IF ONLY—

I

CONSIDERING THE untold tons of garbage that are shot daily from our presses, it would be an intrepid person who should demand a new book on any subject. Nay, with books no longer the symbol of light and leading that they once were, but now become only a symbol of was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine, no one with a literary conscience would ever so faintly suggest that another should be added to the list. Some years ago, I asked one of our ablest publishers how he got books out of his authors. He said, “I don’t. On the contrary, I do everything in my power to keep them from writing books.” I have always treasured the memory of this publisher and honored him as a loyal friend, not only to literature, but also to me; for while I, poor sinner, have fallen from grace once or twice since then, his words have kept my lapses at a minimum.

How many of us wretched addicts, indeed, should such words put in the way of giving literature the very best service we could possibly render! One thinks of Thiers’s profound remark to Count Walewski, who, not content with a career in diplomacy, vainly imagined he could write a good play. “What possessed you to do it, Count?” said Thiers, on the first night. “It is so hard to write a play in five acts; and it is so easy not to write a play in five acts.” How can temptation rear its head against this solid wisdom? Yet it does. At the present moment, for example, now that this idea has occurred to me, I am tempted to make it the subject of a long essay, in the hope of touching the flinty hearts of publishers, editors, literary agents, and above all, the deceitful and desperately wicked people who organize literary competitions. But I forbear; though the impulse is almost overpowering, I shall resist it, for in the cause of righteousness one good example is worth a thousand precepts.

Again, things being as they are, one’s literary conscience would not only stay one from suggesting a new book, but would also admonish one to go very gingerly about recommending a new book to the attention of any public, large or small, general or special. With the noisy vogue of bad taste and vulgarity everywhere rampant, the public is deafened to every voice that is not pitched in the shrill falsetto of utter self-abandonment, and hence the sober appraisal of a new book may easily be taken as its proverbial damning with faint praise. Then, too, even in recommending a serious book to a very small and special public, as I have twice lately ventured to do, one is uncomfortably conscious of Emerson’s sound principle of never reading any book, no matter what, that is not at least a year old. Of contemporary literature, indeed, even serious literature, one can hardly read too little—man lese nicht die mitstrebende, mitwirkende, said Goethe—and almost invariably the mere passage of time discloses any contemporary critical estimate of it as worthless.

But though one may not ask for a new book or even recommend one, I suppose one is still free to say what sort of new book one would most enjoy reading. I imagine one might permit oneself to do this, provided it were done on the clear understanding that one had nothing in view beyond the indulgence of a harmless whim. I hope so, at any rate, for I have long had such a book in mind, and now, having made manifest the spotless purity of my intentions, I should like to say something about it.

II

It would give me a deal of pleasure to read a historical essay that followed out two lines of speculation, one of which I am quite sure has never been explored at all, and the other only a little way. History is notoriously a chapter of accidents, and historians have often entertained themselves by speculating on the probable changes in the course of events if this-or-that accident had not happened precisely when and as it did. If, for example, an unknown soldier’s bullet had not pierced the breast of James Wolfe, on the Plains of Abraham, would George Washington ever have been the leader of a successful revolution? If Napoleon had not been laid up with a bad cold in the head, would he have shown better strategy at Borodino, demolished the Russian army, and turned the campaign of 1812 into a brilliant success which might have altered the whole course of subsequent European history? Speculation on accidents of this order is common enough. There are, however, two extremely commonplace types of accident which I believe have never been properly considered in their historical aspect; that is to say, I have never seen more than a bare hint of any speculations concerning the probable course that history would have taken if in certain given instances such accidents had not intervened.

Hence I should be delighted to read an essay which considered, first, the accident of individual poverty from the historical point of view. Twenty-five or thirty years ago I applied myself to a long study of the works of Henry George, which led me in turn to look closely into the circumstances of his public career and private life, and into the fortunes of what is commonly known as the ‘single-tax movement,’ which was launched into American politics towards the turn of the last century. I wondered then, and have wondered ever since, whether George would have consented to put himself and his philosophy at the service of an Adullamite political jehad if he had not been always so miserably poor. It seems most unlikely. His instinct was strongly against doing anything of the kind, and the cast of his mind was so eminently philosophic that one might expect him to have regarded the politics of America as Socrates regarded the politics of Athens—as something, that is, for a really sound politician to keep as far as possible away from. Instead, however, of concentrating his energies on remaining a man of thought, he divided them, and became in great part a man of action. One might make out a good case for the thesis that the corrosive action of poverty inflamed a naturally ardent and nobly sympathetic temperament to the point of making him peculiarly accessible to the urgings of what Mr. H. G. Wells calls the Gawdsaker—to the point where immediate action, even ill-considered action, in behalf of those as poor as himself seemed a paramount duty.

This being so, it is interesting to speculate upon the historical position that George and his economic philosophy might even now occupy if the determining factor of poverty had not been present. Indeed, a thoughtful person might find that the principal effect of a close survey of this remarkable man’s public career is to make one wonder what his influence would amount to at the present time if he had not been so poor.

Similarly an essayist might find a first-rate exercise for his imagination in trying to estimate the force of Napoleon’s dire poverty as a factor in the fate of Europe. In all that has been written about Napoleon I doubt that this has been done. Even War and Peace, which sets the high mark probably forever as a masterly job of deflating and debunking a historical personage, leaves this factor out of account; yet it must have been considerable. Napoleon, as Count Tolstoy says, makes his first appearance in French history as “a man of no convictions, no habits, no traditions, no name, not even a Frenchman”; moreover, he was dead broke, unsuccessful and despondent, an adventurer, offering his sword here and there, with no takers. The irregularities of his conduct in the French service caused him to be struck off the list of general officers, September 15, 1795; he was in disgrace. Nevertheless, the most extraordinary freaks of chance—a deadlock of partisan political forces, the puerile incompetence of his colleagues, the insignificance of his opponents—opened the way for a free exercise of “his frenzy of self-adoration, his insolence in crime and his frankness in mendacity,” whereby his career was made.

Now no doubt these opportunities lay open to any adventurer who happened to find himself on the spot at the moment, and if one had not been there, another might, and the consequences to Europe might have been quite the same. Napoleon certainly had no monopoly of the very moderate amount of sagacity that was needed to perceive the prospect which these freaks of chance held out, and to profit by them. But that is not the point. The point is whether, for example, if his father, dying in 1785, had left him a good substantial income, Napoleon would have been on the spot when the moment came, or anywhere near it. One may reasonably doubt that he would. It is highly probable, almost certain, that the moment would have found him much more congenially employed elsewhere, very likely at home in Corsica; his previous history gives a distinct color to this supposition. I imagine that if he had chosen to stick to the practical side of military affairs, as seems most likely, he would have ended his days as a first-class competent artillery officer, high in the service; and if he had gone in for the theoretical side, he might have made himself another Clausewitz or Moltke. I believe that a disinterested examination of the matter would show that the basic reason why the disgraced Corsican adventurer, Nabulione Buonaparte, found himself on that particular spot at that particular moment was that practically all his adult life he had been poor and busted and looking for a job. Very probably, too, it was the sudden reaction from this condition that enhanced all the evil qualities in his nature and made them dominant, for this is what so regularly happens in such circumstances that its regularity has given rise to the common proverb concerning the risks of putting a beggar on horseback.

The essayist might have even more fun out of examining the career of Louis-Napoléon in the light of this idea. An anonymous writer of the last century says he knew Louis-Napoleon well for twenty-five years, and was almost certain that if he had not been so poor as he was, there would have been no Second Empire. A great deal can be said for this view. Even granting that he would go back to France in 1848 and put himself up for the presidency of Lamartine’s ramshackle Second Republic, one might find pretty good ground for believing that as a rich man he would have been content to stay in that position and do what he could with it, rather than incur the risks and animosities involved in disintegrating republican solidarity and honeycombing the Legislative Assembly of 1849, in preparation for a coup d’Etat. But the more one considers the state of French politics ensuing upon the fall of the July monarchy, the less reason one sees why, if Louis-Napoleon had not been poor as Job’s turkey, he would have dreamed of going back to France at all.

I shall not anticipate the essayist by recounting the conditions, subjective and circumstantial, which make this seem probable. Suffice it to say that but for his hamstringing impecuniosity, Louis-Napoléon was doing extremely well where he was. Always a studious and reflective man, in spirit much more a philosopher and poet than an emperor, he might have lived on very pleasurably in London, developing his ideas on free trade in association with Richard Cobden and John Bright, and in correspondence with Enfantin, the Periers and Michel Chevalier. He might have written his projected history of Cæsar, continued his studies on the abolition of poverty, and no doubt made quite an impressive thing of his twin schemes for an international currency and for what would seem to be a very practicable sort of United States of Europe, based on the suppression of customs frontiers. English society had received him most favorably, putting its best resources at his disposal for the beguilement of his lighter moments; while for those still lighter, he had the devotion of the blonde Miss Howard, who appears to have made herself always entertaining and delightful—and there is some evidence that her role in the drama of his life in London carried several capable understudies as well. As far as one can see, the only “out” in this excellent situation was his distressing poverty.

I believe one could draw up a highly plausible argument for the thesis that but for this one factor there would have been no Second Empire, and hence doubtless no calamitous messing about in Italian, Mexican and Oriental affairs; probably a satisfactory composition with Prince von Bismarck in the middle ‘sixties, such as almost any bourgeois republic, however imbecile and venal, but alive to its own interest, might easily have arranged; indeed, Louis-Napoleon himself had two capital chances to arrange one, and flubbed them both. Above all, there would have been no Mlle, de Montijo, and hence no Wissembourg, Wörth, Spicheren, Sedan; and for the probable changes ensuing in English, German and Italian history, a whole volume of speculation would hardly be enough. As it stands, that history was determined by a skillfully pumped-up revival of the “Napoleonic tradition,” and the primary spring of action behind that revival may well have been Louis-Napoléon’s poverty. The various stories about his unshakable faith in his “star” have very much the air of something put out after the fact; or, as the sinful would say, the air of being mostly hooey.

The anonymous author whom I mentioned a moment ago says that after witnessing two days of the revolution of 1848 he never read a word about any of the revolutionary movements that took place in France during the nineteenth century. It was enough for him, he says, to know that these movements were invariably led by men in want of five or ten thousand a year. My essayist might look into this matter a little; my notion is that he would find plenty to reward him. It was the accepted understanding among those who were “in the know” that Lamartine proclaimed the Second Republic for money. The great orator was at that time not only in his usual state of being flat broke, but also about $70,000 in the red, and hounded by creditors. With a republican revolution under way, and a right smart chance of himself being president of the republic, he could get his debts paid; as in fact he did. He was somewhat a Daniel Webster of his time; and it is not unreasonable to suspect that his financial disabilities may have had a great deal to do with making him the fugleman of the shouts for a revolutionary republic.

The essayist might make similarly interesting finds among men who were prominent in the other upheavals that France went through after 1789. He could probably turn up something out of the White Terror of 1815, a good deal out of 1830—Louis-Philippe never let himself or anyone else forget how desperately poor he had been; his preoccupation amounted almost to a mania—more out of 1851, and he could fill a long chapter with a study of the needy political adventurers of 1870-1873, Gambetta, Favre, Jules Simon, and their fellow-strivers. While on this last period, too, he might digress for a moment to note a striking example of the effect of individual wealth upon the course of history. When the National Assembly met at Bordeaux in February 1871, it is almost a certainty that if the Orléans family had bestirred themselves in their own behalf, their dynasty would have been restored; which means that if this family had not been rich enough to keep out of the unwholesome prairie-dog’s nest of French politics at that period, there would have been no Third Republic.

I have cited this century of French history only because it affords so many conspicuous and consecutive examples of the kind of thing I mean, and not at all implying that my essayist could not find plenty elsewhere, for they are like the sands of the sea for multitude wherever politics exist. Plenty such he could find in our own history, without rattling any skeletons in our neighbors’ closets. I have in mind one statesman who influenced the course of our political history most profoundly, whom beyond doubt poverty nudged into politics in the first instance, as the easiest way to keep his body and soul together. I would give his name, but that his memory is dear to many, and some of them might think I was going out of my way to disparage him.

III

My mention of Mile, de Montijo, better known as the Empress Eugénie, appropriately introduces my essayist to his second line of research, which is a study of henpecking from the historical point of view. All of us who have maintained even the most formal and austere relations with the fair sex may be presumed to have a fairly clear theoretical idea of what henpecking is; some of us, unhappily, perhaps most of us, have got our knowledge of it at the hands of that harshest of pedagogues, experience. My dictionary defines henpecking as domineering by one’s wife; but when one thinks of Mme. du Barry and Mme. de Montespan, when one thinks of grandmothers, mothers-in-law, maiden aunts, elder sisters and Gott soll hüten débutante daughters, this seems a very limited definition. One might put it more generally, I think, that hen-pecking is the habitual imposing of the female’s will upon the male, whereby the male’s disposition towards the matter at issue is overridden, and his will nullified.

The strategical methods employed in this exercise are very various, running all the way from the hawklike possessiveness of Mme. Polosov, the tragic tears of Mme. Karenin and the freezing hauteur of Lady Dedlock, to the intransigence of Mrs. Raddle, the bickering of Mrs. Caudle and the strong-arm methods of Mrs. Proudie. Those who know more of such matters than I do tell me that by nature practically every woman has all these methods at immediate command, and is also gifted with an extremely fine tactical sense in the matter of their mobilization and deployment. I suppose I might add that my own desultory observations rather tend to bear out this view.

The anonymous friend of Louis-Napoléon, whom I mentioned a moment ago, says in the course of some observations on the Empress that no one has traced the effects of henpecking on the course of history, and he cites some instances in support of his statement. Nevertheless he is not quite right. The henpecked man has mostly been fair game for the Jerrolds and Gavarnis of the world, but the essayist and historian have also sometimes taken him quite seriously. One’s real complaint is that they have not followed through on him, not given the factor of henpecking anywhere near all it is worth, not as a rule taken more than its immediate consequences into account; whereas its more remote consequences are often the most important. For example, in the cardinal instance of Jeanne Poisson’s henpecking Louis XV into the Seven Years’ War, they do not go beyond the immediate political consequences to France, usually stopping with the defeat at Rossbach, the loss of Canada and the extinction of French influence in India; whereas the really interesting thing about this bit of henpecking is what it did to Germany and the German spirit, and what might have befallen these if the lady’s seductions had not worked.

Maria-Theresa, wishing to recover Silesia, got together a group of nations in an alliance against Frederick the Great. To make this alliance strong enough, she had to get France into it; so she sent that strange creature, Prince von Kaunitz—albeit a first-class diplomat, though one hardly sees how he could be—over to Paris to labor with Louis XV. France had just come out of the war of the Austrian Succession with about as much to show for it as the United States got out of the war of 1914, and Louis felt towards this new proposal somewhat as Senator Johnson might feel towards a suggestion from the French Government that we should go over to Europe in force this summer and help exterminate Hitler. Von Kaunitz encountered a deaf ear and a marble heart; there was nothing doing; so he took the matter up with Louis’s lady-friend, Jeanne Poisson d’Etioles, Marquise de Pompadour, and got results. It seems that old Frederick, who was nothing of a lady’s man, regarded Jeanne’s pretensions with blunt Prussian derision, and had lampooned her outrageously in some pretty salty verse—he could do that sort of thing rather well when he felt like it—and Jeanne looked upon Maria-Theresa’s project as a providential chance to get even.

This was the prelude to the Seven Years’ War, which left Prussia flat; it was only Elizabeth of Russia’s death in 1762, and the immediate withdrawal of Peter III from the alliance, which enabled Frederick to win the war by the skin of his teeth. This victory, coupled with those of the two preceding wars, no doubt laid the foundation for the Germany of 1870-1914; but the preceding wars had also firmly consolidated the German spirit, the superb Ernst der ins Ganze geht which the domestic policies of Frederick and his father had liberated and fostered, and which was to make the later Germany the most highly civilized nation of Europe. As far as this consolidation was concerned, the Seven Years’ War was superfluous and useless; and as far as the development of those policies was concerned, it was mischievous and retarding, for all the power and resource of the German Geist, which might have been so fruitfully employed otherwise, had to be concentrated on the problem of sheer physical recovery from the terrible blows which had well-nigh scourged Prussia off the face of the earth.

If, then, Jeanne Poisson had not henpecked Louis XV, Frederick would have had seven clear years of comparatively easy going in the administration of Prussia’s internal affairs; and the question at once arises, what would have been the effect of those years on the future of Germany, not only as a factor in international politics, but also, and of far more consequence, as a moral and intellectual force in the world? Even under the handicap of the Seven Years’ War, that force, as we all know, has been very great; and the fact of its having been so great adds interest to the conjecture at what it might have been, and might now be, but for that handicap.

The line of investigation in this instance is fairly easy to follow. For one that is less so, if the essayist cared to go back as far as the year 1535, he might look into the political consequences of the henpecking of Ercole, duke of Ferrara, by three of the most unbearable Frenchwomen who ever gained a place in recorded history. Then there was Prince Menshikov’s Lithuanian servant-girl who seems to have put Peter the Great up to most of the good things he did, and also some bad ones, and who habitually burned the ground around his imperial moccasins when he did not show enough alacrity about heeding her suggestions. She became Catherine I of Russia, and if Catherine II’s polyandry had not preëmpted the interest of our prurient reading public, she would no doubt be quite a figure in our modern fictional biography. Again, there was Sophia-Dorothea, whose henpecking of her husband resulted in the death of her first-born son, which opened the way to the throne of Prussia for her second son, who is known in history as Frederick the Great. Again, there was Susanna Wesley, who, despite her absorbing labors as the mother of nineteen children, still found time to hold the bull-whip relentlessly over her husband and her son John, who became the founder of Wesleyan Methodism. So one might go on through a long and varied list, from the contemplation of which one arises with an enhanced respect, perhaps tempered by some little touch of uneasiness and apprehension, for the astounding qualities of generalship therein set forth and made manifest.

IV

“Why, of course that is true,” cried a vivacious French friend, with whom I lately broached this topic of henpecking. “Who does the milking in Europe? The women. The American woman won’t do it, so the man must, with the result that presently he is bored with it, and invents a machine to do it for him. She won’t sweep; the man gets tired of living in squalor, and rather than do the sweeping himself, he invents the vacuum cleaner. She won’t cook; so for a while the man risks dyspepsia and ptomaine poisoning on the utterly uninteresting food which your public eating places provide, and then invents automatic toasters, roasters, boilers, fryers and God knows what-not, on the forlorn chance that he can get something out of them that is fit for a dog to eat. She can’t think, can’t read anything worth reading, can’t converse intelligently, can’t sit still; the man puts up with her restlessness as long as he can, and then invents the automobile, the radio, the motion picture, in order to take her out of herself, and thereby give him a few hours of peace.

“If you looked into it, I believe you would find that hen-pecking is responsible for half the so-called labor-saving gadgets in the world; and I assure you, my friend, this hen-pecking has made considerable history already, and is making more every day. It goes against my grain to say so, for I like your people and admire the many good things they have done, but I believe they are fast taking leave of their ancient and inbred integrities, and are setting up instead the ideal of a national life which shall yield all good things to everybody at the touch of a button. My understanding is that you call it the More Abundant Life. I call it a life without any worthy purpose to guide it, without intelligence, without principle, without conscience—in a word, without character. I don’t like many things that are going on at home in my own country, and still less do I like some things that our neighbors are doing; but neither they nor we are setting up any such ideal of a national life as that. Your Mr. Hopkins said as much last fall in an issue of that magazine which you sometimes write for, and he is right. More of you ought to be saying the same thing, and saying it straight from the shoulder, for if you persist in following after that ideal, you may take it from me that it will sink your civilization straight down to Peg Trantum’s, as our old friend Panurge says, fifteen fathom below the corridor that leads to the black pit of Demigorgon.”

My friend’s imagination may have been a little overwrought, though I do not imagine he meant to hold the influence of our women wholly responsible for this unpromising state of things; yet no doubt their influence must be reckoned with in casting up the sum of that responsibility. But we are not concerned with this at present, for I cite the conversation only as suggesting still another point of departure for a research which the essayist might find rewarding; and with that I bring my little flight of fancy to an end. I reiterate my belief that poverty and henpecking have never been appraised at anything like their actual importance in determining the course of history; and while, as I said at the outset, I would not dream of asking for a book on the subject or take the responsibility of recommending one, yet if such a book should by any chance appear, it would be just the book that I should like to read.