Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Religio Journalistici by Morley Christopher
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page
Ebook has 62 lines and 11940 words, and 2 pages
It is an entertaining thought. If it is true, I believe it is due to what I think of as the carburetor-adjustment of the human mind, a delicate, unconscious, and continuous process. It pleases me to imagine that in the intellect there is a valve that regulates the mixture of truth and convention that we utter, just as gasolene and heated air are mixed and vaporized in the carburetor of an engine. Whenever we meet any one, or at any rate any stranger, we are likely to be on our guard. We have our own little private reservoir of sincerity, but we don't intend to draw on it too largely until we know we are safe. There are some people, as you must have noticed, to whom it is almost impossible to say a word of what you really believe. Accordingly, automatically and almost unconsciously, we make a mental adjustment of our "mixture." We admit into it just as much truth as we believe the other is likely to relish, or willing to receive. But we may have made a bad guess. The conversation begins to back-fire. That means the mixture is too "lean." Very well; pull out the choke, enrich it with more candour, all goes delightfully. Too "rich" a mixture, however, is, every mechanician knows, as bad as too "lean." The mind gets crusted with carbon--unassimilated truth. The analogy seems to me highly applicable, even down to the infusion of what used to be called, in a bygone slang, "hot air." Through this needle-valve, for the most part unconsciously, we regulate our mental ignition.
All this, as you shall see presently, has its just bearing on our topic of religion. We need, but are little likely to get, a new "Areopagitica" to liberate our press from its cheery bondage of vulgarity and slip-slop thinking. The newspaper man who has pride in his honourable tradition may well feel grim to see the things he has sweat for trafficked across counters like bundles of merchandise; yes, and to see the transaction applauded by eminent statesmen and divines who feel the need of a front-page quote. A little pride is desirable now and then; yes, in God's name, a little pride, gentlemen. We who have lived, as best we could, for the decency of letters; who have vigiled with Chaucer and taken wine with Descartes and changed opinion with Doctor Johnson, are we to be hired to and fro by the genial hucksters who know the art of print chiefly as a rapid factory for gaily tinted palaver?
In his tight place, beset by doubts just as acute as those of the young theologian, our newspaper man ratiocinates upon the quaint processes of mind. He broods on the haphazard, interest-tainted, and fallible nature of most mortal opinion. He studies the relativity of truth and the proliferation of rumour. He notes how every event is like a stone cast into a pond; it ejaculates concentric vibrations, widening loops of hearsay. Varying layers or rings of truth are available for different classes of bystanders, or bythinkers. How well he knows the queer fact that you can say, unrebuked, in a weekly what would never pass in a daily! You can say still more in a monthly; in a quarterly review almost all the beans can be decanted. And in a book, quite often you can print your surmises in full. Of course, to tell exactly what happens, as Pepys did, it is best to be dead. It does sometimes seem as though the more immediate readers there are for any bit of print, the less candour can be rationed out for each.
So every human being stands at the centre of a little eddy or whirl of testimony. If one could make a map or editor's projection of him considered as a news item--it would be as complicated as an ocean chart with festoons of barographs and isotherms, curves and twists and arrows indicating set of currents, prevailing winds, soundings. On such a chart, we would denote here a cyclone of scandal, there a hot monsoon of misappreciation, yonder a steady trade-wind of generous sympathy. In an ocean so various we should find our victim leading a thousand different phantom lives in the opinion of others. If you begin to think about this sort of thing, the asylum waits; for truly, confronted by the alternating delights and possibilities of life, the mind is not unlike that chameleon that went mad when tethered on a Paisley shawl.
Let us take an example of a miracle-germ in our own time. When Horace Traubel, faithful and simple-minded disciple of Walt Whitman, died in September, 1919, his body was taken to the Community Church, at Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, New York, for the funeral service. But when the body reached the church, the little company of mourners could not enter; the building had suddenly caught fire. Imagine this episode handed down through generations of simple people by word of mouth. The intimate disciple of a great poet, both of them impatient of the genteel religions, is borne dead to a sacred edifice. It bursts into flame. Would that not be taken as some authentic Pentecost, and at the very least as a proof of Walt's divinity? Yet we know well enough that the event was no miracle, but rather what Hobbes called "an extraordinary felicity."
There is one more Biblical passage I should like to refer to, one that has often been considered a knotty saying. It is the parable of the talents and the unprofitable servant. I like to conceive Deity in the guise of that hard master who wanted his own with usury. "Well," I can imagine God saying to the newly dead, "what did you think of that world I gave you?" "Not so bad, on the whole," replies the embarrassed soul. "What!" cries God. "Simpleton, do you mean to say you took it as you found it, accepted it, swallowed it down without question? Depart from me, unprofitable servant! You were supposed to remould it nearer to your heart's desire, to create out of my materials a new world of your own."
Old Doctor Jewett said to Margot Asquith, "You must believe in God in spite of what the clergy say." And truly I don't think that any man who has worked in downtown New York can be much of an atheist. In that great jungle of violent life, under the glittering spires of such steep cathedrals, he must inevitably be a trifle mad. Even Manhattan, supposed to be most material of cities, is best known for the fantastic figure she cuts against the sky. The loveliest picture I ever saw of her profile was a photograph given me by an amateur lensman who caught it by accident. It shows that uneven scarp of buildings in soft masses of dark and shadow, looming on a queerly pebbled and fuscous twilight, like an eclipse. And this, as my astonished friend learned from his film-dealer, was an accident, due to mildew on the gelatin. So some of the most lovely visions of reality are printed on minds that are mildewed. The madman and the nincompoop often see more beauty than the sane and solid cit. The only possible suggestion that one might humbly venture to offer to the authoritative officers of Holy Church is that they are too sane and too businesslike. They ask us to believe not things that are too hard, but too easy. They are too eager to lock the stable door after the Messiah has been stolen. They have learned the tricks of our world of flesh so glibly that they seem sometimes to forget the manners of that world of spirit they are commissioned to represent.
For the world is fascinating and painful beyond human power of testimony. The best of every life is unprintable. If one were given five minutes' warning before sudden death, five minutes to say what it had all meant to us, every telephone-booth would be occupied by people trying to call up other people to stammer that they loved them. You would want to tell a whole lot of people that you love them, but had been too clumsy and too shy to admit it. And the newspaper man himself, who both loves and hates his queer trade, would be the first to remember that one always is severest with what one adores. Every movement is set in some strange turning of wonder. As a man will suddenly discover in himself some miserable petty trick of behaviour which, he painfully realizes, is a true microcosm and characteristic of his life as a whole, so now and then with the world at large. We are aware of lights and shadows and moments of millennium that seem a part of some vast consistency. You know the thrill of a letter or parcel that comes from some one you are fond of, far away. As you undo the string, you say, foolishly, but with a genuine quaver of sentiment, "When that was tied up, So-and-so handled it!" Well, there are instants of preposterous happiness, clear insight, that are just like that--little packages of reality, tied up in the twine of our time sense, that come to us direct, intact, from the eternity and infinity we call God. It matters little how you explain that great word to yourself. Perhaps you mean by it the sum total of all human awarenesses of beauty. In that sense of prevailing loveliness we are all obscurely united. In those moments, moments of heavenly farce and unredeemable tragedy, we can forgive ourselves for being only human.
But in these matters silence is the final eloquence. One does not argue with moonlight. Men talk of "finding God," but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest of hiding-places, your own heart. You yourself are a part of Him. The chief danger is to be too prosaic. Any one who has ever done proof-reading knows the delicious fidelity and strict zeal and maddening literalness with which the professional corrector marks a galley-proof. How he construes the text according to his own rote and rigid scheme; how he resents any unusual use of words; how he is so busy querying things that look odd to him that he misses many of the downright errors. That is precisely the attitude of man toward the universe, which he is so daringly anxious to interpret in some comforting sense. The journalist, whatever his sins and stupidities, would hope to enjoy the text of life in the spirit of a collaborating author rather than presume to correct it. And he will not do any great poet, such as Christ, the dishonour of taking him too literally.
We cannot hope until we have learned to despair. Let me remind you of some great lines by Andrew Marvell:
My love is of a birth as rare As 'tis for object strange and high: It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.
As lines, so loves oblique, may well Themselves in every angle greet: But ours, so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page