BY ZENOBIA COX

FOR the past few months we have had a deluge of optimism. From various sources we are told that man ought to be happy. “Whatever is, is good,” is the handwriting on the wall. Content is preached from what George Eliot called “that Goshen of Mediocrity,” the pulpit; and politicians publish their elastic statistics, proving prosperity and content. This proselyting Optimism reached its height in the advent of Charles Wagner to our hospitable shores and in the thrusting of his little book, “The Simple Life,” under the nose of the public.

The book was published here several years ago, but has lain unnoticed until today. Our sudden torridity of welcome makes one reflect upon a dog who tramples on the grass beneath his feet and feeds on offal; suddenly he begins to eat the grass and then we cry, “The dog is sick!” Humanity has a canine instinct for its needs. Its tastes must ripen. We can neither hasten nor retard them.

As it takes the fever of intoxication to appreciate the purity of water; as the quiet of repose must follow the stress of effort, so man now turns to the sweet nothingness of a dream, amid the warring clash of realities.

That Wagner’s idyl of simplicity is but a dream, a sigh of the imagination, only idealists can deny. Civilization and Simplicity! Bedlam and Elysium! Nirvana on the Tower of Babel! All these alliances are equally possible.

The very fact of his dream arousing such a storm of approval awakens suspicion. Insistence is always a confession of doubt. Man never talks so much of his happiness as when he is unhappy. This is demonstrated in marriage.

Wagner’s arrival in America was singularly opportune. Certainly it was fortunate that his little olive branch was given to the public just when it was clamoring for something. Its palms were itching for some of the sugar-plums the Privileged Few had wrested from it, and it was beginning to get noisy. Yes, that hydrocephalic infant, the Proletariat, was beginning to sob for the golden spoon in the mouth of Special Privilege, when, lo and behold! the powers behind the throne go to Paris and bring back the soothing syrup of Wagner and his philosophy. The infant lets the Pharisee dope him, and he drops the unintelligible complexities of Franchises, Trusts, Labor Problems and Wrongs to grab the little woolly lamb of Content.

Surely the importers of Wagner are altruists, to try thus to make the public so happy. And that Wagner has had importers as well as indorsers, the Initiated know. Nevertheless, Wagner is a remarkable man. He is remarkable in resembling two historical characters and also in possessing the aptitudes for several vocations.

He resembles Rousseau. Rousseau sang the same little Psalm of Simplicity in the most artificial and febrile period of France. The Philistines shrieked the same applause, and even tried to eat the prescribed grass. He resembles Mme. de Pompadour. When no longer she could charm the palled fancy of Louis XV as Circe, coquette, dancer or grande dame, she assumed the garb of a peasant girl.

That was one of the early triumphs of simplicity. Art is always a surprise. Its sole function is to astonish. Therein Wagner is an artist.

He is also a civil engineer, for he has mastered the cosmic momentum. The world is a seesaw. It exists by the eternal balance of contrasts. Wagner, seeing the excess, has given us the weight to restore our equipoise. He has led us back like refractory children to drink of milk after we have eaten marrons glacÉs and liked them. Of course they have given us indigestion, and that is where Wagner fills the role of physician; he diagnoses our disease, he places his finger upon the very “Malady of the Century,” and he prescribes—sugar pills. This shows his great wisdom, for sugar pills and the dissecting-knife should form the sole equipment of every physician.

Wagner is also a philanthropist. His aim is to make us happy, and his method is to make us believe that a gridiron is a lyre and that cobblestones may be Apples of the Hesperides. He tells us that as things now are, each child is “born into a joyless world; that the complexities of our lives have led us into the Slough of Despond; that Civilization has been futile, for it has left us miserable.” And for all our ills he gives us the panacea of content, simplicity and repose. He summons us to be “merely human, to have the courage to be men and leave the rest to Him who numbered the stars. Each life should wish to be what it is good for it to be, without troubling about anything else.”

This is the gospel of non-resistance, of quietism. The absurdity of it is attested by every step we take, for do they not say we could not walk were it not for the resistance of the ground? Eating, alone, is a triumph over opposition. He wishes to steep us in the dolce far niente of Content, and tells us in order to do so all that is needed is our confidence and trust.

“An imperturbable faith in the stability of the universe and its intelligent ordering sleeps in everything that exists. The flowers, the trees, the beasts of the field live in calm strength, in entire security.”

We must remember that Wagner lives in Paris, and, therefore, make allowances for this last statement. He probably has never seen any beasts of the field except in the cages of the Zoo, else he could not have such exuberant faith in their confidence and security. He could never have studied the stealthy horrors of the forests—the furtive panther—the relentless viper—their trembling victims—and possess such a genial conviction of the mercy and goodness of this scheme of creation. No, he must look away from nature for his examples of harmony and peace.

His perpetual refrain is, “Be human and be simple.” Civilization’s answer is that the two are incompatible. Evolution tends to complexity as inevitably as growth leads to death. The beginnings of all things are simple—people, theories of government and vegetable seeds. But the laws of life will not leave them thus. Like American policemen, their continual order is “move on.”

We would have had no history had it not been for man’s love of novelty. It is the one enduring thing. The anthropology of the world is but the record of man’s taste for the strange. Yet Wagner says, “Novelty is ephemeral. Nothing endures but the commonplace, and if one departs from that, it is to run the most perilous risk. Happy he who is able to reclaim himself, who finds the way back to simplicity.”

After reading pages of hazy verbiage descriptive of this simplicity, one cannot but see that his ideal is a vapory creation, a fusing of the honest animality of the savage and the calloused quietism of the lotus-eater.

Simplicity! What prototypes have we for it in all humanity? Two possible types suggest themselves, the savage and the hermit. But Darwin shows us that we cannot find simplicity in the savage. Like civilized man, his instincts are toward exaggeration. He, too, in his limited way, tries to escape from the realities of life. His protest against truth is tattooing. His idea of beauty is distortion.

As the great anatomist, Bichat, long ago said, “If everyone were cast in the same mold, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should soon wish for a variety. We should wish to see certain characters a little exaggerated beyond the existing common standard.”

All the philosophizing of the optimist won’t thwart this tendency of human nature, and it is as futile to bewail “the Vice of the Superlative,” the complexities and hyperboles of life, as it would be to bewail the inevitability of death. Thus we see we cannot find simplicity in man’s primitive form, the savage.

We must, then, look for it in one of his acquired forms—in the idealist who can make of himself a mental Robinson Crusoe, or in the hermit of the monastery or the desert. It must be in some isolated being that we seek simplicity, for certainly it can never be found amid “the madding crowd” and its “ignoble strife.” In solitude alone can one cultivate that contemplative apathy of the mind which Wagner calls peace, which Mahatmas call divinity, and wives call selfishness.

But solitude is not good for man. With it we punish our worst criminals and our old maids. Victor Hugo says, “It makes a god or a devil of man.” Neither of these superlative beings could exist in Wagner’s temperate zone. Wagner yearns for quiet and rest, and where can we find them? Scientists tell us nothing in the world is at rest. There are but two spots on the earth which don’t move with it—the poles. And God has made them uninhabitable—as a lesson.

If Wagner could reach them, he might build his Utopia there, warm it with a rainbow and fertilize it with the waters of Lethe.

Yet humanity must have these Arcadian dreams. The epochs are strewn with them. Periodically man grows tired of the spiced flavors of his repasts and would fain go out in the woods and gather manna from heaven. The effort has always been disastrous. We had the experiment of the Perfectionists, the Icarians, the Owenites, the Harmonists and Brook Farm. They were all founded on simplicity and were all dissolved because of the difference between theory and practice. This is unfortunate.

An ideal is like a schoolboy’s ruler—it is very good to measure by, but is very frail to build a habitation with. Optimism is a good thing, and so is Pessimism. But Optimism alone is popular; man does not like to be told the faults of the universe any more than to be told of his own faults. This accounts for his hospitality to all the myopic dogmas of Optimism, and his antipathy to the equally true tenets of Pessimism.

It is as if one faction believed only in the actuality of the day, and the other admitted only the existence of night. Their polemics suggest the law of gravitation run mad. What if there were only a law of attraction and none of repulsion? Certainly we would all be merged into one. But this union would be chaos and extinction. Our repulsions and suspicions save us. They make an individual where the Optimist with his one law of attraction would have an inert mass. The Lord’s Prayer should be changed to “Deliver us from evil—and good.”

Too great a bias toward a recognition of either is dangerous. The one inculcates content—the other discontent. But of the two, discontent is by far the safer. If content had been universal, our present degree of enlightenment and justice would have been impossible.

Content means egotism, inaction and stagnation. Discontent means reformation, revolution and progress. All our great men were discontented. All our imbecile kings were contented—and tried to make their serfs so. Whose mind was the most beneficial to the world—the fermenting, aggressive brain of Luther, or the tranquil cerebellum of the gorged Vitellius? Civilization has arisen from discontent. Discontent means upheaval, and upheaval is to a nation what plowing is to the corn. Sir Robert Peel defined agitation to be “the marshaling of the conscience of a nation to mold its laws.”

What we want at present is not peace, but agitation. There are too many wrongs to be righted—too many national dragons to be slain to respond yet awhile to Wagner’s call to disarmament! What we need are spears, not olive branches; the flag of battle, not the flag of truce.

Wagner wishes to give us happiness. But man’s effort for selfish, personal happiness has caused all the miseries of the world.

It is by persistently closing their eyes to the sorrows of man that our commercial pirates can so tranquilly exist. I believe that when man sees that he cannot make life enjoyable he will then turn his attention to making it endurable. At present our safest philosophy is the belief in progress by antagonism, and our duty is to unsheathe the sword of rebellion from the scabbard of ignorance, and do battle against all despots and oppressors!