Mr. Clemens meets Dr. Van Dyke near Cathedral and talks with him concerning the human race—Copy of extract from one of Dr. Van Dyke’s articles on fishing.Ⓐtextual note
Last night I read in the Atlantic Ⓐtextual note a passage from one of Rev. Dr. Van Dyke’s books, and I cut it out, with a vaguely defined notion that I might need it some time or other, by and by. I like Van Dyke, and I greatly admire his literary style—this notwithstanding the drawback that a good deal of his literary product is of a religious sort. He is about thirty-fiveⒶtextual note years oldⒺexplanatory note, he is a Presbyterian, he is a clergyman, he is a member of the faculty of Princeton University. Still, I like him and admire him, notwithstanding.Ⓐtextual note
This forenoon I was lounging along Fifth AvenueⒶtextual note, and I stopped opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral to contemplate the crowd massed in front of the edifice. It is a grand Catholic day—a grand Catholic week, in fact. There’s a cardinal here with a message from the Pope, there are sixty bishops on hand, and there is to be great doingsⒺexplanatory note. A hand touched my shoulder—it was Van Dyke’s! We hadn’t met for a year. He nodded toward the multitude, and said:
“What do you think of it? Doesn’t it warm your heart? They are ignorant and poor, but they have faith, they have belief, and it uplifts them, it makes them free. They have feelings, they have views, convictions, and they live under a flag where they have no master, and where they have the right and the privilege of doing their own thinking, and of acting according to their preference, unmolested.Ⓐtextual note What do you think of it?”
“I think you have misinterpreted some of the details. You think that these people think. You know better. They don’t think; they get all their ostensible thinkings at second hand; they get their feelings at second hand; they get their faith, their beliefs, their convictions at second hand. They are in no sense free. They are like you and me and likeⒶtextual note all the rest of the human race—slaves. Slaves of custom, slaves of circumstance, environment, association. This crowd is the human race in little. It is no trouble to love the human race, and we do love it, for it is a child, and one can’t help loving a child; but the minute we set out to admire Ⓐtextual note the race we do as you have done—select and admire qualitiesⒶtextual note which it doesn’t possess.”
And so on and so on; we argued and argued, and arrived where we began: he clung to his reverence for the race as the grandest of the Creator’s inventions, and I clung to my conviction that it was not an invention to be really proud of. We had settled nothing. We were quiet for a while, and loafed peaceablyⒶtextual note along down the street. Then he took up the matter again. He reminded me that there were certain undeniably fine and beautiful qualities in our human nature. To witⒶtextual note, that we are brave, and hate cowardly acts; that we are loyal and true, and hate treachery and deceit; that we are just and fair and honorable, and hate injustice and unfairness; that we pity the weak, and protect them from wrong and harm; that we magnanimously stand between the oppressor and the oppressed, and between the man of cruel disposition and his friendless victim.
[begin page 227] I asked him if he was acquainted with this person.
He said he was—hundreds of him; that, broadly speaking, he had been describing a Christian; that a Christian, at his best, was just such a person as he had been portraying. I said—
“I know a very good Christian who cannot fill this bill—nor any detail of it, in fact.”
“I must take that as a jest,” he said, lightly.
“No, not a jest.”
“Then asⒶtextual note at least an extravagance, an exaggeration?”
“No, as fact, simple fact. And I am not speaking of aⒶtextual note commonplace Christian, but of a high-class one; one whose Christian record is without spot; one who can take rank, unchallenged, with the very best. I have not known a better; and I love him and admire him.”
“Come—you love and admire him, and yet he cannot fill any single detail of that beautiful character which I have portrayed?”
“Not a single one. Let me describe one of his performances. He conceived the idea of getting some pleasure out ofⒶtextual note deceiving, beguiling, swindling, pursuing, frightening, capturing, torturing, mutilating and murderingⒶtextual note a child—”
“Im-possible!”
“A child that had never done him any harm; a child that was gratefully enjoying its innocent life and liberty, and not suspecting that any one would want to take them away from it—for any reason, least of all for the mereⒶtextual note pleasure of it. And so—”
“You are describing a Christian? There is no such Christian. You are describing a madman.”
“No, a Christian—as good a one as lives. He sought out the child where it was playing, and offered it some dainties—offered them cunningly, persuasively, treacherously, cowardly,Ⓐtextual note and the child, mistaking him for one who meant itⒶtextual note a kindness, thankfully swallowed the dainties—then fled away in pain and terror, for the gift was poisoned. The man was full of joy at the success of his ingenious fraud, and chased the frightenedⒶtextual note child from one refuge to another for an hour, in a delirium of delight, and finally caught it and killed it; and by his eloquent enthusiasms one could see that he was as proud of his exploit as ever brave knight was, of deceiving, beguiling, betraying and destroying a cruel and wicked and pestilent giant thirty feet high. There—do you see? Is there any resemblance between this ChristianⒶtextual note and yours? This one was not brave, but the reverse of it; he was not fair and honorable,Ⓐtextual note he was a deceiver, a beguiler, a swindler, he took advantage of ignorant trustfulness and betrayed it; he had no pity for distressⒶtextual note and fright and pain, but took a frenzied delight in causing them, and watching the effects.Ⓐtextual note He was no protector of threatened liberty and menaced life, but took them both. And did it for fun. Merely for fun. But you seem to doubt me. Here is his own account of it; read it yourself; I clipped it out of the Atlantic last nightⒺexplanatory note. ForⒶtextual note ‘fish’Ⓐtextual note in the text, read ‘child.’Ⓐtextual note There is no other difference. It is a Christian in both cases, and in both cases the human race is exposed for what it is—a self-admiring humbug.”Ⓐtextual note
[begin page 228] As a point of departure, listen to a quotation from Dr. Henry van Dyke:—
“Chrr! sings the reel. The line tightens. The little rod firmly gripped in my hands bends into a bow of beauty, and a hundred feet behind us a splendid silver salmon leaps into the air. ‘What is it?’ cries the gypsy, ‘a fish?’ It is a fish, indeed, a noble ouananiche, and well hooked. Now if the gulls were here who grab little fish suddenly and never give them a chance; and if the mealy-mouthed sentimentalists were here, who like their fish slowly strangled to death in nets, they should see a fairer method of angling.
“The weight of the fish is twenty times that of the rod against which he matches himself. The tiny hook is caught painlessly in the gristle of his jaws. The line is long and light. He has the whole lake to play in, and he uses almost all of it, running, leaping, sounding the deep water, turning suddenly to get a slack line. The gypsy, tremendously excited, manages the boat with perfect skill, rowing this way and that way, advancing or backing water to meet the tactics of the fish, and doing the most important part of the work.
“After half an hour the ouananiche begins to grow tired and can be reeled in near to the boat. We can see him distinctly as he gleams in the dark water. It is time to think of landing him. Then we remember with a flash of despair that we have no landing-net! To lift him from the water by this line would break it in an instant. There is not a foot of the rocky shore smooth enough to beach him on. Our caps are far too small to use as a net for such a fish. What to do? We must row around with him gently and quietly for another ten minutes, until he is quite weary and tame. Now let me draw him softly toward the boat, slip my fingers under his gills to give a firm hold, and lift him quickly over the gunwale before he can gasp or kick. A tap on the head with the empty rod-case,—there he is,—the prettiest land-locked salmon that I ever saw, plump, round, perfectly shaped and colored, and just six and a half pounds in weight, the record fish of Jordan Pond.”Ⓐtextual note
We had a very good time together for an hour. And didn’t agree about anything. But it was for this reason that we had a good time, disagreement being the salt of a talk. Van Dyke is a good instance of a certain fact: that outside of a man’s own specialty, his thinkings are poor and slipshod, and his conclusions not valuable. Van Dyke’s specialty is English LiteratureⒶtextual note; he has studied it with deep and eager interest, and with an alert and splendid intelligence. With the result that the soundness of his judgments upon it is not to be lightly challenged by anybody. But he doesn’t know any more about the human being than the President does, or the Pope, or the philosophers,Ⓐtextual note or the cat. I wanted to give him a copy of my privately printed, unsigned, unacknowledged and unpublished gospel, “What is Man?Ⓐtextual note”Ⓔexplanatory note for his enlightenment, but thought better of it. He wouldn’t understand it.
title Dictated April 29, 1908] This “dictation” is in fact based on a manuscript.
He is about thirty-five years old] Henry van Dyke was born in 1852.
It is a grand Catholic day . . . there is to be great doings] The Catholics of the city were participating in festivities held to commemorate the founding of the Diocese of New York, which began on 26 April with a thanksgiving mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and ended on 2 May with a parade down Fifth Avenue. The climax of the week was a pontifical mass celebrated at the cathedral on 28 April by Michael Cardinal Logue of Ireland; at its conclusion Archbishop John M. Farley of New York read a congratulatory message from Pope Pius X (New York Times: “Primate of Ireland Here for Centennial,” 26 Apr 1908, 16; “Papal Greeting to New York Catholics,” 29 Apr 1908, 3; “Big Parade to End Church Centennial,” 2 May 1908, 5).
I clipped it out of the Atlantic last night] The passage inserted below was originally published in “Some Remarks on Gulls,” an article by van Dyke in Scribner’s Magazine for August 1907 (van Dyke 1907, 142). Clemens found it quoted in “Shall We Hunt and Fish? The Confessions of a Sentimentalist,” an essay by Episcopal minister Henry Bradford Washburn which appeared in the May 1908 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Washburn used van Dyke’s words as a “point of departure” to describe and explain his “positive aversion to the processes and the results of sportsmanship entailing death”: “It is bolder still to say that the sentimentalist is the only consistent Christian, that he is the one man who has reached that point where he dislikes all things that entail suffering or the curtailing of natural freedom, the man who cannot add to the total of necessary pain the agony incident to sport” (Washburn 1908, 672, 674, 678).
Source documents.
MS Manuscript, leaves numbered 1–8, 10: ‘Dictated . . . humbug.” ’ (226 title–227.41); ‘We had . . . understand it.’ (228.28–38).Washburn Clipping from “Shall We Hunt and Fish?” by Henry Bradford Washburn, Atlantic Monthly 101 (May 1908): 672, inserted in MS and numbered as leaf 9: ‘As a . . . Jordan Pond.” ’ (228.1–27).
TS1 Typescript, leaves numbered 2499–2506, made from MS and Washburn, and revised.
MS is written on buff-colored laid paper measuring 5¾ by 8¾ inches. TS1 is the unique source for the summary paragraph below the title. Hobby’s accidental variations from copy are not reported.