All this, as I have given it, is the barest, most unsatisfactory sketch. The play itself is amazingly rich, and it knocks at the foundations of ready-made ideas until the cheap flamboyant architecture built upon them totters. In this region between sanity and madness one is, if not closer to truth, at least further from falsehood, since everything is questioned. What is reality? what, illusion? what, madness? what, sanity? what, life itself? ‘All life is crushed by the weight of words, the weight of the dead. Here am I. Can you seriously believe that HenryIVis still alive? Yet—see! I speak and give orders to you who are alive. Does this, too, seem a jest to you—that the dead continue to govern life? Yes, here it’s a jest; but go out from here, out into the world of theliving. Day is dawning. You think you’ll do what you like with this day? Yes? You? Customs and traditions! Begin to talk, and you’ll but repeat words that have always been said. You believe you’re living. You’re only re-hashing the life of the dead.’
Here in this play one finds the most perfect example of Pirandello’s great use of exposition and the clearest proof of its value. The entire tragedy is present from the beginning; the step forward at the end is almost incidental; the drama lies in the revelation of what was already there. Yet I know of no other modern play so breathlessly dramatic. Terror hovers over the darkening room at the end of ActII.
Here, too, obviously, and more richly and completely than ever before, we have that same haunting thesis. But here it is not forced upon the characters, but emerges from them. Pirandello doubtless himself means every word that he makes HenryIVsay; but it is HenryIV, not he, who is speaking—and living. And so vividly real and objective are these characters that one feels it but a coincidence that the thesis which emerges from their lives and thoughts is presumably identical with Pirandello’s own thesis. (A ‘coincidence’ that has never quite happened before, and that I fear will never quite happen again).
Tremendous as the thesis is, and here an integral part of the drama, it is not with it that one’s meditations on this extraordinary play end, but with the characters themselves. Theirobjectivity is amazing; you can walk around them. And, almost, one might say, Pirandello has applied his system of exposition to them, as well as to the plot. For example, Belcredi is odious; yet he is no monster, but only a revelation of how odious is the ordinary libertine man-of-the-world. The Marchesa Matilde is a coarsened embittered wreck of a woman, pathetic because she is aware of her degeneration; but she is only a revelation of what a lady of society, who has been capable of something better, becomes. In short, while there are in this and the other plays strange characters—the central figure inEnrico IV, Marco Mauri inCome prima, meglio di prima, for example—there is a larger number of average people whom we might, any of us, meet at any time. And it is, I think, Pirandello’s highest merit that he makes the former entirely credible, and reveals the significance that we, duller, had not perceived in the latter. A rare virtue, indeed, in a playwright, who must, we had almost come to believe, exaggerate his characters to the point of caricature. For this and for his magnificent development of exposition Pirandello imposes himself as a really great dramatist, despite his obtrusive thesis and despite also his unsatisfactory attitude toward life.
What that attitude is, is revealed, curiously, as unmistakably in the plays as in the short stories or the novels. ‘Curiously,’ because, as I have said, the characters have so complete alife of their own. One gets it, of course, in those painful thesis-interims, when not they are talking, but he; and (one reading the plays) in the stage instructions. But even this does not quite explain the fact that somehow, oddly, one is always aware of Pirandello’s presence. He is the puppet-master who will not be obeyed, looking on at the antics of his rebellious marionettes with a fastidious distaste, a contemptuous pity. He appears to have a sick, but not weak, disgust for life. Well, one certainly does not ask for optimism. Any one who can look upon the world as it has been revealed to us of late years, and yet flaunt a blithe and hopeful spirit, deserves only an audience of children. But the attitude one divines in the bravest seems to be: ‘Sothatis what humanity is—humanity of which we are a part! Very well, then; carry on.’ From Pirandello one gets only the first half of the pronouncement. The end of all his observation is despair, which is only endurable to us because it is not weak, but glows with so fierce an anger.
SometimesI think of the French like this:
They are the only civilized grown-up people in the world. Even those who are ignorant or narrow have a mature attitude toward life, never a raw schoolboy attitude. They are logical in a world of insanity. For them not only do 2 plus 2 make 4, but 32 plus 32 make 64—not, as Blasco Ibañez said of the Russians, 4589. Their minds are orderly, swept and garnished, clear like their language, to hear which spoken by cultivated Frenchmen is an exquisite aesthetic pleasure, and to hear which falling precisely and crisply even from the lips of shopkeepers makes one sigh with relief at having come away from countries such as America or Italy, where common speech is a slovenly massacre, and where voices seem designed for the great open spaces.
Their prose is the marvel of the centuries. Its quality never stales. The mere flavour of the words on a page of Montaigne or of Anatole France is delicious. And no one who has learned that their poetry is not something to be compared with English poetry, but something of a different kind, will ever deem it thin. Racine thin? Alfred de Vigny thin?
Whatever thought they touch they clarify, and it is not true that they do not themselves originate and think creatively. It is only that to people who think muddily obscurity seems profound and simplicity superficial.
They have a fine respect for the individual. Nowhere else is the individual quite so free as in France—free within very broad limits as to behaviour, almost totally free as to thought. The French are infinitely less subject to the tyranny of majority opinion than, for example, the Americans or the Germans. Their minds are not standardized. ‘Equality’ and ‘Fraternity’ may have gone by the board, abandoned as impracticable ideals, but ‘Liberty’ still means something true in France: liberty for the individual.
They live soberly, disliking excess, spending less than they earn, saving for their children, whom they do not, like the Italians, treat as adorable playthings and cover with kisses and spoil, but educate sensibly as human beings.
For them marriage is not a reckless juvenile adventure in romance, but a partnership full of grave responsibilities, of which the woman must bear her part, as well as the man his; with the result that perhaps nowhere else does marriage work so well, so fairly, as in France.
And as with marriage, so with the whole of life. The French do not set for themselves Utopian ideals impossible of realization, the gulf between which and the actual facts of existence can but end in disillusioned despair, butreasonable ideals, difficult, indeed, of attainment, yet not beyond the conceivable reach of struggling mortals.
And yet, and yet ... there is in the French a recurrent touch of madness that keeps all this from becoming grey and monotonous. The sense of drama is a clarion call to them. At almost any time they will sacrifice much that they hold dear for a ringing phrase, abeau geste; and they have more than once staked everything—their patient savings, their lives, their very national existence—on a noble idea, no whit less noble if later it proved to be false.
And then again I think of the French like this:
They are small and mean and petty. Those periods of exaltation are but rare raving moments; in all the long hours of their lives the French are hard and selfish.
Their love of money is a cold terrible passion; acquisition is not for them, as for Americans, a romance involving recklessness, imagination, and some other of the virtues to be found in higher adventures, but a cold, steady, ignoble thing rendering them capable of any baseness, any cruelty. The Americans gamble for high stakes boyishly, risk everything, and desire money for the power it brings; the French run no risks, play safe, and desire money from an ignominious fear of poverty. Their fixed universal longing is to becomerentiers. No French government either dares or desires totax income adequately. Nor are they generous with money, like the Americans or like the Italians, though they are rich and the Italians poor. A French girl may have every quality to fit her to become an exemplary wife and mother, but unless she has adotshe must die a spinster.
And as in their love of money, so in a multitude of other ways are the French small and sordid of spirit.
They are without generosity. They never give something for nothing. And therefore they are incapable of gratitude.
They will not concede superiority of whatsoever sort to another race, and when, as at the Olympic Games, this is demonstrated beyond question, they grow peevish and ill-mannered.
They are narrow. Once having made up their minds they never change them. Alone among the nations to-day, they will not admit that the Treaty of Versailles was other than righteous or that the Allies had any share of responsibility for the war.
They detest Americans because America is rich, Italians because the Italian race is strong and prolific, the English because England would leave Germany a nation, and all these and all the others because they are not French.
They are infinitely more insular than the English. All that they touch they Frenchify. Read any French romance of ancient Athens or Alexandria, and you feel yourself at once dishearteningly on the Boulevards. They knowlittle, and care less, about contemporary life in any other country than their own. They are smug.
Their press is corrupt to—and beyond—the point of blackmail, and, by comparison with theirs, American politics are lily-white.
One Frenchman in every five is a government employee. Nowhere else does there exist so limp, obstructive and deadening a bureaucracy.
In the long run, I find something cheap in their love of thrilling phrase, of effect, of dramatic climax, because to it they sacrifice truth. There was something cheap in Victor Hugo, who could write of Napoleon: ‘This man had become too great. He inconvenienced God.’ There was something cheap in Napoleon himself. There is a strain of cheapness in Anatole France.
And, at all times, all of them, all Frenchmen, talk about France. Englishmen do not perpetually talk about England, nor Americans about America, but Frenchmen are for ever talking about France. ‘La France qui marche à la tête de la civilisation ... la France qui a fait tant de sacrifices ... la France! la France!’ It is unendurable.
I do not like to think in either of these two ways about the French; there is too much passion, too much prejudice, in both estimates. I would like to think of them as I have no difficulty in thinking of theEnglish or the Italians ... as individuals, good and bad, very mixed. But I cannot, no matter how many individual Frenchman I meet; for they will not let me. The truth, I say to myself, should lie somewhere about half-way between; but, instead, I swing helplessly from one of these two exasperating estimates to the other and back again, until, in a pet, I give up for a time thinking about the French at all.
Obnoxiously overdressed as nationality is to-day, one cannot simply dismiss it, deny its existence or even, I suppose, its importance. The things that men do and think and feel are the same everywhere, but in each of certain circles made up of language, climate and, in some slight degree, race, the angle of approach to these things is, roughly, unified and somewhat different from that in the other circles. That a man is a man is far more significant than that he is a Swede or an Englishman; still, in saying that he is a Swede or an Englishman youhavesaid something significant about him, you have suggested certain probable variations (though even then you must be very careful; a Swedish poet is, in most ways, likely to resemble an English poet more closely than he resembles a Swedish butcher).
It is difficult and quite fruitless to determine whether in the past these differences of nationality have been more beneficial than harmful orvice versa. They have been the cause of infinite bloodshed and misery, but we are also the richer for inheriting, say, both Dutch painting and Spanish painting. Presumably they arestill of some value. No great poet could write in Esperanto, and German music is composed in German idiom.
But it is, I think, fair to say that the value of nationality is at the origin, the bottom. Nationality is like the essential underground roots of a tree; the tree itself springs up into the universal air. Thus, in all countries national prejudices are strongest among the uneducated and the half-educated; whereas the more men become truly cultivated, the less marked in them become their national differences. There are no barriers between an intelligent educated American and an intelligent educated Englishman or Italian; merely subtle distinctions in point of view that add to the richness of their mutual relationship. Their nationality is behind them, not with them. Men of genuine cultivation grow impatient at all this flaunting of nationalism. They find themselves too similar to men of other countries to believe any longer in the grosser national generalizations. Indeed, they distrust generalizations of any sort, and grow more and more inclined to take everything, fact by fact, as they find it. Thus, as the mature man whose development has not halted feels an increasing desire to get away from himself, so, too, does he feel an increasing desire to get away from his nationality—not, like the petty Anglomaniac or Francophile, into some other, but into a broader human fellowship. Neither desire can ever be completely realized, but each is noble—a craving to shake off fettersof the mind. Perhaps the two desires are really one. When emancipated men of this sort witness the disagreeable act of some foreigner, it is to them simply a disagreeable act committed by an individual of faulty breeding. They do not say, with a shrug: ‘Characteristically Italian, that, eh?’ or, ‘A Boche is always a Boche.’
That, I fear, is precisely what, with fewer exceptions than among any other western people, a Frenchman would say—or, at any rate, feel. It appears, for some reason, extremely difficult for him to emerge from being a Frenchman into being a man. Perhaps the desire is not very strong. Far more than the Englishman, whose sense of racial superiority is currently supposed to be enormous (and is, of course, among the half-educated, but I am not considering them here), the Frenchman leans on his nationality for support, assumes its heritage of greatness as his own. So far as I am aware, no Frenchman has ever written anything similar to the famous song inPinafore—‘For he himself has said it, and it’s greatly to his credit, that he is an Englishman, that he i-i-i-i-i-i-is an Eng-lish-man.’
Doubtless there is some measure of compensation for this willing narrowness of outlook, even though to-day one can hardly believe in Emerson’s neat pattern of balance, life appearing to us too confused and rich. Something of the French sureness, something of the French clarity, probably derives from the Frenchman’s persistent cultivation of his own garden and refusal to allow himself to be intrigued by the vast variety of exotic plants to be found elsewhere. He does know his own garden better than any of the rest of us know ours. And it is true that wide acquaintance with the varying minds of many different groups often leads to sterility, a poised inaction.
Often, but not always. Here it seems to me that the French sacrifice a possible rare greatness to a moderate average of success. One admires French achievement for being so French, and yet, even while admiring, is faintly dissatisfied that it is not something other than that, and greater. One wearies of so much perfection. It does not seem an adequate interpretation of a chaotic world. French art is noble; yet it has never produced a Tolstoy, a Wagner, a Shakespeare, or a Michelangelo. It is not universal enough; it is too French. At an earlier day, when it was still but half formed, it came perhaps closest to such heroic stature in Rabelais.
Probably more than any other one factor, it is their language that cuts the French off from other peoples and renders them so circumscribed. For it is, when spoken, very different from other languages. The whole system of voice production is different. A foreigner with no knowledge of any language save his own might mistake Spanish for Italian or Italian for Spanish, but he could not possibly mistake either for French. Its system of prosodyis so different from that of other related languages that foreign poetry simply cannot be even approximately translated into French poetry. You can translate Shakespeare into German or into Italian and hear some echo of the original sonority—not into French. It is curious that the spoken language should have developed into this unique isolated instrument, since written French is extremely like any of the other Latin languages; but so it is.
There are no worse linguists in Europe than the French. But this may also be because they care so little about learning foreign languages, have so little esteem for them, since, while almost any cultivated Englishman can speak French correctly enough, if often with a pronounced accent, it is rare indeed to find a cultivated Frenchman who can speak English with even tolerable ungrammatical fluency. (Shopkeepers and hotel porters in France of course speak some English, because it is to their financial advantage to do so). Moreover, even a literary knowledge of other languages is rare among the French. When reputable English or Italian authors have occasion to insert a French sentence in a novel, the sentence is usually correct; a French author can seldom so much as quote a foreign phrase correctly. Paul Morand, who, I believe, has spent many years in the Diplomatic Service, and whose brilliant cosmopolitan short stories do reveal interest in the national characteristics of other people, is frequently guilty of solecisms in the foreign phrases he now andthen employs. In Henri Béraud’s excellent historical novel,Le Vitriol-de-Lune, the principal character is an Italian who is called, throughout the book, ‘Guiseppe,’ though Giuseppe is one of the commonest Italian names. Alone among the contemporary French writers with whose work I am acquainted, André Maurois reveals a genuine knowledge of English. And it is significant that he, too, is practically alone in revealing a genuine sympathetic understanding of the English people.Les Silences du Colonel Brambleoccasionally crosses the line into national caricature; but it is at least caricature based on knowledge, not wild unrelated caricature like Abel Hermant’s. As forAriel, a work of far greater importance—well, written by an Italian, it would have been, if surprising, at least credible, since there are many Italians who love and understand Shelley; written by a Frenchman, it appears little short of miraculous. Nor is this solely a personal judgment of my own, employed for the sake of my thesis. English critics fairly gasped with amazement atAriel. But I repeat that André Maurois stands alone. You would have to go back to Taine to find any similarly lonely figure.[2]
So, reluctantly, I end, as I began, with those two irreconcilable, but I think equally justified, estimates of the French—save that each has atthe moment lost something of its intensity for me through the relief of putting it into written words.
It will not be the French who will overthrow the barriers between races, sacrifice their nationality to something broader and greater, or conduct the League of Nations to a position of supreme importance. True, there are those moments of national madness when it is as though the French were atoning for all their habitual narrowness. But one cannot say: ‘Come, let us now have a moment of madness.’ No, for the achievement of unselfish uncircumscribed ideals the world will have to depend on individuals who in their growth have gradually sloughed off all that is narrow, restrictive and myopic in their nationality. Such individuals have come in the past, and should come increasingly in the future, from many different peoples—hardly from the French.
On the other hand, even though we may feel that nationality is narrowing, and that at best it should be only a means to an end, we may nevertheless be actually grateful that the French have made it an end in itself. The similar devotion to it of the Poles arouses principally distaste; in the French we not only excuse but admire it. For there is about it in their case, and in their case alone, something akin to the results of intensive cultivation in agriculture, something that the best minds of other races must sacrifice (rightly, I think) to broader results—a perfection, an orderliness of thought,a fine neat thoroughness, incapable of achievement in any other way than through this persistent nurture of nationality, and to the contemplation of which we can always turn with pleasure.
Theabridged edition of the Oxford Dictionary, which is the only dictionary within my reach at present, defines pornography as (1) ‘description of manners, etc., of harlots’ (an etymological definition that the word has long since outgrown); and (2) ‘treatment of obscene subjects in literature; such literature.’ Looking up ‘obscene,’ I find ‘lewd’; looking up ‘lewd,’ I find ‘lascivious’; and looking up ‘lascivious,’ I find ‘lustful; inciting to lust.’ (Is there something especially wicked about the Ls?) So the definition finally appears as ‘literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’
Now I have nothing at all against dictionaries. I find them entertaining reading, pithy, diversified, pleasantly alliterative, well informed but never tedious. Indeed, appreciation of the dictionary is growing steadily. Its influence on the arts is strong and increasing. In literature, as far back as E. F. Benson’sDodoit could be faintly discerned, while to-day it shines unmistakably in such books as Compton Mackenzie’sSylvia Scarlettor in any novel by Stephen McKenna. As for the movies, they are fairly suffused with the spirit of the dictionary. For example, a two-dimensioned heroine is goingto make a visit. You see her enter her motor car, ride in her motor car, descend from her motor car. From what does such bright thoroughness derive if not from the thoroughness and inevitable logic of the dictionary? Predictable; prediction; predictive(ly). Nevertheless, the dictionary is imperfect. For it defines only the literal meaning of a word, which is less than half its significance. All valuable words grow hazy with connotation, and this luminous haze becomes a true part of their meaning. What sort of definition is ‘sprite or goblin of Arabian tales’ for ‘genie’? In fact, there are a number of words that to a great many people mean nothingbuttheir connotation, the haze that has risen around them; ‘Bolshevism,’ for instance.
This emanation or glow or haze about words infinitely enriches language; it makes poetry possible. But one does not always want to use language emotionally; often one desires merely to express accurately a prosaic thought. Then the richness clogs one. It is as though a commercial traveller in olive oil, setting out to go from Naples to Smyrna, were to find himself not traversing the eastern Mediterranean, but adrift on the confused enchanted sea of Odysseus. Mediaeval saints frequently had visions of the Madonna that rendered them ecstatic with joy. But the celestial light that shone from her face was so dazzling that they were seldom able to give any satisfactory account of her features.
Thus with words. Thus with ‘pornography.’ ‘Literature treating of subjects inciting to lust’ is no explanation of the shuddering sense of evil, arousing a desire to cross oneself, that the word evokes. Good gracious! we have all listened to dirty stories—in the smoking-room of Pullman cars if we are men, at our finishing schools if we are women—and, whether interested or bored, we certainly felt no shuddering sense of evil. The truth is that the connotation, the emotional significance, of a word may be so different from its original prosaic meaning as almost to kill the thing the word purports to define. This has happened in the case of ‘pornography.’ So powerful is the maleficent exhalation of the name that it has, if not actually destroyed the thing itself, at least repressed and stultified it. It is a pity; for pornography is capable of becoming, and, despite its handicap, has at times in the employ of skilful writers become, one of the most delicate of minor arts. By our terrified taboo we keep it out of the hands of artists, and so a gross and especially a childish thing at the primitive level of the coarse words scrawled on latrines by little boys.
This is all the more unfortunate since there are certain fine and fastidious artists who are at their best when writing pornographically. Sterne was one. Norman Douglas and James Branch Cabell are examples to-day.South Windcontains some of the daintiest pornography ever written, done in so candid and virginal a waythat to read it is like hearing a girl of seventeen say sweetly to a group of her parents’ friends: ‘I always tell my mother everything.’ As forJurgen, its pornographic passages are as fresh and delightful as theContes Drolatiquesthemselves. I have no patience (and I dare say Mr. Cabell has none) with those persons who defendJurgenby denying that it is pornographic, and I have still less patience with those who assert about any book of the kind that it is not pornographic, but teaches a great moral lesson. No doubt there are dull inferior books that ‘treat the phenomena of sex very frankly’ and thereby ‘teach a great moral lesson’; but they bear no relation to pornography, which is either an art in itself or nothing.
‘Literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’ H’m ... I fear the dictionary has failed us all around. For the definition is not only inadequate but inaccurate. Oh, it will hold, I suppose, for the lowest forms of pornography—for, say, certain passages in Smollett’sFerdinand Count Fathomor in Richardson’s nastyPamela. (It is a significant fact that the authors of such primitively and grossly pornographic books as these nearly always protest that they are not pornographic, but teach that ‘great moral lesson’ referred to above, whereas the authors of first-rate grown-up pornography take pride in their calling). But when one progresses beyond such elementary pornography, which can be of interest only to children or to men with the minds of children, the definition collapses. Really goodpornography for grown-ups simply does not ‘incite to lust.’ For example, I read with delight the conversation between Jurgen and the Hamadryad (and if that is not pornography, and of the best, then I don’t know what pornography is, and had better give up trying to write about it), but it did not give me a desire to go downstairs and assault the cook. It is probably true that to a person incapable of desire for the opposite sex such a passage as this would be without interest, but the passage itself does not incite desire; it plays mentally with the idea of the emotion. In short, one must be capable of desire in order to like pornography, but that liking itself is something quite different from desire. Jurgen, you may remember, though scarcely a weakling, soon wearied of the conscientious perversities of his wife, Anaitis, but he loved to get off by himself in her magnificent pornographic library (the run of which I envy him) andreadabout such things. That is profoundly true and illuminating.
The history of civilization is the history of man’s effort to enrich the simple world he was presented with. He transforms handsome but monotonous primeval forests into complicated cities furnished with bathrooms and radios; he builds music up from a few primitive sounds to the elaborate symphony; in eating he progresses from the rending of raw meat and the consumption of wild berries to a dreamy dinner at Paillard’s. And you may be sure that hewould have done the same with the sex-relationship had he been able. Alas, there he was baffled! The facts of sex are immutably simple. There are so few things that one can do. Heroic efforts have been made to increase on these, but, though many men have given their whole lives to the cause, without avail. New meats and vegetables for the table were continually being invented or discovered—foie gras, the grapefruit, the alligator pear; no satisfactory new ways of love were possible. Even so, man was not defeated. On the contrary, he won a great moral victory. The facts of sex were unalterably simple, but the atmosphere of thought and emotion surrounding those facts he discovered to be a luxuriant tropical forest. Three thousand years of thrilling exploration have not exhausted its richness or exorcized its dangers—for the forest breeds monsters as well as gods, and men have been lost and have gone mad there. In fact, in this rich region one may find anything one looks for (besides startling surprises), from harpies to shapes of serene loveliness. It is a Swiss-Family-Robinson kind of forest, save for the delightful uselessness of the discoveries.
To this world pornography belongs. But it is not an earnest-minded art, and so does not concern itself with either the beauties or the horrors, both of which its mocking, reasonable, eighteenth-century nature finds excessive, but with all the minor mysteries of the wood—the fantastic tricks and illusions, the dainty mischievous sprites, the malicious imps who make faces from behind trees then vanish with a burst of clear laughter.
This gay hide-and-seek elusiveness is the precise spirit of pornography. It is always saying one thing while pretending to say another. Why the pretence of something to be something else is art, I don’t profess to know, and of course it is not great art. But pornography lays no claim to be anything but one of the minor arts—and that is what the minor arts all do. In architecture it is no doubt a mistake for a railway station to look like a cathedral, but in fine cooking it is proper for a potato to look like a rose. So—perhaps even especially—with pornography. For it must be remembered that those few facts of sex from which pornography derives are solid, stern and tragically intense. So there is all the more reason why pornography, playing delicately above them, but bound to them none the less, should adopt every possible artifice to display its iridescent lightness. Almost alone among the arts, it runs no danger in this—as does poetry or painting; it can never become thin or empty, since its feet are anchored in those eternal facts. The Siegfried theme beneath the leaping flickering fire-music. Given this foundation (to say nothing of the stupid opposition to the art), it is amazing what delicacy pornography has, at its best, achieved. But that is of course the point. The difficulties of working in such material explain the appeal the artmakes to those fine and fastidious artists who practise it.
There must be some reason beyond the mere sound of a word for the popular horror of pornography; and, in fact, as soon as one begins to dig down, one discovers all sorts of reasons, such as they are. There is, for example, especially in America, a buried remnant of puritanism, which makes people feel obscurely that something is wrong with anything conveying such intense pleasure as the sexual relation, which therefore should be considered morosely, if at all, and should certainly not be made the starting point for all sorts of agreeable fancies. (It is only fair to add that most of the people who feel this would deny quite sincerely that they feel it; nevertheless, they do). More obscure than this objection, but probably even more potent, is another, based on the average individual’s inharmonious attitude toward the whole question of sex. He has been taught, and holds firmly, that the sexual relation is a grave and sacred thing to be celebrated as a holy married rite; but, considering himself honestly, he perceives that it is, instead, a wild physical ecstasy with nothing of grave and little that is perceptibly sacred. Desiring to be honest, he is baffled and exasperated by the contradiction between what he thinks and what he feels, and it is probably this which makes him avoid explaining the facts of sex to his children. He is right about this emotionally; it is an indication of moral integrity for which he should be admired, ratherthan censured. How in the world can he explain the sexual relation to his sons as something grave and sacred when he knows in his heart that it is not that at all? Pornography stirs up and intensifies this latent discomfort in him. Gambolling about and impudently joking, it obviously considers sex neither as something grave and sacred (which he is convinced is the way it ought to be considered, at least publicly) nor yet with the shrinking fear due it, if it is, as he knows it to be, a shattering earthquake among emotions. It is as though pornography were sticking out its tongue at him personally. He is upset by it.
Among more maturely self-conscious persons, who, knowing more about themselves, care less, the sole objection to pornography is one of taste, and is felt only for its grosser primitive forms.
Now it is true that good taste is not a creative thing, but even something of a drag. Great art frequently violates it, and forces subsequent modifications of its criteria. But for minor art, and by and large in the world, taste is valuable. It tends to level things down to a standard—but it only tends. Good taste preserves the amenities. It is taste that makes existence agreeable; with life it has little to do. Used with discretion, it is of great service. For instance, good taste objects to violent noise, violent smells and all monstrous deformities; and while it is true that what at first hearing sounds as violent noise may be made by a Stravinsky,and what at first appears a monstrous deformity be created by a Baudelaire, most noises and deformities are really such, and deserving of suppression. Anyway, no permanent harm is done by good taste; it cannot crush genius. Aristophanes was unable to demolish Euripides. Good taste objects to emotional unrestraint, whether at a prize fight or at a religious revival. It aims at moderation in everything; and the proof that moderation is not fatal to achievement is that the Greeks professed to love it beyond all else.
Especially, taste is averse to anything that inspires disgust, the most sterile and desolate of all emotions. Now there are certain things that almost universally inspire disgust—why, it does not matter; they do. The odour of hydrogen-dioxide, for instance, goitres, or a disfigured human face. And in gross unworthy pornography there are brutal or distorted forms that do so for most of us:Le Rideau Levé, the Marquis de Sade’sJustine, or Cleland’sMemoirs of Fanny Hill. These offend against taste. They do not in a mature man arouse a shuddering sense of horror, but they do arouse disgust, which is a much worse sensation. But it would be as absurd to condemn all pornography on account of these books as to condemn all music on account of ‘Yes, We Have no Bananas.’
It is to be noted that books such as those I have just cited are not really sophisticated; they are unaware of the mental richness enveloping the facts of sex. This is as true of De Sade’s novels, for all the complicated aberrations they record, as of Cleland’s puerile story. They concern themselves solely with the facts, and are still at the stage of trying to increase the number of these, whereas the aim of civilized pornographers is to get away from those monotonous facts into a richer region. A common trick among lesser pornographers is to hint mysteriously that the facts are more numerous than they really are. For example, in an absurd novel by Catulle Mendès, the author, after describing with wearisome detail what the hero and his mistress did together (which was pretty much all of the little thatcanbe done), sends them out into the night. ‘When they returned,’ he says, ‘they did not dare look at each other; they had committed the unforgivable sin; henceforth they were cut off from humanity’—or words to that effect. A puerile and ridiculous piece of bravado. One cannot alter the facts or stare them out of countenance. In truth, it is intolerable to stare at them at all. The sexual act itself, while thrilling to the two concerned, must be depressing and even faintly revolting to a mentally adult observer of it—in part because the violent unrestrained expression of any emotion is distasteful (I can still remember with a touch of nausea Mrs. Leslie Carter inZaza), but chiefly because such a spectacle can only remind us drearily of the elementary paucity of those facts on which all life is constructed. I am told that there are sordid resorts in Paris, where, for a price, onemay gaze through a peep-hole at this primitive exhibition. It is incredible to me that any one should want to. I should go home and weep. ‘“Dust and ashes!” so you creak it ... what’s become of all the gold ...?’ There are enough barren unsought-for moments, God knows! when all life seems but a skeleton affair, unendurably indigent—merely greed, hunger, passion, passion, hunger, greed—without one’s deliberately going in search of others.
In a way it is a shame that we cannot permit the movies to become appreciably pornographic. Still, we cannot. As a virtuous man I admit that at once. Pornographic books and spectacles seem to do something physiologically harmful to immature boys and girls, and while we can (possibly) keep such books out of their hands, we cannot forbid children the movies, which are obviously made for them. Appealing only to the eye, the cinema could not, anyway, achieve such richness as can literature; still, some very pretty pornographic effects might be obtained. Even with the heavy-handed censorship and the determination of producers to run no risks, something now and then slips through. I remember a delightful film in which Miss—no, I had better not mention her name, because perhaps she or her press-agent might assert that the film taught a great moral lesson, and sue me—in which the heroine, when wearing a scandalously alluring bathing suit, paused for a full minute, arms upstretched, before diving—because the water was cold. Later,there was a lovely scene in which the heroine, in the daintiest of nightgowns, was surprised in her bedroom by a young man. The beauty of this scene was that neither he nor she was thinking any harm, both being absorbed in the solution of I forget what innocent problem, whereas the audience, including myself, was thinking all the thoughts that pretty girls in bedrooms normally arouse; just as in the bathing picture the heroine was convincingly thinking about the chill of the water, while we were not. This was really good pornography—something pretending to be something else.
Delight in the pretence of something to be something else is not in itself a sophisticated emotion; it is, like most others, a primitive emotion capable of great sophistication. If you find it in the ceiling decorations of the Settecento, where frescoes are mockingly made to look like architectural reliefs, you also find it in the humblest Italian houses, where an outer wall is grossly painted to represent a window with a blind half-open and a woman looking out. For that matter, you find it—or might have found it thirty years ago—in the American folding-bed (in which incarnation it was certainly not art—not even minor art). This extraordinary piece of furniture really solved no problem of space (a couch would have done that much better), and existed, for a time, solely because it was something pretending to be something else. It disappeared, partly because it was uncomfortable, but chiefly because itdid not keep its promise, since the most ingenuous observer could never possibly have mistaken it for a sideboard or a chest of drawers. Children themselves rejoice in examples of this pretence.
It is well that this is so, that the emotion is primitive, since thus, even when the pretence of something to be something else is refined upon and made acceptable to civilized adults, a fresh youthful quality inspires it. One’s delight in words that say one thing while pretending to say another, is not at all due to a sense of one’s own cleverness in detecting the real meaning, and is only in part due to the richness created by the allusions and by thinking of two things at a time; there is, besides, that gay light-hearted relish of pretence. Nothing, for example, is more delightful than a conversation with a woman whom one does not really desire—well, at least not very much—that is all made up of very riskysous-entendus(and the riskier they are, the daintier they must become), leading to nothing at all, indulged in for their own sake.
Precisely this is what pornography does. It plays about the idea of sex with all the art and wisdom and trained fancy of experience—butit plays. Good pornography is always gay, which is the more to its credit since the subject it is being gay about is so grim. We should welcome such gaiety, not suppress it.
Itis sometimes hard to divine what a certain period in the past was all about, what its principal aim was, if indeed it had one. But the retrospective investigator of some hundred years hence will surely have no difficulty in discovering what our period was about. Discarding (since we assume him to be intelligent) whatever we may have produced of permanent and therefore universal and therefore uncharacteristic of any single epoch, he will devote himself to our ephemeral literature, once the last word in modernity, in his day totally forgotten, but preserved in the British Museum and the Congressional Library. He will also, to even better effect, pore delightedly over such bound volumes of our weekly and monthly magazines as he can obtain. And he will know with a most beautiful certainty that what our period was about was Success.
We can hardly miss the fact ourselves, since our novels do little but exalt success or revile it, and our magazines glorify it, and all our advertisements canonize it. We live in a utilitarian epoch (it is possible that this has been said before), and results are what people demand.
Well, results are surely important, and if one sets out for results it is of no interest, or of little, why he fails to obtain them. The fable known asA Message to Garciais admirably typical of the spirit of the age we live in.
A Message to Garcia, if devoured eagerly by half a world, was an American fable. It is, in fact, America (however resentful older countries feel about this) that more and more sets the pace and the standard to-day. And possibly it is just the ability to succeed (less characteristic of the mass of Americans than they would have us believe, but at any rate characteristic of what they would like to be) which is most influencing the rest of the world.
The admirable things about success are so obvious as hardly to demand mention. Courage, determination, impatience with ineffectiveness and vacillation, refusal to acknowledge defeat, and a kind of drastic simplification of the facts, are among the virtues inherent in the doctrine.
It is, however, equally obvious that if nothing is to matter but success, the attainment of results, the results for which everything is thus sacrificed, and for which innumerable complex side-issues are swept away, must be of the highest importance. Yet extraordinarily little of the energy and intelligence so lavishly employed appears to be directed toward ascertaining the quality of the results to be striven for. That is assumed almost as a matter of course. All the magnificent effort is devoted to achieving them. It is as though in the midstof a terrific blizzard, with the roads impassable and no trains running, people all about me were to say: ‘It is very important that you should go somehow from New York to New Haven and buy a certain kind of lead-pencil made only there,’ and I should reply, though my lips were white: ‘Yes, it is very important that I should go get that lead-pencil made only in New Haven,’ and then should, in fact, at the risk of my life, make that journey on foot through snow-drifts—and procure the pencil. But the oddest thing of all would be if then New York and New Haven were both to ring with my praises, and there were not a soul, not even half-dead me, to ask whether a lead-pencil was really worth all that effort.
Well, any sustained heroic effort is admirable for its own sake. We quite properly admire explorers of poisonous forests and climbers of difficult peaks, even when there is little of value to be obtained by their reaching their goal. Yes, but this particular merit has nothing to do with the matter, but, indeed, runs counter to it, is one of those side-issues to be brushed away. ‘Results! Get results!’ is the cry. There is no way out of it: if the cry has significance it can only be because the results are important.
I wonder whether they are. The quality of our current civilization does not appear especially high. There is a cheapness about it that was lacking not only in more leisurely epochs, such as the first half of the eighteenth century,but also in others as fervent as this. The same splendid intensity of effort pervaded the civilization of the Renaissance as pervades our own; yet the quality of the former civilization was incomparably finer than that of ours. Since the energy is equally admirable in either period, it can only be the nature of the results striven for that renders one period fine and the other cheap. Neither do I think that this was because the Renaissance was All for Art and Art for All (a thesis of which I am profoundly sceptical), whereas our own is—what it is. No, one cannot dismiss current civilization loftily by calling it ‘money-getting.’ When did people not desire money—all the money they could possibly get? Read the letters of great painters of the Renaissance. Their social status was equivocal, and their demands were difficult to enforce, but they drove the hardest bargains they could, and cared every bit as much for money as do modern realtors. The problem goes deeper than that.
What is this success, for which all are striving with magnificent energy, to achieve which brings wide acclaim, and to fail of achieving which relegates one to contemptuous indifference? As I have suggested, it is not merely money-making. We, too, have our artists, and (a more important fact) in business itself, to which most men turn perforce, there are other aims than just that one. To build up a flourishing business from a decrepit one results of course in money-making, must be tested by money-making; but it is the building-up, rather than the financial profit, that is recognized as success.
‘Recognized as success.’ Here we are getting warm. The recognition is essential. You cannot in our modern American-led civilization be a success without being recognized as one. And recognized by whom? By majority opinion. In other words, it is not sufficient that a small heterogeneous minority, who more or less understand the kind of thing you are trying to do, should consider you to have succeeded. The recognition must come from the large homogeneous majority. A man may do something sensitive and significant in one of a dozen fields, but unless he obtains this recognition he is set down as a failure.
Here is part of the trouble. For majorities are always wrong—except when they are right for the wrong reasons. (Not a maxim of my own, but of Time’s). It is invariably a minority that is right. But there are many minorities, with as many varying minds, and most of them prove in the long run as hopelessly wrong as the majority itself. There was once a minority that considered Oscar Wilde a very great author, and another that thought Rossetti a very great painter. True, there is always a minority that turns out to have been right—I mean, what the centuries simmer down to approximate ‘right’—on whatever subject was in question; but how to recognize it—the more as it is a heterogeneous minority?
Fortunately, one does not have to. Even a minority is too much. There is one, and only one, judge of true success: the man who has succeeded—or failed. He is corrupted by vanity, he may desire avidly the acclaim of the multitude, he is full of falsities and pretences, but, all alone by himself, he has moments of clairvoyance when he knows, as no one else ever can, whether he has succeeded or failed in what he tried to do, and just how significant his success was, or how wretched his failure.
In this lies the difference between the Renaissance (or any other period of fine quality—I have no special brief for the Renaissance) and our own period. Then it was the individual who finally decided what was worth while. True, in the arts (to which one turns because after so many centuries they are what chiefly remains to us of the period) there was, perhaps, an unusually sensitive, intelligent and powerful minority opinion; but did the artists very much heed that opinion? Not they! It was not good enough. Throughout all his life Leonardo experimented. What did he care for the judgment of the minority?
We have come a long way from that point of view to-day. Success is no longer success without the sanction of the majority. More than that, at bottom, successisthat sanction.
It is difficult to feel this condition of affairs as other than harmful. For while standardization of dress and behaviour are negligibleevils, standardisation of thought comes pretty close to being the end, the abject death, of thought.
Take, too, that simplification of the facts, which I have mentioned as one of the essentials to modern success. Up to a certain point, and if the aim sought is worth while, it is admirable. The world is altogether too ‘full of a number of things’ not to demand their simplification for the attainment of a single purpose. Some of them must be lopped off. But the larger your majority, the more primitive the simplicity it demands, and the more drastic the pruning. It cuts off living branches along with the dead. Even so, if its aim were only significant! But what it is trying to do is to make a flag-staff out of an umbrella pine. An infinite number of instances, all richly different, capable of a hundred diverse developments—and the majority wants them all the same: one meagre jejune type that it can understand. A forest of flag-staffs!
Yet drill and organize them as we may, this sorry but infinitely exciting world continues, and will continue to eternity, to be made up of some hundreds of millions of individuals, each one, if we will let him be, blessedly different from all the others. Therefore, the effect on these of our present standards of success cannot conceivably be permanent. Neither, one surmises, can the standards themselves. But for the time being, while they endure, the effect is disastrous.
It is not only that the results of our civilization, by which it will be known to future generations, are essentially cheap. They, the future generations, will, it is to be hoped, accomplish other and better things. There is plenty of time. It is also that a finer, truer, if less transmittable form of success is rare to-day: I mean, the full, free, robust development of the individual, whether gifted or not. This, not objective results, is what it seems to me success should mean. If the individual is very gifted, his development will, indeed, bring with it results that may influence men even after his death; but that is by the way, the merest side-issue. It is not, in fact, about the very gifted individual that I am chiefly concerned. However unduly hampered, he will thrust his head up eventually into the free open air; he will develop somehow in his own way, despite majority opinion. But the man with one talent will go bury it in the ground. Every one will tell him he ought to, and he will readily see that he ought to himself. ‘Good Lord, man! Talents went out with the fall of the Roman Empire! Can youbuyanything with a talent? Just so much dead weight. Some day when you’re in a hurry, carrying it about will mean just those two seconds or difference that will make you miss the eight-twelve train to business. Has Jones got a talent? Have I got one? Go bury it quick!’
At first glimpse, this majority-ruled civilization appears a terribly strong, ruthless machine.Conform or be damned! Is it not akin to the stern puritanism of the early New England colonies? So a number of writers deem it, and therefore hate it, and cry out desperately against it. I am not so sure. Its results are, indeed, thin and cruel, but I am unable to see it as that fearful Juggernaut; the legend of its harsh strength leaves me unconvinced. For what is this majority opinion to which all must bow?
If a hundred million people really thought alike, it would be possible, even probable, that they were right. Not right, of course, on specialized subjects such as the doctrine of Relativity, the achievement and failures of Cubist painting, or the merits and defects of the Federal Reserve banking system, since these are matters which only a comparative few have the ability and training to understand, but tolerably right on the universal problems common to all men. But have we in America (which I take only as a symbol) a hundred million people who really think alike? We have not. We have not got a hundred million people who think at all. When you overhear pert snappy retorts hurled by waitresses or shop-girls at impudent young men, or quick lines got off by flappers at country-club dances, do you imagine that such crackling wit spatters spontaneously from these young ladies’ alert brains? Then you must indeed be out of touch with our civilization. Gleaned from the comic strips, echoed from the dialogues of vaudeville, its aim not to be original but thevery latent thing. ‘You poor fish’—or ‘prune’ would be a hopelessly bad retort, being yesterday’s slang; ‘Wet smack’ (at the moment I write) a good one, being to-day’s.
Rising to higher matters, do you fancy that a hundred million Americans calling in chorus for the Americanization of immigrants, the conservation of the Nordic Race, and the election of Calvin Coolidge, signifies that the hundred million have reached their belief in the desirability of these things through processes of thought? Nonsense! A few individuals have patiently, cleverly, and with deadly repetition told them dramatically about these things in words of one syllable; and they have taken up the cry immensely, much as an insensate mountain hurls back tumultuous echoes of a single slender voice.
Thus considered, what becomes of this majority opinion? It is revealed as, at bottom, itself only a very small minority opinion. And such a minority! An idea to be apprehended virtually without thought must be so simple that in a complex world it can have no more relation to truth than Rollo of the Rollo books had to a human boy; and since it must, to appeal, be melodramatic, it must also be cheap. From a few score individuals, all appallingly cheap, superficial and incompetent, from the Northcliffes, the Edward Boks, the Lloyd Georges of the world, springs this dread majority opinion. In personal contact they cannot for a moment hold their own with men of real ability, and areconsidered by these with disdain or, more often, with careless amusement, for they are without quality, and their thought is too superficial to deserve the name; but they have a knack of charlatanry (though mostly they are not intelligent enough to know it for this, but fancy themselves inspired voices of God—vox populi, vox Dei) which enables them to get across to the multitude their tawdry ideas and ideals.
Strong, a civilization based on the thinking of such mountebanks? A single clear truth, ringingly expressed, would slay it; though no doubt it would yet go along for some time, not knowing it had been hurt, like the neatly decapitated giant of the fairy-tale, till something shook it and its head tumbled off.
The conception of success is a good deal better than most of the pabulum on which these masters of a civilization feed the multitude, presumably because in this case a not inconsiderable portion of the majority have devoted some thought to the matter and evolved from it a sort of philosophy. Therearethose merits about what they mean by success. But, with truly Northcliffian repetition, I insist that if success is the ideal, it can be judged only by its results. If what is meant by success is good, then its results will be good. That is no more than saying the same thing twice in one sentence.
What are its results? Oh, not any longer on ‘civilization.’ That is too big and vague aword. Let us descend happily to the concrete, to the only indivisible reality. Estimate the results of success on individuals, enough individuals, and you will then, and only then, have a true test of its value.
No one can do this honestly save through his own personal experience, through his own sincere and careful estimates of other human beings. Obviously, any one man can know but a few of his fellows—so few that it is risky work drawing conclusions from that knowledge. Moreover, his own personal traits limit the amount and kind of knowledge he can, even so, acquire, and render his conclusions dubious. Yet, so far as I can see, there is no other way. So I will take my experience, and do you take yours.
Have you ever known an individual who appeared to you the better for having achieved popular acclaim, recognition in the great world of majority opinion,—success? I have not. I have never known any one whom it had not—or so I truly felt—at least a little harmed. Something of fineness and brave integrity was gone from the best of them. One could not any longer quite safely say to any one of them: ‘Just there what you’ve done is poor, unworthy of you,’ and have him fight the accusation out on its merits. Suppose the man a writer. Expressed or not, there arose unmistakably to his mind the thought: ‘A hundred thousand readers have not found it so. That very passage has been praised in a score ofreviews.’ It is not a question of whether he or his accuser is right; it is the matter of the harm that has been done to the man’s open-mindedness. Of value only as himself, he has become a sort of institution. And institutions are at once absurd and distressing, whether they are the Harvard Commencement,The New Republic, Doney’s restaurant in Florence, or successful individuals.
Among all the men I have known, the ones whom I have most deeply esteemed were men to whom no imaginable stretching of the popular conception would concede success. But I think that what they have, diversely, achieved is precisely what success ought to mean, since it has benefited, not harmed, their character.
But the final saddest note of this homily remains to be sounded. The worst thing—and also the strangest—is not the evil effect of success on the individual who succeeds; for vanity and self-satisfaction are universal human traits easy to arouse, and, if deplored, should be readily pardoned. Moreover, an individual who has achieved success, as success is counted to-day, is likely to be of too poor quality to waste many tears over. No, the worst thing of all is the effect the success of an individual has on other individuals, even intelligent. Hardly ever can they see him as they saw him before; they cannot now meet him quite on an equality; they are a little humble, slightly awed (though they may disguise the emotion beneath pertnessor cynicism). For he has been sanctioned, he has been anointed, he has been canonized.
And, dear heaven! when one thinks of how and by whom, one is oppressed by a sense of desolation beyond even the ministerings of the Ironic Spirit.
Morethan other peoples we Americans have faith in short-cuts—short-cuts to health, happiness, knowledge, and, of course, success. I can remember a period when the one passionate avocation of American life appeared to be the search for the Perfect Breakfast Food. If only it could be found, the problems of existence would at once be solved; through its daily consumption not only would the body become strong and beautiful, but the soul, too, one felt, would be healed, and all at last be indeed right with the world. Then anaemic monthly magazines were enriched with illustrated advertisements of a hundred strange breakfast foods, the inventor—no, discoverer—of each of which claimed, and perhaps believed, that in it he had found that perfect one. Some swore by this one, some by that; but all felt secretly that they had not yet found exactlyIT, but thatITwas there somewhere, just around the corner, waiting for them. There was such fervour in the quest that it was not even vulgar; it had a mystical side, like the mediaeval search for the philosopher’s stone. And so, for a while, millions every morning ate, hopefully, reverently, religiously, weird concoctions—of flax-seed, ofmalt, of hops, of every known grain, kernels shot through a gun, kernels exploded by incredible heat—until at last in a nation-wide wave of indigestion the quest collapsed, like the Crusades.
It was a striking phenomenon, and, like all great, popular, idealistic movements, faintly pathetic; but it does not stand alone. Before it, history tells, there had been a period of even more dangerous faith in patent medicines, and, since, there has been who does not know what?—starvation, careful mastication, Coué-ism, and a score of other short-cuts to health and happiness. Living abroad and returning to America every two or three years, I am always struck, on arrival there, by two things: first, that the one great secret of life has been discovered; second, that the secret of year-before-last has been forgotten as completely as the popular song of its period. The last time I was there, the secret, the master-word, appeared to be Metabolism. I don’t know what Metabolism is; but I was assured that it explained everything, would (eventually) solve every problem of health.
Our faith in short-cuts is immense. If you take twelve—or is it twenty-four?—lessons of a correspondence school, you will double, or triple, or quadruple your salary automatically; if you read Wells’sOutlineyou will immediately know all about history; if you read theBook of Etiquetteyou will at once become suave, well-bred, and will know how to entertain your employer at dinner in a manner certain to be advantageous to you thereafter; and so on.
The characteristic is primitive and childlike; it amounts to a belief in miracles, for what is a miracle but a short-cut? And it argues a conviction that life is a very simple affair, all black and white, with some one secret that you may at any moment hit upon if you are lucky. The attitude of mind is that you are very ill or very ignorant or very poor now, but may in a flash become very well or very wise or very rich; never that you are not as well as you should be now, but may gradually become somewhat better, or that you may through assiduous study moderately improve your education or your financial position.
This black-and-white, miracle-spotted world in which we children of faith believe, is in reality a poor and barren world, as is revealed by our novels that exhibit it. I have no interest in the question of whether our contemporary novelists are better than, for example, the English, or theirs better than ours; but I do assert that the novel in England is vastly richer than the novel in America—not glaringly black-and-white, but full of half-tones, shadows and subtleties. To take two British novelists of not very strong creative ability, Mr. J. D. Beresford and Miss Ethel Sidgwick, where among American writers can you parallel their fine balanced observation, their delicate study of character? It is not that they are more talented than any one of a number of our own novelists, only that the world they describe is a richer world than the world as we see it or have everseen it. For years our novels were all sunny, optimistic and sweet; now they are all drab, cynical and hopeless. Once the village was the abode of quaint, but pure-souled and kindly people unspoiled by the wicked city; now it is a horrid hole. Once our young girls were appallingly pure; now they are appallingly impure. Mr. Wells alone among the English authors of note lives in, and writes of, such a black-and-white, miraculous world. He, too, has always some short-cut to offer, that, if adopted, would transmute life into pure gold; and he, too, has always forgotten his short-cut of the year-before-last. Which is no doubt the explanation of the vastly greater esteem he enjoys in America than at home.
I have turned to the novel for an example simply because in it you get, not by any means a true picture of American life as it is, but a very perfect picture of the American attitude toward life. But you will see the same thing, more directly if more fragmentarily, wherever you look. I.W.W’s are all wicked; La Follette was either a hero or a villain; ‘If Winter Comesmay well last as long as the poem from which it takes its name’ (William Lyon Phelps).
When the war broke out, European countries, too, suddenly adopted (at first quite sincerely) this black-and-white world; and America’s heart went out to Europe—that is, to the shining white part of it. At last America understood Europe. But as early as 1915 Europeans began to feel that they had made a bitter mistake, and by now theyhave slipped back into an even more perplexed, shadowy and complicated world than before; and we, who never change, are further away from them than ever.
It is difficult to account for this rigidly consistent attitude of our mind. Our youth will not explain it (our youth being, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, our oldest tradition); neither will puritanism, nor the pioneer spirit, nor even, entirely, our standardization. Perhaps as much as to any one thing it is due to our unquestioning assumption that the business of making a living and better is the single, really important function of a man’s life. (In at least one provincial American city of considerable size the half-page conceded by the morning paper to art, letters and music is entitled ‘In Woman’s Realm’). Now it is difficult enough, heaven knows! to make a living; and, what with the fierceness of competition, to achieve ‘success in business’ may very likely demand every ounce of a man’s energy and almost every moment of his day. But it does not develop more than a very small part of his mind. At the end of an intensely active life the business man is mentally in much the same condition as the workman who for thirty years has made the same automobile part in a factory. Really he is intensely ignorant of life. By which, of course, I do not mean that he is ignorant because he has not read Thomas Hardy or heard a Richard Strauss tone-poem; rather, that he is ignorant of himself. He has not grown up; he is still a child;in any true sense he does not think at all. And his childish spirit is over everything; it and his puerile canons are shared even by the thousands who have not succeeded in business or in so much as making a living. He is so sure of himself; but he is sure of himself just because he does not know himself at all. And as he is, so are we.
This widespread ignorance of self is no doubt fostered by the manifold senseless activities with which our life is encrusted. Telephones, motor cars, radios, phonographs, movies, magazines, and newspapers save us from the leisure that we dread because, not being able to think, we should not know what to do with it. However that may be, ignorance of self is certainly at the bottom of our conception of the world as black-and-white and miracle-spotted. One deep unafraid look into our own hearts, and we should never again see life as so simple, sharp-edged an affair, because we could never again dissociate ourselves from any manifestation of it. That, of course, is exactly what we do at present and have always done, and it leads to many strange and wonderful things—among others, the institution of scapegoats.
Scapegoats are essential in a black-and-white world—to explain the black part; and we have had precisely as long a line of them as of short-cuts to Utopia. At one time, in the golden early days of muck-raking, they were trusts and their founders; and then we read, with a shudder of revulsion, of how Mr. Rockefeller’s faceresembled that of an evil bird of prey. For Mr. Henry Ford the Jews are apparently the scapegoats, while to these the very numerous members of the Ku Klux Klan generously add the Negroes and the Catholics. But among our intellectual élite the scapegoats of the moment are undoubtedly Governments and Diplomats.
Gazing with horror upon the wreck to which the recent war reduced the world, these more thoughtful members of our public nevertheless share with the unthinking masses the need of a scapegoat, of something evil completely outside themselves, on which the blame can be laid. It approximates the need of a personal Devil. And so they say: ‘France is a menace to the peace of the world; she wishes to destroy Germany (or to obtain an hegemony over the coal-and-iron industry of Europe); she is cold-blooded and selfish. England’s pretence to greater generosity is a lie; she has annexed two million square miles of German colonies, and would be lenient toward Germany now in the matter of reparations solely because she needs a market for her industrial products.’ (Not to mention what they say of our ex-enemies). By ‘France’ and ‘England’ Americans of this sort do not mean the French and English peoples; they are not, like the Ku Klux Klansmen, childish enough to indict whole races. They mean the governments of England and France; but these they conceive of as flawless entities with a soul—an evil soul. Now it is undoubtedly true that any group, whether it be a mob, a literary circleor a government, does evoke a kind of group-spirit, a sort of soul, which is worse than the soul of any one of the individuals who constitute the group. But this is a pallid thing at best, or worst. The group-entity is but a thought in the minds of the individuals, who alone are real, and very like ourselves. Once one admits this, the whole black-and-white world collapses, and one faces a troubled, obscure, but also infinitely richer and more human world, full of pathetically mixed motives.