651 lines
32 KiB
Plaintext
651 lines
32 KiB
Plaintext
10 page printout, page 193 to 202
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 15.
|
||
|
||
HIS DOMESTIC TEACHINGS
|
||
|
||
Woman, Love, Marriage, Home.
|
||
|
||
It has been written, that upon the urn inclosing the ashes of
|
||
our reformer should be the words, "Liberator of Men." Without
|
||
attributing to the author of the latter any lack of comprehension,
|
||
I would substitute, "Liberator of Man, Woman, and Child." And even
|
||
this, as far as woman is concerned, is hardly adequate. Ingersoll
|
||
was more than the liberator of woman: he was a worshiper, an
|
||
adorer, of woman; and he stood as her uncompromising champion, --
|
||
her invincible defender from every form and manifestation of
|
||
barbaric cruelty and theological bigotry, whether it first appeared
|
||
during the earliest historic times, or during the days preceding
|
||
his death. No one who is not both profoundly and widely familiar
|
||
with his thought and work can possibly realize the full truth and
|
||
justness of this statement. For a comprehensive view of Ingersoll
|
||
on a given point is not to be obtained at random, or at a passing
|
||
glance. Nor is such a view to be had through a mental microscope:
|
||
the field to be surveyed is too large -- he is too big a man.
|
||
|
||
Thus we find that one of his strongest objections to the
|
||
Jewish and Christian cosmogony and theology, from creation to the
|
||
ascension of Christ, is the position of inferiority and degradation
|
||
to which woman is therein assigned. Jehovah's attempt to induce
|
||
Adam to select "an helpmeet for him" from among the "cattle," "the
|
||
fowl of the air," and the "beasts of the field"; the failure of
|
||
Adam so to select a companion, and the consequent creation of woman
|
||
from one of his ribs, thus placing her on a plane somewhat higher
|
||
than that of the beast, but lower than that of man; the attributing
|
||
of all the sins of the world to the first woman, through her
|
||
tempting of Adam to fall; the curse which Jehovah placed upon
|
||
maternity; her degradation by sanctioning polygamy, concubinage,
|
||
and slavery; the failure of Christ to recognize her equality with
|
||
man; her calumniation and stigmatization by the early Christian
|
||
"fathers" -- all this (and much more) gave bitter and unpardonable
|
||
offense to Ingersoll's sense of justice and of the sacredness of
|
||
womanhood. Indeed, it would have required only the teachings of the
|
||
Bible, and the attitude of the church, in reference to woman, to
|
||
make Ingersoll an implacable enemy of the Christian religion.
|
||
|
||
And, putting entirely aside, for the present, his purely anti-
|
||
theological propaganda, what a knight-like gallant he was; How he
|
||
did shiver with his intellectual lance the battle-axes and
|
||
bludgeons which the savagery, selfishness, and cant of "the
|
||
stronger sex" had raised above the head of women! We should search
|
||
in vain this wondrously flexible language of ours for a word of
|
||
love, adoration, liberation, vindication, or defense that he did
|
||
not use in her behalf. He was her champion from the first. While
|
||
the wise judges of the law were denying Susan B. Anthony the right
|
||
of trial by jury for the crime of having voted, Ingersoll was
|
||
declaring: "Woman has all the rights I have, and one more, and that
|
||
is the right to be protected, because she is the weaker." He
|
||
insisted, that woman is better than man, that she has greater
|
||
burdens and responsibilities, and that it is for that reason that
|
||
her faults are considered greater. He contended, that woman is not
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
193
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
the intellectual inferior, but, potentially at least, the
|
||
intellectual equal, of man, and, moreover, that the men who assert
|
||
the contrary "cannot, by offering themselves in evidence,
|
||
substantiate their declaration." He believed that she would become
|
||
man's successful rival in every department of artistic and
|
||
intellectual endeavor. She had already achieved many triumphs in
|
||
law, medicine, art, sculpture, and literature, and of the latter
|
||
had raised the moral standard. He would give to her, as to man, all
|
||
the education that she is capable of receiving. In other words, he
|
||
would open wide to her the only gateway that leads to absolute
|
||
moral and intellectual freedom. "The parasite of woman is the
|
||
priest," he said; therefore, he would educate her out of the
|
||
orthodox church. "There will never be a generation of great men,"
|
||
he declared, "until there has been a generation of free women -- of
|
||
free mothers." He failed to discern either justice or reason in
|
||
giving to the brutal and ignorant negro (or to the brutal and
|
||
ignorant white man) the right to vote, while denying it to the
|
||
refined, educated, and intellectual mother; and so he would extend
|
||
to woman, not the "privilege" of, but her inalienable moral and
|
||
political right to, a voice in the affairs of town and city, state
|
||
and nation. In short, to woman, as to man, he would apply the
|
||
Ingersollian Golden Rule: --
|
||
|
||
"Give to every other human being every right that you claim
|
||
for yourself."
|
||
|
||
But while this brief resume will serve to indicate, with some
|
||
degree of adequacy, Ingersoll's regard for, and loyalty to woman,
|
||
it is to such passages as the following, that we must turn for the
|
||
underlying secret of that regard and loyalty. It is through the
|
||
crystalline clearness of such passages, that we perceive, in woman,
|
||
the Ingersollian ideal of humanity and beauty: --
|
||
|
||
"I not only admire woman as the most beautiful object ever
|
||
created, but I reverence her as the redeeming glory of humanity,
|
||
the sanctuary of all the virtues, the pledge of all perfect
|
||
qualities of heart and head."
|
||
|
||
And again, to the same effect: --
|
||
|
||
"The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this
|
||
world, I do not care if he dies in the ditch a beggar, his life has
|
||
been a success."
|
||
|
||
This elevation of woman to the very summit of humanity will
|
||
enable us to understand, not only with the head, but with the
|
||
heart, Ingersoll's exaltation of love in the following prose-poem,
|
||
which, for appositeness and delicacy of imagery, poetic truth,
|
||
insouciance, and verbal melody (be it said in passing), has been
|
||
equaled by none but the master lyricists of our tongue: --
|
||
|
||
"Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning
|
||
and the evening star. It shines upon the babe' and sheds its
|
||
radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of
|
||
poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every
|
||
heart -- builder of every home, kindlier of every fire on every
|
||
hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the
|
||
world with melody -- for music is the voice of love. Love is the
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
194
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to joy, and
|
||
makes right royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the
|
||
perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred
|
||
passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it,
|
||
earth is heaven, and we are gods."
|
||
|
||
After the preceding, we shall not wonder that Ingersoll was an
|
||
uncompromising champion of monogamic marriage, -- certainly not if
|
||
we recall his fundamental maxim: "The only way to be happy yourself
|
||
is to make somebody else so." But if he was an uncompromising
|
||
champion of monogamy, he was an implacable enemy of all ideas and
|
||
practices tending to discredit it. Indeed, if than to defend
|
||
marriage there was anything which he did out of deeper conviction,
|
||
with greater earnestness, it was to attack celibacy; and if than
|
||
to attack celibacy there was anything which he did out of deeper
|
||
conviction, with greater earnestness, it was to attack polygamy. To
|
||
him, celibacy was "the essence of vulgarity" -- "the most obscene
|
||
word in our language," while polygamy was "the infamy of infamies"
|
||
-- a thing the "filth" of which "all the languages of the world are
|
||
insufficient to express."
|
||
|
||
With such hatred of polygamy, is it any surprise, by the way,
|
||
that he regarded the following, from Shakespeare: -- (Sonnet CXVI)
|
||
as "the greatest line in the poetry of the world" --
|
||
|
||
"Love is not love
|
||
Which alters when it alternation finds."
|
||
|
||
And after his characterization of celibacy, as above, can we
|
||
wonder that the advocates of that doctrine fare at his hands no
|
||
better than this? --
|
||
|
||
"I believe in marriage, and I hold in utter contempt the
|
||
opinions of those long-haired men and short haired women who
|
||
denounce the institution of marriage."
|
||
|
||
Or this? --
|
||
|
||
"Back of all churches is human affection. Back of all
|
||
theologies is the love of the human heart. Back of all your priests
|
||
and creeds is the adoration of one woman by the one man, and of the
|
||
one man by the one woman. Back of your faith is the fireside; back
|
||
of your folly is the family; and back of all your holy mistakes and
|
||
your sacred absurdities is the love of husband and wife, of parent
|
||
and child."
|
||
|
||
Continuing in natural sequence, we find that Ingersoll's ideal
|
||
of the institution which he so steadfastly championed was quite
|
||
removed from that of the great majority of individuals, theological
|
||
or lay. To him, the "citadel and fortress of civilization," "the
|
||
holiest institution among men," was something more than a
|
||
"solemnized" or "legalized" ceremonial contract. While
|
||
ecclesiastical, social, and civil institutions, laws, and customs
|
||
might prescribe the ceremony, and furnish the witnesses, no one but
|
||
the two parties to the contract -- not even God himself, if he
|
||
exist -- could effect the real marriage. All others, whether in
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
195
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
heaven or on earth, were simply either curios onlookers or impudent
|
||
intruders. It was therefore the knot intrinsic of human love, and
|
||
that alone, which constituted true marriage. He says: --
|
||
|
||
"Love is a transfiguration. It ennobles, purifies and
|
||
glorifies. In true marriage two hearts burst into flower. Two lives
|
||
unite. They melt in music. Every moment is a melody. Love is a
|
||
revelation, a creation. From love the world borrows its beauty and
|
||
the heavens their glory. Justice, self-denial, charity and pity are
|
||
the children of love. * * * Without love all glory fades, the
|
||
noble falls from life, art dies, music loses meaning and becomes
|
||
mere motions of the air, and virtue ceases to exist."
|
||
|
||
After this presentation of the Ingersollian view of love and
|
||
marriage, we naturally proceed to a consideration of the
|
||
importance, or rather, the absolute essentiality and sacredness,
|
||
which, in his philosophy, the great humanitarian assigned to the
|
||
family and the home. In his innumerable utterances concerning them,
|
||
as in nearly all his utterances on other themes, he has not merely
|
||
expressed the profoundest soul-born reasons and convictions: he has
|
||
clothed the latter in ideal beauty. Thus, in the following, the
|
||
family is glorified as the very foundation of all present worth,
|
||
not only, but as the hope and salvation of the future: --
|
||
|
||
"Civilization rests upon the family. The good family is the
|
||
unit of good government. The virtues grow about the holy hearth of
|
||
home -- they cluster, bloom, and shed their perfume round the
|
||
fireside where the one man loves the one woman. Lover -- husband --
|
||
wife -- mother -- father -- child -- home! -- without these sacred
|
||
words, the world is but a lair, and men and women merely beasts."
|
||
|
||
And again: --
|
||
|
||
"I believe in the religion of the family. I believe that the
|
||
roof-tree is sacred, from the smallest fiber that feels the soft
|
||
cool clasp of earth, to the topmost flower that spreads its bosom
|
||
to the sun, and like a spendthrift gives its perfume to the air.
|
||
The home where virtue dwells with love is like a lily with a heart
|
||
of fire -- the fairest flower in the world."
|
||
|
||
He would convert mankind to this "religion of the family," --
|
||
this blessed "gospel of the fireside": --
|
||
|
||
"Let me tell you * * * it is far more important to build a
|
||
home than to erect a church. The holiest temple beneath the stars
|
||
is a home that love has built. And the holiest altar in all the
|
||
wide world is the fireside around which gather father and mother
|
||
and the sweet babes."
|
||
|
||
With the world domestically evangelized, or Ingersollized,
|
||
rather, we should have, not occasional, but innumerable pictures
|
||
like this: --
|
||
|
||
"If upon this earth we ever have a glimpse of heaven, it is
|
||
when we pass a home in winter, at night, and through the windows,
|
||
the curtains drawn aside, we see the family about the pleasant
|
||
hearth; the old lady knitting; the cat playing with the yarn; the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
196
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
children wishing they had as many dolls or dollars or knives or
|
||
somethings, as there are sparks going out to join the roaring
|
||
blast; the father reading and smoking, and the clouds rising like
|
||
incense from the altar of domestic joy. I never passed such a house
|
||
without feeling that I had received a benediction." And no one with
|
||
heart and brain ever read such a passage without feeling the same
|
||
way.
|
||
|
||
But, as we should naturally suppose, Ingersoll's philosophy
|
||
offered something more than even the preceding incomparably
|
||
beautiful and inspiring ideas of love and marriage, of family and
|
||
home. His "religion of the family," his "gospel of the fireside,"
|
||
did not end with a glimpse of the loved and loving father, mother,
|
||
and babes "about the pleasant hearth" -- did not conclude with the
|
||
"benediction" which we have just received. The philosophy that
|
||
placed all human life on the firm basis of happiness as "the only
|
||
good" did not content itself with pictures, which, even though
|
||
momentarily real, might be, after all, as purely temporal, as
|
||
transient, as they were beautiful. Far from it, that philosophy
|
||
would make those pictures the idealistic reflections of enduring
|
||
realities. Indeed, it was with the "benediction," that Ingersoll's
|
||
domestic evangelization really commenced.
|
||
|
||
I have stated that Ingersoll was not only the "Liberator of
|
||
Man," but the "Liberator of Man, Woman, and Child." Having
|
||
accordingly shown, as fully as is here practicable, that he was
|
||
woman's liberator outside the family circle, it is my next pleasure
|
||
to show that he was her liberator within that circle, -- the
|
||
liberator of the wife and mother.
|
||
|
||
"But from what," will perhaps he asked, "did he liberate her?"
|
||
He liberated her from the idea that there must be a "head of the
|
||
family" -- a "boss." He liberated her from the heartless time-
|
||
sanctified doctrine of the divine rights of domestic kings -- from
|
||
the tyrant of the fireside -- the Jehovah of the hearth. He
|
||
demolished the latter's petty throne, and on its ruins made "a
|
||
happy fireside clime to weans and wife." He commanded the husband
|
||
to be a gentleman; bade the wife arise, Minerva-like, from her
|
||
swollen knees; and he wrote, in glowing gold, on the somber walls
|
||
of millions of orthodox homes: "Liberty, Equality, and Love." If
|
||
this alone had been his earthly task, paeans of praise should rise
|
||
to his memory from every hearth in Christendom.
|
||
|
||
Any idea that savored of tyranny filled his liberty-loving,
|
||
justice-loving soul with indignation and repugnance. To him,
|
||
tyranny in one place was the same as tyranny in another. In this,
|
||
he was absolutely and fundamentally consistent. "The Universe," he
|
||
declared, "ought to be a pure democracy -- an infinite republic
|
||
without a tyrant and without a chain." Because he believed in
|
||
liberty and justice, he rejected the tyrant of heaven; and because
|
||
he rejected the latter, he rejected the tyrants of earth, including
|
||
the tyrant in the home. Completely and perfectly civilized, he was
|
||
as consistent in rejecting tyranny in all three places as the
|
||
savage is in accepting it in all three. The average civilized man
|
||
-- the average American, say -- is inconsistent here: lie differs
|
||
from Ingersoll about as much as he differs from the savage. He
|
||
believes in tyranny in heaven, democracy in The White House, and
|
||
tyranny in the home. Ingersoll believed in democracy everywhere.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
197
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
And in his domestic philosophy, "democracy" has much more than
|
||
its usual significance. For the Ingersollian ideal of home excludes
|
||
not only the time-honored notion of the domestic tyrant, -- "the
|
||
head of the family," the "boss," -- but all idea of duty and
|
||
obligation as well. While the ideal democracy exists by virtue of
|
||
a government which derives its powers from the consent of the
|
||
governed, and which, therefore, it is the common obligation and
|
||
duty of those concerned to support and obey, the Ingersollian home
|
||
exists solely in the mutual adoration of husband and wife, -- the
|
||
common affection of parents and child: --
|
||
|
||
"In love's fair realm husband and wife are king and queen,
|
||
sceptred and crowned alike and seated on the self-same throne."
|
||
|
||
And again: --
|
||
|
||
"The highest ideal of a family is where all are equal -- where
|
||
love has superseded authority -- where each seeks the good of all,
|
||
and where none obey * * *. The ideal democracy is government by
|
||
consent: the Ingersollian home is the anarchy of love. In the
|
||
latter, the husband loves the wife, "not only for his own sake, but
|
||
for her sake. He longs to make her happy -- to fill her life with
|
||
joy." And it is upon this basis that the great liberator proffers
|
||
the following advice: --
|
||
|
||
"Whoever marries simply for himself will make a mistake; but
|
||
whoever loves a woman so well that he says, 'I will make her
|
||
happy,' makes no mistake. And so with the woman who says, 'I will
|
||
make him happy.' There is only one way to be happy, and that is to
|
||
make somebody else so, -- he adds, in that familiar straight-out
|
||
Ingersollian style, which unmistakably means that there is a man
|
||
behind it all --
|
||
|
||
"you cannot be happy by going 'cross lots; you have got to go
|
||
the regular turnpike road."
|
||
|
||
As would naturally be supposed, in championing the ideal home
|
||
as the sine qua non of happiness, "the only good," there are,
|
||
besides the "boss," -- "the head of the family," -- two classes of
|
||
husbands whom the great liberator of woman does not overlook -- to
|
||
whom, indeed, he does not hesitate to impart some seemingly
|
||
wholesome advice -- "cross" husbands and "stingy" husbands.
|
||
|
||
Of the former, he inquires, in a tone which itself elicits a
|
||
melancholy negation: --
|
||
|
||
"What right has he to murder the sunshine of the day? What
|
||
right has he to assassinate the joy of life?"
|
||
|
||
And he adds, for the benefit of this cross husband: --
|
||
|
||
"When you go home you ought to go like a ray of light -- so
|
||
that it will, even in the night, burst out the doors and windows
|
||
and illuminate the darkness."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
198
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
As to the stingy husband, it is inconceivable, despite the
|
||
strength of religious prejudice, that even the most orthodox of
|
||
wives and mothers could fail to appreciate the following: --
|
||
|
||
"Do you know that I have known men who would trust their wives
|
||
with their hearts and their honor but not with their pocketbooks;
|
||
not with a dollar. When I see a man of that kind, I always think he
|
||
knows which of these articles is the most valuable. Think of making
|
||
your wife a beggar! Think of her having to ask you every day for a
|
||
dollar, or for two dollars and fifty cents! 'What did you do with
|
||
that dollar I gave you last week?' Think of having a wife that is
|
||
afraid of you! What kind of children do you expect to have with a
|
||
beggar and a coward for their mother? Oh, I tell you if you have
|
||
but a dollar in the world, and you have got to spend it, spend it
|
||
like a king; spent it as though it were a dry leaf and you the
|
||
owner of unbounded forests! That's the way to spend it! I had
|
||
rather be a beggar and spend my last dollar like a king, than a
|
||
king and spend my money like a beggar! If it has got to go, let it
|
||
go!"
|
||
|
||
And when some well-meaning heretic to the Ingersollian
|
||
domestic gospel, -- some thrifty gentleman who has never known the
|
||
ecstasies of love, -- objects that "Your doctrine about loving and
|
||
wives and all that is splendid for the rich, but it won't do for
|
||
the poor," the great apostle of love replies: --
|
||
|
||
"I tell you * * * there is more love in the homes of the poor
|
||
than in the palaces of the rich. The meanest hut with love in it is
|
||
a palace fit for the gods, and a palace without love is a den only
|
||
fit for wild beasts. That is my doctrine! You cannot be so poor
|
||
that you cannot help somebody. Good nature is the cheapest
|
||
commodity in the world; and love is the only thing that will pay
|
||
ten per cent. to the borrower and lender both. Do not tell me that
|
||
you have got to be rich!" "No matter whether you are rich or poor,
|
||
treat your wife as though she were a splendid flower, and she will
|
||
fill your life with perfume and with joy."
|
||
|
||
Under the latter conditions, even the poorest of men would be
|
||
a Croesus; for "Joy is wealth," and "Happiness is the legal tender
|
||
of the soul."
|
||
|
||
Nor does the proceeding, amply as it would seem to establish
|
||
Ingersoll's preeminence as champion of the fireside, afford the
|
||
most significant evidence of the superlative importance which, in
|
||
his philosophy, he assigns to family and home. Many passages
|
||
uttered or written in connection with subjects widely divergent
|
||
from the latter, and from one another, afford even more significant
|
||
evidence. They are found, here and there, throughout all his
|
||
productions. Indeed, the more comprehensively and critically we
|
||
examine his work, and the longer we contemplate his life, the more
|
||
certain does it become that the hearth-fire is the sun around which
|
||
all the planets of his system revolve. Whether we read his lay
|
||
utterances, his legal and political addresses, his anti-theological
|
||
lectures and discussions, his tributes to departed worth, his
|
||
poetry -- whatever of his we read -- we find the same precious
|
||
element: the hearth-fire lights the page! In economics, in
|
||
politics, in religion, the roof-tree is the standard by which all
|
||
else is measured -- the criterion for acceptance or rejection.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
199
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
Thus he objects alike to socialism, slavery, polygamy, and
|
||
"free love" because they divide the family or destroy the home.
|
||
Similarly, he objects to the Christian doctrine of immortality
|
||
because it offers, ostensibly through the lips of Christ,
|
||
"everlasting life" to "everyone that hath forsaken * * * father, or
|
||
mother, or wife, or children * * *" in this life, and because it
|
||
divides the family in the life which it promises. "I will never
|
||
desert the one I love for the promise of any god," he declares. He
|
||
opposes Sabbatarianism because the "poor mechanic, working all the
|
||
week, * * * needs a day * * * to live with wife and child * * *.
|
||
And his weary wife needs a breath of sunny air, away from street
|
||
and wall, amid the hills, or by the margin of the sea, where she
|
||
can sit and prattle with her babe and fill with happy dreams the
|
||
long, glad day." "Maternity," he says, "is the most pathetic fact
|
||
in the universe" -- mother and wife the holiest words in every
|
||
tongue. "It is far more important to love your wife than to love
|
||
God", he insists; and he makes of the ideal husband a worshiper in
|
||
the noblest sense: "To build a home, to keep a fire on the sacred
|
||
hearth, to fill with joy the heart of her who rocks the cradle of
|
||
your child. This is worship." After saying, in his tribute to
|
||
Mills, that "wife and children pressed their kisses on his lips,"
|
||
he adds: "This is enough. The longest life contains no more. This
|
||
fills the vase of joy."
|
||
|
||
Of such expressions, there is in Ingersoll no end; but it is
|
||
perhaps in that greatest of war-paintings, A vision of War, that
|
||
his domestic love and sympathy rise to the loftiest heights, or
|
||
rather, sink to the most touching depths: for it is pathos which is
|
||
there achieved. It is there, at the sound "of heroic bugles," that
|
||
"some are parting with mothers who hold them and press them to
|
||
their hearts again and again, and say nothing." It is there that
|
||
departing patriots "are bending over cradles, kissing babes that
|
||
are asleep." It is there that others "are talking with wives, and
|
||
endeavoring with brave words, spoken in the old tones, to drive
|
||
from their hearts the awful fear." It is there that the wife is
|
||
"standing in the door with the babe in her arms -- standing in the
|
||
sunlight sobbing. At the turn of the road a hand waves -- she
|
||
answers by holding high in her loving arms the child. He is gone,
|
||
and forever." This is dramatic, tragic -- the perfection of pathos!
|
||
And it was, I repeat, Ingersoll's profound domestic love and
|
||
sympathy, blending with the graceful flame of his genius, that
|
||
created it -- one of the greatest qualities of the greatest poetry.
|
||
|
||
But of all the precious words that he wrought from feelings of
|
||
ruby and thoughts of gold, those most clearly disclosing his sense
|
||
of the utter vanity and insignificance of all else in comparison
|
||
with the home are yet to follow. It will be recalled by the reader
|
||
of Chapter 4, that, while Ingersoll was unable (when in Paris in
|
||
1875) to locate, through the superintendent of Pere Lachaise, the
|
||
final resting-place of Auguste Comte, he did locate "the grave of
|
||
the old Napoleon." It was during his contemplation by that
|
||
"magnificent tomb of gilt and gold"; it was while he "gazed upon
|
||
the sarcophagus of rare and nameless marble" -- while he "leaned
|
||
over the balustrade and thought about the career of the greatest
|
||
soldier of the modern world," from "the banks of the Seine "to
|
||
Saint Helena, that he was moved to utter, in the now world-famous
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
200
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
"Soliloquy," words which disclosed in their author as great a
|
||
genius for domestic love and human sympathy as Napoleon had
|
||
possessed for murder: --
|
||
|
||
"I thought of the orphans and widows he had made -- of the
|
||
tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who
|
||
ever loved him. pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition.
|
||
And I said, I would rather have been a French peasant and worn
|
||
wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine
|
||
growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the amorous
|
||
kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that peasant,
|
||
with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the
|
||
sky -- with my children upon my knees and their arms about me -- I
|
||
would rather have been that man, and gone down to the tongueless
|
||
silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial
|
||
impersonation of force and murder, known as Napoleon the Great."
|
||
|
||
Ah, that "hut with a vine growing over the door"! It takes a
|
||
great man to prefer that hut to an empire and "a magnificent tomb
|
||
of gilt and gold, fit almost for a deity dead" -- a great man.
|
||
|
||
And not only did Ingersoll place domestic love above all else;
|
||
not only would he evangelize the world with his "gospel of the
|
||
fireside"; he would soothe mankind with the beautiful thought that
|
||
love is eternal. Those who recall that the Great Agnostic traced
|
||
the hope of a future life to human love in the present, -- to "a
|
||
flower that grows on the edge of the grave," -- will not wonder at
|
||
this -- at the following wishful vision of immortal love on earth:
|
||
|
||
"And do you know, it is a splendid thing to think that the
|
||
woman you really love will never grow old to you. Through the
|
||
wrinkles of time, through the mask of years, if you really love
|
||
her, you will always see the face you loved and won. And a woman
|
||
who really loves a man does not see that he grows old; he is not
|
||
decrepit to her; he does not tremble; he is not old; she always
|
||
sees the same gallant gentleman who won her hand and heart. I like
|
||
to think that love is eternal. And to love in that way and then go
|
||
down the hill of life together, and as you go down, hear, perhaps,
|
||
the laughter of grandchildren, while the birds of joy and love sing
|
||
once more in the leafless branches of the tree of age."
|
||
|
||
There is another picture, the only one, perhaps, in the
|
||
gallery of English letters, which would make for this a perfect
|
||
companion-piece. The two ought not to be longer apart: --
|
||
|
||
"John Anderson, my jo John
|
||
When we were first acquent,
|
||
Your locks were like the raven,
|
||
Your bonnie brow was brent;
|
||
But now your brow is beld, John.
|
||
Your locks are like the snow;
|
||
But blessings on your frosty pow,
|
||
John Anderson, my jo.
|
||
|
||
"John Anderson, my jo. John,
|
||
We clamb the hill thegither;
|
||
And monie a canty day, John,
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
201
|
||
|
||
INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION
|
||
|
||
We,ve had wi' ane anither:
|
||
Now we maun totter down, John,
|
||
But hand in hand we'll go,
|
||
And sleep thegither at the foot,
|
||
John Anderson, my jo."
|
||
[From Robert Burns]
|
||
|
||
And just as these two utterances are inseparably united in our
|
||
hearts and memories, not because of any resemblance in literary
|
||
form, but because of the affection and fidelity which permeate
|
||
both, -- which are the origin of both, -- so with many other
|
||
utterances of the same authors. And so with the authors themselves.
|
||
Indeed, to the worshiper at the shrine of humanitarian genius, not
|
||
only the qualities mentioned, but the tenderness and the ardent
|
||
love of liberty and justice which they alike manifested, have long
|
||
since transformed the names of Robert Burns and Robert Ingersoll
|
||
into perfect synonyms for each other.
|
||
|
||
It was said by Ingersoll, that "men are oaks, women are vines,
|
||
children are flowers." We have admiringly beheld the "oaks" and the
|
||
"vines," more especially the latter, and have heard his teachings
|
||
concerning their proper climate and environment. Let us enjoy with
|
||
him, in our next chapter, the perfume of the "flowers."
|
||
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
|
||
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
|
||
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
|
||
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
|
||
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
|
||
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
|
||
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
|
||
that America can again become what its Founders intended --
|
||
|
||
The Free Market-Place of Ideas.
|
||
|
||
The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
|
||
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
|
||
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
|
||
us, we need to give them back to America.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
The Works of
|
||
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
202
|
||
|