A Man of Meaning
THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The...
...existence these things because all his life had been given to and it also furnishes adequate criticism...
...The circle Some believe that no remedy can come...
...A particuoped, for instance, a really barbarous fondness for larly jagged vocabulary may reveal the suffocating anecdote...
...But there was To this conviction he remained faithful, and guided by developed in him the finest grasp of beneficent oppor- it he did his best to leaven the thought of his fellow tunities open to one of his superior family fortune, Catholics with plans for a better social democracy...
...recipes for integral human development...
...The American may respond say, vicious gossip...
...By force of stunted unless, in the sense popularized by Maurice circumstances we are compelled to avow humbly that Barres in France, he draws nourishment from the fam- France is the victim of a special malady, ancient and ily tombs...
...That is one reason why he is remembered in itself a document of great historic interest-at the here in a day when the heralds of darkening democmoment when France was overwhelmed by the mili- racy might be reassured through the vision of such tary and political debacle of 1871, avows the fact that an amicable aristocrat...
...William James's famous statement that education There has been so much talk of "awakening slugtaught people how to recognize things well done needs gish America" and of "punching the yokel in the mida supplement-a supplement which may be defined riff," that nobody seems to have considered how imsimply as an escape from the phosphorescent boredom portant it is that America should settle down...
...Only the of enthusiasts from disastrous monomanias of reform...
...Documents of this sort certain weight with my mind, that the republic is the are rare...
...Nowhere else fundamental remedial endeavors...
...And so it was enormous and distressing results...
...and the brains of men who have the good of their His assumptions, his political guesses, may have civilization ~t heart...
...The constant flooded light ane remark over a bottle of ginger-ale...
...but adds as well that "all been wrong...
...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...Under the circumstances great author...
...We have succumbed and are still under dust scared up from the wanderers' highway...
...together with requisite tact and' ability for making His studies of industrial poverty, his work in behalf use of them...
...It might the malignant spell of a lamentable moral weakening, even be said that a , human being will inevitably be and of a profound social antagonism...
...French that plays about every person or thing attended with authors, desperately in need of bolsters for their primomentary prominence dwarfs stature and magnifies vate budgets, work overtime to supply credulous defects...
...We have devel- ond-rate teacher or a disappointed clerk...
...Or perhaps it would be more correct to platitudes of Main Street, but when the smoke has 396 THE COMMONWEAL September 1, 1926 cleared away the chief result is an increase in the its author cannot detach his thought from "the consubway crowd...
...a succession of brilliant politicians but one can only view with astonishment the descending no statesman...
...The manufacturers of petty dual light he regarded the major problems of his biography will not find him a subject for juicy contemepoch...
...Obviously, neither man nor civiliza- dition of the workers in the large cities...
...He might well say trials and theories...
...It supplies the stuff of...
...A letter written to the sociologist Le Play-- plation...
...trinsically of veneration...
...He was one of those FrenchFor these reasons it is worth while reflecting upon men who, following the brilliant lead of Montalemthe career of Augustin Cochin, French publicist, states- bert, accepted the democratic version of government...
...tion can grow without roots ; and roots need a rela- "We are," he said, "the defeated, but we are also tively deeper soil than can be compounded out of the the diseased...
...Augustin Cochin was probably not a man natural form of government in a country like ours...
...cratic preconceptions...
...its verve was healthy and steadfast, so that he must It is most interesting to observe how, no matter what remain an illustrious example of the cultured layman urgent professional or altruistic duties might engage who squanders none of his energy but correlates it his time, this man lived in perpetual consciousness of always with the best purposes for which his family domestic ties from which he drew vital hope...
...In this and his race have lived...
...chronic, intensified by the faults of the empire, the Family consciousness is, indeed, one of the surest disasters of the war, and the crimes of the commune...
...of a hearing as the domestic or imported gentlemen The old becomes pallid, no matter how deserving in- who can describe the very rattle of a closeted skeleton...
...Devoted to the is the revelation of infirmities more salutarily made, service of Catholicism at a time when most persons and in the pattern of achieved ancestral nobility a of prominence were removing religion from their lives, character can be nobly and energetically formed...
...deluge of impertinent futility...
...a downpour of ideas but no philosophy...
...Prying and exceedingly induspertinently, it seems to us, with a reference to trious persons fill up books with the kind of chatter his own ego...
...The he learned from leaders like Frederic Ozanam and value to America of the family idea, though dimly Pere Lacordaire the truth that "the best way in which recognized historically in such instances as the Lees Christians can serve their faith is to be, in all fields and the Adamses, has almost been lost sight of, with of endeavor, the first and the best...
...I would proof ancestors and compeers, living and dead, is some- test against this pessimism...
...I believe in the possible thing beyond which one cannot escape, regardless of convalescence of our country...
...badly that sense of the artistocracy of their employ- He had that splendid knowledge of permanently vital ment which somehow will not be developed outside things which alone can prevent even the most gifted the sphere of inherited and established skill...
...No one is so certain of constantly illuminating new objects, new horizons...
...Would the sons natural that Cochin who was burdened with the duties of old Harvard, one wonders, surrender the privileges incident to a political career and to the editorship of of parenthood so blithely if they understood the pos- the newly resurrected Correspondant, should also find sibilities of childhood...
...can startle the college freshman with revelations of Perhaps no aspect of this rotogravure civilization is how dully his mind functions, but when you get through more disquieting than the distorted medium through startling you usually have, sadly enough, only a secwhich it views human personality...
...In no other country has so ceaseless which entertains the more spinsterly sororities, to show an inventory been taken by intelligence or what pre- that in 1913 such and such a celebrity uttered an insumes to be intelligence...
...of the first order, a genius, a creator...
...profession of arms and the religious ministry seem to It is part of the significance of Cochin that he was have retained to some extent the idea of honor and quite free of what might so easily have been aristoservice bequeathed from generation to generation...
...You of advertising...
...But the source from which his life drew my being longs for the noble affections of family life...
...Under such conditions it is Of course, all this might be really interesting if there possible to have a series of entertaining books but no were not so much of it...
...man and sociologist, as it is revealed in the newly pub- "It seems to me," he wrote early in life, "that, apart lished collection of his letters, briefly reviewed else- from idealistic theories which never cease to carry a where in the present issue...
...It even renders permanent attentiveness to Yankee readers of translations with minutely detailed spectacles of importance out of the question by dint accounts of artistic love affairs...
...And at the other end of the time to visit schools which his generosity enabled to social ladder tillers of the soil and craftsmen need exist and orphanages for which his heart beat swiftly...
...Volume IV New York, Wednesday, September 1, 1926 Number 17 CONTENTS A Man of Meaning 395 Some Vulgar Errors Robert J. Kane 405 Week by Week 397 The Play R. Dana Skinner 407 The Doctor of Letters 400 Communications 408 Relations With Latin America Books Bertram C. A. Windle, William Franklin Sands 401 Catherine Radziwill, George N. Shuster, On the Contemplative Life Grenville Vernon 409 Donald Attwater 404 The Quiet Corner 413 A MAN OF MEANING W HAT is criticism...
...of labor organization, his public advocacy of practical One of Cochin's earliest letters to his uncle ex- charity-all these things were part, not of his dream presses the desire "to discuss at length about those about the future, but of his desire of what the future subjects which demand all the strength, the good will, should be...
Vol. 4 • September 1926 • No. 17
