Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  Mr. Hopkins being a missionary, one naturally prefers his views to those of anyone who is still in the bonds of iniquity, and moreover, writes for the newspapers; nevertheless, I do not see that any harm would come of a plain statement of the facts in the case of the Rev. Mr. Dawson. He was not eaten by the dusky monarch — in the face of Mr. Hopkins’ solemn assurance that cannibalism is a myth, it is impossible to believe that Mr. Dawson was himself the dinner to which he was invited. That he was eaten by Mr. Hopkins himself is a proposition so abysmally horrible that none but the hardiest and most impenitent calumniator would Have the depravity to suggest it.

  THE JAMAICAN MONGOOSE

  WHEN man undertakes for some sordid purpose to disturb the balance of natural forces concerned in the conservation and in the destruction of life on this planet he is all too likely to err. For example, when some public-spirited Australian, observing a dearth of donkeys in his great lone land, thoughtfully imported a shipload of rabbits, believing that they would grow up with the country, learn to carry loads and eventually bray, he performed a disservice to his fellow colonists which they would gladly requite by skinning him alive if they could lay hands on him. It is well known that our thoughtless extermination of the American Indian has been followed by an incalculable increase of the grasshoppers which once served him as food. So strained is the resulting situation that some of our most prominent seers are baffled in attempting to forecast the outcome; and it is said that the Secretary of Agriculture holds that farming on this continent is doomed unless we take to a grasshopper diet ourselves.

  The matter lends itself to facile illustration: one could multiply instances to infinity. We might cite the Australian ladybird, which was by twenty well defined and several scientists brought here and acclimated at great expense to feed upon a certain fruit pest, but which, so far, has confined its ravages mainly to the fruit.

  The latest, and in some ways the most striking, instance of the peril of making a redistribution of the world’s fauna, is supplied by the beautiful tropical isle of Jamaica, home of the Demon Rum. It appears that someone in Jamaica was imperfectly enamored of the native rats, which are creatures of eminent predacity, intrepid to a degree that is most disquieting. This person introduced from a foreign land the mongoose — an animal whose name it seems prudent to give in the singular number. The mongoose, as is well known, is affected with an objection to rats compared with which the natural animosity of a dog to another dog is a mild passion indeed, and that of a collector of customs to holy water seems hardly more than a slight coolness. Jamaica is now ratless, but, alas, surpassingly tickful.

  The ticks have so multiplied upon the face of the earth that man and beast are in equal danger of extinction. The people hardly dare venture out-of-doors to plant the rum vine and help the north-bound steamers to take on monkeys. The mongoose alone is immune to ticks.

  It appears that when this creature had effaced the rats it was itself threatened with effacement from lack of comestible suited to its tooth; but instead of wasting its life in repinings and unavailing regrets — instead of yielding to the insidious importunities of nostalgia, it fell upon the lizards and banqueted royally if roughly; and soon the lizards had gone to join the rats in the Unknown. Now, the Jamaica lizard had for countless ages “wittled free” upon ticks, maintaining among them a high death-rate with which, apparently, their own dietetic excesses (for ticks are greatly addicted to the pleasures of the table) had nothing to do. The lizard abating his ravages, through being himself abated by the mongoose, the tick holds dominion by the unchallenged authority of numbers. Man, the whilom tyrant, flees to his mountain fastnesses, the rum vine withers in the fields and the north-bound steamer sails monkeyless away. Jamaica’s last state is worse than her first and almost as bad as ours. She is as yet, however, spared the last and lowest humiliation that a brave and generous people can experience; her parasites do not pose as patriots, nor tickle the vanity of those whom they bleed.

  UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS

  CONTENTS

  A POSSIBLE BENEFACTOR

  WARLIKE AMERICA

  WRITERS OF DIALECT

  ON KNOWING ONE’S BUSINESS — AN INSTANCE

  A TRADE OF REFUGE

  THE DEATH PENALTY

  A ROLLING CONTINENT

  A MONUMENT TO ADAM

  HYPNOTISM

  AT THE DRAIN OF THE WASHBASIN

  GODS IN CHICAGO

  FOR LAST WORDS

  THE CHAIR OF LITTLE EASE

  A GHOST IN THE UNMAKING

  THE TURN OF THE TIDE

  FAT BABIES AND FATE

  CERTAIN AREAS OF OUR SEAMY SIDE

  FOR BREVITY AND CLARITY

  GENIUS AS A PROVOCATION

  A BIVOUAC OF THE DEAD

  THE BATTLE OF NASHVILLE

  ON BLACK SOLDIERING

  A POSSIBLE BENEFACTOR

  FROM Paris comes the terrible news that M. Verneuil, a chemist, has succeeded in making rubies at no considerable cost. This will doubtless prove a sharp affliction to many persons addicted to display of rubies on their surfaces, as well as to some who have them under lock and key for sale to the others; for of course the value of the natural stones must eventually fall to that of the artificial, if the two kinds are identical in composition, hardness and color. Rubies will perhaps go out of use altogether, for gems accessible to the poor are worthless to the rich, and gems worthless to the rich are not wanted by the poor. The beauty of the ruby will remain, but so will human nature.

  Having few rubies and, I trust, not much human nature, I am disposed to regard M. Verneuil’s crime as a public benefaction. If he will pursue his experimentation to its “logical conclusion,” giving us cheap diamonds, pearls, emeralds, turquoises and the rest, many of us will rise up (from our seats away back) and call him blest.

  Victims of the habit of wearing pretty pebbles have always accounted for their affliction by affirming the beauty of the pebbles. If that is why they wear them they will continue to wear them when they are common and cheap — when M. Verneuil and his anarchist co-workers in the laboratory have put them “within the reach of all.” Does any one believe that they will? Why do they not now wear (and confess it) the paste jewels that are every bit as beautiful as the genuine? Why would the “society woman” consider herself dishonored if caught red-handed in a necklace of wax beads distinguishable from pearls by the microscope only?

  The “preciousness” of these things is their cost. A woman “ablaze with diamonds” is a woman silently shouting: “I am rich!” If her jewels did not say this, and say it plainly, she would throw them into the nearest gutter — nay, her contempt of them might receive such avowal as giving them to the poor.

  Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored taste persuades him to personal adornment with porcupine quills, eagle feathers, bear-claws and the tail of a wildcat! They are lovely — no doubt of that — but if porcupines, eagles, bears and wildcats were abundant, accessible and amiable he would make himself a thing of glory and consequence with something less easily acquired. Please to consider the peculiar significance lurking in the good old word a bravery” applied to the fine attire and ornaments of the lowly. Does it not distinctly point to a primitive state when personal adornment was the prize of courage in the chase? “Bravery” is the finery of persons not far removed from a state of nature; our own finery we do not call so, not even in poetry. A fairly good name for it is “pursery.”

  In the progress of the race away from primitive conditions and barbaric modes of thought and feeling, the female contingent does not walk at the head of the procession. Women are more “conservative” than men: they are last to renounce the habits and customs of the ancestral savage. Witness their addiction to powder and paint. We have all inherited the tendency to daub our faces, a once useful custom, for by differing designs tribes and families were distinguished from one another at a glance. Attentive to other matters, mostly nonsense and mischief, men have suffered the practice to fall into disuse, but wome
n — whom God bless! — continue it as when frighthood was in flower, accounting for it by hardily affirming its service to the complexion. Let it go at that; that is a better reason than can be urged for defacing the female periphery with pebbles, candidly inutile and in open apostasy to the gospel of Beauty Unadorned. Wherefore, that we may have surcease of the pretty-pebble habit in the otherwise supportable female of our species as she has been handed down to us from her noisy sessions in primeval tree-tops, let us pray for success of M. Verneuil and his accomplices in their hardy effort to discredit and vulgarize the product of gem farm and pearl pool.

  1902.

  WARLIKE AMERICA

  I

  IN a speech at Huntsville, Alabama, President McKinley said:

  “We are not a military people. We are not dedicated to arms. We love peace, and the United States never goes to war except for peace, and only where it can have it in no other way. We have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation or for territory, but always for liberty and humanity, and in our recent war with Spain the people of the whole United States as one man marched with the flag for the honor of the nation, to relieve the oppressed people in Cuba.”

  The American people are a singularly “cantankerous” people. True we are not “military,” but that was not what the president meant to affirm; he meant that we are not “warlike,” which is a very different thing. The Germans are military, the North American Indians are warlike. To be warlike is to be fond of war; to be military is to cultivate the arts and sciences of war, to make the arts of peace subservient to them, to maintain a powerful standing army, with armaments of high efficiency. A people may be both warlike and military, or it may be either and not the other. The distinction was evidently not in the president’s mind, for he said that we love peace, that we go to war only to assure it, and so forth. What are the facts?

  There have been four generations of politically independent Americans. Each of the four fought a war of magnitude, not counting the small affairs and the “continuous performance” against the Indians. There were the war of 1812 against Great Britain, the war against Mexico, the war among ourselves, the war against Spain. We may say that all these were fought to assure peace, and that is true — peace on our terms. No war is undertaken for any other purpose. It was for that that Alexander invaded Asia and Hannibal Italy. It was for that that the Turks laid siege to Vienna. It was for that that Napoleon overran Europe.

  II

  It seems that “we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory;” we have the word of a president for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people, and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had “territorial aggrandizement” been the spirit of our purpose and the heart of our hope.

  The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations. They insist upon having their own way, and in dealing with vanquished enemies are without conscience. If it were not for the restraints that powerful European sovereigns are able to put upon their subjects, Europe would be a theater of continuous war. We lack that element of restraint. Happily we lack, also, many of the hereditary animosities that inflame the jealous peoples of the Old World; but when the fire is kindled it burns; there is nobody to quench it. We have always a hand upon the sword, and if we do not more frequently strike, it is because, in the first place, it is not much of a sword, and, in the second, the enemy is commonly out of reach. In our navy we have now a sword that is a trifle longer and stronger, but our army is still a dull and clumsy weapon.

  In the future, as in the past, we shall have wars and enough of them — wars of honor, wars of conquest, wars of hatred and revenge. War has never found us ready. War has never found any modern nation ready, excepting Prussia, and her only once. If we will learn nothing by experience, let us try observation. Let us cease our hypocritical cant, rise from our dreams of peace and of the love of it, confess ourselves the warlike people that we are, and become the military people that we are not.

  III

  The notion that a standing army of whatever strength could be a “menace to American liberty” is one of the crudest and most discreditable of errors. It is an outgrowth of ignorance, and rooted in a false analogy. It assumes that the a common people” of the Old World monarchies are oppressed, discontented, ripe for revolt and republican government; that they are held in subjection by the powerful armies that serve their tyrants. Of course all this is mere moonshine, but if true it would hold no such lesson for us as we think we read in it, namely, that all armies are serviceable tools to tyrants and usurpers. A European army, recruited by conscription and officered by noblemen and the sons of relatives of noblemen, is an entirely different thing from what we have, and very different indeed from what we may have if we choose. The monarchical army sustains the monarchy, not because an army is naturally and necessarily monarchist, but because monarchy is the constitutional government; and armies, more generally than other human organizations, are faithful to duty and obedient to law. For the same reasons an American army will sustain the republic. Whenever a monarchical army has not sustained the monarchy — has assisted to overthrow it and set up a republic — then, indeed, have we been given a reason to distrust “the military” — of a monarchy.

  An army of raw volunteers springing to the colors to meet some unforeseen emergency is an inspiring spectacle, but that kind of army is good for nothing when pitted against trained and seasoned troops. Every military man knows this, although there are no large recent instances free from obscuring elements, like “the war of 1812.”

  In European countries that have universal conscription the years that the young men pass in the army are the best spent years of their lives. Those who enter the service as ignorant peasant lads, brutally stupid, leave it well set up in body and mind — with better health, better morals and better intelligence. The American peasant is of course perfect in respect of all that, but perhaps his refining society would be of advantage to his officers.

  WRITERS OF DIALECT

  I

  WITH regard to dialect, the literary law, I take it, is about this: To be allowable in either verse or prose it must be the mother-speech, not only of the characters using it, but of the writer himself, who, also, must be unable to write equally well in the larger tongue. This was the case with Burns. Had he not been to the manner born how absurd it would have been in him to write for the few who, naturally or by study and with difficulty, can understand, instead of the many who read and love good English! For my part, I am unable to read Burns with satisfaction; and I am steadfast in the conviction that, excepting among his countrymen, few of those who parrot his praise are better able than I. Of another thing I am tolerably well assured, albeit it is nothing to the purpose, namely, that Burns was more wit than poet. Upon that proposition I am ready to do battle with all Caledonia, the pipers alone excepted.

  In humorous and satirical work like, for example, The Biglow Papers, the law is relaxed, even suspended; and in serious prose fiction if the exigencies of the narrative demand the introduction of an unlettered hind whose speech would naturally be “racy of the soil” he must needs come in and sport the tangles of his tongue. But he is to be got rid of as promptly as possible — preferably by death. The making of an entire story out of the lives and loves and lingoes of him and his co-pithecans — that is effrontery. If it be urged in deprecation of this my view that it is incompatible with relish of and respect for, Miss Mary Wilkins Freeman, Miss Mary Murfree, Mr. Hamlin Garland and other curled darlings of the circulating libraries, I c
andidly confess that it is open to that objection. Of all such offenders against sweetness and sense I have long cherished a comfortable conviction that it were better if instead of writing things “ racy of the soil” they would till it.

  The talk of intelligent persons in an unfamiliar language is a legitimate literary “property,” but the talk of ignorant persons misusing their own language has value and interest to nobody but other ignorant persons and, possibly, the philologist. Literature, however, is not intended for service in advancing the interests of philology. The “general reader” whose interest in the characters of a tale is quickened by their faulty speech may reasonably boast that the ties of affinity connecting him with their intellectual condition have not been strained by stretching: it is not overfar from where he is to where he came from.

  For several months the booksellers of the principal cities in this country reported that the book David Harum sold better than any other. The sales went into the hundreds of thousands. It was reviewed with acclamation by all the popular newspapers and magazines, stared at you from every “centre table” and was flung into your ears whenever you had the hardihood to enter a “parlor.” David Harum is one of the most candidly vulgar and stupid books ever proffered to the taste and understanding of “the general reader.” It is of course largely written in “dialect” — that is, in the loutly locution of an illiterate clown making a trial at his mother-speech. Its “dialect” is so particularly offensive that I suppose it to be a “transcript from nature:” persons from whom it is possible would certainly not deny themselves the happiness of speaking it; and the book may have some value to the hardy philologer tracing backward the line of linguistic evolution to the grunt of the primeval pig. To record the vocal riddances of the ignorant may be one of the purposes of popular fiction, for anything that I know, but at least its authors might, in the interest of art, charge its horrible words with something that one unaffected by softening of the brain might think to be thoughts; and perhaps they would if that pandemic infirmity had not marked them for its own.