Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  It is easy to affirm, in the case of China, the impossibility of any such racial transformation as the one supposed, but fifty years ago it would have been easy to point out its impossibility in the case of Japan — if any human being had had the imagination and hardihood to suggest it. Japan has made the impossible possible, the possible a thing to be feared. As a measure of precaution, the partition of China merits the profoundest consideration.

  Actual forces at the back of a great movement are seldom apparent to those engaged in directing it. Statesmanship is mostly a matter of temporary expedients for accomplishment of small purposes, but if there is to-day a really great statesman of the Caucasian race he is considering the partition of China among European nations as an alternative to the partition of European nations among the Chinese.

  Meantime we occupy ourselves with laws and treaties to “exclude” Chinese and other inevitable Asians from our continent. Successive relays of American statesmen wreck themselves upon the problem and go down smiling. To some of us it is given to see that the Asian can not be excluded — that the course of empire, having taken its way westward until it has reached its point of departure, is turning backward, an irresistible “tide in the affairs of men.” But what can we do but propose further and futile measures of “exclusion”? We supplicate our Government to forbid us to employ our destroyers, to deny us the fruits of our cupidity and prohibit us from bringing the hateful race here in our own ships. Our courts, minded madwise, make in good faith the monstrous assumption that the writ of habeas corpus is a right which we, having invented it, are bound to share with races that never heard of it. Our churches, gone clean daft in pursuit of souls never caught and not worth the catching, pull the strings of their God to a gesture of injunction and bid us respect the brotherhood of man. Every moment and at all points we feel the baffling hand thrusting us roughly down and back, while this awful invasion pours in upon us with augmenting power.

  Not for an instant has the refluent wave been stayed. Every American city has its “Chinatown,” every American village its scouts and pioneers of the movement. On the Pacific Coast the Japanese have a foothold everywhere, monopolizing entire industries in cities and valleys, owning the lands that once they leased and charitably employing their former employers. And all along the line of every growing railway in the west may be seen the turbaned Hindu bending to his work and biding his time to be a “shipper.”

  As it is, it will be: the Oriental races are in motion westward, and this continent is doomed to their occupancy. A higher, sterner law than any of man’s devising is in action here. Fate has exercised the right of emiment domain and condemned this New World to the use of ancient races. For four hundred years the European has been wresting it from the Indian; within one-half the time the Asian will have accomplished its conquest from the European. There is no help for us: as we did unto others it shall be done unto us, and the Asian shall be master here. It is comforting to know that we shall have had a hand in our undoing; one does not like to be a “dead-head” in any enterprise.

  No; we shall not kill the Chinese, nor will they “go” without killing — nor cease to come. As surely as the sun shall rise each day, so surely each day will his beams gild the ever advancing flag of this irresistible migration. Beneath the feet of that mighty host the arts and sciences of the Aryan, his laws and letters, his religions and languages, the very body and soul of his civilization will be trampled out of record, out of memory, out of tradition.

  It is not a sunny picture; what need to look upon it? I invite to despair; but there stands the dear American statesman, parchment in hand — a new exclusion law! His face shines in the dawning of another hope; in his eyes is the morning of a new era. Between the two of us — him and me — all patriots may be united: each with a prophet of his choice. It is clear whom ye will choose, but I hope I don’t intrude.

  FAT BABIES AND FATE

  THE modern Baby Show is a fruitful source of mischief — a degenerate successor to that ancient display whose beneficent purpose was to ascertain what ailing or deformed or merely puny infants might most advantageously be flung off a cliff. The object of the modern Baby Show is not improvement of the race by assisting Nature in “weeding out,” nor is such the practical result. Prizes, we are told, are commonly bestowed by a committee of matrons, and necessarily fall to the fattest exhibit. In the matron’s ideal “scale of being” the pudgiest, the most orbicular, babe holds the summit place, the first adiposition, so to speak.

  This is not as it should be; no true improvement in the race can be effected by encouraging our young to bury their noses in their cheeks and their knuckles under a mass of tissues overlying them like a boxing-glove. The prize winners do not become better men and women than their unsuccessful but more deserving competitors; while the latter, beginning life in the shadow of a great disappointment, retain to the end of their days a sharp sense of injustice incompatible with warm and elevated sentiments. The effect on the characters of the beaten mothers is even more deplorable. Every mother of a defeated babe is convinced that her exhibit is incomparably superior, physically, intellectually and morally, to the roly-poly impostors honored by the committee of matrons. Her wrath at the unjust decision is deep, constant and lasting; it embitters her life, sours her temper and spoils her beauty. As to the fathers, the only discernible effect upon them of either winning or losing is to make them a trifle more ashamed of their offspring than they were before “ The proud and happy father” had never the advantage of existing outside the female imagination, but if he really existed the Baby Show would be fatal to both his pride and his happiness.

  In enumerating the manifold mischiefs that fly from that Pandora’s-box, the Baby Show, we are perhaps not justified in mentioning the desolating effect upon the committee of matrons whose action springs the lid. It is doubtful if the disasters which themselves incur can rightly be rated as evils in the larger sense of the word; and, anyhow, the nature of these is imperfectly known; for after making their award the unhappy arbiters commonly vanish from the busy haunts of women. The places which knew them know them no more forever, and their fate is involved in obscurities pervious only to conjecture. In view of this regrettable but apparently inevitable fact, it is desirable (if the Baby Show cannot be averted) that the lady judges be selected early, in order that our citizens may bestow upon them before they are taken from us some suitable testimonial of public esteem and gratitude, attesting the popular sense of their heroism in accepting the fatal distinction.

  CERTAIN AREAS OF OUR SEAMY SIDE

  THE thrifty person who attends, uninvited, a wedding reception and, retiring early from the festivities, leaves the unhappy couple poorer by a few unconsidered trifles of jewelry has a just claim to the gratitude of mankind. The interests of justice demand his immunity from detection: the officer who shall molest him is hostis humani generis. Neither grave rebuke nor ridicule has sufficed to overcome and stamp out the vulgar custom of ostentatiously displaying wedding presents, with names of givers attached; perhaps it will yield to the silent suasion of the sneak-thief. To healthy and honest understandings — that is to say, to the understandings of this present writer and those who have the intelligence to think as he does — it is but faintly conceivable how self-respecting persons can do this thing. Display of any kind is necessarily repugnant to those tastes which distinguish the well-bred from those whose worth is of another sort. Among the latter we are compelled (reluctantly) to reckon those amiable beings who display coats-of-arms, crests and the like, whether they are theirs by inheritance, purchase or invention; those, we mean, who blazon them about in conspicuous places for the obvious purpose of declaring with emphasis whatever merits and advantages may inhere in their possession. In this class, also, we must place the excellent ladies and gentlemen who “boast” their descent from illustrious, or merely remote, ancestors. (The remoter the ancestor — that is to say, the less of his blood his descendant has — the greater that funny person’s pride
in the distinction.) A person of sense would be as likely to direct attention to his own virtues as to those of his forefathers; a woman of modesty, to her own beauty or grace as to the high social position of her grandmother.

  Nay, we must carry our condemnation to an even greater extreme. The man who on public occasions covers his breast with decorations, the insignia of orders, the badges of high service or of mere distinction such as results from possession of the badge, is guilty of immodesty. “Why do you not wear your Victoria Cross?” the only recipient of it who ever failed to wear it was asked. “When I wish people to know how valiant I am in battle,” was the reply, “I will tell them.”

  But below this lowest deep of vanity there is a lower deep of cupidity — and something more. The custom of displaying wedding presents duly labeled with the givers’ names and publishing the list in the newspapers supplies a very “genteel” method of extortion to those who have conscientious scruples against highway robbery. That extortion is very often the conscious intent I am far from affirming; but that such is the practical effect many a reader inadequately provided with this world’s goods will pause at this point feelingly to aver. But he is a lofty soul indeed if at the next silent demand he do not stand and deliver as meekly as heretofore. Looked at how one may please, it is a bad business, not greatly superior in point of morality to that of the sneak-thief who is one of its perils, and with whose intelligent activity its existence may, one hopes, become in time altogether incompatible.

  FOR BREVITY AND CLARITY

  MR. GEORGE R. SIMS once “invited proposals” for a brief and convenient name for the misdemeanor known in England as “traveling in a class of railway carriage superior to that for which the defendant had taken a ticket.” It is a ludicrous fact that the offense has never had another name, nor is it quite easy to invent a better one off-hand. I should like to know what it is in Esperanto. We have in this country certain clumsy phrases which might advantageously be condensed into single words. For example, to “join in the holy bonds of Wedlock” might become to “jedlock.” The society editor would be spared much labor if he could say of the unhappy couple that they were “jed-locked,” or “lemaltared,” — the latter word meaning, of course, “led to the matrimonial altar.” Many of the ordinary reporter’s favorite expressions could be treated in the same practical fashion. The familiar “much-needed rest” would become simply “mest.”

  The “devouring element” would be “delement,” and have done with it. When it is, as so very frequently it is, necessary to say that something “reflects credit” on somebody, the verb “to refledit” would serve an honorable and useful purpose. Instead of writing of a man freshly dead that he was “much esteemed by all who knew him,” we should say that he was “mestewed.” By such simple and rational devices as these the language would be notably improved, and in a newspaper report of the birth of a rich man’s child a few lines could be saved for the death of a poet.

  As the words “not either” have been condensed into “neither,”

  “not ever” into “never” and “no one” into “none,” why should not the negative or privative, when followed by a vowel, be always compounded in the same way? For example, “neven” for “not even,” “nin” and “nout” for “not in” and “not out” “Nirish” for “no Irish,” and so forth. Nay, it is not necessary that a vowel follow the negative: “no Popery” could be “nopery,” “no matter,” “natter,” and “never-to-be-forgotten,” “notten,” or “netten. The principle is pregnant with possibilities.

  While reforming the language I crave leave to introduce an improvement in punctuation — the snigger point, or note of cachinnation. It is written thus w and represents, as nearly as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence; or, without the stop, to every jocular or ironical clause of a sentence otherwise serious — thus: “Mr. Edward Bok is the noblest work of God w.”

  “Our respected and esteemed w contemporary, Mr. Slyvester Vierick, whom for his virtues we revere and for his success envy w, is going to the devil as fast as his two heels can carry him.”

  “Deacon Harvey, a truly good man w, is self-made in the largest sense of the term; for although he was born great, wise and rich, the deflection of his nose is the work of his own coat-sleeve.”

  To many a great writer the new point will be as useful as was the tail to his unlettered ancestor. By a single stroke of his pen at the finish, the illustrious humorist who reviews books for The Nation can give to his dismalist plagiarism from Mulgrub’s Theory of Quaternions all the charm and value of a lively personal anecdote, as he would relate it. By liberally sprinkling his literary criticism with it; Dr. Hamilton W. Mabie can give to the work a lilt and vivacity that will readily distinguish it from a riding-master’s sermon on the mount; the points will apprise his reader of a humorous intention not otherwise observable as a factor in the humorous effect. Embellished with this useful mark, even the writings of that sombre soul, Mr. John Kendrick Bangs, will have a quality that will at least prevent the parsons from reading them at the graveside as passages from the burial service.

  GENIUS AS A PROVOCATION

  IN his own honorable tongue Mr. Yoni Noguchi is, I dare say, a poet; in ours he is a trifle unintelligible. His English prose, too, is of a kind that one does not write if one has a choice in the matter, yet sometimes Mr. Noguchi thinks in it with clarity and point. Concerning the late Lafcadio Hearn and the little tempest that was roaring round that author’s life and character, Mr. Noguchi wrote:

  “It is perfectly appalling to observe in the Western countries that when one dies his friends have to rush to print his private letters, and even an unexpected person volunteers to speak as his best friend, and presumes to write his biography.”

  No, this is not good prose (barring the “unexpected person,” which is delicious) but it is obvious truth and righteous judgment. Publication of letters not written for publication is prima facie evidence of moral delinquency in the offender. In doing this thing he supplies the strongest presumption against himself. The burden of proof is heavy upon him; he is to be held guilty unless he can support it with positive evidence of a difficult thing to prove — an untainted intention not related to gain, glory nor gratification of a public appetite to which there is no honorable purveyance. No evidence less valid than written permission obviously covering the particular letters published is acceptable. In all the instances that I have observed this credential is wanting. True, the scope of my observation is somewhat narrow, for I would no more read a dead man’s private correspondence in a book than I would break open his desk to obtain it. From a woman related to a famous poet and critic then recently deceased I had once a request for any letters that I might have from him. The lady said that she wanted them for his biography, already in course of preparation. The letters related to literary matters only, but as the lady submitted no authorization from their writer for their publication I civilly refused and took the consequences — there were consequences. Whether or not my part of the correspondence appeared in the book I shall not know unless told.

  The family of a man of genius and renown may be pretty confidently trusted to make him ridiculous in life with their clumsy tongues, and after death with their thrifty pens. I think there was never a man of genius whom all his relatives excepting his immediate offspring did not, while jealous of his fame, secretly regard as a fool. (Even the brothers of Jesus of Nazareth did not “believe on him,” and to some of us who are immune to legends of the Church it is given to know that his mother was of their way of thinking.) Dumbly resenting the distinction that seems to accentuate their own obscurity, these worthies are nevertheless keen to shine by the growing light of his posthumous fame, if he have it, and to profit by it too, as are his more appreciative children and children’s children, usually dullards and dolts to the thirteenth and fourteenth generation. His death is the opportunity of all. Some of them are very sure to crucify th
e body of him and thrust a pen into his side to show that his blood is the same as their own.

  A most disagreeable instance of this most disagreeable practice is that of a son of Robert Browning, who has won literary renown and popular commendation by publishing his parents’ love-letters. Doubtless he is proud of his work, but in the eyes of his sainted father, I fear, he is one of Mr. Noguchi’s “unexpected persons,” at least in the sense that he is not expected in Paradise. Another and more recent illustration is the book My Soldier, the sanguinary work of a wife. Observe with what celerity the forehanded family of Tennyson “improved the occasion” of his passing. The poor man was hardly cold before they thrust a volume of Shakspeare into his dead hand, clove it with his finger at a significant passage chosen by a domestic council, admitted a consistent ray of moonshine into the death chamber and invited the world to witness the edifying show. So the man who wrote

  Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me was made to seem to “pass out to sea” in an impressive pose, appropriately spectacular and dramatically ridiculous.

  If there is a Better Land it is where a great man can grow up from the ground like a tree, without human agency, get on without a friend, write no letters and leave no name at which himself grew pale, to point a lying anecdote or tale.