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Good will to Men.

YING open on the table was a bound volume of an illustrated paper. An old volume it must have been, for it was open to a cartoon by an artist whose pictures years ago ceased to appear in the public prints. This picture represented a lot of negroes under some bitter experience of discipline, with burning houses near by, and the gist of it was that order was again in course of establishment in the South. Probably the Force Bill was pending at that time and this cartoon was in support of it. But what the picture suggested, as I saw it, was the great change in the Northern sentiment that had come to pass since it was drawn. Worse things happen to individual negroes nowadays, than happened then. There were no burnings at the stake twenty years ago. Interest in the Southern negroes is as keen as ever. There never was a deeper sense of responsibility about them and their future than there is now. Money was never given more freely, nor thought and work spent more lavishly than now in their behalf; and yet such a cartoon as that that caught my eye would express nowadays no sentiment that has an important following. For while there is solicitude ever so keen about the negro's moral and economic welfare, the idea of securing to him political ascendency against the will and the interest of the white men that are his neighbors is moribund, if not dead. And why has that idea passed into such obvious decline? Because the country at large has come slowly to the conclusion that the hope of the South is in white-man's government; that where two races clash, it is to the interest of both that the abler shall prevail; that under negro domination the South would go down, and civilization would be retarded, and that under white man's government it will prosper, and the negroes prosper with it.

That, in a general way, is why the wisest friends of the Southern negro talk no more of Force Bills, and bestow little thought on the negro's right to vote and hold office, but bend all their efforts to the attempt to teach him morals, skill in handicrafts, thrift and

responsibility. They have gone back to first principles. First, they say, he must learn to take care of himself, and to climb the difficult ladder that leads to self-reliance and independence. A government in which personal and property rights are secure and under which energy, enterprise, and self-denial are reasonably sure of their rewards is necessary to his advancement. There is far better hope that such a government will result in the South from the labors of white men than from the political activity of negroes. Therefore let the white man govern for the present and the negro take such advantage as he may of the order that surrounds him.

There is a great deal of novelty about this growing American appreciation of order. Liberty was what the Fathers fought for when they won independence, and Liberty was the watchword of the nation for a hundred years afterward. Liberty Liberty and Union one and inseparable "—was the war cry in our great civil conflict. Liberty is still a word infinitely dear to every true American, but experience seems to be qualifying our definition of it. It used to mean self-government, and equality and fraternity followed after it naturally as part of the same mental process. In that sense it is still our ideal, for all peoples, as well as for ourselves, but our theories, as to its attainment, seem to have been gradually modified. We have come to think a great deal about order, and to suspect that the liberty which includes self-government has a price, and that those who cannot pay that price must wait for it until they can. That price is order; such a degree of order as will make it possible for civilization to advance. We have begun to doubt whether liberty is at all times, for all men of all races, a panacea for all political ills. We have begun to discrimi

dependence all at once, we dare not grant." And then we wonder not a little if we are doing right.

As to that, heaven knows; but certainly we are doing our best. "Peace on Earth, good will to men," are sentiments so closely associated that we may not separate them. Though sometimes our anxiety to make peace prevail may cause our good will to be questioned, we may certainly insist-however doubtful of the comprehensiveness of our own wisdom-that our obligations as promoters and conservators of the world's peace are far too grave to be neglected in the interest of our reputation for mere goodnature. As human parents we often show our love for our children in ways distasteful to them, and if by reason of strength and capacity we have come as a nation to stand in a parental relation to some of Earth's children that are not of our breed, our good will toward them is not to be impugned because we decline to treat them in all respects as though they were competent and responsible adults. The parental relation is new to us as a nation. We are green hands at it. The rule we have best known and practised has been, "Give every man a chance and let him do his best with it." Nowadays we have to modify that maxim so that it reads: "Give every man as much opportunity as he seems competent to handle, and if necessary help, and even constrain, him to handle it." We may make mistakes. Undoubtedly we have made mistakes and shall make many more. But our hopes for success, both for ourselves and those we try to guide, need not falter as long as our purposes square with the Golden Rule. So long as we say to our step-children, and are sincere in saying it, Do thus and so, accept this or that plan, for your own profit and our honor," we shall be in the right path, and may hope to blunder through to a good end. When we say, "Do thus and so for our profit and because we are stronger than you" we shall have strayed into a path that our feet should never have trod, and turned our backs shamefully on that ideal of liberty to which we were born.

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OT long ago I heard a distinguished physician-a man of many years' experience as city medical examiner, and quite as noted for his keen humor as for his skill as a practitioner-say: “When I retire, I mean to amuse myself with v riting a book

which will contain some rather startling truths.
I am afraid, though, that it will not be much
more than an amusement, and will
The Distrust of

do little real good; for I shall not Humor.
be able to keep a touch of humor
from creeping in every now and then, and
this will prevent ninety-nine readers out of a
hundred taking any of it seriously."

I was reminded of Oscar Wilde's Only the dull are taken seriously.

Why is it that humor should be so suspicious, as it undoubtedly is, to the average Anglo-Saxon? We Americans, in particular, are supposed to possess quite a racial sense of humor; yet most of us are terribly prone to suspect that, when a man says a thing epigrammatically, he does not quite mean what he says. How explain this apparent inconsistency?

One explanation might be sought in the general human-and by no means distinctively Anglo-Saxon tendency sharply to classify men according to their more salient qualities. We instinctively assign specialties to our fellow-mortals. Let but a man emerge from the vulgar throng with a resounding success in any line, and we straightway hang that success round his neck, as a label, ready ever afterward to predisprize what he may attempt in any other line. Hector Berlioz once said that a composer who had won fame with a symphony had best give up all hope of succeeding with an opera; all the world have already classed (parqué) him as a symphonist, and it was well known that no true symphonist could write a fine opera-Mozart and Beethoven to the contrary notwithstanding. The late Professor Bowen, the metaphysician of Harvard University, was once heard to opine that what had, for years, most stood in the way of Schopenhauer's recognition in Germany was his admirable prose style. "Everybody thought that a man who wrote as well as that could not possibly be a philosopher!"

Now, few mental qualities are taken by the public at large to be more sharply classifying than humor. Let a man but be recognized as a humorist, and small hope has he of being accepted as anything else. Few actors have had a more penetrating power of pathos than the late William Warren, of the Boston Museum; but he was best known to the public as a comedian, his assigned "specialty" was the Morton farce; the result was that unthinking play-goers—the thinking play-goer is a rarity imagined that everything he did.

must be funny, and his finest pathetic moments in serious parts were too often greeted with a stupid guffaw. Mark Twain has complained to friends that his reputation as a humorist stood terribly in the way of people's believing that he ever meant what he said. The philosopher of Hartford is but a funny man to too many readers, and the deep humanity of his philosophy recognized, for the most part, only by critics of insight.

Still, though the tendency to assign "specialties" to men according to their more salient qualities, and to set corresponding limits to what shall be accepted as valuable in their doings, is broadly human, surely we AngloSaxons have outstripped most of the rest of the world in regarding humor as incompatible with seriousness of purpose. Strange that this should be true of so intrinsically humorous a race as ours! The trouble probably is that we too often misappreciate the true quality and function of humor, to the extent of valuing only its laughter-provoking side. It seems to be only the thinkers among us who recognize its underlying and uneliminable seriousness, and appreciate that the possession of that sense for the incongruous, which is the heart and soul of humor, is the surest guaranty of a man's seeing things in their true relations. What debarred Victor Hugo, for instance, from supreme greatness as a poet? Nothing but a well-nigh total lack of humor, rendering him blind to all true philosophic and emotional proportion. Wit he had, and poetic energy; mainsprings galore, as many and strong as any poet who ever wrote; but the balance-wheel of humor was denied him, and it is only by the Frenchwho have, for the most part, as little humor

as he that he is confidently placed in the front rank.

If anyone doubt the very general distrust of the inherent seriousness in humor here in America, let him but look at—it were cruel to ask him to read-the ostensibly serious authors whose works have the largest sales in this country. For it is just these ostensibly serious writers who are taken with the most grim seriousness by our average reading public. Perhaps it were hardly fair to bring up the portentous Martin Farquhar Tupper in this connection now; his day is pretty well past. But take Hall Caine, whose books are positively devoured; a man whose lack of humor is so complete that he can be taken seriously only by those who are in the same ill case, or by the far larger mass who have never thought of exercising their sense of humor, save for fun. It is not too much to say that the enormous success with the general public of writers of the Hall Caine stamp-not to mention some earnest essayist of overwhelming dulness-has been largely, if not chiefly, owing to precisely their lack of humor. They, as it were, advertise their seriousness; it is "down on the bills," and people can read them with the comfortable assurance that their dignity runs no risk of being compromised by a smile. But let the author smile himself, and his hold upon a serious public is lost.

The serious humorist and the humorous philosopher can speak intelligently only to the élite of readers, whose nature is so nobly serious in itself that they can afford to dispense with the trappings and the suits of earnestness; who know how to distinguish between humor and levity, and see the unfathomable néant that underlies dulness.

ART SOCIETIES AND SOCIETIES OF ARTISTS

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I

UCH precious thought and time go yearly to the management of art societies: and this calls forth many disparaging remarks to the effect that there are too many of these societies; that the artistworld does not husband its forces; and that something like consolidation is the remedy. It is noticeable that the persons from whom these criticisms have come are not the persons immediately interested in the societies. When the great number of the societies is alluded to, as, for instance, in New York, it is not one of the men devoted to their management who complains-it is the outsider, the business man who thinks that it is unbusiness-like for the artists to divide up their forces in this extreme way. Business men are always thinking for artists. They assume, naturally, that artists want just that which they, the business men, would want. It does not strike a business man, even him who is fond of fine art and addicted more or less to the society of artists-it does not strike him that there are other causes for the existence of an art society than the holding of a business-like exhibition once a year. Or, if he is reminded that the due influence of the artists upon the political organizations and the financial world can only be made good by means of joint action, his conviction is strong that such influence would be better secured, such joint action much more powerful, if the societies were to be merged in one powerful Union of Interests.

It is not merely as a union of interests that the societies appeal to the artists; and in that fact lies the objection to the business man's theory as above set forth. There are a score of separate objects to be gained—a score of separate dreams to be realized, a score of ambitions more or less worthy, more or less noble, more or less important to the whole community as well as to the smaller community of men devoted to art; and every one VOL. XXX.-82

of these dreams, of these interests, of these ambitions might, under certain conditions, become the raison d'être of a society.

II

1. The artists wish to talk things over among themselves; and the more serious and strenuous of them have but little time for that traditional chat of the studios of which we hear so much, and which, for good and evil, has indeed done much to make the modern artist what he is. They need very much the opportunity of discussing artistic topics, sometimes in twos and threes in corners of the rooms, sometimes in meetings of thirty or sixty men. Nor is it to be supposed that the debate in the large meeting is of little value, even where there are but few men who can talk readily on their feet, and those few are monologuists to a fatiguing extent, as sometimes happens; that is not the last word of the discussion by any means! After such a debate the minds of the men present are primed for further meditation and for further and more tranquil private discussion, and that is the true result of these meetings. The critical talk which follows such a meeting and continues until men part at the corner of the street, two hours later, is often the best part of it; and it is something which could hardly be replaced by any other conditions were those meetings once abolished.

2. The artists want better and more intimate knowledge of the feelings of their possible employers, of the public bodies or the rich men from whom important orders are to be had; and for this purpose they wish to mix with others than artists and, on certain occasions at least, to have such communication in a way more intimate than ordinary private society gives, more close to the subject at issue than the social clubs can give, more frequent than the ordinary meetings of acquaintances can be in a vast modern civic community. In this sense, the Society becomes an exchange; the more valuable that ideas as well as material interests are concerned.