Royce's Practice of Genuine Loyalty

Frank M. Oppenheim, S. J. Royce's Practice of Genuine Loyalty Married in 1886, Edward and Mary Lord Mason had reared a family of three sons and one daughter by 1900. In August 1899, Mary and Daniel Gregory Mason (Edward's youngest brother by ten years) were seen together at soirées for artists, without Edward being present. Five years later, in October 1904, a previously unmarried Daniel married Mary Lord Mason and in 1905 Edward married a Mary Coombs. Sexual questions about intra- or extra-marital relations can easily distract readers of these Royce-Mason letters from the point made in publishing them: that the practice of genuine loyalty requires a disciplined balance and a persistently loving attitude. Therapeutically trained readers of these letters may dismiss Royce as a failure here since his efforts failed to maintain the marriage of Edward and Mary Mason. Others personally acquainted with the strong passional forces involved in a love-triangle may charge Royce with naivete for "letting himself get hooked" into counseling persons trying to tread such turbulent waters. However readers react to the choice which Royce made to try fallibly to help this Mason trio, his care, self-restraint, and warmly personal touch clamor for a heartfelt hearing. Three decades after Royce penned the last of the letters here reproduced, Daniel Gregory Mason wrote in a signed memorandum, dated August 24, 1934, "I consider them [these letters] so valuable, and possibly unique, a contribution to an understanding of him [Royce], that I want to have them eventually edited and published."1 Nine years later, he recorded the hope that "this beautiful set of letters" become known "as a concrete and dramatic illustration of the way Mr. Royce's doctrine of loyalty actually worked out in life."2 These letters show in the concrete how Royce, the Peircean pragmatist, actually practiced loyalty. They also suggest how Royce induced the doctrine of loyalty he later articulated from his experience of dynamic inter-personal relations, such as those here displayed. This "record of a spirit rare in its swift will to assume the loads of others"3 highlights Royce's concrete practice of the art of genuine loyalty towards the three needy people caught in the love-triangle reflected in these letters.4 To witness Royce, working here mostly in 1901 in this quasi-laboratory of loyalty, is to discover a rich illustration and a foreshadowing Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Winter, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 1 48 Frank M. Oppenheim, S. J. of his authentic message about practicing loyalty. Eventually he refined this into a general doctrine as part of his 1908 Philosophy of Loyalty which he further refined in his remaining years.5 Yet loyalty, as practiced and taught, often evokes suspicion today. For as John J. McDermott asked appositely, "Is there a more treacherous and ambivalent virtue than that of loyalty?"6 The term "loyalty" often functions as unreliably as some other great ethico-religious terms like "good," "love," and "God," while today practices that are at least ethically questionable are often proclaimed as "being loyal." Although Royce styled himself "a man of theory by profession" (24e),7 yet in this affair of the love-triangle of three Mason family members he showed himself a practical man by becoming psychologically quite close to the participants. This led him to acknowledge, regarding his relations to Mary and Daniel Mason, "I feel and have felt the deepest sympathy for you both" (22b). Royce grew in touch with Mary Mason's letting herself become blinded by the tensions she felt (32bc), with Daniel's wobbling in purpose (21c, 34), and with Edward's "beautiful generosity" and "plain and practical common sense" (23e), as well as his "wounded heart," rightful anger, and understandable resentment [24ab]. Our task, then, will be to discover what makes loyalty genuine, as opposed to the many forms of false loyalty. Knowing Royce's commitment to community,8 we will not be surprised to find that his norm of genuineness lies in whether the participating members are or are not tending to promote community life, that is, whether they tend for or against the common good. When, with the...