The Project Gutenberg eBook ofOpinionsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: OpinionsAuthor: Claude C. WashburnRelease date: April 5, 2023 [eBook #70465]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1926Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Hathi Trust)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPINIONS ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: OpinionsAuthor: Claude C. WashburnRelease date: April 5, 2023 [eBook #70465]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1926Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Hathi Trust)
Title: Opinions
Author: Claude C. Washburn
Author: Claude C. Washburn
Release date: April 5, 2023 [eBook #70465]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1926
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Hathi Trust)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPINIONS ***
OPINIONS
BOOKS BY CLAUDE WASHBURNPAGES FROM THE BOOK OF PARISGERALD NORTHROPORDERTHE LONELY WARRIORTHE PRINCE AND THE PRINCESSTHE GREEN ARCH
byCLAUDE WASHBURNNEW YORKE. P. DUTTON AND COMPANYPUBLISHERSFirst published 1926Printed in Great Britain by T. and A.Constable Ltd.at the University Press, EdinburghTOT. R. YBARRA
Ofthe following essays, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Black-and-White’ originally appeared inThe Freeman, ‘Sophistication’ and ‘The French’ inThe Nineteenth Century and After. My thanks are due to the editors of both publications for permission to reprint those essays here.C. C. W.
Ofthe following essays, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Black-and-White’ originally appeared inThe Freeman, ‘Sophistication’ and ‘The French’ inThe Nineteenth Century and After. My thanks are due to the editors of both publications for permission to reprint those essays here.
C. C. W.
Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as any one of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate the shortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means of determining whether it is worth while to borrow the book.
Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as any one of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate the shortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means of determining whether it is worth while to borrow the book.
Opinionsare troublesome things, especially to a writer of novels. Members of the latter, not very lovable tribe frequently assert that the characters they create acquire a life of their own, take the bit in their teeth, and become altogether unmanageable. This is as it may be. Novelists are not among the most veracious of people, and are apt to state as true, if in a whimsical deprecatory manner, things about their work that they only wish were true. ‘How did I come to writeWayfarers? Really I can hardly say. Once begun, the book seemed to write itself.’
What is much more certain is that opinions have a life of their own. They form gradually in one’s mind and must be got rid of ever so often,like clogging sediment in a water-pipe; theywillbe expressed. And the reason that they trouble especially the writer of novels is that he will again and again find himself putting them in the mouths of characters who would never have held them.
For it is a curious fact that a writer cannot rid himself of opinions (or of anything else) save by writing them down in a book. He may unload them repeatedly on conversation, he may shout them to the house-tops—all to no avail. But once he has embalmed them in print he is released from them, perhaps does not even believe in them any longer, and sets involuntarily about collecting other different opinions.
Why this should be so is a mystery. Unless the writer is even more than usually vain, or unless he is one of the very few whose books are in every home and whose opinions therefore presumably sway thousands (only I don’t believe they do), he must in his heart be aware that nothing he has written has had the slightest effect on any one, that nothing any one has written has had much effect, and that immortality is a myth. No, there he and I are wrong. Thereisone way to literary immortality, a small immortality but assured: to have a book printed in the Tauchnitz Edition. Miss Rhoda Broughton’s name may be to the world at large but a shadowymemory, Mrs. Mackarness’s a total blank, but for ever and ever, on rainy afternoons, in dingy German or Italianpensions, elderly English spinsters will, in default of anything else to do, read tattered Tauchnitz copies ofCometh Up as a FlowerandA Peerless Wife. They will be bored—but they will read them.
At any rate, your writer of novels, if he is to go on writing novels that at all satisfy him for the moment (though why he should, God knows!), must occasionally get rid of his opinions by means of a volume of essays; which does him good and does no one else any harm.
And that is what I have set out to do here.
Thisis not an essay in defence of living abroad nor yet a plea to others to choose such a life. Rather, it is in the nature of a dispassionate explanation intended respectfully for those who wonder why a good many Americans who are neither loafers nor sentimentalists endeavouring to escape backward into what they fancy to have been the Utopian life of the twelfth century (or was it the thirteenth?) do prefer living abroad to living at home.
The first and very natural objection of such readers would probably be: ‘You are cut off from the life to which you belong.’ But is this really true? It would be true of, say, an Italian coming to America. He is indeed cut off, and unless he has a very strong personality his character suffers for it. A certain looseness comes. But it is not equally true of an American who emigrates to Italy. The Italian has strong bonds, roots that go down and down and link him to an incalculable past. (Which is both valuable and harmful). The American lives like some drifting rootless water-plant. Family for him is something to get away from; at least it does not postulate the obligations it does abroad. And he has seldom ties of place. So few Americans live at maturity in the house or even in the town where they were born that those who do are made the subject of quaint, rather emasculated, dialect stories in our more expensive monthly magazines. There is an appearance of national life because so many thousands are doing the same thing at the same time—reading the same advertisements, wearing the same kind of clothes, going to the same movies; but they are not consciously performing the same duties. In existence we are a gregarious nation, but existence is nothing; in real life we are intensely lonely, isolated individuals—as much so as if we lived in Europe. Perhaps this would be as it should be, a foundation for individual achievement, if we would recognize it and rejoice in it. But no nation in the world is so wistfully desirous of a unity that, despite appearances, it has not got. All sorts of judgments, mostly idiotic, have been passed on Americans by Europeans, but there is at least one which is profoundly true: that Americans want pathetically to be liked. This is at once a sign of weakness in us and a proof of frustration; it reveals the fact that we have not the unity we crave. We huddle together for comfort, but, because we are doing childish insignificant things, we get no closer for that. It is true that individuals can never get very close to one another. Still, two men even at opposite ends of the earth may exchange a few lines of writing that can profoundly influence thelife of each. But two men side by side, brushing their teeth ...?
So, leaving all this, one is not really leaving a life-in-common. If I go to see a baseball game, what is it to me that ten thousand others are also there watching it? The real question is: of how much value to me and toeachof the ten thousand is the baseball game? Also, leaving all this, one is thrown frankly upon himself. Living among people who speak a different language and have different customs, he can no longer be supported by that illusory sense of companionship. If he has any strength of character he presently finds this an immense relief and becomes aware that at home his time was recklessly wasted on a thousand things that meant nothing to him—that did not touch his mind or his heart. To take the most trivial example, the telephone system in Italy or France is so bad that there he will almost never use a telephone; which at once frees him from something very like tyranny.
This sense of freedom is not the least of the advantages of living abroad. In large part, no doubt, it comes from one’s not really belonging to the life about one, since however well one gets to know a foreign country it always remains foreign, and though one acquire fluency in the language it must always, unless learned in childhood, be spoken more consciously—and conscientiously—than one’s own. But this is not the whole story. One is, too, aware of a greater freedom surrounding him in European—at least in Latin European—countries than in his own America. There is stronger individualism, less herd spirit, greater divergence of opinion. Individuals appear less like one another, and eccentricities that would almost ostracize men from their disapproving fellows in America are in France and Italy accepted with a smile. The sensitive American, especially if he is one of the many who have suffered bitterly at school and college and dully afterward from the intolerable oppression of herd standards, breathes in this relative freedom deeply with a sense of sudden release. It is true that after a while, if he is observant, he perceives that the liberty is not, as perhaps he first thought it, something deep affecting the fundamentals of life, but, rather, a freedom from unnecessary rules for existence. He may even come to explain it as the result of a number of very superficial things—the comparative absence of standardizing advertisements, for example, the lack of universally read magazines, the smaller size of newspapers, the greater localism of feeling—though whether such things are cause or result remains a question to him. At any rate, even when estimated at only its proper importance, the sense of freedom still remains as something gracious.
Curiously enough, as our expatriate learns to understand better this delightful surface freedom, he begins to discern beneath it, in things that have to do not with existence but with life, some very rigid laws—more rigid than anybeneaththe surface in his own country—recognized unshirked duties. The greatest of these is theaccepted burden of the family. In America children early shake themselves free from their parents. More often than not, a grown man’s life is completely cut off from that of his father and mother, especially after his marriage; he frequently lives in another city than that where they live; the whole adventure of bearing and rearing him becomes to them as well as to him almost as though it had not been; not uncommonly he evades the responsibility of giving them a home when they are in need of one in their old age. As for uncles, aunts, and cousins, the average American avoids them with distaste. In Italy and France you get the opposite extreme. Except in the detached, irresponsible and less national aristocracy, family ties are tremendously strong. A family is always closely bound together, even in its obscure ramifications of cousinship. However much its individual members may dislike one another they accept unquestioningly the family duties. Grave financial sacrifices are assumed as a matter of course. In many years of living in Italy I have never yet had servants who did not send the greater part of their wages to their parents, or known a single individual of the bourgeoisie or the provincial aristocracy who would not as a matter of course give up something he really wanted to do with a friend for the sake of something he ought to do for a relation. As for the peasants, no matter how poor, they will support ailing brothers or cousins, and even the wives and children of these, in perpetuity; for among the peasants,who are the most truly Italian of all Italians, the family is law—the only law.
This undoubtedly has its defects. The better an American comes to know Italy or France (where the influence of the family is almost equally strong) the more he feels the often disastrous tyranny of this universal obligation. Yet it is more admirable than harmful; for in a world only too full of greed and selfishness it supplies a bed-rock of self-sacrifice, an anchor in something solid and permanent for the individual, and it creates a strong national life, which we Americans, for all our standardization of existence, are without. You have, in short, in Italy and France, the exact opposite to life in America. In the latter country there is unanimity, all but identity, of behaviour in superficial things, with, beneath, no convictions, no obligations, a chaotic emptiness; in the former countries below a surface freedom approximating licence there is a life founded on stern unquestioned laws.
One of the dangers (and they are many) for Americans who live abroad is that, not sharing the real life of the country, they get all the surface freedom without any of the underlying obligations. Trivial as the American’s obligations at home were—obligations to speak, dress, and behave like his fellows—they at least bound him to something, even if it was a silly something; and it is safer to be bound by some duties, though they are only to do a ‘daily dozen’ or to support Americanization, than tobe bound by none at all. For those Americans who do not look beneath the surface, or, looking, do not care, or whose character is weakened rather than strengthened by sudden freedom, the Latin countries of Europe are a dangerous place of residence. I have seen many such. They become very petty, very selfish, and so lazy that they do not even take the trouble to learn decently the language of the country in which they live, but play, instead, with other expatriates like themselves. Since at home their standards were imposed from the outside, instead of evolved from within, and are now at one stroke abolished, they grow limp and flaccid in character and pick up any tawdry vice that appeals to their standardless weakness. Frequently the men go in for homo-sexuality, since somehow this seems to harmonize with living futilely and prettily with nothing to do but to look after the rose gardens about their villas. They are quite mad—in a mild suave way. Their only care in life is that they are occasionally blackmailed. Also they are gently fuddled most of the time. But their rose gardens are very pretty.
However, this is by the way. What denationalized Americans of this sort do is of no conceivable importance to any one, and the fact that they might have failed to do it had they remained at home is of little greater moment. They drift above life like soap-bubbles on a gentle breeze, and when they burst no one even cares. The real question is: what can be doneby an American of a little more character with the freedom that such as these misuse?
A great deal, I think. For a writer or a painter it is invaluable. It gives him a blessed feeling of space around himself that becomes more precious to him than all the soft comforts of America, that becomes indeed the one superlative comfort. At last he has elbow-room—and peace to think down to the bottom of his thoughts. Let him but guard his gift of freedom jealously and he can have evening after evening of solitude. In America he must have fought rudely to obtain even half-hours of solitude, since nobody could understand that he wanted it. He builds up about him now a peace that is not empty but the richest of all mediums. Any flight, any surrender, any subterfuge, was justifiable to obtain it—provided he does something with it; and if he does not, the punishment will be swift and he alone the sufferer, for the full sense of space will become an aching emptiness and his precious leisure a burden.
A lesser but quite genuine advantage in living abroad is the wider variety of one’s surroundings. I have lived in half a dozen different cities or villages, besides those in which I have merely sojourned for a short time, and each place had its own special flavour. To respond to the stern austere beauty of the Syracusan plain and then to the blurred softness of Taormina, to the dainty toy-like perfection of Lake Orta and then to the breathless magnificence of Garda, is to draw from every side of one’s nature.But there is also a wider human variety. One can know more kinds of people here (I am writing now of Italy, where I have lived longest) than at home. For example, in America I and all my friends are barred from even superficial acquaintance with men who work with their hands. This, no doubt, is chiefly because America has become an industrial country, and it seems especially hard for members of other classes to know industrial labourers anywhere. But in Italy, except in a few large cities such as Milan and Turin, industrial workers do not form a separate homogeneous class. There is this young man, who is the son of your or some one else’s gardener, or that, who is cousin to the peasant family at the foot of your hill. Besides which, Italy is largely an agricultural country. The peasants are in some ways odd inscrutable people, yet one does, with reservations, get to know those who live near-by—as well, perhaps, as in America one gets to know one’s neighbours, the insurance man, and the banker. (As far as that goes, a peasant’s mind does not seem to me any more inscrutable than a banker’s). But there is still another difference. In America manual labourers are mostly of foreign birth, so that it is doubly hard to get to know them. HowcanI get in touch with a Finn? His language, his antecedents, his manner of thought, all are strange to me. In the small and delightful town of southern Minnesota where my father lived as a young man, there appears to have been at that time a very agreeable community life.The farmers in the country round about were of one blood with the town-dwellers—chiefly of New England origin, Anglo-Saxons all, save for a slight mixture of Germans; and the professions in the town were recruited from among the sons of farmers. I don’t know whether the townspeople had a feeling of social superiority to the farmers; probably they had. But there was no gulf between them; they were of the same race and understood one another. To-day the townspeople remain principally Anglo-Saxon, but the country round about is farmed by Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns. The townspeople do not understand them nor they the townspeople. And you get the condition that Mr. Sinclair Lewis depicted, if rather too gloomily, inMain Street. In his unconvincing portrayals of a Scandinavian servant and a Scandinavian labour agitator one felt him straining, unavailingly, for a comprehension which he lacked the knowledge to attain.
In Italy peasants are of one race with the doctors, lawyers, land-owners, and provincial aristocracy (as distinguished from that of the great historic families in, for instance, Rome, which are cosmopolitan in their way of living, and so mixed in blood through intermarriage with foreigners that they are by now almost as American, English, French, or Austrian as Italian). It is perhaps impossible to know the peasants intimately, but it is not difficult to know them fairly well; and such knowledge adds greatly to one’s experience. I think there are times when all of us feelimpatient at knowing none but those who work with their brains and only think about or traffic in the things that other men have grown or built with their hands. This is a feeling easily capable of exaggeration. Carried too far it leads to the foolish belief, not uncommon to-day, that only those who work with their hands and create the physical wealth of the world are of value in it—which, of course, would reduce all life to mere existence. But perpetual contact with the earth does make for sanity and for something not far removed from wisdom. I esteem the Italian peasants, especially those of Tuscany, as highly as any class of men with which I am acquainted. They are calm but alert; they are, I believe, in the main, kindly; they are tenaciously attached to the land; they work indefatigably; they have an infinitely deeper and truer culture than, for example, the supposedly higher class of shopkeepers, and, especially, a serenity approaching fatalism, that leads them to regard all governments with indifference and consider wars in much the same way as they consider earthquake or drought. There is a splendid permanence about them. Acquaintance with them is the best antidote I have found to that desperate apprehension of universal meaningless chaos that every man must so often feel to-day—to what Mr. Bernard Shaw so well expressed when he said it sometimes seemed to him that this world must be a place used by the other planets as an insane asylum.
. . . . . . .
In America, beneath the fevered surface, the jazz, the wild rush hither and thither, the absence of contemplation, the divorce-fed looseness of the married relation, there is, I think, a monotony, a dull-eyed prosiness, against which all those surface things are perhaps but a reaction. People do not read poetry (as all do in Italy); which is not an indication of poor literary taste (since in Italy, as elsewhere, the mass of people prefer bad poetry to good), but of either an inability or a disinclination to feel vividly. The undergraduates of our great universities are not, as in France or Italy, uncritical rebels against all accepted conventions of life and letters, but for the most part as conservative as their parents, caring little about politics save to accept indifferently the Republican Party, caring nothing at all about either old currents or new among the arts. Would students at our universities ever riot because of the execution of a Francisco Ferrer? Inconceivable! They become violently excited about sports, as do students abroad; but that, again, is a surface excitement which does not affect beliefs about life. Defeat in the annual football game would hardly impel undergraduates at Harvard or Yale to risk their lives in passionate protest.
This greyness follows Americans throughout their life and is due, I think, to our over-complication of and concentration upon the surface facts of existence. No matter what one does with existence, it remains a dull thing. Radios, motor cars, telephones, vacuum cleaners—they are all infinitely dull because they are all surface thingsthat do not trouble the heart or the brain. Existence is dull, but life, underneath it, is a wild and thrilling adventure. What one does is nothing; what one believes and feels is everything. ‘After all,’ said William James, ‘the most important thing about a man is what he thinks about the universe.’ But if he does not think about it ...? For all its feverish activity, America does not seem to me to have the fever of living. I know of nothing more desolate than the exceedingly well done stories in the most widely read of our magazines, which, to judge from its immense circulation, must almost literally be ‘in every home.’ They are virtually all about the facile success in business of handsome young men with Arrow Collar souls. This tawdry shirking of life is, I believe (and I wish I did not believe it), the mental attitude of most Americans. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has revealed it with a clear, terrible perfection, Mr. Sinclair Lewis has satirized it tumultuously in terms of itself (and has thereby, ironically, become popular), and numerous others have revolted against it with futile bitterness. But there it is. And there, perhaps, it must remain till some great national disaster sweeps away at one stroke the glittering surface rubbish and the worship of it, and turns men’s thoughts inward upon the emotions and desperately evolved convictions that are real life and thrilling. The potentiality, the potential life, is there; it must be. We are men and women like other men and women. Life must be struggling beneath the choking surface. Women bear childrenin agony. Men love, toil, suffer hardships. It is only that our thoughts are directed elsewhere. It may be that if all our press, all our monthly and weekly magazines, and everything else that carries advertisements were wiped out for a single month, we should begin to live. For advertisements are responsible for no small part of the mischief. They waken our sense of romance or of beauty or of charm and then try to convince us that these feelings, which belong to life and have nothing to do with existence, can be thoroughly satisfied by cake made with a special kind of baking powder or by somebody’s chocolates or by perfume with an exotic name. Thus belittling the emotion they conjure up, they make us smile sheepishly at it—and then, in a half-hope, buy the chocolates or the perfume. They deliberately confuse our sense of values. They depict beauty as a genial strumpet for sale to any one at a reasonable price.
The word ‘beauty’ is at a discount to-day. One is wary of employing it. The trouble is that in the ’nineties of the last century a very loquacious group of aesthetes made a silly cult of the conception and thereby so cheapened the word itself that even after thirty years it has not quite recovered. This sort of thing always happens when an adjective is turned into a noun. (Not, of course, that this had not happened to the word ‘beautiful’ long before the eighteen-nineties—only never quite so hard). As an adjective it modified facts and was thus related to life; as a noun it is credited with an existenceof its own and is thus divorced from life. ‘A beautiful woman’ or ‘a beautiful landscape’ means something very real and fairly definite, but ‘beauty’ all alone by itself means nothing at all, or is at best an abstraction to be used for convenience’ sake, and very carefully, in the midst of earthy life-giving facts. Repeatedly employed, it nauseates the hearer and reveals a lack of genuine feeling in the person who employs it. Where the quality belongs, that the word too often mars, is in life itself; it has no god-like existence of its own. There is no occasion to mention it in a low reverent voice or to turn it into a thin cult. But as just this has been so frequently done I have needed all this apologetic introduction before venturing to say that one of the reasons for which I live in Italy is the varied but almost universal beauty of the landscape that encircles me in nearly any part of that country. I trust it may be evidence of my cultless honesty in the matter when I say that I am not in a perpetual state of thrill about my surroundings (though, to be quite truthful, there do come rare, brief, and unexpected moments of lifting delight in some sudden touch of loveliness), but, rather, feel this quality of beauty in them as something friendly, breathed in with the air. Often, because of long familiarity with the landscape about me, I am not consciously aware that it is beautiful. Nevertheless, the fact that it is so is never quite forgotten. If, though with every possible advantage of space, leisure and friends, I had suddenly to live in Patterson,New Jersey, or in Superior, Wisconsin, something of tremendous importance would seem to me to have disappeared from my life, and a background of serenity that enables me happily to do the little that I can do as well as is possible for me would become a background to be at any moment consciously subdued before I should be able to achieve anything at all.
‘But all these things.’ a quite justifiably impatient reader might by now object, ‘are no better than theories. You, who are by way of being a writer, like and are able to live abroad, and it amuses you to depict this as advantageous. But is it really? Let us have facts. Discarding those degenerate rose-garden Americans, are there others to whom living abroad has been of actual benefit?’
Well, if by ‘benefit’ is meant actual benefit to achievement, I honestly cannot say. I know, or know of, a number of American writers and painters who live in France or Italy, and I cannot truthfully claim that I think any of their work as good as the best that is being done by some in America itself. But that, unfortunately, proves nothing. Their number, of course, is very small compared with the number of those at home, and among these last only a handful are achieving work of consequence. The significant question (which it is quite impossible to answer) is whether these transplanted Americans are painting better pictures or writing better books than, given the limitations of their talent, they would have been able to write or paint had they stayed at home.
If, on the other hand, the word ‘benefit’ is to be taken in a wider sense than simply that of creative achievement, I can at once answer the question in the affirmative, without (thank heaven!) having to confine myself to artists and authors. One does not come readily to know these expatriates of the best sort. They are isolated individuals who value their isolation. (It is the rose-garden people who at first acquaintance press you, with a pathetic wistfulness, to come to tea or dinner at their villas). But some, to my good fortune, I do know, and I hear quiet rumours of others—individuals scattered here and there, not all of them by any means writers, painters or composers, but solitary absorbed students of this or that period or local fragment of a period, or even only (only?) of the intense modern life about them. Useless? I do not think so. Being, necessarily, of independent means (though it is astounding on how slender an income they are often content to live), it is not essential for them to go on making money. Yet that, if they had remained in America, is probably what the force of public opinion would have compelled them to do. Instead of studying the development of the Commedia dell’ Arte or the annals of the Medici or the history of the Risorgimento or the development of co-operatives in pre-Fascista Italy, they would have been selling bonds or juggling with real estate. It is not probable that one would have found them useful members of more serious professions, since it was precisely for thatstudy of the Commedia dell’ Arte or co-operatives that their minds were really fitted. And even if the bits of curious knowledge that they dig up are of no external value, or, though of some small value, are not passed on to others, individuals of this sort are not without use both to their adopted country and to the one they have deserted. In their infinitesimal way they help toward the distant mutual understanding of two races. They spin one thin spider’s thread across the Atlantic. For they respect and partly understand the people among whom they live, and are respected and partly understood by these. Some day, if the world lasts that long, a vast number of such threads, entwined, will make a cable that will bind two countries together as no governmental treaties or commercial agreements or grandiloquent speeches by distinguished momentary guests will ever bind them. It is not without significance that on the outbreak of the war Americans living in Germany sided with the Germans, Americans in France with the French. It indicated that through daily intercourse such Americans had begun to see into the hearts of another people, and had found them individuals like themselves. Given enough of this peaceful interpenetration among all nations, war would surely become more difficult.
Yet it is not the problematic value to others of the knowledge these expatriated Americans acquire nor their slight influence upon international relations that appears to me their real importance, but what they have, quietly andalmost unconsciously, done with themselves. The few individuals of this sort whom it is my privilege to know seem to me more fully developed, rounded, and, especially, grown-up than they could possibly have become except through this way of living. I have even now more friends, if vastly fewer acquaintances, in America than in Europe, but not one among them is as mature and mellowed as are these expatriates. They have, the latter, a tolerance, an illusionless sympathy for mankind and an insight into human motives. They see men solely as individuals.
Take, for example, my friend Etheredge (that is not his name). In a way it is not fair to do this, since, to my mind at least, he is so very much more of a person than any of the few other expatriates of this sort whom I know as to be uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, he could not have become what he seems to me to be without his many years of living abroad, and also there is something to be said for taking not the average but the finest exceptional result as a study of a type.
I first met Etheredge fourteen years ago, shortly after he had come to live in Europe. He happens to be a painter (as also is his wife), but I am not myself capable of judging as to whether he is a good painter or not. Some of his pictures (which become increasingly abstract) move me; some do not. I have heard supposedly competent critics say that they were very good indeed, and others, equally expert, that they were very poor.To tell the truth, I do not care in the least which they are. By all American Standards Etheredge would, I suppose, be accounted a failure, since he can hardly ever sell his pictures, and then for a wretched price. And for that, too, I do not care in the least. It is in his personality that Etheredge seems to me really important.
Even fourteen years ago, at thirty, he had an arresting personality. There was something at once quiet and eager about him, as though he were questioning everything without quarrelling with anything, which struck me as rare. But I should not at that time have set him down as a success. He had not yet found himself. He was not yet sufficient to himself. Now, after fourteen years, he is. I know no one else who is so completely rounded a personality, who accepts so simply the external world and is so little troubled by it. He has built around himself a wall not of indifference but of acceptance, against which waves break unavailingly, within which he lives with his whole self, serenely, gently and richly.
All this that I feel about Etheredge I express badly. I cannot successfully put it into words. I make him sound smug and even selfish, whereas he has come very near to abolishing self—and thus has grown the more. The best I can do is to give up the attempt at portrayal and fall back on a few tangible results. Thus, I am not alone in my estimate of Etheredge. Quiet and unassuming though he is, people of distinction gravitate toward him. He has, to my knowledge, exerted a profound influence on three creative artists of international fame and upon a number of other individuals of even greater sensitiveness and fineness of character if of less effective talent. Again, if financial disaster were to overtake me to-morrow, Etheredge would, I know, share with me whatever he has. But it is not that which is of importance (he was always generous), but the fact that, though his income is very small, this would honestly seem to him now no hardship, of no importance. Yet again, neither he nor his wife has ever made a single sacrifice to comfort. They continue to live in one after another of the most inaccessible places in all Italy—places with no water, places with no light, places with toilet facilities straight out of the Stone Age. To plan a Tour of Discomfort I could hardly do better than enumerate the villages where they have lived. If this were ever for them an act of heroism, if they ever gave an impression of struggling bravely against heavy odds for the sake of the Higher Life, I should consider such behaviour with distaste. But they never do. They simply ignore the discomfort. All that mattered to them was that each of these places was a place of singular beauty and interest. Theylikedliving in them. And, whether I have made you feel Etheredge as important or have failed to do so, it must, with this, surely be apparent that his kind of development would be all but impossible in America.
There are things about Etheredge that exasperate me at times. I cannot, for instance, understand both his and his wife’s failure to learn the language. Their Italian is distressing. Now Italian shopkeepers and servants are no worse than those or other countries—if anything, I think, a little better, being capable of extraordinary acts of generosity toward suddenly impoverished clients—but undoubtedly their dominant thought in the presence of strange and presumably wealthy foreigners living, heaven knows why, in their midst, and with difficulty stammering mistakenly a few phrases of the language, is that the Lord has delivered these into their hands. Accordingly, Etheredge and his wife have been the victims of a long series of minor frauds and peculations. I do not know why this should annoy me, but it does. It does not annoy them; they disregard it.
Similarly, I am at times annoyed by Etheredge’s indifference to the social movements that swirl madly around us all. It is, for instance, impossible for me to watch the progress of Fascismo coolly. I feel grudging admiration for the machine, resentment at the suppression of free speech, bitterness at the cynical pretence of constitutionalism. I cannot, in other words, keep Fascismo out of my life, any more than I can keep out the problems of international relations, German indemnities and the war debts. Etheredge can. He scarcely, I believe, thinks about these things at all; certainly he does not think about them passionately.
In this, I know at heart, I am wrong and heis profoundly right. For it is on my part, and would be on his, a waste of energy to puzzle and think and fume over these questions. Neither he nor I is fitted to cope with them; neither of us can have the faintest influence upon them. And, indeed, gigantic though they loom above the world to-day, they are but ephemeral phenomena. Beneath, far beneath, lies the only truth—the perplexed, troubled, struggling, human soul. Only contact with individuals can have significance, either to them or to oneself. To such relationships and to the beliefs and questions arising from them Etheredge devotes his fine unwasted strength.
The influence he exerts is deep but not wide, and its necessarily narrow range is, in my saner moments, the only thing I hold against him. Here, I think, is a man of rare sympathy, insight and character. Must his influence be exerted only upon the small number of individuals whom he can personally know? Well, of course, there are his pictures, at which he works with intense and persistent energy. They must to some extent express his personality, and if the critics who call them good are in the right they will doubtless some day reach a wider circle than that of personal acquaintanceship. But, even so, comparatively few will see them, and of these only a small proportion be able to understand clearly the fine spirit they express. Another insoluble problem.
But, as I meditate upon it, I have a sudden happy suspicion that here, too, I am in the wrong,still believing despite myself in widespread movements, organization and the like. Perhaps, after all, the finest and most hopeful thing about an apparently sorry world is that over its surface are sparsely strewn men and women of matured developed charm or intelligence or perception, who exert unconsciously the influence of their personality on those in immediate touch with them. Why expect or ask for more than this? And, certainly, if some of these can only attain full self-development through living in another country than their own, for their sake we can well afford to disregard the larger number of silly snobs and rose-garden idlers that such a life creates.
IfMr. Sinclair Lewis’s fine novel,Babbitt, is simply the story of George F. Babbitt, the only adverse comment I can make upon it is to question whether that gentleman deserved such detailed and careful study. One thing is certain: he does not deserve it a whit more if, as some newspaper has asserted, there are ten million of him than if there is only one.
But there are indications that Mr. Lewis intended also to depict the city of Zenith and to show Babbitt and his friends as typical of its spirit, to do with this novel for the city what he attempted to do inMain Streetfor the village. True, there are circles above Babbitt, in which move William Eathorne, the banker (magnificently sketched), and the McKelveys (not realized at all). And one is made to feel intensely that beneath the all-too-articulate Babbitt and his friends are toiling, almost inarticulate masses. ‘At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow.’ Nevertheless, it appears to me that in Babbitt, Vergil Gunch, Howard Littlefield, and the others, Mr. Lewis intended to typify the dominant spirit of Zenith. Indeed, if they did not typifyit, if they were not significant of anything greater than themselves, he would hardly have taken such pains to depict them. ‘Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg....”’This sounds very like special pleading.
Well, I recently spent a summer in Zenith. At least, it may well have been Zenith. It is in the same part of the Middle-West and it looks like the city Mr. Lewis describes. True, it has only 150,000 inhabitants, whereas Mr. Lewis claims 340,000 for his city. But Mr. Lewis is himself sufficiently of the Middle-West to be unreliable on this subject. And, to tell the truth, his city does not feel like a city of 340,000. The social items in its newspapers are too boisterous and unsophisticated; it has, apparently, neither orchestra nor art gallery. No, Mr. Lewis’s Zenith is my Zenith. But if this essay should happen to meet his eye, and he should protest that I have selected a city quite different from his, called it Zenith, and then set out to prove that it was not what he said it was, I can only reply that he may be right, but that if the Babbitts are not typical of a city of 150,000, still less are they likely to be of a city of 340,000.
As I say, I recently spent a summer in Zenith; but any observations that I make are not based solely on that single visit. My parents moved to Zenith when I was six years old—which, alas,was long enough ago to make them Old Residents by now; I lived there as a child, as a boy, and during my summer vacations from college; and I have returned to Zenith for six months or so every two or three years since. I have seen the city grow and have noted the changes more sharply for the intervening years of absence. And I assert that Zenith is not at all in spirit the kind of place that Mr. Lewis implies.
Of course I did not know, not really know, even one individual among the toiling throngs in the factories, at the steel plant, in the cement works. How should I? And I did not know the Babbitt group, save, superficially, a member here and there. But I observed them on the streets and heard them talk in hotel lobbies, and I admired the accuracy of Mr. Lewis’s eye and ear. The people I played with were the people who take their diversion at the Country Club or give dinners at the Zenith Club in the city proper. I saw them, too, at work in their offices: lawyers, doctors, railwaymen, brokers, architects, contractors, merchants; young men of twenty-five to forty; middle-aged men of forty to sixty-five; and their wives and daughters. A not unfair cross-section of Zenith life, once the hopeless separation from the vastly larger mass of manual labour beneath is admitted, and I think they were more numerous than the Babbitts. Of course I do not profess to have known them all; but I am not concerned with their numbers. The point is that theywereZenith. They gave the city its tone; you felt them inlooking at the blocks and blocks of handsome houses; they made the Babbitts appear not so much shoddy as unrepresentative, insignificant; their composite soul was the soul of Zenith.
What, then, were these people like? In any profound sense that is a difficult question to answer. There was a deep similarity among them; something important that they all had in common, but something that was very hard to get at. It is, however, easy to say what they were not like. They were not like the Babbitts; they were not at all like the McKelveys or Horace Updike, the people whom George Babbitt longed to know; they were not like the characters in Mr. Hergesheimer’sCytherea, nor like those in Margaret Banning’sCountry Club People. They were less sophisticated, if to be sophisticated means to have a weary air and to say cynical things cleverly; they were more so, if it means to be reasonably well educated, to stand unconsciously for some reality (no matter what), and to have ease of manner.
The strongest impression they made on me was that of smoothness. Their homes ran quietly, despite perpetual servant trouble; they entertained easily; even the weekly dinner-dance at the Country Club gave me a sense of smoothness that was rather delightful. The immense dining-room would be crowded—scores of big tables and little tables almost uncomfortably filled; but there seemed to be no friction, and the voices were a well-modulated hum, pleasant to hear. People did not seem to get in oneanother’s way; and that was true mentally as well as physically. They were very well-bred and they were not at all self-conscious. Almost, these people, collectively, had grace. A kind of delightful suavity surrounded them, that was like the suavity of their smoothly running Packards and Cadillacs.
Not that they all had Packards or Cadillacs. Many of the younger men were still struggling near the bottom of the business ascent; a great many were less than well-to-do; a few were known to be virtually down and out. But the point is that none of them, even among these last, ever so much as questioned the system. Hatred and jealousy of individuals there must have been; a revolt against the collective whole, or even a doubt of its importance, none whatever.
They were so very sure of themselves, so beautifully sure. They had something of the easy charm one sniffs up at the tea-room of the Ritz (in Paris). They were so sure of themselves that if an outsider expressed radical opinions or even questioned rudely the importance of the reality for which they stood, these Zenith people were not annoyed, but, quite politely, amused. They were, in fact, civilized.
This was the dominant surface impression that I carried away from Zenith after my last visit, and it is so different from anything that I have read or heard about even the smallest minority in any Middle-Western city that I have gone about telling it to a number of people—in New York and elsewhere. My listeners,when at all interested, were sceptical, and usually observed that Zenith must be very different from most Middle-Western cities—a special case. It may be so. I do not profess to generalize about the whole region. Zenith is the only Middle-Western city that I know well. But I am doubtful. I rather fancy that people are corrupted by literature. They do not see things for themselves, even those close-by; instead, they read in novels or plays that things are thus and so, and take the author’s word for it. And the author, himself, I fancy, is frequently writing about what he, too, has read to be thus and so. One sees Victor Margueritte, for example, becoming uncomfortably aware (like all the rest of the elderly writers, through hearsay) that something dreadful has happened to the younger generation, and then setting out to write about it inLa Garçonne—a work as sheerly literary, lacking in observation, and impossible in its psychology, as a novel by Florence Barclay.
But, to return to the people of Zenith, I found them very like well-bred people anywhere else—like, say, well-bred people in Philadelphia or in an English city. They read—the women, anyway—desultorily, as people everywhere read, but books demanding some effort:The Revolt against Civilization,The Education of Henry Adams, novels by Couperus, Bojer, and Knut Hamsun; almost never poetry. They did not know a great deal about pictures—at least, pictures and statues were not an intimate part of their lives—because in Zenith there was no art gallery;they did not have daily opportunity to look at pictures. But a great many of them were intelligently and sincerely fond of music, because there was much good music to be heard every year in Zenith. A string quartet would be glad indeed to draw such a house in New York as it draws in Zenith.
When you come to think of it, all this is natural enough (except perhaps the intensity of their love for music—but I shall say more of that later). There is no reason outside of literature why these people should have been crude or conventionally Middle-Western. Virtually all of them had been away to school or college, probably half of the younger men and a much larger proportion of the younger women in the East; all had travelled widely in America, and a great many, especially the women, in Europe. A considerable number of the older ones go to California or Florida for the winter.
There were, of course, different groups and eddies within this society. There were the very young—the débutantes and their swains. I observed them at the dances and talked casually with a few, but I really learned little about them. My very superficial impression, which I give you for whatever it may be worth, was that they had magnificent and amusingsavoir-faire, beneath which they hid an ashamed ingenuousness. I do not know or greatly care what their morals were, but I should guess that they were much the same as morals wereamong people of their age and wealth ten years ago or twenty.
There was also the fast set, a small group of young married people. Personally I saw nothing of them and can only repeat what I was told of them by others: that they drank hard in order to experience some emotion in promiscuous embraces, and that it was all hopelessly raw. I cannot vouch for the truth of the description, but it sounded plausible. Having refused to generalize about the whole of the Middle-West, I am certainly not going to do so about the whole of the United States, but I can say that, from what little I have seen of fast sets anywhere in America, they have always seemed to me raw. I have seen elegance and swiftness delightfully combined in Europe, but not in America. It may be that this group in Zenith represented some obscure, desperate and futile revolt against the smoothness of Zenith society, of the Zenith soul. If so, it was pathetic, for it did not cause so much as a ripple. People did not seem even shocked by it, only bored.
This, then, was the impression I received of Zenith people: smoothness, ease, manner, something approaching grace, something approaching charm. It was very delightful.
Still, I should not like to live in Zenith. For, if it has none of the faults popularly attributed to the Middle-West, it has others, unsectional, beneath and perhaps even in part the cause of its charm, that trouble me deeply.
This society, which is the heart and mind andsoul of Zenith, is immensely conservative, immensely conventional, both morally and mentally. It does not belligerently flaunt, or argue in favour of, conventional standards; it accepts them as something settled a long time since. There is a good deal to be said for this—or for a part of it. Indeed, there is a good deal to be said for most of what Zenith does or is. Is not more real freedom to be obtained through accepting certain age-old conventions, such as that of marriage and married fidelity, for instance, and then making the best of them, than through wasting one’s strength in struggling against them, with no adequate substitute to offer? But Zenith accepts too much. It accepts the Steel Corporation, Mr. Gary, the American Legion, the Republican Party, the total wickedness of the I.W.W., the sole responsibility of Germany for the war, and the entire basic system of Capital and Labour as at present existing, though it is willing to concede improvements in detail. But this attitude probably makes for the almost suave charm of this society, which is, after all, the same kind of charm that was to be found in Upper-Middle-Class English society before the war.
These people are amazingly cut off from and ignorant of the vast labouring class. They know that not one of themselves could be elected congressman or mayor or even to membership on the school-board, but they accept the fact coolly and without much resentment as revealing nothing more than the jealousy of the ‘Have-Nots’ for the ‘Haves,’ of those atthe bottom for those who have deservedly reached the top. Yet they are democratic among themselves, and, unlike the McKelveys, admit newcomers easily, with no inquiry into their antecedents. They are not really snobbish. Many of the men are employers of labour on a large scale, yet even they seem to be merely exasperated by the increasing difficulties in controlling their men, in much the same way that the women are annoyed by the difficulty of getting and keeping servants. They talk of demagogues, of Red propaganda, of the unwillingness of men to do an honest day’s work, of labour unrest, of Bolshevism—oh, especially of Bolshevism! But among even these employers I could detect no perception that the whole economic system was being seriously questioned, and certainly no perception of the numerical strength and growing unity of the questioners. But it would not be fair to consider this ignorance in the class of people I am describing as confined especially to Zenith or the Middle-West. Where in the world does it not exist?
A lesser fault was that there was no good general conversation. Indeed, there was virtually no general conversation at all. Perhaps this was because the men did not join in. There seemed, in fact, to be a strange separation of men from women in Zenith. The attitude of the men toward the women was delightful—easy, courteous without being deferential in the obnoxious Southern fashion—and the women’s attitude toward the men was equally pleasant. But men and women seemed to have nothing in common. They often did things together, played golf or bridge or tennis or even went on long canoe-trips, but they did not think together. They did not even appear to be united by sex-attraction. One simply did not feel, not ever, the haunting presence of that restless vivifying emotion. Zenith was uncannily, horribly cool. How in the world, I kept wondering, did babies get born here? Still, they did, and their mothers, with quite inadequate help, looked after them admirably. For real amusement the men liked to get off by themselves, have dinner, drink, and play poker or bridge. They were continually giving small parties of this sort in some private dining-room of the Zenith Club. At one which I attended a discussion of wives arose, the model wife being esteemed the one who cheerfully let her husband go out any or every evening. On this same evening a mixed dinner-party was being given in the ladies’ dining-room of the club, and when it was over the young men of that party drifted into our smaller room for a few minutes. They sniffed up rather wistfully the doggy atmosphere that pervades a stag-party and helped themselves to drinks from the bottles on the sideboard. ‘And where are you going now?’ one of us inquired. ‘Up to Jim’s house to play bridge.’ ‘Think of it!’ exclaimed my host pityingly, as the victims to sex filed out. ‘They’re going to Jim’s house—to play bridge—with women!’
This absence of sex-attraction in Zenith gatherings was only one expression of a lack that in course of time seemed to me almost insupportable—the lack of thrill. Everything was too quiet, too even, too reasonable. Nobody seemed ever to feel or think anything passionately. The key was low, pulled down, like the decoration of the houses, which was usually in good taste but so very sober and restrained. These people, I said to myself, must have some emotional outlet; what is it?
Well, the young men, no doubt, found an outlet in business. For it must be remembered that among all these men there was not one professional idler. It was one of the accepted conventions that a man must work. Some of them were idlers by nature and worked, I dare say, as little as possible; most of them worked almost fiercely, though not during such long hours as had the men of their fathers’ generation. And they drank hard at their stag-parties. I heard of one or two disreputable road-houses in the country near-by, so somewhere in Zenith sex-attraction did exist, but it existed as something outside the magic circle. So far as I was able to learn, very few of the young men I knew frequented those places. Their outlet was not women; they seemed strangely uninterested in women; they did not even talk about them at the stag-parties.
But what of the women, the younger women, themselves? They appeared so cool, so reasonable, so sure of themselves, and so gracious, thatit seemed an impertinence to be sorry for them. Nevertheless, I was sorry for them—secretly. What outlet did they have? It is true that they had their homes to manage and their children to bring up. But, even with at best inadequate servants—hardly ever more than one, never more than two—and at frequent intervals no servants at all, this took only a small part of their time. Their homes were so well organized, and possessed, too, every known mechanical labour-saving device, from vacuum cleaners to electric stoves. What did these attractive young women do with their spare time? Well, they read, of course, and they gave or attended a great many teas, at which no man was ever present. That could hardly be an emotional outlet. Music, perhaps, was a partial one. As I have said, there was excellent music to be heard in Zenith. There were two concert courses every winter, to which came really great artists—Paderewski, Mischa Elman, famous string quartets, the Vatican Choir. And to these concerts, I feel sure, these young women listened with intelligence and emotion. (Their husbands sat through the concerts patiently). But even so? Zenith is, after all, only a small city. There may have been fifteen concerts in a season. What about the rest of the time? A few young women played exceedingly well, themselves. That might really be an outlet. But most did not play well enough to find satisfaction in playing at all, knowing what they knew of great music. They went in for golfand boating, and they danced a good deal, too—well, but without the grace of abandon. To me, for all their perfection and intelligence, they seemed only half alive.
Theywereintelligent, more so than their husbands—or perhaps more grown-up. And in a way they were well educated. They knew something about, were interested in, a great many subjects to which their husbands were indifferent—music, Russian dancing, Scandinavian literature, social welfare work, civic improvement, and so forth and so forth. But it is true that they did not know any one thing thoroughly, as their husbands knew their business. Again, I think, that was because they did not know any one thing passionately. ‘What can have been their outlet?’ I asked a woman—not in Zenith. ‘Virtue, perhaps,’ she replied. They seemed sadly wasted, somehow, those delightful young women, and only half alive.
I think, perhaps, that subconsciously they were afraid of coming alive. They filled their days deliberately with pretty, well-ordered, superficial activities. They made existence so pleasant and so full that it disguised the absence of life. A proof of this seemed to appear in their gregariousness. They clung together in everything. If they wanted to study a period of history they did not do it in solitude; they organized a club among themselves to study it. They organized a club or a class or a group for everything. It was as though they huddled together, for comfort—and in fear. Fear ofwhat? Of their individual selves, I fancy. Groups have only a factitious life; real life is in the individual alone. And I think these young women were afraid of real life. So they were, I suppose, failures. But there was something finer in their failure than in their husbands’ narrow success. The young men were aware of but one possible activity in life—business; and threw themselves into it desperately. The young women were aware of a score, and, held back by all the pleasant conventions among which they existed, and, unlike their husbands, by a vague perception of dark troubled depths in the individual soul, threw themselves into none.
But how charming they were, how candid and clear and—oh, decent! I wonder if they would mind if they knew that, even while admiring, some one had found them, and Zenith, a little pathetic.