A MATTER OF BACKGROUND.

If the war in the extreme East just ended has done no more for humanity, it has demonstrated the unfitness in these days of a nation that has no perspective. Philosophers we have had, and eke reformers, who saw no farther than their noses. But here is a great people whose polity is exclusive, whose art recognizes no relation of distance, whose social code is rigidly formal and openly mercenary, whose methods in war consisted up to a late date of noise and stenches and hideous banners designed to frighten an enemy. With rare powers of detail, the art of China is lifeless and without spirituality or suggestive force. With centuries of training in literary industry, its lore is the elaborate repetition of didactic sayings thousands of years old. There is no background in its pictures. There is no constructive basis in its social theory. All is flat surface, repression, imitation. Yet here is the oldest nation in the world in continuous history. We need not wonder it has fallen at last. The marvel is that it stood so long. The student of history may well ask what has held back destroying hands through so many centuries of the world’s unrest.

Lack of a sense of proportion and distance is not peculiar, however, to Orientals. Even in the light of western civilization philosophers have forgotten yesterday and to-morrow, and the foreground has usurped the canvas. Impatience is a sign of modern degeneration if the oracle who has a caveat on that warning is good authority. It is strange to find in the prophet himself the fault he attributes to our time. For in all ages the world has been on the point of going to the dogs, according to some voice crying in the wilderness or on the house tops, as he is crying now. From Jonah warning luxurious Nineveh down to Max Simon Nordau listing crooked ears as the breeder counts his cross-billed chicks as proof that the race is “running out,” the warning has been unceasing. And yet the race lives, and builds on its ruins.

Our nerves have worn us out, according to Mr. Nordau. If Count Tolstoi knows, amatory passion is the cause of the wreck, and high feeding back of that. If Mr. Ibsen is right, artificiality has destroyed the virtues. M. Zola is sure that bestiality has brought judgment upon at least one modern Sodom. Mynheer Maartens is Philistine enough to ascribe most of our ills to repression of sincerity, of naturalness in social life. And so a score of doctors describe special symptoms, each empirically, each truthfully. The wisest of them—those who have a sense of perspective—see beyond the immediate ailment the persistent vitality which is never wholly conquered.

We have specialized philosophy and literature as we have medicine. These are not quacks who tell us the world is going to wreck through the extravagances of society, through the repression of humanities, through the lusts of gross living. They are students of particular phases of distemper. The world, not the men in its clinics, is to blame when it hails each as a cure-all. The realism of a Zola or a Nordau is not a finality. While the knife is in hand the ulcer is pre-eminently in evidence. Its removal is the business in order. But the genius of a Zola that divines the cancer in the vitals of society presupposes the life that is behind it—and that is the main factor in his surgery.

He would be a false teacher who should put the immediate in the place of the permanent in any such calculation. The world that listens has an equal responsibility. The greatest artist can only paint passing phases of the limitless evolution going on about him. It is heresy in itself fatal to put a phase in the place of the infinite process. Grant that society is always at war with itself, always repressing truth, always promoting animalism by its very more or less disguises. The paradox of these results can never be wholly escaped. The teacher who sees what is and was in due proportion will judge what is to be, though no son of a prophet. The new realism for which Philistines contend is no expose of the evils of modern society, no uncovering of a witch’s pot. It holds all these manifestations in perspective, but substitutes none of them for a general view of life and human destiny. It would make health instead of disease infectious, substituting for blind Oriental imitation a truer standard of custom, freer from convention that has no warrant of purpose, more direct in its expression of natural and normal vitality in personal living and thinking. “From within outward,” is its motto. It would depose and outgrow self-consciousness—the vampire fungus that signalizes arrested development and decay in thought or in letters or in the self-projection of social life. The realism of the Philistines is manifested in the recognition of healthy life that we find in some of the new literature—in the heroic romance of Anthony Hope, in the charming tenderness and sweetness of Maartens’s Hollandais and in the fresh-witted islanders, full of arterial blood, of Hall Caine and the wizard who lies buried on the mountain top of his own beloved island—that second one to the left after you leave San Francisco.

Even the modern stage, corrupted by French intensities and the commercial idea of filling the house, is showing signs of a reaction. Not more than nine-tenths of the standard attractions of the coming season are based on infractions of the seventh commandment or of that similar law which every chivalrous man knows, though it was never traced in fire on the Sinaitic stone.

William McIntosh.