Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  He realized clearly the difference between the stern ascetic spirit of the Baptist and his own sunny trust and simple human love, but to the end of his life he championed John and dared the Pharisees to deny his divine mission. It seems impossible to assume that his own fundamental purpose, at least in the beginning of his ministry, was wholly divergent from that of John. In the main he shared John’s national and social hope. His aim too was the realization of the theocracy. Moreover, in joining hands with John, Jesus clasped hands with the entire succession of the prophets with whom he classed John. Their words were his favorite quotations. Like them he disregarded or opposed the ceremonial elements of religion and insisted on the ethical. Like them he sided with the poor and oppressed. As Amos and Jeremiah foresaw the conflict of their people with the Assyrians and the Chaldeans, so Jesus foresaw his nation drifting toward the conflict with Rome, and like them he foretold disaster, the fall of the temple and of the holy city. That prophetic type of religion which we have tried to set forth in the previous chapter, and which constituted the chief religious heritage of his nation, had laid hold on Jesus and he had laid hold of it and had appropriated its essential spirit. In the poise and calm of his mind and manner, and in the love of his heart, he was infinitely above them all. But the greatest of all prophets was still one of the prophets, and that large interest in the national and social life which had been inseparable from the religion of the prophets was part of his life too. The presumption is that Jesus shared the fundamental religious purpose of the prophets. If any one asserts that he abandoned the collective hope and gave his faith solely to religious individualism, he will have to furnish express statements in which Jesus disavows the religious past of his people. The purpose of Jesus: the kingdom of God The historical background which we have just sketched must ever be kept in mind in understanding the life and purpose of Jesus. He was not merely an initiator, but a consummator. Like all great minds that do not merely imagine Utopias, but actually advance humanity to a new epoch, he took the situation and material furnished to him by the past and moulded that into a fuller approximation to the divine conception within him. He embodied the prophetic stream of faith and hope. He linked his work to that of John the Baptist as the one contemporary fact to which he felt most inward affinity. Jesus began his preaching with the call: “The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is now close at hand; repent and believe in the glad news.” The kingdom of God continued to be the centre of all his teaching as recorded by the synoptic gospels.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  By swift moral intuition, by the instinct of human fellow-feeling under the impulse of religious faith, regulations were conceived there which anticipated and outran the rudimentary protective legislation of our day. We shall glance at a few points only. The land belonged to Jehovah, the national god. That is only another way of saying that it belonged to the community. It was not individual property, but clan and family property. There were various provisions to protect the right of the family to its ancestral holding and to prevent any permanent alienation. If land was sold under stress of need, it could be purchased back under favorable terms. In an agricultural community and before the introduction of machinery in farming the land is by far the most important means of production. It is one of the highest problems of statesmanship how to plant and root the people evenly and wisely in the land. If the land is owned by the men who till it, there is social health and strength. If it is owned by wealthy proprietors and tilled by landless agricultural laborers, a curse is on the people. All the provisions of the Hebrew Law were meant to counteract the separation of the people from the land. It sought to prevent the growth of great estates and a landed aristocracy on the one side, and the growth of a landless proletariat on the other side. Every seven years the fields were to lie fallow (probably in rotation) and their untilled harvests were to belong to all alike, like the berries that grow along our country roadside or in our forests. Of course the poor were benefited most by such liberty to picnic. When the grain, the grapes, and the olives were harvested, the poor had the right to glean, and the owner was forbidden to be too careful in harvesting the corners or to go over the vines and trees a second time. A hungry man passing through the fields was always free to eat of grain or fruit. These provisions doubtless were based on ancient customs, which in turn were remnants of primitive communism in land, a lingering recognition that the entire community has rights in the land which limit those of the individual owner. This right of the hungry man to help himself was not like the coin flung to a beggar in pity. It was the claim to joint-ownership. It was his right. There is a fundamental moral distinction between the two things. The laborer was to be paid at sundown. That recognizes the importance of prompt payment of wages, for which modern labor legislation has had to contend. The principle for which the Eight-hour Movement and the Early-closing Movement now agitate was embodied in the Sabbath law. The Decalogue emphatically throws the protection of that law over those whose labor-force was most in danger of being exploited, the slaves, the immigrant stranger, and the beasts of burden.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Their religion became international in its horizon and more profoundly ethical. Had their piety previously been narrow in its outlook and ritual in its character, it would now have suffered shipwreck. The Assyrian riddle would have been insoluble. Because they were men of large interest, new occasions under the inspiration of God were able to teach them new duties and new truths. They added new terms to the synthesis of truth. Their new faith at first seemed to the people a blasphemous denial of religion. When the events which they had foretold were actually fulfilled, the prophetic books became the support and stay on which popular religion slowly climbed to new life. We are often told that ministers who concern themselves in political and social questions are likely to lose their spiritual power and faith. Professor George Adam Smith, in discussing the development of prophetic religion, says on the contrary: “Confine religion to the personal, it grows rancid, morbid. Wed it to patriotism, it lives in the open air, and its blood is pure.” I do not think so sweeping a generalization about purely private religion is just. But those who hold that the flower of religion can be raised only in flowerpots will have to make their reckoning with the prophets of Israel. The very book on which they feed their private devotion and that entire religion out of which Christianity grew, took shape through a divine inspiration which found its fittest and highest organs in a series of political and social preachers. It is safe to say that the “ethical monotheism” which has been Israel’s invaluable contribution to the religious life of humanity, would never have developed and survived if the prophets had from the outset limited their religion in the way in which we are nowadays advised to limit it. The later religious individualism That virility and humaneness of the prophets and that capacity for growth which stir our enthusiasm were largely due to the breadth and inclusiveness of their religious sympathy and faith. All the world was God’s field; all the affairs of the nation were the affairs of religion. Every great event in history taught them a lesson in theology. This type of religion was destroyed when the national life itself was destroyed by the foreign conquerors. The nation had been the subject of prophecy, and now the nation as such was blotted out. How could the prophets any longer appeal for national righteousness, when it was not at the option of the people to be righteous? Political agitation among a people under jealous foreign despotism would mean revolutionary agitation and would never be tolerated. Thus all the religious passion and reflection which had formerly flowed into social and political channels was dammed up and turned back. Prayer and private devoutness in pious individuals and in groups of pious men was the only field left to the religious impulse.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  This is the more remarkable because it was weak in numbers, apparently withdrawn from the larger life of society, and without any present or any apparent future influence on the organized life of the civilized world. Such convictions, cherished in the face of such odds, argue that it was launched with a powerful and invincible social impetus, and that the consciousness of a regenerating mission for social life is inseparable from the highest form of religion. The strength of its social tendencies was not exhausted by its hopes for the future. It immediately began to build a society within which the new ideals of moral and social life were to be realized at once, so far as the limitations of an evil environment permitted. The primitive Christian churches were not ecclesiastical organizations so much as fraternal communities. They withdrew their members from the social life outside and organized a complete social life within their circle. Their common meals expressed and created social solidarity. Their organization at first was executive and was devised to meet social and moral, rather than religious and doctrinal, needs. Their income was completely devoted to fraternal help. As organizations for mutual help and fraternal cooperation the Christian churches became indispensable to the city population and invincible by the government. This fraternal helpfulness was more than mere religious kindliness. It was animated by the consciousness of a creative social mission and accompanied by a spirit of social unrest which proves the existence of powerful currents of democratic feeling. Under the first impact of its ideas and spirit, men and women tried to realize at once those social changes which have actually been accomplished in centuries of development. This impulse proves that a reconstructive social dynamic inheres in Christianity and must find an outlet in some form, slow or swift. We were prepared to find a long drop downward when we passed from Jesus to the thoughts and doings of his followers. We did find it so. In their religious life not even the greatest maintained his level, and the lowest groped in a density of superstition and puerile legalism which makes it seem queer to put the great name of Jesus upon them. And yet the higher impulse was implanted. Give it time! Humanity is an organism that passes through a long series of metamorphoses, and it measures its seasons by centuries. The purification of the religious life, the comprehension of the real meaning and spirit of Christ, have made marvellous progress in recent times. In the social direction of the religious spirit we found a like decline. There is not the same unerring penetration of judgment on social morality, not the same eagle-eyed boldness of hope and faith for the future, not the same sweet reasonableness about the slow methods of realizing the ultimate goal, not the same lovable love nor the same power to heal and save the broken and diseased members of the social body.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The first scientific life of Christ was written in 1829 by Karl Hase. Christians had always bowed in worship before their Master, but they had never undertaken to understand his life in its own historical environment and his teachings in the sense in which Jesus meant them to be understood by his hearers. He had stood like one of his pictures in Byzantine art, splendid against its background of gold, but unreal and unhuman. Slowly, and still with many uncertainties in detail, his figure is coming out of the past to meet us. He has begun to talk to us as he did to his Galilean friends, and the better we know Jesus, the more social do his thoughts and aims become. Jesus not a social reformer Under the influence of this new historical study of Christ, and under the pressure of the intense new social interest in contemporary life, the pendulum is now swinging the other way. Men are seizing on Jesus as the exponent of their own social convictions. They all claim him. “He was the first socialist.” “Nay, he was a Tolstoian anarchist.” “Not at all; he was an upholder of law and order, a fundamental opponent of the closed shop.” It is a great tribute to his power over men and to the many-sidedness of his thought that all seek shelter in his great shadow. But in truth Jesus was not a social reformer of the modern type. Sociology and political economy were just as far outside of his range of thought as organic chemistry or the geography of America. He saw the evil in the life of men and their sufferings, but he approached these facts purely from the moral, and not from the economic or historical point of view. He wanted men to live a right life in common, and only in so far as the social questions are moral questions did he deal with them as they confronted him. And he was more than a teacher of morality. Jesus had learned the greatest and deepest and rarest secret of all—how to live a religious life. When the question of economic wants is solved for the individual and all his outward adjustments are as comfortable as possible, he may still be haunted by the horrible emptiness of his life and feel that existence is a meaningless riddle and delusion. If the question of the distribution of wealth were solved for all society and all lived in average comfort and without urgent anxiety, the question would still be how many would be at peace with their own souls and have that enduring joy and contentment which alone can make the outward things fair and sweet and rise victorious over change. Universal prosperity would not be incompatible with universal ennui and Weltschmerz .

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  He paid tribute to the rugged bravery and power of the man, and asserted that the new religious era had begun with John as an era of strenuous movement and stir. “The Law and the prophets were until John; from that time the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached, and every man entereth violently into it.” Both Jesus and the people generally felt that in John they had an incarnation of the spirit of the ancient prophets. He wore their austere garb; he shared their utter fearlessness, their ringing directness of speech, their consciousness of speaking an inward message of God. The substance of his message was also the same. It was the old prophetic demand for ethical obedience. He and his disciples fasted and he taught them certain forms of prayer, but in his recorded teaching to the people there is not a word about the customary ritual of religion, about increased Sabbath observance, about stricter washings and sacrifices, or the ordinary exercises of piety. He spoke only of repentance, of ceasing from wrongdoing. He hailed the professional exponents of religion who came to hear him, as a brood of snakes wriggling away from the flames of the judgment. He demolished the self-confidence of the Jew and his pride of descent and religious monopoly, just as Amos or Jeremiah did. If God wanted children of Abraham, they were cheap and easy to get; God could turn the pebbles of the Jordan valley into children of Abraham by the million. But what God wanted, and found hard to get, was men who would quit evil. Yet God was bound to get such and would destroy all others. Now was the time to repent and by the badge of baptism to enroll with the purified remnant. The people asked for details. What would repentance involve? “What then must we do?” He replied: “He that hath two coats, let him share with him that hath none; and he that hath food, let him do likewise.” The way to prepare for the Messianic era and to escape the wrath of the Messiah was to institute a brotherly life and to equalize social inequalities. If John thus conceived of the proper preparation for the Messianic salvation, how did he conceive of the Messianic era itself? Luke records his advice to two special classes of men, the tax-gatherers and the soldiers. The tax-gatherers had used their legal powers for grafting and lining their pockets with the excess extorted from the people. The soldiers had used their physical force for the same ends, like a New York policeman taking a banana from the push-cart while the Italian tries to look pleasant. John told them to stop being parasites and to live on their honest earnings. Would any preacher have defined repentance in these terms if his eyes had not been open to the social inequality about him and to the exploitation of the people by the representatives of organized society?

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Last night I sat up until one o’clock reading Henry’s novel, Moloch , while he read mine. His was overwhelming, the work of a giant. I was at a loss to tell him how it affected me. And this giant sat there quietly and read my slight book with such comprehension, such enthusiasm, talking about the deftness of it, the subtlety, the voluptuousness, shouting at certain passages, criticizing, too. What a force he is! I gave him the one thing June cannot give him: honesty. I am so ready to admit what a supremely developed ego would not admit: that June is a terrifying and inspiring character who makes every other woman insipid, that I would live her life except for my compassion and my conscience, that she may destroy Henry the man, but Henry the writer is more enriched by ordeals than by peace. I, on the other hand, cannot destroy Hugo, because he has nothing else. But like June, I have a capacity for delicate perversions. The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure. My conflict is going to be greater than June’s, because she has no mind watching her life. Others do it for her, and she denies all they say or write. I have a mind which is bigger than all the rest of me, an inexorable conscience. Eduardo says, “Go and be psychoanalyzed.” But that seems too simple. I want to make my own discoveries. I do not need drugs, artificial stimulation. Yet I want to experience those very things with June, to penetrate the evil which attracts me. I seek life, and the experiences I want are denied me because I carry in me a force which neutralizes them. I meet June, the near-prostitute, and she becomes pure. A purity which maddens Henry, a purity of face and being which is awesome, just as I saw her one afternoon in the corner of the divan, transparent, supernatural. Henry speaks to me of her extreme vulgarity. I know her lack of pride. Vulgarity gives the joy of desecrating. But June is not a demon. Life is the demon, possessing her, and their coition is violent because her voraciousness for life is enormous, a tasting of its bitterest flavors. After Henry’s visit I began to tiger-pace the house and to say to Hugo I had to go away. There were outcries. “You are not really sick—just tired.” But Hugo, as usual, understood, consented. The house suffocated me. I couldn’t see people, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t rest either.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  things. He is no Proust, lingering and stretching. He is in movement. He lives by gusts. It is the gusts I enjoy in Henry. I may sit for a whole day after a gust and sail my river boat slowly down the feelings that he has dispersed with prodigality. Eduardo says I have never really entirely given myself, but that seems impossible when I see how I submit to the nobility and perfection of Hugo, to the sensualism of Henry, to the beauty of Eduardo himself. The other night at the concert I stood transfixed before him. He has learned not to smile, which is what I must learn. The color of his skin alone attracts me. He has the golden pallor of the Spanish but with a Northern glow, too, a rosiness under the tan. And the color of his eyes, that changeful green, unbearably cool. It is the mouth and nostrils which promise. But again I have the sensation of Eduardo and me walking through the world and knocking our heads together. Our heads alone meet and knock. I would have nothing else. I like his mind, which is like a sanctuary, very rich with his continuous plumbing and analysis. He seems without will because he obeys his unconscious, and, like Lawrence, cannot always tell why. Henry has noticed what neither a Hugo or an Eduardo would notice. I was lying in bed and he said, “You always seem to be taking poses, in an almost Oriental way.” He demands strong words from me when he fucks, and I cannot give them. I cannot tell him what I feel. He teaches me new gestures, prolongations, variations. Eduardo asked me the other day if I would like to try June’s way: plunge into an absolute denial of scruples, to lie (to one’s self, principally), to deform one’s nature so as to allow no impediment, like my incapacity for cruelty. Yesterday, in the very paroxysm of sensual joy, I could not bite Henry as he wanted me to. Eduardo is afraid of my journal. He is afraid of an indictment, and that I should not have understood. He confessed this fear to his psychoanalyst.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  This, because I received this morning the first pages of his new book, stupendous pages. He is doing his best writing now, fevered yet cohesive. Every word now hits the mark. The man is whole, strong, as he never was. I want to breathe his presence for a few hours, feed him, cool him, fill him with that heavy breath of earth and trees which whip his blood. God, this is like living every moment in an orgasm, with only pauses between plunges. I want Henry to know this: that I can subordinate the jealous grasping of woman to a passionate devotion to the writer. I feel a proud servitude. There is splendor in his writing, a splendor which transfigures everything he touches. Last night Henry and Hugo talked for each other, admired each other. Hugo’s generosity blossomed. When we were in our bedroom, I compensated him. At breakfast, in the garden, he read Henry’s latest pages. His enthusiasm flared. I took advantage of it to suggest we open our home to him, the great writer. Holding my hand, weighing my words of reassurance—“Henry interests me as a writer, that’s all”—he assented to all I wanted. I go to the gate to see him off. He is happy just to be loved, and I am astonished by my own lies, my acting. I did not come out unscathed from the inferno of Henry’s overnight visit. The development of those two days was intricate. Just as I was beginning to act like June, “capable of worship, devotion, but also of the greatest callousness to obtain what she wants,” as Henry had said, he fell into a sentimental mood. It was after Hugo had gone off to work. Henry said, “He is so sensitive, one ought not to hurt a man like that.” This roused a storm in me. I left the table and went to my room. He came to watch me weeping, and he was glad to see me weep, showing the absence of callousness. But I became tense, poisonous. When Hugo returned in the evening, Henry began again to listen to him attentively, to speak his language, to talk gravely, ponderously. The three of us were sitting in the garden. Our talk was at first desultory, until Henry began to ask questions on psychology. (Sometime during the day, probably out of jealousy of June, I had said something which had aroused Henry’s jealousy of Allendy.) Everything I had read the previous year, all my talks with Allendy, my own broodings on the subject, all this gushed out of me with amazing energy and clarity. Suddenly Henry stopped me and said, “I don’t trust either Allendy’s ideas or your thinking, Anaïs. Why, I only

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Everything is secondary to Henry. If he did not have June, I would give everything to live with him. Each different aspect of him holds me: Henry correcting my novel with amazing care, with interest, with sarcasm, with admiration, with complete understanding; Henry, without self-confidence, so extraordinarily modest; Henry, the demon pumping me, making diabolical notes; Henry concealing his feelings from Fred and displaying to me a tremendous tenderness. Last night in bed, half asleep, he was still murmuring, “You’re so wonderful, there is no man good enough for you.” He has made me more honest with myself. And then he says, “You give me so much, so much and I give you nothing.” He, too, lacks confidence. He is uneasy in certain social situations if they are the least bit chic. He is not sure of my love. He believes that I am extremely sensual and therefore I could easily leave him for another man and still another. At this I laugh. Yes, of course I would love to be fucked five times a day, but I would have to be in love. That is certainly a drawback, an inconvenience. And I can only love one man at a time. “I want you to stop with me,” Henry says. “I love your not being promiscuous. I was terribly worried when you were interested in Montparnasse.” And then he begins to kiss me. “You’ve got me, Anaïs.” He has playful, almost childish caresses for me sometimes. We rub noses, or he chews my eyelashes, or runs his thumb over the outlines of my face. And I then see a sort of gnomelike Henry, a little Henry, so tender. Fred is sure Henry is hurting me fearfully. But Henry cannot hurt me any more. Even his faithlessness could not hurt me. Besides, I require less tenderness. Henry is toughening me. When I find out he does not like my perfume because it is too delicate, at first I am a bit offended. Fred loves Mitsouko, but Henry likes acrid, powerful perfumes. He always demands assertion, potency. It is like his asking me to change my hair style because he likes wildness in hair. When he uttered the word “wildness” I responded to it, as though it were something I had been wanting. Wild hair. His stocky, firm hands go through my hair. My hair is in his mouth when we sleep. And when I clasp my hands behind my head, raising my hair, in a Grecian way, he exclaims, “That is the way I love it.” I feel at home in Clichy. Hugo is not necessary to me. I only bring to him my weariness from sleepless nights, a joyful weariness.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I always admired his long and carefully manicured fingers, stained yellow at the tips, between the index and the middle finger, from the Turkish tobacco that perfumed his classroom. He had published two slim volumes of verse of a beauty that, to me, seemed quite disconcerting; this alone showed me that it is possible to achieve a true mastery of a language that is not one’s mother tongue. Marrou, however, was not very popular. Our other teachers made no bones about proclaiming their opinions on his vanity and his pretentiousness. As for my classmates, they made fun of his elegant way of dressing and rather theatrical manner, his majestic gait as he walked with slow movements but a springy step, which they all suspected, perhaps quite rightly, of being affected. It was whispered that he could be violent and brutal, that he had been divorced, and that his wife, a Frenchwoman, had no longer been able to bear his violent rages. It was even insinuated that he had struck her, and they then pretended to blame her for having had the strange idea of marrying outside her race. That was where all mixed marriages are bound to lead! Perhaps this very hostility aroused in me a greater sympathy for my French instructor. I could sense all the conflicts within him and his struggle to achieve calm and become an example of civilization. His continual play was but a sign of how he constantly repressed his passions. I felt a violent urge to communicate with him, transgressing all those conventional distances that exist between an instructor and his pupil, and to ask for his help in solving my own similar problems, even to offer him, in all simplicity, my assistance. But he was too preoccupied with himself and did not immediately understand me. To please him and attract his attention, I saw to it that all my compositions were well prepared, properly thought out, and carefully written. As he was a poet and an artist, I would do my best to surprise him. Unfortunately, I was never able to get into the front row among the best students in his class. Because he himself was both impulsive and passionate, Marrou could accept only the kind of art that is perfectly controlled. He used to declare with passion, allowing no contradiction, that there can be no such thing as an art that is not classical, and he even managed to force us to share his contempt for all Romantic makeshifts. But my own compositions, though they may well have been richer in content than most written by his class, were always defeated, in the matter of literary form, by the compositions handed in by a young Frenchman who had a natural felicity of expression and easy style. This made me feel angrily that Marrou’s obsession with form prevented him from discovering my talent, and I became even more attentive and eager, always at his elbow.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘That one’ was a very large photographic portrait-study, touched up with water-colours now quite faded. Blue eyes, a laughing mouth, a chignon of fair hair, and a look of calm yet exultant triumph. ... High-breasted - in a First Empire corselet, legs showing through gauze skirts, legs that never finished, rounded out at the thigh, slender at the knee, legs that. ... And a fetching hat, a hat that turned up on one side only, trimmed like a single sail to the wind. ‘She never gave you that one, not that one, I bet! It makes her a goddess, a fairy walking on clouds! And yet it’s absolutely her, of course. This big photo is the loveliest, to my way of thinking, but I’m still every bit as fond of the others. Here, for instance, look at this little one here — much more recent, of course — isn’t it a sight for sore eyes? ’ A snapshot, clinging to the wall with the help of a rusty pin, showed a woman standing in the shade against a sunlit garden. “It’s the navy-blue dress and the hat with the seagulls,” Cheri said to himself. ‘I’m all for flattering portraits, myself,’ the Pal went on. ‘A portrait like this one. Come now — you must confess - isn’t it enough to make you join your hands and believe in God?’ A degraded and smarmy art, to lend glamour to the ‘portrait photograph,’ had lengthened the neck line and modified those around the sitter’s mouth. But the nose, just sufficiently aquiline, the delicious nose with its ravishing nostrils, and the chaste little dimple, the velvety cleft that indented the upper lip under the nose — these were untouched, authentic, respected by even the photographer. ‘Would you believe it? She wanted to burn the lot, pretending that nobody to-day is the least interested in what she used to be like. My blood boiled, I shrieked like a soul in torment, and she gave me the whole collection the very same day that she made me a present of the bag with her monogram. ...’ ‘Who’s this fellow with her ... here ... in this one underneath?’ ‘What were you saying? What’s that? Wait till I take off my hat.’ ‘I’m asking you who this is — this fellow — here. Get a move on, can’t you?’ ‘Heavens, don’t bustle me about so. ... That? It’s Bacciocchi, come! Naturally, you can hardly be expected to recognize him, he dates from two turns before you.’ ‘Two what?’ * After Bacciocchi, she had Septfons—and yet no—wait... Septfons was earlier than that. ... Septfons, Bacciocchi, Sp^leieff, and you. Oh! do look at those check trousers! ... How ridiculous men’s fashions used to be!’ * And that photo over there; when was that taken? * He drew back a step, for at his elbow the Pal’s head was craning forward, and its magpie’s nest of felted hair smelt like a wig.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It was quite within the bounds of human nature for the frugal farmer to send them to work, while he sent himself to rest; hence they are especially enumerated. The earliest form of the Sabbath law is the most purely humane in its wording: “that thine ox and thine ass, and the son of thy handmaid, and the sojourner may be refreshed.” In a non-capitalistic community loans would usually be asked only to relieve need and therefore no advantage was to be taken of a neighbor’s necessities by making his distress profitable. Interest was forbidden, so that debt could not breed more hopeless debt. This also counteracted the tendency to inequality in mobile capital. If an Israelite through debt or misfortune became slave to another, he was not a pariah, but was still to be treated as a member of the family, with a right to share in the family feasts. His servitude was not to become perpetual and when its term was over, he was to be loaded with gifts that he might have a start in shifting for himself. A fugitive slave was to be protected. Israel had no “Fugitive Slave Law.” There is no record of any slave riots or of any burning slave question in its history. Thus the Law, like the preaching of the prophets, manifests a striking sympathy for the poorer classes and an unflagging respect for their equal humanity. The manhood of the poor was more sacred to it than the property of the rich. In this fundamental attitude the Hebrew Law differs widely from the Roman Law, which was formulated in a despotic State and amidst a flagrant monopoly of wealth, and is responsible for much of the excessive reverence for private property rights in our Western civilization. Some of the laws were purely ideal conceptions. The Year of Jubilee provided for a universal shake-up and a new start all around every fifty years; it was to restore the slave to liberty and the peasant to his land, and lift to the saddle again those families that had been thrown by a stumble in some gopher-hole of misfortune. We know that this beautiful scheme remained a Utopia which even post-exilic zeal for the Law managed to disregard. Other laws were set aside by the ruthlessness of the strong. Only those were likely to be really effective which were firmly based on ancient custom. But in any case these were the ideals of social life that lived in the nobler hearts of Israel, and these ideals either created the prophetic convictions, or they were the product of the prophetic preaching. We rightly hold that social ideals of such moral value could grow only out of a religious life of high value. But the reverse is also historically true: that the high religious life of Israel could develop only within a nation that cherished and maintained such social ideals.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If he had not appreciated the heroic generosity of the poor, he would not have breathed more quickly when he saw the widow dropping her two mites in the temple treasury. He knew how large a share the lawyers get in settling an estate and how little is left for the widow. He knew how bitterly hard it is for the poor to set the judicial machinery of organized society in motion in their favor; hence he used the illustration of the widow and the judge. He knew the golden rule of “society”: dine those by whom you want to be dined. Those who most need a dinner are never asked to have a dinner. He suggested to his hosts a reversal of this policy, and he loved to think of the Messianic salvation as an actual reversal on a grand scale, in which the regular guests would be left out in the cold, while the halt and blind were gathered from the highways and hedges to enjoy the fat things. No man would have laid on the colors in the opening description of Dives at his feasting and Lazarus among the dogs as Jesus did, who had not felt vividly the gulf that separates the social classes. If that parable came from the lips of Jesus, that is enough to mark his social spirit. Ex ungue leonem . Jesus proceeded from the common people. He had worked as a carpenter for years, and there was nothing in his thinking to neutralize the sense of class solidarity which grows up under such circumstances. The common people heard him gladly because he said what was in their hearts. His triumphal entry into Jerusalem was a poor man’s procession; the coats from their backs were his tapestry, their throats his brass band, and a donkey was his steed. During the last days in Jerusalem he was constantly walking into the lion’s cage and brushing the sleeve of death. It was the fear of the people which protected him while he bearded the powers that be. His midnight arrest, his hasty trial, the anxious efforts to work on the feelings of the crowd against him, were all a tribute to his standing with the common people. Dr. W. M. Thomson, in his “Land and the Book,” beautifully says: “With uncontrolled power to possess all, he owned nothing. He had no place to be born in but another man’s stable, no closet to pray in but the wilderness, no place to die but on the cross of an enemy, and no grave but one lent by a friend.” That, perhaps, overstates his poverty. But it is fair to say that by birth and training, by moral insight and conviction, by his sympathy for those who were down, and by his success in winning them to his side, Jesus was a man of the common people, and he never deserted their cause as so many others have done.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He lashes and whips you into occasional wholeness. I have Hugo.” I wanted to see her again. I thought Hugo would love her. It seemed so natural to me that everybody should love her. I talked to Hugo about her. I felt no jealousy. When she came out of the dark again, she seemed even more beautiful to me than before. Also she seemed more sincere. I said to myself, “People are always more sincere with Hugo.” I also thought it was because she was more at ease. I could not tell what Hugo was thinking. She was going upstairs to our bedroom to leave her coat. She stood for a second halfway up the stairs where the light set her off against the turquoise green wall. Blond hair, pallid face, demoniac peaked eyebrows, a cruel smile with a disarming dimple. Perfidious, infinitely desirable, drawing me to her as towards death. Downstairs, Henry and June formed an alliance. They were telling us about their quarrels, breakdowns, wars against each other. Hugo, who is uneasy in the presence of emotions, tried to laugh off the jagged corners, to smooth out the discord, the ugly, the fearful, to lighten their confidences. Like a Frenchman, suave and reasonable, he dissolved all possibility of drama. There might have been a fierce, inhuman, horrible scene between June and Henry, but Hugo kept us from knowing. Afterwards I pointed out to him how he had prevented all of us from living, how he had caused a living moment to pass him by. I was ashamed of his optimism, his trying to smooth things out. He understood. He promised to remember. Without me he would be entirely shut out by his habit of conventionality. We had a cheerful dinner together. Henry and June were both famished. Then we went to the Grand Guignol. In the car June and I sat together and talked in accord. “When Henry described you to me,” she said, “he left out the most important parts. He did not get you at all.” She knew that immediately; she and I had understood each other, every detail and nuance of each other. In the theatre. How difficult to notice Henry while she sits resplendent with a masklike face. Intermission. She and I want to smoke, Henry and Hugo don’t. Walking out together, what a stir we create. I say to her, “You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.” She answers, “It is a good thing that I am going away. You would soon unmask me. I am powerless before a woman. I do not know how to deal with a woman.” Is she telling the truth? No.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Nathan and Gad were the political advisers of David. Nathan determined the succession of Solomon. The seed of revolutionary aspirations against the dynasty of David was dropped into the heart of Jeroboam by the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh. Some of the prophets would get short shrift in a European State as religious demagogues. The overthrow of the dynasty of Omri in the Northern Kingdom was the result of a conspiracy between the prophetic party under Elisha and General Jehu, and resulted in a massacre so fearful that it staggered even the Oriental political conscience. On the other hand the insight of Isaiah into the international situation of his day saved his people for a long time from being embroiled in the destructive upheavals that buried other peoples, and gave it thirty years of peace amid almost universal war. The sufferings of Jeremiah came upon him chiefly because he took the unpopular side in national politics. If he and others had confined themselves to “religion,” they could have said what they liked. Our modern religious horizon and our conception of the character of a religious leader and teacher are so different that it is not easy to understand men who saw the province of religion chiefly in the broad reaches of civic affairs and international relations. Our philosophical and economic individualism has affected our religious thought so deeply that we hardly comprehend the prophetic views of an organic national life and of national sin and salvation. We usually conceive of the community as a loose sand-heap of individuals and this difference in the fundamental point of view distorts the utterances of the prophets as soon as we handle them. For instance, one of our most beautiful revival texts is the invitation: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” The words are part of the first chapter of Isaiah, to which reference has been made. The prophet throughout the chapter deals with the national condition of the kingdom of Judah and its capital. He describes its devastation; he ridicules the attempts to appease the national God by redoubled sacrifices; he urges instead the abolition of social oppression and injustice as the only way of regaining God’s favor for the nation. If they would vindicate the cause of the helpless and oppressed, then he would freely pardon; then their scarlet and crimson guilt would be washed away. The familiar text is followed by the very material promise of economic prosperity, and the threat of continued war: “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.” Of course the text is nobly true when it is made to express God’s willingness to pardon the repentant individual, but that was not the thought in the mind of the writer.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  “You mean you didn’t see many black people in Boston,” Susan Traylor’s mother had suggested when Quintana got back to Malibu and reported on her trip. “No,” Quintana said, definite on this point. “I mean it’s not in color.” She had learned to order triple lamb chops from room service on this trip. She had learned to sign her room number for Shirley Temples on this trip. If a car or an interviewer failed to show up at the appointed time on this trip she had known what to do: check the schedule and “call Wendy,” Wendy being the publicity director at Simon & Schuster. She knew which bookstores reported to which best-seller lists and she knew the names of their major buyers and she knew what a green room was and she knew what agents did. She knew what agents did because before she was four, on a day when my schedule for household help had fallen apart, I had taken her with me to a meeting at the William Morris office in Beverly Hills. I had prepared her, explained that the meeting was about earning the money that paid for the triple lamb chops from room service, impressed on her the need for not interrupting or asking when we could leave. This preparation, it turned out, was entirely unnecessary. She was far too interested to interrupt. She accepted a glass of water when one was offered to her, managed the heavy Baccarat glass without dropping it, listened attentively but did not speak. Only at the end of the meeting did she ask the William Morris agent the question apparently absorbing her: “But when do you give her the money?” When we noticed her confusions did we consider our own? I still have the “Sundries” box in my closet, marked as she marked it.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He stretched out to his full length, turned his head to look up at her, and opened wide his eyes. They looked black, but their true shade, Lea knew, was a dark almost reddish brown. As though to indicate her choice of what was rarest among so much beauty, she put her forefinger on his eyebrows, his eyelids, and the corners of his mouth. At moments this lover, whom she slightly despised, inspired her with a kind of respect by his outward form. “ To be as handsome as that amounts to nobility,” she said to herself. ‘Tell me, child, how does this young person feel about you?’ ‘She loves me. She admires me. She never says a word.’ ‘And you - how do you behave with her? ’ ‘I don’t,’ he answered simply. ‘Delightful love duets,’ Lda said dreamily. He sat up, crossing his legs tailor fashion. ‘You seem to me to be thinking a lot about her,’ he said severely. ‘Don’t you think of yourself at all, in this upheaval?’ She gazed at Cheri with an astonishment that made her look years younger - eyebrows raised and lips half open. ‘Yes, you, Lea. You, the victimized heroine. You, the one sympathetic character in all this, since you’re being dropped.’ He had become rather pale, and his tough handling of Lea seemed to be hurting him. Lea smiled. * But, my darling. I’ve not the slightest intention of changing my life. Now and then, during the next week, I’ll come across a pair of socks, a tie, a handkerchief on my shelves ... and when I say a week ... you know in what excellent order my shelves are kept I Oh, yes, and I’ll have the bathroom redone. I’ve got an idea of putting in encrusted glass. ...’ She fell silent and assumed an almost greedy look as she traced a vague outline with her finger. Cheri continued to look vindictive. * You aren’t pleased I What do you want, then? Do you expect me to go to Normandy to hide my grief? To pine away? To stop dyeing my hair? To have Madame Peloux rushing to my bedside? ’ And she imitated Madame Peloux, flapping her arms and trumpeting: ‘“The shadow of her former self, the shadow of her former self! The poor unfortunate creature has aged a hundred years, a hundred years!” Is that what you want? ’ He had been listening with a smile that died on his lips, and a trembling of the nostrils that might be due to emotion. ‘Yes!’ he cried. Lea rested her smooth, bare, heavy arms on Cheri’s shoulders. ‘My poor boy! But at that rate, I ought to have died four or five times already! To lose a little lover. ... To exchange one naughty little boy. ...’ She added in lower, lighter tones: ‘I’ve grown used to it! ’

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It is worthy of note that Luke was able to mention only a single instance of such generosity by name, and that was by a man of remarkable largeness of heart, Barnabas. All evidence indicates that Luke was not an eye-witness of this early life at Jerusalem. The purpose of his book was not to furnish an impartial and critical account of the beginnings of Christianity, but to give an edifying sketch of the wonderful progress of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome. His tone is that of a modern pastor giving a centenary history of his church, or of a missionary describing the progress of Christianity in a Karen tribe. Writing at such a distance and for such a purpose it is very natural and right that he should dip his brush in the liquid gold of enthusiasm and say, “Not one of them claimed anything of his possessions as his own, but all things were common to them.” Yet the fraternal fervor must have been strong, for even Ananias and Sapphira felt that they had to make at least a show of complete renunciation to measure up to the standard set by the Christian community. But whatever the extent of this generosity may have been, it was always generosity, and not communism in any proper sense of the word. No one was required to turn his property into the common fund on admission, as in all communistic colonies. And above all there was no common economic production. In fact, there seems to be no trace of communistic production in ancient Christian literature. The rudimentary communism of primitive tribal life was gone and forgotten. The possibility of a higher communistic ownership of the instruments of production had not yet risen above the horizon of common thought. Individual and family production was the only kind commonly known. Thus these first Christians produced separately and consumed in common. It was religious and instinctive fraternity, but not communism in any strict sense. Wherever people meet closely on a footing of equality, sharing is inevitable. In the family we always hold most of our possessions for common use. Students in dormitory, soldiers on the march, sportsmen in camp, share freely. It is impossible to have a man sit by you as your brother and let him go hungry while you feed. Therefore as a usual thing we do not let him sit by us or we deny that he is our brother. But whenever calamity or joy sweeps away the artificial barriers, men at once begin to share. Religion had the same effect in Jerusalem, and often since. The later poverty at Jerusalem may have been due in part to this generosity. If a man turned in his farm to be eaten up, he raised the standard of living of all for a while, but his private capital was gone without creating any capital for common production.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  “Disappointment’s dry and bitter root, Envy’s harsh berries, and the choking pool Of the world’s scorn, are the right mother-milk To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind And break a pathway to those unknown realms That in the earth’s broad shadow lie enthralled; Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts; These are their stay, and when the leaden world Sets its hard face against their fateful thought, And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror, Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale, The inspired soul but flings his patience in, And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe,— One faith against a whole earth’s unbelief, One soul against the flesh of all mankind.” The championship of social justice is almost the only way left open to a Christian nowadays to gain the crown of martyrdom. Theological heretics are rarely persecuted now. The only rival of God is mammon, and it is only when his sacred name is blasphemed that men throw the Christians to the lions. Even for the social heretics there is a generous readiness to listen which was unknown in the past. In our country that openness of mind is a product of our free intellectual life, our ingrained democracy, the denominational manifoldness of our religious life, and the spread of the Christian spirit. It has become an accepted doctrine among us that all great movements have obscure beginnings, and that belief tends to make men respectful toward anything that comes from some despised Nazareth. Unless a man forfeits respect by bitterness or lack of tact, he is accorded a large degree of tolerance, though he will always be made to feel the difference between himself and those who say the things that please the great. The certainty of opposition constitutes a special call to the strong. The ministry seems to have little attraction for the sons of rich men. It is not strange when one considers the enervating trials that beset a rich man in a pastorate. But here is a mission that ought to appeal to the rich young man if he has heroic stuff in him. His assured social standing would give him an influence with rich and poor alike which others attain but slowly if at all. The fear of being black listed for championing justice and mercy need have no terrors for him. To use his property as a coat of mail in fighting the battles of the weak would be the best way of obeying Christ’s command to the rich young ruler to sell all and give it to the poor. When Mr. Roosevelt was still Police Commissioner in New York, he said to the young men of New York.” “I would teach the young men that he who has not wealth owes his first duty to his family, but he who has means owes his to the State. It is ignoble to go on heaping up money.