disease, where, I dare say, I was nothing but a nuisance. The result that might have been expected followed; the shoulders upon which the double duties before mentioned have now rolled are all too slender to carry them. "Bear ye one another's burdens," is the most beautiful doctrine ever preached, but surely a stern, if unexpressed, prerequisite is that we shall not drop our own, and apparently few of us are of sufficiently heroic stature for both. We all know people eager to do this or that service, to grant a favor, to do anything in the world except their own duty. I can remember, as a little girl, becoming astonishingly attentive to aunts and older sisters just about the time when I should have gone to dry the dishes or to prepare my lessons. I have always supposed, and many artists have strengthened the supposition, that it was a point of honor with the martyrs of olden time to hold fast each to his individual martyrdom. I have respected St. Laurence for sticking to his gridiron; St. Peter Martyr to his severed head; St. Catharine to her wheel; St. Sebastian to his arrows. The martyrs of the present day are pooling their interests, wishing to share and share alike duty, symbol and reward; saintship has become a trust. It is as if St. Peter Martyr grew tired of his gory head and handed it on to St. Catharine, St. Catharine rolling her wheel toward St. Sebastian, St. Sebastian flinging his arrows to St. Laurence. Modern martyrs can no more cling to their individual properties than modern college youths can to their individual wardrobes. No doubt change is pleasant, but to me the impressiveness of the saints has come, not so much from the special instrument of torture which each holds as from the fact that he does not drop it. Monotony I have always considered one of the chief requisites of thorough martyrdom, and the way in which the elect nowadays are picturesquely trying on one another's halos gives me pause. One would not lag behind the developing instincts of the race, and growth from a toodeep-seated individualism is welcome to us all. In watching the signs of the times, however, listening to lecturers and to eager discussions, one cannot help wondering if the change is not too feverish and too sudden. Is not this a case, perhaps, where it is not well to be entirely off with the old love before being on with the new? What is to be the outcome of the sudden feminization, if I may use the term, of our thought in regard to social problems? The instinct of womankind to dart immediately to the rescue, no matter what is dropped by the way, is something which we cannot spare, but it can hardly serve at present as a basis for the whole social structure; as one watches its pretty, compassionate freaks, one is compelled to confess a reluctant admiration for the dull masculine fashion of standing in place. Speaking as one who lives within the charmed circle of the New Thought, I confess that its most earnest advocates seem to me astonishingly ignorant of certain simple principles of architecture, the necessary dependence, for instance, of stone on stone. Imagine the result if each stone in an arch should begin to scramble for the next one's place, thinking to do better service there! Of the result only the earthquake can tell us. It is part of my unachieved development, I have no doubt, but I cannot get rid of a lingering idea that there was something in my father's way of looking at things, old-fashioned and individualistic and outgrown as I now know it to be. He used to say that human happiness and effectiveness are best achieved by finding your work and doing it as well as in you lies. When you think of the world of nature, and of the relations and the harmonies there, you are almost inclined to go back to this forgotten faith. Should the thorn conceive it its mission to bring forth grapes, the thistle to sacrifice itself to the production of figs, should all the fauna and flora in the chain of being try, with the noblest motives, to change places, we should be at a pretty pass, with resultant confusion comparable to that in the world of thought about our duty here. To be what you are, and to be it well-surely some of the people who have achieved this have left deep impress on the world. Other aspects of our new and broader thought perplex me. The discovery, for instance, that my sins and those of my forefathers are social, not individual, does not keep them from weighing on my mind. I am forever haunted by that old bogey of personal responsibility for conduct which I know, like Santa Claus and the Erl King, has no real existence. We have learned to trace social and physical causes and effects; we can demonstrate the laws which brought about this or that wrong condition or misdeed; but I cannot help thinking that it is an unfortunate line of thought to follow, unless we can confine it strictly to our neighbor's conduct and not to our own. It is excellent doctrine for the looker-on, but very bad for the sinner; we must not find too many ways of tempering existence to our shorn selves. Whatever may be the ultimate truth in regard to the freedom of the human will, there is a deep challenge in the belief that the human will is free and accountable. Nothing else serves as so deep a stimulus to the race, so vigorous a whip and spur. All this amounts but to a confession that, the more I see of the new-fashioned virtues, the more I admire the old. I hear the prophets of the new order crying aloud in the marketplace, and I cannot help wickedly remembering how many of them have failed under the old law, and have come out of wrecked homes to testify to the need of change. As I hear the loud clamoring for this and that larger responsibility, certain unforgotten and unforgetable faces float before me, of those who had assumed the high and heroic task of being themselves, and their best selves. I shall never enjoy to the full the new freedom offered; the old notion that it is for me to make good in my special task will not let me be quiet, and I find the social conscience no substitute for my own. Midas the appreciation of any rival music. Old age comes to all, or at least all hope so, and the means of diminishing its "tristesse" are or should be interesting to all. Midas has, he says, "provided for his old age." But in fact he has not provided for any employment for his old age except feeling his ears and dividing himself between fear and hope whether they are growing longer and hairier. Very likely, intent upon the business of the dollar hunt, he has, like the unwise man of Emerson, "let learning and romantic expectations go till a more convenient season," and has set his retirement from activity as the convenient season. But this is highly fallacious. The avocations and hobbies which are to alleviate retirement must have been sedulously cultivated in the intervals of activity. This in the case of the successful dollar hunter. But how about the unsuccessful? What solace is there for him who has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage and has not received the pottage? What is the "Comfortress of Unsuccess"? "The use of culture," observes the delightful author of "Confessio Medici," "is not to help us get practice, but to console us for the want of practice; and then its price is above rubies." "Bishop Blougram's Apology," as delivered to "Gigadibs the literary man," and conceived purely from the point of view of a man of this world, is entirely satisfactory. He has attained and enjoyed his success lesse vous vous preparez." The moral is that it behooves a man to have avocations for his old age, to lay up hobbies against Of "Hobbies" a rainy day. This is a counsel rather opposed to strenuosity. The strenuous Sallust lays it down: "Verum enimvero is demum mihi vivere, et frui anima videtur qui aliquo negotio intentus," and so forth. That is the ideal which has of late been thrust upon us more importunately than usual, that to live and to get the good of life you must be intent upon some job of work. And doubtless you do get the good of life in that way, while you can keep it up. The dollar hunter, Yankee, Scotchman or Jew, does immensely enjoy the pleasures of the chase, and is happier in his busy pursuit than the idler who pursues nothing. There is no doubt about that. But in the first place we cannot all be typical Scotchmen, Yankees or Jews, and this would be a very monotonous scene if we were. A world full of dragons in their prime, that tear each other in their slime, were mellow music matched with that. And even the dollar hunter cannot always be dollar hunting. Without disrespect to later voices, Thomas Carlyle remains, even for this generation, the leading apostle of strenuosity. "The most unhappy of all men is the man who has got no work cut out for him in the world and does not go into it." Here is the modern version of Sallust's "aliquo negotio intentus." And yet it is Carlyle who has recalled to us our Lempriere about Midas who "got gold so that whatever he touched became gold, and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it." "What a truth in those old fables," perorates Thomas. What a moral he himself furnished in his own "sad old age" against excess of strenuosity, whether or not employed (which of course his was not) in dollar hunting. Sent down to Mentone for the climate, within easy access of great works of art which so much of his strenuosity had been spent in misprising and preparing himself not to appreciate, with the acute pangs of bereavement added to the chronic troubles of dyspepsia, with reading become difficult and "the act of writing," as he confessed, irksome and distasteful, what was there In his repertory of avocations, his stable left for him? If he had only relaxed his of hobbies, it must be owned that the heredistrenuosity enough—well, even to learn tarily well-to-do Briton is apt much to exwhist! A fortiori is the lot of the dollar ceed the more strenuous and self-made hunter sad when he is divulsed from his American. Thus the British squire in Mr. "ticker," and has not cultivated himself in Whiteing's "Yellow Van," being inquired While writing all the same my articles The millionaire who has so many interests of by his American guest as to what the neighboring squires "did," was able to an swer Well, let me see. Torold's rather an authority on church restoration; Nethercott keeps the pack; Of fley never misses a meeting at quarter-sessions; Rodeland's very keen on model villages. It would be hard to make out as good a showing at N**p*rt or T*x*d*. The retired millionaire who had laid up even one of these subsidiary interests might be accounted happy, much happier than the retired millionaire who had swallowed the gospel of strenuosity at a gulp, ignoring that its use, like Bacon's "some few powders," was to be chewed and digested. More Portmanteau Words made acquaintance with Humpty Dumpty, who declared his ability to interpret any poem that ever had been written or that ever would be written. (It is a pity, by the way, that Alice did not promptly try him with "The Ring and the Book." It is also a pity that the late Browning Societies never elected Humpty-DumptyAlice's Humpty-Dumpty as an Honorary Vice-President.) Alice propounded to this interpreter of lyric enigmas the immortal poem beginning "'Twas brillig and the slithy toves." He promptly explained that slithy meant lithe and slimy. "Lithe is the same as active. You see, it's like a portmanteau-there are two meanings packed up in every word." And he later elucidated mimsy as made up of fimsy and miserable. It was of malice prepense that the narrator of Alice's marvellous misadventures manufactured these portmanteau words. And yet in real life they make themselves now and again, unconsciously, and often most felicitously. In the Reconstruction days of two score years ago a sable legislator of South Carolina howled back with scorn the insin uendoes of a political opponent. Insinuendo is a good word, handy on occasion and to be recommended to the dictionary-makers always in quest of the latest linguistic novelties. And the attention of these fishers of phrases may be called to another portmanteau word in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's latest comedy, "Dolly Reforming Herself." The play is a charming example of light comedy, and Dolly is a charming heroine. She abounds in feminine fascination; and she is forever coaxing her husband into paying the debts she is continually incurring for the pretty frocks he likes to see her in. But she goes a little too far on occasion, and then her docile husband violently revolts. "I will not be sweedled!" he cries in energetic protest. And her father promptly asks, “What is sweedled?" To which the indignant son-inlaw responds hotly, "Sweedling is sweedling! It's part swindling and part wheedling! It's what every d-ee-d good-natured husband like me has to go through, when he's fool enough to put up with it." Now, sweedling is a good word, an excellent word, a muchneeded word. I thank thee, Jones, for teaching me that word! And yet this is the discovery of an Englishman, although one would have supposed that it might have been happened upon earlier by some American husband harassed by a thoughtlessly extravagant wife. Two other little-known linguistic inventions there are which deserve the praise of the advertisement in that each of them may be called A Felt Want Filled. One of these is despisery, as a differentiated synonym for contempt; it seems to convey a subtler shade of meaning. And the other is interruptious, which is credited to Lincoln. He is reported to have declared that a certain member of his cabinet was "a very interruptious man." Dictionarymakers please copy. Indeed, the compilers of vocabularies ought to Get Busy, now that English is the mother-tongue of nearly a hundred and forty millions of human beings and now that it bids fair to become a world-language, the second speech of all educated men all around the globe. Words easily get used up, living as they do from hand to mouth. Theirs is a strenuous life, and their ranks must be constantly recruited if the supply is to be kept equal to the demand. SOME MODERN GERMAN PAINTINGS AT production in its present examples of this IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM N continuing these papers on modern pictures at the Metropolitan Museum, the German School, which will include those of Düsseldorf and Munich, will be reviewed at a moment when it is peculiarly illuminating to consider it; for in view of the recent temporary exhibition of the German Secessionists the works about to be discussed seem more or less remote in both subject and method. For it is indeed a fact that, as a nation, the Germans have been slow in developing on the practically artistic side; and when other countries had passed the period of pompous historical and mythological subjects, and those even of intimate and narrative genre, the highest names in German art were still pursuing the cut-and-dried themes of ancient history or contemporary romance. In consequence of this tendency, and because the Museum has not carried its collection into the immediate present, there is even less to note of vital, legitimate, painter-like VOL. XLV.-82 school than in the French or English departments which also are not brought up to date. The fact remains that as a race the Germans do not express themselves so fluently through the medium of paint as do some of their neighbors. They are more literary, philosophical, didactic. Nature does not exist for them as a beautiful fact to be interpreted emotionally by means of form and color. They have often mistaken their medium in delivering themselves of ideas through painting, and should have, in most cases, resorted to verbal expression. The outside world did not seem to stir them as a lovely thing of sight as it did the French or English, so that we find no such faithful recorders of nature as Constable, nor such imaginative creators as Turner in the whole range of German landscape art; nor in their figure painters do we discover, at a corresponding period, such searching definitions of character and form as have been left behind by Ingres. This comes, I think, from the fact that the 765 |