FullReads

Dean Swift quotes Sir Philip Sidney as saying that the “chief life of modern versifying consists in rhyme.” Swift agrees with him. “Verse without rhyme,” he says, “is a body without a soul, or a bell without a clapper.” He thinks Milton’s “Paradise Lost” would be greatly improved if it had rhyme. This, he says, would make it “more heroic and sonorous than it is.”

Unobtrusive rhyme may be a help in certain cases, but what modern reader would say that a poem without rhyme is a body without a soul? This would exclude many of the noblest productions of English literature.

BERGSON AND TELEPATHY

Bergson seems always to have been more than half-convinced of the truth of spiritualism. When we are already half-convinced of a thing, it takes but little to convince us. Bergson argues himself into a belief in telepathy in this wise: “We produce electricity at every moment; the atmosphere is continually electrified; we move among magnetic currents. Yet for thousands of years millions of human beings have lived who never suspected the existence of electricity.”

Millions of persons have also lived without suspecting the pull of the sun and moon upon us; or that the pressure of the atmosphere upon our bodies is fifteen pounds to the square inch; or that the coast of this part of the continent is slowly subsiding (the oscillations of the earth’s crust); or without suspecting the incredible speed of the stars in the midnight sky; or that the earth is turning under our feet; or that electrons are shooting off from the candle or lamp by the light of which we are reading. There are assuredly more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, many of which we shall doubtless yet find out, and many more of which we shall never find out. Wireless messages may be continually going through our houses and our bodies, and through the air we breathe, and we never suspect them. Shall we, then, infer that the air around us is full of spirits of our departed friends? I hope it is, but I fail to see any warrant for the belief in this kind of reasoning. It does not lend color even to the probability, any more than it does to the probability that we shall yet be able to read one another’s thoughts and become expert mind-readers. Mind-reading seems to be a reality with a few persons, with one in many millions. But I cannot therefore believe in spiritualism as I believe in the “defeat of the Invincible Armada.” Fleets have been defeated in all ages. Facts are amenable to observation and experiment, but merely alleged facts do not stand the laboratory tests.

If memory is not a function of the brain, of what is it a function? If “judgment, reasoning, or any other act of thought” are not functions of the brain, of what are they the functions? The scientific method is adequate to deal with all questions capable of proof or disproof. If we apply the scientific or experimental method to miracles, where does it leave them? Ask Huxley. Thought-transference is possible, but does this prove spiritualism to be true?

I know of a man who can answer your questions if you know the answers yourself, even without reading them or hearing you ask them. He once read a chemical formula for Edison which nobody but Edison had ever seen. I am glad that such things are possible. They confirm our faith in the reality of the unseen. They show us in what a world of occult laws and influences we live, but they tell us nothing of any other world.

METEORIC MEN AND PLANETARY MEN

There are meteoric men and there are planetary men. The men who now and then flash across our intellectual heavens, drawing all eyes for the moment, these I call meteoric men. What a contrast they present to the planetary men, who are slow to attract our attention, but who abide, and do not grow dim! Poets like Emerson, Whitman, and Wordsworth were slow to gain recognition, but the radiance of their names grows. I call such a poet as Swinburne meteoric, a poet of a certain kind of brilliant power, but who reads him now? Stephen Phillips with his “Marpessa” had a brief vogue, and then disappeared in the darkness. When I was a young man, I remember, a Scottish poet, Alexander Smith, published a “Life Drama,” which dazzled the literary world for a brief period, but it is forgotten now. What attention Kidd’s “Social Evolution” attracted a generation or more ago! But it is now quite neglected. It was not sound. When he died a few years ago there was barely an allusion to it in the public press. The same fate befell that talented man, Buckle, with his “Civilization in England.” Delia Bacon held the ear of the public for a time with the Bacon-Shakespeare theory. Pulpit men like Joseph Cook and Adirondack Murray blazed out, and then were gone. Half a century ago or more an Englishman by the name of M. F. Tupper published a book called “Proverbial Philosophy” which had a brief season of popularity, and then went out like a rush-light, or a blaze of tissue paper. Novels like Miss Sprague’s “Earnest Trifler,” Du Maurier’s “Trilby,” and Wallace’s “Ben Hur” have had their little day, and been forgotten. In the art world the Cubists’ crazy work drew the attention of the public long enough for it to be seen how spurious and absurd it was. Brownell’s war poems turned out to be little more than brief fireworks. Joaquin Miller, where is he? Fifty years ago Gail Hamilton was much in the public eye, and Grace Greenwood, and Fanny Fern; and in Bohemian circles, there were Agnes Franz and Ada Clare, but they are all quite forgotten now.