Imaginary Obituaries:—E. S. Martin

Why Not Estimate Our Writers and Philosophers While They Are Still Alive?

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

HARDLY a man could have passed on in America who would leave a more widely spread personal sorrow behind him than E. S. Martin, the chief editorial writer on Life for upward of twenty-five years, and the author of half a dozen books of essays and commentaries. He was a veteran journalist, and had always the art—particularly in the pages of Life—of making friends of his readers, and sharing with mankind the religion that shone through him. He was handsome; and you could somehow feel this in his writings. He possessed a certain natural power; and you could see it in his face. During thirty or forty years he radiated from within his deafness, which was the tower of his isolation, and yet became also the lens about his light, the concentrator of his character.

Martin belonged to the old school of American journalists who were sages, counsellors and shepherds of the people. The race was born when the Newspaper came into existence in the eighteenth century and when the village schoolmasters and town wisemen became editors. Ben Franklin is the common ancestor of all of these household oracles, who grew up with the country and gave the moral tone to its best newspapers for a hundred years. The most famous and powerful of the race was Horace Greeley, who flourished at a time when their influence was at its height and while they were still to be found enthroned in the editorial offices of our great daily newspapers.

The American people still has its sages and oracles, hundreds of them, though they are not often found in the offices of great newspapers, but rather in the quiet sanctums of more thoughtful publications. There is today no room for a shepherd in a-really busy editorial office, and this condition was well shown by the life of E. S. Martin, who had to move his desk and carry his crook across the street many times during his life,—though he always managed to keep his flock together through it all.

The Eternal Farmer

MARTIN was a whimsical sage who came to town from the center of New York State and remained always the countryman. He used the quaint speech of his youth as a literary vehicle, and though he had been to schools and colleges (somebody said to Harvard) ; though he passed his life in Metropolitan newspaper offices and in writing about current events, he never lost his gentle aloofness,—a sort of wondering, benevolent, homely manner of approach to any subject he might be treating.

He never approached any subject very closely, but sipped and flitted, doubted, guessed and smiled. He acquired an immense popularity, due to the fact that he really was the eternal farmer that lives in every true American. He typified not only the natural goodness, the native piety, the mild social warmth that clothes our continent, but also our intellectual inertia, our inability to think hard and long upon a single subject, our dread of any clear-cut vision-of-evil, our fear of hurting the feelings of others, our willingness to wind up any discussion—no matter what the subject may be—with some soothing non-conclusion.

From one point of view Martin was a menace to Society; because, while he lived and wrote in an epoch when it was everybody's duty to wake up, his function was apparently that of a narcotic.

We are beginning to feel the prick of conscience and intellect about such matters as political reform, education • and the responsibility of the individual, when, amid the mild ferment of the times Martin became the prophet of our great national characteristic—Moderation.

The Ready Optimist

IT is hard to say just what is at the bottom of that easy-going American tolerance which is the enemy of righteous indignation. The first backwoodsmen of North America probably originated the ready optimism which has become ingrained in the American mind and is identified with our race.

The thing itself bears a profound relation to the truths of religion, and you can hardly attack or expose it without seeming to be cynical. If you admit that God is good, God's goodness is immediately cited by your Ready Optimist as proof that no one need get excited. He will maintain that everything is, ultimately speaking, all right, and especially that everyone is all right,—good enough, clever enough, educated enough, courageous enough, well enough trained, and well enough equipped and featured in every way.

Now the slumbering, ignorant, lazy persons among us who began, during the last quarter of a century, to see glimpses of new ideas, to groan and labor here and there with a new thought or impulse, were always being told by their village sages not to worry too hard; it would all come out right in the end; there was a little of good and a little of bad everywhere; and life was puzzling. To be sure, mowing-machines would rust if you left them in the open air, but perhaps they'd rust anyhow. A little reading and writing is good, but farmers don't need much. You can spell 'most anyway that comes easiest to you, just so long as you make it clear that your heart's in the right place.

American Moderation

MODERATION is no doubt often a virtue, as for instance, where revenge is in question, or bad passions are aroused. Moderation in language is generally commendable. But the American thinks it wrong to be more than moderately clearheaded, .more than moderately in the right about anything. He distrusts righteous indignation because righteous indignation savors of the absolute. It planks down an assertion or a comment without a "perhaps," or a "let us hope," or an all s well." This, to the American, seems to smack of impiety.

The greatest boon the war brought us was the carnival of indignation that came with it. This rage humanized us. Our slow entry into the war was due to our deep ancestral belief that moderation is the cure for all things. This belief still haunts us. We are enthusiastically moderate where hard thinking is concerned; because, as history shows, hard thinking and animosity go together. Even clear thought is inextricably mixed up with animosity; and every temperament has to make its choice between the two.

The Short Cut to Brotherly Love

THIS is part of Christ's teaching which the American people have seldom accepted. The teaching bites too keenly. It draws blood; it sheds blood. We are ready to worship God with all our heart but not with all our mind. The tolerance that comes in the wake of a big, righteous outburst does a man good and has cost him something; but. easy tolerance is the enemy to moral sense, it avoids conflict, it seeks brotherly love by a short cut, and it represents unfaith because it dares not trust the mind.

It was Martin's function to pour oil upon the wavelets of a very still pond, and to shelter the sensibilities of a very protected people. I suppose that if you should take all ofhis essays on all subjects during the last thirty years —and they would be as voluminous as the writings of Voltaire—you would find that in all that mighty pile of manuscript he had never struck an uncompromisingly clear note about anything.

And yet, as his mind moved along across contemporary history, it reflected a certain selfless beauty, always the same, ever unaffected by events. It was this element, so clearly predominating in his writings that gave Martin his power.

There is a force that strikes through any man's work and writes his character into every seventh word, no matter what the subject may be, no matter what the victim is trying to say about it. We read these codes easily in the common case, i.e., where a man is uttering true, lofty thoughts while the imp of his own soul peeps through them and grins at us.

But in Martin's case the process is reversed. His writings are full of feeble commonplaces, and yet through them all the nobility of the man confronts us.

Martin and America

THE idealism of America, her right-mindedness and pure-heartedness spoke in him; not in the trumpet tones which those qualities are supposed to employ, but in the halfthoughts and ponderings of proverbial philosophy.

His compass swings aimlessly about, and he doesn't know where the North is; yet you feel that this is because the dial-plate of his education is loose: his education is a jumble. The plate lurches from N. E. to S. W.; but the needle itself is really pointing North.

That is somewhat the way the world at large feels about the United States. We are thought to be right-minded, but we are regarded as being neither highly educated nor coherent; we do not "talk after the wisest."

Yet I must say that if our integrity of spirit shall prove to be as great as was Martin's, I am content to await the jostling of worldevents which will sooner or later clamp our dial into place.