Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  What has all this to do with the labor question? “Industrial discontent” has many causes, but the chief is over-population. (In this country it is as yet a “coming event,” but its approach is rapid, and already it has “cast its shadow before.”) Where there are too many producers they are thinned out to make an army, which serves the double purpose of keeping the rest of them in subjection and resisting the pressure from without. Armies are to fight with; no nation dares long maintain one in idleness; it is too costly for a toy; the people burn to see it put to practical use. They do not love it; they promise themselves the advantage of seeing it killed; but when the killing begins their blood is up and they want to go soldiering.

  Our labor troubles — our strikes, boycotts, riots, dynamitation, can have but one outcome. We are not exempt from the inexorable. We shall soon hear a general clamor for increase of the army — to protect us against aggression from the east and the west. We shall have the army.

  That is as far as one cares to follow the current of events into the dubious regions of prediction. What lies beyond is momentous enough to be waited for; but any man who fails to discern the profound significance of the events amongst which he is moving to-day may justly boast himself impregnable to the light.

  THE JEW

  A NOTED Jewish rabbi has been uttering his mind concerning “manufacturers of mixed marriages” — clergymen, that is to say, who marry Christians to Jewesses and Jews to Christianesses. In the opinion of this gentleman of God such marriages are accursed, and those of his pious brethren who assist the devil in bringing them about are imperfectly moral. Doubtless it is desirable that the parties to a marriage should cherish the same form of religious error, lest in their zeal to save each other’s immortal part they lay too free a hand upon the part that is mortal. But domestic infelicity is not the evil that the learned doctor has in apprehension: what he fears is nothing less momentous than the extinction of Judaism! On consideration it appears not unlikely that in a general blending of races that result would ensue. But what then? — will the hand of some great anarch let the curtain fall and universal darkness cover all? Will the passing of Judaism be attended with such discomfortable befallings as the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds?

  Good old Father Time has seen the genesis, development, decay and effacement of thousands of religions far more ancient and quite as well credentialed as that of Israel. The most daring of that faith’s expounders will hardly claim for it an age exceeding a halfdozen millenniums; whereas the least venturesome anthropologian will affirm for the human race an antiquity of hundreds. It is hardly likely that the world has ever been without great religions, of which all but a few (so new that they smell of paint and varnish) are as dead as the dodo. No portents foreshadowed their extinction, no cataclysms followed. The world went spinning round the sun in its immemorial way; men lived and loved, fought, laughed, cursed, lied, gathered gold and dreamed of an after-life as before. No mourners follow the hearse of a dead religion, no burial service is read at the grave. Does the good rabbi really believe that the faith which he professes, rooted in time, will flourish in eternity? Can he suppose that its fate will be different from that of its predecessors, whose temples, rearing their fronts in great cities, the seats of mighty civilizations in every part of the habitable globe, have perished with the empires that they adorned, and left not a vestige nor a memory behind? Does he think that of all the incalculable religions that have swept in successive dream-waves the ocean of mystery his alone marks a continuous current setting toward some shining shore of truth and life and bearing thither all ships obedient to its trend?

  I can not help thinking that the pious rabbi would better serve his people by less zeal in broadening and blackening the delimiting lines by which their foolish fathers circumscribed their sympathies and interests and made their race a peculiar people, peculiarly disliked. The best friend of the Jews is not he who confirms them in their narrow and resented exclusiveness, but he who persuades them of its folly, advises them to a larger life than is comprised in rites and rituals, the ceremonies and symbolisms of a long-dead past, and strives to show them that the world is wider than Judea and God more than a private tutor to the children of Israel.

  Why do they fear effacement by absorption? If the entire Jewish race should disappear (as sooner or later all races do) that would not mean that the Jews were dead, but that Judaism was dead. No single life would have gone out because of that, and all that is good in the race would live, suffusing and perhaps ennobling the characters of races having still a name. All that is useful and true in Jewish law and Jewish letters and Jewish art would be preserved to the world; the rest could well be spared. Even the rabbis’ occupation would not be gone: they would thrive as priests of another faith. Man is not likely to cease forming himself into “congregations,” for he likes to see his teachers “close to.” Even if preaching were abolished many kinds of light and profitable employment would remain.

  As matters now are, mixed marriages — between Jew and Gentile — are not to be advised. But matters are now not as they should be, nor does our holy friend’s teaching tend to make them so. Let the Jew learn why he is subject to hate and persecution by the Gentile. It is not, as he professes to think, and doubtless does think, because his ancestors, ages ago, denied the Godhood and demanded the life of another Jew. Other races and sects deny Christ without offense; and the Gentile who daily crucifies him afresh is no less active in dislike of the Jew than the most devout Christian of them all. Christ and Christianity have nothing to do with it. Nor is the explanation found in the Jew’s superior thrift, nor in any of those commercial qualities whereby, legitimately or illegitimately, he gets the better of his Gentile competitor; though those advantages too pitilessly used against a stupid and improvident peasantry have sometimes compelled his expatriation by sovereigns who cared no more what he believed than what he ate.

  The Christians will cease to dislike and persecute the Jews when the Jews abandon their affronting claim to special and advantageous relations with the Lord of All. The claim would be no less irritating if well founded, as many Christians believe that once it was. When has it not been observed that a favorite child is hated by its brothers and sisters? Did not the brethren of Joseph seek his undoing? In missing the lesson of it the Jew “recks not his own rede.” When was it not thought an insult to say, “I am holier than thou,” and when did not small minds “strike back” with brutal hands? The Christian mind is a small mind, the Christian hand a brutal hand.

  The Jew may reply: “I do not say so; in the pulpit I forbear to denounce other peoples and other creeds as outside the law and devoid of the divine grace.” In words he does not say so, but he says so with emphasis in his care to preserve his racial and religious isolation; in his practice of self-mutilation and the affronting reasons in which he disguises his consciousness of the shame of it; in his maintenance of a spiritual quarantine; in the diligence with which he repairs time’s ravages in his Great Wall, lest Nature take advantage of the breach and some caroling Gentile youth leap lightly through to claim a Jewish maid. In a thousand ways, all having for purpose the safeguarding of his racial isolation in a ghetto of his own invention, the orthodox Jew shouts aloud his conviction of his superior holiness and peculiar worth. Naturally, the echo is not unmixed with Christian denial, formulated too frequently into unrighteous decrees by the voice of authority.

  None than I can have a greater regard for the Jewish character, as found at its best in the higher types of the Jewish people, and not found at all in those members of the race who alone are popularly thought of as Jews. None than I can have a deeper detestation of the spirit at the back of persecution of the Jews, in all its forms and degrees. Rather than have a hand in it I would have no hand. Yet I venture to say that if a high degree of contributory negligence, constituting a veritable invitation to evil, is foolish the calamity entailed is entitled to a place in the list of expectable phenomena; and if a certain presumptu
ous self-righteousness is bad its natural and inevitable punishment is not entirely undeserved.

  In the mud that the Christian hand flings at the Jew there is a little gold; in the Christian’s dislike of him there is what the assayers and analysts call “a trace” of justice. He who thinks that whole races of men, through long periods of time, hate for nothing has considered history to little purpose and knows not well the constitution of the human mind. It should seriously be considered whether, not the chief, but the initial, fault may not be that of the Jew, who was not always the unaggressive non-combatant, the long-suffering victim, that centuries of oppression and repression have tended to make him. If we may believe his own historical records, which the Christian holds in even higher veneration than he does himself, he was once a very bad neighbor. No worse calamity could then befall a feeble people than the attention of an Israelite king. Believing themselves the salt of the earth, his warlike subjects had always in pickle a rod for every Gentile back. Every contiguous tribe which did not accept their God incurred their savage hatred, expressed in incredible cruelties. They ruled their little world with an iron hand, dealing damnation round and forcing upon their neighbors a currency of bloody noses and cracked crowns. Even now they have not renounced their irritating claim to primacy in the scale of being, though no longer able to assert it with fire and sword. It is significant, however, that here in the new world, at a long remove from the inspiring scenes of their petty power and gigantic woes — their parochial glory and imperial abjection — they have somewhat abated the arrogance of their pretensions; and in obvious consequence, the brutal Christian hand is lifted more languidly against them in service of a softened resentment.

  Being neither Christian nor Jew, and with only an intellectual interest in their immemorial feud, I find in it, despite its most tragic and pathetic incidents, something essentially comic — something to bring a twinkle to the eye of an Apuleius and draw the merriment of a Rabelais, “laughing sardonically in his easy chair.” That two races of reasoning beings, inhabiting one small planet and having the same sentiments, passions, virtues, vices and interests, should pass loveless centuries, distrusting, hating and damaging each other is so ludicrous a proposition that no degree of familiarity with it as a fact suffices to deprive it altogether of its opera bouffe character. Nevertheless it is not to be laughed away. It must be dealt with seriously, if at all; and it is encouraging to observe that more and more it is taking attention in this country, where it can be considered with less heat, and therefore more light, than elsewhere.

  If the Jew cares for justice he must learn, first, that it does not exist in this world, and second, that the least intolerable form of injustice goes by favor with the hand of fellowship; and the hand of fellowship is not offered to him who stands austerely apart saying: “I am holier than thou.” America has given to the Jews political and civic equality. If they want more more is attainable. But it is their move.

  WHY THE HUMAN NOSE HAS A WESTERN EXPOSURE

  WHEN Bishop Berkeley had the good luck to write, Westward the course of empire takes it way, he suggested a question which has not, to my knowledge, been adequately answered: Why? Why do all the world’s peoples that move at all move ever toward the west, a human tide, obedient to the suasion of some mysterious power, setting up new “empires” superior to those enfeebled by time, as is the fate of empires? Many a thoughtful observer has confessed himself unable to name the law at the back or front of the movement. Yet a law there must be: things of that kind do not come about by accident.

  A natural law is one thing, a cause is another, and the cause of this universal tendency to “go West” may not lie too deep for discovery. May it not be that the glory of the sunset has something to do with it? — has all to do with it, for that matter. In civilization sunsets count for little — we know too much. We know that the magical landscapes of the sunset are “airy nothings” — optical illusions. But we inherit instincts from primitive ancestors to whom they were less unreal. The savage is a poet who

  Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind, reading into the visible aspects of nature many a meaning which in the light of exact knowledge we have read out of them. Not a Grecian of the whole imaginative race that had sight of Proteus rising from the sea and heard old Triton blow his wreathed horn could beat him at that. He knows that beyond the mountains that he dares not scale, and beyond the sea-horizon that he has not the means to transgress, lies a land wherein are all beauty and possibilities of happiness. To him the crimson lakes, purple promontories, golden coasts and happy isles of cloudland are veritable presentments of actual regions below. He never bothers his shaggy pate with the question “Can such things be?” — his eyes tell him that they are. Why should he not have ever in heart the wish to reach and occupy the delectable realm to which the sun daily points the way and sometimes discloses? That is the way he feels about it and his forefathers felt about it, as is shown in the myths and legends of many tribes. And because they so felt we have from them the wanderlust that lures us ever a-west.

  To this hypothesis it may be objected that the cloudscapes of the sunrise ought, logically, to offset the others, giving the race a divided urge. But the primitive ancestor was not an early riser; he was a notorious sluggard, as is the savage of to-day, and seldom saw the sunrise — so seldom that its fascination did not get into the blood of him and from his into ours. Even when he did see the cloudlands of the dawn he was not in a frame of mind to observe them, being engrossed in rounding up the early cave-bear or preparing an astonishment for his sleeping enemy. But the chromatic glories of the country reflected in the sunset sky took his attention when it was most alert. Moreover those of the dawn are distinctly inferior, as we are assured by credible witnesses who have observed them, through the happy chance of having been up all night companioning the katydids and whip-poor-wills.

  BITS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  CONTENTS

  On a Mountain

  What I Saw of Shiloh

  A Little of Chickamauga

  The Crime at Pickett’s Mill

  Four Days in Dixie

  What Occurred at Franklin

  Way Down in Alabam

  Working for an Empress

  Across the Plains

  The Mirage

  A Sole Survivor

  On a Mountain

  They say that the lumberman has looked upon the Cheat Mountain country and seen that it is good, and I hear that some wealthy gentlemen have been there and made a game preserve. There must be lumber and, I suppose, sport, but some things one could wish were ordered otherwise. Looking back upon it through the haze of near half a century, I see that region as a veritable realm of enchantment; the Alleghanies as the Delectable Mountains. I note again their dim, blue billows, ridge after ridge interminable, beyond purple valleys full of sleep, “in which it seemed always afternoon.” Miles and miles away, where the lift of earth meets the stoop of sky, I discern an imperfection in the tint, a faint graying of the blue above the main range — the smoke of an enemy’s camp.

  It was in the autumn of that “most immemorial year,” the 1861st of our Lord, and of our Heroic Age the first, that a small brigade of raw troops — troops were all raw in those days — had been pushed in across the Ohio border and after various vicissitudes of fortune and mismanagement found itself, greatly to its own surprise, at Cheat Mountain Pass, holding a road that ran from Nowhere to the southeast. Some of us had served through the summer in the “three-months’ regiments,” which responded to the President’s first call for troops. We were regarded by the others with profound respect as “old soldiers.” (Our ages, if equalized, would, I fancy, have given about twenty years to each man.) We gave ourselves, this aristocracy of service, no end of military airs; some of us even going to the extreme of keeping our jackets buttoned and our hair combed. We had been in action, too; had shot off a Confederate leg at Philippi, “the first battle of the war,” and had lost as many as a dozen men at Laurel Hill an
d Carrick’s Ford, whither the enemy had fled in trying, Heaven knows why, to get away from us. We now “brought to the task” of subduing the Rebellion a patriotism which never for a moment doubted that a rebel was a fiend accursed of God and the angels — one for whose extirpation by force and arms each youth of us considered himself specially “raised up.”

  It was a strange country. Nine in ten of us had never seen a mountain, nor a hill as high as a church spire, until we had crossed the Ohio River. In power upon the emotions nothing, I think, is comparable to a first sight of mountains. To a member of a plains-tribe, born and reared on the flats of Ohio or Indiana, a mountain region was a perpetual miracle. Space seemed to have taken on a new dimension; areas to have not only length and breadth, but thickness.

  Modern literature is full of evidence that our great grandfathers looked upon mountains with aversion and horror. The poets of even the seventeenth century never tire of damning them in good, set terms. If they had had the unhappiness to read the opening lines of “The Pleasures of Hope,” they would assuredly have thought Master Campbell had gone funny and should be shut up lest he do himself an injury.

  The flatlanders who invaded the Cheat Mountain country had been suckled in another creed, and to them western Virginia — there was, as yet, no West Virginia — was an enchanted land. How we reveled in its savage beauties! With what pure delight we inhaled its fragrances of spruce and pine! How we stared with something like awe at its clumps of laurel! — real laurel, as we understood the matter, whose foliage had been once accounted excellent for the heads of illustrious Romans and such — mayhap to reduce the swelling. We carved its roots into fingerrings and pipes. We gathered spruce-gum and sent it to our sweethearts in letters. We ascended every hill within our picket-lines and called it a “peak.”