SLIGHT LAPSES

Southland Times, Issue 19389, 1 November 1924, Page 11 (Supplement)

SLIGHT LAPSES

THE SOFT PREFERENCE.

(By

Hui E. Gee.

I thought of the orphans and widows he had made—of the tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And I said I would rather have been a French ■’peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the Autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky—with my children upon my knees and their arms about me —I would rather have been ’ that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder known as Napoleon the Great.

Robert Ingersoll, the loquacious foe of the orthodox, is here revealed in all the purple patchiness of his oratorical might. Ingersoll stood before the world as the strong sceptic, as the icy examiner of fairy stories, the cold steel which ran the surplices and reversed collars of the orthodox churchmen through and through. He wanted “Reason, throned upon the world’s l>rain,” and fought with the idea of making Reason the “King of Kings and God of Gods,” and yet we find, in a confession of his own thoughts, while looking at the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brain capable of producing such flub-dub as that which I have quoted. Ingersoll’s tongue was his master, and though he supported the Republican Party, Demos was his idol. Of his warfare with the churches let us say. nothing to impede a fair examination of the man revealed by his “Reflections on the Tomb of Napoleon,” which is preserved on gramophone records, and is frequently revived in debating and elocutionary contests. Look into this statement, for it is Ingersoll, and it is the product of a demagogic brain, it is the impassioned flurry of a soap-box evangelist, a homily for the crowd dressed in the gimcrack trappings of American oratory. Any man possesses an inalienable right to have preferences, and he is as much entitled to give voice to those preferences so long as he is prepared to take the consequences. Free speech in the true sense does not exist—Shakespeare may beg: “Give me leave to speak my mind,” but he knows that though permission is given, he cannot avoid the consequences of his utterance. Ingersoll may have preferred the life of the clod-like French peasant in wooden shoes, with all its alliterative details, the “grapes growing,” as the “day died,” to the fiery blaze of international glory which was the high point in the career of the “imperial impersonation” of force, Napoleon Bonaparte; Ingersoll may have preferred the “tongueless silence of the dreamless dust” to the grand chorale of Napoleon’s memory. But if he did honestly harbour these preferences, he based them on one lie, and he was, in his exaggerated language, putting up a plea for the advantages of the pig in its sty over the peasant who, in spite of the purple grapes and his knitting wife, had regrets as well as memories of pleasant things. Ingersoll, speaking to the crowd, was stating the soft preference; he was arguing for the cabbage, which, like his peasant in wooden shoes, could not leave “footprints in the sands of time.”. It is by no means clear that, if the choice had been given him, Ingersoll would have accepted the tongueless silence of the soil-worker. His life was one of combat, and theatricalism was never far off, in addition to which the future was always in his mind. He had been in American politics and he had tasted the joys of a world’s excited interest. Ingersoll wanted to do things in the world. Would he have taken the dull calm of the unknown peasant in preference to the whirl of Napoleon’s tumultous effort to give the world something which he believed he alone could give? Ingersoll stated the soft preference in terms that were popular, but at least one statement in his “reflections” is untrue, and the falseness of it should have been known to a man who wanted “Reason throned on the brain of the world.”

That falsehood is the line “and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of- ambition.” Herein are two untruths used to make the kind of hocus-pocus that the crowd—especially the American crowd of Ingersoll’s day —enjoyed at their emotional feasts. In this statement Ingersoll spoke of Josephine, Napoleon’s first wife, who is the pathetic figure of that un-Napoleonic drama “A Royal Divorce,” which is still popular because it is untrue. Josephine was not the only, woman who ever loved Napoleon, and it is not really certain that Josephine loved him for any appreciable period. Her lifestory prior to her meeting with Napoleon is not pleasant, and there are good reasons for doubting her fidelity to her soldeir husband in the first six months O'f their marriage, when he was winning his first battle in Italy. Napoleon then loved her passionately, and married her against the advice of his friends, but something happened in that first campaign to kill his affection for her, and probably changed his attitude to women, which up to then had been such that any moralist could have applauded it. A Polish woman, believed to have given herself to the Emperor from patriotic motives, loved the man and continued to do so until her end. The cold hand of ambition did not push Josephine from his heart —she had already done that by her own acts, which in these days would have given him a host of grounds for divorce. Ingersoll spoke to the world as the apostle of Reason, but these “reflections” mirror a man who either deliberately mis-stated facts to please the crowd, or was so ignorant of the truth that his utterances were those of an unreasoning brain. The clap-trap of the alliterative phrase, which occurs so frequently, is in perfect harmony with this piece of flabby buncombe, calculated to gain the applause of the multitude. The great man steps through these lines in the form of a loquacious humbug.