Life — July 9, 1896 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LIFE 555 , do battle with the intangible, and ethical struggle is in danger of dying ‘| ie ! SINGER. | a out of life. warm, alive, get-at-able. fenced round by death, silent. know him best refuse to generalize about him in public places. has at least the platform. To whom can we look for help in this crisis? will come to chase away this spectre and give us a prince of darkness, The scientist who holds the present in his hands has failed us. him we learned to trace evil to our ancestors. Warfare ends at the edge of the grave. when it might be said that Society and the Microbe are vying with each other to fill the gap left by the personal devil, the scientist is strangely The microbe cannot become a popular. conception while those who Surely, some new poct Through But one's ancestor is remote, Even now ** Society ” Woman, who is said to hold the keys of the fature, has apparently nothing toxsuggest. Yet it would be fitting if, in a world under feminine rule, the spirit of darkness should for the first time assume feminine form, The serpent has had his day; it is Eve's turn now. objects to the new drift of thought in regard to the source of all evil. No- where is to-day’s lack of poetic power more apparent. By the side of the old ideas of the workers of wrong jit dwin- dles toa mere notion. The poverty of the conception puts our generation to the blush. The medixval dragon became visible by means of its scales, its open jaws, its folded tail. The witch of all ages has ridden into reality on her broom- stick. And the devil, to whom the de- parting Pan bequeathed his horns and hoofs, won credence through his con- crete picturesqueness. But “ Society"? Its intangibility is unreality, It has not even marrowless bones. We cannot believe that which we cannot see even with the mind's eye, and are in danger that the good lady feared for her daughter under the influence of a new preacher, of losing faith altogether in a personal devil. For the new ogre lacks personality. The mischief-makers of old times, dwarf, wizard and hobgoblin, were companionable. Even Milton's Satan is a person one would like to know in one’s epic: moments, and Mephistopheles fills one always with a baffled longing for further acquaintanceship. But Society is not winning. [t is unsocial, unresponsive. No gracious human quality lends charm to the thin generalization. « Again, this has none of the suggestive power of the older ideas. The devel- opment of the spirit of evil has been rich in poetic mystery. The gloom that brooded over Ahriman, prince of darkness, and over Loki, the worker of wrong among the northern gods, filled men’s hearts with awe. And the gods whom the Greek saw, stealing out of cloud or sunshine to blind men’s eyes and make Fate sin in his stead, were wonderful because so dimly understood. ‘‘Society,” too, it is hard to grasp, but the unintelligible is not the inexplicable. Not fear and not awe, but vexation of spirit results from the attempt to solve the mystery that clouds the term ‘‘ Society.” Clearly, the new notion is,inadequate. It is not fitted to perform the simplest duty of a principle {of evil. We cannot see, we cannot fear the unimaginable spectre. Thus its esthetic lack is moral lack. We cannot Meanwhile a starved world waits for a nobler conception. Until that comes we cannot quite give up the old familiar friends. They are too dear and too long tried to be lightly parted with. We can only beseech the swift years to let us have them yet a little time, imp, kobold, witch and demon. No abstrac- tion can take their place. It is hard to let the half-gods go before the gods arrive. NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. HAT'S what I call an up-to- date woman,” said the livery stable man. “Why?” “‘She wanted a horse that a man could drive.” _ USE comicbooks.com