A

JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS

CAMBRIDGE

CHILD'S inquiry which is quoted at Hull House raises one of

the most troublesome of all difficulties in the theory and prac

tice of the social question, “Who can be good without any back yard?" There is a dignified and very stubborn theory that the back yard has little to do with goodness. Some inherent personal quality, according to this view, determines our destiny. Whether this quality mature in a rookery or in a palace, it will, after its nature, come to its own. The back yard will neither help nor hinder.

I heard long since a lecture by the artist, Whistler, called "Ten O'clock." The thesis was that genius in art is independent of all back yards. If the divine sensitiveness to beauty once take possession, it will find avenues to express itself. The dullest age cannot quench it. The meanest upbringing cannot long hold it in check. The artist will thrive in poverty as in luxury. A dreary and commonplace generation cannot defeat him. Whether the childhood is happy or miserable will count for little. Once the talent is here in any age or place, it will mould the unhappiest events and make them tributary to its own destiny. Circumstance is nothing if the careless deities once grant

the gift.

In Taine's "Philosophy of Art," the reader may find the exact opposite of Mr. Whistler's views put with the learning of an historian as well as with an artist's skill. With Taine, the difference is infinite, whether the man be born here or there, in an age of machine production or in the cinque cento. The gloom over the figures of Rembrandt is but the reflection of the sombre sky under which the great master painted. The flame on Titian's canvas mirrors the light in which he lived. The splendor of raiment in Van Dyck's pictures would have been impossible but for the condition of eastern commerce in his time. Give Taine a certain setting of external media, climate, industry, custom, and he returns the result in character, as if character were a product of that into which it happened to be born.'

To

get the artist or even a special kind of artist,

"Une certaine température morale est nécessaire pour que certains talents se développent; si elle manque, ils avortent. Par suite, la température changeant, (1) See his account of this art from Hubert van Dyck to Quentin Massys, vol. ii., chapter i. Again, the effect of external conditions on Greek sculpture, vol. ii., page

102.

Copyright, 1903, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved.

l'espèce des talents changera; si elle devient contraire, l'espèce des talents deviendra contraire et, en général, on pourra concevoir la température morale comme faisant un choix entre les différentes espèces de talents, ne laissant se développer que telle ou telle espèce, excluant plus ou moins complètement les autres. C'est par un mécanisme de cette sorte que vous voyez, en certains temps et en certains pays, se développer dans les écoles tantôt le sentiment de l'idéal, tantôt celui du réel, tantôt celui du dessin, tantôt celui de la couleur."

Professor M'Kechnie, a teacher of law and history in the University of Glasgow, writes in his "State and the Individual ":—

"It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the conduct of governments, whether in acting or in letting alone, is largely responsible for the existence, or at any rate, the distribution, of most of the suffering that exists in the world."

It would be easy to give a list of weighty names of those who take their stand with Whistler as against Taine in this dispute. Just as easy would it be to fill out as long a list of those who side with Taine.

Mazzini shows, for example, that he sympathizes with Taine:

"For the people there is but one thing certain,-their own misery. As for the moralists, the philosophical writers, who would begin with transforming the inward man-they forget that the laboring man, who works fourteen or sixteen hours a day for a bare subsistence, with no security for the morrow's existence but the labor of his hands, has not time to read and reflect ;—he drinks and sleeps."

In the same spirit Macaulay urges that free and popular institutions will create great qualities. On the other hand, Ruskin accepts Carlyle's teaching, that the temper of the artist is

"not a teachable or gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man that, teach or preach or labor as you will, everlasting difference is set between one's capacity and another's, and this God-given supremacy is a priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another."

Ruskin maintains that all effectual advancement toward this true felicity of the human race must be by individual, not public effort. Ruskin never quite freed himself from Carlyle's estimate of our poor humanity as a "rotten multitudinous canaille" that would not recognize the great man when the wayward gods created him.

The artist-poet, Morris, called himself a follower of Ruskin, but the pupil tells us that years of hard work with common men led him to see little hope for art or for sweeter life until social conditions were transformed. Here one sees a purely collectivist sympathy aroused by the conviction that both art and sweeter life depend largely upon enveloping

circumstance.

There is, perhaps, no more fundamental contention in socialism than this. At first blush it appears puerile to seek labored proofs of the merits of this dispute. To the practical instinct, it is at best a quibble. "Character is of course important, so also are favorable circumstances.' Like many a decision of common experience, there is a kind of final truth about this, upon which churches, charities, and legislators (forced to take things in the rough), unfortunately act. The student, however, must qualify and make distinctions. He sees that the social question is perpetually confused by conflicting notions on this issue. He sees that no discussion can take him far until some attempt is made to weigh "character" against "circumstance." I have rarely heard a debate between one who thought himself an individualist and one who claimed to be a socialist that did not, at bottom, turn upon the inquiry about the relative importance of man's character and that of his surroundings. The dispute is as old as human thought, and people will doubtless quarrel over it as long as diversities of temperament continue in the race. Attempts to secure social and labor legislation are troubled by the same antagonisms. One insists that the external changes proposed by the bill in hand will be useless because they cannot affect character. Another is confident that character has no chance until the outward changes have taken place.

An instructed worker in social settlements tells me :—

"It's not much good if the heads of the various houses once get bitten with socialism. Then I find them always acting on the assumption that if they can create some new device-bath-house, local library, art industry-and induce the city later to carry it on, they have fulfilled their highest function. These changes do not make character at all. The only good settlements do is through personal and individual contact; but very few of these associations are content with that and so seem to me to be wasting their energies."

I asked this critic why, from his own point of view, these same creations, penny savings, baths, libraries, clubs,may not be considered as so many means of enlarging and systematizing that personal contact which appears to him so primary. The inquiry did not move him from his position. Said he :

"No, once get that illusion into the mind, that externals of any sort are greatly important and straightway your hold as character-maker is gone. Every one of these fine and showy alterations is sure to call off the attention from the one task. With these so much in mind you will weaken character, not strengthen it."

He who believes the evil to be primarily one of character, is likely to oppose the interference of any law, and to think lightly of external

changes. I asked a coal operator during the recent strike, why the employers did not obey the state law and pay the miners once a fortnight instead of once a month. He said, "Yes, that's the law, but it's a bad one. The miners have so little self-control that if they get their pay in small amounts, they waste it for rum at the 'speak easy."" Such laws, he felt, were useless until the miners and their wives "got more character." One holding the opposite view would insist that self-control grows by exercise. How the miner spends his money is his business. If he is ever to learn prudence and forethought, it must be by exercising his own judgment. If the law compel the employer to throw upon the miner the responsibility of using his wages as seems to him best, this may prove to be one agency for the miner's training.

During the tenement house agitation in New York, a clever lawyer, pleading for owners of low class tenements, maintained that "with this class of tenants no improvement in housing was worth while because they were so filthy. Paint and whitewash as much as you like," he said, "and they will daub everything over within a fortnight." If proper sanitary appliances were put in, they would not use them. These tenants, according to the lawyer, were a bad lot for whom new surroundings could do nothing. They must first get decent habits and then it might be feasible to trust them in cleanlier quarters.

The reply to this has been the same:—

You will not get the instincts of cleanliness as long as tenants are left in filth. What you call "character" will remain squalid if it habitually lives in squalor. A rare few will have qualities that find the filth unbearable. These will escape, but the mass will remain a bad lot as long as their lot is bad. The socialist of every shade urges that all talk of character first is cant. First knock your shabby tenement to pieces. First give tolerable housing, and then the virtues, from which character is made, begin to grow.

One learns among these social questions that nothing is so practical as a theory. One of our most conscientious "single taxers" refuses to help in tenement house reform, "because better homes for workingmen are useless under our present vicious tax system. Replace this chaos by the single tax and the evil of over-crowding and bad tenements passes away forever." The theory of Mr. George, strictly construed, makes this attitude consistent and unanswerable.

A socialist commenting in Chicago upon Mr. Stead's terrible arraignment of female prostitution in that city, says:

"When will the fools learn that prostitution is a necessity of our wage system? If they will have capitalism and the kind of family it makes, they must have prostitu

tion. The well dressed thieves could not otherwise protect their own wives and daughters."

If this critic's theory is true, his conclusion is true. If the private appropriation of rent, interest, and profits, creates a sex slavery,—a commercial monogamy on one side and a prostitute class on the other,—he was right in saying "Your houses of refuge are nothing but places where these wretched victims recuperate for their calling. No such institutions can touch the disease which is in our social system."

Alfred de Musset sides in this with the socialist. The young girl's fall is not because of native frailty, but from the circumstance of surrounding misery :

To trace this special evil not to hidden inclination but to lack of bread, a mean home, or scant and fitful wages, forces those who hold such views to look to a very different order of remedies. As theories of environment vary, so varies every conception of social remedies.

When George Jacob Holyoke, still young, was groping his way toward some service that could enlist his enthusiasm, he fell upon a passage from Coleridge which runs thus:

"Accustomed to regard all the affairs of men as a process, they never hurry and they never pause. Theirs is not a twilight of political knowledge which gives just light enough to place one foot before the other; as they advance the scene still opens upon them. Convinced that vice originates not in the man, but in the surrounding -not in the heart but in the understanding,-they are hopeless concerning no one. By endeavoring to alter the circumstances they would remove, or by strengthening the intellect, disarm temptation.''I

circumstances,

Holyoke says that these words describe the class of socialists of which (1) Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life, vol. 1., p. 49.