THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"
"We ask
To put forth just our strength, our human strength,
All starting fairly, all equipped alike."
"But when full roused, each giant limb awake,
Each sinew strung, the great heart pulsing fast,
He shall start up and stand on his own earth,
Then shall his long, triumphant march begin,
Thence shall his being date."
BROWNING.
The great poet's lines express Edward Bellamy's aim in writing his
famous book. That aim would realize in our country's daily being the
Great Declaration that gave us national existence; would, in equality
of opportunity, give man his own earth to stand on, and thereby--the
race for the first time enabled to enter unhampered upon the use of
its God-given possibilities--achieve a progress unexampled and
marvelous.
It is now twelve years since the writing of 'Looking Backward' changed
one of the most brilliant of the younger American authors into an
impassioned social reformer whose work was destined to have momentous
effect upon the movement of his age. His quality had hitherto been
manifest in romances like 'Doctor Heidenhof's Process' and 'Miss
Ludington's Sister,' and in many short stories exquisite in their
imaginative texture and largely distinguished by a strikingly original
development of psychical themes. Tales like 'The Blindman's World' and
'To Whom This May Come' will long linger in the memory of magazine
readers of the past twenty years.
'Doctor Heidenhof' was at once recognized as a psychological study of
uncommon power. "Its writer," said an English review, "is the lineal
intellectual descendant of Hawthorne." Nor was there in America any
lack of appreciation of that originality and that distinction of style
which mark Edward Bellamy's early work. In all this there was a strong
dominant note prophetic of the author's future activity. That note was
a steadfast faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature, a sense
of the meaning of love in its true and universal sense. 'Looking
Backward,' though ostensibly a romance, is universally recognized as a
great economic treatise in a framework of fiction. Without this guise
it could not have obtained the foothold that it did; there is just
enough of the skillful novelist's touch in its composition to give
plausibility to the book and exert a powerful influence upon the
popular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of the
nineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and the
vivid dramatic quality of the dream at the end of the book, are
instances of the art of the trained novelist which make the work
unique of its kind. Neither could the book have been a success had not
the world been ripe for its reception. The materials were ready and
waiting; the spark struck fire in the midst of them. Little more than
a decade has followed its publication, and the world is filled with
the agitation that it helped kindle. It has given direction to
economic thought and shape to political action.
Edward Bellamy was born in 1850,--almost exactly in the middle of the
century whose closing years he was destined so notably to affect. His
home has always been in his native village of Chicopee Falls,
Massachusetts, now a portion of the city of Chicopee, one of the group
of municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He lived on
Church Street in a house long the home of his father, a beloved
Baptist clergyman of the town. His clerical ancestry is perhaps
responsible for his essentially religious nature. His maternal
grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one of the early pastors of
Springfield, and among his paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamy
of Bethlehem, Connecticut, a distinguished theologian of revolutionary
days, a friend of Jonathan Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr.
He, however, outgrew with his boyhood all trammels of sect. But this
inherited trait marked his social views with a strongly
anti-materialistic and spiritual cast; an ethical purpose dominated
his ideas, and he held that a merely material prosperity would not be
worth the working for as a social ideal. An equality in material
well-being, however, he regarded as the soil essential for the true
spiritual development of the race.
Young Bellamy entered Union College at Schenectady, but was not
graduated. After a year in Germany he studied law and entered the bar,
but never practiced. A literary career appealed to him more strongly,
and journalism seemed the more available gateway thereto. His first
newspaper experience was on the staff of the New York 'Evening Post,'
and from that journal he went to the Springfield 'Union.' Besides his
European trip, a journey to Hawaii by way of Panama and a return
across the continent gave a considerable geographical range to his
knowledge of the world at large.
It is notable that his first public utterance, made before a local
lyceum when a youth in his teens, was devoted to sentiments of social
reform that foreshadowed his future work. When 'Looking Backward' was
the sensation of the year, a newspaper charge brought against Mr.
Bellamy was that he was "posing for notoriety." To those who know the
retiring, modest, and almost diffident personality of the author,
nothing could have been more absurd. All opportunities to make money
upon the magnificent advertising given by a phenomenal literary
success were disregarded. There were offers of lecture engagements
that would have brought quick fortune, requests from magazine editors
for articles and stories on any terms that he might name, proffered
inducements from publishers to write a new book and to take advantage
of the occasion to make a volume of his short stories with the
assurance of a magnificent sale,--to all this he was strikingly
indifferent. Two or three public addresses, a few articles in the
reviews, and for a while the editorship of 'The New Nation,' a weekly
periodical which he established in Boston,--this was the sum of his
public activity until he should have made himself ready for a second
sustained effort. To all sordid incentives he was as indifferent as if
he had been a child of his new order, a century later. The hosts of
personal friends whom his work made for him knew him as a winsome
personality; and really to know him was to love him. His nature was
keenly sympathetic; his conversation ready and charming, quickly
responsive to suggestion, illuminated by gentle humor and occasionally
a flash of playful satire. He disliked controversy, with its waste of
energy in profitless discussion, and jestingly averred that if there
were any reformers living in his neighborhood he should move away.
The cardinal features of 'Looking Backward,' that distinguish it from
the generality of Utopian literature, lie in its definite scheme of
industrial organization on a national basis, and the equal share
allotted to all persons in the products of industry, or the public
income, on the same ground that men share equally in the free gifts of
nature, like air to breathe and water to drink; it being absolutely
impossible to determine any equitable ratio between individual
industrial effort and individual share in industrial product on a
graded basis. The book, however, was little more than an outline of
the system, and, after an interval devoted to continuous thought and
study, many points called for elaboration. Mr. Bellamy gave his last
years and his ripest efforts to an exposition of the economical and
ethical basis of the new order which he held that the natural course
of social evolution would establish.
'Equality' is the title of his last book. It is a more elaborate work
than 'Looking Backward,' and in fact is a comprehensive economic
treatise upon the subject that gives it its name. It is a sequel to
its famous predecessor, and its keynote is given in the remark that
the immortal preamble of the American Declaration of Independence
(characterized as the true constitution of the United States),
logically contained the entire statement of universal economic
equality guaranteed by the nation collectively to its members
individually. "The corner-stone of our state is economic equality, and
is not that the obvious, necessary, and only adequate pledge of these
three rights,--life, liberty, and happiness? What is life without its
material basis, and what is an equal right to life but a right to an
equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men be free who
must ask the right to labor and to live from their fellow-men and seek
their bread from the hands of others? How else can any government
guarantee liberty to men save by providing them a means of labor and
of life coupled with independence; and how could that be done unless
the government conducted the economic system upon which employment and
maintenance depend? Finally, what is implied in the equal right of all
to the pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as it
depends at all upon material facts, is not bound up with economic
conditions; and how shall an equal opportunity for the pursuit of
happiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of economic
equality?"
The book is so full of ideas, so replete with suggestive aspects, so
rich in quotable parts, as to form an arsenal of argument for apostles
of the new democracy. As with 'Looking Backward,' the humane and
thoughtful reader will lay down 'Equality' and regard the world about
him with a feeling akin to that with which the child of the tenement
returns from his "country week" to the foul smells, the discordant
noises, the incessant strife of the wonted environment.
But the writing of 'Equality' was a task too great for the physical
strength and vitality of its author. His health, never robust, gave
way completely, and the book was finished by an indomitable and
inflexible dominion of the powerful mind over the failing body which
was nothing short of heroic. Consumption, that common New England
inheritance, developed suddenly, and in September of 1897 Mr. Bellamy
went with his family to Denver, willing to seek the cure which he
scarcely hoped to find.
The welcome accorded to him in the West, where his work had met with
widespread and profound attention, was one of his latest and greatest
pleasures. Letters came from mining camps, from farms and villages,
the writers all longing to do something for him to show their love.
The singular modesty already spoken of as characterizing Mr. Bellamy,
and an entire unwillingness to accept any personal and public
recognition, had perhaps kept him from a realization of the fact that
his fame was international. But the author of a book which in ten
years had sold nearly a million of copies in England and America, and
which had been translated into German, French, Russian, Italian,
Arabic, Bulgarian, and several other languages and dialects, found
himself not among strangers, although two thousand miles from the home
of his lifetime.
He greatly appreciated and gratefully acknowledged his welcome to
Colorado, which he left in April, 1898, when he realized that his life
was rapidly drawing to a close.
He died on Sunday morning, May 22, after a month in the old home which
he had eagerly desired to see again, leaving a widow and two young
children.
At the simple service held there, with his kindred and the friends of
a lifetime about him, the following passages from 'Looking Backward'
and 'Equality' were read as a fitting expression, in his own words, of
that hope for the bettering and uplifting of Humanity, which was the
real passion of his noble life.
"Said not the serpent in the old story, 'If you eat of the fruit of
the tree of knowledge you shall be as gods?' The promise was true in
words, but apparently there was some mistake about the tree. Perhaps
it was the tree of selfish knowledge, or else the fruit was not ripe.
The story is obscure. Christ later said the same thing when he told
men that they might be the sons of God. But he made no mistake as to
the tree he showed them, and the fruit was ripe. It was the fruit of
love, for universal love is at once the seed and fruit, cause and
effect, of the highest and completest knowledge. Through boundless
love man becomes a god, for thereby is he made conscious of his
oneness with God, and all things are put under his feet. 'If we love
one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.' 'He
that loveth his brother dwelleth in the light.' 'If any man say, I
love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.' 'He that loveth not
his brother abideth in death.' 'God is love, and he that dwelleth in
love dwelleth in God.' 'Every one that loveth knoweth God.' 'He that
loveth not knoweth not God.'
"Here is the very distillation of Christ's teaching as to the
conditions of entering on the divine life. In this we find the
sufficient explanation why the revelation which came to Christ so long
ago and to other illumined souls could not possibly be received by
mankind in general so long as an inhuman social order made a wall
between man and God, and why, the moment that wall was cast down, the
revelation flooded the earth like a sunburst.
"'If we love one another, God dwelleth in us,' and mark how the words
were made good in the way by which at last the race found God! It was
not, remember, by directly, purposely, or consciously seeking God. The
great enthusiasm of humanity which overthrew the older and brought in
the fraternal society was not primarily or consciously a Godward
aspiration at all. It was essentially a humane movement. It was a
melting and flowing forth of men's hearts toward one another; a rush
of contrite, repentant tenderness; an impassioned impulse of mutual
love and self-devotion to the common weal. But 'if we love one
another, God dwelleth in us,' and so man found it. It appears that
there came a moment, the most transcendent moment in the history of
the race of man, when with the fraternal glow of this world of
new-found embracing brothers there seems to have mingled the ineffable
thrill of a divine participation, as if the hand of God were clasped
over the joined hands of men. And so it has continued to this day and
shall for evermore.
"Your seers and poets in exalted moments had seen that death was but a
step in life, but this seemed to most of you to have been a hard
saying. Nowadays, as life advances toward its close, instead of being
shadowed by gloom, it is marked by an access of impassioned expectancy
which would cause the young to envy the old, but for the knowledge
that in a little while the same door will be opened to them. In your
day the undertone of life seems to have been one of unutterable
sadness, which, like the moaning of the sea to those who live near the
ocean, made itself audible whenever for a moment the noise and bustle
of petty engrossments ceased. Now this undertone is so exultant that
we are still to hear it.
"Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have
passed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end is
lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God, 'who is our
home,' the return of the individual by the way of death, and the
return of the race by the fulfillment of its evolution, when the
divine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a
tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and,
veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race
is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The
heavens are before it."
There are those who have made strenuous objections to the ideals of
Edward Bellamy on the ground that they are based on nothing better
than purely material well-being. In the presence of the foregoing
utterance can they maintain that attitude?
SYLVESTER BAXTER.
